[61] hands. If, then, the Government shall proceed to apply it to war purposes, the responsibility will rest with the Government, not with you. This is the light in which we regard it: still, we offer no other suggestion than this— “Let every one be fully persuaded in his own mind.” We shall honor none the less him who may feel it his duty to take the most afflicting alternative, as the most effectual method to meet the issue before the community. Of that he must be the judge; and especially must he be sure to count the cost and act intelligently.1With regard to abolitionists who were not non-resistants, and who had hitherto abstained from voting on account of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution, the argument showed that as the Union was dissolved and the Government had the war-power to abolish slavery (even in the Border States, Mr. Garrison maintained), ‘every obstacle to Constitutional Emancipation is taken2 out of the way, and the Government is, and must be, if true to itself, wholly on the side of liberty. Such a government can receive the sanction and support of every abolitionist, whether in a moral or military point of view.’ It was a happy coincidence that the same number of the Liberator in which this article appeared should also contain President Lincoln's first Emancipation Proclamation,3 promising a final edict of freedom to the slaves in all States or parts of States which should be in rebellion against the Government on the first of January following,4
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1 ‘A beautiful specimen of clear and unanswerable reasoning,’ was Gerrit Smith's comment on this editorial (Lib. 32: 155).
3 Sept. 22.
4 Just a month before this (Aug. 22) Mr. Lincoln had addressed his famous letter to Horace Greeley, stating that his paramount object was to save the Union, without reference to slavery. ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it—if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it—and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.’ The encouragement of the letter lay not only in the growing popular conviction that the second alternative was the one he would be compelled to choose, but in his frank promise, ‘I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views’; and in his closing assurance that while he had thus stated his purpose according to his views of official duty, he intended no modification of his ‘oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free’ (Greeley's “American Conflict,” 2: 250). Not until two years later did it become publicly known that Mr. Lincoln had submitted the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to the Cabinet a month before he wrote this letter to Greeley (July 22), and was holding it in his desk until a decisive victory of the Union armies should afford him a favorable moment for issuing it. For a full account of Lincoln's steps towards emancipation, see J. G. Nicolay's and John Hay's chapter in the Century Magazine for December, 1888.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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