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Mr. Lincoln called the Emancipation Proclamation a war measure β not a moral act. He was right that it was a war measure. He was wrong if he thought it was only that. You cannot emancipate three million people, call the act a military technicality, and expect history to receive it as such. The Proclamation may have been signed for strategic reasons. It was received as a promise. And once a promise of freedom is made to a people who have been enslaved, it becomes the measure by which everything else is judged.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
β Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863β Frederick Douglass, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Washington D.C., 14 April 1876
19th Century