09/22/2025
September 22, 1862, Desperation Sets In.
After U.S. President Lincoln’s federal forces suffered a series of crushing defeats in attempting to invade the confederacy resulting in heavy federal losses, support for the war is waning in states loyal to the Union. With C.S. President Jefferson Davis forming European alliances, with a C.S. constitution that outlawed the international slave trade, and President Davis’s plan to end chattel slavery in the confederacy, Abraham Lincoln desperately issued his “preliminary” emancipation proclamation. It stipulated that if the Southern states would return to the Union and pay the Morrill tariffs by 1 January 1863, the “proclamation” would not into effect, and any state that agrees to pay the back tariffs and return return prior to this date, could do so without any interference with the institution of slavery “permanently and irrevocably.”
When the Confederacy, or any member state, refused to accept Lincoln’s terms, the final “proclamation” legislation was issued. It ONLY effected the states “IN REBELLION”, in which Lincoln had NO authority to enforce. It DID NOT APPLY to ANY state or territories loyal to the Union! All slave states or occupied territories “NOT in rebellion” are to be “left precisely as if this proclamation were NOT issued”. For example: Missouri, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, lower Louisiana and specifically exempted Virginia counties (which were under U.S. occupation), Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, were also EXEMPT, and all remained “slave states” and territories in Lincoln’s union until after the war.
Lincoln’s U.S. Secretary of State William Seward said of Lincoln’s “proclamation”; “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bo***ge where we can set them free."
The London Spectator, weekly British magazine first published in 1828, mocked; "The Union government liberates the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them in the conflict. The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."
Lincoln then made his deportation plans known. “I have urged the colonization of the negroes, and I shall continue. My Emancipation Proclamation was linked with this plan. There is no room for two distinct races of white men in America, much less for two distinct races of whites and blacks. I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the negro into our social and political life as our equal.... We can never attain the ideal union our fathers dreamed of, with millions of an alien, inferior race among us, whose assimilation is neither possible nor desirable."
February 3, 1865, at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, Lincoln pointed out that his proclamation had been issued only as a war measure and “that as soon as the War ceased it would have no further application”. Lincoln then stated that “it had never been his intention to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed and that he would not have done so during the War except that it became a military necessity.” He thought there would be "many evils attending" the immediate ending of slavery in those states.
Source-- Lincoln address delivered at Washington, D.C.; in Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume V, pages 371-375
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hampton-roads-conference/?fbclid=IwY2xjawMX-RBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFBR1A4a2V0VHQ1ZkJvV2MwAR6d7_lqMNHf8FAp91x9TvfmCBRAM1dDBDB_Dk2Bk5_Dc5TlXt181JAyZxhY4g_aem_ImjzxIGfv90iCuGhJGo3wQ
