free on fair terms, and that therefore the government which had caused his enslavement must rescue him from that condition. There was no frank concession that capital had been lured by the nation into a vast investment in slave labor which was entitled to protection, notwithstanding secession had resulted from the fear of its destruction. The tremendous reform was in fact preceded by frantic declarations that the purpose of the war was not to raise the negro to the common brotherhood of "equality before the law" nor to condone the mutual error of slavery by satisfying all just demands which emancipation exacted. It was even trifled with by the authorized statement of the head of the nation to Greeley, August 22, 1862, one week before the preliminary proclamation, as follows: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do it." The President s devotion to the view he entertained of the Union, and which he afterward expressed in his memorable short speech during the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, is well worthy of profoundest national respect, but he was not the emancipator of the negro race.
The proclamation only went so far as to serve a military purpose. It simply called a reserved instrument of war into a field of operations where the battles of two years, with the customary array of resources, still left the Union armies defending Washington. With flagrant denial of the right of every negro in the slaveholding sections to emancipation if any were set free, the proclamation left slavery untouched in whole districts of the border States. " It did not pretend," says Mr. Julian, of Indiana, "to operate upon the slaves in other large districts in which it would have been effective at once, but studiously excluded them while it applied mainly to States and parts of States within the military occupation
