What to expect from The Party of Lincoln
Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform by Derreick Bell, pg 55 and thereabouts:
The prevailing view in the North was that the Civil War was intended to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. But when, during the Civil War field commanders issued orders on their own initiative freeing slaves in the area of their military operations, Lincoln vetoed their actions. In his view, the question of emancipation was political and not military. Abolitionists, who had been urging Lincoln to end slavery, denounced his overruling of the field commanders. In a famous response to one of them, Horace Greeley, the editor of New York Tribune, Lincoln indicated his primary goal was to win the war and preserve the Union. He wrote Greeley:
I would save the union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union as it was. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and 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 also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps me save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe that what I am doing hurts the cause and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the . I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.Lincoln's response to Greeley is significant for more than its candor. Here was, for perhaps the first and last time, a president of the United States acknowledging that the civil rights of blacks, even the basic right not to be a slave in a society dedicated to individual liberty, must take a lower priority to the preservation of the Union.
