Correct, Capn.
As noted:
http://www.historynet.com/emancipation-proclamation
As noted:
http://www.historynet.com/emancipation-proclamation
Quote:Just as Lincoln had feared, the Proclamation was immediately and bitterly denounced. Newspapers around the world warned ominously that it would ignite race riots (an invitation to “burning, ravishing, massacring, and destroying,” shrieked The London Times). The stock market declined. Desertions increased, with some soldiers unwilling to fight a war to “free Negroes.” And Lincoln’s Republican Party indeed suffered significant mid-term election losses that fall. To be sure, accolades followed as well, but as a dispirited Lincoln put it, “breath alone kills no rebels.” In a letter to his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, he admitted: “This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory….I wish I could write more cheerfully.” But Lincoln would not back down, even in the wake of a humiliating Union military setback at Fredericksburg in December. “We cannot escape history,” he warned Congress that month. On January 1, 1863, as millions of enslaved people awaited word on their fate, Lincoln overcame political pressure, incurable national racism, popular suspicion, press antagonism, battlefield setbacks and his own trembling hand, and signed the final Emancipation Proclamation.
