Quote:, the language they put in ink DID set the stage for Lincoln.
Lincoln had no intention of ending slavery. By the time he took office the country was coming apart at the seams and he saw his job to restore the union.
Quote:My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 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.
Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley. 8/22/1862
By August 22, 1862, McClellan's Peninsula campaign had ended in total and humiliating failure and Stonewall Jackson had defeated 3 union armies in the Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln did not know it but he was a week away from watching John Pope fight the disastrous Battle of Second Bull Run. He needed an excuse to keep Britain and France from intervening in the war and he needed a military victory to announce his Emancipation Proclamation which was #3 in his list of solutions given to Greeley.
He didn't get a victory. He did get Antietam which was a bloodbath and a tactical Confederate victory but it stopped Lee's 'invasion' of the north, such as it was. Lincoln was far from the last president to try to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear when it came to the military.
