Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, Part 3 What was at Stake

The initial cabinet discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation took place in July of 1862, and when Lincoln was advised to wait its publication until the North had won a victory so that it would not appear the desperate gesture of a loser he agreed.

That victory came when the North repulsed Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North at the battle of Antietam in Maryland. So, on September 22, 1862, a few days after that fateful battle, the North issued what came to be called the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

It represented a stark choice: if the errant sisters of the South laid down their arms and returned to the Union by January 1, 1863 they would be rewarded with a plan for gradual compensated emancipation of their slaves.

Failure to do so would result in a far more upsetting expropriation: the freedom of their slaves without any compensation whatever.