Abraham Lincoln was committed to ending slavery as well as preserving the Union. In his first year in office, President Abraham Lincoln had stubbornly rejected the idea of abolishing slavery. But by 1862 he recognized that the best path to preserving the Union was by freeing the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation played a central role in achieving this goal. It was the most revolutionary pronouncement ever signed by an American president, impacting four million black slaves and setting the nation's face toward the total abolition of slavery within three more years.
Lincoln believed that if he could prevent the expansion of slavery into the federal territories and prevail upon state legislatures to accept gradual, compensated emancipation, he could shrink slavery, making it uneconomical and place it back on the road to extinction. The outbreak of war derailed the original version of his grand scheme, but even after the war began, Lincoln believed that if he could convince the......
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