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PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET

From the famous painting made at the White House by F. B. Carpenter.

that day in July was not all laid aside as this statement by Mr. Lincoln seems to indicate. The first portion of that document related to a confiscation act which had been passed by Congress a few days before, and three days later (on July 25th) it was issued as a separate proclamation by the President. The second portion of the paper considered that day by the Cabinet was a declaration by the President of his purpose to ask Congress to enact a law providing for compensation to states abolishing slavery, and the third and last portion was the Proclamation of Emancipation. That proclamation with the preceding section in relation to the President's purpose was laid aside and amended from time to time as stated by President Lincoln to Mr. Carpenter.

It was at this meeting of the Cabinet that Secretary Seward suggested an amendment that would pledge the United States to maintain the freedom of those who should be emancipated by the proclamation.

Wednesday, September 17th, the battle of Antietam was fought, and not until Saturday, September 20th, was it known with certainty that the result was favorable to the Union cause. When that information reached the President at the Soldiers' Home, he immediately proceeded to the final revision of the preliminary proclamation.

Monday, September 22nd, 1862, President Lincoln came in from the Soldiers' Home to the White House, called a meeting of the Cabinet, and for the second time presented to them the Emancipation Proclamation. It was at this meeting that he also told the members of his Cabinet that he had "made a solemn vow before God" which he intended now to keep "by the declaration of freedom to the slaves"; that he did not wish their advice about the main matter, for he knew their views, as they had freely and fully expressed them when the subject was before them in July; that he had decided to issue the proclamation and would be glad to consider any suggestions they might wish to make respecting forms of expression or minor matters connected with the document.

The proclamation read by Mr. Lincoln at this meeting of his Cabinet was quite unlike the paper he submitted to them, and after consideration laid aside two months before. It had been enlarged and strengthened and made much more expressive of its high purpose, and it contained the two words. suggested by Seward at the July meeting. Other amendments failed to receive the President's approval and the historical proclamation, after being signed and given the Government's official seal, was published on Tuesday morning, September 23rd, 1862.

The foregoing record shows that from July 22nd to September 22nd-exactly two months-the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was under consideration by the President and his Cabinet, with no other persons save the Vice-President and the President's pastor having any knowledge of the purpose to issue such a document. This fact gives peculiar interest to the events that transpired during those two months. Twenty-eight days after that proclamation was first submitted to the Cabinet, and by their advice temporarily laid aside, and while the President was waiting and praying for a victory that would enable him to issue it under auspicious conditions, Horace Greeley, in the Tribune of August 19th, published an editorial entitled, "The Prayer of Twenty Million," in which, with harsh and heartless severity, he denounced the President for not pursuing a more vigorous policy against slavery. That editorial expressed the feelings of the radical antislavery people, who were eager for just such an edict as was the proclamation the President had prepared and was anxiously waiting to announce. The harmful influence of that Greeley editorial was speedily arrested by Mr. Lincoln's reply which, though it made no disclosures of the emancipation policy soon to be adopted, effectively silenced the great editor and quieted the unrest of the reasonable people throughout the nation. There is ample reason for the belief that when Mr. Lincoln prepared that reply to Greeley he was confidently expecting an early victory of the Union Army under General

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FACSIMILE OF MANUSCRIPT BY R. M. DEVENS

for that work in 1878. An exact reproduction in size and otherwise of the manuscript of "Our First Century," presented to Dr. Ervin Chapman when he subscribed

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