Essay About Lincoln's Attitude Towards The Civil War

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This proclamation is considered a political and historical presidential or executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln in the City of Washington on January 1, 1863. It is not considered a law passed by the Congress but a proclamation written by the president alone based on the war powers given to the President by the Constitution. The moment in which it took place was critical as it was in the middle of one of the greatest wars America has gone through in history, the Civil War. To understand the meaning of this proclamation and how it changed the history of America we have to move back to the start of the Civil War and Lincoln’s attitude towards it. The Civil War of America is known as the conflict between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that …show more content…

Lincoln’s political principles were based on the American Founding which he studied from an early age. Those principles combined reverence for the Declaration of Independence with respect for the Constitution. Lincoln saw slavery as antithetical to the principles of these Founding doctrines. Lincoln long believed in conceding unimportant points to political and legal rivals while he concentrated on the most important point. For Lincoln in the 1850s, the big point was preventing the spread of slavery. As President, the big point was preserving the Union – and then ending slavery as well. So, Lincoln’s moral universe was framed by what was right and what was practical. That was especially the case regarding slavery. In his early days, his main goal was to preserve the Union, but he often expressed moral opposition to slavery in public and private circles expecting to bring about the eventual extinction of slavery by stopping its further expansion into any U.S. territory, and by proposing compensated emancipation by advocating a program in which slaves would be freed