made a lot of mistakes, especially with his generals, but unlike Davis he learned from them. The
South was fighting for its very existence, and knew it; there was never any lack of motivation
there. The North was divided, bemused, reluctant to go to war; or, rather, composed of large
numbers of fanatical anti-slavers and much larger numbers of unengaged or indifferent voters
who had no wish to become involved in a bloody dispute about a problem, slavery, which did not
affect them directly. Then there were the four border states, all of them slave-owning, whose
adherence to the Union it was essential to retain. Lincoln, beginning with a professional army of
a mere 15,000, was fighting a war waged essentially for a moral cause, and he had to retain the
high moral ground. But he had also to keep the rump of the Union together. That meant he had to
be a pragmatist without ever descending into opportunism. His great gift-perhaps the greatest of
the many he possessed-was precisely his ability to invest his decisions and arguments with moral
seemliness even when they were the product of empirical necessity. He was asked to liberate the
slaves-what else was the war about? He answered: it was to preserve the Union. He realized, he
knew for a fact, that if he did preserve the Union, slavery would go anyway. But he could not
exactly say so, since four of his states wanted to retain it.
Some of Lincoln's generals, for military purposes, began to issue local emancipation decrees,
hoping to get the Southern slaves to rise and cause trouble behind Confederate lines. Lincoln had
to disavow these efforts as ultra vires. He hated slavery. But he loved the Constitution more,
writing to a friend in Kentucky:
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember
when I did not so think and feel, and yet I have never understood that the presidency
conferred on me an unrestricted right to act officially on this judgment and feeling. It was
in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor
was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the
power.
He made public his intentions about slavery in an order disavowing an emancipation decree
issued by General David Hunter. Declaring it altogether void' and rejecting the right of anyone except himself to liberate the slaves, he nonetheless made it publicly clear that such a right might well be invested in his presidential power:I further make it known that whether it be competent
for me, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any State or
States free, and whether at any time and in any case, it shall have become a necessity
indispensable to the maintenance of the Government to exercise such supposed power, are
questions which, under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I cannot feel justified in
leaving to the decision of commanders in the field. He followed this up by writing a reply to Horace Greeley, who had published a ferocious editorial in the New York Tribune, entitledThe Prayer of Twenty Millions,' accusing Lincoln of
being strangely and disastrously remiss' in not emancipating the slaves, adding that it was preposterous and futile' to try to put down the rebellion without eradicating slavery. Lincoln
replied by return of post, without hesitation or consultation, and for all to read:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and it is not either to save or to
destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, 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 slaves and leaving others alone I would do that. What I do about slavery and the