The final Emancipation Proclamation was issued on the first day of January, 1863.  The various official measures that preceded it may be briefly sketched, together with closely related incidents.  As early as the autumn of 1861 the problem of the relation of the war to slavery was brought forcibly to the President’s attention by the action of General J.C.  Fremont, the Union commander in Missouri, who issued an order declaring the slaves of rebels in his department free.  The order was premature and unauthorized, and the President promptly annulled it.  General Fremont was thus, in a sense, the pioneer in military emancipation; and he lived to see the policy proposed by him carried into practical operation by all our armies.  Lincoln afterwards said:  “I have great respect for General Fremont and his abilities, but the fact is that the pioneer in any movement is not generally the best man to carry that movement to a successful issue.  It was so in old times; Moses began the emancipation of the Jews, but didn’t take Israel to the Promised Land after all.  He had to make way for Joshua to complete the work.  It looks as if the first reformer of a thing has to meet such a hard opposition and gets so battered and bespattered that afterward when people find they have to accept his reform they will accept it more easily from another man.”

Lincoln at first favored a policy of gradual emancipation.  In a special message to Congress, on the 6th of March, 1862, he proposed such a plan for the abolition of slavery.  “In my judgment,” he remarked, “gradual, and not sudden, emancipation is better for all.”  He suggested to Congress the adoption of a joint resolution declaring “that the United States ought to co-operate with any State which may adopt a gradual abolition of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid to compensate for the inconvenience, public and private, produced by such change of system.”  In conclusion he urged:  “In full view of my great responsibility to my God and to my country, I earnestly beg the attention of Congress and the people to this subject.”

On the 16th of April of this year, Congress passed a bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia—­a measure for which Lincoln had himself introduced a bill while a member of Congress.  In confirming the act as President, he remarked privately:  “Little did I dream in 1849, when as a member of Congress I proposed to abolish slavery at this capital, and could scarcely get a hearing for the proposition, that it would be so soon accomplished.”

Emancipation measures moved rapidly in 1862.  On June 19 Congress enacted a measure prohibiting slavery forever in all present and future territories of the United States.  July 17 a law was passed authorizing the employment of negroes as soldiers, and conferring freedom on all who should render military service, and on the families of all such as belonged to disloyal owners.  Two days later, in a conference appointed by him at the Executive Mansion, the President submitted to the members of Congress from the Border States a written appeal, in which he said: