What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated?  I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!  Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?  Is there a single court or magistrate or individual that would be influenced by it there?

And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines?  Yet I cannot learn that that law has caused a single slave to come over to us.  And suppose they could be induced by a proclamation of freedom from me to throw themselves upon us, what should we do with them?  How can we feed and care for such a multitude?  General Butler wrote me a few days since that he was issuing more rations to the slaves who have rushed to him than to all the white troops under his command.  They eat, and that is all; though it is true General Butler is feeding the whites also by the thousand, for it nearly amounts to a famine there.  If now, the pressure of the war should call off our forces from New Orleans to defend some other point, what is to prevent the masters from reducing the blacks to slavery again?  For I am told that whenever the rebels take any black prisoners, free or slave, they immediately auction them off!  They did so with those they took from a boat that was aground in the Tennessee River a few days ago.  And then I am very ungenerously attacked for it.  For instance, when, after the late battles at and near Bull Run, an expedition went out from Washington under a flag of truce to bury the dead and bring in the wounded, and the rebels seized the blacks who went along to help, and sent them into slavery, Horace Greeley said in his paper “that the government would probably do nothing about it.”  What could I do?

Now, then, tell me, if you please, what possible result of good would follow the issuing of such a proclamation as you desire?  Understand, I raise no objections against it on legal or constitutional grounds, for, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war I suppose I have a right to take any measures which may best subdue the enemy; nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.  I view this matter as a practical war-measure, to be decided on according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.

[The committee had said that emancipation would secure us the sympathy of the world, slavery being the cause of the war.  To which the President replied:]