BY THE PRESIDENT:  WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.]

It recited the announcement of the September proclamation; defined its character and authority as a military decree; designated the States and parts of States that day in rebellion against the government; ordered and declared that all persons held as slaves therein “are and henceforward shall be free”; and that such persons of suitable condition would be received into the military service.  “And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

The conclusion of the momentous transaction was as deliberate and simple as had been its various stages of preparation.  The morning and midday of January 1, 1863, were occupied by the half-social, half-official ceremonial of the usual New Year’s day reception at the Executive Mansion, established by long custom.  At about three o’clock in the afternoon, after full three hours of greetings and handshakings, Mr. Lincoln and perhaps a dozen persons assembled in the executive office, and, without any prearranged ceremony the President affixed his signature to the great Edict of Freedom.  No better commentary will ever be written upon this far-reaching act than that which he himself embodied in a letter written to a friend a little more than a year later: 

“I am naturally antislavery.  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 upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon 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.  I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery.  I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways.  And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.  I did understand, however, that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government, that nation, of which that Constitution was the organic law.  Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution?  By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.  I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the