The revocation of Hunter’s order infuriated the Abolitionists.  It deeply disappointed the growing number who, careless about slavery, wanted emancipation as a war measure, as a blow at the South.  Few of either of these groups noticed the implied hint that emancipation might come by executive action.  Here was the matter of the war powers in a surprising form.  However, it was not unknown to Congress.  Attempts had been made to induce Congress to concede the war powers to the President and to ask, not command, him to use them for the liberation of slaves in the Seceded States.  Long before, in a strangely different connection, such vehement Abolitionists as Giddings and J. Q. Adams had pictured the freeing of slaves as a natural incident of military occupation.

What induced Lincoln to throw out this hint of a possible surrender on the subject of emancipation?  Again, as so often, the silence as to his motives is unbroken.  However, there can be no doubt that his thinking on the subject passed through several successive stages.  But all his thinking was ruled by one idea.  Any policy he might accept, or any refusal of policy, would be judged in his own mind by the degree to which it helped, or hindered, the national cause.  Nothing was more absurd than the sneer of the Abolitionists that he was “tender” of slavery.  Browning spoke for him faithfully, “If slavery can survive the shock of war and secession, be it so.  If in the conflict for liberty, the Constitution and the Union, it must necessarily perish, then let it perish.”  Browning refused to predict which alternative would develop.  His point was that slaves must be treated like other property.  But, if need be, he would sacrifice slavery as he would sacrifice anything else, to save the Union.  He had no intention to “protect” slavery.(6)

In the first stage of Lincoln’s thinking on this thorny subject, his chief anxiety was to avoid scaring off from the national cause those Southern Unionists who were not prepared to abandon slavery.  This was the motive behind his prompt suppression of Fremont.  It was this that inspired the Abolitionist sneer about his relative attitude toward God and Kentucky.  As a compromise, to cut the ground from under the Vindictives, he had urged the loyal Slave States to endorse a program of compensated emancipation.  But these States were as unable to see the handwriting on the wall as were the Little Men.  In the same proclamation that overruled Hunter, while hinting at what the Administration might feel driven to do, Lincoln appealed again to the loyal Slave States to accept compensated emancipation.  “I do not argue,” said he, “I beseech you to make the argument for yourselves.  You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. . . .  This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any.  It acts not the Pharisee.  The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything."(7)