Five days later on September 22, just as he had promised his cabinet, himself and his God, the president announced the Preliminary Emancipation Proc­lamation. It gave the Confederacy until January 1, 1863, to return to the Union or forfeit slaves who would otherwise be "thenceforward, and forever free," their liberty recognized and maintained by "the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof…."

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Just as Lincoln had feared, the Proclamation was immediately and bitterly denounced. Newspapers around the world warned ominously that it would ignite race riots (an invitation to "burning, ravishing, massacring, and destroying," shrieked The London Times). The stock market declined. Desertions increased, with some soldiers unwilling to fight a war to "free Negroes." And Lincoln's Republican Party indeed suffered significant mid-term election losses that fall. To be sure, accolades followed as well, but as a dispirited Lincoln put it, "breath alone kills no rebels." In a letter to his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, he admitted: "This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory….I wish I could write more cheerfully."

But Lincoln would not back down, even in the wake of a humiliating Union military setback at Fredericksburg in December. "We cannot escape history," he warned Congress that month. On Janu­ary 1, 1863, as millions of enslaved people awaited word on their fate, Lincoln overcame political pressure, incurable national racism, popular suspicion, press antagonism, battlefield setbacks and his own trembling hand, and signed the final Emancipation Proclamation. This version even included the truly extraordinary recommendation that freed blacks now join Union military forces to battle for the freedom the document promised. The Union war effort would now embrace what Lincoln came to call his "sable arm," the U.S. Colored Troops. Marching—and winning—remained the sword behind the president's pen. Lincoln, and surely African Americans as well, knew that for all its good intentions, the Emancipation Proclamation would free slaves only if Union armies won victories in Rebel states. Such was the case as well for America's first freedom document: the Declaration of Independence. Its promise was not fulfilled by magic or ukase on July 4, 1776, but through hard fighting by the Continental Army in the months and years that followed.

Although it is nearly impossible to quantify with precision, Lincoln and Seward believed the Emancipation Proclamation freed at least 200,000 slaves by February 1865, as Union troops marched farther into the Confederacy, setting blacks free in their path. The slaves rushed by the thousands into the safety of Union lines and volunteered to take up arms against former masters. Lincoln took another giant step the following year and supported a constitutional amendment to free slaves everywhere—even in the loyal slave-holding Border States, which he had excluded from the Proclamation, recognizing he had no constitutional authority to confiscate property there. Lincoln not only approved a plank endorsing the measure in his reelection platform, he twisted arms and knocked heads in Congress to make sure it was passed and sent to the states for ratification. That amendment became the law of the land in late 1865, although Lincoln himself did not live to see it ratified.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation has been somewhat battered—at least in the field of public opinion—by several factors. The first was its authors' own diversionary smokescreens in the run-up to its announcement. The second reflected a retrograde cultural shift that also saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Codes. White supremacist America began emphasizing Lincoln as a hero of national unity, rather than of freedom—as if to justify society's unceasing racism. Suddenly the Gettysburg Address became Lincoln's greatest document—not the Emancipation Proclamation—anything but the case in Lincoln's own time. Finally African Americans themselves, painfully aware that the full promise of freedom and equality had never been kept, began turning to spokesmen of their own—especially Frederick Douglass (who later called Lincoln "quintessentially the white man's president")—in a sense abandoning Lincoln as a hero. Forgotten was the fact that Douglass himself had remembered the announcement of the Proclamation that January day with unbridled "joy." Forgotten by revisionists too was perhaps the most dramatic public moment of Lincoln's presidency: the day in April 1865 when he was surrounded and cheered by a group of freed slaves who saw him enter Richmond, Va., following the fall of the Confederate capital.

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