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Abraham Lincoln – The Proclamation of Emancipation

By Hermann Grundel

| 2 min read

President’s Day: February 21, 2022

From: Genius of Place by Justin Martin (Recommended Reading)

Throughout the war Olmsted – like many Northern opponents of slavery -had been frustrated by Lincoln’s gradualism.  It was a stance Olmsted himself has once held, before traveling to the South in the 1850s.  Now Lincoln had made the same transition to red-hot abolitionist.  Olmsted revised his estimate of the man: “The Proclamation of Emancipation by President Lincoln, looking at its possible economical and moral results in the future, is undoubtedly one of the great events of the century,” he declared in the New York Times editorial on September 28, 1862.  Privately, in a letter to a fellow USSC commissioner, Olmsted wrote: “I shall stand by it (the proclamation) now as long as I live, and shall try to bring up my children to make it good.  I shall be for continual war, or for Southern independence rather than go back one step from it.” 

Read and Explore the History and Background:
The Proclamation of Emancipation
The Gettysburg Address

Historic Civil War Era Quote:

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the U.S.  1809 – 1865

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