I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology.
Carrol
That refers to Lincoln too?
Mike B)
Historian James McPherson has a book on Antietam that argues that the Emancipation Proclamation was announced after Union losses forced Lincoln to adopt a make-or-break effort that involved big political risks. McPherson is an interesting figure. He represents that wing of American scholarship that puts the most "revolutionary" spin on the Northern leadership, despite the evidence here of Lincoln's waffling. This has endeared him to the WSWS website, a Healyite sectarian outfit that does have excellent analysis of movies and other topics that are not compromised by their dogmatism. You can read interviews with him at:
http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/history/h-mcpher.shtml
Here's a quote from Salon.com review of his Antietam book:
What made Antietam different from other engagements, according to McPherson, was that it decided the fate of the country in at least two lasting respects. Prior to the battle, Lincoln performed an excruciating tightrope act, suspended between a northern political mosaic that exerted "crosscutting pressures from various quarters for and against emancipation as a Union war policy" and a "need to keep border slave states and Northern Democrats in his war coalition." Lincoln himself stated: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," but he knew the limits of both his constitutional power and his political base too well to jeopardize the war effort by being aggressive on freeing the slaves. Five days after Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
He had tried half-measures before then, however; as Union generals, without Lincoln's official approval, began to confiscate slaves as war contraband, Lincoln would urge the border-state representatives to accept government compensation -- literally, payment for their former property - in return for a gradual emancipation of their slaves. It didn't work -- but Lincoln's efforts prompted some great rhetoric from the master orator "[Gradual emancipation] would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times."
full: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/09/17/mcpherson/index1.html
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