aside until a military
achievement would make it something more than an idle gesture. In
September, the severe check administered to Lee at Antietam seemed to
offer the golden opportunity. On the 22d, the immortal document was
given to the world announcing that, unless the states in arms returned
to the union by January 1, 1863, the fatal blow at their "peculiar
institution" would be delivered. Southern leaders treated it with slight
regard, and so on the date set the promise was fulfilled. The
proclamation was issued as a war measure, adopted by the President as
commander-in-chief of the armed forces, on grounds of military
necessity. It did not abolish slavery. It simply emancipated slaves in
places then in arms against federal authority. Everywhere else slavery,
as far as the Proclamation was concerned, remained lawful.

[Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN]

To seal forever the proclamation of emancipation, and to extend freedom
to the whole country, Congress, in January, 1865, on the urgent
recommendation of Lincoln, transmitted to the states the thirteenth
amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. By the end
of 1865 the amendment was ratified. The house was not divided against
itself; it did not fall; it was all free.

=The Restraint of Civil Liberty.=--As in all great wars, particularly
those in the nature of a civil strife, it was found necessary to use
strong measures to sustain opinion favorable to the administration's
military policies and to frustrate the designs of those who sought to
hamper its action. Within two weeks of his first call for volunteers,
Lincoln empowered General Scott to suspend the writ of _habeas corpus_
along the line of march between Philadelphia and Washington and thus to
arrest and hold without interference from civil courts any one whom he
deemed a menace to the union. At a later date the area thus ruled by
military officers was extended by executive proclamation. By an act of
March 3, 1863, Congress, desiring to lay all doubts about the
President's power, authorized him to suspend the writ throughout the
United States or in any part thereof. It also freed military officers
from the necessity of surrendering to civil courts persons arrested
under their orders, or even making answers to writs issued from such
courts. In the autumn of that year the President, acting under the terms
of this law, declared this ancient and honorable instrument for the
protection of civil l