n from people at war with the United States, just as horses
or carts might be taken, to subtract from their resources and add to
those of the United States. In a curiously prophetic manner,
ex-President John Quincy Adams had argued in Congress many years before
that, if rebellion ever arose, this very thing might be done. Adams
would probably have claimed that the command of the President became
law in the States which took part in the rebellion. Lincoln only
claimed legal force for his Proclamation in so far as it was an act of
war based on sufficient necessity and plainly tending to help the
Northern arms. If the legal question had ever been tried out, the
Courts would no doubt have had to hold that at least those slaves who
obtained actual freedom under the Proclamation became free in law; for
it was certainly in good faith an act of war, and the military result
justified it. A large amount of labour was withdrawn from the industry
necessary to the South, and by the end of the war 180,000 coloured
troops were in arms for the North, rendering services, especially in
occupying conquered territory that was unhealthy for white troops,
without which, in Lincoln's opinion, the war could never have been
finished. The Proclamation had indeed an indirect effect more
far-reaching than this; it committed the North to a course from which
there could be no turning back, except by surrender; it made it a
political certainty that by one means or another slavery would be ended
if the North won. But in Lincoln's view of his duty as President, this
ulterior consequence was not to determine his action. The fateful step
by which the end of slavery was precipitated would not have taken the
form it did take if it had not come to commend itself to him as a
military measure conducing to the suppression of rebellion.

On the broader grounds on which we naturally look at this measure, many
people in the North had, as we have seen, been anxious from the
beginning that he should adopt an active policy of freeing Southern
slaves. It was intolerable to think that the war might end and leave
slavery where it was. To convert the war into a crusade against
slavery seemed to many the best way of arousing and uniting the North.
This argument was reinforced by some of the American Ministers abroad.
They were aware that people in Europe misunderstood and disliked the
Constitutional propriety with which the Union government insisted that
it was