success than in time of military weakness and peril.

We have seen that both the President and Congress had been careful to
insist that the war was not undertaken on behalf of the Negroes. Yet the
events of the war had forced the problem of the Negro into prominence.
Fugitive slaves from the rebel States took refuge with the Union armies,
and the question of what should be done with them was forced on the
Government. Lincoln knew that in this matter he must move with the
utmost caution. When in the early days of the war, Fremont, who had been
appointed to military commander in Missouri, where he showed an utter
unfitness, both intellectual and moral, for his place, proclaimed on his
own responsibility the emancipation of the slaves of "disloyal" owners,
his headstrong vanity would probably have thrown both Missouri and
Kentucky into the arms of the Confederacy if the President had not
promptly disavowed him. Later he disavowed a similar proclamation by
General Hunter. When a deputation of ministers of religion from Chicago
urged on him the desirability of immediate action against Slavery, he
met them with a reply the opening passage of which is one of the world's
masterpieces of irony. When Horace Greeley backed the same appeal with
his "Prayer of Twenty Millions," Lincoln in a brief letter summarized
his policy with his usual lucidity and force.

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without
freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about
Slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save
the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it
would help to save the Union."

At the time he wrote these words Lincoln had already decided on a policy
of military emancipation in the rebel States. He doubtless wrote them
with an eye of the possible effects of that policy. He wished the
Northern Democrats and the Unionists of Border States to understand that
his action was based upon considerations of military expediency and in
no way upon his personal disapproval of Slavery, of which at the same
time he made no recantation. On the military ground he had a strong
case. If, as the South maintained, the slave was simply a piece of
property, then the slave of a rebel was a piece of enemy property--and
enemy p