This famous document (16) is as remarkable for the parts of it that are now forgotten as for the rest.  The remembered portion is a warning that on the first of January, one hundred days subsequent to the date of the Proclamation—­“all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”  The forgotten portions include four other declarations of executive policy.  Lincoln promised that “the Executive will in due time recommend that all citizens of the United States who have remained loyal thereto shall be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.”  He announced that he would again urge upon Congress “the adoption of a practical measure tendering pecuniary aid” to all the loyal Slave States that would “voluntarily adopt immediate or gradual abolishment of slavery within their limits.”  He would continue to advise the colonization of free Africans abroad.  There is still to be mentioned a detail of the Proclamation which, except for its historical setting in the general perspective of Lincoln’s political strategy, would appear inexplicable.  One might expect in the opening statement, where the author of the Proclamation boldly assumes dictatorial power, an immediate linking of that assumption with the matter in hand.  But this does not happen.  The Proclamation begins with the following paragraph: 

“I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States and each of the States and the people thereof in which States that relation is or may be suspended or disturbed.”

XXV.  A WAR BEHIND THE SCENES

By the autumn of 1862, Lincoln had acquired the same political method that Seward had displayed in the spring of 1861.  What a chasm separates the two Lincolns!  The cautious, contradictory, almost timid statesman of the Sumter episode; the confident, unified, quietly masterful statesman of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Now, in action, he was capable of staking his whole future on the soundness of his own thinking, on his own ability to forecast the inevitable.  Without waiting for the results of the Proclamation to appear, but in full confidence that he had driven a wedge between the Jacobins proper and the mere Abolitionists, he threw down the gage of battle on the issue of a constitutional dictatorship.  Two days after issuing the Proclamation he virtually proclaimed himself dictator.  He did so by means of a proclamation which divested the whole American people of the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus.  The occasion was the effort of State governments to establish conscription of their militia.  The Proclamation delivered any one impeding that attempt into the hands of the military authorities without trial.