Replying to an excoriating editorial in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in August denouncing Lincoln’s pusillanimity for not proclaiming the abolition of slavery at once, Lincoln sent an open letter further preparing the ground for emancipation as a means to military success, explaining the point better in a few dozen plain words than a closely argued treatise might have done. My paramount object in the struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery.
