As late as the summer of 1862, in the last weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had insisted that the purpose of the war was to save the Union. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” he wrote Horace Greeley, “and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”82 But by 1864, he had wholly changed his mind. Victory without abolition would be no victory at all.
