“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that,” President Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 20, 1862. “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a “necessary war measure.”
I think this attitude by Abraham Lincoln is probably the most typical one
