Why didn't Lincoln free all slaves?
1 Answer
His primary commitment was to preserving/restoring the Union.
Explanation:
Lincoln famously said that if he could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, he would do it, and if he could preserve he union by freeing no slaves, he would do that. It's tempting to impute a 21st Century sensibility onto out 19th Century heroes, but that would be a mistake.
While freeing all the slaves seems in retrospect like the obvious moral thing to do, at the time, the outcome of the war was far from a done deal. Emancipating the slaves meant bankrupting slave owners. Lincoln needed the cooperation of elites in Maryland, Louisiana, Tennessee, Northern Virginia, Missouri, Delaware and Kentucky; most of these areas (sometimes individual counties in some states) were exempted by name in the Proclamation.
