ABSTRACT
In December 1862 John Murray Forbes, Bostonian businessman and wartime convert to emancipation, wrote to Charles Sumner about the president’s forthcoming proclamation. Abraham Lincoln’s loyalty to the notions of gradual emancipation and colonisation has remained something of a puzzle. On 13 September, as rumours of a proclamation spread, Lincoln spoke at length to a delegation which presented an Emancipation Memorial from a group of Chicago Christians. Emancipation and the recruitment of Negro troops were the most dramatic changes wrought by the war, great but flawed monuments to the Northern cause. The limitations of emancipation owed most of all perhaps to the moral ambiguities which clouded the cause for which each side fought in the Civil War. Pressures against emancipation were at their strongest early in the war, and were almost inevitably weakened by the development of the conflict itself. Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, but the road to emancipation was paved with equivocation.
