Sublime

Lincoln proclaimed emancipation chiefly for military reasons, but as its moral implications became evident, they simplified his diplomacy. They gave the Union the high ground of conscience:96 just as no Northerner would re-enslave former slaves who’d served in its army, so no foreign state could afford, by the middle of 1864, to recognize the Confe

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Lincoln said nothing of slaves held in states remaining loyal: he could hardly have claimed war powers if not at war with them.80 He also knew, though, that he didn’t have to: the more blood the Union shed the more just—and, therefore, the more legitimate—emancipation would become. The proclamation, in this sense, was Lincoln’s Tarutino: with no mo

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It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkne

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Lincoln’s goal, in each of these instances, was to balance law against military necessity, in the expectation that the passage of time and the success of his armies would stabilize the equilibria. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” he wrote in 1864. “I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet, I have never understood tha

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