THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
procrastination, let slip the moments when he could easily have beaten the divided enemy in detail. As it was, General Lee came near being justified in calling Antietam a “drawn battle.” He withdrew almost unmolested from the presence of our army across the Potomac. But the battle of Antietam became one of the landmarks of human history by giving Abraham Lincoln the opportunity for doing the great act which crowned him with eternal fame. There is something singularly pathetic in the story—and it is a true story—that Abraham Lincoln, harassed by anxious doubts as to whether the issue of the emancipation proclamation, already once postponed, would not cause dangerous dissension among the Northern people, at last referred the portentous question to the arbitrament of heaven, and vowed in his heart to himself and “to his Maker” that the proclamation should certainly come forth, if the result of the next battle were in favor of the Union. And so, after the battle of Antietam, the great proclamation, in Lincoln's heart sanctioned by the decree of Providence, did come forth, and it made our Civil War not only a war for a political Union, but also a war against slavery before all the world.
The effect produced by the appearance of the proclamation did much to justify the previous hesitation of the President. In the first place, it did not at once bring about the confusion in the internal conditions of the Southern States that had been expected by the anti-slavery men who advised the measure. They had, indeed, not looked for nor desired a servile insurrection. But they had expected the ruling class, and with it the Confederate Government, to fear the possibility of such a calamity, and, for that reason, to withdraw a part of their forces from the fighting line to watch the negroes. They had also expected that the number of negro fugitives from the Southern country would become much larger, and that thereby
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