[BroJoeK]

Svartalfiar: "He didn't free any slaves in the north, where he actually had the power to do so. Funny, right?"

DiogenesLamp: "Cold blooded and cynical."

That's total rubbish and you well know it.
Lincoln's authority as commander in chief allowed him to declare "contraband of war", which he did, for obvious military reasons.
But he had no authority to, as a future president would say "use my pen and my phone" to abolish slavery in Union states.
That required a constitutional amendment, the 13th, which Lincoln strongly supported.

So, words like "cold blooded and cynical" might well describe DiogenesLamp's defenses of the Lost Cause, but not Lincoln's support for emancipation, abolition & citizenship, which eventually got him murdered.

[DiogenesLamp]

"Rubbish and nonsense!"

:)

[Svartalfiar]

That's total rubbish and you well know it. Lincoln's authority as commander in chief allowed him to declare "contraband of war", which he did, for obvious military reasons. But he had no authority to, as a future president would say "use my pen and my phone" to abolish slavery in Union states. That required a constitutional amendment, the 13th, which Lincoln strongly supported.

Oh, so he had no authority to abolish slavery in the Union. Yet, according to him/all of y'all, the South's secessions weren't legal, and those states never truly left the Union. So by what authority could he then free slaves in those states, but not the northern ones? You can't have it both ways - either the South truly left and had to be beaten back in, in which case he had no power or authority over the Confederacy to issue his Proclamation, or the states were always in the Union and he couldn't have freed the Southern slaves yet had no power to free those in the North.