You are going to call a Union General's refusal to send back workers to the Confederacy as equivalent to initiating emancipation?
That is silly. I dare say no General would send anything useful back to the enemy. As a matter of fact, it would appear the General initially regarded them as "property", which kind of blows a big hole in your argument there.
August Confiscation Act of 1861 declares that any property, including slaves, used by CSA could be confiscated by military action.
And this just reinforces the point that they were regarded as confiscated property, and not free men. The Union wasn't even buying their own press releases at this point.
September “Contrabands” employed by US Army and Navy paid wages, in addition to rations
And here they realized just how silly they look and so they put a fig leaf on it after the fact.
The rest of this stuff is just attempts at rationalizing various events as being equivalent to a post hoc casus belli. Anything which happened after July 21 does not count as the cause of the Invasion. A lot of this stuff is just tactics to weaken the South militarily while strengthening the North Militarily.
None of this explains why they bypassed Maryland on their way to invade Virginia. What was the difference between Slave owning Maryland and Slave owning Virginia?
One of them was independent, the other was not. It is that independence which was intolerable.
Interestingly, you're also leaving out a couple of rather important events that took place that year before either date. The CSA formally declared war on the USA on May 15, and Virginia formally joined the CSA on May 23. When a nation formally declares war on another (that is what the CSA claimed it was doing, whether the USA recognized it as such or not), it pretty much loses the right to act all shocked and innocent when the other country chooses to fight.
And Virginians could not be overly shocked about being "invaded" when they had voluntarily joined a country that had already declared war on the people just across the river.
http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/union_or_secession/unit/10/referendum_on_secession
http://www.oldplaces.org/Colleton/civilwar.htm
None of this explains why they bypassed Maryland on their way to invade Virginia. What was the difference between Slave owning Maryland and Slave owning Virginia?
That one had declared and waged war on the USA and the other had not? (With exception of some pretty nasty riots in Baltimore, burning of bridges, etc.) But those were acts of individuals, not formal acts of the state.
Also, why exactly do you think the USA should have invaded MD?
Interestingly, Virginia initiated acts of war, by any definition, against the Union well before any acts of war by the USA against VA. VA troops were marching on Harpers Ferry and Fort Monroe shortly after, or possibly before, the convention voted for secession, and well over a month before VA, even in theory, withdrew from the Union by its referendum on May 23.
Despite VA having violated any reasonable expectation of its obligations as a State, the USA nevertheless did not "invade" until after VA had formally seceded.
Tell me again why VA had some "right" to not be invaded when it was already waging war on the USA.
You keep coming back, like you're stuck, to implying that I'm trying to say the Union had identical war aims in May 61 to those it had in May 63 or 64. I've never said any such thing.
In April 61 abolitionists went about in most of the North in considerable risk of violent attack. A year later their leaders were publicly welcomed to the Congress and cheered in the streets.
Wars have a way of changing people's attitudes and minds.
Look at Ben Butler, for example. He had supported Jefferson Davis for the Democratic nomination for president in 1860. A year or two later, he was the darling of the radical Republicans.
To be sure, BB was pretty much a despicable, though extremely clever, opportunist. But many other men made a similar journey of opinion. They had been in favor of compromise and conciliation to bring peace. When the CSA chose to throw peace out the window, they decided on war to the hilt. Which fairly obviously included war on the institution that had caused the war.