Yeah, I read the link to the Smithsonian, a one-paragraph item written at a 7th-grade level. First, you appear to confuse "wanting" with "having the power." I'm sure President Bush "wants" to end abortion. Does he have the power to do so, though? No. You make the all-too-usual Lost Causer mistake of starting from the assumption that Lincoln was a dictator, then accusing him of being morally lax because he didn't use his dictatorial powers.
Indeed, Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a war aim at the beginning. Nor was it a war aim at the end. The war aim was to put down the rebellion and preserve the Union. The EP was a war measure. Before the war, Lincoln frequently said that he had neither any intention of abolishing slavery in the states where it existed, nor the belief that he had the power to do so. His concern was the slave states' insistence on expanding slavery into the territories and into new states. The war, however, gave him to opportunity end slavery in the south.
He did not want to do so for fear of alienating slave holding border states. So when he did so, it was only the rebellious Confederate states.
Wrong again. By the time of the EP on January 1, 1863, the border states were firmly Union. Now, if he'd done it a year and a half earlier, you might have a point.
All of the other comments you made took place years later.
But they were in the works, through normal political process. West Virginia debated ending slavery at their statehood convention in January 1862, passed an act phasing out slavery that July. Debates in all the Union slave states were ongoing, with Democrats holding out. The 1864 election was the turning point, tipping three of the four Union slave states toward abolition within weeks and allowing Congress the pass the 13th on to the states. We're talking about 24 months here to let democracy take it's course in states that stayed loyal to the Union and therefore weren't under Lincoln's authority as Commander in Chief.
If you read the link at the Smithsonian, he could have but refused to free all slaves for political reasons.
You'll have to point out where it says that. Here, I'll save you a step. Here's the whole three sentences of your source: "In spite of vocal prodding from abolitionists, President Lincoln steadfastly refused to make the abolition of slavery a Northern goal in the early stages of the Civil War, lest doing so would alienate slaveholding border states that remained loyal to the Union. By mid-1862, however, Lincoln’s concern for enhancing the moral weight of the United States in the eyes of the world convinced him that it was time to act. In September 1862, he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, which would take effect on January 1, 1863, and declared all slaves free in those regions of the South still in rebellion. Where does it say, "he could have but refused to free all slaves for political reasons." What it says is that early on he didn't make it as a "Northern goal" and that the EP "declared all slaves free in those regions of the South still in rebellion." It does NOT say that he could have freed slaves in Union states on his say-so.
t is also in history that Pres. Lincoln gave 250,000 to a man to go to Haiti (or some country down there) to set up a means to transport blacks to that country. This person in charge made off with the money and everything fell through.
Proof again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Yes, Lincoln supported colonization schemes, including the disastrous Ile de Vache scheme, which took black volunteers to Haiti, then ditched them there and took the money. Inexplicably (I'm sure to you), Lincoln sent ships to return the black colonists to the US. Pretty poor deportation scheme, huh? The fact is that Lincoln, naively perhaps, thought many blacks wouldn't want to live among whites after they were freed. The colonization schemes he supported were always predicated on volunteers wanting to go, and he utterly rejected any notion of forcible deportation.
Which goes back to my first post, that the Civil War was first and foremost a war of States Rights.
Sure, a state's right to weaken the entire nation. to seize forts and armories and to fire on US troops, when an election doesn't go their way and they think that maybe the new administration might put some pressure on their rights to own black people. If that's the state's right you mean, I agree.
I do think though, he should have set out to free all slaves.
And maybe he did. Maybe in his heart that was always the goal. There's plenty of evidence of his opposition to slavery throughout his life. ("If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong".) But he was also constricted in his ability to make it happen--by the war, by congress, by the states, and by the Constitution.
In the end, though, it comes down to one, simple irrefutable fact: Before Lincoln, slavery. After Lincoln, no slavery.