What prompted Lincoln to make the Proclamation of Emancipation of 1862 when he did ?Was he prompted by some political considerations ? In particular the bold and plain statement could be seen as giving the Civil War the appearance of a crusade against slavery and thereby cause any potential European supporters of the Confederacy to think twice. After all, the British Empire had abolished slavery in 1833, but the Times was, nonetheless,commonly reporting the War in terms favourable to the South.If not why was the proclamation made then (or at all )?

While Lincoln was known as the great Emancipator,what is not widely known is that Lincoln had ideas which are never stressed in our American History books.
In the book "The Free and the Unfree" by Peter Carrol & David Noble,the authors state that while Lincoln wanted to free the slaves ,his eventual goal was to ship them all back to Africa or to the various islands in the Caribbean....so his motives weren't all that pure as our History books paint him.

Not such a strange idea at the time !The West African country of Liberia was created, was it not, as a country for those who were freed from slavery to live in? Is not Monrovia, the capital, named after the President of the day ? The settlement appears to have been comprised of slaves freed from North America.

Another point: Lincoln only freed the slaves in the states currently in rebellion. Not one slave in Maryland or elsewhere in the North went free until the 14th Amendment.

He also timed the Proclamation to coincide with Lee's failure to win at Antietam, a failed Confederacy thrust North. The effect was a sort of double whammy to the South's hopes for recognition in Europe both on moral and practical grounds.

Lincoln, himself, was not an abolitionist. Well into the Civil War he continued to maintain that preservation of the Union was his aim. His attitude changed when it became evident that his European contacts were not in favor of slavery.

In issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he specifically exempted large areas of both Louisiana and Virginia from his proclamation; these areas being under Union control at the time. His act was more of a tactic than it was a statement of his own sentiments.

It was pretty much a political move. In Freeing the slaves on the rebel states, he hoped to inspire the slaves to leave their owners, as they were legally allowed to do. And as Hippolips points out, one of his goals was to move them out. As for not freeing all the slaves.. if he had done that then the slave states still in the union would have succeeded to the Confederacy, which would only create a larger problem for Lincoln.

Europe did not get involved, I'd say, because the South started to lose after Gettysburg.

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Originally posted by FredPuli:
What prompted Lincoln to make the Proclamation of Emancipation of 1862 when he did ?

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I won't pretend to be privy to Lincoln's thinking, but I suspect that it was, at least in part, an effort to undermine the economy of the Confederacy, which depended heavily on the plantation system for cotton production. He may have believed that by reducing cotton production, he could interfere with the Confederacy's war effort, either by forcing them to divert military force to keeping the laborers at work, or by cutting off their main source of money. This may well have been an effective tactic. Egypt made significant economic gains during the US Civil war years by growing cotton, replacing the reduced American supply.

Alan Moore