LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Abraham Lincoln: Emancipation Proclamation
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Lincoln mentioned colonization favorably in his first Emancipation Proclamation, and continued to support efforts at colonization throughout his presidency. He appointed the Rev. James Mitchell as his Commissioner of Emigration to oversee colonization projects from 1861 through 1865. Between 1861 and 1862 Lincoln actively negotiated contracts with businessmen to colonize freed Blacks in Panama and on a small island off the coast of Haiti. The Haiti plan collapsed in 1862 and 1863 after swindling by the business agents responsible for the plan, prompting Lincoln to send ships to retrieve the colonists. The much larger Panama contract fell through in 1863 after the government of Colombia backed away from the deal and expressed hostility to colonization schemes. In 1862 Lincoln ... convened a colonization conference at the White House where he addressed a group of freedmen and attempted to convince them of supporting his policy.
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Lincoln believed that the Constitution was adequate for all purposes. His impressive educability and his innate instinct for interracial decency led him, on becoming president, to envisage an improved as well as reunified nation. In 1862 he requested Attorney General Edwin Bates to specify the rights adhering to national citizenship. Bates's reply rested on Justice Bushrod Washington's 1823 circuit opinion in Corfield v. Coryell. He stressed mobility, a right no slave enjoyed. Lincoln's catalog of federal citizens' rights grew much larger after his military emancipation order in 1862 and his 1863 orders to the army to recruit blacks, especially recent slaves.
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Lincoln did, even as a boy, largely reject organized religion, but the Calvinistic "doctrine of necessity" would remain a factor throughout his life. In 1846 Lincoln described the effect of this doctrine as "that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control. In April 1864, in justifying his actions in regard to Emancipation, Lincoln wrote, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.
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Lincoln met with his Cabinet for the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation draft on July 22, 1862. He later said: "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper."
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Lincoln made it clear that the North was fighting the war to preserve the Union. On August 22, 1862, just a few weeks before signing the Proclamation and after a draft of it was on his desk, he wrote a letter in response to an editorial by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune which had urged complete abolition:
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The following document has often been confused with Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation. Lincoln believed that the civil war was God's judgment on the nation for it's sinfulness. And in an omimous echo of the words of the King of Nineveh in Jonah 3:7-8, Lincoln made this proclamation of a national day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer.
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Emancipation Proclamation