"I wanted him to do it," Lincoln explained to a friend, "not say it." Still, he couldn't abide General Hunter's order. "You can not if you would, be blind to the signs of the times," he warned. Even as he disavowed abolition as a primary objective, Lincoln privately beseeched border state representatives to emancipate their slaves under generous terms, before the tide of war swept away the whole system under no terms at all. The year 1862 would see the president sign legislation banning the "peculiar institution" in Washington, DC and the western territories. It wasn't the first time that the president subordinated his personal antipathy toward slavery to placating the border states, and it wouldn't be the last. ![]() In May 1862, to the considerable frustration of anti-slavery stalwarts in his own party, Abraham Lincoln overturned an order issued by General David Hunter that would have freed every slave across vast swaths of the southern Atlantic coast.
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