To what extent does Abraham Lincoln deserve the accolade The Great Emancipator?

Abraham Lincoln, also known as The Great Emancipator, has caused quite a stir in the publics mind. We were persuaded and taught in school that Lincoln was a man of virtue. We were told to follow in the footsteps of the so called Honest Abe. To some this would mean living a life of deception, skepticism, and possibly even racism to be precise. Nevertheless, Lincoln was and still is a hero. However, there are reasons to believe that Lincoln was reluctant towards the emancipation. Even though he recited in speech after speech that his main motive for the Civil War was for the slaves to be “forever free”, he had his own surreptitious reasoning which was to preserve the Union.

Since the beginning, Lincoln's life was always portrayed as unsatisfactory. When he ran for election people believed that he was poor which helped some relate to him. He wanted everyone to see him as an equal, and persuaded them to believe that he was an average, regular, common type of man. When Lincoln was a child there were times after his mother died that his father didn't have two dimes to rub together. When Lincoln made the decision to become a lawyer it is true that he didn't have much money, but he became successful in his occupation. By the time he ran for president he was quite wealthy. He wasn't an Average Joe like he wanted people to believe. This was the first stop on his trail of deception.

Lincoln began to view emancipation as a tool that could be used to his advantage in the battle against the confederacy. As the Union war machine began to roll across the South, slaves would escape across battle lines seeking refuge among Union troops. In the beginning, Lincoln's generals had questions about what to do with the escaped slaves.23 Some of them put the slaves to work, others were returned to their masters. General George McClelland was returning slaves to their masters until December of 1861, when President Lincoln instructed H. Seward to write a letter to McClelland clarifying that Union policy was not to return slaves.24 Following that, an act of July 17, 1862 allowed Lincoln's army the ability to accept “persons of African descent” into the service “for the purpose of constructing intrechments, or performing camp duty, or any other labor, or any military or naval service for which they were found competent.”25 Lincoln began to view the slaves as a valuable resource to him in the Union ranks, as seen above, but he also knew that they were a valuable resource the rebellion.

Depriving the south of their workforce would be the Union's key to victory. In September of 1862 Lincoln issued another General Order which liberated any slave captured by the union. He changed their status from “contrabands” to “prisoners of war,” and proclaimed them all “forever free of their servitude.”26 The effect of Lincoln's emancipation proclamation had an ...