William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[197] his supporters “are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of rebels.” Under nine headings he set forth the specifications of this charge, its main points being that the President was “strangely and disastrously remiss” in regard to the emancipation provisions of the new confiscation act; that the Union cause had suffered immensely from mistaken deference to rebel slavery; that timid counsels in such a crisis were calculated to prove perilous; and that if the President, in his inaugural address, had given notice that, if rebellion was persisted in, he would “recognize no loyal person as rightfully held in slavery by a traitor,” the rebellion would have received a staggering, if not fatal, blow. Finally, he demanded that the President give his subordinates direction that, under the confiscation act, the slaves of rebels coming or brought within the Union lines were to be free.

This letter called out Lincoln's reply of August 22, in which he said: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could ”