Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 25.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[118] the South proceeded to withdraw, and when the North insisted upon blocking the way, did the parties come to blows. In regard to slavery, which was merely incidental to the struggle, Mr. Lincoln, in his inaugural in 1861, pointedly said: ‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so.’ And when on January 1, 1863, he issued his emancipation proclamation it was nothing more than a war measure, or, as he called it in the proclamation, a ‘military necessity,’ and the sentimentality we hear of now about the ‘apostle of freedom’ and ‘striking off shackles with the stroke of a pen,’ etc., came afterwards. The North freed the slave not from sympathy for the slave, but as a military move to weaken and conquer the South.