Did Lincoln free the slaves or did the slaves free themselves? There is a lot of conspiracies or beliefs of who freed the slaves. In my opinion I think that they both freed the slaves. They needed each other in order to succeed in freeing them. Lincoln freed the slaves with signing the Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves in other rebel states as the first paragraph in document A said “all persons as slaves within any State in rebellion against the United Sates, shall be forever free”. That being said the slaves came over to the North and helped fight with the war as Lincoln urged them too as he told Frederick Douglass on Document B paragraph two “to organize men who would go into the rebel states, and carry the news of Emancipation, …show more content…
If they really didn’t need the slaves they would of never let them fight in the war, but it was essential for them to use them as Lincoln said on document A paragraph five “upon military necessity” he realized that if he didn’t get their help they would lose and not be able to preserve the Union which was the main goal according to him in the passage on Document B paragraph two “that his goal was to save the Union, with or without slavery.” By reading this quote from the passage people may think that Lincoln didn’t try to free the slaves, but he really did because even Frederick Douglass a great man in history could see that he really did try to set the slaves free because in the end it wasn’t really about preserving the Union, that was just said as an allusion for the white men to keep fighting for the Union. We could tell that he did because he was showing concern and stress as said on the passage in Document B “Lincoln worried that [Northerners who opposed the war would force him to accept an early peace] which would leave all those who had not escaped in slavery.” He could have just had done that, but he passed the Emancipation as Frederick Douglass said “was not passed merely as a necessity.” He passed it not really to keep the Union intact, but to ensure the ending of slavery by reassuring the outcome of the war for them to overpower the