But the earthly choirs have never wholeheartedly joined in, which is why Allen C. Lincoln did not take back the Proclamation but instead pushed on, as events permitted, to its logical consequence, the 13th Amendment and the angels have been singing for 140 years now. When you are dead and in Heaven, in a thousand years that action of yours will make the Angels sing your praises.' In the introduction to its document, the New York State Library quotes the now famous letter written to Lincoln about these matters on July 31, 1863, by Hannah Johnson, a black freedwoman from Buffalo with a son in the 54th Regiment, New York Infantry: 'They tell me, some do, you will take back the Proclamation, don't do it. On January 1, 1863, as promised, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln replied that 'he would rather die' than take back a word of it and continued to urge Kentucky to adopt voluntary emancipation.

Union man George Templeton Strong in New York despaired: 'All is up….The Historical Society should secure an American flag at once for its museum of antiquities.' A delegation of Kentuckians visited the White House on November 21 to urge Lincoln to take back the Proclamation. New York Governor Horatio Seymour described the Proclamation as a 'bloody, barbarous, revolutionary, and unconstitutional scheme.' In October and November, Republicans suffered electoral losses in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, New York, and New Jersey. Radical abolitionists scorned the Proclamation. Others denounced Lincoln for stirring up anarchy or race war. Some worried that this rash act would set off an uprising within the Union armies. There was a storm of reaction to the Proclamation. This is the document (you can read it in Lincoln's hand at their website) in which Abraham Lincoln, as 'President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof,' proclaimed on September 22, 1862, 'That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.' Since 1865, the New York state library has been the proud owner of the original Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. A review of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, by Allen C.

Abraham Lincoln by Allen C. Guelzo