Journal #9

Read the Emancipation Proclamation and--in not less than 300 words (total)--explain why you agree or disagree with each of the following assessments of it.

• "The act makes clear that the lives of our heroes have not been sacrificed in vain. It makes a victory of our defeats." Ralph Waldo Emerson (1862)
• "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."  William Seward (1863)
• "[The Emancipation Proclamation was] the central act of my administration [and] the great event of the nineteenth century."  Abraham Lincoln (1865)
• "I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the 'Great Emancipator.'  Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military necessity than a clarion call for justice."  Barack Obama (2005)