rred the serious military crisis in
Virginia; and the battles of the Peninsula, of the second Bull Run, and
of Antietam necessarily compelled the postponement of minor questions.
But during this period the President's policy on the slavery question
reached its development and solution, and when, on September 22, he
issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, it also paved the
way for a further defining of his policy of reconstruction.

That proclamation announced the penalty of military emancipation against
all States in rebellion on the succeeding first day of January; but also
provided that if the people thereof were represented in Congress by
properly elected members, they should be deemed not in rebellion, and
thereby escape the penalty. Wishing now to prove the sincerity of what
he said in the Greeley letter, that his paramount object was to save the
Union, and not either to save or destroy slavery, he wrote a circular
letter to the military governors and commanders in Louisiana, Tennessee,
and Arkansas, instructing them to permit and aid the people within the
districts held by them to hold elections for members of Congress, and
perhaps a legislature, State officers, and United States senators.

"In all available ways," he wrote, "give the people a chance to express
their wishes at these elections. Follow forms of law as far as
convenient, but at all events get the expression of the largest number
of the people possible. All see how such action will connect with and
affect the proclamation of September 22. Of course the men elected
should be gentlemen of character, willing to swear support to the
Constitution as of old, and known to be above reasonable suspicion of
duplicity."

But the President wished this to be a real and not a sham proceeding, as
he explained a month later in a letter to Governor Shepley:

"We do not particularly need members of Congress from there to enable us
to get along with legislation here. What we do want is the conclusive
evidence that respectable citizens of Louisiana are willing to be
members of Congress and to swear support to the Constitution, and that
other respectable citizens there are willing to vote for them and send
them. To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected,
as would be understood (and perhaps really so), at the point of the
bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous; and were I a member of
Congress here, I would vote against admittin