The
Baltimore Sun now thinks the Emancipation Proclamation was a pretty good idea, even if it wasn't too crazy about it at the time.[*]
Quote:
The Civil War would enact a great strain on Abell and The Sun. While he was a Northerner, he sympathized with the South. When the city was occupied, he was warned that any pro-Confederate articles could lead to his arrest and charges of sedition.
Abell, also the largest holder of ground rents in Baltimore, had made substantial deposits in both Union and Southern banks, and by 1864 had bought out his original partners.
With the end of the Civil War, Abell editorially supported the re-enfranchisement of voters, the acceptance of African-Americans as freemen and President Andrew Johnson's plans for reconstruction of the South.
Quote:
The Civil War. In terms of the moral consequences of the paper's editorial positions, it would be difficult to do worse than The Sun's opinions leading up to the Civil War. The paper never openly advocated for Maryland to join the Confederacy, but it flirted with the idea. Once the federal government started throwing Baltimore newspaper editors in jail for pro-Confederate writings, though, The Sun began keeping its opinions to itself. (On the plus side, The Sun was, a century later, a strong proponent of the Civil Rights Act.)
Quote:
For the president, however, even a partial victory represented an opportunity. Five days after the battle, on Sept. 22, 1862, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in all the states of the Confederacy. Fully as much as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, that transformative edict, in the words of historian Benjamin Quarles, "was destined to take on the evocative power reserved only for the half-dozen great charter expressions of human liberty in the entire Western tradition."
Antietam enabled Lincoln to identify the nation's cause with the cause of liberty for men and women everywhere and at all times, and had it not occurred, it is quite possible that America never would have become the beacon of freedom the world now recognizes. That is why on this day we pause to honor the legacy of its terrible blood and suffering, which a century and a half later remains a cornerstone of the more perfect union we are still engaged in building.
[*]
Big talk. I worked for The Plain Dealer, which went bust in the Civil War supporting the Copperheads.
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