Hey everyone, welcome to episode number 204 of our Civil War podcast.

My name is Rich and unfortunately sadly regrettably Tracy won't be with us today.

She's visiting family but we thought it would be important to get a new episode out to you guys this weekend.

So that means I'll be flying solo for this show.

Yeah, I know.

Tracy is not only the better half of our marriage but she's also the better half of this podcast.

But we, that is you and I dear listeners, will soldier on and finish up our discussion of the

Emancipation Proclamation.

All right, so when we left off last time it was September 22nd 1862, five days after the battle

of Antietam and Abraham Lincoln had just announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

And what we really tried to show in our discussion previous to that point is that Lincoln's

issuing of that preliminary proclamation was part of a progression of events.

Was another step forward if you will in an accumulating series of policy decisions

by Congress and the Lincoln administration regarding slavery as they responded to the shifting

course of the war, the tide of northern public opinion and the steady arrival of fugitive slaves

within union lines. What we tried to show is that Lincoln's preliminary proclamation was a

vitally important and undeniably dramatic act but it was only one part of a broader ongoing

republican assault on slavery because as Frederick Douglass had predicted back in May of 1861

secession and the onset of the war had resulted in an inexorable logic of events that was leading

to the destruction of slavery.

Frederick Douglass called the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation the most important document

ever issued by an American president, the quote first chapter in a new national story,

...