ALWAYS FUN TO READ LIBERTARIAN RAVINGS ABOUT WHAT A TYRANT IT MADE HIM:

[E]ven with those shortcomings, Lincoln was still satisfied, as he said early in 1865, that the Emancipation Proclamation "is the central act of my administration, and the great event of the 19th century." Certainly there has been no presidential document before or since with quite its impact.

As Wesyelan University's Richard Slotkin points out in his new book, "The Long Road to Antietam," the proclamation wiped out $3.5 billion of "investment" in slaves, at a time when the entire wealth of the nation amounted to only $16 billion. But Lincoln saw the proclamation's largest importance in the way it pulled down America's "one retrograde institution" and made it clear that equality, law and freedom were not some charade.

"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free," Lincoln said in his second State of the Union message. It makes Americans "honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve." And it has ever since.

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