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)
