Are you reading James Oakes’s The Crooked Path to Abolition? If so, you should know what the “federal consensus” about slavery was. In his first inaugural address, March 4, 1861, what did President Abraham Lincoln say to indicate that he accepted the federal consensus. On January 1, 1863, in the final Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln took an important step toward rejected the federal consensus. What did Lincoln write there? What caused Lincoln to change his position within a period of fewer than two years? Discuss in a few sentences.
