sed, more and more people in the North would come to agree with these aims. While battles raged throughout the South, Douglass traveled on the lecture circuit, calling for Lincoln to grant slaves their freedom. On April 16, 1862, the president signed a bill outlawing slavery in Washington, D.C., but he was slow to approve congressional measures confiscating slaves in captured areas of the South. Lincoln believed that if he passed laws that emancipated the slaves, the Union's border states might rebel and join the Confederacy. Douglass continued to insist in his speeches and newspaper editorials that the aim of the war must be to abolish slavery and that blacks must be allowed to join in the battle for their freedom. Battlefield casualties were frighteningly high, and antidraft riots erupted in northern cities. Gradually, as the costly war dragged on, with no final victory in sight for the North, Lincoln began to realize that stronger actions needed to be taken against the Confederacy. In the summer of 1862, Lincoln read to his cabinet a draft of an order that would emancipate slaves in the Confederate states. He decided to issue the proclamation as soon as the North won a major battle. In September, Lincoln got his victory when northern troops pushed back a Confederate army at the bloody battle of Antietam in Maryland. On the night of December 31, 1826, the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of the next day all slaves in areas not held by Union troops were free. Slavery was not abolished in the border states or in already captured areas of the South. Nevertheless, Lincoln's act freed millions of blacks, who fled from their masters and took "freedom's road" to areas controlled by Union forces. In Boston on the night that the proclamation was announced, Douglass wrote of the spirit of those who had gathered with him at the telegraph office to witness slavery's death: "We were waiting and listening as for a b...
