September 23, 1862---"The most execrable measure..."

SEPTEMBER 23, 1862:     

President Lincoln is alternately praised and damned in the Northern Press for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.  The Washington Evening Star pronounces it “void of practical effect.”  Many Radical Republicans criticize it for not freeing a single slave, although some Radicals, such as Senator Charles Sumner, greet its advent by saying that “the skies are brighter and the air is purer, now that slavery has been handed over to judgment.”

The South is universal in its condemnation, as might be expected. President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy condemns it in unrestrained terms, saying that Lincoln’s idea would "debauch the inferior race by promising indulgence of the vilest passions” with what he calls “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.”  

Davis authorizes capital punishment for Union officers captured while leading African-American troops: “that they may be dealt with in accordance with the laws of those States, providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrections.”