It seems pertinent to say after the foregoing that one consequence of Lincoln’s love of definition was a war-time policy toward slavery which looked to some like temporizing. We have encountered in an earlier speech his view that the Negro could not be classified merely as property. Yet it must be remembered that in the eyes of the law Negro slaves were property; and Lincoln was, after all, a lawyer. Morally he believed them not to be property, but legally they were property; and the necessity of walking a line between the moral imperative and the law will explain some of his actions which seem not to agree with the popular conception of the Great Emancipator. The first serious clash came in the late summer of 1861, when General Fremont, operating in Missouri, issued a proclamation freeing all slaves there belonging to citizens in rebellion against the United States. Lincoln first rebuked General Fremont and then countermanded his order. To O. H. Browning, of Quincy, Illinois, who had written him in support of Fremont’s action, he responded as follows: You speak of it as the only means of saving the government. On the contrary, it is itself the surrender of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the Government of the United States—any government of constitution and laws—wherein a general or a president may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?[100] This was the doctrine of the legal aspect of slavery which was to be amplified in the Second Annual Message to Congress: Doubtless some of those who are to pay, and not to receive, will object. Yet the measure is both just and economical. In a certain sense the liberation of the slaves is the destruction of property—property acquired by descent or by purchase, the same as any other property.... If, then, for a common object this property is to be sacrificed, is it not just that it be done at a common charge?[101] It is a truism that as a war progresses, the basis of the war changes, and our civil conflict was no exception. It appears to have become increasingly clear to Lincoln that slavery was not only the fomenting cause but also the chief factor of support of the secessionist movement, and finally he came to the conclusion that the “destruction” of this form of property was an indispensable military proceeding. Even here though—and contrary to the general knowledge of Americans today—definitions were carefully made. The final document was not a proclamation to emancipate slaves, but a proclamation to confiscate the property of citizens in rebellion “as a fit and necessary measure for suppressing said rebellion.” Its terms did not emancipate all slaves, and as a matter of fact slavery was legal in the District of Columbia until some time after Lincoln’s death.