Events had gradually led Lincoln to see the necessity of taking one great step--the freeing of the slaves. The question of slavery was at the bottom of the war; it was the great division between North and South. Two reasons led Lincoln to take this step now. One was that he knew the negroes when free would fight, for the most part, for the North; and the North needed every help she could find. The other was the great difficulty of knowing what to do with the negro slaves which fell into the hands of the conquerors of any part of Southern territory. On the 22nd of September, very soon after the news of the battle of Antietam and Lee’s retreat from Maryland had arrived, Lincoln called a meeting of his Cabinet. None of them knew why he had summoned them. They found the President reading Artemus Ward; one story amused him so much that he read it aloud. They all laughed a great deal except Stanton, who could never see a joke, and did not understand that Lincoln must have broken down altogether under the fearful strain of all he had to bear, if he had not been able sometimes to forget himself. When he had finished reading the story, the President’s face grew grave again. He drew from his pocket a large sheet of foolscap, covered with his straight, regular writing, and read it to the Cabinet. It was the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that, after January 1st of the coming year, all slaves were to be free; that Government would pay some compensation to loyal owners. No one dared oppose Lincoln when his mind was made up. His reason for introducing Emancipation now was, that he thought it would help the cause of Union, and that cause was to him sacred beyond everything. “As long as I am President,” he said later, “this war shall be carried on for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without the use of the Emancipation policy.” [Illustration: Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet] His first object in everything was to hold the American nation together as one whole. But, at the same time, he detested slavery as much as any man. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” An opportunity had now come when to strike a blow at slavery was to assist the Union cause. By freeing the blacks, Lincoln provided the North with a new resource, at the time when the South had nowhere to turn to for fresh resources. By declaring the abolition of slavery an unchangeable part of the Union, which the South must accept before peace could be made, he won the sympathy of Europe for the North, and prevented it from sending help to the South at a time when such help would have changed the balance of affairs.