Lincoln's actual position on freeing 
enslaved African-Americans is somewhat surprising today. Though 
he is well known for ending slavery in the USA, he was prepared 
to accept it in existing states and also spoke against full 
equality for freed slaves. He believed that the Declaration of 
Independence's statement that "all men are created equal" should 
have been applied also to black slaves, and that slavery was a 
profound evil which should not spread to the Territories. However, 
Lincoln maintained that the federal government did not possess 
the constitutional power to bar slavery in states where it already 
existed, and he supported colonization, believing that freed black 
slaves were too different to live in the same society as white 
Americans. Lincoln addresses the issue of his consistency (or 
lack thereof) between his earlier position and his later position 
of emancipation in an 1864 letter to Albert G. Hodges 

Lincoln is often credited with freeing enslaved African-Americans 
with the Emancipation Proclamation, though in practice this only 
freed the slaves in areas of the Confederacy as those areas came 
under control of Union forces; in territories and states that 
still allowed slavery but had remained loyal to the Union, slaves 
were not initially freed. Lincoln signed the Proclamation as a 
wartime measure, insisting that only the outbreak of war gave 
constitutional power to the President to free slaves in states 
where it already existed. He later said: "I never, in my life, 
felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing 
this paper." The proclamation made abolishing slavery in the 
rebel states an official war goal and it became the impetus for 
the enactment of the 13th Amendment to the United States 
Constitution which abolished slavery. Politically, the 
Emancipation Proclamation did much to help the Northern cause; 
Lincoln's strong abolitionist stand finally convinced Britain 
and other countries that they could not support the South.