After meeting one week earlier with pro-Union Kentuckians and acknowledging that he “would rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom” an ever increasingly depressed Abraham Lincoln on Monday, November 24, 1862 wrote his friend and fellow abolitionist Carl Schurz, admitting “I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not.”
Clearly, Lincoln realized that the fate of America’s blacks and the war’s outcome was still in doubt. While he hoped that Ambrose Burnside would soon provide victory, the president was realistic enough to understand who would be held accountable if the North lost the American Civil War. And that man would not be Ambrose Burnside but rather himself, Abraham Lincoln.