When Lincoln announced his intention to issue an Emancipation Proclamation his utterly astonished cabinet greeted this decision with stunned silence. After all, this was the most far-reaching decision of any presidential administration in American history, before or since for it challenged the nation to live out the obvious implications of “all men are created equal.”

Someone eventually broke the silence with the suggestion that we wait the issuance until the Union had achieved a military victory in the field for victories were proving hard to come by in mid-1862.

This of course reminded the President of a story. A farmer was returning home after a trip of a few days and was greeted by one of his workers after the following fashion: “Master, the little pigs is all dead. Oh,” he drawled eventually, “and the old sow is dead too, but I didn’t want to tell you all at once.”