From left to right: Gideon Welles (Secretary of Navy); President Abraham Lincoln; and William Seward (Secretary of State)
On July 13, 1862, a day after meeting with Border State representatives and senators at the White House in which President Abraham Lincoln appealed to them to approve compensated emancipation, Lincoln first broached the idea of emancipation by proclamation with both William Seward (Secretary of State) and Gideon Welles (Secretary of Navy). The occasion was a solemn one. The president had invited both of his secretaries to accompany him in his carriage to the funeral of Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton's infant son. The slow procession permitted the president the time to discuss the gravity of a decision that he had dwelt earnestly on for quite some time. Lincoln concluded that emancipation was justified on the grounds of military necessity, that it was absolutely essential for the Union's salvation. The president said his intentions were to threaten wavering Rebels into surrendering or to deprive them of a vital laboring agricultural and military resource. According to Welles, Lincoln declared that “we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”
The president then asked both men to be frank in their reaction to his proposition. Seward exercised caution before speaking. The Secretary of State said that a presidential proclamation of emancipation was such a vast and momentous decision that there would be consequences and that he wished to reflect on the matter before giving a more decisive response. That said, Seward offered his opinion that emancipation was justified and perhaps both expedient and necessary. Welles was shocked by Lincoln's sudden about-face on the issue of emancipation, especially given that the president understood the conservative attitude of a majority of the Cabinet that recoiled from federal interference in what they maintained was “a local, domestic question appertaining to the States respectively, who had never parted with their authority over it.”
Welles concluded that recent events had swayed Lincoln's attitudes on emancipation and he too shared Seward's opinion that a presidential proclamation might be justified: “But the reverses before Richmond, and the formidable power and dimensions of the insurrection, which extended through all the Slave States, and had combined most of them in a confederacy to destroy the Union, impelled the Administration to adopt extraordinary measures to preserve the national existence. The slaves, if not armed and disciplined, were in the service of those who were, not only as field laborers and producers, but thousands of them were in attendance upon the armies in the field, employed as waiters and teamsters, and the fortifications and intrenchments were constructed by them.”
Eleven days later, President Lincoln presented a draft of a proclamation freeing slaves in Rebel occupied territory to his Cabinet.
Source: Diary of Gideon Welles, John T. Morse, ed., 3 vols. (Boston, 1911), 1: 70-71.