Always their worse fear was that slaves would not only defect, but also would then be turned against them as Union soldiers -- literally heroes of the Northern cause and the primary reason for defeating the Southern cause.
However, fortunately for the South, on the Northern side, there was mirror image white racism (Lincoln's own, as well as the Northern white population's more generally) that prevented Lincoln from seeing and then exploiting these very pregnant Southern fears and military weaknesses.
In fact, it was not until the run up to the election for his second term, that Lincoln sensed that the North might indeed be losing the war. And with this perception becoming more and more widespread, his chances for winning a second term would vanish.
This pessimistic assessment occurred at the same time that Lincoln was unhappy with his generals, and at a time when there was general disgruntlement about the war across the Northern landscape. This general unease about the likely failure of the war, was accompanied by a precipitous drop in Union recruitment. In fact, there had been recruitment riots in Northern streets against "the draft," or against continual "impressment" into the war.
Incredibly, up until this point Lincoln had been obeying the "Fugitive Slave Act." Sending runaway slaves back across the Southern lines where they undoubtedly would continue to be used to further the Rebel war efforts.
Only after Brigadier General Benjamin Butler unilaterally refused to hand over three runaway Virginia slaves, did Lincoln begin to take the hint. General Butler had argued that since Virginia had seceded from the Union, the "Fugitive Slave Act" no longer applied to it. Plus, since the slaves were being used for strictly military reasons, they must be considered "contraband of war" and therefore subject to confiscation.
But even this was not enough for Mr. Lincoln. Only after Major General George B. McClelland, (a died-in-the-wool racist like Lincoln himself), argued that it made no sense for Lincoln to defend slavery (by sending slave defectors back, when it was the very defeat of slavery that was the reason for the war in the first place). Only then did Lincoln finally realize that the demands of the war must outweigh traditional Northern racist values and beliefs. Only after his own racist generals chastised him on this very point did Lincoln relent and decide on a military-based path to emancipation.
Once convinced, Lincoln had planned to announce the Proclamation in January 1863. But the Union's situation on the ground was so dire that it would have been embarrassingly obvious that "impressing" black soldiers was the desperate act of a President trying to use them to save the Northern army and his re-election chances from certain defeat.
Thus, it was not until September that the situation on the ground improved enough for Lincoln to announce his proclamation without appearing desperate for black intervention to save both his military and political bacon.
As a result, nearly two hundred thousand black soldiers did eventually "saddled-up" in the last two years of the war to help the Union forces "rout" the Rebel's poisonous pro-slavery racist cause.
However, unfortunately, as we now know the rest of the story: Those black solders were not to be deemed heroes of the war, or even of their own self-emancipation, or, for that matter, heroes of the Northern cause (as the South had expected them to become, and, as they had every right to be regarded).
And although slavery as a legally-sanctioned institution did end with the end of the war and the eventual adoption of the 13th Amendment (not with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as many blacks still think was the case), the poisonous Southern racist way of life did not end with the South's military defeat or with the Emancipation Proclamation.
As I like to say, and as history seems to confirm, the North may have won the shooting war, but contemporary history proves that the South won (and is still winning) the cultural war.
We now have become "South" from sea-to-shinning-sea.
As "the rest of the story confirms:" Lincoln was assassinated, and as part of a deal that resulted in Rutherford B. Hayes' election to the presidency in 1876, the North again betrayed the cause of racial equality by turning its back on their freed black men of the south who had come to Lincoln's rescue. Instead of becoming heroes, many of those soldiers became gravediggers burying the Union dead.
Without a single shot being fired, and in a precedent unheard of in world history, the North simply handed over its military bounties back to the rabid racist Southerners who had started the Civil War in the first place.
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