In response to David Brook's column Stuck in Lincoln's Land:

David Brooks' assertions of Abraham Lincoln's religious piety are, at best, misleading.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation when he did because it was politically
expedient -- he needed to couch the Civil War in terms of a struggle to end slavery
in order to prevent European intervention.   The British Empire had abolished slavery
in 1834, and the French outlawed it in 1848; neither government could politically
afford to enter the war on the side of the anti-abolitionist Confederacy.

Moreover, historians commonly acknowledge that Lincoln was a practitioner of Realpolitik
even before Bismark coined the term.  He was a pragmatist, who would do whatever was
necessary to preserve the Union, even if meant suspending constitutionally guaranteed
rights like habeas corpus.

Therefore, it would appear that Mr. Lincoln made his decisions dispassionately after
careful consideration of the secular political consequences -- unless holding US
citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime is 'in accordance with
transcendent moral truth.'