In an 1862 letter to editor Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln explicitly stated that his primary goal in the Civil War was to save the Union, not to save or destroy slavery. Lincoln wrote that if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves, he would do so, and if he could save it by freeing all of them, he would do that as well. This historical document is cited to challenge the modern consensus that the war was fought exclusively over the issue of slavery.
