Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Dale Owen

A sentence like this is political jiu-jitsu: it pretends to defer to the listener while quietly tightening the screws. Owen isn’t asking Lincoln (the likely “you” in context) to emancipate; he’s framing emancipation as an inevitability and daring the president to control the timing. The key move is “if the option remain with you.” It’s a velvet threat. Keep dithering and the “option” won’t remain; events, radicals, border-state backlash, or sheer wartime necessity will make the decision for you.

Owen’s phrasing also reveals how emancipation is being sold inside power, not as moral awakening but as management. “A question of time and of form” reduces a world-historic rupture to administrative sequencing: when and how, not whether. That’s not cynicism so much as strategic realism. In 1862, Union leadership was boxed in by military setbacks, constitutional anxiety, and the politics of keeping slaveholding loyalists from bolting. Owen’s line accepts those constraints and uses them: if emancipation is coming anyway, better to issue it as a presidential proclamation than have it arrive as chaos - via mass self-emancipation, battlefield necessity, or Congress forcing the issue.

The subtext is aimed at legacy as much as policy. Owen implies that history will record emancipation regardless; the only variable is whether Lincoln authors it or is dragged behind it. “Time and form” becomes a challenge: choose statesmanship over procrastination, design the narrative before the war designs it for you.