His assassination transformed him from a mere grieving political leader into a dedicated and heroic martyr.[xxvi] Lincoln accomplished what no other president has had to overcome. Abraham Lincoln rebuilt a nation on the verge of being torn apart by the grave issue of slavery with the help of African American leaders and abolitionists who pushed the president to express his true views and create the Emancipation Proclamation. A shocked Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln "showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before anything said or written by him." as an icon of black freedom in African American celebrations and as an American hero because of it