Chase, to encourage them to support general emancipation. Owen's letter of 23 July 1862, was published in the New York Evening Post on 8 August 1862, and his letter of 12 September 1862, was published in the same newspaper on 22 September 1862. In another open letter that Owen wrote to President Lincoln on 17 September 1862, he urged the president to abolish slavery on moral grounds. Owen also believed that emancipation would weaken the Confederate forces and help the Union army win the war. On 23 September 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation (as he had first resolved to do in mid-July). In Emancipation is Peace, a pamphlet that Owen wrote in 1863, he confirmed his view that general emancipation was a means to end the war. In The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States, a report that Owen wrote in 1864, he also suggested that the Union should provide assistance to freedmen. Toward the end of his political career, Owen continued his effort to obtain federal voting rights for women. In 1865 he submitted an initial draft for a proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would not restrict voting rights to males. However, Article XIV, Section 2, in the final version of the Amendment, which became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1868, was modified to limit suffrage to males who were U.S. citizens over the age of twenty-one. Spiritualism In The authenticity of the Bible (1833), Owen remarked : For a century and a half, then, after Jesus' death, we have no means whatever of substantiating even the existence of the Gospels, as now bound up in the New Testament. There is a perfect blank of 140 years; and a most serious one it is. Like his father, Owen converted to Spiritualism and was the author of two books on the subject: Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1859) and The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next (1872). Later years Although he retired from active public service at the conclusion of his work as a member of the Freedman's commission on 15 May 1864, Owen continued his writing career. Major writing projects in retirement included Beyond the Breakers (1870), a novel; The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next (1871), one of his two books