AP U.S. History 5.9: Government Policies During the Civil War

Lincoln and most Union supporters began the war to preserve the Union. At his inauguration Lincoln had promised: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." The National Archives sums up the start: the North fought to prevent the secession of the Southern states and preserve the Union, and ending slavery was not a goal of the war.

Politics held Lincoln back. Slave states on the border had stayed loyal, and his administration worried that recruiting Black soldiers would push them to secede. When two Union generals, John C. Frémont in Missouri and David Hunter in South Carolina, issued orders freeing enslaved people in their regions, their superiors revoked them.

The war's needs changed the calculation. By mid-1862 more and more enslaved people were reaching Union lines, white volunteers were declining and the army needed men. On July 17, 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act, which among other things freed enslaved people whose enslavers were in the Confederate Army.

Sources: Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (Avalon Project); Emancipation Proclamation (National Archives); War Department General Order 143 (National Archives).

On September 22, 1862, days after the Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation: enslaved people in areas still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared free. On that day he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He described the order "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion." Its central sentence declares "that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free."

Because it rested on war powers, it reached only areas in rebellion. Slavery in the loyal border states was untouched, and parts of the Confederacy already under Union control were exempted. And the freedom it promised depended on Union victory.

After January 1, 1863, writes the National Archives, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. The war for the Union was now also a war against slavery. Lincoln also hoped the proclamation would keep England and France from giving the Confederacy political recognition and military aid. Britain had signed a treaty in April 1862 with the United States "for the suppression of the slave trade carried on upon the coast of Africa." Reasoning from that: once the Union fought openly against slavery, it was harder for a European government to recognize a slaveholding Confederacy against it. The proclamation helped keep the Confederacy from winning full diplomatic support in Europe.

Sources: Slave Trade Treaty, 1862 (Avalon Project); Emancipation Proclamation (National Archives).

Enslaved people did not wait for Washington. From the first days of the war, the National Archives notes, they acted to secure their own liberty. Many fled plantations for Union lines, where the army called them "contrabands." Each person who escaped took labor away from the Confederacy.

The Union had begun to reconsider its ban on Black soldiers in 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation then announced that freed men "will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service." By announcing that Black men would be accepted into the army and navy, the National Archives says, the proclamation was "enabling the liberated to become liberators." Black recruitment was then pursued in earnest. On May 22, 1863, the War Department's General Order 143 created the United States Colored Troops. Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders urged Black men to enlist to ensure eventual full citizenship. Roughly 179,000 Black men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army, and another 19,000 in the Navy.

They served in segregated units, usually under white officers, and at first for less pay: $10 a month with $3 taken out for clothing, against $13 for white soldiers. In June 1864 Congress granted equal pay to the U.S. Colored Troops.

Sources: Emancipation Proclamation (National Archives); War Department General Order 143 (National Archives); Black Soldiers in the Civil War (National Archives).

Lincoln also used speeches to give the war its meaning. At Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, ten months after the Emancipation Proclamation, he described the war as a test of the nation's founding promise: "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." The nation had been "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He asked his listeners to take up "the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced," and resolved "that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom."

The address never names slavery. Its moment invites a reading: spoken while Union armies were carrying emancipation into the South, it is widely read as presenting the struggle against slavery as the fulfillment of the nation's founding democratic ideals.

In his Second Inaugural, on March 4, 1865, with the war nearly won, Lincoln did name slavery: "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war." Yet he aimed at reunion, not revenge. "With malice toward none, with charity for all," the nation should work "to bind up the nation's wounds" and seek "a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Sources: Gettysburg Address (Avalon Project); Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (Avalon Project).