How And Why Did A War To Save The Union Become A War To Free The Slaves?

This essay will disprove the assumption that a war to free the Union became a war to free the slaves and will argue instead that the Civil War was always a war to save the Union. Emancipation became a necessary war means to achieve that end but was never the reason for the war itself. The essay will trace Union policy on emancipation from the beginning of the war when measures to secure slavery were taken, through the period when emancipation was encouraged gradually, until it became an integral military aim after almost two years of fighting.

I will focus on the policies of President Abraham Lincoln who, as Commander-in-Chief of the Union armies dictated (dictatorially, according to many) what the North was fighting for. His wartime policies were influenced by the ideological and political divisions of the Northern electorate: radical Republicans and abolitionists "badgered the Lincoln administration to acknowledge emancipation as a higher cause than the Union", while conservative Republicans and Democrats lobbied for proslavery measures. It was Lincoln's task "to mould these disparate elements into a government that could win the war at the same time that it defined what victory would mean". His statements on policy, therefore, were sometimes vague or inconsistent, in his efforts to maintain support for the war effort.

Historians have disagreed on Lincoln's position on slavery. Some downplay his role as an abolitionist and "have viewed the salvation of the Union as his greatest achievement and hailed him primarily as the architect of the modern American nation-state" - an interpretation popular in the early twentieth century. By the 1960s, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln's emancipatory role was emphasised by the likes of Martin Luther King. Around the same time, however, "neo-abolitionist" historians condemned his conservatism and lack of action.

More recently, Richard Striner in Father Abraham, glorifies Lincoln for bestowing freedom on a benighted race and argues that any comment or action Lincoln made that appeared to hinder emancipation was an "expedient concession" in his "gradual phaseout of slavery". By contrast, Lerone Bennett's Forced into Glory concludes, "based on his record and the words from his own mouth," that Lincoln was a white supremacist and if he could have saved the Union "without freeing any slave [he] would" have done so, as he once famously declared in a public response to Horace Greely in August 1862. A less polemical work, although one which also "confront[s] the fact of Lincoln's racism candidly", is Michael Lind's What Lincoln Believed. Although he disapproves of it, Lind does not think Lincoln's racism makes him any less of a great politician and exponent of American democracy. But the degree to which, as James McPherson conceded in his generally unfavourable review of Forced into Glory, Lincoln "share[d] the racial prejudices of his time and place," is not the concern of this essay. I will focus on the "expedient adaptations [of such convictions] to political circumstances or necessities" - the 'stuff', in other words, that drove the war effort.

Lincoln himself wrote in a letter in 1864, "I am naturally anti-slavery . And yet I never understood that the Presidency conferred on me the unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgement or feeling". This emphasises the fact that emancipation needed to become more than simply the will of the President in order to be secured in legislation; it would have to contribute to the wider strategy to save the Union.

Although the Confederacy perceived the Republican threat to slavery as "the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution" , liberating the slaves was not on Lincoln's war agenda in 1861. In his First Inaugural address in March, the new president spoke of slavery in the same terms he used in the letter quoted above: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so". Lincoln reiterated his promise of non-interference several months later in his 4 July message to Congress. He was "willing to put off any definitive action on emancipation . in order to keep the option of negotiating a settlement with the rebel states". It is likely that slavery would have remained intact if the South had agreed to terminate the war on those conditions.

For the next year, Lincoln's actions appeared to protect rather than diminish slavery. His reason: he had to consider the Northern electorate, many of whom were racist or were worried about the economic consequences of a free flow of blacks. "The truth is," wrote an editor of the Illinois State Journal, "the nigger is an unpopular institution in the free States". The Crittenden-Johnson resolution of 25 July stipulated that the war was not being fought for the purpose of "overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States," but "to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union". In September 1861, Lincoln overruled General John C. Frémont's policy of using martial law to emancipate slaves in Missouri and in May 1862 he rescinded General David Hunter's order to free and arm all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

With classic Lincolnian ambiguity, the President simultaneously approved some initial emancipatory moves. The first cautious and somewhat oblique step towards emancipation was acknowledging Southern slaves as enemy property. While Lincoln objected to Frémont and Hunter's use of Martial Law to free slaves he eventually approved similar measures taken by General Benjamin Butler who refused to return fugitive slaves on the grounds that they were "contrabands of war." On August 6, 1861 Lincoln signed the First Confiscation Act authorising the seizure of all property, including slaves, used in military aid of the rebellion. Almost a year later Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared slaves in the hands of rebel masters "forever free of their servitude". Although these acts may have helped undermine the institution, they did nothing to interfere with states' power to issue their own policies.

In 1862 Lincoln developed his colonisation plan to send freed slaves to a territory outside the United States. He would also provide former slave owners with compensation. This change would "come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything". His promotion of colonisation was in part an effort to "make emancipation more palatable to white supremacist Americans by alleviating their fears of the social consequences of freeing millions of blacks". The policy was approved by Congress in April 1862 but it was unpopular in the border states and their legislatures rejected it. In the next few months Lincoln changed tack when it became clear that emancipation had aligned with the winning of the war. The North was receiving a continuous influx of slaves and Union armies were experiencing severe military losses. Lincoln could emancipate the slaves and enlist them to remedy the manpower shortage. This would severely handicap the Southern economy, which was almost entirely dependent on slave labour. It would also affirm the North's antislavery stance, thereby preventing England and France - both antislavery powers - allying with the Confederacy to protect their cotton interests. Emancipation thus became an "expedient contribution to the Northern war effort". Lincoln told a border state congressmen in July 1862 that "if the war continue long, as it must . the institution [of slavery] in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion - by the mere incidents of the war".

On 1 January 1863 Lincoln astutely issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that "all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, . henceforward shall be free". It was a military and political measure and as such had an expiration date and a limited scope of influence. It exempted the North, the border states and all regions not under Union control, and at the war's close it could be "ruled unconstitutional by the courts, outlawed by Congress, retracted by Lincoln or his successor, or simply ignored if the Confederacy won the war". As the London Spectator noted sardonically, it was "not that a human being can not justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States". Not a single slave was freed by the Proclamation.

Lincoln knew that if he had extended the Proclamation's influence to the 400,000 slaves in the border states, he might lose their loyalty. He could, on the other hand, defend his emancipation in rebel territories "on the grounds that it would demoralize and weaken the enemy". He was also safely acting within the realm of what his war powers permitted, whereas he may have been accused of crossing the line had he freed the slaves in loyal areas. The final proclamation also contained an important change in the wording: "thenceforward, and forever free" (in the preliminary version) was replaced by "henceforward shall be free". The omission of 'forever' indicates Lincoln's uncertainty about the proclamation's standing after the war. The Emancipation Proclamation's significance was that it demonstrated both to the South and to the rest of the world that the Union endorsed emancipation.

Despite the impotence of the Proclamation, emancipation was advanced by the progress of Union armies into Confederate territory, giving slaves themselves the opportunity to become agents of abolition. As Ira Berlin argues, slaves "acted resolutely to place their freedom - and that of their posterity - on the wartime agenda". Black recruitment (official policy from 1863) had significant implications for their status in American society. They proved themselves on the battlefield at Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend and at Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863. With African Americans fleeing the South to fight and die for the Union, emancipation seemed more and more like a "patriotic, Union-saving measure" and morally right.

After Union triumphs at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, questions about reconstruction and permanent abolition were already being raised. With public opinion warming to emancipation (there had been no black 'invasion' northward following the Proclamation), Lincoln made his "most advanced statement so far on [the issue]" in the Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863, a pithy summary of what was at stake in the war. Invoking the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution Lincoln announced that the nation being fought for was one "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Although an incredibly vague allusion to racial equality, the Address was hugely influential and gained him favour with Northern abolitionists and radical Republicans.

By 1864, with reconstruction planning underway, there was a pressing need for decisive legislation on emancipation. Lincoln decided to put his full support behind a Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery throughout the nation as the abolitionists and radical Republicans hoped. With Union victory practically secured Lincoln could reconcile his personal and political views and set slavery on the "course of ultimate extinction" (the plan he introduced before he became president during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858). This was hugely significant as between the black race and true freedom, commented Frederick Douglas, "the constitution is interposed. It always is". The Amendment was finally passed after the Republican victory in the November elections in 1864, but only made it through Congress in March 1865. It was approved on January 31 by the House of Representatives for ratification by the states.

The Thirteenth Amendment did not mean that the war to save the Union had become a war to free the slaves for two reasons. Firstly it was only seriously considered when Union victory was certain; secondly, even though abolition was built into reconstruction plans Lincoln was still more preoccupied with a swift restoration of the Union than he was with the status of blacks in that Union. He vetoed the Wade-Davis bill, a piece of legislation passed by Congress on July 2, 1864 that sought to establish stricter abolitionist conditions on states re-entering the Union.

Although freeing the slaves had become a war aim by 1863, because it was always an aim inferior to - and manipulated in support of - preserving the Union, it was not enough of an end in itself to define what the war was about. This essay has proven that despite Lincoln's seeming personal hatred of the institution, he acted as a politician and as the President of a largely proslavery nation: "on slavery as an institution, Lincoln was prepared to negotiate; on slavery as a principle, he would not".

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