Topic 5.9 Notes – Government Policies During the Civil War

How Lincoln Changed the Meaning of the Civil War

When the war began in 1861, Lincoln’s public goal was preserving the Union. He hated slavery’s expansion and said secession was illegal, but in the First Inaugural Address he also said he had no immediate constitutional power to abolish slavery where it already existed.

That caution came from politics as much as principle. The Union coalition included:

• Abolitionists who wanted slavery destroyed
• Republicans united against secession
• War Democrats who wanted reunion more than racial equality
• Loyal slave states that Lincoln could not afford to lose

Over time, those goals fused together. Union victory came to mean:

• saving the nation
• ending slavery
• defending self-government

That is the core exam idea. Lincoln changed victory from simple reunion into reunion without slavery. He also tied the war to the Declaration of Independence, especially liberty and equality, which set up Reconstruction fights over citizenship and civil rights.

From Union First to Emancipation Policy

Lincoln’s early caution makes more sense once you see the border states.

Border states and wartime caution

• Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri stayed in the Union.
• West Virginia entered in 1863 after breaking from Confederate Virginia.
• Maryland mattered because Washington, D.C. sat inside it.
• Kentucky controlled key rivers and access to the Ohio Valley.
• Missouri mattered for the Mississippi and the West.

On this Civil War map, the lighter blue states are the loyal slave states that made Lincoln especially cautious. Lincoln used troops and arrests against secessionists, but he avoided immediate emancipation in these states.

Civil War Union, Confederacy, and border states

The road to emancipation

Enslaved people forced the issue by fleeing to Union lines. Federal policy shifted step by step:

1. Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe called escaped enslaved people contraband of war.
2. First Confiscation Act (1861) allowed seizure of enslaved labor used for the Confederacy.
3. Second Confiscation Act (1862) freed enslaved people of rebels who came under Union control.
4. Washington, D.C. abolished slavery in 1862 through compensated emancipation.
5. Congress banned slavery in federal territories in 1862.
6. Lincoln tried and failed to win compensated emancipation in border states.

The Emancipation Proclamation

1. Lincoln drafted it in 1862.
2. Seward told him to wait for a military win.
3. Antietam led to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.
4. The Final Emancipation Proclamation took effect January 1, 1863.

It applied only to areas in rebellion. It did not free enslaved people in loyal slave states or some Union-held areas. Students miss this all the time. It was limited, but it still transformed the war because Union armies now carried freedom with them.

Its effects:

• weakened the Confederate labor system
• made slavery’s destruction an official Union goal
• hurt Confederate hopes for recognition abroad, especially in Britain
• made reunion with slavery intact much less likely

African Americans and the Destruction of Slavery

African Americans were not passive. They helped destroy slavery by:

• fleeing plantations
• denying labor to the Confederacy
• giving the Union labor, intelligence, and soldiers

The proclamation allowed Black enlistment. About 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army and about 20,000 in the Navy, around one-tenth of Union forces.

Black military service

• 54th Massachusetts Infantry became the most famous Black regiment.
• Robert Gould Shaw commanded it.
• Their assault on Fort Wagner showed Black troops’ courage and answered racist doubts.

The memorial below honors Shaw and the men of the 54th Massachusetts, the regiment most students connect with Black military service in the Civil War.

Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Massachusetts Memorial

Service still came with limits:

• segregated units
• white officers
• lower pay until equalized in 1864
• Confederates often refused to treat captured Black troops as normal POWs

Still, military service strengthened later claims to citizenship and suffrage.

Britain and France also mattered here. King Cotton diplomacy failed, and antislavery opinion in Britain made support for a slaveholding Confederacy harder after emancipation.

Wartime Power, Opposition, and Lincoln’s New National Vision

Lincoln’s war leadership expanded federal power and sparked backlash.

Civil liberties and executive power

• Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the protection against unlawful detention.
• Ex parte Merryman challenged that move.
• The Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863 backed presidential suspension.
• Ex parte Milligan after the war limited military trials of civilians where civil courts were open.

This left a lasting question about security vs civil liberties.

Home-front conflict and political opposition

• Enrollment Act of 1863 created a federal draft.
• The $300 commutation fee fed the complaint of a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”
• The New York City Draft Riots in 1863 were violent and deeply racist.
• Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, wanted negotiation.
• Clement Vallandigham became their best-known figure.
• In 1864, George B. McClellan ran against Lincoln and Andrew Johnson on the National Union ticket.
• Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and Farragut at Mobile Bay helped Lincoln win reelection.

Lincoln’s speeches and national ideals

The Gettysburg Address redefined the nation as “conceived in Liberty” and dedicated to equality. Its “new birth of freedom” made the war a test of whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could survive.

The Second Inaugural Address named slavery as the cause of the war and called for reunion “with malice toward none,” tying justice to mercy.