![]() ![]() This loss of slaves eventually helped impair the South’s capacity to pursue the war.Īside from emancipation, the Civil War also affected blacks through their participation in the war - their military service, Northern blacks were initially rejected when they volunteered to fight, since their participation implied equality and blacks were believed to be too servile and cowardly to fight whites “this is a white man’s war,” went a common expression in the North. ![]() Thus, while the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the Confederate-held states and territories and actually freed no slaves, it did encourage more of them to escape. ![]() ![]() An estimated five hundred thousand of them (12.5 percent of the total slave population) ran away from their owners during the war. The slaves themselves, who from the outset of hostilities constantly escaped to the Union lines, were also a factor. In this month he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation: effective January 1, 1863, it made the abolition of slavery a war aim - a military objective, The untiring efforts of the abolitionists, who constantly reminded Lincoln of the military advantages of freeing the slaves, helped produce this document. In 1862, for example, he implemented a pilot colonization project that used federal funds to settle about five hundred blacks on an island off the southern coast of Haiti.īy September 1862, Lincoln’s initial position regarding the war and slavery had changed. Lincoln, in fact, regarded blacks as the intellectual inferiors of whites believing the two races could not coexist peacefully, he supported black emigration as the solution to the nation’s racial problem. In March 1861 in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln indicated that although he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed, He would not permit secession, a confirmation of his initial intent to preserve the Union and not end slavery. Spurred by Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 and South Carolina’s continued articulation of its 1832 doctrine of nullification, eight states seceded from the Union between December 1860 and April 1861 and established a provisional government. ![]()
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