5.9 Government Policies During the Civil War

At first Lincoln said his goal was to restore the Union, not to end slavery, partly to keep the slaveholding border states loyal. In an 1862 public letter to the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, he wrote that his 'paramount object' was to save the Union, whether that meant freeing all, some or none of the enslaved.

But pressure built from several directions: enslaved people escaping to Union lines, abolitionists and Radical Republicans in Congress, and the military logic of weakening the Confederacy's labor force. Congress passed Confiscation Acts allowing the seizure of enslaved people used to support the rebellion, abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., with compensation to owners (April 1862) and banned it in the federal territories (June 1862).

After Antietam, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation in September 1862, and the final Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. Using his war powers as commander in chief, Lincoln declared free all enslaved people in areas still in rebellion against the United States.

Its limits matter: it did not apply to the loyal border states or to Confederate areas already under Union control, and it could not be enforced where the Confederacy still ruled. But its effects were huge. It turned the war into a fight for freedom, encouraged more enslaved people to escape, let the Union enlist Black soldiers, and made it politically impossible for Britain and France, which had abolished slavery, to support the Confederacy. Every advance of the Union army now brought freedom with it.

Because a wartime proclamation might not survive the war, Republicans pushed the Thirteenth Amendment, which passed Congress in January 1865 and abolished slavery throughout the United States when ratified in December 1865 (5.10).

At the dedication of a cemetery at Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln gave a speech of about 270 words. He tied the war to the Declaration of Independence's promise that 'all men are created equal' and called for 'a new birth of freedom' so that 'government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'. The address redefined the war's purpose as a test of democracy and equality.

These laws, which Southern members of Congress had long blocked, expanded federal power and set up the economic growth of Period 6.

• Homestead Act (1862): 160 acres of public land free to settlers who lived on and farmed it for five years.
• Pacific Railway Act (1862): land grants and loans to build a transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869.
• Morrill Land-Grant College Act (1862): federal land to states to fund colleges teaching agriculture and engineering.
• Higher protective tariffs, a national banking system with a uniform currency, paper money called greenbacks, and the first federal income tax.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, the right of an arrested person to challenge their imprisonment before a judge, first in Maryland in 1861 and later more widely. Thousands of suspected Confederate sympathizers were held without trial, and some critics, such as the Peace Democrat (Copperhead) leader Clement Vallandigham, were arrested. After the war, in Ex parte Milligan (1866), the Supreme Court ruled that military courts could not try civilians where civilian courts were open.

Both sides used conscription, a military draft. The Confederacy drafted first, in 1862, and exempted one white man on plantations with twenty or more enslaved people, leading poor Southerners to call it 'a rich man's war and a poor man's fight'. The Union draft of 1863 let men hire a substitute or pay $300 to avoid service. In July 1863 the New York City draft riots, led largely by working-class Irish immigrants, killed more than 100 people; rioters attacked Black New Yorkers and burned an orphanage for Black children.