The Thirteenth Amendment

The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves in states still at war. As a wartime order, it could subsequently be reversed by presidential degree or congressional legislation. The permanent emancipation of all slaves therefore required a constitutional amendment.

In April 1864, the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in the United States. Opposition from Democratic
Representatives prevented the amendment from receiving the required two-thirds majority. If McClellan and the Democrats had won the election of 1864, as Lincoln and most Northerners expected in the summer, the amendment would almost certainly have been defeated and slave emancipation repudiated as a war aim. Only after Lincoln was reelected did Congress approve the amendment. Ratification by the states was completed in December 1865.


Total War

Initially, Lincoln and his generals anticipated a conventional war in which Union soldiers would respect civilians' property. Convinced that there was residual unionist support in the South, they expected to preserve the South's economic base, including its factories and rail lines. But as the war dragged on, the Civil War became history's first total war, a war in which the Union sought the Confederacy's total defeat and unconditional surrender. To achieve success, Union officers such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman believed that it was necessary to break the South's will to fight. Sherman summed up the
idea of total war in blunt terms: "We are not only fighting hostile armies," he declared in 1864, "but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

A year earlier, a general order was issued that declared that military necessity "allows of all destruction of property" and "appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the Army." This order allowed soldiers to destroy anything that might be of use to the Confederacy.


Slaves' Role in Their Own Liberation

Slaves played a critical role in their own liberation. Southern slaves deserted plantations and fled to Union lines. Slaves also staged a few small insurrections during the war as the slave system itself began to unravel. Planters were stunned to see trusted house slaves and field drivers lead field hands in deserting to the Union army. Eventually, 150,000 former slaves fought as soldiers in the Union army. The plantation system of labor and discipline was beginning to break down in the face of protracted war.


The 1864 Presidential Election

The 1864 presidential election was one of the most critical in American history. At stake was whether the war would end in unconditional surrender or a negotiated settlement, which might result in the preservation of slavery as a legal institution. Even though hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted to Union lines during the war, it is not at all inconceivable that slavery could have survived if the President had not been committed to emancipation. During the American Revolution a third of Georgia's slaves had been freed by the British, and tens of thousands of Virginia's slaves had escaped bondage. Nevertheless, slavery survived the revolutionary upheavals in the South, and soon began to flourish and expand. Similarly, slavery was temporarily
reinstituted by the French in St. Domingue and greatly expanded in Guadeloupe, Martinique and other colonies despite the Haitian
Revolution and the French emancipation decree of 1794.

In August 1864, Lincoln expressed his view in moving words. Observing that over 130,000 blacks were fighting to preserve the Union, he said that they were motivated by the "strongest motive...the promise of freedom. There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors. I would be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will."