Throughout the North and the Union-occupied South, January I was a day of celebration. An immense gathering, including black and white abolitionist leaders, stood vigil at Boston’s Tremont Temple, awaiting word that the Proclamation had been signed. It was nearly midnight when the news arrived; wild cheering followed, and a black preacher led the throng in singing “Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea, Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free.” At a camp for fugitive slaves in the nation’s capital, a black man “testified” about the sale, years before, of his daughter, exclaiming, “Now, no more dat! … Dey can’t sell my wife and child any more, bless de Lord!” Farther south, at Beaufort, an enclave of federal control off the South Carolina coast, there were prayers and speeches and the freedmen sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” To Charlotte Forten, a young black woman who had journeyed from her native Philadelphia to teach the former slaves, “it all seemed … like a brilliant dream.” Even in areas exempted from the Proclamation, blacks celebrated, realizing that if slavery perished in Mississippi and South Carolina, it could hardly survive in Kentucky, Tennessee, and a few parishes of Louisiana.²

Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship. From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development. Even as slavery mocked the ideals of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty and equality, slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth, expanding westward with the young republic, producing the cotton that fueled the early industrial revolution. In the South, slavery spawned a distinctive regional ruling class (an “aristocracy without nobility” one Southern-born writer called it) and powerfully shaped the economy, race relations, politics, religion, and the law. Its influence was pervasive: “Nothing escaped, nothing and no one.”³ In the North, where slavery had been abolished during and after the American Revolution, emerged abolition, the greatest protest movement of the age. The slavery question divided the nation’s churches, sundered political ties between the sections, and finally shattered the bonds of Union. On the principle of opposing the further expansion of slavery, a new political party rose to power in the 1850s, placing in the White House a son of the slave state Kentucky, who had grown to manhood on the free Illinois prairies and believed the United States could not endure forever half slave and half free. In the crisis that followed Lincoln’s election, eleven slave states seceded from the Union, precipitating in 1861 the bloodiest war the Western Hemisphere has ever known.

To those who had led the movement for abolition, and to slaves throughout the South, the Emancipation Proclamation not only culminated decades of struggle but evoked Christian visions of resurrection and redemption, of an era of unbounded progress for a nation purged at last of the sin of slavery. Even the staid editors of the New York Times believed it marked a watershed in American life, “an era in the history … of this country and the world.” For emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nation’s largest concentration of private property (“the most stupendous act of sequestration in the history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence,” as Charles and Mary Beard described it).⁴ The demise of slavery inevitably threw open the most basic questions of the polity, economy, and society. Begun to preserve the Union, the Civil War now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic.

In one sense, however, the Proclamation only confirmed what was already happening on farms and plantations throughout the South. War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution, and well before 1863 the disintegration of slavery had begun. Whatever politicians and military commanders might decree, slaves saw the war as heralding the long-awaited end of bondage. Three years into the conflict, Gen. William T. Sherman encountered a black Georgian who summed up the slaves’ understanding of the war from its outset: “He said … he had been looking for the ‘angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and, though we professed to be fighting for the Union, he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom.”⁵ Based on this conviction, the slaves took actions that propelled a reluctant white America down the road to abolition.

As the Union Army occupied territory on the periphery of the Confederacy, first in Virginia, then in Tennessee, Louisiana, and elsewhere, slaves by the thousands headed for the Union lines. Union enclaves like Fortress Monroe, Beaufort, and New Orleans became havens for runaway slaves and bases for expeditions into the interior that further disrupted the plantation regime. Even in the heart of the Confederacy, far from Union lines, the conflict undermined the South’s “peculiar institution.” Their “grapevine telegraph” kept many slaves remarkably well informed about the war’s progress. In one part of Mississippi, slaves even organized Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League to spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern armies impressed tens of thousands of slaves into service as laborers, taking them far from their home plantations, offering opportunities for escape, and widening the horizons of those who returned home. The drain of white men into military service left plantations under the control of planters’ wives and elderly and infirm men, whose authority slaves increasingly felt able to challenge. Reports of “demoralized” and “insubordinate” behavior multiplied throughout the South. Six months after the war began, slaves in one Kentucky town marched through the streets at night, shouting hurrahs for Lincoln.⁶

But generally, it was the arrival of federal soldiers that spelled havoc for the slave regime, for blacks quickly grasped that the presence of occupying troops destroyed the coercive power of both the individual master and the slaveholding community. A Virginia coachman, informed by soldiers in 1862 that he was free, “went straight to his master’s chamber, dressed himself in his best clothes, put on his best watch and chain … and insolently informed him that he might for the future drive his own coach.” On Magnolia plantation in Louisiana, the arrival of the Union Army in 1862 sparked a work stoppage and worse: “We have a terrible state of affairs here negroes refusing to work…. The negroes have erected a gallows in the quarters and give as an excuse for it that they are told they must drive their master … off the plantation hang their master etc. and that then they will be free.” Here in the sugar country, where large gangs of slaves labored in some of the South’s most wretched conditions, blacks sacked planters’ homes and, months before the Emancipation Proclamation, refused to work unless paid wages. Slavery, wrote a Northern reporter in November 1862, “is forever destroyed and worthless, no matter what Mr. Lincoln or anyone else may say on the subject.”⁷

“Meanwhile,” in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, “with perplexed and laggard steps, the United States government followed in the footsteps of the black slave.” The slaves’ determination to seize the opportunity presented by the war initially proved an embarrassment to the Lincoln administration and a burden to the army. Lincoln fully appreciated, as he would observe in his second inaugural address, that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war.⁸ But he also understood the vital importance of keeping the border slave states in the Union, generating support among the broadest constituency in the North, and weakening the Confederacy by holding out to irresolute Southerners the possibility that they could return to the Union with their property, including slaves, intact. In 1861 the restoration of the Union, not emancipation, was the cause that generated the widest support for the war effort.

Thus, in the early days of the war, the administration insisted that slavery had little to do with the conflict. When Congress assembled in special session in July 1861, one of its first acts was to pass, nearly unanimously, the Crittenden Resolution, affirming that the “established institutions” of the seceding states were not to be a military target. Throughout 1861, army commanders ordered their camps closed to fugitive slaves and some actually returned them to their owners, a policy that caused Gov. John A. Andrew to protest: “Massachusetts does not send her citizens forth to become the hunters of men.” Yet as the Confederacy set slaves to work as military laborers, and the presence of Union soldiers precipitated large-scale desertion of the plantations, the early policy quickly unraveled. Increasingly, military authorities adopted the plan, inaugurated in Virginia by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, of designating fugitive slaves as “contraband of war.” Instead of being either emancipated or returned to their owners, they would be employed as laborers for the Union armies.⁹

Then, too, an influential segment of the Northern public—abolitionists and Radical Republicans—recognized that secession offered a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow at slavery. “We have entered upon a struggle,” wrote a Massachusetts abolitionist four days after the firing on Fort Sumter, “which ought not to be allowed to end until the Slave Power is completely subjugated, and emancipation made certain.“ Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass repeatedly called for the liberation and arming of the slaves, insisting from the outset, “The Negro is the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns.” Carl Schurz, who had fled his native Germany after the abortive revolution of 1848 and emerged as a leading antislavery lecturer in the 1850s, later remarked that emancipation would have come “even if there had not been a single abolitionist in America before the war.” But the pressure of antislavery men and women had its impact. With traditional policies unable to produce victory, abolitionists and Radicals offered a coherent analysis of the conflict and a plausible means of weakening the rebellion. Most of all, they kept at the forefront of Northern politics the question of the struggle’s ultimate purpose.¹⁰

The steps by which Congress and the President moved toward abolition have often been chronicled. As the danger of secession by the border states receded, the collapse of slavery accelerated, and the manpower needs of the Union armies increased, pressure mounted for emancipation. In March 1862, Congress enacted an article of war expressly prohibiting the army from returning fugitives to their masters. Then came abolition in the District of Columbia (with compensation for loyal owners) and the territories, followed by the Second Confiscation Act, liberating slaves who resided in Union-occupied territory or escaped to Union lines, if their masters were disloyal.

Seeking to hold the political middle ground, even as that ground shifted to the left, Lincoln searched for a formula that would initiate the emancipation process but not alienate conservatives and Southern Unionists. First, he urged the border states to adopt measures for gradual, compensated emancipation, promising generous financial aid from the federal government. But he found no takers, even in tiny Delaware with fewer than 2,000 slaves. In a widely publicized conference, Lincoln urged Northern black leaders to support the colonization of freedmen in Central America or the Caribbean, insisting “there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be for you colored people to remain with us.” Whether his embrace of colonization stemmed from genuine conviction, uncharacteristic naïveté, or political calculation (an attempt to neutralize fears that emancipation would produce an influx of blacks into the free states), Lincoln’s plans came to naught. But to the very end of 1862, he held out the possibility of compensation and colonization, raising both ideas in his December message to Congress, and adding a thinly veiled suggestion that Northern states possessed the authority to exclude freedmen from their territory. As late as December, the President signed an agreement with an entrepreneur of dubious character for the settlement of 5,000 blacks on an island off Haiti. (Four hundred hapless souls did in fact reach île à Vache; those fortunate enough to survive returned to the United States in 1864.)¹¹

It is tempting to interpret the evolution of Lincoln’s policy as the vacillation of a man desperate to avoid the role history had thrust upon him. This, however, would be unfair, for Lincoln genuinely abhorred slavery. He shared, it is true, many of the racial prejudices of his time and accepted without dissent the racial discriminations so widespread in both sections. But Frederick Douglass, who had encountered racism even within abolitionist ranks, considered Lincoln a fundamentally decent individual. “He treated me as a man,” Douglass remarked in 1864, “he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.” It is probably most accurate to say that Lincoln, neither an egalitarian in a modern sense nor a man paralyzed, like so many of his contemporaries, by racial fears and prejudices, did not approach any policy, even emancipation, primarily in terms of its impact upon blacks; for him, winning the war always remained paramount. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, with its exemption of Union-held areas, reflected not only Lincoln’s effort to make emancipation legally unassailable, but also his determination to retain the backing of the millions of Northerners who cared little about abolition but might support an act essential to military victory.¹²

Most important of all, however, Lincoln understood that the war had created a fluid situation that placed a premium upon flexibility and made far-reaching change inevitable. As Wisconsin Sen. Timothy O. Howe explained in December 1861, change had become the order of the day: “Don’t anchor yourself to any policy. Don’t tie up to any platform. The very foundations of the Government are cracking…. No mere policy or platform can outlast this storm.” The Proclamation represented a turning point in national policy as well as in the character of the war. For the first time tying Union success to abolition—a commitment from which Lincoln never retreated—it ignored entirely both compensation and colonization, and for the first time authorized the large-scale enlistment of black soldiers. In effect, it transformed a war of armies into a conflict of societies, ensuring that Union victory would produce a social revolution within the South. In such a struggle, compromise was impossible; the war must now continue until the unconditional surrender of one side or the other. Even in areas exempted from the Proclamation, the Union Army henceforth acted as a liberating force. Indeed, a federal army officer in Tennessee flatly declared in 1863: “Slavery is dead; that is the first thing. That is what we all begin with here, who know the state of affairs.” In December 1861 Lincoln had admonished Congress that the Civil War must not degenerate into “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” The Emancipation Proclamation announced that this was precisely what it must become.¹³

Of the Proclamation’s provisions, few were more radical in their implications or more essential to breathing life into the promise of emancipation than the massive enrollment of blacks into military service. Preliminary steps had been taken in 1862, since as the army moved into the South, it required a seemingly endless stream of laborers to construct fortifications and additional soldiers to guard its ever-lengthening supply lines. The reservoir of black manpower could not be ignored, but it was only with the Emancipation Proclamation that the enlistment of blacks began in earnest. Massachusetts Governor Andrew commissioned a group of prominent black abolitionists to tour the North for recruits, and other Northern governors quickly followed suit. In the South, especially in the Mississippi Valley under the direction of Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, former slaves by the thousands were enlisted. By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army—over one fifth of the nation’s adult male black population under age forty-five. The highest percentage originated in the border states, where enlistment was, for most of the war, the only route to freedom. Nearly 60 percent of eligible Kentucky blacks served in the armed forces. Here, military service pushed the Union’s commitment to abolition beyond the terms of the Proclamation to embrace, first, black soldiers, and, shortly before the war’s end, their families as well. Well before its legal demise, slavery in the border states had been fatally undermined by the enlistment of black men in the army.¹⁴

Within the army, black soldiers were anything but equal to white. Organized into segregated regiments, they often found themselves subjected to abuse from white officers. Initially, black enlistment was intended to free whites for combat; accordingly, black recruits received less pay than white and were assigned largely to fatigue duty, constructi...