Who Was Abraham Lincoln 林肯 Chapter 7 The End of Slavery

As the war neared the end of its second year, more than one hundred battles had been fought, with many thousands of men wounded and killed.

And still, neither side was winning. In the North, it became harder and harder to find men who were willing to join the army. And the government was running out of money to pay for the war.

The South had broken away to keep slavery. Yet, so far, Lincoln had avoided dealing 1 with slavery directly. Now he realized he had to face the issue. Abolitionists supported the war because they thought it would end slavery. They wanted Lincoln to make it illegal once and for all. But even in the North, a lot of people were against this idea. Lincoln was afraid to lose their support. So he hesitated.

He wasn’t sure that the president had the power to outlaw 2 slavery. He had sworn to protect the laws of the United States, and slavery in the South was legal. The president couldn’t just overturn laws all by himself. That had to come from the people. Only the citizens of the country could change the United States Constitution.

At last, Lincoln came upon a way to do what he thought was right and at the same time obey the Constitution. A country at war was allowed to seize property that the enemy was using to fight the war. Southern states were using slave labor 3 in many ways that helped the war effort. Lincoln decided 4 this was a good legal reason to take slaves away from their owners in the rebel states.

Congress began to pass laws that chipped away at slavery. Slaves who escaped from rebel owners or were captured by the Union army would not be returned to their owners. They were free.

Then Lincoln decided to go further. Quietly, all by himself, he wrote the Emancipation 5 Proclamation. This proclamation did not free all slaves. It was an act of war, and it applied 6 only to Confederate states. In the rebel states, all slaves would be freed forever. But in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, slavery remained legal because these states had stayed with the Union.

Lincoln was sure that, once the nation was reunited, it would be possible to end slavery in the whole country. But that had to be done by Congress. As president, he only had power to act against states that were rebelling.

Of course there was no way to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation until the Union had won the war. Just because the proclamation told Southerners to free their slaves, it didn’t mean they would. Lincoln knew this. He said he felt like someone trying to make a law to change the behavior of a comet. But now he had made it clear that the Union planned to end slavery for good. When Lincoln talked to his cabinet, he told them he was not asking their advice. He had made up his mind.

The act took effect on January 1, 1863. Slaves in the South heard the news. Right away, many of them escaped and went north. The Union army began to form regiments 7 of black soldiers. As free men, they would now fight against their former masters. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 blacks had joined the Union army.