Slavery During the Civil War



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   Slavery was one of the reasons for the start of the Civil War.  When Abraham Lincoln was elected president no one southern state voted for him because his goal was to stop the expansion of slavery not to abolish it.  White Southerners didnt believe that Lincoln would protect slavery where it already existed so South Carolina declared they would secede from the union of Lincoln was elected president and did just that in December 1861 and was later followed by the lower south states of  Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Florida. In Feburary 1862 a month before Lincoln's inaguration the states formed a new nation called "The Confederate States of America," Lincoln then called for volunteers to suppress the rebellion and firing on Fort Sumpter, right after the other slave states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy. The States of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri stayed in the Union.

   The North went to war to save the American union, their goal in the war was to fastly restore the union under the constitution and the laws during 1862 which recognized slavery as legitiment.  Going against slavery would make the reunion of the union difficult so union generals like George B. McClellan in Virgina and Henry W. Halleck in the west were ordered not defeat the southern armies but to prevent rebellion.  In the beginning of the war slaves who escaped to union lines were sent back to their owners in conformity of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the South they used their slaves to fight in the war, they used them to build  fortifications, dig latrines, and haul supplies.  Slave owners were reluctant to send their slaves to the front line for 2 reasons one because they risked the lost of their most valuable property so they watched them more closely than they did on their farms and the other reason is the men were overworked and mistreated, they returned back to the farms in bad physical condition so they sent there most unmanagable slaves. With the shortage of white manpower it left the South no choice but to put slaves to work in the factories and mines, with the use of the slaves in industry it prevented the south from fightin longer that they could've.  In the last days of the war the Confederacy even used black slaves to fight offering them freemdom as their reward. The slaves ran way in massive numbers during the spring and summer of 1862, abolitionists who insisted that the war should be one for the freedom of the slaves confronted Lincoln so he created the Emancipation Proclimation which didn't free one slave but silenced the abolitionist. Lincoln pressure and authorized the first all black army unit, aftican americans were offered a step towards emancipation because the North needed them badly. 180,000 African-Americans served in the Union army, and another 20,000 in the Union navy, they made up about 15 percent of all Northern forces in the war out of all the causes the african americans were fighting for their freedom which was the most significant of all the causes.  In September 1862 Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made ending slavery in the South a war goal, which complicated the Confederacy's manpower shortages. The slaves of the Confederacy were free because of the Emancipation Proclamation. When the thirteenth Amendment banned slavery in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment said that neither slavery nor involuntary bondage should exist in the United States.

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