EMANCIPATION—AND AFTER

Ironically, although Southern politicians supported secession in order to preserve slavery, their action led instead to slavery's death. As the war dragged on, Northern war aims gradually shifted from preserving the Union to abolishing slavery and remaking the Union. Two especially important catalysts of this shift included: (1) the wartime behavior of Southern blacks, who under conditions of weakened authority at home increasingly refused to behave like slaves; and (2) the changing views of Northern whites, a growing number of whom accepted the Radical Republican position that the war provided an ideal opportunity to overthrow slavery and institute a sweeping transformation of the Southern social order.

Slavery ended for hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks well before the Confederate surrender, as Union troops occupied larger and larger areas of the South and as increasing numbers of slaves fled from their owners and sought refuge within Union lines. In Union-occupied areas of the South, blacks experienced a rehearsal for Reconstruction, as federal officials experimented with various forms of free and semifree labor and as Northern missionaries established schools to help turn slaves into citizens. The freedpeople's enthusiasm for education, in turn, created a powerful impression among Northern whites and contributed to their growing determination that the war must yield what President Lincoln termed "a new birth of freedom."

This goal received symbolic recognition with the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863 (see Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment). Although the proclamation applied only to areas under rebel control, and did not end slavery in the United States, it marked a clear turning point in the struggle against the "peculiar institution": a war for union had become a war for freedom, and henceforth everyone recognized that a federal victory would mean the death of slavery. During the second half of the war, as slavery crumbled in much of the South, more than 188,000 African Americans, both Southern and Northern, served in the Union's armed forces, fighting to hasten that death. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in January and ratified by the states in December 1865, completed the process, outlawing slavery everywhere in the United States.

Despite the overthrow of slavery, at war's end the future status of the former slaves remained unclear and resolving that status remained at the center of the nation's political agenda. An intense struggle ensued, as freedpeople strove for economic security, social autonomy, and civil rights; former slave owners sought to preserve their old prerogatives; and Northern politicians divided among themselves over the proper course of Reconstruction. The compromise that resulted from this struggle yielded an unprecedented—although temporary—national commitment to turn former slaves into citizens, anchored by the 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868. Together, these measures provided basic civil rights to former slaves, enfranchised black males, and imposed a largely self-administered democratization process on the former Confederate states, under federal supervision.

Emancipation brought many tangible rewards. Among the most obvious was a significant increase in personal freedom that came with no longer being someone else's property: whatever hardships they faced, free blacks could not be forcibly sold away from their loved ones. But emancipation did not bring full equality, and many of the most striking gains of Reconstruction — including the substantial political power that African Americans were briefly able to exercise — were soon lost. In the decades after Reconstruction African Americans experienced continued poverty and exploitation and a rising tide of violence at the hands of whites determined to reimpose black subordination. They also experienced new forms of discrimination, spearheaded by a variety of state laws that instituted rigid racial segregation in virtually all areas of life and that (in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments) effectively disfranchised black voters. The struggle to overcome the bitter legacy of slavery would be long and arduous.