“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”37 —Abraham Lincoln
The Civil War was about slavery, although both sides sometimes pretended that it was not. The southern states feared that the new Republican Party, led by President Abraham Lincoln, would try to end slavery in the South, but they knew that their moral arguments for slavery were not convincing to anyone but slavery’s staunchest defenders. So they argued that the real issue was the right to self-government. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential election of 1860, accused abolitionists of proposing to “destroy the right and extinguish the principle of self-government.”38 Confederate President Jefferson Davis said similarly that “[w]e are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence.”39 But self-government and independence to do what? To enslave people.
For his part, Lincoln tried at first to preserve the Union without war by minimizing the two sides’ differences and denied that he would attempt to end slavery.40 Shortly after war broke out, he tried to unify many factions in favor of the Union by denying that the war was about slavery:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.41
The truth, as Lincoln suggested in his House Divided speech, was that this war would either cut the country in two or see it become entirely free. Black Americans knew this. Frederick Douglass saw that they “comprehended the genius of this war before [white Americans] did”42 and that when Lincoln’s Secretary of State Henry Seward said that the war would not address slavery, they “did not believe him.”43 It is no surprise that 200,000 black men fought for the Union and the eventual abolition of slavery across the nation.
They were right that a Union victory would end slavery. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the war’s true cause took its place center stage. Slavery would either live on in an independent Confederacy or would die in the Union. True, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the southern states, but its message and implications cannot be overstated. It was much more than a mere military order. It was, in the words of Henry M. Turner, Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, “one of the most memorable epochs in the history of the world.”44 It was an unmistakable signal that the moral arguments against slavery had won. With that announcement, the Thirteenth Amendment—which ended slavery throughout the whole country—was inevitable. Congress passed the Amendment before the Civil War was even over, and it became law six months after the war’s end.
The Reconstruction Amendments
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
ENDNOTES:
37. Abraham Lincoln, House Divided, June 16, 1858 (quoting either Matthew 12:25 (“[E]very city or house divided against itself shall not stand”) or Mark 3:25 (“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”)).
38. Stephen A. Douglas, Speech in the Senate, Mar. 3, 1845.
39. James R. Gilmore, We Must Conquer, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, Sep. 1864 (quoting Jefferson Davis).
40. Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1861.
41. Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley, Aug. 22, 1862.
42. Douglass, What the Black Man Wants, Jan. 26, 1865.
43. Id.
44. Henry McNeal Turner, Washington Correspondence Christian Recorder, Jan. 10, 1863.
