jan 1, 1863 - Emancipation Proclamation

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At the beginning of the war, Lincoln believed that slavery was morally wrong, but he didn’t think that the federal government had the power to make it stop completely. But as the war went on, he found a way to make that happen through the Emancipation Proclamation. He did this through his troops, since he had the power to command them to take enemy resources, he also commanded them to emancipate slaves while they were doing that. Not only was emancipation a moral issue, it became a weapon for the war. Due to the fact that the Confederacy had seceded from the United States, this only applied behind Confederate lines and thus didn’t actually free any slaves at the time, but this became a huge driving force for the north to win the war because the war became an issue of freeing slaves, an issue many in the north felt very strongly about.

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