Karl Marx’s assessment of the situation was astute. Describing Lincoln as “a first-rate, second-rate man,” Marx wrote, “All Lincoln’s acts appear like the mean pettifogging conditions which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter their historic content.... The events over there [the United States] are a world upheaval.”19 An assault on slavery was the inevitable precondition for a Union victory. “Events themselves,” he wrote in 1861, “drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan—emancipation of the slaves.”20
That “events themselves” forced the war to take on the character it did was admitted by Lincoln himself: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”21 A number of factors made emancipation the key question of the war. The role of slaves in the Southern economy was decisive. Summing up the views of both sides at the start of the war, historian Cedric Robinson writes:
The majority of the civilian and military leaders on both sides expected a quick, three-month conflict. They anticipated no major battles, rather a few decisive skirmishes that would demonstrate the cause of secession as being too tenuous militarily (as loyalists anticipated) or the Union as without the resources or resolve to end the rebellion (as Southerners hoped). That the war extended into a protracted struggle spelled the end of only one side, however: the slave regime was undone. Being a slave regime, constantly on alert for threats from the domestic enemy, the white South had the advantage in military readiness and the habit of mobilizing armed militias. But they mistakenly imagined that they could call up a good portion of the white males without disrupting the economy; that Black coerced labor would release sufficient free laborers and small farmers for war duties; that their human property would manage the production of staple crops, construct fortifications, transport supplies, and serve as support in the battle camps; that slaves would go on, according to the Southern racist mantra, being dependent, loyal, and simple.22
Almost any comparison of forces appeared to favor an easy victory for the North. Its population numbered twenty-two million, compared with nine million in the Confederacy, four million of them slaves. In every measure of economic strength, the North also proved dominant. But the North’s initially half-hearted prosecution of the war—and above all its refusal to appeal to the four million slaves behind enemy lines—soon led to significant losses and demoralization. Radical elements within the Republican Party began to urge the war be turned into a war for emancipation, and raised the demand that Blacks be brought into the Union Army. Reluctantly at first, and later more decisively, Lincoln began to move toward abolition.
In September 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It was conceived primarily as a military move. It gave the South four months to stop rebelling and threatened to emancipate their slaves if the Confederates continued to fight. At the same time, it promised to leave slavery untouched in states that came over to the North.
Of course, the Confederacy did not surrender. In response, Lincoln lifted the four-month time limit and issued the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. The proclamation read in part: “That on the 1st day of January, AD 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people thereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”23 Even at this time, the Emancipation Proclamation was essentially a military measure. In the words of radical historian Richard Hofstadter, the proclamation had “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading. It contained no indictment of slavery, but simply based emancipation on ‘military necessity.’” This led a cynical London Spectator writer to put it bluntly: “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the U.S.”24
The Proclamation did not affect 450,000 slaves in border states loyal to the Union (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri), or in Southern territory occupied by the Union Army (in Louisiana, Tennessee, Virginia), but it declared the more than three million Southern slaves “are henceforth and shall be free.”25 The practice of returning escaped slaves to their former owners was halted, and slaves joined the Union Army in the thousands. By the war’s end, 189,000 slaves had served in the army, out of a force of 2.1 million.26
The new policy transformed the course of the war. “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves,” Marx predicted correctly. “A war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines while the Yankees have thus far been trying to conduct it constitutionally.”27
But by 1863 Lincoln was clearly tying the Emancipation Proclamation to the North’s military success. “My enemies pretend I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition,” Lincoln wrote in 1863. “So long as I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without the use of the emancipation policy, and every other policy calculated to weaken the moral and physical forces of the rebellion. Freedom has given us two hundred thousand men raised on Southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from the enemy.”28
The transformation of the Civil War into a war of emancipation was greeted enthusiastically by Blacks, abolitionists, and the nascent socialist movement. Frederick Douglass took to the pages of his newspaper, Douglass Monthly, to urge Blacks to enlist in the Union Army:
The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the place of common equality with all other varieties of men. Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston—-remember Nathaniel Turner of Southampton, remember Shields Green, and Copeland, who followed noble John Brown, and fell as glorious martyrs for the cause of the slave—-Remember that in a contest with oppression, the Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with oppressors. The case is before you. This is our golden opportunity.29
Blacks proved themselves to be able and brave fighters. In fact, James McPherson concludes that the North would not have won the war as quickly as it did without Black soldiers—and it may not have won the war at all.30 The courage and fighting spirit of the Black soldiers also affected their white comrades. A surgeon in a Black artillery regiment, writing to his wife, spoke of how the term “rabid Abolitionist” used to be considered an insult. “[B]ut now, if you will substitute the adjective earnest, which is all that was meant then by ‘Rabid’ it is a title of honor. We are all Abolitionists, unless we are copperheads, which is now a contemptuous epithet.”31
But despite the great advances made in the fight against racism, its legacy also found expression in brutal race riots. Needing to replenish the ranks of the Union Army, the federal government initiated the military draft in 1863. In response to the enforcement of conscription in July 1863, thousands of New York workers, most of them Irish immigrants and their descendents, protested by launching a virtual insurrection and pogrom against Blacks. Tired of the war and its financial burden, they were hostile to conscription. But their hostility to the rich, who could buy a deferment for $300, was combined with anti-Black hatred. The five-day riot was one of the most violent and graphic examples of the hold racist ideas exercised, even among groups of workers who were themselves the victims of racist pogroms. The New York riots against Blacks in 1863 left more than 100 dead.32
That racism persisted should not blind us to how the victory of the North over the South smashed the hideous system of slavery and marked a dramatic advance for freedom and equality. The key to the Civil War was the role that the Black slaves themselves played in achieving their own emancipation. As W. E. B. Du Bois puts it in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction:
The Negro became in the first year contraband of war; that is, property belonging to the enemy and valuable to the invader. And in addition to that, he became, as the South quickly saw, the key to Southern resistance. Either these four million laborers remained quietly at work to raise food for the fighters, or the fighters starved. Simultaneously, when