Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865

A powerful history of emancipation that reshapes our understanding of Lincoln, the Civil War, and the end of American slavery.Freedom National is a groundbreaking history of emancipation that joins the political initiatives of Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress with the courageous actions of Union soldiers and runaway slaves in the South. It shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery. These two aims―"Liberty and Union, one and inseparable"―were intertwined in Republican policy from the very start of the war. By summer 1861 the federal government invoked military authority to begin freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines in the disloyal South.