Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Lincoln focused on what he saw as a more politically practical goal: preventing the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories, which, if it occurred, could lead to new slave states, and if it were prevented would eventually lead to slavery's demise. [9]
Lincoln's fears of making slavery a war issue were based on a harsh reality: abolition did not enjoy wide support in the west, the territories, and the border states. [ 270 ] [ o ] In 1861, Lincoln worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose ...
Abraham Lincoln's pledge to emancipate slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation solidified slavery as the prominent issue surrounding the war, and also influenced European opinion as the military situation of the United States now categorically rested on a social issue and moral crusade to end slavery on the North American continent. [119]
April 12, 1861: The American Civil War begin after Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Jan. 1, 1863: President Abraham Lincoln announces the Emancipation ...
However, Lincoln emerges as a nationally known moderate spokesman for Republicans and a moderate opponent of slavery. [208] In a debate with Lincoln at Freeport, Illinois, Douglas expresses an opinion which becomes known as the "Freeport Doctrine". Lincoln asks whether the people of a territory could lawfully exclude slavery before the ...
The question would continue to trouble them and eventually lead to a split within their party as the war progressed. [113] Lincoln further alienated many in the Union two days after issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation by suspending habeas corpus. His opponents linked these two actions in their claims that he was becoming a despot.
At first Lincoln stressed preserving the Union as a war goal to unite the War Democrats, border states, and Republicans. In 1862, he added emancipation, finding it a military necessity for preserving the Union. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said that slavery "was, somehow, the cause of the war". [28]
Although President Abraham Lincoln lived to see the effective end of the war, he did not live to see it through to its conclusion. Assassin John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and he died the next morning. Lincoln's death was a shock to both North and South.