Abraham Lincoln
...ate spring of 1861 the states of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Arkansas left the Union and joined the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was aware that the country was being torn apart. In his inauguration speech he cautioned the Confederate States telling them, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.” The country that Abraham Lincoln took over was catastrophic. The country was dividing faster then he could catch up. He had a Union Army that was small and short of men. In the book Why the North Won the Civil War, written by historians Richard N. Current, et al (64). Lincoln went ahead and asked for 75,000 volunteers to fight for the Union army during the Civil War. During this duration four more states joined the South and the Civil War began. President Lincoln was strong-minded to keep protecting the North. The Union Army ended up raising over three million soldiers to defeat the Southerners who had a little over two million fighting to keep the Confederate States strong. Lincoln was trying to govern a country that was being torn apart. With his legal background Abraham Lincoln started the draft to get more men to fight for the Northern Army, he had armed soldiers put a halt on riots and demonstrations and ordered martial law in certain southern cities. The Civil War that was once being fought to keep the nation united became a war to rationalize that all men white or black as equal. When Abraham Lincoln had his seat in congress in 1846 he tried to prove that James Polk (President at this time) fought the Mexican-American War so that the federal government can extend slavery in what is now Texas and New Mexico region (95). Lincoln said slavery was “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” Lincoln despised the idea of taken ownership to another human being. The battles of The Civil War seemed as if they were being fought for freedom for all black slaves and abolish slavery. In January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation was passed by Lincoln. It did not do too much for the south because Lincoln was worried it might make states that border (Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware) the Confederate States also rebel but it represented the abolishment of slavery and freedom for blacks in the north. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation did not entirely eliminate slavery but it did remind the North Lincoln’s goal for the Union. After the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln advised former slaves and blacks to join the Union Army and support the north. Lincoln said, “Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature-opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.” By the end of the Civil War the Union Army had over 200, 000 former slaves fighting for the Northern Army.(Lincoln and Black Freedom 72 ) During the ups and downs of the Civil War, Lincoln never stopped thinking about the future of the United States of America. He often reminded the nation of its ambition of the outcome of the Revolutionary War and what the Founding Fathers wanted for the nation’s future. Lincoln constantly kept his own hopes high about the outcome of the Civil War and reassured the nation that the country will become united just as the Fore...