Emancipation

Emancipation. Preston Jackson, 2006.

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy."

, Abraham Lincoln insisted that slavery was a "monstrous injustice" and "an unqualified evil." He believed the nation's founding fathers agreed with his position and that the restrictions they had placed on slavery's expansion would ultimately bring slavery to extinction. However, with the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln re-entered politics protesting that the law would allow for the expansion of slavery. Lincoln's moral condemnation of slavery raised his profile before a national audience, and his election to the presidency in 1860 prompted seven states to form the Confederate States of America in February 1861. Within months, four more states seceded to join the Confederacy and the American Civil War began. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freeing the slaves in the rebel states and thus changing the war to save the Union to a war that also would ultimately destroy slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation paved the way for 200,000 black men, most former slaves who had risked their lives to escape plantations, to serve in the Union Armies and Navies. In August 1863 Lincoln wrote, "the emancipation policy and the use of the colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.