Center for Civic Education - Lincoln Bicentennial with Supplemental Lesson: Page 4

At first, the war went badly for Lincoln and the Union. Events of 1863, however, turned the tide of victory toward the Union. On January 1, the president issued an Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery within the Confederate states. Abolitionists were disappointed by the limited scope of Lincoln’s order. They recognized, however, that it gave an inspirational moral purpose to the Union war effort. In the mid-year turning point battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Union soldiers won decisive victories. By the end of 1863, the Confederacy’s chances for survival were seriously diminished.

Lincoln won a second term of office during the presidential election of 1864. This political contest, conducted constitutionally during the country’s greatest crisis, demonstrated the vitality of democracy in America. By the time of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, the Civil War was winding down. Lincoln spoke movingly about the tragic conflict by which the Union would be saved and slavery ended. He concluded with these memorable and magnanimous words: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” A short time later, on April 15, 1865, Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. “Now he belongs to the ages,” said Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address offered reconciliation to states that had left the Union to form the Confederate States of America and warned of dire consequences if they persisted in secession. He claimed the Union was perpetual and “that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.” And he pledged to faithfully carry out “the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.” Thus, when fighting began between Confederate and Union forces, Lincoln acted quickly and strongly. He called up 75,000 soldiers from the state militias, requested 42,000 volunteers to the United States military for a three-year term of duty, suspended the writ of habeas corpus to curb anti-Union activity by disloyal citizens, ordered a naval blockade of the Confederacy, and authorized the borrowing and spending of money by the federal government to pay for the war.

Lincoln acted without prior approval from Congress. His very broad and extraordinary interpretation of the president’s constitutional war powers was based on necessity, not precedent. Critics complained the president had acted unconstitutionally, that he had usurped power expressly granted to Congress by the Constitution. So, Lincoln called a special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, to justify his actions and to seek legislative endorsement of them. Lincoln’s “Message to Congress” emphatically expressed the president’s determination to defend the Union against insurgency. After reviewing the causes of armed conflict, he concluded that “no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government; and so to resist force employed for its destruction by force for its preservation.” Lincoln claimed that his actions were necessary to save the Union and the Constitution, >