It looked like a triumphal march for the slave barons, but each step cost more than the last.  Missouri gave rise to the early abolitionist movement.  Mexico and the fugitive slave law aroused deep opposition in the North, and Kansas developed an attack upon the free labor system, not simply of the North, but of the civilized world.  The result was war; but the war was not against slavery.  It was fought to protect free white laborers against the competition of slaves, and it was thought possible to do this by segregating slavery.

The first thing that vexed the Northern armies on Southern soil during the war was the question of the disposition of the fugitive slaves, who immediately began to arrive in increasing numbers.  Butler confiscated them, Fremont freed them, and Halleck caught and returned them; but their numbers swelled to such large proportions that the mere economic problem of their presence overshadowed everything else, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation.  Lincoln was glad to have them come after once he realized their strength to the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation was forced, not simply by the necessity of paralyzing industry in the South, but also by the necessity of employing Negro soldiers.  During the first two years of the war no one wanted Negro soldiers.  It was declared to be a “white man’s war.”  General Hunter tried to raise a regiment in South Carolina, but the War Department disavowed the act.  In Louisiana the Negroes were anxious to enlist, but were held off.  In the meantime the war did not go as well as the North had hoped, and on the twenty-sixth of January, 1863, the Secretary of War authorized the Governor of Massachusetts to raise two regiments of Negro troops.  Frederick Douglass and others began the work with enthusiasm, and in the end one hundred and eighty-seven thousand Negroes enlisted in the Northern armies, of whom seventy thousand were killed and wounded.  The conduct of these troops was exemplary.  They were indispensable in camp duties and brave on the field, where they fought in two hundred and thirteen battles.  General Banks wrote, “Their conduct was heroic.  No troops could be more determined or more daring."[96]

The assault on Fort Wagner, led by a thousand black soldiers under the white Colonel Shaw, is one of the greatest deeds of desperate bravery on record.  On the other hand the treatment of Negro soldiers when captured by the Confederates was barbarous.  At Fort Pillow, after the surrender of the federal troops, the colored regiment was indiscriminately butchered and some of them were buried alive.

Abraham Lincoln said, “The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with Democratic strategy.  It would sacrifice all the white men of the North to do it.  There are now in the service of the United States near two hundred thousand able-bodied colored men, most of them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory....  Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men; take two hundred thousand men from our side and put them in the battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks."[97] Emancipation thus came as a war measure to break the power of the Confederacy, preserve the Union, and gain the sympathy of the civilized world.