After being elected in times of great tension, presidents, Lincoln and Kennedy, led the nation to a greater good by showing leadership and sacrifice. Many similarities are shared throughout both presidencies. Some of the most important are the abolition of slavery and the rise of civil rights.
On September twenty-second, eighteen sixty-two president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This declared that all slaves in the Confederacy should be free as of January first eighteen sixty-three. All states had a hundred day window to decide whether they chose to rebel or accept the proclamation. Any state thereafter would have chose war and were considered enemies of the Union. Slaves within those states would have also had a hundred day window to escape. If any state decided to rebel former slaves would lose their opportunity to become free and would once again become slaves. Any slave emancipated was also given the right to have reasonable wages and enlist in the union army if desired. This proclamation fueled what would become the greatest domestic controversy that our nation has ever endured much like the Civil Rights
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Southerners found themselves no longer fighting to protect the rights of their state, but fighting to keep slaves. As the news of Lincoln’s proclamation spread throughout the south, more and more slaves crossed into the union. Around one hundred and eighty thousand slaves joined the Union Army, giving them valuable information on the Confederacy and their secret locations. The Emancipation Proclamation led the way to the complete freedom of slaves. When the war ended in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment was put into effect, completely abolishing slavery in the United States. Three days after the war ended Lincoln was assassinated, paying the ultimate price for his greatest accomplishment as