Did Lincoln Really Free The Slaves Essay

Did Lincoln Really Free the Slaves? If you ask any American, who freed the slaves, most will say President Abraham Lincoln. Many myths surround the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves, including one that tells us that “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen – in an act of moral indignation at the horrors of slavery in the Southern states” (Green). Did you know that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave? As the president whose election triggered the Southern states to withdraw from the Union and create the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln played a minor role in the emancipation of slavery. Lincoln certainly does not deserve the credit of freeing the slaves all by himself. President Lincoln’s role in the emancipation of slaves was insignificant compared to the African Americans themselves, the people of the abolitionist movement and the Union Army. Lincoln’s Presidential election platform in 1860 was to stop the expansion of slavery, not to liberate the slaves. “Although Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, he did not want to deprive slave owners of their property rights" (Green). Lincoln never

The President would have been ineffective and powerless without the millions of Billy Yanks who wore the blue coats for the Union over the course of the Civil War. Military action played a vital role in the emancipation. “It took a fighting force of two million soldiers in the Union Army to bring the Confederacy to its knees – and make the defeat of the slave system a fact” (Richardson). The Confederacy was all about slavery, and continuing the tradition of slavery; if the Union Army had not won the Civil War, the slaves would not have been freed. The Confederates were willing to go to war to keep their slaves, and “nothing less than military force was going to make them free their slaves”