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"I AM NATURALLY anti-slavery," Lincoln insisted. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Yet, "I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling." Because he had no constitutional power to interfere with slavery in the states, and because he needed to retain the support of border states and Democrats, Lincoln in the first year of the war repeatedly defined his policy as restoration of the Union -- which of course meant a Union with slavery.
From the beginning, however, abolitionists and radical Republicans echoed the words of black leader Frederick Douglass: "To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business. War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery." More and more Republicans -- eventually including Lincoln -- came to agree with this idea as the war ground on. They took note of southern boasts that slavery was a "tower of strength to the Confederacy" because slaves did most of the labor in the South, thus enabling Confederates "to place in the field a force so much larger in proportion to her [white] population than the North." Douglass declared that he could not understand "Why? Oh! why in the name of all that is national, does our Government allow its enemies this powerful advantage? The very stomach of the rebellion is the Negro in the condition of a slave. Arrest that hoe in the hands of the Negro, and you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life."
Slave labor was so important in Confederate armies as well as on the home front that the government impressed slaves into service before it began drafting white men as soldiers. Thousands of slaves worked as army laborers, teamsters, cooks, musicians, servants, and in other support...