Southerners demanded that the Union Army help return their escaped slaves however, the Confederacy used slaves for labor in military camps and fortifications, so Union soldiers were reluctant to return slaves to rebel owners. officials to address slavery and slave owners.

Slaves fled their masters for Union lines and forced U.S. While white Northerners and Southerners refused to recognize emancipation as a war aim, enslaved men and women believed that they could use the war to free themselves. He chose not to invoke this part of the act because it suggested that the war threatened slavery. Under the Confiscation Act of 1861, Lincoln could have legally allowed blacks in the Union military, as laborers if not as soldiers. Moreover, Lincoln knew that the loyal slave states of Maryland, Missouri, and particularly Kentucky, might secede if emancipation was a war aim. While Lincoln despised slavery, he needed the support of the white majority in the North to sustain the war effort so he eschewed emancipation as a war goal. Both Confederates and Unionists believed that this war was a white man’s war. Northerners rejected black troops because the majority of white people in the North believed that the war was to preserve the Union, slavery and all. Southerners rejected using black Americans for the obvious reason that they were trying to preserve the institution of slavery. Northerners and Southerners agreed that they had no need for black troops. When war broke out between the United States and the Confederacy on April 12, 1861, both sides had not originally intended to enlist African Americans into the military. Their involvement in the war ensured the end of slavery in the United States and the preservation of the Union. Yet despite this amnesia, black soldiers on the battlefield during the Civil War are important both to the war’s narrative and the narrative of our nation. Americans realized only recently the important role that they played in this struggle.

Civil War: African Americans in the Civil War By Sara Nazarianįor much of the past century and a half, the contributions of African American soldiers to the Civil War were largely forgotten their efforts were a footnote in our nation’s history.

2 goals of union navy in civil war