These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

He did not mention slavery. There would be those, after the war ended, who said that it had been fought over states’ rights or to preserve the Union or for a thousand other reasons and causes. Soldiers, North and South, knew better. “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper explained in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks,” a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade’s newspaper wrote that same year, “is either a fool or a liar.”67 By then, the emancipation had begun.