The thirteen slave states of 1776 had become, by 1860, eighteen free and fifteen slave states. During the Civil War Republicans admitted three new free states to the Union—Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada. More important, however, was the revolutionary impact that universal military emancipation and Black enlistment had on Lincoln’s sustained campaign for state-by-state abolition. In the last year of the war, six slave states—Arkansas, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, and Tennessee—abolished slavery on their own—though under enormous pressure from the federal government to do so.
