provide compensation to assist states that were willing to voluntarily abolish slavery and encouraged all slave states to come up with a plan to carry it out. By the end of 1861 tens of thousands of slaves were emancipated as they crossed into Union lines at Fort Monroe, Virginia, the Sea Islands off South Carolina, and in western Missouri. In December the Lincoln administration announced its emancipation policy in a series of annual reports by the president and by several of his cabinet secretaries. By January Lincoln himself declared that no federal authority, civil or military, could legally return fugitive slaves to their owners. By then the sentiment for a more radical approach to emancipation had been building, and in July Congress authorized the president to issue a more general emancipation proclamation, freeing all the slaves in all areas in rebellion. A few days after Lincoln signed the law—known as the Second Confiscation Act—he drafted the first version of what would become his Emancipation Proclamation. Because the Constitution could sanction emancipation only under the president's war powers, freeing slaves could be justified only as a means of suppressing the Southern rebellion and winning the war. As a result, until the very end of the war, Lincoln claimed that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union. Southern leaders denounced Lincoln as a bloodthirsty revolutionary whose emancipation policies proved that the secessionists were right all along about those they labeled "Black Republicans." Northern Democrats, meanwhile, denied that emancipation was a "military necessity," as Lincoln and the Republicans claimed it was. But Lincoln never deviated from his official position, that because the Constitution recognized slavery in the states, the only constitutional justification for freeing slaves was military necessity. All throughout 1862, the Lincoln administration took several direct actions against slavery. On April 16, Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which abolished slavery in Washington, D.C. Two months later, on June 19, Congress banned slavery in all federal territories, fulfilling Lincoln's 1860 campaign promise to ban the expansion of slavery. On July 17, Congress passed the second of the Confiscation Acts. While the initial act did not make any determination on the final status of escaped slaves who fled to Union lines, the Second Confiscation act did, stating that escaped or liberated slaves belonging to anyone who participated in or supported the rebellion "shall be deemed captives