Title: Emancipation | National Museum of American History
Headings: Emancipation
Emancipation
“If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is into it.”
Commemorative Print
Telegraph Office Inkstand
Entering Union Lines
Sibley Tent
Contraband Camp
Map of Camps
Private Gordon, 1863
Celebrating Emancipation
“Fugitive Slaves Crossing the Rappahannock River, Virginia in August, 1862”
“Contrabands Building a Levee on the Mississippi Below Baton Rouge”
Quartermaster’s Wharf, Alexandria, Virginia, about 1863
Image Gallery

Content: Thomas T. Eckert, and Lincoln later explained to Eckert that he had been composing a document “giving freedom to the slaves of the South.” National Museum of American History
Self-Emancipation
For most white Americans, the Civil War was a war for the Union. But for black Americans, it was a battle for freedom. Determined to end slavery, tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans used the war to escape their bondage. As the Union Army drove into the Confederacy, enslaved people stole away and entered Union lines. These thousands of African Americans made their freedom a fact. Within two years, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and made ending slavery government policy. “Imagine, if you will . . . an army of slaves and fugitives, pushing its way irresistibly toward an army of fighting men. . . . Their arrival among us . . .