Insurrection

Emancipation was the signal, transformative event of the American Civil War, engulfing most wartime contemporaries in a social, political, and cultural revolution. From the war’s outset, African Americans insisted that the Lincoln administration wage an uncompromising abolitionist war. Black men petitioned to serve in Union armies. Eventually, once the Union determined the military and political necessity of emancipation, African Americans poured into the Union army, waging war against former enslavers and the Confederacy’s slaveholding cornerstone. No group of Americans depended more on conquering the slaveholders’ rebellion. But the very act of emancipation radicalized Confederates who alleged that Black men enlisting in Union armies violated the laws of war and the Confederacy itself. Declaring this enslaved “insurrection” as the world’s largest enslaved revolt, Confederates condemned Black Union soldiers and their white officers to death. African American military service, however, convinced loyal white Unionists of the moral imperative of emancipation, aligning loyal white and Black in a common cause against the Confederacy.