This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1862

Abraham Lincoln writes a short statement threatening to free the slaves in the Rebel States. He reads it to his cabinet. Some in the room have been waiting years for these words. Still they are stunned to actually hear them. This will change everything. The war will no longer be fought to restore the old Union, but to establish a new one. The end of slavery will be, henceforth, the primary purpose of the Union forces.

William Seward, once his rival for the Republican nomination, now Lincoln’s Secretary of State, advises him. A move so momentous must not be seen as an act of desperation, a last throw of the dice by a losing army. Lincoln should announce it only after the Union has won some substantial victory.

Lincoln agrees. He waits.

The Battle of Antietam is a horror. More men are killed on this single day than the fatalities in all of America’s other nineteenth-century wars combined. The dead cover the ground like grass. The mud turns red.

Nevertheless, it is a victory. Lee has been driven back out of Maryland. Five days later, Lincoln issues his ultimatum. He gives the Confederacy until January to return to the Union. If they refuse, he will free every slave in the rebelling states. He tells his cabinet that he’d promised this to God if He delivered a great victory. “God has decided this question in favor of the slaves,” Lincoln says.

Lincoln and the Dakota War

You have asked for my advice. I really am not capable of advising you whether, in the providence of the Great Spirit, who is the great Father of us all, it is best for you to maintain the habits and customs of your race, or adopt a new mode of life. I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do . . .

—Abraham Lincoln addressing the fourteen chiefs in Washington, DC, March 1863

In September of 1862, at the very same moment as his ultimatum to the South, Lincoln is also warring with the Dakota Sioux in Minnesota. When Sioux leader Taoyateduta agreed to the sale of land in northern Minnesota, he believed the deal he’d made meant his people would never again be poor. But the monies promised did not arrive and the Sioux began to starve. Taoyateduta made the following entreaty: