Letter from Senator Charles Sumner to President Abraham Lincoln, November 20, 1864
Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was a leading abolitionist in Congress. In this letter to the president, Sumner expressed his view that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War and that emancipation, once declared, could not be revoked. He urged President Lincoln to take a strong stand in dealing with the leaders of the rebellion.
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…I have replied…that freedom once given could not be reclaimed, & that the Country was solemnly bound to the immediate present freedom of every slave in the rebel States.
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
Proclaiming Emancipation
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Designed to weaken the Confederacy, it declared that all persons enslaved in a state, or part of a state, then in rebellion against the United States were and would be forever free. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed by Congress and ratified by the states in 1865, abolished slavery in all the states.