Government Policies During the Civil War

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the constitutional grounds Lincoln invoked to suspend habeas corpus, try civilians in military courts, and emancipate enslaved persons in Confederate-held territory by executive order.
• Distinguish what the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 accomplished from what it did not, and explain why permanent abolition required the Thirteenth Amendment.
• Compare Union and Confederate conscription policies, and account for the New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 as a window onto wartime social tensions.
• Identify the wartime statutes that produced a lasting national economic order — the Legal Tender Act, the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Land-Grant Act — and account for why all of them passed in the same brief window.
• Read the Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863 as Lincoln's deliberate reframing of the war from a defense of the Union into a "new birth of freedom," and account for the rhetorical strategy that reframing required.

Before April 1861, the federal government touched the daily lives of most Americans only through the post office and the customs house. By April 1865, it had drafted soldiers, taxed incomes, issued a national paper currency, jailed civilians without indictment, freed nearly four million enslaved people by executive order and constitutional amendment, and placed federal troops in occupation of half of the United States. The reach of national power widened more in those four years than it had widened across the previous seven decades. CED Topic 5.9 organizes that expansion around two ideas drawn directly from KC-5.3.I.B and KC-5.3.I.C: that Lincoln's policy choices reframed the war's purpose, and that Lincoln used speeches such as the Gettysburg Address to portray the struggle against slavery as the fulfillment of America's founding democratic ideals.

The first wartime measure was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Three weeks after Fort Sumter, with the rail lines that fed Washington running through a Maryland that was openly considering secession, Lincoln authorized General Winfield Scott to suspend the writ along the Philadelphia-Washington corridor and to detain suspected Confederate sympathizers without indictment. The first detainee to challenge the order, John Merryman, was arrested at his Maryland home in late May 1861. Sitting on circuit, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled in Ex parte Merryman (1861) that the Constitution placed the power to suspend the writ in Article I, with Congress, and not in Article II, with the president. Lincoln did not release Merryman and did not formally answer Taney; in his July 4, 1861 message to Congress he replied that the executive could not be expected to watch all the laws fail in order to preserve the one that protected indictment. Congress retroactively endorsed the suspension in the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of March 1863. Across the war, military courts tried roughly 4,200 civilians, most of them Confederate sympathizers, blockade runners, draft resisters, or soldiers in occupied districts. The wartime suspension was lifted after the war ended.

The second wartime measure transformed what the war was for. The Confiscation Acts of August 1861 and July 1862 permitted Union forces to seize property used in support of the rebellion, including enslaved persons, and the Second Confiscation Act in particular freed enslaved persons whose owners were in rebellion against the United States. Lincoln signed both, and his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation followed in September 1862, after the Battle of Antietam gave the United States its first real Eastern battlefield victory and removed the appearance that emancipation was a desperate measure. The final Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, was an executive order grounded in Lincoln's constitutional war powers as commander in chief. Because it rested on a wartime military rationale, the order freed enslaved persons only in territory still in rebellion against the United States: it did not reach Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, or Delaware, the loyal slave states; nor did it reach Tennessee or the Union-held parishes of Louisiana, where the rebellion had been suppressed. Within those constraints it was nevertheless transformative. It redefined the war as a struggle against slavery, denied the Confederacy the diplomatic recognition it had been seeking from Britain and France, and authorized the enlistment of African American soldiers, roughly 180,000 of whom would serve in the Union Army before the war ended.

Permanent abolition required a constitutional amendment, because the Emancipation Proclamation rested on war powers that would expire when the war ended. The Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate in April 1864 and the House of Representatives in January 1865 after Lincoln spent personal political capital on holding the necessary lame-duck Democratic votes. Three quarters of the states ratified by December 6, 1865, eight months after Lincoln's assassination. The amendment did what the Proclamation could not: it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States, with the narrow exception of punishment for a crime, and it gave Congress express authority to enforce that abolition by appropriate legislation. The Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would build on that enforcement clause.

The third wartime measure put soldiers in uniform. Both governments turned to conscription as volunteer enlistment slowed. The Confederate Conscription Act of April 1862 was the first national draft in American history; it covered white men aged eighteen to thirty-five and provoked sustained resistance, especially in the upcountry South where slaveholders were rare. The provision that exempted owners or overseers of twenty or more enslaved persons fed a sharp resentment captured in the period phrase "rich man's war and poor man's fight." The Union Enrollment Act of March 1863 was the first federal draft in United States history. It covered men aged twenty to forty-five and allowed two escape routes: a draftee could buy a substitute, or could pay a 300-dollar commutation fee, the equivalent of roughly a year's pay for a laborer, and be released from that draft call. The same provisions that had inflamed the Confederate yeomanry inflamed the Union working class, and the response in New York City in July 1863 was the deadliest civil disturbance in nineteenth-century American history. For four days, mostly Irish American working-class New Yorkers attacked draft offices, federal property, the homes of Republican officials, and the city's Black residents and institutions, including the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, which they burned to the ground. More than a hundred people were killed before federal troops, several regiments diverted directly from the Gettysburg battlefield, restored order. The riots are the clearest reminder that wartime expansion of federal power was not received the same way in every part of the loyal North.

The fourth wartime measure paid for the war and reordered the national economy. To finance combat operations whose monthly cost exceeded the federal government's annual peacetime revenue, Congress enacted the Revenue Act of 1861 (the first federal income tax), the Legal Tender Act of February 1862 (which authorized the issue of greenbacks, the first national paper currency not backed by specie), and the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864. The Banking Acts created federally chartered banks, required them to hold federal bonds as reserves, and imposed a tax that drove most state-bank notes out of circulation. The result was the first uniform national currency the United States had possessed since the expiration of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836, and the legal architecture of American banking would rest on the 1863 and 1864 framework until the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

Three other 1862 statutes belong on the same list, and they passed only because the Southern bloc that had spent two decades blocking them had walked out of Congress. The Homestead Act of May 1862 offered any adult head of household 160 acres of surveyed public land for a small filing fee and five years of residency and improvement, reorienting western settlement around free-labor smallholders rather than slaveholding planters. The Pacific Railway Act of July 1862 chartered the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads and authorized the federal government to grant alternating sections of public land and to issue subsidy bonds along the right-of-way, beginning the construction of the transcontinental rail network. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act, also of July 1862, granted public lands to the states for the endowment of colleges teaching agriculture, mechanical arts, and military tactics, founding what would become the network of public state universities. None of the three was strictly a wartime measure: their effect ran across the next half century and longer, and the historians who argue that the United States was made into a modern nation between 1861 and 1865 lean heavily on this trio.

The fifth measure was rhetorical. On November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke for less than three minutes at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery on the battlefield. The 272 words of the Gettysburg Address reframed the war from a defense of the federal compact into a struggle to redeem the Declaration of Independence's claim that all men are created equal. Lincoln dated the founding from 1776 rather than from 1787, anchoring the Union cause in the Declaration's universal language rather than in a Constitution that had compromised with slavery. He used the war dead at Gettysburg to call for "a new birth of freedom" and to bind the survival of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" to the survival of that founding promise. Read with the Emancipation Proclamation in front of it and the Thirteenth Amendment ahead of it, the Address is the verbal hinge on which the war turns from a contest over secession into a contest over the meaning of American democracy.

Several themes run through the lesson. The NAT theme is foreground: every measure described here either redefined who counted as an American (the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment) or redefined what the federal government was authorized to do to or for them (habeas corpus, the draft, the income tax, federally subsidized higher education and railroads). A continuity-and-change reading is the most natural reasoning frame: most of the temporary measures were rolled back after the war (habeas corpus restored, the wartime draft ended, the income tax repealed in 1872), while most of the permanent measures (the Thirteenth Amendment, the national banking system, the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, the Morrill Act) survived in some form for at least half a century. The argumentative payoff for AP students is that Civil War policy is the period's clearest case of how a national emergency can produce a long-running enlargement of federal power without ever quite admitting that it has done so.

The four sources below sample the principal categories of wartime federal action: civil liberties under suspension, executive emancipation, federal economic policy, and the rhetorical reframing of the war's purpose.

1. (Sourcing and Situation) Read the operative paragraph of the Emancipation Proclamation. Identify the constitutional ground Lincoln names for the order, and account for what that ground forced the Proclamation to leave out. Why does the document have to read more like a military order than like a moral declaration?
2. (Continuity and Change) List five federal policies enacted between 1861 and 1865 and classify each as primarily a wartime emergency measure or a lasting structural change. Defend at least one of your classifications against an alternative reading.
3. (Causation) Account for why the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Land-Grant Act all passed in the summer of 1862 after fifteen years of failure. What does the timing reveal about the relationship between sectional politics and federal economic policy?
4. (Sourcing) Compare Taney's reasoning in Ex parte Merryman with Lincoln's response in his July 4, 1861 message to Congress. What constitutional question are they actually disagreeing about, and which of the two arguments has had the longer afterlife in American jurisprudence?
5. (Continuity and Change) Read the closing sentence of the Gettysburg Address against the operative clause of the Thirteenth Amendment. Identify two ways in which the address anticipates the amendment, and one way in which the amendment goes beyond what the address claims.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.