Source F When I first enlisted, I believed I was fighting to keep our Union together. That was reason enough. But since the President issued his Proclamatio...

This is a "how far do you agree" question worth 10 marks, asking you to evaluate whether the main reason the North fought the Civil War was to end slavery. You must use the source and your own knowledge to build a balanced argument.

What does the source show?

The source is a letter from a Union soldier written in July 1863. It reveals a personal evolution in motivation:

• He initially enlisted to preserve the Union - "I believed I was fighting to keep our Union together."
• After the Emancipation Proclamation (issued January 1, 1863) and the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863), his thinking changed. He came to believe the war must end slavery to be meaningful.
• His shift was gradual and driven by wartime experience, not a position he held from the start.

This source illustrates how Northern war aims evolved over the course of the conflict.

Arguments that ending slavery was the main reason:

• Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison had always argued that the war was fundamentally about slavery. Douglass campaigned for Black soldiers to serve in the Union army.
• The Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) officially made the abolition of slavery in Confederate states a war aim, and the source shows it changed at least some soldiers' thinking.
• The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 1865) abolished slavery throughout the United States, confirming abolition as a central outcome of the war.
• Slavery was the underlying cause of secession - Confederate states explicitly cited the protection of slavery in their declarations of secession.

Arguments that other reasons were more important, at least initially:

• Lincoln himself stated that his primary goal was to save the Union. In his famous 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, he wrote: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it."
• The Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people only in Confederate states (not in border states loyal to the Union like Kentucky and Missouri), suggesting it was partly a military strategy to weaken the South and discourage British recognition of the Confederacy.
• Many Union soldiers were hostile to abolition. Some fought to preserve the Union but did not support racial equality, and there were anti-draft riots in New York City (July 1863) partly motivated by racial resentment.
• The source itself shows the soldier originally fought for the Union, not against slavery, and only changed his view after nearly two years of war.

Reaching a balanced conclusion:

The source demonstrates that Northern motivations were mixed and changed over time. While slavery was the root cause of the conflict, most Northerners initially fought to preserve the Union rather than to abolish slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation and the experience of war gradually shifted the North's understanding of what the war meant. By 1865, abolition had become inseparable from the Union cause, but this was an evolution, not the starting position for most soldiers or politicians.

Exam technique: This source is valuable because it shows change over time within one individual. Use it to demonstrate that motivations were not static. A strong answer avoids treating "the North" as a monolithic group - show awareness that different people fought for different reasons, and that those reasons shifted as the war progressed.