Slavery in the Civil War

Slavery during the Civil War is a complex topic that historians have approached from many different directions. Some have treated the war years as a culmination of American slavery's evolution during the nineteenth century, while others see wartime slavery as the first stage in Reconstruction. Scholars focused more tightly on the war years have emphasized the ways that slaves shaped military policy for the United States and Confederate governments. All of these approaches suggest that wartime slavery functioned primarily as a series of emancipation moments. Studies of wartime slavery, which have proliferated in the past thirty‐five years, take most of their cues from the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Willie Lee Rose, both of whom emphasized the war years as a transition to freedom.