When Lincoln took over power as the president of United States, he listened to many views from people with no intentions to make threats to the south. Although he did not make any efforts to take back property forcefully taken by confederates, he made it very clear that he would protect Fort Sumter and this led to the start of war. He also deduced that he had no intentions of bringing slavery to an end or even discarding the law that guided slavery. On hearing this, the African Americans were not happy. This eventually led to the attack of Fort Sumter, based in the southern side of Carolina (Rodriguez, 1999).

Following the attacks, four states pulled out of the union. In a bid to ensure that the remaining states were united, President Lincoln for the second time repeated that the war had nothing to do with slavery or the rights of African Americans. Although he said that the war was meant to protect the union, the blacks knew that it was a battle to fight slavery. However, a good number of them discarded the thought of fighting to protect the union for the simple fact that it did not allow them citizenship rights besides rejecting them (Rolfs, 2009).

When it was clear that most slaves were being used to fight in the war, they were regarded as contraband and therefore free. When this happened, Lincoln continued to insist that the war was meant to save the union until 1862, when he thought of using the slaves in order to win the war. Lincoln was in fear of declaring the war for saving slaves because the European opinion from the citizens would throw their weight behind the Northern people (Rolfs, 2009). However, this had to wait until the union had declared victory. Upon the union securing victory, Emancipation Proclamation was issued and eventually all the confederates were left with no choice but to surrender or risk their slaves being freed. This was the reason why the war to fight for the union, ended up being a war to fight slavery.