Abstract
Abraham Lincoln is considered to be one of the greatest American presidents who expressed himself as not simply a forceful war while demonstrating the vast power inherent in the presidency, but as a dictator, albeit in many accounts a benevolent and constitutional dictator. Lincoln, it is said, took the law into his own hands in meeting the attack on Fort Sumter and subsequently in dealing with the problems of internal security, emancipation, and Reconstruction. The author of a well-known treatise on emergency government in the Western political tradition states that "it was in the person of Abraham Lincoln that the constitutional dictatorship was almost completely reposed. . . ." In the following paper I would like to discuss Abraham Lincoln's policies during the civil war. The discussion will be structured in the way that will shape President's motives in actual conducting the war and mostly pointed into defining whether the reasons were to abolish slavery or receive economic benefit. Faced with heavy Union losses and the destructive nature of the war, Abraham Lincoln, an antislavery proponent, gradually adopted slave emancipation as the most prudent means of ending the conflict between North and South, bringing an end to the war, and thus paving the way to a reunited nation. Lincoln's role in the destruction of the institution of slavery during the Civil War and afterward is widely accepted to be the reason of Civil War as the institution of slavery, so instrumental in dividing the nation, provided Lincoln with an effective tool for ending the conflict. Slowly, at a pace too deliberate for most blacks and many Republicans, Lincoln gradually approached emancipation through the Confiscation Acts, compensation plans, and the Emancipation Proclamation (Abbott, 1968).
