In July of that year, Union and Confederate armies clashed at a sleepy Pennsylvania town named Gettysburg, as well as out west at the Mississippi River port of Vicksburg.
That document freed slaves in states then in rebellion.ĭespite the Union gaining the moral advantage after the issuance of the Proclamation, the bloody war raged on into 1863. While the American Civil War began in April 1861 - with the first shots fired at Fort Sumter - it was in September 1862, after the battle of Antietam, that President Abraham Lincoln finally believed he had the victory he needed to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.