In the 1860,Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election with with 1,866,462 votes (18 free states) and

beat Stephen A. Douglas, John Beckenridge and John Bell .But he was inaugurated later on the 4 th of March , 1861. Lincoln selected his Cabinet carefully as he knew he would need a united government to solve the serious problems. His team included William Seward (Secretary of State), Salmon Chase (Secretary of the Treasury), Simon Cameron (Secretary of War), Gideon Welles (Secretary of the Navy), Edward Bates (Attorney General), Caleb Smith (Secretary of the Interior) and Montgomery Blair (Postmaster General). It was a time of crisis in America. Slavery was a big problem. The Southern states needed slaves to work on their big farms and the people in the North were against slavery. In 1861 the American Civil War started. The Southern states broke away from the North and formed their own army. It became the bloodiest war in American history. During the four years of the American Civil War, the president steered the North to victory and authored the Emancipation Proclamation which was an executive order issued on the 1 st of January, 1863. The Proclamation was based on the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces; it was not a law passed by Congress. It proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states.

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Reproduction of the Emancipation Proclamation at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.