Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

March 4, 1865, is remembered as the day of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address, but it was also a moment that has been forgotten in the long history of slave emancipation in America.

As Lincoln spoke of malice toward none, almost 100,000 slaves went free in states loyal to the Union. All were women and children, emancipated by an act of Congress designed to “encourage Enlistments” by black men in the Union Army.

This wartime liberation has disappeared from public memory. But it was a turning point in the downfall of American slavery – in which slaves played a leading part in transforming the Civil War into a war for abolition.

The Enlistment Act reached beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, which applied only to areas in rebellion. By declaring “forever free” the black soldier’s wife and children, the act brought liberation to slaves owned by loyal masters in the border states – human property that Lincoln had pledged the Civil War would leave untouched.

By 1865, saving the Union had become inseparable from destroying slavery. But men still enslaved in the border states refused to wage war for the Union unless, in exchange, they won their families’ freedom as well as their own.

The Enlistment Act was revolutionary. In a world in flux, where constitutional change flowed from the tides of war, it based abolition on slave marriage. It assumed precisely what slavery denied – the right of chattel property to marry and have a family. And, for the first time, Congress stripped loyal slaveholders of property without compensation, a challenge to the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

For nearly a year, Congress had debated two abolition decrees: One became the 13th Amendment; the other was the enlistment measure. The amendment altered the fundamental law enshrined in the Constitution. The enlistment measure created a soldier’s quid pro quo under the war power of Congress. But both broke the bonds of slavery, converting chattel property into free persons.

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The Enlistment Act took effect while the amendment was still awaiting ratification by the states – which was as antislavery statesmen intended. “The country cannot wait the slow action of a constitutional amendment,” argued Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. “All must confess the humanity of the proposition to enfranchise the families of the colored persons who have borne arms for their country.”

But slaveholding statesmen saw it differently. The enlistment legislation was “utterly to disregard the Constitution,” argued Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, “a crusade against slavery … as unjust, as fanatical, and as irrational as all the other crusades that have heretofore taken place in the world.”

At the heart of the constitutional debate lay the perplexity of freeing a slave wife bound to both a loyal master and a Union soldier – of basing abolition on the legal fiction of slave marriage, since slaves had no right to make contracts. Some legislators doubted the possibility of proving which Union soldier “has a wife, or how many wives he has.” Others spoke of loyal masters deserving a fair price for slaves, “five hundred apiece.” Ultimately, Congress refused to purchase the slave wife’s liberty, denying that just compensation under the Fifth Amendment applied to ending the ownership of human beings.

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And at the heart of the revolutionary law lay the aspirations of slaves. The question of who freed the slaves is a longstanding one; whether it was Lincoln, or Congress, or Union generals or fugitives who fled from masters. Yet it is clear that the enlistment act originated in claims pressed by slaves.

Appeals for congressional abolition came to the Capitol from across the border states, emerging from plantations and Army camps – and from deep within slave households. Letters from slave wives described home life to their husbands away at war, letters relayed to antislavery statesmen who read the words aloud in Congress. The accounts told of soldiers’ wives “beaten ‘scandalously’” and left “almost naked” by slaveholders allegedly loyal to the Union. As one slave wife wrote: “I cannot ask any of our neighbors to enlist and have them suffer as I am suffering.”

The slave women’s torment drew soldiers back to plantations, to call for abolition instead of returning to battle. Their military affidavits told of wives “unmercifully whipped” and “awfully abused,” grievances that led Union generals to press Congress to enact “immediate emancipation” by virtue of the enlistment measure.

“I have a wife,” a black soldier named George Washington wrote directly to Lincoln, explaining she had a “hard master.” He pleaded for a “dis Charge,” but also asked “if you will free me and hir.”

Today, on the sesquicentennial of the Second Inaugural, it is worth remembering not only how Lincoln justified the Civil War as a divine retribution for slavery, but how slaves inscribed their will in the forgotten Enlistment Act. The president spoke of the war lasting “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Meanwhile, bondswomen impatient for freedom found deliverance as wives of Union soldiers instead of waiting for the 13th Amendment.

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Amy Dru Stanley, a professor of history at the University of the Chicago, is currently a fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. She writes on the history of slavery and emancipation, capitalism and human rights.