WHAT THE WAR BECAME

Why did Southern states secede?Why did the United States initially go to war?And how did a conflict fought first to preserve the Union become inseparable from emancipation and the destruction of slavery?Those are not the same question.What the War Became follows the Civil War through the words, laws, decisions, and experiences of the people who lived it-from fugitive-slave cases and secession declarations to Fort Sumter, emancipation, Black military service, constitutional abolition, Reconstruction, racial terror, and the struggle over how the war would later be remembered.The evidence reveals a history more complicated than the simplified stories Americans are often asked to choose between.Slavery was central to the crisis that produced secession. Preserving the Union was the federal government's initial war aim. But the war did not remain what it was in 1861.It changed.And as it changed, so did the meaning of Union, freedom, citizenship, federal power, and the nation itself.Drawing on primary documents, court decisions, legislation, military records, contemporary testimony, and historical scholarship, What the War Became is a documentary history of that transformation-and of what happens when true facts are made to answer the wrong historical question.