The people of the North needed an answer and Abraham says, “By giving liberty to the slave, we secure liberty to the free: honorable alike in what we give and in what we preserve.” Now Lincoln wanted all human beings in the United States to be free and not to worry about the South moving or returning to the Union. He knew that war must break out and that “to win the war, therefore, the Union must do the 'institution that is the economic and social basis of Southern life a military objective' (Fiero 408) In Ken Burns: The Civil War- Forever Free-1862 when Lincoln visits the battlefield to see the troops and talk to the commander McClellan. The men said: "They could see the deep sadness on the president's face and feel the weight on his heart, thinking of the great commission of saving these people and knowing that he could not have done it any differently than he had done. Through the virility of these men. (Burns) He later decided to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, which did not yet free all slaves but set a date for them when slavery would be abolished. “Not only did the Emancipation Proclamation alter the nature of the Civil War and the course of American history, it also marked a turning point in Lincoln's thinking. For the first time, he committed the government to enlisting black soldiers