The immediate results were to draw four additional states[13] "into the confederacy with their more Southern sisters", and Lincoln called Congress into extraordinary session on July 4, 1861.

[15] Members taking their seats had been elected before the secession crisis, during the formation of the Confederate government, and after Fort Sumter.

[10] Once assembled with a quorum in the House, Congress approved Lincoln's war powers innovations as necessary to preserve the Union.

[16] Following the July Federal defeat at First Manassas, the Crittenden Resolution[17] asserted the reason for "the present deplorable civil war."

President Lincoln quickly rescinded the order, reserving this "supposed power" to his own discretion if it were indispensable to saving the Union.

[19] Later in the same month without directly disobeying Lincoln's prohibition against emancipation, General Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe Virginia declared slaves escaped into his lines as "contraband of war", that is, forfeit to their rebel owners.

[20] On May 24, Congress followed General Butler's lead, and passed the First Confiscation Act in August, freeing slaves used for rebellion.

[21] In Missouri, John C. Frémont, the 1856 Republican nominee for president, exceeded his authority as a General, declaring that all slaves held by rebels within his military district would be freed.

[23] On January 1, 1863, the war measure by executive proclamation directed the army and the navy to treat all escaped slaves as free when entering Union lines from territory still in rebellion.

The measure would take effect when the escaped slave entered Union lines and loyalty of the previous owner was irrelevant.

[25] The practical effect was a massive internal evacuation of Confederate slave labor, and augmenting Union Army teamsters, railroad crews and infantry for the duration of the Civil War.

They were highly charged with partisan opinions "vehemently expressed" by chair Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Representative George Washington Julian of Indiana, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan.

It would create the modern Congressional era in which generals fought wars with Congress looking over their shoulders, "and with public opinion following closely behind.

"[26] Republican majorities in both houses, apart from pro-union Democrats, and without vacant southern delegations, were able to enact their party platform.

Congressional caucuses organized and funded political campaigns, publishing pamphlet versions of speeches and circulating them by the thousands free of postage on the member's franking privilege.

Party congressional committees stayed in Washington during national campaigns, keeping an open flow of subsidized literature pouring back into the home districts.