Abraham Lincoln is largely credited with freeing the slaves. However, if you look at his speeches over time, his emotional attachment to freeing the slaves seems to grow as slaves become more of an issue. While his personal views on slavery was that it shouldn't exist, he only started to stress the issue as it became more of an inconvenience to the war. The original purpose of the war and the point that was stressed was to reunite the union.
The issue that was created by the slaves and why they needed to be addressed was because as the Union army moved through the south, any slaves nearby began to follow them. This raised the question of what to do about them, because the army didn't want to say to go back, and obviously the slaves themselves wouldn't leave. Out of this rose the emancipation proclamation, overriding the effects of the fugitive slave act, officially abolishing slaves in the Union, passing in the senate on April 8th, 1864, getting approval from president Lincoln on February 1st, 1865, and gaining enough support from the states to adopt it on December 6th, 1865.
Because of these things, it makes sense to say that the people forced the issue to be realized by the people with the power to free them. But this isn't the only example of this. Many issues are forced by the people effected by it, and prime example being what is happening with the riots in Baltimore. While in my opinion this is not the best way to go about things and raising issues, it still does show that it takes an issue to be shown to the people who can fix it before it will be fixed.
A diagram of where the issue was made, made by my group
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