On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which sets a date for the freedom of more than 3 million black slaves in the United States and recasts the Civil War as a fight against slavery.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration as America’s 16th president, he maintained that the war was about restoring the Union and not about slavery. He avoided issuing an anti-slavery proclamation immediately, despite the urgings of abolitionists and radical Republicans, as well as his personal belief that slavery was morally repugnant. Instead, Lincoln chose to move cautiously until he could gain wide support from the public for such a measure.
In July 1862, Lincoln informed his cabinet that he would issue an emancipation proclamation but that it would exempt the so-called border states, which had slaveholders but remained loyal to the Union. His cabinet persuaded him not to make the announcement until after a Union victory. Lincoln’s opportunity came following the Union win at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. On September 22, the president announced that slaves in areas still in rebellion within 100 days would be free.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebel states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” The proclamation also called for the recruitment and establishment of black military units among the Union forces. An estimated 180,000 African Americans went on to serve in the army, while another 18,000 served in the navy.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, backing the Confederacy was seen as favoring slavery. It became impossible for anti-slavery nations such as Great Britain and France, who had been friendly to the Confederacy, to get involved on behalf of the South. The proclamation also unified and strengthened Lincoln’s party, the Republicans, helping them stay in power for the next two decades.
The proclamation was a presidential order and not a law passed by Congress, so Lincoln then pushed for an antislavery amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ensure its permanence. With the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was eliminated throughout America (although blacks would face another century of struggle before they truly began to gain equal rights).
Lincoln’s handwritten draft of the final Emancipation Proclamation was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Today, the original official version of the document is housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Wow great idea that was never thought through considering the inability of far to many blacks to intellectually achieve true equality . After 2 centuries and trillions pissed away America still has a huge population of blacks unfit to function in a modern society so they tend to turn their living areas into something they understand and can cope with a “JUNGLE”
It has been known for decades that only about 20% of the 13.3% Of the population of blacks in America possess the mental faculties to dwell and succeed in American society . When 80% of that 13.3% barely have an IQ of 85 a mere 10 points above the measurement for mental retardation considerations true equality is nothing more than liberal lunacy regardless of which political party keeps pushing it .
30% of all government employees are black this explains a black middle class thanks to government overstaffing and make work nonsense programs and quotas that ignore reality with a babbling of excuse making for abject failure !
There are many elements in the previous article, “A Path To War? China Cancels US Trade Talks As ‘Skirmish’ Escalates” that apply to Lincoln’s “emancipation” of southern state slaves. His motives weren’t humanitarian, they were economic. Disputes over the issue of slavery had very little part in Southern states decision to secede from the Union, and Lincoln didn’t emancipate a single slave in the northern, Union states. The only “slavery” issue that southern states had with northern states was that the northern states didn’t enforce the laws requiring the return of property (runaway slaves). That was an insignificant problem compared to the overarching economic impact on southern states by Federal tariffs and embargoes.
Cotton was, to the 1860’s global economy, what oil is to the economy today. The Southern Confederacy, as a “country” would have been the fourth richest in the world. It was all cotton wealth.
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/291/cotton-and-the-civil-war
In the 1860s, American industry was still in diapers. Almost all farming machinery was imported from Europe to Southern farmers. To help develop its fledgling industrial base, the Federal government introduced tariffs on European farming and manufacturing machinery that dramatically increased costs for southern farmers. The Morrill Tariff did more to initiate the Civil War than any issue around slavery. The south seceded so they (as an independent nation) could buy machinery at world prices without paying to subsidize northern industry. Then the north blockaded the southern ports and reduced cotton exports (Southern income) by 95%.
In early 1860 the Morrill tariff passed in the House not only raising tariff rates but replacing Polk’s ad valorem system with the reintroduction of a specific duties-based system. The vote was almost strictly on north-south sectional lines in the House but the Senate tabled the measure where it languished until early December 1860 when it was reintroduced. With southern delegations of seceding states no longer in Congress to block the measure, the Morrill Tariff was signed into law by President James Buchanan in March 1861.
http://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/tariffs-and-the-american-civil-war.html
The southern states did secede over slavery, their reasons arose from the unfair economic burdens foisted on the south, which could only end in war. The 13th Amendment didn’t end slavery. It just relegated it to prison. Everyone in prison is a legal slave of the government. There are millions more black slaves in prison today than were working cotton farms in 1860. There are more black men in America’s prisons today than the number of free women who will be raped in this country for the entire year.
I think they would all prefer picking cotton to being gang-raped and beaten.
Diogenes’ Dung, you are exactly correct.
The EP was pure politics, it didn’t free anyone. Slaves in Northern controlled territory weren’t even included…Typical Lincoln BS…Meanwhile, Lincoln was secretly sending ambassadors to Central America to see if they would accept blacks from the USA.
Lincoln’s emancipation declaration was for the South only, which carried no weight because the South seceded and was a separate government and he had no power there. Notice he didn’t free anyone in the North until the 13th Amendment was actually ratified by Congress after the war ended and Reconstruction was underway in the South, in which many whites were prohibited from Congress and blacks from the South were basically placed in Congress by the North. Lincoln was a hypocrite at the least.
At least this got it right that the war was started to save the Union, not because of slavery, as is falsely said.