Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln declared the enslaved people of the rebelling states free from 1 January 1863, and the proclamation freed almost no one on the day it was issued. It applied only to areas in rebellion, where the United States had no authority to enforce it, and explicitly exempted the border slave states that had stayed in the Union and the parts of the Confederacy already under federal occupation. That was not an oversight. Lincoln issued it as a war measure under his powers as commander-in-chief, and a war measure had to be directed at the enemy; anything broader would have been struck down and would have cost him Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri. He had waited for a victory to issue it from, so that it would not read as desperation, and Antietam in September 1862 supplied one. What it did was change the object of the war. Every advancing Union column became an instrument of emancipation, and around 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors served in United States forces by 1865, which the proclamation authorised. It also ended any prospect of British or French recognition of the Confederacy, because no European government could intervene on the slaveholding side once the war was explicitly about slavery. Lincoln called it the central act of his administration. Legal abolition required the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, eight months after his death. The practical dating varied enormously on the ground. Texas was the last Confederate state reached, and the announcement there on 19 June 1865 is the origin of Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021.
- Year: 1863 CE
- Category: Political
