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On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a pronouncement incorrectly assumed by many to be the moment setting up that U.S. slaves would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Unfortunately, things weren’t that simple. The implementation of the Proclamation was neither easy nor seamless – it was a step toward ending slavery, not the end itself. Issued even as our nation’s bloody Civil War approached its third year, the Emancipation Proclamation was less expansive – and effective – than it sounded.
The reality of the Emancipation Proclamation was that it didn’t free all of the slaves, instead it only freed (on paper only) those living in states in actual rebellion – which means that it did not apply to slavery in either the border states at the time, nor to those Confederate states that had already been taken under the control of the Union. In addition, it proclaimed freedom that was dependent on the Union achieving actual military victory in the Civil War itself. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Southern states were not even aware of the Proclamation and continued to suffer under slavery just as before.
This also means that when the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect at midnight on January 1, 1863, it turned the war, for Black citizens, into an intensely personal fight for their own lives, liberties, and freedoms. This is why, by the end of the war, over 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors had joined the fight in the U.S. Army and Navy, spreading news of the Proclamation along the way as they fought their way against the Confederacy into the South. They also provided the opportunity for enslaved people to escape behind Union lines as they did so.
Even though the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually end slavery in America, it was a crucial step in U.S. history – one that cemented slavery for all time as the inescapable moral and fundamental issue at the heart of the Civil War itself. The Proclamation also enacted the acceptance of Black men into the United States Army and Navy – a huge milestone – while providing the vital starting point in the obliteration of slavery in the United States.
Learn more about the Emancipation Proclamation (and its ties to Juneteenth)
https://www.history.com/news/what-is-juneteenth
View the Emancipation Proclamation Online:
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation