1 January 1863 A.D. Lincoln Issues the “Emancipation Proclamation”
Editors. This Day in U.S.
Military History. N.d. http://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/january-1/. Accessed 31 Dec 2014.
1863 – President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation
Proclamation, calling on the Union army to liberate all slaves in states still
in rebellion as “an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon
military necessity.” These three million slaves were declared to be “then,
thenceforward, and forever free.” The proclamation exempted the border slave
states that remained in the Union at the start of the Civil War and all or
parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union army. As a Republican
politician, Lincoln had fought to isolate slavery from the new territories, not
outlaw it outright, and this policy carried over into his presidency. Even after
the Civil War began, Lincoln, though he privately detested slavery, moved
cautiously on the emancipation issue. However, in 1862, the federal government
began to realize the strategic advantages of emancipation: The liberation of
slaves would weaken the Confederacy by depriving it of a major portion of its
labor force, which would in turn strengthen the Union by producing an influx of
manpower. That year, Congress annulled the fugitive slave laws, prohibited
slavery in the U.S. territories, and authorized Lincoln to employ freed slaves
in the army. Following the major Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in
September, Lincoln issued a warning of his intent to issue an Emancipation
Proclamation for all states still in rebellion on New Year’s Day. The Emancipation
Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a war against secession into a war
for “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address in
1863. This ideological change discouraged the intervention of France or England
on the Confederacy’s behalf and enabled the Union to enlist the 200,000
African-American soldiers and sailors who volunteered to fight between January
1, 1863, and the conclusion of the war. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution formally abolished slavery.
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