Emancipation Proclamation (1863): Lincoln's Order to Free Slaves

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, announced in preliminary form on 22 September 1862 and taking effect on 1 January 1863. It declared that all people held as slaves in areas still in rebellion “are, and henceforward shall be free”, and opened the Union army and navy to Black men. Although limited in its immediate reach, it transformed the war into a struggle against slavery and set the United States on the road to the Thirteenth Amendment.

Background: a war for the Union

When the war began with the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln’s stated aim was to restore the Union, not to abolish slavery. He personally hated slavery, but he believed the Constitution gave the federal government no power to interfere with it in the states where it existed. He also needed to keep the slaveholding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri loyal.

Events on the ground moved faster than policy. From May 1861 thousands of enslaved people escaped to Union lines, and some commanders, beginning with Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe in Virginia, refused to return them, calling them “contraband of war”. Lincoln overruled two generals, John C. Frémont in Missouri in 1861 and David Hunter in the Deep South in 1862, who issued their own emancipation orders.

Congress went further step by step. The First Confiscation Act of August 1861 allowed the seizure of enslaved people used to support the rebellion. In April 1862 slavery was abolished, with compensation to owners, in the District of Columbia, and in June it was banned in the federal territories. The Second Confiscation Act of July 1862 declared free the slaves of anyone supporting the rebellion who came under Union control, though it was difficult to enforce.

Lincoln’s decision

By the summer of 1862 Lincoln had concluded that emancipation was a military necessity. Slave labour grew the Confederacy’s food, dug its fortifications and freed white men to fight. Efforts to persuade border-state leaders to accept gradual, compensated emancipation had failed.

On 22 July 1862 Lincoln read a draft proclamation to his cabinet. Secretary of State William H. Seward advised him to wait for a military victory, so that the measure would not look like a desperate act by a losing side. Lincoln put the draft away.

Publicly he remained cautious. Replying on 22 August 1862 to an open letter from the newspaper editor Horace Greeley, he wrote that his paramount object was to save the Union: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it”. He added that this was his view of official duty and did not change his personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

The victory he needed came at the Battle of Antietam on 17 September 1862, when Lee’s invasion of Maryland was turned back. Five days later, on 22 September, Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation. It warned that on 1 January 1863 all slaves in any state or part of a state still in rebellion would be declared free.

What the proclamation said

On 1 January 1863, after a New Year’s reception at the White House, Lincoln signed the final proclamation. It named the states and parts of states in rebellion: Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and most of Louisiana and Virginia. In those areas, it declared, all persons held as slaves “are, and henceforward shall be free”, and the executive government, including the army and navy, would “recognize and maintain” their freedom.

The document asked freed people to refrain from violence except in self-defence and announced that suitable men would be received into the armed services of the United States. Lincoln justified it as “a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion”, issued under his power as commander-in-chief. Near the end he called it “an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity”.

What it did not do

The proclamation did not apply everywhere. It exempted the four loyal border states, Tennessee, which was largely under Union control, the 48 counties that were becoming West Virginia, several Union-occupied areas of Virginia, and 13 parishes of Louisiana including New Orleans. Slavery in those places was unaffected by the order.

Critics at the time, and some since, pointed out the irony that it declared free the people the Union could not yet reach while leaving slavery in place where Union power was strongest. The exemptions were deliberate: as a war measure, the order could be justified only against enemy territory, and Lincoln feared that a broader decree would be struck down by the courts.

The proclamation also raised legal doubts about what would happen after the war, when war powers lapsed. Lincoln and many Republicans therefore concluded that only a constitutional amendment could end slavery permanently.

The original document

The official original, signed by Lincoln and by Secretary of State Seward, was sent to the State Department and is now held by the National Archives. Lincoln’s own handwritten draft of the final proclamation was donated to a fund-raising fair in Chicago in 1863 and destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Printed copies, souvenir editions and illustrations spread the proclamation widely, and the painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter spent six months at the White House in 1864 working on his large canvas of Lincoln reading the first draft to his cabinet, now in the United States Capitol.

Effects during the war

Even so, the effects were profound. Every advance of the Union army now became an advance for freedom, and as troops moved into the South, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people gained their liberty. Many did not wait: they escaped to Union lines, undermining the Confederate economy from within.

The proclamation’s provision for Black enlistment was among its most important. By the end of the war about 180,000 Black men had served in the Union army, organised in the United States Colored Troops, and roughly 18,000 to 19,000 in the navy. Units such as the 54th Massachusetts, which fought at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in July 1863, proved their courage under fire, and Lincoln himself came to see Black soldiers as essential to victory.

Abroad, the proclamation made it harder for the governments of Britain and France to recognise or aid the Confederacy, since doing so would now look like supporting slavery. Working-class meetings in Britain, including one in Manchester, sent messages of support to Lincoln despite the hardship caused by the cotton shortage.

At home, the reaction was mixed. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass welcomed it, and African American communities held “watch night” services on 31 December 1862 to await the moment of freedom. Many Northern Democrats opposed it, and resentment over emancipation and conscription fed into unrest such as the New York City draft riots of July 1863. In the Confederacy, leaders denounced it as an incitement to slave revolt.

From proclamation to the Thirteenth Amendment

The war years also showed how fragile emancipation by decree could be. If the Union lost the war, or if a future president or the courts treated the proclamation as lapsing once peace returned, people freed under it might be pushed back into bondage. In the 1864 election campaign, Lincoln resisted suggestions that he soften his position to attract Democratic voters and insisted that he would not return to slavery anyone freed by the proclamation.

Several states acted on their own. Maryland abolished slavery with a new state constitution in November 1864, and Missouri followed in January 1865, while Unionist governments in occupied Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee also moved to end it. These steps covered places the proclamation had exempted.

At the national level, the Senate passed a constitutional amendment banning slavery on 8 April 1864, but it failed to win the necessary two-thirds in the House. After his re-election, Lincoln pressed hard for it, and the House approved it on 31 January 1865. Ratified by the required three-quarters of the states, it took effect in December 1865, eight months after Lincoln’s assassination, and ended slavery throughout the United States. The questions of what freedom would mean in practice, including citizenship, voting and land, then passed to the era of Reconstruction.

Key people

• Abraham Lincoln: 16th president of the United States, who drafted and issued the proclamation.
• William H. Seward: secretary of state, who advised waiting for a battlefield victory.
• Salmon P. Chase: treasury secretary, who suggested the closing appeal to justice and God.
• Frederick Douglass: abolitionist leader who urged emancipation and the recruitment of Black soldiers.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the proclamation ended slavery in the United States. It applied only to rebel areas and depended on Union victory. Slavery ended nationally with the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865.
• Myth: it freed no one. Tens of thousands gained freedom on 1 January 1863 in Union-occupied parts of the South, such as the South Carolina Sea Islands, and millions more as the war continued.
• Myth: Lincoln did not believe in it. He saw it as the central act of his administration and refused to retract it, even when doing so might have helped him politically in 1864.

Timeline

• 1862, 16 April: Slavery is abolished in the District of Columbia.
• 1862, 22 July: Lincoln reads a draft proclamation to his cabinet.
• 1862, 17 September: Union victory at the Battle of Antietam.
• 1862, 22 September: Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
• 1863, 1 January: The final proclamation takes effect.
• 1865, 31 January: The House of Representatives passes the Thirteenth Amendment.
• 1865, 19 June: General Gordon Granger announces emancipation in Galveston, Texas.
• 1865, 6 December: The Thirteenth Amendment is ratified, abolishing slavery nationwide.

Why it matters

The Emancipation Proclamation changed the meaning of the Civil War. A conflict fought to preserve the Union became also a war to end slavery, and nearly 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors joined the fight for their own freedom. Though limited by its legal basis, it made the abolition of slavery inevitable if the Union won, and it remains one of the most important documents in American history.