No Confederate states took the offer, and on January 1 Lincoln presented the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared, "all persons held as slaves within any States, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control. William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, commented, "We show our symapthy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.
On September 17, , Union troops halted the advance of Confederate forces led by Gen. Robert E. Lee near Sharpsburg, Maryland, in the Battle of Antietam. On January 1, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which included nothing about gradual emancipation, compensation for enslavers or Black emigration and colonization, a policy Lincoln had supported in the past.
Lincoln justified emancipation as a wartime measure, and was careful to apply it only to the Confederate states currently in rebellion. Exempt from the proclamation were the four border slave states and all or parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union Army. It also had practical effects: Nations like Britain and France, which had previously considered supporting the Confederacy to expand their power and influence, backed off due to their steadfast opposition to slavery.
Black Americans were permitted to serve in the Union Army for the first time, and nearly , would do so by the end of the war. Finally, the Emancipation Proclamation paved the way for the permanent abolition of slavery in the United States. As Lincoln and his allies in Congress realized emancipation would have no constitutional basis after the war ended, they soon began working to enact a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
By the end of January , both houses of Congress had passed the 13th Amendment , and it was ratified that December. The Emancipation Proclamation, National Archives. Norton, The document was bound with other proclamations in a large volume preserved for many years by the Department of State. When it was prepared for binding, it was reinforced with strips along the center folds and then mounted on a still larger sheet of heavy paper.
Written in red ink on the upper right-hand corner of this large sheet is the number of the Proclamation, 95, given to it by the Department of State long after it was signed. With other records, the volume containing the Emancipation Proclamation was transferred in from the Department of State to the National Archives of the United States. Top Skip to main content. Lincoln worried that freeing the enslaved might aggravate northerners who had tired of the human and material costs of the war; he hoped it would inspire many of them.
Given a noble cause, they might regain a resolve that would match that of their enemy. Many in fact applauded him. This laudatory commentary was drawn by a Pittsburgh artist. Southern and border state unionists, loyal slaveholders, and Democrats denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "revolutionizing the war. He had reinvented his "war to save the Union" as "a war to end slavery. Their costly sacrifice could be justified by the nobility of a cause to end such atrocities as slave hunts. For decades they had hidden there.
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