On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The document declared “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The Emancipation Proclamation is only a few words over 700 but the small section above directly states Lincoln’s intent. It means all slaves, living in areas in rebellion against the federal government, were declared free and included states that had seceded from the Union. It changed to course of the Civil War and was the beginning of the end of slavery in the United States. (Armentrout 2005) On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln read …show more content…
It only applied to states that seceded from the Union, which left slavery in bordering states. It also exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control. The most crucial was that the entire proclamation depended completely on the Union military’s victory. The proclamation did transform the character of the war though. Every advancement of the Union expanded the domain of freedom. More importantly, it accepted black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. (National Archives and Records Administration …show more content…
In the North, some of the white people assumed that the whole reason the Civil War was being fought was to free the slaves while others believed it rationalized the bloodiest conflict in United States history. Many abolitionists and African-American reformers thought that the Emancipation Proclamation was not just a one-time event but a process that continue until all African Americans were treated equally. Many southern white people drew upon the antebellum racial stereotype and asserted that blacks were not suited to liberty and the Emancipation Proclamation had failed. (Abolition Seminar