Emancipation Proclamation Dbq Essay

Between the start of the Civil War and the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation, opinions about emancipation took a turn for the better. During the Civil War, President Lincoln decided that the Union could use emancipation, or the freeing of slaves, as a weapon against the South and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation, put into effect on the first of January in 1863, was a document declaring the release of slaves from the cruel chains of slavery. In an October issue from 1861, the Sacramento Bee stated that the emancipation of slaves would only worsen things, because black people and white people can never live as equals. The superior race will always rise, and the lower race will

The document uses the word “inevitable” to describe this system of rising and falling, which suggests that to these people, slavery was just nature saying that the strongest should be at the top, and the weakest, at the bottom. This opinion, however, changed greatly over the course of the war. In an article written by the Sacramento Daily Union after the proclamation was put into action, the author described Lincoln’s passing of the law as a direct hit at the cause of the Civil War. (Document E) This statement gives the impression that by 1863, people had started to like the idea of emancipation. We can clearly see, by comparing the two articles, that people had gone from supporting slavery to supporting its removal. This change of heart can also be seen in a January issue of the Sacramento Bee from 1863. The article talked about a recent party where many people had gathered and celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation. The author recalled a conversation that he had heard in which a man had expressed his surprise about the party. The man pointed out that four years before, nobody would have ever proposed the emancipation of