Emancipation Proclamation
A PROCLAMATION
Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
"That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, 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; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
"That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States."
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for supressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh. By the President: ABRAHAM LINCOLN
WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.
January 1, 1863 Throughout his political career, President Abraham Lincoln had opposed slavery as a moral wrong, but he knew slavery was sanctioned by the Constitution and he respected the law. Besides, the border states that remained in the Union were slave states, and the war effort could little afford to repay their loyalty with the freeing of their slaves. Several of Lincoln's military commanders had attempted to emancipate the slaves in their districts, but each time Lincoln countermanded the orders.
Utilizing the broad range of powers the Constitution gives presidents during national emergencies, Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a measure to help the North win the war. Slavery was an asset to the South's war effort in that it provided a readily available labor force for the Confederate armies and allowed production to continue on the home front while the men fought the battles. Telling the slaves that they were free could possibly incite them to rebel against their masters, thus opening a new front in the prosecution of the war. Also, once Lincoln took this major step, any hopes the Confederate states may have had of foreign intervention on their side were immediately dashed. Once slavery became a central issue in the war, England and France could no longer contemplate aiding the Confederacy.
Still, Lincoln could not bring himself to lose the good faith of slave owners in the loyal states of Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri; therefore, he did not free any slaves in New Orleans, northern Virginia, much of Tennessee, the South Carolina coast, and any other areas of the Southern states already under federal control. Lincoln's emancipation proclamation freed only the slaves in rebellious areas of the country- areas administered by the Confederate government where, ironically, the federal government had no control.
In the Union, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation evoked a wide range of positive and negative reactions. In the Confederacy, the Proclamation was universally condemned. The idea of blacks resisting the authority of whites had been a nightmare of Southerners for more than 200 years. Lincoln's proclamation endorsed the concept of arming and training slaves stolen from Southern farms and sending them into the Confederacy to wage war against their masters.
The Southern reaction was not only vehement, but ferocious. Confederate President Jefferson Davis had warned the South that the Union intended "to incite servile insurrection and light the fires of incendiarism." The North, said Davis, would "debauch the inferior race by promising indulgence of the vilest passions," and he hinted at "atrocities from which death itself is a welcome escape."
Eleven days after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Davis told the Southern Congress that the document was "the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man." He said Union officers captured at the head of black troops would be turned over to state governments to be punished as "criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection"; the penalty for this crime would, of course, be execution. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard recommended the summary execution of Union officers of black units, and "let the execution be with the garrote."
Though the South never officially carried out its policy of punishment for officers of black troops, there is considerable evidence that captured black troops and their officers were sometimes "dealt with red-handed on the field or immediately thereafter." In a letter to his mother, a North Carolina soldier reported skirmishing with a black unit and that "several [were] taken prisoner & afterwards either bayoneted or burnt. The men were perfectly exasperated at the idea of negroes opposed to them & rushed at them like so many devils."
