The Emancipation Proclamation is perhaps the most misunderstood of the
documents that have shaped American history. Contrary to legend, Lincoln
did not free the nearly four million slaves with a stroke of his pen.
It had no bearing on slaves in the four border states, since they were
not in rebellion. It also exempted certain parts of the Confederacy
occupied by the Union. All told, it left perhaps 750,000 slaves in
bondage. But the remaining 3.1 million, it declared, “are, and
henceforward shall be free.”
The proclamation did not end slavery in the United States on the day it
was issued. Indeed, it could not even be enforced in most of the areas
where it applied, which were under Confederate control. But it ensured
the eventual death of slavery — assuming the Union won the war. Were the
Confederacy to emerge victorious, slavery, in one form or another,
would undoubtedly have lasted a long time.
A military order, whose constitutional legitimacy rested on the
president’s war powers, the proclamation often disappoints those who
read it. It is dull and legalistic; it contains no soaring language
enunciating the rights of man. Only at the last minute, at the urging of
Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, did Lincoln add a
conclusion declaring the proclamation an “act of justice.”
Nonetheless, the proclamation marked a dramatic transformation in the
nature of the Civil War and in Lincoln’s own approach to the problem of
slavery. No longer did he seek the consent of slave holders. The
proclamation was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of
compensation for owners, and made no reference to colonization.
In it, Lincoln addressed blacks directly, not as property subject to the
will of others but as men and women whose loyalty the Union must earn.
For the first time, he welcomed black soldiers into the Union Army; over
the next two years some 200,000 black men would serve in the Army and
Navy, playing a critical role in achieving Union victory. And Lincoln
urged freed slaves to go to work for “reasonable wages” — in the United
States. He never again mentioned colonization in public.
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