Illustration of the Emancipation Proclamation

A crowd celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, in Port Royal, South Carolina.

Tsado/Alamy Stock Photo (Emancipation Proclamation); Library of Congress (Port Royal)

STANDARDS

Common Core: RH.6-8.1, RH.6-8.2, RH.6-8.3, RH.6-8.4, RH.6-8.7, RH.6-8.9, WHST.6-8.4, RI.6-8.1, RI.6-8.2, RI.6-8.3, RI.6-8.4, RI.6-8.7, W.6-8.4, SL.6-8.1

NCSS: Time, Continuity, and Change • Individuals, Groups, and Institutions • Power, Authority, and Governance • Production, Distribution, and Consumption

U.S. HISTORY

"Forever Free"

President Abraham Lincoln issued an order during the Civil War that sought to end slavery in the Confederate states. It was partly inspired by a huge wave of enslaved people seeking their own freedom. 

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As You Read, Think About: How did the Emancipation Proclamation change lives?

Black & white headshot of Frederick Douglass

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Famous orator Frederick Douglass called for an end to slavery.  

For two long days, it was as if much of the United States was holding its breath—either in anticipation or in anger. Since April 1861, the country had been divided by the brutal Civil War. But on January 1, 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was expected to issue a decree that would change the lives of millions. 

Beginning on New Year’s Eve, formerly enslaved people and their supporters throughout the nation paused for something like hope. Many waited in churches and assembly halls. Thousands of Black Americans met together in camps where most of them had lived since escaping from slavery. 

The great orator Frederick Douglass, who had fled enslavement himself years before, gathered with 3,000 people at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts. “We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky,” he would later write. 

Deep into the evening of January 1, that bolt finally came. Word arrived that the president had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. With the stroke of a pen, Lincoln had declared the enslaved people of the Southern states “forever free.” The historic document would change the course of the war—and of the entire nation.

Enlargeable illustration of Abraham Lincoln and his advisors at the White House

VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images

Abraham Lincoln (third from left) at the White House with his top advisers in July 1862

Torn Apart by War

The struggle over slavery had been a part of the U.S. since its founding. The institution was common in the 13 American Colonies. Gradually, Northern U.S. states ended it, partly because of the influence of abolitionists—people opposed to slavery. Also, slavery was not as essential to the Northern economy. Yet the rural South, which relied on the profits from growing cotton and other crops, viewed the labor of enslaved people as vital.

During the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, delegates from Southern states had threatened to walk out unless slavery was protected in their part of the country. That didn’t end the debate though.

As the young nation expanded in the decades that followed, the argument over whether the practice should be allowed to spread to new states continually threatened to pull the country apart. 

For the South, the last straw came in November 1860 with the election of Lincoln as president. At the time, about 3.9 million people of African descent were being held in bondage in the U.S. The majority of them were in the South. Lincoln had steadily opposed the spread of slavery. Southern leaders feared that, under Lincoln, the federal government would try to end slavery nationwide. They thought that each state should make that decision for itself.

Declaring Lincoln and the North “hostile to slavery,” South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860. Within months, 10 more of the 34 U.S. states followed. Together, the states that had left the Union declared themselves the Confederate States of America.

Lincoln still hoped to keep the country together, even if it meant letting slavery continue in some places. At his inauguration on March 4, 1861, he said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” 

But the wheels were already in motion. On April 12, Confederate guns opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. America’s Civil War had begun.

A Fragile Union

In theory, the Union had the upper hand in the struggle. It had far more people, factories, and wealth than the Confederate states. Yet the Confederacy had its own strengths, including a long military tradition and a strong belief that its independence was threatened by the Union.  

Confederate forces swiftly defeated Union troops in a series of early Civil War battles. As the death tolls and Union losses mounted, Lincoln faced growing criticism over how the war was being fought. Meanwhile, abolitionists blasted him for not moving to end slavery.

The president wrestled with his beliefs. He hated slavery, but because it was then protected by the Constitution, Lincoln believed he could not take bold action against it. He also faced resistance from many Northerners who insisted that the war was being fought to preserve the Union, not to free enslaved people.

Lincoln did try to use his influence on Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Although slavery was still legal in those border states, they remained part of the Union—for now. Lincoln offered to pay enslavers in those states to gradually free their people. But they resisted. The president feared that pushing too hard would cause those states to leave a fragile Union and join the Confederacy. 

Feeling stuck on all fronts, Lincoln looked for a way forward.

Enlargeable sepia tone image of families being held at a camp in Virginia in 1862

Library of Congress

Men, women, and children at a contraband camp in Cumberland Landing, Virginia, in 1862 

Pushing for Freedom

On May 23, 1861, part of the solution appeared at Fortress Monroe, a Union outpost on the Virginia coast. That night, soldiers there were taken aback by an unexpected sight: three Black men rowing up to their camp. They had escaped from bondage under a Confederate officer. The Union commander declared the three men to be “contraband”—material seized from an enemy. They began to work at the fort—as free men.

Word spread among the local Black population. By the end of July, more than 850 enslaved people had escaped to the “freedom fort.” 

Then, in November, the Union Navy seized the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The local enslavers fled. The nearly 10,000 Black people they left behind formed an encampment of newly freed people on the island of Port Royal. 

Over the following months, the numbers of self-emancipated Black Americans would steadily grow into the tens of thousands at these and other “contraband camps” near wherever Union troops established bases. Their numbers became impossible to ignore. And with their knowledge of local roads and Confederate troop movements, the escapees proved invaluable to Union commanders. In addition, many took on jobs in the camps—everything from building defenses to cooking to working as nurses. 

On the Union side, everyone from soldiers to Congress took notice, says Steven F. Miller, a historian at the University of Maryland. “The escape of the enslaved to Union lines [and their] contribution to the war effort convinced more and more Northerners that the war for the Union must be a war against slavery.”

Enlargeable painting of the Union and Confederate troops fighting at the First Battle of Bull Run

Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Union and Confederate troops clash at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, north of Manassas, Virginia.

KEY DATES

Emancipation Proclamation

April 12, 1861: War Begins
Confederate troops open fire at 4:30 a.m. on Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. The 34-hour battle ends in a Confederate victory.

September 22, 1862: Plan Announced  
President Abraham Lincoln issues the first version of the Emancipation Proclamation. He warns the Confederate states that the order will take effect on January 1 unless they rejoin the Union by that date. 

January 1, 1863: Proclamation Takes Effect
Lincoln signs the decree, formally declaring millions of enslaved people in rebelling states “forever free.” 

April 9, 1865: War Ends
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War is effectively over.

December 6, 1865: Slavery Abolished
To end slavery in the U.S., the 13th Amendment needs approval from three-fourths of the 36 states. Georgia ratifies the amendment in December—the final vote needed to make it law. 

“This Righteous Decree”

Yet the Union was still losing badly. By summer 1862, Lincoln devised a controversial new strategy: to declare the enslaved people of the Confederacy free, weakening the rebellion militarily and financially in the process. He was gambling that, as Black Americans being forced to work for the Confederacy heard about the decree, they would flee to Union lines. Still, not wanting to seem as if he was acting from weakness, Lincoln decided to wait for a Union victory to announce his plan.

Then, at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, Union forces turned back Confederate troops trying to invade Maryland. It was not an overwhelming Union victory. But Lincoln felt it was enough.

The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued September 22, declared that the enslaved people of the Confederacy would be considered free on New Year’s Day—unless those states laid down their arms first. 

Confederate officials greeted the decree with scorn. Abolitionists criticized the plan too—for not going far enough. It would not free enslaved people in the border states. 

Douglass, however, recognized the document’s symbolic power. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he wrote. The president may move slowly, but “Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward.” 

Enlargeable sepia tone image of Lincoln visiting soldiers at a battlefield in 1862

Rischgitz/Getty Images

Lincoln (center) visits soldiers camped at the battlefield at Antietam, Maryland, in October 1862.

A Historic Act

In the following months, the war continued with increasing ferocity and heavy Union losses. Then New Year’s Eve arrived. In the North, Black and White abolitionists gathered, separately and together, with great expectation for the president’s proclamation. At the contraband camps, people sang, prayed, and gave speeches for hours. “They can’t sell my wife and children anymore, bless the Lord,” said one man at a Washington, D.C., camp. 

At the White House, the actual signing was delayed until late in the day, in part because an error in the handwritten document had required it to be redone. Also, Lincoln had spent hours receiving a long line of New Year’s guests. Finally, the president retired to his office to sign the decree. 

“If my name ever goes into history,” Lincoln reportedly said, “it will be for this act.”

The crowd waiting at the Tremont Temple in Boston trembled with anticipation. “Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes,” Douglass later wrote. “Eight, nine, 10 o’clock came and went, and still no word.” At last, someone rushed through the crowd, shouting, “It is coming! It is on the [telegraph] wires!” Soon, someone else arrived to read the proclamation aloud—but was quickly drowned out by celebrations “wild and grand,” Douglass recalled.

“We wanted to join in the shout for freedom,” he wrote, “and in the anthem of the redeemed.”

Ending the Rebellion

Sepia tone image of a black soldier in the Union Army

Library of Congress

Black soldiers in the Union Army helped win the war.

News of the decree spread by word of mouth, and as Union troops pushed south in the months that followed, more and more Black escapees rushed their way. That March, an officer in a Union-held part of Tennessee wrote that “whole families” were fleeing captivity.

Lincoln’s decree also had taken the bold step of allowing Black men to enlist in the Union Army for the first time. Black regiments quickly formed and proved themselves skillful and brave. By war’s end, Black Americans made up nearly 10 percent of the Union Army. As many as three-fourths of them had escaped slavery to fight for their own freedom. 

Over the next two years, the Confederacy would steadily lose much of the enforced labor that had kept its economy and war effort going. By one historian’s estimate, some 61 percent of Virginia’s adult male enslaved population would ultimately achieve freedom. 

That shift, combined with the Union’s overall economic and military might and its advances into the Confederate states, gradually turned the tide. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. The war had effectively ended.

The Tide Toward Freedom

Still, the institution of slavery remained technically legal. Lincoln’s proclamation applied only to the states in rebellion. The president knew that to actually free all of America’s enslaved people, the Constitution would have to be changed. Only the 13th Amendment would be able to do that. Passed by Congress in January 1865, it needed approval by the states to take effect. 

Assassinated in mid-April, Lincoln did not live to see the amendment ratified nearly eight months later, in December 1865. With its ratification, slavery in the U.S. was abolished.

Today experts agree that the end of slavery would not have happened without Lincoln. And yet, many say, it was also the determination of America’s enslaved people to seek liberty that truly made the difference. 

As historian Barbara J. Fields has written, “By the time Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, no human being alive could have held back the tide that swept toward freedom.”

SKILL SPOTLIGHT: Analyzing a Primary Source

Image of the written version of the Emancipation Proclamation

Tsado/Alamy Stock Photo 

Abraham Lincoln is known for his poetic, stirring speeches. But historians say that when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he used precise legal language to make his position perfectly clear. The decree began with the declaration that on January 1, 1863, . . .

“all persons held as slaves within any 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.”


What is Lincoln’s message to the Confederate states? What is his message to their enslaved people?

Words to Know

assassinate: to murder an important person, usually for political reasons

Civil War: a conflict from 1861 to 1865 in the U.S. between the Union and the Confederacy

decree: an official order by someone in power delegate: someone who has been chosen to speak, vote, or make decisions for a group

delegate: someone who has been chosen to speak, vote, or make decisions for a group

economy: a system for making, buying, selling, and distributing products and services within a country, region, or industry

emancipate: to free a person from someone else’s control or power

Emancipation Proclamation: an order issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 that declared free all enslaved people living in states that had withdrawn from the U.S. 

federal: relating to the national government

inauguration: the ceremonial beginning of something, such as a term of office

orator: a person with great skill and power as a public speaker

ratify: to give legal or formal approval, often by a vote

secede: to formally separate from a country or a group

13th Amendment: the part of the U.S. Constitution that officially abolished slavery in the U.S. in 1865

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