Lincoln personally hated slavery, and considered it immoral. At the outset of that conflict, Lincoln insisted that the war was not about freeing enslaved people in the South but about preserving the Union. Four border slave states Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri remained on the Union side, and many others in the North also opposed abolition. When one of his generals, John C. But hundreds of enslaved men, women and children were fleeing to Union-controlled areas in the South, such as Fortress Monroe in Virginia, where Gen.
Benjamin F. Abolitionists argued that freeing enslaved people in the South would help the Union win the war, as enslaved labor was vital to the Confederate war effort. Lincoln also tried to get the border states to agree to gradual emancipation, including compensation to enslavers, with little success. When abolitionists criticized him for not coming out with a stronger emancipation policy, Lincoln replied that he valued saving the Union over all else.
Abraham Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation before his cabinet. Lincoln had written a draft in late July, and while some of his advisers supported it, others were anxious. William H. On September 17, , Union troops halted the advance of Confederate forces led by Gen. Robert E. Lee near Sharpsburg, Maryland, in the Battle of Antietam.
On January 1, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which included nothing about gradual emancipation, compensation for enslavers or Black emigration and colonization, a policy Lincoln had supported in the past.
Lincoln justified emancipation as a wartime measure, and was careful to apply it only to the Confederate states currently in rebellion. Exempt from the proclamation were the four border slave states and all or parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union Army.
Granger commanded the Headquarters District of Texas, and his troops had arrived in Galveston the previous day. This day has come to be known as Juneteenth, a combination of June and nineteenth.
It is also called Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, and it is the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The official handwritten record of General Order No. Learn More. He avoided issuing an anti-slavery proclamation immediately, despite the urgings of abolitionists and radical Republicans, as well as his personal belief that slavery was morally repugnant.
Instead, Lincoln chose to move cautiously until he could gain wide support from the public for such a measure. In July , Lincoln informed his cabinet that he would issue an emancipation proclamation but that it would exempt the so-called border states, which had slaveholders but remained loyal to the Union.
His cabinet persuaded him not to make the announcement until after a Union victory. On September 22, the president announced that enslaved people in areas still in rebellion within days would be free. An estimated , African Americans went on to serve in the army, while another 18, served in the navy. After the Emancipation Proclamation, backing the Confederacy was seen as favoring slavery.
It became impossible for anti-slavery nations such as Great Britain and France, who had been friendly to the Confederacy, to get involved on behalf of the South. The proclamation was a presidential order and not a law passed by Congress, so Lincoln then pushed for an antislavery amendment to the U.
Constitution to ensure its permanence. With the passage of the 13th Amendment in , slavery was eliminated throughout America although Black people would face another century of struggle before they began to gain equal rights in the U. Today, the original official version of the document is housed in the National Archives in Washington, D. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On the afternoon of September 22, , Atlanta papers report four separate assaults on white women by Black men, none of which are ever substantiated by hard evidence.
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