The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically.
As a milestone along the road to slavery's final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom. With the text covering five pages the document was originally tied with narrow red and blue ribbons, which were attached to the signature page by a wafered impression of the seal of the United States.
Most of the ribbon remains; parts of the seal are still decipherable, but other parts have worn off. The document was bound with other proclamations in a large volume preserved for many years by the Department of State. When it was prepared for binding, it was reinforced with strips along the center folds and then mounted on a still larger sheet of heavy paper. He favored gradual, voluntary, compensated emancipation of slaves tied to a plan for colonization. Even in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln conspired to get Delaware — a slave state north of the Mason-Dixon Line with relatively few slaves that had not seceded — to accept such a plan.
But the Delaware Legislature defeated it. The African nation of Liberia was created under this plan in the s. Lincoln was definitely interested in and enthusiastic about this idea, and somewhat deluded about how many freed slaves would want to emigrate.
In his message to Congress, he asked for funds to finance colonization efforts. Even late in the Civil War, he held a meeting with African-American leaders to urge them to get behind the colonization idea and even suggested that since it was the presence of blacks in the United States that had caused the Civil War, they were under some obligation to cooperate.
Such a proclamation would have been political suicide earlier, but by , the North had lost sympathy for the property rights of slaveowners in the rebel states. As the war was ending and as the recent Steven Spielberg film portrayed , Lincoln spent considerable energy and political capital in the last weeks of his life pushing the 13th Amendment through Congress.
That was perhaps his greatest contribution to the end of slavery. But in , when Lincoln was a mere former one-term congressman and unsuccessful candidate for the Senate, the Dred Scott ruling in some sense catapulted Lincoln toward his Great Emancipator destiny.
In the past, when I read about the Dred Scott case, I was mostly impressed by the staggering racism of it. But Taney had gone rhetorically wild. He ruled that had Dred and Harriet Scott had not been emancipated by their multi-year sojourn into the free state of Illinois or the federally administered territory that would later become the state of Minnesota.
The Scotts lacked standing to file a federal lawsuit because, as slaves, they were not citizens of the United States, Taney ruled. But, he made clear, even free blacks in free states, even in free states that decided to treat them as citizens of the state, could never be citizens of the United States.
In , abolitionism was still a radical movement and the idea of full equality for blacks was a fringe idea. Lincoln went to great lengths to explicitly deny that he harbored any such notion.
And he rejected the idea that free states could bestow freedom on those within their own borders who had come in as slaves. That brings me to the most vital single element of the emerging Republican plan to place slavery on the path to ultimate extinction: They had to keep it from spreading into any new states or territories.
At this point in history, after the huge conquest of formerly Mexican territory in the Southwest, the United States had become enormous. But there were only six states west of the Mississippi River three slave and three free. There would be many new states to organize and admit into the Union. The Republican principle — and to Lincoln it was a central principle around which the new party was to be organized — was to oppose any expansion of slavery, to choke the institution off economically and, perhaps, to eventually alter the balance of free states to slave states to the point that the Constitution could be amended.
In January of , as he accepted the Republican nomination to run for the U. He believed that in time southern slave holders would be willing to manumit their slaves if they were going back to Africa. Colonization would find support in the north as they would not have to compete with free white labor. Lincoln did not support deportation by force like many other colonists. During his first term he issued the Second Confiscation Act in supporting the recolonization of those African Americans willing to leave the U.
Section 12 of the Second Confiscation Act stated:. He created the Bureau of Emigration under the Department of the Interior to oversee the colonization project. Lincoln abandoned the idea of colonization sometime in because it was an impractical plan. This plan never worked as freedmen did not consider Africa their homeland, they were born and raised in America.
Lincoln did not consider the Civil War as a struggle to free slaves but to keep the Union together. On March 6, , as a last call to rebel states and prior to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the President announced its policy of compensated emancipation. This policy offered states fair indemnity for economic losses for emancipating its slaves.
None of the Southern States complied, not even border states. By the end of the year Lincoln decided to free all slaves in Confederate States. The Emancipation Proclamation read text was declared on January 1, It did not free all slaves, only those in rebel territory.
Slaves in border states such as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri were not freed.
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