Emancipation Proclamation

On 1 January 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued Proclamation 95, declaring free all people held as slaves in the areas still in rebellion against the Union. The order covered more than 3.5 million of the roughly 4 million enslaved people in the country, allowed freedmen to enlist in the Union forces, and made the destruction of slavery an open aim of the war.

Before the war, Lincoln accepted the common view that the Constitution did not let the federal government abolish slavery in the states during peacetime. In wartime he relied instead on his powers as commander-in-chief, presenting emancipation as a necessary military measure to suppress the rebellion. That reasoning limited its reach. It applied only to the ten states of the Confederacy still fighting, leaving out the loyal slave-holding border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, where nearly 500,000 people were enslaved, as well as Tennessee and Union-held parts of Virginia and Louisiana, exemptions that left about 300,000 more in slavery.

Lincoln first raised the idea with his cabinet in July 1862. When he presented it formally on 22 July, Secretary of State William Seward urged him to wait for a military success, so that the measure would not look like a desperate gesture. The Battle of Antietam in September, which turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland, provided the opportunity. On 22 September 1862, five days later, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation warning that slaves in any area still in rebellion on 1 January would be freed, giving the rebel states a hundred days' notice.

On New Year's Eve, African Americans across the country gathered for Watch Night services to await the change. The final proclamation took effect immediately in Union-occupied parts of the South, such as the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, where perhaps 25,000 to 75,000 people were freed at once. Elsewhere it depended on the advance of Union armies, and enslaved people seized the opportunity by escaping to Union lines in large numbers. Nearly 200,000 Black men, most of them formerly enslaved, served in the Union Army before the war ended. Confederate leaders reacted with fury; Robert E. Lee described it as a "savage and brutal policy" and urged the South to fill its ranks.

The proclamation linked the Confederate cause openly to slavery, and that made it far harder for governments in Britain and France to back the South. Public opinion in Europe shifted towards the Union, and the Confederacy's hope of foreign recognition faded. Giuseppe Garibaldi wrote to Lincoln that posterity would call him "the great emancipator", and workers in Manchester sent him a message of support.

Because it rested on war powers, the proclamation did not abolish slavery as an institution and could in principle have been reversed. It was never challenged in court. Lincoln therefore made abolition a condition of restoring rebel states, encouraged loyal states to end slavery themselves, as Maryland did in a constitution that took effect on 1 November 1864, and pressed for a constitutional amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate on 8 April 1864 and the House on 31 January 1865, and its ratification was completed on 6 December 1865. Slavery remained legal in Delaware and Kentucky until the amendment took effect on 18 December.

During its centenary the proclamation became a reference point for the civil rights movement in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. opened his 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial by recalling it, and argued that a century later Black Americans were still not free. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson also invoked it, Johnson warning in 1963 that until justice was blind to colour, emancipation would remain "a proclamation but not a fact".

None of our map years falls during the Civil War; the nearest afterwards, 1878, shows the reunited United States.