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Washington, D.C., USA
164 years ago

On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation announcing that on January 1, 1863, all people held as slaves within any state still in rebellion against the United States would be, in the words of the document, thenceforward and forever free. It was a warning as much as an act, giving the Confederate states just over three months to end their rebellion and keep slavery within the Union. None of them did.

Lincoln had drafted the proclamation in July and read it to his cabinet, who advised him not to release it while Union armies were losing. Issuing it after a string of defeats would look, as Secretary of State William Seward put it, like a last shriek from a government in retreat. Lincoln put the draft in a drawer and waited for a battlefield success. It came on September 17 at Antietam in Maryland, the single bloodiest day in American history, where Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North was checked. Five days later Lincoln issued the proclamation.

The proclamation's legal basis was the president's war powers as commander in chief, which is why it applied only to areas in rebellion and not to the slaveholding border states that had stayed in the Union, nor to Confederate territory already under Union control. Critics then and since have pointed out that it purported to free people in precisely the places where the federal government had no ability to enforce it. That criticism misses how it worked in practice. As Union armies advanced, the proclamation converted every mile of ground taken into an act of liberation, and it made every enslaved person who reached Union lines legally free rather than contraband to be argued over.

It also changed the international position of the war. Britain and France had been weighing recognition of the Confederacy, driven partly by their cotton industries. Once the Union war aim explicitly included ending slavery, intervention on the Confederate side became politically impossible in countries where abolition was popular. The diplomatic door that the Confederacy needed swung shut.

The final proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, added a provision authorizing the enlistment of Black men into the armed forces. Roughly 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union army and about 20,000 in the navy before the war ended, a contribution that was militarily significant and politically transformative. Emancipation by proclamation was a war measure, and Lincoln knew its legal standing after the fighting stopped would be uncertain. That was resolved by the Thirteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified in December of that year, which abolished slavery throughout the United States.

Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in July 1862 and kept it in a drawer because issuing it while losing would have looked like panic. Five days after Antietam, he put the country on notice: end the rebellion by January 1 or lose slavery. Nobody took the offer, and the war became a war about slavery.

How much do you know about the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, why Lincoln waited for Antietam, what territory it actually covered, and the Thirteenth Amendment that followed?