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Primary source: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, 1863.
Caption: Read the Emancipation Proclamation to determine whom exactly it set free. Was the Proclamation issued because the war was not going well for the North or because African Americans were demanding that the destruction of slavery become the key aim of the war?
Whereas, on the twenty–second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty–two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty–three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a 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.
"That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States."
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Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863), in John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Wheeling, Ill.: Davidson, c. 1995), at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/emancipa.htm.
Courtesy of The Avalon Project at Yale Law School.
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