EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

Emancipation Proclamation

Emancipation Proclamation

Thesis statement

“The Emancipation Proclamation changed the tenor of the Civil War by linking the Union cause with the liberation of the slaves.”

Introduction

Emancipation, the liberation of 4 million slaves, was a major legacy of the Civil War. The fundamental difference between the South and the North in 1861 was that one was a slave society and the other was not. At first, the Northern goal in the Civil War was to preserve the status quo, that is, to maintain the Union as it was, which meant without interfering with Southern slavery. As the war dragged on unexpectedly, and as Southern resistance seemed to grow stronger, emancipation for the slaves became both a military necessity and a moral imperative.

Discussion

African Americans from the beginning realized that the war brought opportunity to gain their freedom. Both slaves in the South and free African Americans in the North, agitated, lobbied, and fought for freedom, and in so doing, they challenged Northern leaders to end the institution of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln ensured slavery's doom when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Union army put the force behind the proclamation by defeating the Confederacy on the battlefield. The Thirteenth Amendment finally completed the work that slaves, free African Americans, and abolitionists had begun so long before: the destruction of slavery in the United States of America.

A revolution bringing freedom to enslaved peoples emerged from the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, but the meaning of that freedom was not clear. Freed people of the South, African Americans living in the North, and white people across the country had very different ideas about what black freedom should entail. In the decades following emancipation, the outward signs of freedom, civil rights, citizenship, suffrage, and economic independence, would become battlegrounds of a different kind.

At the time of the Fort Sumter bombardment, Lincoln was clear that the Civil War would be fought only to restore the Union. Slaves, on the other hand, took advantage of the social disruption that the war engendered by fleeing from bondage. Wherever the Union army moved, slaves flocked to their lines. At first, some military leaders returned slaves to their owners, but others realized that these men constructed Confederate fortifications and provided many other services for the Confederate army. To return fugitive slaves, then, would aid the Confederate cause and harm the Union's.

Thus, Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler declared fugitive slaves "contraband of war" and put them to work for the Union army. In the following months, thousands of slaves sought refuge with the army, which needed help in caring for them. Northern missionaries and benevolent associations provided aid and education to fugitive slaves in crowded and filthy contraband camps. The sheer numbers of contrabands, however, soon demanded that the political and military leadership address the issue of slaves and slavery.

Congress helped push the Union toward emancipation. The first Confiscation Act declared that slave owners would forfeit their rights to slaves if their slaves were used for Confederate military ...