History of the United States I / Unit 15 USH1 2147 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Emancipation Proclamation
The idea
Lincoln issued an ultimatum on September twenty-second, eighteen sixty-two, shortly after Antietam, giving the Confederate states until January first, eighteen sixty-three to return, after which slavery would end at the war's conclusion. The Confederacy did nothing. The Proclamation issued that January declared that 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. Its legal architecture is what exams test. It rested on commander-in-chief powers. It excluded territory outside Lincoln's control, so slaveholders there could not sue. It did not apply to the Union slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri, so they could not sue either. And its exceptions were enumerated by name: thirteen Louisiana parishes including New Orleans, the forty-eight counties of West Virginia and seven more Virginia counties including Norfolk and Portsmouth, and Tennessee entire.
In practice
A document that freed almost nobody on the day it was signed, and made the freedom of four million people the purpose of the war.
Where people slip
This is the most misunderstood document in the course. The familiar version says it freed no one where the United States had power, and that version is too strong. The exceptions were named, not general. Where the Union held territory the Proclamation had named, slavery deliberately stood; where it held territory the Proclamation had not named, such as the South Carolina sea islands and parts of Florida, people were free at once and the army was there to make it so. Every exception is a place where a suit could have been brought or a border state lost. What the document did was change what the war was for, and one hundred and ninety thousand Black soldiers followed from it.
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