📘 The proclamation that stopped short

What you’ll learn

1. New Year's Day, upstairsPlace the proclamation as a five-page war order signed after a reception on 1 January 1863, not as a peacetime statute or an ending.Franklin, from Carpenter and the secretaries, puts Lincoln upstairs with a trembling arm. The warrant on the page is Commander-in-Chief.
2. The exceptsRead the state list and the parentheses as the legal design: rebel ground only, with Union-held pockets and the border left out.Ten states named. Louisiana parishes and Virginia counties excepted. Tennessee omitted. Border states never appear.
3. What a limited order could doShow how a limited war measure could still change the war: every Union advance expanded freedom, and Black men were received into service.The Archives' almost 200,000 is 179,000 soldiers plus 19,000 sailors. People were already walking toward the lines.
4. What a war order cannot finishHold the proclamation beside the 13th Amendment, and leave the reader with the excepts to read aloud.Watch Night waited for a first step. The amendment, ratified 6 December 1865, is what can wind the legal thing up.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• National Archives, Featured Documents, 'The Emancipation Proclamation.' Issued 1 January 1863; applied only to states that had seceded, leaving slavery untouched in loyal border states; expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy already under Northern control; freedom promised depended upon Union military victory; did not end slavery in the nation; after 1 January every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom; announced acceptance of Black men into the Union Army and Navy; by war's end almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors; enslaved people had acted to secure their own liberty from the first days of the war; original is five pages, red and blue ribbons, State Department number 95, transferred from State in 1936. https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation ; transcript: https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html
• National Archives, Milestone Documents, 'Emancipation Proclamation (1863).' Preliminary proclamation 22 September 1862, a few days after Antietam; 100 days later the final order; Commander-in-Chief war measure; hoped to keep England and France from recognizing the Confederacy; full text including the Louisiana parish and Virginia county exceptions, the 'left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued' clause, reception into the armed service, and 'an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.' https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/emancipation-proclamation
• John Hope Franklin, 'The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice,' Prologue 25, no. 2 (Summer 1993), National Archives. New Year's reception; Seward's correction of 'set my name' to 'set my hand'; signing upstairs after guests departed, no cabinet meeting, no ceremony; Carpenter's account of the trembling arm and 'I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right'; compensation and colonization dropped from the final draft; enlistment sentence new in January; telegraph about 8 p.m.; Tremont Temple and Twelfth Baptist Church; Douglass on the first step; Lincoln later reported calling the 13th Amendment a king's cure that winds the whole thing up. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1993/summer/emancipation-proclamation.html
• National Archives, Milestone Documents, '13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865).' Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation; Senate April 1864; House 31 January 1865, 119–56; Lincoln approved the joint resolution 1 February 1865; ratified 6 December 1865; neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment ; also https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/13th-amendment
• National Archives, Milestone Documents, 'War Department General Order 143: Creation of the U.S. Colored Troops (1863),' 22 May 1863; roughly 179,000 Black men as soldiers (10 percent of the Union Army) and another 19,000 in the Navy. National Archives, Budge Weidman, 'Black Soldiers in the Civil War': Second Confiscation and Militia Act, 17 July 1862; Lincoln did not authorize combat use until the 1 January proclamation; unofficial Louisiana, South Carolina, and Kansas units already in the field. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/war-department-general-order-143 ; https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/article.html
• Library of Congress, The African American Odyssey, 'The Civil War.' Contrabands of war; Timothy O'Sullivan, fugitive African Americans fording the Rappahannock, August 1862; Watch Night / Freedom's Eve, 31 December 1862; Heard and Moseley, Waiting for the hour. U.S. Senate, 'First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln,' Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864: cabinet first reading 22 July 1862; Seward advises delay until military success; preliminary issued 22 September after Antietam. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/civil-war.html ; https://www.senate.gov/art-artifacts/fine-art/paintings/33_00005_000.htm

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