To follow up my post about the Christmas season and the trauma that sometimes accompanied the new year in the slave quarters, I thought I would add a quick note about one January 1 that brought hope.

It was January 1, 1863. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He had written a version of the document as early as July of 1862, but his cabinet persuaded him to wait to issue it until after a substantial victory for the North. That occasion came with the Union’s win in the Battle of Antietam, upon which Lincoln signed a preliminary decree on September 22, 1862. He finalized it on New Year’s Day 1863.

Lincoln’s main goals at that point were to preserve the Union and to increase its fighting power by drawing newly freed men into its forces. The 1863 proclamation did not apply to all enslaved people, only to the 3.5 million who lived in the ten states that had seceded. But it called for the establishment of Negro units in the Union armed forces. As a result, the numbers of slaves fleeing bondage in the South increased substantially. Approximately 180,000 Black men served in the army and another 18,000 became sailors for the benefit of the North and the detriment of the South.

Lincoln was a pragmatist. His thinking in the following quote from a letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862, clearly shows that:

“As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”[1]

Lincoln’s personal views on slavery again took a back seat to preserving the Union and to serving the Constitution. Another quote, this one in an 1864 letter to Albert Hodges, editor of the Commonwealth, a newspaper in Frankfort, KY, summarizes them:

“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”[2]

Between 1777 and 1804, all Northern states had abolished slavery, but none in the South had followed suit. As the war progressed, and especially as the North’s forces began to win, the demands for abolition became stronger. Lincoln’s focus for the war became not just preserving the Union but also ending slavery. He “read the room” and saw that abolition was the only way to achieve his main goal.

The Proclamation of 1863, however, had only been an executive decree and didn’t apply to all the enslaved. An amendment to the Constitution was necessary to complete the work. The Senate passed a resolution on April 8, 1864, calling for such, but the measure failed in the House. It took until January 31, 1865, for it to pass both chambers. It stated:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The journey of the document that began in July of 1862, saw the light of day on January 1, 1863, was passed into law two full years later on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required three fourths of the states on December 6, 1865, reached its completion when Major General Gordon Granger ordered its enforcement in Texas on June 19, 1865.

[i]Sources

---

[1] Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part III: Overcoming Adversaries and Preserving the Union | National Portrait Gallery

[2] Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation  |  Articles and Essays  |  Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress  |  Digital Collections  |  Library of Congress (loc.gov)

---

Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation | January 1, 1863 | HISTORY
The Emancipation Proclamation | National Archives