Emancipation: Policy, Self-Liberation & Black Military Service — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · They freed themselves first

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend rowed across Hampton Roads to Fort Monroe in May 1861 to avoid being sent to build Confederate fortifications. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, still law, Butler was obliged to return them. He declined, reasoning that Virginia claimed to be a foreign country and could not invoke a United States statute, and that labour being used against the army was contraband.

Word travelled faster than anyone expected. Within two months a thousand people had reached Fort Monroe; within a year there were camps outside every Union position in the South. They were often wretched places, short of food and shelter and swept by disease, and people kept coming anyway, which tells you what they were leaving.

Congress followed rather than led. The First Confiscation Act of August 1861 freed people used directly in Confederate military work; the Second, in July 1862, freed those belonging to anyone in rebellion. Both were narrow, hard to apply and widely ignored by officers who returned people anyway.

This order of events matters for how the period is taught. The familiar version has Lincoln deciding to free the enslaved; the records show hundreds of thousands of people making the question unavoidable, then a government catching up and writing down what was already happening. Both things are true, but only one of them is usually in the title.

Part 2 · What the Proclamation covered

Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation after Antietam in September 1862 and the final one on 1 January 1863. Its authority was the president's war power as commander-in-chief, and that is the key to everything odd about it: a war power reaches enemy territory, not loyal states.

So it exempted the four slave states that had stayed in the Union, and it exempted the parts of Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia the Union already occupied, naming the parishes and counties one by one. Of roughly 3.9 million people held in slavery, about 3.1 million were covered, and the Union controlled none of them on the day.

Critics then and since called it a document that freed people where it had no power and left them enslaved where it did. The observation is accurate and the conclusion is wrong. From 1 January 1863 every mile the Union army took was an emancipation, carried out by soldiers with written orders, and the Union armies took a great many miles.

It also changed what the war meant abroad. Britain had abolished slavery in 1833 and a British government could not easily enter a war on the side now openly fighting to keep it. After January 1863 the recognition question was closed for good.

One more consequence is easy to miss. The order instructed the armed forces to recognise and maintain the freedom of the people it named, which made emancipation a military duty rather than a political opinion. Officers who had been returning escapees to their enslavers now had written orders not to, and the camps that had grown up outside Union positions stopped being an awkward improvisation and became something the army was obliged to run.

Part 3 · Men in blue

The United States Colored Troops grew to about 180,000 soldiers, roughly a tenth of the Union army, plus 19,000 in the navy. Many were formerly enslaved men who had reached the lines; others were free northerners who had been refused enlistment for two years.

The 54th Massachusetts led the assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863 and lost nearly half its men, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who was buried in the mass grave with his soldiers as an intended insult. Northern newspapers that had doubted Black troops would fight stopped printing that doubt.

They were paid less. White privates received thirteen dollars a month; Black soldiers were paid ten with three deducted for clothing, so seven. The 54th refused to accept any pay at all for eighteen months rather than take the lesser sum, and Congress equalised it in June 1864 and made it retroactive.

They also faced a danger white soldiers did not. The Confederate government declared captured Black soldiers would be returned to slavery or executed, and at Fort Pillow in April 1864 Confederate troops killed surrendering Black soldiers. About 40,000 USCT died in the war, the great majority of disease, a higher proportion than among white troops because they got worse camps, worse rations and worse medical care.

Part 4 · Kentucky, and why an amendment was necessary

Kentucky never seceded. It was therefore exempt from the Proclamation, and slavery remained perfectly legal there throughout the war, in a state supplying troops to the Union army. Delaware, Maryland and Missouri were in the same position, though Maryland and Missouri abolished it themselves before the war ended.

That alone would have been reason enough for an amendment, but the deeper problem was the Proclamation's legal footing. A war power lasts as long as the war. Lincoln and his lawyers were genuinely unsure whether a court in peacetime would hold that an emergency military order had permanently changed the property law of a dozen states, and a single adverse ruling could have put hundreds of thousands of people back into slavery.

So the Thirteenth Amendment was written to put it beyond argument: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, shall exist within the United States. The Senate passed it in April 1864; the House refused; Lincoln made it the centrepiece of his re-election and pushed it through in January 1865 by a margin of two votes, using patronage and promises that have been argued about ever since.

It was ratified in December 1865, eight months after Appomattox and after Lincoln's death. Kentucky and Delaware voted against it and slavery there ended only because the rest of the country ratified. The exception clause for criminal punishment, inserted almost without debate, became the legal basis for convict leasing within a few years, and is the subject of argument to this day.

It is worth sitting with the timing. The amendment that ended slavery in the United States was ratified by states voting in the ordinary way, eight months after the shooting stopped, and two of them voted no. Nothing about the outcome was automatic, and a different House vote in January 1865 would have left the question to courts deciding, after the emergency had passed, what an emergency order had been worth.