Emancipation Proclamation: its reach and its limits
The Emancipation Proclamation applied to designated states and parts of states in rebellion against the United States, rather than every place where slavery remained legal. Abraham Lincoln issued the final presidential proclamation and executive order on January 1, 1863, during the Civil War. Its reach included more than three million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states. Freedom became permanent as people escaped enslavers' control by reaching Union lines or as federal troops advanced. The order also opened the United States armed services to formerly enslaved people, connecting emancipation with the military effort against rebellion.
Lincoln had announced the policy in a preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862. That document set the coming first day of January as the moment when people held in slavery in states, or designated parts of states, still in rebellion would become free. The final order then identified the territory to which it applied. Of the eleven states that had seceded, ten remained on that list; Tennessee was already under Union control.
The United States Constitution of 1787 did not use the word slavery. The legal authority Lincoln claimed for the Emancipation Proclamation came from his position as commander in chief during armed rebellion. He framed emancipation as a necessary war measure for suppressing that rebellion. Before the war, he accepted the conventional constitutional interpretation that the federal government could not abolish slavery in states during peacetime, as distinct from federal territories and the District of Columbia. The preliminary announcement drew attention to two statutes passed in 1862, including the Confiscation Act. The final order did not mention a statute, resting instead on Lincoln's joint presidential and military capacities in the wartime setting.
The four slaveholding border states outside rebellion were Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Lincoln did not name them in the Emancipation Proclamation, leaving nearly 500,000 enslaved people in those states outside its coverage. West Virginia presented another jurisdictional complication. In January 1863, the region was still part of the legally recognized reorganized state of Virginia, based in Wheeling and aligned with the Union, as distinct from Confederate Virginia based in Richmond. Tennessee also remained outside the final designation because a Union-controlled military government had already been established in Nashville.
Within named Confederate states, exemptions created further boundaries. In Virginia, the order excluded the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia and other named counties, including areas associated with Norfolk and Portsmouth. Louisiana's exemptions covered thirteen named parishes, including Orleans Parish and the city of New Orleans, in areas under Union control. Those parishes included St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, and St. James, among others. Areas considered no longer in rebellion or loyal to the Union would require later state or federal action to end slavery. Such exemptions left an additional 300,000 enslaved people outside the immediate emancipation declaration.
Enforcement depended on the war's progress. Around 25,000 to 75,000 people were immediately emancipated in Confederate regions where the United States Army was already present, but the declaration could not be enforced in areas still under rebellion's control. As Union armies advanced, enslaved people escaped toward their lines or were left behind when enslavers fled. The Emancipation Proclamation gave a legal framework for liberation as that military control spread. Many who escaped joined the Union Army. Their departures weakened the Southern economy while enlistments strengthened the Northern military, bringing personal flight from slavery into the larger course of the conflict.
Lincoln also pursued abolition through reconstruction and state action. His plan for captured Louisiana required only a tenth of the electorate to take a loyalty oath, while requiring acceptance of emancipation and abolition in a new constitution. By December 1864, abolition under his reconstruction plan had been enacted in Louisiana and Arkansas; Tennessee enacted it on February 22, 1865. Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia also prohibited slavery before the war ended. In Kentucky, Union commanders used the offer of freedom for army enlistees to free their families as well. Slavery nonetheless remained legal in Kentucky and Delaware until the Thirteenth Amendment took effect.
The constitutional amendment followed a separate legislative and ratification path. The Senate approved it by the required two-thirds vote on April 8, 1864, and the House of Representatives did so on January 31, 1865. Ratification by the necessary three-fourths of the states was completed on December 6, 1865. It made slavery and involuntary servitude unconstitutional except as punishment for crime. The original proclamation also has a physical history: its five pages are held in the National Archives Building. Until 1936, they had been bound with other proclamations in a large volume maintained by the Department of State.