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Forever Free: The Emancipation Proclamation:
Five days after the battle of Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln declared war on slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln had been waiting for a battlefield victory to lift public morale because of the limited support for emancipation. The Southern Army's retreat at the end of the Maryland Campaign provided the necessary boost to Northern spirit despite a combined casualty list from South Mountain, Harpers Ferry and Antietam of 25,000 Federal soldiers killed, wounded and surrendered.
Southern newspapers, like Virginia's Staunton Spectator, were horrified by Lincoln's Proclamation and predicted a race war. "He invites the servile population of the South to enact the bloody scene of St. Domingo throughout the limits of the Southern Confederacy." None of the predicted atrocities occurred.
Although the Proclamation's immediate effect was limited, and very few people were actually freed by this act, the words served a greater purpose. The document changed the course of history and steered the country in a new direction. The Emancipation Proclamation determined that the Civil War was not only about preserving the Union, but also about preserving personal freedom.
From that moment forward, the Civil War became what some historians have called the "Second American Revolution." President Lincoln captured the significance of this turning point in history when he said, "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth." |