Existing comment:
Emancipation Proclamation
Milestone on the Path to Freedom
President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declared that "all persons held as slaves within any States... in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."
This executive order was limited. As a strategic war measure designed to cripple the Confederacy, it applied only to Confederate territories -- which federal forces did not control -- while leaving slavery intact in slaveholding states loyal to the Union. Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation marked a historic realignment of the war's objective from preserving the Union to abolishing slavery. |