Emancipation proclamation
With the Emancipation Proclamation ( English Emancipation Proclamation ) said the government of Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, the abolition of slavery in those southern states after the entry into force on 1 January 1863 still part of the Confederate States of America were. The Emancipation Proclamation had no legally binding effect on Union states .
Despite this restriction, this Executive Order was a first, decisive step towards the complete abolition of slavery in the United States of America .
development
The attitude of the Union to the acts of emancipation has developed in several stages since the outbreak of war in 1861. After the Union troops began to conquer parts of the south, the question arose of how to deal with the property of the rebels, including slaves. To date, slaves who fled behind Union lines were viewed more by some commanders and less by others as rebel property to be confiscated and placed in the service of Union troops. In order to create a legitimate course of action for this issue, Congress passed the First Confiscation Act in August 1861. This act authorized the confiscation of all rebel property that aided the rebellion - including slaves. For slaves who fought in Confederate forces, this meant that if captured or overflowed, they would be treated as prisoners of war with appropriate rights. Slaves who did not serve in war were not included in this act. In addition, the act of confiscation said nothing about the liberation of the slaves.
Lincoln, who, on the one hand, out of consideration for the four slave states in the Union and, on the other, because his electorate feared that freed slaves would compete with white workers for jobs, argued that southerners' property was still protected by the constitution. Lincoln's attitude led to tension with the radical Republicans, who sympathized with the opinion of the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass that a war against slave owners without the war on slavery was in itself only a half-hearted affair.
After the failure of the negotiations with the slave states of the Union about compensation for the liberation of their slaves and after a decisive victory for his troops at Antietam , the act of emancipation was declared in September 1862, which on January 1, 1863, declared all slaves under rebellious control to be free explained. The almost two-month warning period should give the rebel states an opportunity to return to the Union - and thus possibly to maintain their slavery. No rebel state accepted this offer.
In July 1862, Congress passed the Second Act of Confiscation, which stipulated that all slaves entering the Union ranks should be free forever. This law also authorized the President to draft blacks into the army.
Even during the war, the Lincoln government exerted gentle pressure on the border states that had remained loyal to voluntarily abolish slavery. After the war, the goals of the proclamation were implemented throughout the United States. On January 31, 1865 , the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution , which finally and officially abolished slavery. With the ratification by Georgia on December 6, 1865, the addition was finally final.
From a practical point of view, the act of emancipation had little effect, as the proclamation neither ended slavery nor freed "all" slaves. In and of itself one was no further than the situation after the second act of confiscation. But from 1863 onwards it changed the struggle to protect the Union and strengthened the movement against slavery. According to the proclamation, by the summer of 1864, 400,000 signatures had been collected calling for the complete abolition of slavery.
Purpose and context
The proclamation had three aims. On the one hand, it was considered a combat measure in the civil war . It was supposed to get the slaves to revolt and thereby destabilize the southern states economically. On the other hand, Lincoln wanted to increase his chances of re-election in the upcoming presidential election at the end of 1864 through a moral goal in the Civil War , which he succeeded: He received 55% of the vote and 211 out of 233 electors . No rebellions broke out in the Confederate-held areas; around half a million black slaves probably fled from the south to the north during the war (for comparison: 4.2 million citizens voted in the 1864 presidential elections). Only the slaves in the areas occupied by the Union armies were freed.
In the first half of 1862, the situation was aggravated by the fact that the south, whose slaves continued to maintain the productivity of the cotton industry, could send a larger number of white soldiers into battle.
Lincoln initially remained true to his conviction that the unification of the Union was his most important goal (even before the liberation of slaves).
Of greater importance was the effect of the proclamation on the people of the north and abroad. Because it gave the war aims of the north a moral legitimation that was valued higher in public than the struggle of the south for its individual state rights. In addition, the northerners did not share his fears that the “black man” could endanger the economic position of the “white man”. The governments of Great Britain and France , which for economic and political reasons leaned toward the cause of the South, would have opposed public opinion in their countries if they had intervened actively in the war on the side of the slave owners. The British government was then headed by Lord Palmerstone (Premier 1855-1858 and 1859-1865), who considered entry into the war on the side of the southern states quite conceivable . From November 1861, the Trent affair had strained relations with the United States. In France, Emperor Napoleon III ruled . who tried to establish a client state in America with the intervention in Mexico (1862–1867). This intervention was only possible because the United States was prevented by the civil war from giving military weight to the Monroe Doctrine , which was directed against the interference of European powers on the American continent.
literature
- Carin T. Ford: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation . Enslow Publ., Berkeley Heights, NJ 2004, ISBN 0-7660-2252-8 (English)
- David Armentrout, Patricia Armentrout: The Emancipation Proclamation . Rourke Press, Vero Beach, Fla. 2004, ISBN 1-59515-233-4 (engl.)
- Allen C. Guelzo: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The End of Slavery in America . Simon & Schuster, New York 2005, ISBN 0-7432-6297-2 (English)
- Karen Fisher Younger (Ed.): Lincoln's Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 2012, ISBN 978-0-8078-7220-8 .
Web links
- Emancipation Proclamation in HTML
- Abraham Lincoln Papers Emancipation Proclamation
- ourdocuments.gov Complete text and image
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States . Harper Perennial, New York 2005, pp. 192-194 ISBN 0-06-083865-5