The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States president Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation changed the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation played a significant part in the end of slavery in the United States.
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (Proclamation 93). Its third paragraph begins:
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Final Emancipation Proclamation. It stated:
Lincoln then listed the ten states — of the eleven that had seceded — still in rebellion, Tennessee then being under Union control, and continued:
The Proclamation applied to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country, though it excluded states not in rebellion, as well as parts of Virginia under Union control and Louisiana parishes thought to be pro-Union. Around 25,000 to 75,000 were immediately emancipated in those regions of the Confederacy where the US Army was already in place. It could not be enforced in the areas still in rebellion, but, as the Union army took control of Confederate regions, the Proclamation provided the legal framework for the liberation of more than three and a half million enslaved people in those regions by the end of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation outraged white Southerners and their sympathizers, who saw it as the beginning of a race war. It energized abolitionists, and undermined those Europeans who wanted to intervene to help the Confederacy.Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, vol. 6: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863 (1960) pp. 231–241, 273 The Proclamation lifted the spirits of African Americans, both free and enslaved. It encouraged many to escape from slavery and flee toward Union lines, where many joined the Union Army. The Emancipation Proclamation became a historic document because it "would redefine the Civil War, turning it from a struggle to preserve the Union to one focused on ending slavery, and set a decisive course for how the nation would be reshaped after that historic conflict."
The Emancipation Proclamation was never challenged in court. To ensure the abolition of slavery in all of the U.S., Lincoln also mandated that Reconstruction plans for Southern states require them to enact laws abolishing slavery (which occurred during the war in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana); Lincoln encouraged border states to adopt abolition (which occurred during the war in Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia) and pushed for passage of the 13th Amendment. The Senate passed the 13th Amendment by the necessary two-thirds vote on April 8, 1864; the House of Representatives did the same on January 31, 1865; and the required ratification by three-fourths of the states was completed on December 6, 1865. The amendment made slavery and involuntary servitude unconstitutional, "except as a punishment for crime".
Authority
The United States Constitution of 1787 did not use the word "slavery" but included several provisions about unfree persons. The Three-Fifths Compromise (in Article I, Section 2) allocated congressional representation, and therefore the number of each states' votes in the Electoral College, based "on the whole Number of free Persons" and "three-fifths of all other Persons". Under the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2), "No person held to Service or Labour in one State" would become legally free by escaping to another. Article I, Section 9 allowed Congress to pass legislation to outlaw the "Importation of Persons", but not until 1808. In addition, for purposes of the Fifth Amendment—which states, "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"—slaves were understood to be property. Although abolitionists used the Fifth Amendment to argue against slavery, it was made part of the legal basis for treating slaves as property by Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).Tsesis, The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom: A Legal History (2004), p. 14. "Nineteenth century apologists for the expansion of slavery developed a political philosophy that placed property at the pinnacle of personal interests and regarded its protection to be the government's chief purpose. The Fifth Amendment's Just Compensation Clause provided the proslavery camp with a bastion for fortifying the peculiar institution against congressional restrictions to its spread westward. Based on this property-rights-centered argument, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in his infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, found the Missouri Compromise unconstitutionally violated substantive due process". Slavery was also supported in law and in practice by a pervasive culture of white supremacy.Tsesis, The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom (2004), pp. 18–23. "Constitutional protections of slavery coexisted with an entire culture of oppression. The peculiar institution reached many private aspects of human life, for both whites and blacks.... Even free Southern blacks lived in a world so legally constricted by racial domination that it offered only a deceptive shadow of freedom." Nonetheless, between 1777 and 1804, every Northern state provided for the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery. No Southern state did so, and the slave population of the South continued to grow, peaking at almost four million people at the beginning of the Civil War, when most slave states sought to break away from the United States.
Lincoln accepted the conventional interpretation of the Constitution before 1865 as not allowing the federal government in peacetime to end slavery in the states where it existed, as opposed to in U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. During the Civil War, however, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation under his authority as "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution.Crowther, p. 651 As such, in the Emancipation Proclamation he claimed to have the authority to free persons held as slaves in those states that were in rebellion "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion". In the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said "attention is hereby called" to two 1862 statutes, namely "An Act to Make an Additional Article of War" and the Confiscation Act of 1862, but he didn't mention any statute in the Final Emancipation Proclamation and, in any event, the source of his authority to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the Final Emancipation Proclamation was his "joint capacity as President and Commander-in-Chief".Fabrikant, Robert, "Emancipation and the Proclamation: Of Contrabands, Congress, and Lincoln". Howard Law Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 (2006), p. 369. Lincoln therefore did not have such authority over the four border slave-holding states that were not in rebellion—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware—so those states were not named in the Proclamation. The fifth border jurisdiction, West Virginia, where slavery remained legal but was being abolished, was, in January 1863, still part of the legally recognized "reorganized" state of Virginia, based in Alexandria, which was in the Union (as opposed to the Confederate state of Virginia, based in Richmond).
Coverage
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only in the ten states that were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, namely South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina. The Proclamation did not cover the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slaveholding border states of Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. Also not named was the state of Tennessee, in which a Union-controlled military government had already been set up, based in the capital, Nashville. Specific exemptions were stated for other areas under Union control on January 1, 1863, namely 48 counties that would soon become West Virginia, seven other named counties of Virginia including Berkeley county, which was soon added to West Virginia, New Orleans and 13 named parishes nearby.
Exemptions were also made for certain areas that were deemed no longer in rebellion and areas Lincoln considered loyal to the Union. Enslaved people in those areas would be freed by later state and federal actions. The areas covered were, as the Proclamation stated, "Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth)."
Also, six additional counties and two independent cities were exempted in the Union-controlled Tidewater region of Virginia. And, in Louisiana, the city of New Orleans and the 13 named parishes were exempted because Lincoln regarded them as loyal to the Union. These exemptions left unemancipated an additional 300,000 slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation resulted in the emancipation of a substantial percentage of the slaves in the Confederate states as the Union armies advanced through the South and slaves escaped to Union lines, or slave owners fled, leaving slaves behind. The Emancipation Proclamation "deserves much of the credit for the Union Army's ultimate successes in 1863-1864.... Slave escapes crippled the southern economy, and slave enlistments bolstered the northern military".Amar, Akhil Reed (2025). Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920. New York: Basic Books, p. 463.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation resulted in the gradual freeing of most slaves, it did not make slavery illegal. Of the states that were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia prohibited slavery before the war ended. In 1863, President Lincoln proposed a moderate plan for the Reconstruction of the captured Confederate State of Louisiana.Stauffer (2008), Giants, p. 279 Only 10 percent of the state's electorate had to take the loyalty oath. The state was also required to accept the Emancipation Proclamation and abolish slavery in its new constitution. By December 1864, the Lincoln plan abolishing slavery had been enacted not only in Louisiana, but also in Arkansas and Tennessee.Peterson (1995), Lincoln in American Memory, pp. 38–41McCarthy (1901), Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction, p. 76 In Kentucky, Union Army commanders relied on the Proclamation's offer of freedom to slaves who enrolled in the Army and provided freedom for an enrollee's entire family; for this and other reasons, the number of slaves in the state fell by more than 70 percent during the war. However, in Delaware and Kentucky, In 1866, Kentucky refused to ratify the 13th Amendment, but it ratified it in 1976. slavery continued to be legal until December 18, 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment took effect.
Background Military action prior to emancipation