An Emancipation, If You Can Enforce It
American Documents: The Emancipation Proclamation
2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. So far I have covered The Mayflower Compact, Patrick Henry’s Speech, The Lee Resolution, The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris, the Virginia Plan, The Northwest Ordinance, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Monroe Doctrine, the Indian Removal Act, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club rules. and Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ Speech.
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The public-school version of the Emancipation Proclamation is that Lincoln wrote it and freed the slaves during the Civil War, and we all lived happily ever after. Which is sort of fine as a starting point for first-graders but it’s nowhere near the whole story.
The National Archives link has the whole speech, as well as a pretty good foreword to explain the context of it. While the key line states that slaves in the Confederacy are “thenceforth and forever free,” that declaration only mattered insofar as the Union could enforce any law in the South.
Lincoln might as well have declared that they were all millionaires, or that Southern women were now all single; it didn’t matter to the immediate material condition of Southern slaves.
However.
To those who were able to cross territorial lines into the North, they were now guaranteed their freedom, and the rippling effect of this change would make controlling and subjugating Southern blacks a lot more difficult. There were legal and cultural reasons to do this, and they cannot be divorced from the tactical.
Personally I think this all coincided with Lincoln’s ongoing personal spiritual journey during the war. I read a book by a guy who laid out a case for this in 2020, but the book has since gone out of print and the author is…kind of a piece of crap, so I’ll probably restate that part of the argument here at a later time. Suffice it to say that Lincoln’s relationship with his faith changed dramatically during the war, and his attitude toward black Americans changed in conjunction therewith.
Yes Virginia: at the start of the war, Lincoln didn’t care about freeing the slaves. In fact he outright said he wasn’t going to. (Check the previous post from this week, it was one of the first points he addressed in his inaugural speech.) Turns out that a few hard years of war will change the way a man thinks—especially when that man is responsible to God for the ongoing existence of his country.
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