Some will say that prison work has its virtues. Perhaps, they speculate, prison work could help incarcerated people become active members of society after release. This conveniently ignores many truths. It ignores the fact that firefighters imprisoned in California cannot be employed as free persons as firefighters. It ignores the discriminatory nature of criminal background checks when recruiting. To paraphrase writer Mitchell S. Jackson in a February 2022 Esquire article – what kind of society that is not welcoming, what is the purported virtue of this work? There are certainly people who are incarcerated and want to do something while they are serving their sentence. At the very least, this work should be paid voluntarily and fairly. That on the first day of January, in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves in a State or a certain part of a State, whose people shall then rebel against the United States, shall henceforth and forever be free; and the executive government of the United States, including its military and naval authorities, shall recognize and respect the liberty of such persons and shall take no action or act to repress such persons or any of them in any effort they undertake for their effective liberty. Two years of struggle changed what war was. In 1863, the North was fighting not only to save the United States, but also to end slavery. Ending slavery was the only way to win the war and not have to fight again.
Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed only a small percentage of slaves, namely those who were behind Union lines in areas that were not exempt. Most slaves were still behind Confederate lines or in liberated territories occupied by the Union. Secretary of State William H. Seward commented, “We show our sympathy for slavery by freeing slaves where we cannot reach them and by enslaving them where we can free them.” If a slave state had ended its secession attempt before January 1, 1863, it could have retained slavery, at least temporarily. The proclamation freed slaves only in the southern regions that were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863. But as the Union army advanced south, the slaves fled behind its lines, and “after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Lincoln administration lifted the ban on attracting slaves to Union lines.” [69] These events contributed to the destruction of slavery. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, proclaiming the freedom of slaves in the ten states still in rebellion. [11] However, it did not affect the status of slaves in border states that had remained loyal to the Union. In December of that year, Lincoln again used his war powers and issued a “Proclamation for Amnesty and Reconstruction,” which offered Southern states the opportunity to peacefully join the Union if they abolished slavery and obtained the oaths of allegiance of 10% of their voting population.[12] [13] The southern states did not readily accept the treaty and the status of slavery remained uncertain. In his State of the Union message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln outlined a plan for the “gradual emancipation and deportation” of slaves. The plan included three constitutional amendments. The first would have required states to abolish slavery by January 1, 1900.
[14] As the big day approached, there was more singing than usual in the slave quarters. It was bolder and had more ringtones, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs referred to freedom. A man who appeared to be a foreigner (an American officer, I suppose) made a short speech, and then read a rather long document – the Emancipation Proclamation, I believe. After the reading, we were told that we were all free and that we could go whenever and wherever we wanted. My mother, who was standing next to me, leaned forward and kissed her children as tears of joy streamed down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that it was the day she had been praying for so long, but feared she would never live to see it. Black citizens of North and South, who saw the Thirteenth Amendment as a promise of freedom—the freedom to “come and go at will” and “buy and sell when they want”—would be left with a “mere paper guarantee” if Congress were powerless to ensure that a dollar in the hands of a black man buys the same as a dollar in the hands of a white man. At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to guarantee under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy everything a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least as much, then the Thirteenth Amendment has made a promise that the nation cannot keep. [163] Inspired by the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, between 1777 and 1804, every northern state provided for the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery.
Most of the slaves freed by this legislation were domestic servants. No Southern state did, and the enslaved population of the South continued to grow, peaking at nearly four million in 1861. An abolitionist movement, led by figures such as William Lloyd Garrison, grew stronger in the North, calling for an end to slavery nationwide and exacerbating North-South tensions. The American Colonization Society, an alliance between abolitionists who believed that races should be separated and slave owners who feared the presence of freed blacks, would encourage slave uprisings, call for the emigration of free blacks and slaves to Africa, where they would establish independent colonies. Their views were supported by politicians such as Henry Clay, who feared that the American abolitionist movement would provoke a civil war. [6] Proposals for the abolition of slavery through constitutional amendments were introduced by MP Arthur Livermore in 1818 and John Quincy Adams in 1839, but failed to materially succeed. On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, Lincoln convened his cabinet and issued the Provisional Emancipation Proclamation.[7] [64] According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson told Lincoln to cabinet members, “I made a solemn vow before God that if General Lee were driven out of Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by declaring freedom to the slaves.” [65] Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin,[67] an ardent abolitionist who was often kept in the dark about presidential decisions.
The final proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. Although Lincoln was implicitly authorized by Congress, he used his powers as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy to issue the proclamation “as a necessary act of war.” Therefore, it was not the equivalent of a law enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment, since Lincoln or a later president could remove it. A few days after the final proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Maj. Gen. John McClernand: “After the outbreak of hostilities, I struggled for nearly a year and a half to get by without touching the institution; and when at last I had conditionally decided to touch it, I made known to all the states and peoples for a hundred days my intention to put it aside altogether by simply becoming good citizens of the United States again. They decided to ignore it, and I made the convincing proclamation of what seemed to me to be a military necessity.