TragicMonkey said:
And a hypocritical one, at that. Lincoln freed the slaves only in territories he did not have control over--the South. Any slaves in current Union territory (and yes, there were some) were specifically excluded. I think the old saw about it is "where he could, he did not, and where he did, he could not."
And it's a bad old saw.
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You have to understand Lincoln's paradigm for what the war was. It was not a "war between the states" and it was not a war of secession. On the latter point, Lincoln considered secession to be a
legal nullity; it literally could not, and did not exist.
Okay, the validity of that last point is something historians and constitutional scholars have been arguing about for 143 years. but the important point is that Lincoln maintained that the Confederacy was an illegitimate highjacking of the legal government of the southern states. Those states were in rebellion against the legal government, but, Lincoln maintained, that did not mean the laws of the United States no longer applied to South Carolina. You might make an analogy with a riot in your city. The mob overpowers the police force, and attacks city hall and tars and feathers the mayor and city council and rides them out of town on a rail.
Nobody would seriously claim that the mob was now the legitimate authority, and that the laws no longer applied.
That was Lincoln's point regarding slavery. As far as Lincoln was concerned, the Constitution remained the law of the land, even in the states that had "seceded", and the fact that the U.S. government was temporarily unable to enforce the law changed none of that. And, unfortunately, at that time,
slavery was still protected by the Constitution.
Lincoln did not free the slaves in Union-held territory because the Constitution gave him no power to do so. He freed the slaves in the territories not held by the Union as a measure to pursue the war (don't ask me the legal reasoning behind this, because I'm not clear on it; if Hutch is around, he may be able to add to my understanding). No, he did not free any slaves where the Constitution was being enforced, but he freed them where he hoped and expected it might soon be enforced. Remember, on January 1, 1863, the Confederacy was largely intact; Grant was making inroads in the west, and there was a blockade of southern ports, but Union troops had just suffered a disasterous defeat at Fredericksburg and was soon to suffer another at Chancellorsville. What the Emancipation Proclamation was saying was that slaves in the areas of rebellion would be freed regardless of the Constitution, once order was restored.
And they were, in enormous numbers. As Union troops reestablished control throughout the south, slaves left their plantations by the hundreds of thousands, in such huge numbers that Sherman found them to be a nuisance on his march through Georgia.
The Emancipation Proclamation served another important purpose: It put the Union on the moral high ground on the issue of slavery, and virtually ended the possibility of England and France interceding in the war.
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