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The Impact Of The Emancipation Proclamation

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Although there were more than four million slaves living in the U.S. at this time, the Emancipation Proclamation did not formally free a single one of them. So that presents us with a couple of very interesting questions: first, why did Lincoln issue the proclamation if it had no practical effect? Second, why is the Emancipation Proclamation considered Lincoln's most important legacy if it didn't actually free anyone? Washington D.C., summer 1862. The Civil War had been going on for over a year, and it was not going well for Abraham Lincoln. 11 of the 15 southern states where slavery was legal had formed the Confederate States of America (CSA) and were waging a war to break free from the United States. Lincoln was determined that the nation was not going to fall apart on his watch. During the first year of the civil war, the Confederate Army had won the majority of important battles. When Lincoln became president, he had had no intention of abolishing slavery. Though he personally despised slavery and had won the presidency on an anti-slavery platform, he would gladly have given up any chance of ending slavery in the South if it meant that the Confederate states would rejoin the United States. With no hope of bringing the South back into the United States by protecting slavery, Lincoln had a new dilemma. His own political party, the Republicans, had formed around their opposition to slavery. Many of the more radical politicians in the party saw the secession of the South as the best opportunity to abolish slavery once and for all. As the US war dead piled up, more and more Northerners began to push Lincoln to punish the states that had seceded by making abolition a major goal of the war. The problem with abolishing slavery, however, was that there were still four slave states that had not seceded from the United States: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Lincoln feared that if he advocated emancipation he would provoke those states into joining the Confederacy, making the war even more difficult to win. Of the border states, Maryland was particularly worrisome, because the US capital at Washington D.C. sat on its border with Virginia. If Maryland decided to join the Confederacy, Washington D.C.

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