The Emancipation Proclamation

     Unfortunately, all that was done to aid the slaves in their fight for freedom was a document that held no more authority over the Confederacy than Britain currently held over its American colonies.  The document gave hope to slaves in the Confederacy, that if the North could win the war then they would be set free.  The events that followed however, told a different story. 

     The Emancipation Proclamation allowed slaves to run into the safety of the North, and join the Union Army and free their fellow slave brethren.  And that is exactly what many slaves did.  Only places where the union still had authority were slaves actually freed, and of the places that were not, slaves were freed after the Union Army marched through the town they were residing in and took control and enforced the Proclamation.  Slaves could then run north into the free Union, cementing their freedom, as even if the town they were in lost its Union influence, they were already long gone into a free state. 

     It was not Lincoln that gave the slaves freedom, but rather the army he commanded and the will of the slaves themselves to run away and become freed men.  If the slaves did not have the drive and determination that they did to throw off the literal and figurative shackles that bound them to the ignorant slave holding south, then they would never have escaped from that oppression and cotton would still be harvested by slaving black men.  With revolutionary figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Harriett Tubman (Harriett Tubman), and Frederick Douglas (Frederick Douglas) to lead and promote abolition the fate of many black Americans was decided in favor of freedom. 

     The slaves had amazing resilience and fortitude to endure until the right moment to join the Union.  Self-educated slaves taught other slaves, and they formed songs that would guide them through the Underground Railroad by the stars at night.  Lincoln’s Proclamation had little to do with them gaining their freedom, and more to do with winning the war, as he said himself. 

     Three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, all the slaves were considered free. That statement alone should be enough to prove that it was not Lincoln who freed the slaves, because the document he is so famous for signing in an act of abolishment did not, in fact, do much abolishing.  If it took three years for the slaves to gain their freedom then it obviously was not because of this document but rather of the efforts of men and women all over the country who pushed for abolition in their own states, and the slaves themselves who gained freedom under their own steam.  Rather the Emancipation Proclamation was a jumping off point for abolitionists and slaves to rally together in a tornado of reform and tolerance and escape from the plantations and white slave owners who were holding them back and denying them their unalienable right of freedom.  Lincoln’s stance on slavery and abolition is historically unknown, but whether or not he freed the slaves in America is a solid fact.  Lincoln freed the slaves no more than any other abolitionist of his time did; his work was but a tile in the mosaic of abolition.

Works Cited

“Emancipation Proclamation.” Wikipedia.org. Web. 17 November 2009.

“Frederick Douglas.” Wikipedia.org. Web. 17 November 2009.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Wikipedia.org. Web. 17 November 2009.

“Harriet Tubman.” Wikipedia.org. Web. 17 November 2009.

Owens, Mackubin. “Abraham Lincoln Saved the Union, But Did He Really Free the Slaves?”

     Ashbrook Center. Web. 17 November 2009.