Emancipation Proclamation issued

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in Washington, D.C., as Commander in Chief of the United States Army and Navy. The proclamation declared enslaved people in the rebelling Confederate states to be forever free, while exempting loyal border states and areas already under Union occupation. Lincoln had announced the policy after the Battle of Antietam in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, giving the Confederacy one hundred days to return to the Union before emancipation took effect.

The Emancipation Proclamation changed the Civil War from a war fought only for Union into a war openly linked to the destruction of slavery. Lincoln also used Proclamation 95 to authorize Black enlistment in the United States Army, making emancipation a military policy that directly strengthened Union manpower. The document also undercut Confederate hopes for British or French recognition, because any European government that aided Richmond after January 1863 would be seen as aiding slavery.

Black enlistment accelerated after January 1863, and nearly 180,000 African American soldiers eventually served in the United States Colored Troops. The Emancipation Proclamation also laid the political groundwork for the Thirteenth Amendment, which Congress passed in January 1865 and the states ratified in December 1865 to abolish slavery throughout the United States.