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From: "Oakes, James" <JOakes@gc.cuny.edu>
I'm sympathetic to Mr. Bickers' general argument. But rather than see
the Emancipation Proclamation as a military order I prefer to think of
it as a legal document that reflected a significant shift in military
policy. By the time Lincoln issued the proclamation Congress had
already passed, and Lincoln had signed, a law prohibiting Union soldiers
from returning escaped slaves to their owners. The significance of the
proclamation, both militarily and politically, lies elsewhere.
The proclamation did three important things:
First, it made emancipation rather than confiscation the policy of the
federal government. To implement that policy the War Department swiftly
appointed a cadre of commanders charged with moving through the South to
emancipate slaves and gather them into the custody of the Union armies.
General Lorenzo Thomas was the most prominent of these officers. Their
efforts resulted directly, albeit over time, in the emancipation of tens
of thousands of slaves during the war. This is one of the reasons James
McPherson has said that the proclamation transformed the Union Army into
an army of liberation.
Second, once the Republicans accepted the constitutionality of requiring
a state (in the immediate case, West Virginia) to abolish slavery as a
condition for entering the Union, Lincoln used that precedent to require
Florida and more importantly Louisiana to endorse the terms of the
Emancipation Proclamation as a condition for re-admission to the Union.
In May 1865 Andrew Johnson, following Lincoln's precedent, similarly
required the defeated confederate states to endorse the proclamation as
a condition for readmission to the Union. This resulted in the largest
single wave of emancipations, in the summer of 1865. It was the second
and most important means by which the Emancipation proclamation was
implemented.
Finally--as the late John Hope Franklin demonstrated in his
underappreciated 1963 book on "The Emancipation Proclamation"--
Lincoln's order immediately led thousands of slaves to declare their
freedom on January 1, 1863, in complete disregard for the geographical
restrictions of the document. The Union did nothing to stop them.
Notwithstanding the oft-repeated claim that the Emancipation
Proclamation "did not free a single slave," the evidence suggests that
it immediately freed thousands of slaves, eventually hundreds of
thousands, and ultimately millions.
That said, the Emancipation Proclamation was only one part of a much
larger process of emancipation that began shortly after the Civil War
started and ended months after the war ended and the Thirteenth
Amendment was ratified. Lincoln was a critical part of that process,
but so were runaway slaves, abolitionists, northern churches, Republican
politicians, and of course, union soldiers.
James Oakes
Ph.D. Program in History
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Tel. (212) 817 8430
email: joakes@gc.cuny.edu
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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