The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln on August 8th, 1863. It is important to remember that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves from slavery. It ended all slavery throughout the United States. So what does that mean for the future of freedom? The main issue is that the Emancipation Proclamation was not written as a direct grant to freed slaves but as a blessing to those that had suffered and struggled for their rights.
A common myth is that the Emancipation Proclamation was written during the time of Abraham Lincoln’s first term as President of the United States. The falsehood of this is that the Proclamation was not written during the first term of Lincoln’s presidency. It actually came after his second term, when the Articles of Causes drafted by the Confederate States of America was published. Because of the bitterness felt by the American people over the Civil War, Lincoln was looking for a way to end the war quickly and with a minimum of casualties.
One myth surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation is that it was issued during the time of the so-called “ephemeral” presidential term. The Proclamation was actually issued on September 16th, eighteen hundred and sixty-one. Two days later, on September twenty-third, President Lincoln signed the emancipation policy into law. It was not called an ephemeral policy but rather a legal formal declaration.
Another common myth surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation is that it was issued in order to end the slave trade. This is also untrue. The Proclamation issued on September sixteen made it legally illegal for any American citizen to be held as a slave by an employer. It stated clearly that slaves who had been put to work in any of the American states before the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation would be free. Slaves who had worked on a tobacco plantation were not considered free on that plantation until after the Proclamation had gone into effect. Therefore, the Proclamation really did nothing to end the slave trade in the United States.
The main concern about the Emancipation Proclamation was its definition of the word “slavery”. It used the word “slavery” to describe what occurred between the slaves and their owners. The British Anti-Slavery Society and the Anti-Slavery Society of the United States viewed the Emancipation Proclamation as an improper and in violation of the United States Constitution. They were concerned that the proscription of slavery would allow slave trade between the British and the other countries. This would have had a significant negative impact on the British economy.
The British government, headed by Queen Victoria, considered the Emancipation Proclamation to be a direct violation of their own Declaration of Independence. The Bibles of 1776, which were written by John Milton, included a section that described the way in which the British had tried to get around the provisions of the Declaration of Independence through acts of terror. For this reason, many American citizens were afraid that the Emancipation Proclamation could be using to institute slavery once again. The British government, headed by King George III, brushed off any fears of this happening. They maintained that they had ended slavery permanently with the abolishment of slavery through the Dredictions Act of 17 abolishing slavery in England.
One common myth about the Emancipation Proclamation is that it was secretly implemented by the Union forces, in an effort to make the war with the US even more bitter. Actually, there were no underground railroad and no such plans were ever put into place. The myth stems from the fact that many Americans believed that the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves who had been forced into bondage by the proclamations of the British authorities. The Union forces, on the other hand, had made contact with the prisoners of the British Army camps during the course of the war, and those prisoners were also not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Moreover, General Winfield Scott, the commander of the American forces in the overseas territory, and the American soldiers, had met separately with the representatives of the Crown and told them about the freeing proclamations.
On 4 September, after the preliminary proclamation of the Emancipation Proclamation had been published, a ceremony was held to celebrate the start of the twelve-year freedom for all American slaves. This was on Fort Donelson in New Orleans. Some of the American slaves who were liberated on that day were given thirteen hundred dollars as a bonus. Several representatives of the African American communities in the US attended the ceremony. These people included representatives of St. Louis, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Cleveland.