Did Lincoln REALLY Free The Slaves? - Excerpt

Ebony, Feb, 2000 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

If African-Americans had relied on that document alone, they would still be in slavery in several states and areas. The Proclamation didn't apply to the Border States and Tennessee, and it excepted, as we have seen, certain slaves, a lot of slaves, in other states. If we were relying on the Emancipation Proclamation today, then, Blacks would still be in slavery in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, part of Virginia and part of Louisiana. What about the slaves in other areas? Would they be free? Probably not, for the Proclamation, as Lincoln pointed out to anybody who would listen, was a war document of limited legality and scope, and its writ would probably have ended, as Lincoln said, with the end of the war. Worse, there were so many legal loopholes in the document itself that, standing alone, it would have triggered at least a century of litigation.

If further evidence is required to show that Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free Blacks, and that Lincoln knew it didn't free Blacks, it can be found in the numbers.

On January 1,1863, there were some four million slaves in America. A contemporary source, Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia, said in 1863 that the Proclamation "did not appear to make free any slave by its own operation during the year."

On January 2, 1863, therefore, and January 2, 1864, and on the day after that and the day after that, there were approximately four million slaves in America.

On this point, we can call Lincoln and his secretary of state to witness against the mythmakers. Two months before the end of the war, on February 3, 1865, Lincoln and Seward said that "only about two hundred thousand slaves had come under the actual operation of the Proclamation, and who were then in the enjoyment of their freedom under it ..." (italics added). What they meant of course was that some two hundred thousand slaves had freed themselves or had been freed by the Union Army, which meant, among other things, that almost all of the two hundred thousand, assuming the truth of the figures, would have been freed under the confiscation acts, and that most of them would have been freed sooner if Lincoln had enforced those acts.

Whatever the accuracy of these figures, the fact that Lincoln said that 95 percent of the slaves--at least 3, 800,000 by their figures--were still in slavery in February 1865, two months before the end of the war, destroys the foundation of the great emancipator myth and proves the thesis of this chapter.

There is finally and conclusively the testimony of Abraham Lincoln. What did he think he was doing when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation? He thought, if we can judge by what he said two months before his death, that he was only freeing slaves who freed themselves by escaping or by "coming under the operation of the Proclamation." He didn't even believe, according to the proof of his own words, that he was freeing the overwhelming majority in the slave states. It was his personal belief, he said, that the courts would hold that the Emancipation Proclamation was a war decree that would be "inoperative" after the war ended and that the status of the overwhelming majority of slaves would be up to the courts to decide.