The process by which enslaved Americans won freedom during the Civil War, from wartime escapes and the Emancipation Proclamation to the Thirteenth Amendment.
Emancipation in the United States was not a single act but a process that unfolded across the Civil War, and enslaved people set it in motion. On 23 May 1861 Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend fled to Fort Monroe, Virginia. General Benjamin Butler refused to return them, declaring them “contraband of war,” and within days hundreds more sought refuge under the fort’s guns. Congress soon passed the First Confiscation Act, allowing Union forces to seize enslaved people used in the rebellion. In 1862 Robert Smalls freed himself and his family by seizing the Confederate steamer Planter.
After the Union victory at Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation on 22 September 1862 and the final Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. It declared enslaved people in areas still in rebellion “henceforward shall be free,” but it did not apply to the loyal border states or to Confederate territory already under Union control, and its promise depended on Union armies. It also opened the Army and Navy to Black men; nearly 200,000 served by the war’s end. In June 1863 Harriet Tubman helped plan and lead a raid along South Carolina’s Combahee River that freed more than 750 people.
Because the proclamation was a war measure, a constitutional amendment was needed to end slavery everywhere. The Senate approved the Thirteenth Amendment in April 1864; the House passed it 119 to 56 on 31 January 1865; and it was ratified on 6 December 1865. It abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” an exception Southern states soon exploited through convict leasing.
Freedom arrived unevenly. In Texas it was announced by General Order No. 3 on 19 June 1865, the origin of Juneteenth. What freedom would mean in practice, from land and wages to schooling and the vote, became the central question of Reconstruction.
See also: Juneteenth, Freedmen’s Bureau, Forty Acres and a Mule, Reconstruction, Underground Railroad
Sources
- National Archives, “Emancipation Proclamation (1863).” Link
- National Archives, “13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865).” Link
- National Park Service, “Fort Monroe and the ‘Contrabands of War.’” Link
- National Park Service, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, “Harriet Tubman.” Link
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