From the National Archives: The Emancipation Proclamation
“President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared ‘that all persons held as slaves’ within the rebellious states ‘are, and henceforward shall be free.’
“Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.
“Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of Black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.”
From The American Presidency Project, Proclamation 10598—Juneteenth Day of Observance, 2023
“On June 19, 1865—months after the Civil War ended and more than 2 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved people—Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to free 250,000 people still held in bondage. The arrival of Major General Gordon Granger and his troops signaled that the Federal Government would not relent until the last enslaved people in America were free.”
Key Stats
Source: Commercial lithographer Henry S. Graham printed this choropleth map showing the distribution of the slave population in September 1861. The map shows in graphic terms the density of the slave population in the Southern states, based on figures from the 1860 census. Although the development of this map was a collaborative government effort, cartographers working for Edwin Hergesheimer, U.S. Coast Survey Drafting Division, created it.
Mapping Slavery in the Nineteenth Century
SOURCE: Bureau of the Census. For urban-rural figures for 1790-1940, sex and race figures for 1850-1940, and nativity figures for 1900-1940, see, Sixteenth Census Reports, Population, vol. II, part 1, pp. 18 and 19; for race figures for 1790-1840, sex figures for 1820-1840, and nativity figures for 1850-1890, see Fifteenth, Census Reports, Population, vol. II, p. 97; for slave figures for 1790-1860, see Ninth Census Reports, Population, p. 7. (See page 16, B 13-23.)
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1949/compendia/hist_stats_1789-1945/hist_stats_1789-1945.pdf
