Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation, formally Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on 1 January 1863, during the American Civil War, using his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. It declared that all enslaved people held within the states then in rebellion against the United States "are, and henceforward shall be free," changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy. As Union troops advanced into Confederate territory, and as enslaved people reached Union lines, they gained their freedom in practice as well as in law, and the proclamation also allowed freed slaves to be received into the armed service of the United States, leading to roughly 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors serving the Union by the war's end. Though it did not immediately free slaves in the border states loyal to the Union or in areas already under Union control, the proclamation reframed the Civil War as a fight against slavery and was a decisive step toward the Thirteenth Amendment's abolition of slavery throughout the United States in 1865.