They Walked to Freedom First

A child listens; a parent reads. This page answers the questions that come after the story. The script is available from the script button during playback.

What this is about

These are the words the story stops to explain. Slavery was a system that let one person buy and sell another person like a thing. A proclamation is what a leader writes down and hands to the people, saying what he is going to do. Congress is the group of people who make a country's laws. Border states were states that kept slaves and still did not leave the country. Joining the army means becoming a soldier. The Constitution is the biggest promise a country writes down, and an amendment writes a new line into it.

The subject is the preliminary proclamation of September 22, 1862, the final one of January 1, 1863, and the three years after. The story answers three questions — what happened · what it was like then · what it meant. The weight is on the third. A sheet of paper did not make people free. People were already walking out, and the paper met them there, made it law, and put the army on their side. This is neither "Lincoln freed the slaves" nor "the proclamation did nothing." What the evidence describes is an order of events.

What actually happened

• Four million people were held in bondage in 1860 (DOI: 10.1353/rah.2019.0082).
• On May 23, 1861, a month into the war, three men who had been put to work building a Confederate gun battery made their way to a Union fort in Virginia. An owner demanded them back under the Fugitive Slave Act (DOI: 10.1353/rah.2019.0082); the general refused and called them "contraband of war." Dozens, then hundreds, followed them in (DOI: 10.1093/oahmag/oas007).
• In 1862 Congress authorized federal forces to employ Black people as laborers. By the end of the war five hundred thousand to one million people had fled to Union lines, and two hundred to three hundred thousand of them worked for the army — more than twice the number of enslaved men who became soldiers. When Union soldiers reached the Alabama plantation where Ann Lewis was enslaved, she immediately hired herself out as a cook (same article).
• The September 22, 1862 preliminary proclamation warned that in a hundred days the enslaved people in rebel areas would be free, and committed the federal government and the army to "recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons" and not to "repress… any efforts they may make for their actual freedom" (DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190860608.003.0006).
• Word spread and people did not wait for January 1 (DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139061148.004). A Union general wrote in September 1862: "They will not even wait until 1st January" (DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1974.0006).
• On January 1, 1863, prayer meetings across the South and mass meetings across the North marked the day. A hall in Boston was packed, and at a building nearby there were three meetings — morning, afternoon, and evening — all of which filled the house (same book). Lincoln steadied his weary hand and signed. Praise arrived from abroad; a man in Italy wrote that Lincoln would pass down to posterity "under the name of the Emancipator" (DOI: 10.1057/9781137336484_2).

Questions a child may ask

"So did the proclamation free the slaves?" Where the government had power it freed no one, and where it had no power it freed everyone. It covered only areas in rebellion, and left the slave states still loyal to the Union — Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri — untouched (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.13.1.04). One documentary reader puts it more bluntly: neither proclamation actually freed a single enslaved person; it only promised that people who escaped would not be returned to their owners (DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139034784.025). The slaveholders of Kentucky understood the irony very well and held on to their slaves longer than their counterparts in rebel South Carolina (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.40.2.08).

"Then was the paper useless?" No. It did two things. First, it changed the army. By the final proclamation of 1863 the Union army had become the key force for carrying out emancipation — though one study argues the motive was not racial equality but a practical judgment about winning the war (DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469638867.001.0001). Second, the final proclamation carried a clause permitting Black men to enlist. Lincoln had opposed this through the first two years; the people who walked into the camps convinced him. About one hundred eighty thousand served by war's end, and Lincoln wrote that they were "prompted by the strongest motive" — freedom (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.46.1.03).

"Were the border state people still slaves, then?" Enlistment broke that wall. Black enlistment weakened slavery in the loyal border states as well; enlistees there gained their freedom, and eventually their enlistment guaranteed the liberty of their immediate families (DOI: 10.1017/cbo9780511625978.004). That last step came from a demand — men refused to go to war unless their families went free with them, and abolitionists in Congress said it was "a burning shame to this country" to hold the wives and children of men who are periling their lives. The measure took effect on March 4, 1865, and upwards of fifty thousand wives and children went free (DOI: 10.1086/ahr.115.3.732). In the spring of 1863 at Corinth, Mississippi, nearly twenty-four hundred Black men, women, and children marched and sang with banners, and a general told them the time had come for all of them, "men and women," to become citizens (DOI: 10.1353/cwe.2014.0041).

"So who ended slavery?" The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865 (DOI: 10.1353/rah.2019.0082). A proclamation was a wartime order from a president, and another president could rescind it once peace came. So Congress moved to change the Constitution itself, and Ashley, a congressman from Ohio, pushed the amendment through the House on January 31, 1865 (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.40.2.08). That article abolished slavery and involuntary servitude (DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaac049), and it is when the people held as slaves in Kentucky went free.

"Then why does everyone say Lincoln freed them?" Because the credit went to one man. The figure standing before Lincoln's tomb, dedicated in 1874, held a copy of the proclamation in its left hand, and eight of the eleven outdoor Lincoln statues put up before the century's end showed him with it (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.25.1.03). One reviewer writes that, far from being a great egalitarian, the "great emancipator" lagged behind the Republican Congress, African Americans, his own military officials, and even public opinion in taking action against slavery (DOI: 10.1353/khs.2023.a902573).

"How does this fit with the Gettysburg Address? What happened to Lincoln after?" The Gettysburg Address came in November of the same year, and the other episode in this album — "Those Words Arrived a Hundred Years Later" — follows it. Lincoln's assassination was in April 1865, before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. The course of the Civil War itself is not in this episode. The question of why the proclamation came when it did belongs to the adult episode "Why the Emancipation Proclamation Came When It Did."

What is evidence and what is interpretation

Well established — the dates and reach of both proclamations, the four border states, the enlistment clause, the House vote of January 31, 1865 and ratification on December 6, and a new class of citizens numbering well over three million (DOI: 10.1017/s0145553200017089).

Where scholars divide — who freed them. One book asks exactly this in its title and answers Congress. A piece written about that book sets out the split: one side keeps Lincoln at the center of the process; the other holds that the enslaved people themselves forced the men in power to act. The same piece carries this episode's central line — "freeing slaves was one thing; ending slavery was quite another matter" (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.40.2.08). One article notes that the proclamation opened a sanctioned path through military service for enslaved men, while the path it offered women came without even that veneer of protection (DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2146431).

Deliberately left out — scenes of violence, whipping, auctions, and family separation; battles; casualty counts. That people were bought and sold like property is said once, inside a definition.

Left out for lack of evidence — the story that on the night of December 31, 1862 Black communities gathered to wait for the news. There are zero supporting passages in the forty-paper shortlist, so it appears nowhere; only the meetings of January 1 are used. The names of the three men who went to the fort are not in the evidence either.

Things to try together

• Work out which came first — May 23, 1861 (three men reach the fort) and September 22, 1862 (the preliminary proclamation).
• Find Kentucky and South Carolina on a map. The place the proclamation freed and the place that took longest are not the same place.