Countdown to Jubilee

Abstract Antietam was the victory Lincoln had waited for, and on September 22, 1862, in keeping with the secret pledge he had made to his cabinet, he promulgated his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The document reiterated the standing offer to loyal slaveholders: if they undertook their own voluntary measures to gradually dismantle slavery, Lincoln would urge Congress to provide them with pecuniary compensation for their lost property and federal aid for colonization of the freedpeople. It reprised the major provisions of the Second Confiscation Act, underscoring that U.S. military forces would no more act as slave catchers: all slaves of rebels who came to Union lines or under Union occupation would be “deemed captives of war... forever free of their servitude and not again held as slaves.” But Lincoln’s edict also went beyond the earlier colonization proposals and Confiscation Acts.

Levied under his presidential war powers, the preliminary proclamation was a warning: as of January 1, 1863, Lincoln told disloyal Southerners, “all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Implicitly acknowledging both the self-emancipation of fugitive slaves and the army’s role as the beacon for flight, the proclamation promised that the federal government and military would “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons” and “not repress... any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”