Title: Effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on African Americans
Headings: Effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on African Americans
Effect of the Emancipation Proclamation on African Americans
To what extent did the lives of African Americans change following the Emancipation Proclamation
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The meaning of Freedom:
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Content: from the first European settlement in North America in 1565, to the Seven Years’ war and to the American Revolutionary war in 1775. But few would rival the rippling effects the end of the Civil War inflicted on America. After years of agony, humiliation and psychological pain inflicted by the white Americans on the helpless African Americans who were made to be slaves, the centuries in which they had to endure this pain admirably, seemed to have finally ended towards the end of the Civil War. That is, Lincoln’s controversial decision to proceed with the Emancipation Proclamation [3], a document that stated that “all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, …. Shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.” [ 4] The initial impact that drew from this major turning point in the war was stark, not due to the change in the sanctity of life for African American slaves themselves, but on the outcome on the war. Upon this declaration, there was an increase in slaves escaping from their white owners in the South, enlisting and strengthening the Union army but at the same time, weakening the Confederacy, whose economy largely relied on the use of slaves but to also, dissuade potential European imperial powers from supporting the Confederacy. Whether or not it was Lincoln’s priorities to abolish slavery before the Civil war does not matter, but rather it was inevitable that there would be a transitioning period, a period now known as the Reconstruction era [5] (1863-1877) in modern times. The Emancipation Proclamation turned the war from a political war, where by Lincoln’s main priority was the preservation of the Union, to a moral war, inducing revised, existing perceptions and widely held beliefs from the white Americans, about whether their mistreatment of former African Americans were justifiable or not. As the war came to a definitive end, the introduction of the Emancipation Proclamation
breathed new life into the freedmen, who finally had this unveiling that left them in an open playing field.