African Americans and Emancipation

Historians increasingly understand emancipation was not a singular event that simply involved the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Instead, emancipation is better understood as a complex process that involved many actors, not the least of whom were the slaves themselves. Even before the start of the Civil War, the antebellum abolition movement had agitated for an end to slavery for thirty years and southern slaves had runaway and, occasionally, rebelled against slavery. During the war, black and white abolitionists, Radical Republicans in Congress, and the thousands of slaves who defected to the Union pressured the Lincoln administration to act on emancipation.More »