please help me i have to do a presentation about this in my us history class!!!How did the Emancipation of Proclamation change life for people in the south?
Up to the Emancipation Proclamation (EP), the aims of the Union under Lincoln had been restoration of the Union - to bring the Southern state back into the Union even if slavery were left intact.
With the EP, the North objectives included the freeing of the slaves. The South now knew - there was no compromise with the North. The South would have to fight to the end to maintain slavery (and their entire economic system). Slavery would either live or die with the outcome of the war.
This from Wiki:
%26quot;Slaves had been part of the %26quot;engine of war%26quot; for the Confederacy. They produced and prepared food; sewed uniforms; repaired railways; worked on farms and in factories, shipping yards, and mines; built fortifications; and served as hospital workers and common laborers. News of the Proclamation spread rapidly by word of mouth, arousing hopes of freedom, creating general confusion, and encouraging thousands to escape to Union lines.%26quot;How did the Emancipation of Proclamation change life for people in the south?
~The Emancipation Proclamation was not intended to abolish slavery. It never mentions the word %26quot;abolition%26quot; and it expressly kept slavery intact in those places where it existed, including sections of Louisiana, Virginia and all of, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware and Maryland. I won't go off on my usual rant about how it was illegal and constitutional, but if you read Article I, section 2 and Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution and Amendments IV, V, IX and X, you should be able to figure it out. I also commend you attention to the First and Second Confiscation Acts so you can see for yourself that Lincoln purported to do in EP what Congress had already purported to do earlier (equally illegally and unconstitutionally).
EP was not a doctrine of humanitarianism or human rights. It was a tool of war. Support for the war was waning in the North and EP opened a whole new source of recruits and conscripts. Lincoln hoped EP would engender slave revolts in the CSA and that it would cause large scale desertions from the CSA army since he hoped and believed that troops would abandon their units to rush home to protect their property and families from the prospect of rampaging hordes of revolting slaves. Since any slave owner was allowed to keep his slaves by simply renouncing the CSA and swearing allegiance to the USA, Lincoln hoped to dilute CSA manpower and finances when large numbers of slaveholders turned their backs on the Southern cause in order to hang onto their human chattel. Enlisting the support of European nations or at least keeping them from allying with the CSA was an afterthought, if a consideration at all.
One of the most important reasons for EP was to clear up confusion in the field and to help Union commanders violate the law, their oaths of office and the Constitution. Everyone knew the Constitution required that escaped slaves be returned to their masters (Article IV, section 2 - that was the basic law of the land, with or without the Fugitive Slave Law, the FSL simply being legislation that emphasized and put enforcement teeth into the constitutional mandate).
Generals in the field did not know what to do with 'liberated' or escaped slaves. They weren't about to return them to their owners, since the southern economy and southern fortunes were based on the output of and ownership of the slaves. Were the slaves spoils of war? Did they have to be freed? What was to be done with them if the Constitution was ignored and they were not returned to their owners? At least two Union commanders had issued orders creating their own 'emancipation proclamations' long before Antietam, but Lincoln made them rescind those orders under threat of removal from command and/or court martial. EP resolved the issue.
One direct impact on southern life is that EP increased the southern resolve to fight. Another was that as areas of the south were conquered and the slaves were freed, the economies in the conquered areas collapsed, just as Lincoln intended. Another change was that the CSA enlisted slaves into CSA units - an idea that had been contemplated as early as 1861 but had been met with much resistance. Tens of thousands of freed slaves were allowed to, and did, take up arms against the Union Army as a consequence of EP.
The consequences of EP were the harbingers of the total collapse of the southern society, economy and way of life that would result from the appointment of carpetbagger governments and the abolition of slavery by Amendment XIII after the war.
A much more interesting presentation for you to do would be to explain why the Proclamation was illegal and unconstitutional, but you'll have to be ready to support it. Lincoln claimed he had the right to do it as Commander-in-Chief as an act of war in spite of all his earlier acknowledgments that he lacked the authority (see his First Inaugural Address, for instance) as President and Chief Executive. Saying it while wearing a different hat didn't make it so and in doing it, he violated Amendments IV, V, IX and X as well as Article IV, section 2 and his oath of office to %26quot;preserve, protect and defend the Constitution%26quot; (oops, going off on that rant after all - sorry).
In any event, if the CSA states could lawfully secede (and given the history of the Philadelphia (Constitutional) Convention as well as the threatened secession of the New England States in 1803 and again in 1812/14, I submit it is constitutionally clear that they could) then the CSA was an independent nation and no edict from Washington applied to them. If they could not secede legally, then there was no way Lincoln could reconcile EP with the numerous constitutional provisions with which it was so clearly in conflict. Regardless of the legitimacy of secession, the EP had no effect whatsoever unless and until federal troops conquered those areas as identified in the proclamation to which it specifically applied, and it had no effect whatsoever at any time on those areas not identified by the document. One effect, direct or otherwise, was the illegal and unconstitutional admission of West Virginia into the union in 1863. W Va was admitted as a slave state.
