You are aware, aren't you, that the Emancipation Proclamation was nearly a year before the Gettysburg Address, aren't you?
Do you disagree that ending slavery was the right thing to do?
I am. I'm also aware that it was a war measure which didn't free any slaves.
Do you disagree that ending slavery was the right thing to do?
You didn't answer my question: Freedom for whom?
1) The proclamation presupposes that State secession was unconstitutional, and could be equated with “rebellion against the United States.” That question had not been settled at the time of the proclamation (and given the juvenile, revisionist substitute for actual reasoning and historical fact which the majority opinion in Texas v. White offered up, might be said to be unsettled to this day). Had secession been vindicated in federal court following the war, the proclamation would have, in effect, been null and void.
2) One might ask, by what authority Mr. Lincoln supposedly freed “some 4 million” slaves? The proclamation claims to free “slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion,” suggesting that such authority was somehow founded on martial law. Such authority may allow the military to seize property for government use during an emergency, but would hardly convey permanent ownership in any legal sense, particularly after the emergency had passed. To suggest otherwise would be to negate the 6th Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..”) as well as the 7th (“…nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”).
3) Even supposing that Mr. Lincoln’s military authority somehow extended to permanently seizing the property of citizens engaged in rebellion, it most certainly could not be similarly extended, following the cessation of the supposed rebellion, to citizens who had not rebelled. For such loyalists, I suspect it would have simply been a matter of bringing the issue before a federal judge, and establishing the facts, to regain possession of any property seized by the federal executive branch.
In summary, then, I suggest that Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation never had a hope or prayer of freeing every slave, “thenceforward, and forever,” even in the so-called rebel States.
Finally, someone here asked, “Do you disagree that ending slavery was the right thing to do?” One must first answer a more important question: “Shall government be bound by law, or by morality?” I would say “by law” – if you disagree, feel free to justify your position…
;>)