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Photo Credit: Creative Commons license/ Flickr |
The
film Lincoln ends after the Amendment that ended slavery throughout the
nation passed. But for blacks, earning the rights of citizenship was to
prove a much more protracted war.
December 10, 2012
Lincoln is a magnificent movie. But as I left the theatre, to echo
Paul Harvey, the late radio commentator, I wanted to know “the rest of
the story.”
The movie begins in January 1865, exactly 2 years after Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves of the
Confederate States “thenceforward and forever free. ”
As Lincoln himself told Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles issuing
the Proclamation was a “military necessity. We must free the slaves or
be ourselves subdued.” Indeed, Lincoln wanted to issue the Proclamation
in July 1862 but Secretary of State William Seward cautioned that the
series of military defeats suffered by the Union army that year would
lead many to view such a move simply as an act of desperation. The
victory at Antietam in September gave Lincoln the opportunity he needed.
The Emancipation Proclamation helped the Union immeasurably. It
converted a war to preserve the union into a war of liberation, a change
that gained widespread support in key European nations. And by
rescinding a 1792 ban on blacks serving in the armed forces, the
Proclamation solved the increasingly pressing personnel needs of the
Union Army in the face of a declining number of white volunteers. During
the war nearly 200,000 blacks, most of them ex-slaves joined the Union
Army, giving the North additional manpower needed to win the war. As
historian James M. McPherson writes, “The proclamation officially turned
the Union army into an army of liberation…And by authorizing the
enlistment of freed slaves into the army, the final proclamation went a
long step toward creating that army of liberation.”
Abolitionists viewed arming ex-slaves as a major step toward toward
giving them equality. Frederick Douglass urged blacks to join the army
for this reason. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass
letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his
shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can
deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
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