Many Americans think that slavery ended in the United States when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, a document which declared that “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
But in reality, the path to realizing freedom was much more complicated.
Fearing the loss of Americans who remained loyal to the Union, Lincoln’s Proclamation did not emancipate enslaved people in certain parishes in Louisiana as well as the states of Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia, though each of those states abolished slavery before the war’s end.
In fact, news of the proclamation did not reach all enslaved people at the same time, with some African Americans first hearing about emancipation months after the war ended in April 1865.
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