On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet in Washington and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, five days after the Battle of Antietam. The proclamation declared that enslaved people in states or parts of states still in rebellion against the United States on January 1, 1863, would be declared free. The announcement did not immediately abolish slavery nationwide but transformed the Civil War into an explicit struggle against slavery and linked Union victory to emancipation. The measure created a pathway for the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union armed forces and increased the conflict’s international significance. At midcentury roughly four million enslaved people lived in the United States, concentrated in Southern states where slavery underpinned the agricultural and political order. The preliminary proclamation strengthened the federal commitment to ending slavery and helped set the United States on the path toward the constitutional abolition of slavery in 1865.
