CNN: The Myth of The Emancipation Proclamation- Lincoln Freed The Slaves

CNN reports:

Myth 1: President Lincoln freed all slaves with the stroke of a pen.

It is an easy narrative, historians argue, that a single document granted freedom. But that’s not how it happened.

Look to the proclamation’s language: “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”

Freedom only applied to those slaves in states that had seceded. It did not apply to border states, or specific regions in Union control: about 750,000 slaves.

The 13th Amendment later abolished slavery.

Dishonest Abe was alright wish slavery as long as slave states stayed in the union.