Did Lincoln Really Free the Slaves?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has a history lesson for you:

the Emancipation Proclamation, despite its enormous symbolic significance, did not abolish the institution of slavery in the United States. Rather, it “freed” any slave in the Confederate states (that’s right—it did not apply to states in the Union in which slavery remained legal) who could manage to flee her or his plantation and make their way behind liberating Union lines.

Imagine that. The establishment's Louis Gates Jr. has a reminder for you.