The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation played a significant part in the end of slavery in the United States.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks, such as the Give Me Liberty series for high school classrooms. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner is the first to associate the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln frequently expressed his moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, even though concentrated in only the Southern United States, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. Olaudah Equiano was an African man who wrote The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography published in 1789 that became one of the first influential works about the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved Africans. His work was published sixteen years after Phillis Wheatley's work. She was an enslaved African woman who became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, which was published in 1773. Her collection, was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
George Moses Horton, was an African-American poet from North Carolina who was enslaved until Union troops, carrying the Emancipation Proclamation, reached North Carolina (1865). Horton is the first African-American author to be published in the United States. He is author of the first book of literature published in North Carolina and was known as the "Slave Poet".
Steven Howard Hahn is Professor of History at New York University.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and former president of Organization of American Historians.
The New York Manumission Society was founded in 1785. The term "manumission" is from the Latin meaning "a hand lets go," inferring the idea of freeing a slave. John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States as well as statesman Alexander Hamilton and the lexicographer Noah Webster, along with many slave holders among its founders. Its mandate was to promote gradual emancipation and to advocate for those already emancipated. New York ended slavery in 1827. The Society was disbanded in 1849, after its mandate was perceived to have been fulfilled. the society battled against the slave trade, and for the eventual emancipation of all the slaves in the state. In 1787, they founded the African Free School to teach children of slaves and free people of color, preparing them for life as free citizens. The school produced leaders from within New York's Black community.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
The trafficking of enslaved Africans to what became New York began as part of the Dutch slave trade. The Dutch West India Company trafficked eleven enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam in 1626, with the first slave auction held in New Amsterdam in 1655. With the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies, more than 42% of New York City households enslaved African people by 1703, often as domestic servants and laborers. Others worked as artisans or in shipping and various trades in the city. Enslaved Africans were also used in farming on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, as well as the Mohawk Valley region.
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
Lunsford Lane was an entrepreneur tobacconist from North Carolina who bought freedom for himself and his family. He became a vocal abolitionist and wrote a slave narrative autobiography. His life and narrative shows the plight of slavery, even for the relatively privileged slaves.
Philip D. Morgan is a British historian. He has specialized in Early Modern colonial British America and slavery in the Americas. In 1999, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).
Peter Robert Kolchin is an American historian. He has specialized in slavery and labor in the American South before and after the Civil War, and in comparisons with Russian serfdom and other forms of labor. He won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Avery O. Craven Award for his book Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987).
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery is a historical non-fiction book written by American historian Eric Foner. Published in 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company, the book serves as a biographical portrait of United States President Abraham Lincoln, discussing the evolution of his stance on slavery in the United States over the course of his life. The Fiery Trial, which derives its title from Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress of December 1, 1862, was the 22nd book written by Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. It was praised by critics and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Joseph Patrick Reidy is an historian of the American Civil War. He is a professor emeritus and retired associate provost at Howard University.
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie is a British historian and professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
