{"id":2,"date":"2011-06-03T12:19:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T12:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2013-02-20T14:07:20","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T14:07:20","slug":"sample-page","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/","title":{"rendered":"Emancipation 101"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/2012\/07\/14\/emancipation-proclamation\/\">Emancipation Proclamation<\/a> (January 1, 1863) was a pivotal document but really only one element in a dramatic and relentless struggle to abolish slavery.\u00a0 This classroom attempts to explain the <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/2011\/07\/09\/clickable-chronology-of-emancipation-1860-1865\/\">narrative of Civil War emancipation<\/a>\u00a0using insights from several sources, including James Oakes&#8217;s important new book,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/2012\/12\/20\/insights-from-james-oakess-book-freedom-national-2012\/\"><em>Freedom National\u00a0<\/em>(Norton, 2012)<\/a>.\u00a0 Wartime emancipation began in <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/2012\/07\/14\/contraband-of-war\/\">spring 1861<\/a> with runaway slaves\u00a0 &#8211;the so-called &#8220;contrabands&#8221;&#8211; and then escalated as Union generals and Republican politicians experimented with <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/2012\/07\/14\/congressional-confiscation-acts\/\">different types of &#8220;confiscation&#8221; policies<\/a> designed to free Confederate slaves.\u00a0 President Abraham Lincoln feared that confiscation was both <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/files\/2011\/06\/Pinsker-chapter-Summer-of-Emancipation-2007.pdf\">impractical and unconstitutional<\/a>\u00a0as a freedom strategy and so by autumn 1862 he moved to create an emancipation policy rooted in military necessity and derived from his <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-projects\/2010\/10\/24\/limits-of-presidential-war-powers-by-matthew-pinsker\/\" target=\"_blank\">inherent powers<\/a>\u00a0as Commander in Chief. Hundreds of thousands of slaves achieved freedom\u00a0under these policies and this classroom offers dozens of examples of <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/files\/2011\/06\/Emancipation-Moments1.pdf\">first-hand testimony<\/a>\u00a0from these historical figures. \u00a0Yet emancipating slaves was not the same as abolishing slavery.\u00a0 To really understand emancipation, you must also study abolition efforts in the District of Columbia (1862), Border States (1863-5) and through the fight in Congress for an anti-slavery Thirteenth Amendment, a story most recently brought to life by <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/spielberg\/\">Steven Spielberg&#8217;s \u00a0movie, &#8220;Lincoln&#8221; (2012)<\/a>.\u00a0 This commitment to constitutional abolition became a central\u00a0 issue in the 1864 election and proved to be a <a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/files\/2011\/06\/Pinsker-chapter-Blind-Memorandum-20120001.pdf\">defining moment<\/a>\u00a0for President Lincoln. \u00a0The president did not live to see the end of <a href=\"http:\/\/goo.gl\/maps\/HRFa\" target=\"_blank\">more than two centuries of legalized slavery<\/a>, but he surely would have agreed with John Greenleaf Whittier&#8217;s classic poem celebrating the amendment. \u00a0 &#8220;It is done,&#8221; wrote Whittier proudly in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/files\/2011\/06\/Whittiers-Laus-Deo-1865.pdf\">&#8220;Laus Deo&#8221;<\/a>. The title means simply, &#8220;Praise God.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) was a pivotal document but really only one element in a dramatic and relentless struggle to abolish slavery.\u00a0 This classroom attempts to explain the narrative of Civil War emancipation\u00a0using insights from several sources, including &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1299,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/emancipation\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}