How The 13th Amendment Helped Free Slaves

One might argue and say that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed the slaves. However, in my perspective, the 13th Amendment helped free slaves and the 14th and 15th Amendments made African Americans part of society. The Emancipation Proclamation was a speech delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 during the Civil War. As the Union and Confederacy was about to enter the third year of the war, the Union scored victory in the Battle of Antietam and Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Announced on September 22, 182 Lincoln declared that if the states rebelling did not join back by January 1, 1863 all slaves residing in those territories would become free. The confederates were furious and rejected the choice to
It was not until the 13th Amendment that all slaves would be free. The 13th Amendment was issued by President Lincoln and was ratified by Congress December 6, 1865, a couple months after the war ended. This amendment was passed during the Reconstruction Era in which it abolishes slavery, except if a they committed a crime, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”. This amendment is different from the Emancipation Proclamation as it essentially liberated every African American from slavery in the United States and not just in certain states. Southerns now reestablished back in the Union were enraged with abolishing slavery, aside from their economy depending on them to work in the fields they did not see African Americans as individuals. Southerners sought different ways in which they could still get cheap labor, which led to sharecropping. In this system, freedmen would be allowed to live on the planters land in exchange for a share of the crop they