From Emancipation to Abolition: Two Historic Documents at the Lincoln Memorial
Documents photographed during a June 28 visit connect Lincoln’s wartime strategy with the pursuit of freedom, state-level abolition and the constitutional changes that followed.Part 4 of Whittier 360’s Lincoln Memorial series.
WASHINGTON — Beneath the Lincoln Memorial, two framed documents added another dimension to my June 28, 2026, visit.
One contained a lengthy presidential proclamation. The other displayed a much shorter constitutional proposal above rows of signatures. They were historic signed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, exhibited through a loan from Kenneth C. Griffin’s collection.
I had come to Washington to cover the Great American State Fair for Whittier 360 News Network. While waiting for my media credentials, I used the opportunity to cross the Lincoln Memorial off my bucket list. After the rainy approach, the statue and the inscribed speeches upstairs, the documents downstairs provided a reason to examine a familiar historical summary more closely.
The progression from emancipation to abolition was not accomplished through one order, one government or one date. The two documents represented different sources of authority and different stages in the destruction of slavery: a geographically limited wartime proclamation and a nationwide constitutional prohibition.
Historic copies, not modern reproductions
The word “copy” needs clarification.
The National Park Foundation identified the displayed documents as historic signed copies, not modern reproductions. The proclamation was printed for Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair in 1864, giving that particular artifact a history separate from the presidential order issued the previous year.
The original five-page Emancipation Proclamation is held by the National Archives. A visitor could therefore encounter an authentic nineteenth-century signed copy at the memorial without seeing the same physical document preserved in the federal government’s official records.
My photographs record the displays as they appeared during the visit. Understanding their significance requires looking beyond the glass to the words, dates and legal processes they represent.
Emancipation to save the Union
Lincoln’s initial declared objective was preserving the Union, not immediately abolishing slavery throughout the United States.
In his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, he rejected unilateral secession while stating that he did not intend to interfere with slavery in states where it existed and did not believe he possessed the lawful authority to do so.
His administration’s policy changed during the war. Lincoln announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, followed by the final proclamation on January 1, 1863. Emancipation became part of the Union’s military strategy well before his second inauguration in March 1865.
Lincoln explained that connection directly in his August 26, 1863, letter to James C. Conkling:
“I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.”
The argument was practical. Removing enslaved labor from Confederate control weakened the enemy, while recruiting Black servicemen strengthened United States forces. Lincoln also insisted that the freedom promised to those risking their lives for the Union had to be honored. Military necessity and an obligation to maintain freedom appeared in the same explanation.
In his April 4, 1864, letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln distinguished his personal opposition to slavery from his understanding of presidential authority. He described initially restraining military emancipation, urging compensated emancipation upon the border states, and eventually concluding that emancipation and Black participation had become necessary to preserve the nation.
Emancipation to save the Union was therefore more than a later interpretation of Lincoln’s actions. It was part of his own stated reasoning. But once freedom was promised, his commitment was not to treat it as something that could simply be withdrawn when convenient.
What the proclamation did—and did not do
The final proclamation invoked Lincoln’s authority as commander in chief during rebellion. It declared freedom for people enslaved within the states and portions of states it designated and committed the executive government, including the military, to recognizing and maintaining that freedom.
Its territorial limits were substantial.
It did not abolish slavery in the loyal slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky or Missouri. Tennessee was omitted, while specified portions of Louisiana and Virginia were expressly excluded. It was not a nationwide abolition law covering every enslaved person.
Its practical enforcement depended on the reach of federal authority. Enslaved people also acted to obtain their own freedom, leaving enslavers, reaching United States lines and contributing to the war effort. They were participants in emancipation, not merely people waiting for events to happen to them.
Other federal measures operated outside the proclamation’s boundaries. Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act on April 16, 1862, ending slavery in the federal capital. Congress also approved a March 3, 1865, resolution freeing the wives and children of men mustered into United States military or naval service, including families in loyal slave states.
The proclamation was a major instrument of emancipation, but it was not the only one.
For an enslaved family, freedom was the objective
The government’s military strategy did not describe the full meaning of emancipation for the people seeking it.
For an enslaved parent, freedom could mean recovering children, ending forced labor and preventing another family separation. A letter from Spotswood Rice, a previously enslaved Missouri man who enlisted in the Union Army in February 1864, provides a particular example.
Writing from a military hospital in St. Louis on September 3, 1864, Rice told his still-enslaved daughters:
“be assured that I will have you if it cost me my life”
Rice anticipated an expedition involving White and Black soldiers and hoped to accompany it to recover his children. In a separate letter, he rejected an enslaver’s claim that attempting to recover his own daughter amounted to theft.
His correspondence preceded Missouri’s statewide abolition by several months. It illustrates how an individual could enter military service while relatives remained enslaved.
For Lincoln’s government, emancipation and enlistment strengthened the effort to preserve the Union. For Rice, military service also offered a way to secure his family’s freedom. The purposes were connected, but they were not identical.
Who served in the armies?
The Union Army was predominantly (90%) White, while Black soldiers became a substantial and increasingly important part of its strength. Contrary to propaganda from the Far Left, the conflict was not simply a Black army fighting a White army.
The National Archives estimates that roughly 179,000 Black men served in the Union Army, describing them as approximately 10 percent of its soldiers. Another approximately 19,000 Black men served in the Navy. These are broad wartime figures, not matching racial censuses of both armies on a particular surrender date.
Black soldiers fought and performed the support duties necessary to sustain an army. Their service did not bring equal treatment in every respect: units were segregated, commissioned officers were generally White, and discriminatory pay persisted until Congress acted to establish equal pay.
Military service could provide a route from enslavement to legal freedom, but that protection initially did not extend equally to all accompanying relatives. Camp Nelson in Kentucky, for example, recruited enslaved men while their families’ status remained uncertain. Union personnel expelled hundreds of women and children in November 1864, with deadly consequences, before the Army reversed its refugee policy. This incident happened on November 23, 1864, Brigadier General Speed S. Fry ordered the forcible removal of over 400 African American refugees—mostly women and children who were family members of United States Colored Troops (USCT)—from the Union army base at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, driving them out into sub-freezing winter conditions without adequate shelter or clothing. This directly resulted in the deaths of at least a quarter of those who were expelled, Many were women and children.
Recognizing the Union’s role in emancipation does not require overlooking those contradictions nor does it require covering up the Union's acts of inhumanity. Today this kind of action would be considered a war crime.
The Confederacy’s late enlistment decision
The Confederate government eventually authorized the recruitment of enslaved men on March 13, 1865. That decision came during the war’s closing weeks, after years of excluding Black men from regular combat service. The National Park Service notes that, before this legislation, Confederate law generally prohibited Black men from serving as soldiers, although thousands of enslaved and free Black people had already been compelled to work for Confederate forces as laborers, cooks, wagon drivers, nurses and in other support roles.
The decision did not emerge without controversy. By early 1865, Confederate leaders were sharply divided over whether Black military service could coexist with slavery.
Robert E. Lee had moved toward supporting enlistment and emancipation. In a January 11, 1865 letter to Virginia legislator Andrew Hunter, Lee argued that the Confederacy should give immediate freedom to enslaved men who enlisted, freedom at the end of the war to the families of those who served faithfully, and accompany the policy with what he called a “well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation.” Lee reasoned that enslaved men could already obtain freedom by going to Union lines and that the Confederacy therefore needed to give prospective Black soldiers a personal stake in its survival.
A little more than a month later, Lee reiterated the military side of that position. In a February 18 letter from Confederate Army headquarters in Richmond to Representative Ethelbert Barksdale, Lee called Black enlistment “not only expedient, but necessary.” The letter was subsequently reproduced in the March 17, 1865 edition of The Liberator.
Lee’s position went further than simply allowing Black men to carry weapons. By January 1865, he was supporting immediate freedom for those who enlisted and a broader gradual-emancipation policy. The National Park Service likewise describes Lee as having recommended “gradual and general emancipation” as part of the debate over Black military service.
Other Confederate leaders strongly opposed even that approach. The disagreement was not merely over manpower; it also concerned what arming enslaved men would mean for the future of slavery itself.
The law Congress ultimately passed was more cautious than Lee’s proposal.
Congress’s legislation preserved the relationship between enslaved recruits and their owners unless altered through the required consent and state law. Section 5 expressly stated that the act itself did not authorize a change in that relationship except with the consent of the owner and the state, and in accordance with state law.
That limitation reflected the Confederate constitutional system, which restricted the central government’s authority to impair slave property rights and left substantial control over emancipation to the states and slaveholders themselves.
General Orders No. 14, issued March 23, went further in implementing the law. It required the recruit’s own consent and an owner’s written instrument conferring, as far as the owner legally could, the “rights of a freedman.”
This was conditional emancipation connected to recruitment—not general abolition. It would be inaccurate either to omit the freedom provision or to describe it as the Confederacy abandoning slavery throughout its territory.
It also did not mean recruits were expected simply to remain enslaved until the war ended. Under the implementing regulations, an enslaved man could not be accepted without his own consent and a written act from his owner conferring the rights of a freedman to the extent legally possible. Lee’s own proposal had gone farther by calling for immediate freedom for the soldier and eventual freedom for his family after faithful service.
The National Park Service documents two experimental companies being organized in Richmond. Contemporary estimates of their numbers vary, and incomplete Confederate records do not support an exact nationwide Black-to-White percentage comparable to Union figures. The authorized program remained very small and existed for less than a month before the Confederacy collapsed.
Those recruits must also be distinguished from the thousands of Black people compelled to support Confederate forces as laborers, drivers, cooks and attendants. Forced military labor did not automatically constitute enlistment, consent or support for Confederate independence.
The larger significance is that by early 1865 the Confederacy was no longer united over whether slavery could continue unchanged. Some leaders still resisted Black enlistment and emancipation, while Lee and others had begun arguing that military service should bring freedom and, in Lee’s case, that the process should extend toward gradual and general emancipation. The war ended before that internal debate could produce a longer-term outcome.
Missouri: abolition outside the proclamation
Missouri’s constitutional convention abolished slavery on January 11, 1865, while the war continued. The ordinance preceded the House of Representatives’ approval of the Thirteenth Amendment and the amendment’s nationwide ratification later that year. Only four convention delegates voted against Missouri’s ordinance.
That action is significant precisely because Missouri was outside the Emancipation Proclamation’s designated territory. It demonstrates that emancipation through federal military policy and statewide abolition through a convention were separate processes.
Missouri’s divided government requires careful description. A rival government had claimed secession and obtained Confederate recognition, while a Unionist government operated under United States authority. The abolition ordinance came from the Unionist convention, not from the Confederate-recognized government claiming to represent Missouri.
Missouri was not the first state claimed by the Confederacy in which Unionist authorities adopted abolition. Arkansas, Louisiana and the Unionist Restored Government of Virginia had taken such steps in 1864.
The distinction is between a state’s territory and the competing governments claiming authority over it.
How abolition proceeded while the war continued
In several seceded states, Unionists reorganized governments under federal protection while Confederate authorities continued to claim the same territory.
Lincoln’s December 6, 1864, annual message described the creation of loyal governments in Arkansas and Louisiana with constitutions prohibiting slavery. These were governments loyal to the United States, not Confederate governments voting to end the institution.
Virginia provides a particularly clear example. Its Unionist convention met in Alexandria and adopted abolition in 1864, while the Confederate-aligned government remained in Richmond. The Unionist constitution’s practical wartime operation was limited by the territory its government could control.
The following milestones distinguish those wartime actions from postwar recognition of emancipation. They identify major governmental steps—not the date every enslaved person obtained practical freedom.
State | Principal abolition or enforcement milestone |
Virginia | The Unionist convention voted for abolition on March 10, 1864, and adopted its constitution on April 7. This was the Restored Government’s action, not Confederate Richmond’s. Encyclopedia Virginia |
Arkansas | Pro-Union voters ratified a constitution abolishing slavery on March 16, 1864. Freedmen and Southern Society Project |
Louisiana | Pro-Union voters ratified a constitution abolishing slavery on September 5, 1864, extending state-level prohibition beyond the proclamation’s coverage. Freedmen and Southern Society Project |
Maryland | A new state constitution abolishing slavery took effect November 1, 1864, following an October ratification vote. Freedmen and Southern Society Project |
Missouri | The Unionist constitutional convention adopted immediate abolition on January 11, 1865. Missouri Secretary of State |
West Virginia | Following the gradual-emancipation arrangements associated with statehood, the legislature enacted immediate abolition on February 3, 1865. West Virginia Legislature |
Tennessee | A constitutional amendment adopted through the Unionist restoration process abolished slavery on February 22, 1865. Freedmen and Southern Society Project |
Texas | General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865, order announced freedom under federal authority in Galveston. It was military enforcement, not a voluntary abolition act by the Confederate state government. National Archives |
Mississippi | The 1865 postwar convention adopted an abolition ordinance. Federal investigator Carl Schurz recorded delegates accepting emancipation as a consequence of defeat while some continued to oppose it personally. Project Gutenberg |
Alabama | The September 1865 convention adopted a constitution banning slavery during reconstruction under a federally appointed provisional governor. Encyclopedia of Alabama |
South Carolina | Its September 1865 constitution recognized emancipation by United States authorities and prohibited slavery’s reestablishment. Carolana |
Georgia | The November 1865 constitution abolished slavery as part of the state’s postwar reconstruction. Digital Library of Georgia |
Florida | Its November 1865 constitution prohibited slavery and expressly acknowledged that the United States government had destroyed the institution in the state. FSU Law Library |
North Carolina | Voters approved the convention’s ordinance prohibiting slavery in a November 9, 1865, referendum. 50 Constitutions |
Kentucky | Military enlistment and related federal measures freed particular people during the war; the Thirteenth Amendment supplied statewide constitutional abolition in December 1865. National Park Service |
Delaware | Slavery persisted until the Thirteenth Amendment became effective nationwide in December 1865, despite Delaware not then having ratified it. University of Delaware |
Outside the states, Congress’s compensated-emancipation law for the District of Columbia supplied another route. The capital’s experience was neither state constitutional action nor an application of the January 1863 proclamation.
These different processes explain why freedom could arrive for one person while relatives remained enslaved, or why a constitution could prohibit slavery while a rival government and army continued resisting.
The Thirteenth Amendment: a nationwide prohibition
The second framed document beneath the memorial represented a different kind of authority.
The Thirteenth Amendment did not identify particular rebellious areas. It prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States and places under its jurisdiction, with an exception for punishment following a criminal conviction. It also gave Congress enforcement power.
The Senate approved the proposed amendment on April 8, 1864. After initially failing in the House, it secured House approval on January 31, 1865, by a vote of 119–56. The required state ratifications were completed on December 6, 1865, and Secretary of State William Seward formally proclaimed ratification on December 18.
Lincoln signed the congressional joint resolution on February 1, 1865. His signature was historically significant but legally unnecessary: constitutional amendments proceed through Article V’s proposal and ratification process, not the presidential approval process used for ordinary legislation.
Once the required three-fourths of the states ratified it, the amendment became binding nationwide. A state’s refusal to ratify did not create an exemption from its prohibition.
Ratification under pressure, not unanimous agreement
The amendment’s adoption did not mean every government or community welcomed it.
Following Lincoln’s death, President Andrew Johnson pressured several Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as part of restoring their relations with the federal government. Congress’s Constitution Annotated records that pressure as part of the amendment’s ratification history.
A September 19, 1865, South Carolina convention committee report described abolition as a:
“condition precedent to the restoration of our rights in the Union”
The committee distinguished the convention’s acceptance of state abolition from the legislature’s separate responsibility to consider ratification of the federal amendment. Its language provides contemporary evidence of political pressure and reluctant acceptance.
Restoring political relations and congressional representation was not simply a matter of unanimous reconciliation. Alabama’s experience illustrates the continuing dispute: its legislature ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, but Congress still refused to seat its newly elected delegation. Later congressional Reconstruction imposed additional conditions, including ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Nor should the views of convention delegates be treated as the opinions of everyone in the region. Acceptance by officials who had opposed emancipation was a different experience from the achievement of freedom by people who had been enslaved.
Why further constitutional protections followed
Abolition removed slavery’s legal foundation. It did not automatically establish equal citizenship, protect access to the courts or prevent new restrictions on freedom.
The Black Codes adopted after the war demonstrate the problem. Mississippi’s 1865 laws authorized the arrest and return of certain workers who left their employers before their contracts expired. South Carolina imposed special licensing requirements on Black people pursuing trades outside specified agricultural and domestic employment. These restrictions operated after emancipation.
Such measures helped drive congressional support for the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified in 1868, the amendment established citizenship rules and prohibited states from denying due process or equal protection. It addressed matters not settled by the prohibition of slavery alone. Contrary to popular opinion of today, the amendment did not declare that children of illegal aliens could hold the presidency of the United States but simply said that anyone born on US soil was a regular citizen of the USA. For the time the amendment was ratified until halfway through the Obama administration the US State Department's explanation on its own website was that simply being born on US soil did not make a person a natural born citizen of the United States.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited federal and state governments from denying or abridging citizens’ voting rights because of race, color or previous condition of servitude. Its constitutional protection did not guarantee that officials or private groups would obey it.
The Ku Klux Klan and other opponents of Reconstruction used intimidation and violence against Black citizens exercising political rights. Congress’s Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 sought to protect those rights and provide federal means of confronting organized violence. It is important to note that according to available records, General Robert E Lee strongly opposed the Ku Klux Klan and its activities.
Later disfranchisement campaigns used poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and other devices to obstruct Black citizens from voting. These measures should not all be presented as having preceded the Reconstruction amendments; many became instruments for undermining protections that already existed.
Further action followed generations later. The Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibited poll taxes in federal elections in 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked discriminatory voting practices, and the Supreme Court rejected Virginia’s state-election poll tax in 1966. Voter ID requirements are permitted as long as they fully funded by the state, they are given to people for free, and the state pays full costs of delivery and of locating specific voters to ensure they recieve the state funded ID's.
The distinction is between establishing a constitutional right and securing its exercise in everyday life.
What the memorial’s walls leave to the museum
One panel I photographed downstairs was headed “What’s Missing?”
It explained that the memorial’s principal speech inscriptions are the Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, while the Emancipation Proclamation is not inscribed on its walls. The museum’s document displays therefore add material that visitors do not encounter as a complete architectural inscription upstairs.
The documents also encourage distinctions that can disappear in a brief account of the war.
Lincoln’s original declared objective was not identical to every policy adopted during the conflict. A soldier’s reasons for serving were not necessarily identical to the government’s reasons for recruiting. Individual emancipation, state abolition and federal constitutional change could occur at different times.
Those distinctions do not diminish the importance of the proclamation or amendment. They explain their place within a larger process.
My visit began as an opportunity to see a landmark. The two documents provided a reason to move beyond the familiar summary that Lincoln “freed the slaves” and examine how freedom was pursued, proclaimed, enforced and ultimately protected through constitutional change.
For Lincoln, emancipation became essential to saving the Union. For people such as Spotswood Rice, freedom also meant the possibility of bringing their children home.
About the photographed displays
Most of these photographs document the exhibition on June 28, 2026.
On July 16, E&E News reported that the National Park Service had temporarily relocated the historic documents while addressing heat-related environmental concerns. Their return to display has not been confirmed for this article; readers should check with the park before planning a visit specifically to see the signed copies.
Learn More
National Park Foundation — The announcement of Kenneth C. Griffin’s loan, including the provenance of the historic proclamation and amendment copies. National Park Foundation
National Archives — The Emancipation Proclamation, Thirteenth Amendment and constitutional amendment process, including original texts and passage histories. National Archives
Lincoln’s writings — His First Inaugural Address, letter to James C. Conkling, letter to Albert G. Hodges and December 1864 annual message. Avalon Project
University of Maryland’s Freedmen and Southern Society Project — Spotswood Rice’s letters, the chronology of emancipation, Confederate recruitment legislation and the resolution freeing military families. Freedmen and Southern Society Project
Missouri State Archives and South Carolina’s 1865 convention records — Documents concerning state abolition, divided government and the conditions of political restoration. Missouri Secretary of State
National Archives, National Park Service and congressional historical offices — Black military service, the Reconstruction amendments, Black Codes, enforcement legislation and the later struggle over voting rights.
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