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Emancipation Proclamation

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Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation
The American Civil War and the ending of slavery through issuing the Emancipation Proclamation are the two crucial events of U.S. history. Perhaps the war would not have occurred if slavery did not exist because it is one of the main reasons that the southerners and northerners got into conflict. However, if there was no Civil War and Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation declaring the freedom of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America, then slavery and liberation would not have taken the same course. Thus, the Emancipation Proclamation was a momentous event that many historians have been discussed its significance in U.S. history and that a lot of people now are still wondering whether or not freeing the slaves was the original intent of the president at that time.
Prior to the Civil War, the existence of slavery in some parts of country had always been an unsolved complicated issue of the United States of America. Since the very first days when American leaders gathered to revise the Articles of Confederation at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, the slave population in the South was already one of the discussing topics because the Southern and Northern State could not reach agreement on the issue of popular representation in the House. The delegates of the convention eventually agreed to the Three-Fifths Compromise, which allowed the Southern States to count three-fifths of all non-free people toward population counts and allocations. Indeed, American leaders knew that the institution of slavery was going to be a problem right at that moment but they were afraid that the convention would be dissolved if they ever proposed things such as abolishing slavery. Therefore, they have accepted some measures that helped preserve the institution well into the nineteenth century and keep it from dividing the nation. Among these was the Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress in 1793 that required the



Bibliography: Brands, H. W., T. H. Breen, Robert A. Divine, George M. Fredrickson, Ariela J. Gross, and R. Hal Williams. America Past and Present, Volume I (8th Edition) (MyHistoryLab Series). 8 ed. New York: Longman, 2006. Foner, Eric. Review of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln 's White Dream, by Lerone Bennett, Jr. Los Angeles Times Book Review, Jun 30, 2008. Guelzo, Allen. Lincoln 's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2004. Perman, Michael. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction- Documents and Essays. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Vorenberg, Michael. The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin 's, 2010. [ 2 ]. Harold Holzer, "A Promise Fulfilled." Civil War Times, Vol. 48 Issue 6 (December 2009): 3 http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/ehost/search?vid=1&hid=104&sid=7c9bc048-5713-4643-ba6c-ac2345357d1f%40sessionmgr114 (accessed July 31, 2010). [ 3 ]. Michael Vorenberg, The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), 71 [ 4 ] [ 5 ]. Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln 's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York : Simon & Schuster, 2004), 229 [ 6 ] [ 7 ]. Eric Foner, Review of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln 's White Dream, by Lerone Bennett, Jr. Los Angeles Times Book Review, Jun 30, 2008.

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