Emancipation Proclamation Rhetorical Analysis
Calling for military emancipation makes it difficult to declare who actually freed the slaves before the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. The slaves who ran to Union lines were freed with the document, but they ran to the military on their own will. Lincoln did not have anything to do with their running away because it has happened for centuries. It is this fact that makes the efficiency of the Emancipation Proclamation questionable. If the document did not remove the slaves from their masters and no one enforced it, how could it be efficient? Gates, Bennett, and Lincoln made the observation that the document only freed the males that joined the union. This makes it difficult to find records of exactly how many slaves the document