Executive Orders - Part 3/7 Continued

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the Emancipation Proclamation was, in effect, an economic sanction on the Confederacy. It was designed to cause slave riots in those states, allowing the Union to gain the upper hand and crippling their economies. In fact, in January 1862, Representative Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican leader in the House, argued that total war against the rebellion should include emancipation of slaves, saying that emancipation would ruin the rebel economy by forcing the loss of enslaved labor.

Even with the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was not outlawed. After all of this (and there is so much more on this topic), allow me to say that the Emancipation Proclamation was a useless scrap of paper, and 20th century black intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois would agree. The 13th Amendment freed the slaves and outlawed slavery, and I applaud the Congress that ratified it, not Abraham Lincoln.