the Emancipation Proclamation goes into effect


Grand Old Partisan celebrates the Republican Party's Emancipation Proclamation. It went into effect on January 1st 1863. President Abraham Lincoln observed: "I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. If my name goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it."

While the Republicans rejoiced, Democrat politicians and newspapers denounced Lincoln for freeing slaves. Demonstrating their depravity, New York's Governor, Horatio Seymour, later the 1868 Democrat presidential nominee, denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as "a proposal for the butchery of women and children." The Louisville Daily Democrat called it "an outrage of all constitutional law, all human justice, all Christian feeling."

Acting on authority granted by the GOP-controlled 37th Congress to seize rebel 'property,' President Lincoln had issued a preliminary proclamation two months before, to the dismay of Democrats. Effective at yearend, all slaves in Confederate-controlled territory would be "forever free."

Ill-informed critics of President Lincoln fault him for not freeing slaves in areas under U.S. control, but the federal government lacked the necessary authority. Within three years, the GOP-controlled 38th Congress followed up the Emancipation Proclamation with the 13th Amendment, banning slavery nationwide.

This was adapted from Back to Basics for the Republican Party, my civil rights history of the GOP. To quote the book: "The more we Republicans know about the history of our Party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs." For more information, see www.grandoldpartisan.com

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Michael Zak is author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, a history of GOP civil rights achievement.


Each day, his YouTube videos and TikTok videos and Rumble videos and Grand Old Partisan blog celebrate more than seventeen decades of Republican heroes and heroics. And, see Speech Raves for audience feedback from his presentations in thirty-one states.

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