On this day, January the 1st, in the year of 1863, then President Abraham Lincoln put the Emancipation Proclamation into effect, which said that all slaves in the rebelling Southern states shall be freed, shifting the messaging of the American Civil War.

While in its inaction didn’t officially free all the slaves, as the Unites States didn’t have control of the land where they freed slaves, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the cause of fighting the Civil War from regaining control of the South from that and freeing the slave population (History).

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