What did the South look like in the months after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863?

by icychaos

Hi,

I'm wondering what the South looked like directly after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 36% of southern families were slaveholding. In the lower south, slaves made up 47% of the total population, and due to the 3/5 clause, it could have been more.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea on December 31, 1862, slaveholders had free will to torture and kill slaves, and the very next day, all of those slaves were free. What did these former slaves do? I assume almost all of them had no education, unskilled, had nowhere to live; and the white population must have still held a deep seeded hatred for blacks.

My question is: What did all of these former slaves do? Did they all travel north? Did they just continue to work on plantations for wages? Was there still a lot of slavery going on under the radar? I'm hoping that someone can paint a picture of culturally what was going on in the South in 1863.

bayside2seaside

It really didn't free many slaves at all.

  1. It only affected areas "under rebellion," so loyal slave states like DE or MD could keep their slaves under the EP.
  2. These areas held no regard for the EP as they were part of another nation, so why would they follow US laws?

The real factor for slaves being freed during the war was presence of the U.S. Army, but even wit that being said, 6/7 of the enslaved population of 1860 was still enslaved at the end of the Civil War.

it didn't really free anyone and was more symbolic, that's why we have the 13th Amendment