President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the country moved toward its third year of the wicked common war. The announcement proclaimed "that all people held as slaves" inside the defiant states are, and henceforward might be free." On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his preparatory Emancipation Proclamation, in which he proclaimed that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves in states in disobedience to the Union "might be at that point, thenceforward, and perpetually free.
