The Emancipation Proclamation was an order by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in 10 states. It applied to slaves in the states still in rebellion in 1863 during the American Civil War. It did not actually immediately free all slaves in those states, because those areas were still controlled by the Confederacy. It did, however, free at least 20,000 slaves immediately, and nearly all 4 million slaves (according to the 1860 United States census) as the Union army advanced into Confederate states. Until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865, only the states had power to end slavery within their own borders. Thus, Lincoln issued the Proclamation as a war measure in his role as commander-in-chief.

The Proclamation made emancipation a goal of the Civil War. It also weakened efforts within England and France to officially recognize the Confederacy. As Union troops advanced into Rebel (Confederate) territory, they freed thousands of slaves per day. Many did not wait, but fled their owners to claim their freedom.

Five slave states (the Border States) had remained loyal to the Union and were not at war with the federal government. Thus, Lincoln did not have authority to free slaves in those states, and so this Proclamation was not applied in those states. The Proclamation also did not apply to Tennessee, nor to areas within Virginia and Louisiana which Union forces already controlled. The Proclamation was issued in two parts. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln said that in 100 days, he would free all slaves in areas not then under Union control. On January 1, 1863, he named the ten states in which the proclamation would then apply: Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana. The five border states where slavery was still legal were exempt, and so not named, because they had remained loyal to the Union and were not in rebellion. Tennessee also was not named because Union forces had already regained control there. Several counties of Virginia that were in the process of separating from that state to form the new state of West Virginia were specifically named as exemptions, as were several parishes around New Orleans in Louisiana. The next paragraph is part of a quote from the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a small number of slaves already behind Union lines were immediately freed. As Union forces advanced, nearly all four million slaves were effectively freed. Some former slaves joined the Union army.

Before the war was over, some of the exempted border states ended slavery within their own borders. While the Proclamation had freed slaves, it had not made slavery illegal. Thus, Lincoln sponsored a constitutional amendment to ban slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment, making slavery illegal everywhere in the United States, was passed late in 1865, eight months after Lincoln was assassinated.

The Emancipation Proclamation was created by Abraham Lincoln as a way to try and take advantage of the rebellion that was currently underway in the south. This rebellion was known as the Civil War, with the North and the South divided due to ideological differences. The political situation of the Civil War was relatively dire. With the South in a state of outright rebellion, it was on Abraham Lincoln’s shoulder to try and preserve the Union at all costs. The war itself was still not recognized by the North as a war, because Abraham Lincoln refused to recognize the South as its own nation. While the South prefer to call itself the Confederate states of America, to the north they were still states of the United States of America.

The emancipation Proclamation’s entire purpose was to free the slaves in the South. In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation had nothing to do with slavery in the North. The Union would still be a slave nation during the war, despite the fact that Abraham Lincoln would y be laying the ground for a greater abolitionist movement. When the proclamation was passed, it was aimed at the states that were currently in rebellion; the entire purpose was to disarm the South.

During the Civil War, the Southern economy was primarily based on slavery. With the majority of men fighting in the Civil War, slaves were used primarily for reinforcing soldiers, transporting goods, and working in agricultural labor back home. The South did not have the same level of industrialism without slavery, as the North did. Essentially, when Lincoln passed to the Emancipation Proclamation it was actually an attempt to weaken the Confederate states by removing one of their strongest methods of production.

From the era of Reconstruction to the end of the 19th century, the United States underwent an economic transformation marked by the maturing of the industrial economy, the rapid expansion of big business, the development of large-scale agriculture, and the rise of national labor unions and industrial conflict.
An outburst of technological innovation in the late 19th century fueled this headlong economic growth. However, the accompanying rise of the American corporation and the advent of big business resulted in a concentration of the nation's productive capacities in fewer and fewer hands. Mechanization brought farming into the realm of big business as well, making the United States the world's premier food producer--a position it has never surrendered. But still the land hunger of white Americans continued unabated. This led to wars against the Native Americans of the Plains and the "second great removal" of indigenous peoples from their ancient homelands.
Indispensable to this growth and development were an unprecedented surge in immigration and urbanization after the Civil War. American society was in transition. Immigrants arriving from southern and eastern Europe, from Asia, Mexico, and Central America, were creating a new American mosaic. And the power of Anglo-Saxon Protestants--once so dominant--began to wane.
What many thought of as progress, however, others regarded with apprehension. Agricultural modernization disrupted family farms, for example, provoking the country's farmers to organize protest movements as never before. And the social problems that accompanied the nation's industrial development fueled the rise of national labor unions and unprecedented clashes between capital and labor. This discontent captured the attention of reformers and politicians who began to challenge traditional party politics through third-party movements. he use of a STATE CHARTER to provide special benefits for a PRIVATE CORPORATION was a crucial and controversial innovation in republican America. The idea of granting special privileges to certain individuals seemed to contradict the republican ideal of equality before the law. Even more than through rapidly expanded banking institutions, state support for internal transportation improvements lay at the heart of the nation's new political economy. Road, bridge, and especially canal building was an expensive venture, but most state politicians supported using government-granted legal privileges and funds to help create the INFRASTRUCTURE that would stimulate economic development.

The most famous state-led creation of the Market Revolution was undoubtedly New York's ERIE CANAL. Begun in 1817, the 364-mile man-made waterway flowed between Albany on the Hudson River and Buffalo on Lake Erie. The canal connected the eastern seaboard and the Old Northwest. The great success of the Erie Canal set off a canal frenzy that, along with the development of the steamboat, created a new and complete national water transportation network by 1840.One of the real impetuses for United States entering the Industrial Revolution was the passage of the Embargo Act of 1807, the War of 1812 (1812–14) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) which cut off supplies of new and cheaper Industrial revolution products from Britain. The lack of access to these goods all provided a strong incentive to learn how to develop the industries and to make their own goods instead of simply buying the goods produced by Britain. The 1850s were a time of westward expansion for the United States. The California Gold Rush and Nevada Silver Rush pushed U.S. Americans further and further west with the promise of economic prosperity. In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Bill and several grants that allowed financial support for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies. These two companies then began constructing what would become the transcontinental railroad. The Financial Sector also saw increased support during the war, once the charter of the First Bank of the United States' charter expired in 1811, it became clear that the U.S. Government would have trouble financing the war without it,[7] which lead to the ultimate renewal of the bank by President James Madison in 1816. There were 3 separate incidents of financial downturn in the early 19th century: the Embargo Act of 1807, the Depression of 1818-21 and the Panic of 1837, each requiring the financial sector to employ new strategies to deal with large-scale financial downturn never before seen in the United States in the fashion presented during that period.