Emancipation Proclamation

As the war progressed, Lincoln realized that freeing slaves in areas still under Confederate control would be an effective war measure and would link the Union side to a moral cause.  Lincoln first issued a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, after the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam.  The Proclamation became effective on January 1, 1863.  Pro-Union, proslavery Kentuckians abhorred the Proclamation, because they believed that the Federal government could not interfere with slavery in any state.  The Kentucky legislature also expressed its agitation over the Proclamation by passing an act on March 2, 1863, that prevented any slaves freed by the edict from entering Kentucky.  If any of these freed slaves were caught, they were to be sent back into slavery.

Since Kentucky was under Union control, the Emancipation Proclamation did not affect the Bluegrass State.  Kentucky bondsmen, however, had other ways to gain their freedom, which resulted in self-liberation.  As the war progressed and white Union military enlistment slowed, Federal authorities turned to another available source of manpower—African Americans.   Lincoln tried to persuade Kentuckians to support the enlistment of free blacks, but this policy was rejected.  General Boyle knew Kentucky’s mind and warned the president that black recruitment “will revolutionize the state and do infinite and inconceivable harm.”  Despite these complaints, the enlistment of United States Colored Troops (USCT)—both slave and free—began in earnest in February 1864.  Loyal slave owners were to receive $300 for each slave who volunteered to the army, and fugitive slaves were pressed into the service.  Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette was so angered over the policy that he wrote, “If the president does not, upon my demand, stop the negro enrollment, I will.”  Fearing violence, however, three days later the governor called on Kentuckians to quietly accept enrollment plans.  When white Kentuckians did not rush to fill the state’s manpower quotas, Bramlette, and other Unionist Kentuckians, were ineffectual in stopping these enlistments.  When black volunteering also declined, slaves and freemen were pressed into the service.  Eventually, more than 23,700 African American Kentuckians joined the Union army.  Of all states, only Louisiana enlisted more troops into the USCT.

Lincoln realized that the mere sight of African Americans in uniform was an experience that would affect the war and forever alter the nation.  He wrote that, “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.”

Many Kentuckians feared economic collapse if their slaves were freed, and economic motives were why many residents fought against emancipation and the enlistment of the USCT.  The enlistment of African Americans and the March 1865 Federal policy that declared that the wives and children of enlisted USCT were also free, made the number of Kentucky slaves plummet.  With this came economic consequences.  With laborers enlisting in the military or simply running away as they came in contact with Northern troops, tobacco production fell fifty-seven percent; wheat dropped sixty-three percent; barley sank fifteen percent; and hemp plummeted by eighty percent.  In addition, from 1860 to 1865, the assessed value of Kentucky slaves dropped by more $100 million. This made such an economic impact on the commonwealth that when the 13th Amendment was proposed, Governor Bramlette said that Kentucky should ratify it only if Kentucky were paid $34 million, the assessed value of slaves in 1864.  It was a final, failing attempt to squeeze funds from a dying institution.

Yet emblematic of Kentucky’s complete, sometimes enigmatic relationship with Lincoln and his policies, Governor Bramlette had urged Kentuckians after the election of 1864 to support the president.  Moreover, in a speech soon after Lincoln’s assassination, Bramlette apologized for his and Kentucky’s sometimes vociferous opposition to the president.  On April 18, 1865, Bramlette said in a Louisville speech:

"We may differ with him, and have differed with him, but when the judgment of future events has come, we found we were different blindly;  that he was right and we were wrong.  Standing as we did in local positions, surrounded as we were by local prejudices, he occupied an elevated stand-point and viewed the whole political surroundings of the country . . . His course has been marked by the honest purposes of preserving the institutions of our country—to preserve all that is worth preserving and that could possibly be preserved from the wreck of this revolution.  We cannot deny, fellow citizens, that a revolution has swept over our country . . . [E]xperience and time has demonstrated that his was the only line of salvation for our country.”