Emancipation

Emancipation is the ending of legal enslavement. In the United States, it chiefly denotes the liberation of enslaved people during and after the Civil War.

Emancipation Proclamation: An 1863 wartime order declaring enslaved people in designated areas rebelling against the United States to be free. It made emancipation a Union war measure, though it did not free everyone immediately.
American Civil War: The 1861–1865 war between the United States and the Confederacy over secession and slavery. The conflict transformed emancipation from a contested political issue into a Union war policy.
Reconstruction: The period after the Civil War when the United States restored the South and contested the rights of formerly enslaved people. Emancipation opened a broader struggle over how freedom would reshape Southern society.
District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act: An 1862 federal law that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia and compensated former enslavers. It was an early, geographically limited route to emancipation during the war.
Thirteenth Amendment: The 1865 constitutional amendment that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as punishment for crime. It extended abolition beyond the areas covered by Lincoln’s wartime proclamation.
Abolitionism in the United States: A movement seeking to end slavery in the United States through moral, political, and direct action. Abolitionists had challenged slavery and pressed national leaders toward emancipation for decades.
Black Codes: State and local laws enacted after the Civil War to restrict the rights and labor of African Americans. These laws sought to constrain the freedom emancipation had made legally possible.
West Virginia: A U.S. state formed in 1863 from counties that separated from Virginia during the Civil War. Its admission involved gradual emancipation conditions, distinct from later nationwide abolition.
Juneteenth: A commemoration of June 19, 1865, when Union forces announced emancipation in Galveston, Texas. The announcement illustrates how freedom’s enforcement reached some places after legal declarations.
Contraband of war: A Civil War-era Union policy treating people escaping slavery from Confederate territory as contraband seized from the enemy. This early wartime measure brought thousands of self-emancipating people under Union protection.

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