Emancipation Expectations

Some historians believe that the Emancipation Proclamation never freed a single slave and that it was a political ploy to garner support for the war by rebranding it as a moral fight. Information found in the National Archives seems to support their argument.

According to the article entitled "Emancipation Proclamation, 1863":

"Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free a single slave, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of African Americans, and fundamentally transformed the character of the war from a war for the Union into a war for freedom."

The transformation was a success politically but in reality the "emancipated" slaves were labeled as "contraband".  Their fate was not freedom but rather a new type of slavery through exploitation.

Information found in a paper entitled "Civil War in the Delta: Environment, Race and the 1863 Helena Campaign" states:

"By early June 1861, all of the companies raised in Helena had departed to fight elsewhere, but residents continued to feel the effects of the conflict. In the war’s opening year, slaves, civilians, and rebel soldiers moved in and out of Phillips County, while white residents suffered from crippling inflation, cash and manpower shortages, the collapse of credit, and eventually, draconian Confederate impressment and conscription. Nature also wreaked havoc on the county’s citizens.8 A hog cholera epizootic reduced its swine population, a drought diminished its corn crop, and the “great [Mississippi] flood of 1862” inundated its buildings and fields. All of these trials paled in comparison to those spurred by the Union invasion of the county on July 12, 1862. On that day, the van of General Samuel R. Curtis’s Army of the Southwest trotted into Helena, and over next three days, some 20,000 federal troops overwhelmed Phillips County. The soldiers appropriated buildings, confiscated crops and livestock, ransacked homes, and emancipated more than 2,000 slaves, most of whom ran to Union lines to secure their freedom. Many of these refugees, labeled “contrabands” by the soldiers, tragically found that freedom did not live up to its promise. They lived in dilapidated camps on the outskirts of town, worked various jobs for wages that most never received, and died in droves due to hunger and disease."