With Lincoln having issued preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Unionists in Tennessee and southern Louisiana undertake to organize congressional elections so as to gain exclusion from the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Lincoln encourages southern Unionists – and provides them military assistance – in their efforts. Lincoln’s Annual Message in December 1862 puts forward compensated abolition plan, providing for abolition in the rebellious states. Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, but exclusion of Tennessee and southern Louisiana do not comport with specifications in the preliminary version. Exclusions will provide opportunity for proslavery Unionists to salvage slavery, but proclamation also raises issue of how fate of slavery will factor into restoring rebellious states to the Union.

During second half of 1862, Unionists – including slaveholders – in the occupied lower Mississippi valley organize politically, with assistance from Federal military authorities. By July, Lincoln has already decided to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, and his frustration with the failure of Unionists in Louisiana to act influences his thinking. Lincoln issues preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September, spelling out requirements for Confederate areas not to be declared in rebellion. Federal military forces establish contraband camps for fugitive slaves, but also express fears of former slaves becoming dependent of government support; they also implement systems of wartime free labor on plantations under military oversight.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s central contention that antebellum interpretive debates over slavery encouraged contextual readings of sacred texts and deepened a sense of historical distance from America’s favored biblical and founding pasts. It restates the argument that while some aimed to set aside the historical distance and change their readings revealed, others used distance and change in advancing new readings of the Bible and, especially, the Constitution. The conclusion narrates how Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln continued to use historical distance and the insight of historical contingency in working towards slavery’s abolition. Douglass found hope in Lincoln’s election, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and despite crucial differences between them, Douglass and Lincoln continued to advance antislavery readings of the Constitution based in the framers’ expectation of abolition. This reading gave shape to Lincoln’s Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address. The conclusion also indicates the limitations of approaches like Lincoln’s and emphasizes the need today for new kinds of historical narratives and new kinds of actions.

In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved people in Union-occupied territory during the American Civil War, three men were selected to determine how freed African Americans could assist in the war effort, what their needs were in the transition from slavery to freedom, and what the social effects of releasing so many men and women from bondage would likely be. This was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. The conclusion of this book explores how this wartime commission’s investigations leveraged the example of black freedom in free-soil havens abroad to develop its recommendations to the Lincoln administration. Their conclusions helped to structure advice that ultimately gave shape and substance to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was active among freed slaves in the South throughout the Reconstruction era. As a conclusion to five decades of international free-soil investigation and inspiration, this commission embedded the complexities of black freedom experienced abroad into the foundation of freedom in the United States.