Slavery was officially abolished in the United States when the 13th Amendment was passed in 1868. An interesting bit of history, when the southern states refused to ratify the 14th Amendment because in it was language that prohibited any ex-Confederate soldier or politician from ever holding any public office, the Northern dominated Congress refused to seat any of the Southern reresentatives or senators, declaring them "illegitimate holders of the seats". They then put in political hacks that could be counted on to be good little yes-men and proceeded to institute Reconstruction which was a continuation of northern appointed political hack carpetbaggers who made sure that NORTHERN interests were of top priority while the interests of the Southern states and people were ignored.
Can you begin to understand why Southerners were so pissed at the damnyankees for so long?
The 13th Amendment was ratified and became law by 6 December 1865. In 1859 or 1860 slavery was firmly established in a large part of the United States, by 1866 it was gone. That was quite an achievement. I certainly wish it could have been accomplished without war, but it won't do to minimize or demean what was done.
Lincoln couldn't free all the slaves by executive proclamation. That would have been unconstitutional, and would have been regarded as tyrannical, so the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to areas in rebellion against the US. It derived its legitimacy from the President's war powers, and those wouldn't have applied to areas not actively in rebellion.
But three years later, the remaining slaves in America were freed by a constitutional amendment. It was the only way it could have been done. Lincoln had pushed for it, and the Republicans urged ratification of the amendment as a tribute to him after his assassination. Well before 1865, slaveowners could see the "handwriting on the wall" and chose a side to fight on accordingly, effectively choosing slavery and rebellion or emancipation and union.
If they'd had their way, the Confederates might have waited generations before freeing all the slaves on their territory, and you complain that three years elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the final emancipation of the last slaves. That looks cockeyed.
Frederick Douglass, no fan of Lincoln's, summed up: "Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined."
So many of the "arguments" made by defenders of the Confederacy are false or weak. People blame Lincoln for not having felt a certain way or done a certain thing at a given point in time, ignoring the real progress that he made in his lifetime, and give Confederates or Southerners an eternity to get "right" on questions like slavery, segregation or racial equality. Or they blame Northerners for having slaves in 1770 or 1820, and absolve Southerners who had slaves in 1860 and weren't going to get rid of them.
So much of the talk of "Northern hypocrisy" just amounts to Southern hypocrisy. We've had faults and weaknesses as a nation, but there's no justification for the kind of slight of hand that some people practice to make Southern slaveowners come off looking better than they should and better than their opponents.
True and the north has kept the southern states poor ever since, but with this last election, the south is going to rise again!