“Isn’t it strange, then, but after four long horrible years of war, with hundreds of thousands of dead, the union did not begin to free the slaves until after the war was over.”
Yeh, I don’t know where that meme comes from, it’s absurd on its face.
The fact is that from Day One, Unionists understood abolition was a weapon of war against Confederates and quickly began freeing such “Contraband of War” as they could.
So even before Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, many tens of thousands of Confederate slaves were freed by the Union army.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation resulted in nearly all Confedetate slaves freed by war’s end and, at the same time such Southern states as Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia abolished slavery before the war’s end.
The net result was that by the time the 13th Amendment was ratified, in December 1865, only a few thousand slaves were left to be freed in Kentucky & Delaware.
So yes, the Civil War did free the slaves.
If only that were true.
The army had no authority to free slaves in the US. There were slaves in Washington, Maryland and throughout the US until the Constitution was amended to free slaves in December 1865. In fact the first proposed 13th Amendment that passed the congress and was sent out to the states for ratification forever guaranteed the right to own slaves in the US.