On the contrary, what it meant was that slaves who fled their owners and/or wound up in territory that had been liberated from the Confederate forces could not be returned to their masters as the law required because, wait for it, they weren't slaves anymore.
Had he intended to f4ree slaves, he could have easily applied it everywhere, not just in the areas he didn’t control.
He could not because of that pesky document called the Constitution of the United States of America. Slavery was not outlawed under the Constitution. Lincoln could free the slaves owned by the rebels because the Confiscation Acts gave him the power to seize private property used to further the rebellion. Ending slavery everywhere required an amendment to the Constitution. Look between the 12th Amendment and the 14th Amendment and there is will be.
The language is quite clear. it is applied to “the states now in rebellion.” i.e., the territory he did not control. Nothing else. It only freed slaves in the Confederate-controlled states and not in any place the Union controlled.
Lincoln did it that way quite on purpose.
He had no authority to free a single slave, but he used his pen and whatever was being used instead of a phone and did it anyway.
Had he intended to free the slaves, he would simply have declared them free. But he didn’t.
“On the contrary, what it meant was that slaves who fled their owners and/or wound up in territory that had been liberated from the Confederate forces could not be returned to their masters as the law required because, wait for it, they weren’t slaves anymore.”
It took an independent observer from afar to place the Emancipation Proclamation, and to some extent the entire debate over northern war aims, into perspective.
The London Spectator publication said it best about federal policy: “The Government liberates the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them in the coming conflict . . . the principle asserted is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”