Contrary to popular belief, the ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ only affected slave owners in the Confederacy. Slavery continued to be practiced in Delaware and Maryland for more than six months after ‘Juneteenth’. The reason for that was because it actually was legally impossible to free people already enslaved without amending the Constitution, because it infringed on the ‘right to property’ of their (at the time) legal owners. In other words, ‘ujm’ is actually correct (legally, not historically). After the Civil War ended, the states passed bills paying compensation to the slave-owners, and Congress amended the Constitution, ending slavery in the United States. So, this issue was real, but it was dealt with already. The ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ was done by invoking the President’s wartime powers as Commander in Chief, which do include the ability to confiscate enemy property to further the war effort. (This involved treating the Confederate States as an ‘enemy’ entity, which was also legally tricky.) The connection to the war effort was to encourage the freed slaves to take up arms against their former owners and undermine the Confederacy. (Something that did happen to some extent.) BTW, all this belies the Liberal revisionist history that sees slavery as the main reason for the Civil War, when it was actually primarily about State versus Federal power (which was the hottest political issue for the first 80 years of the United States, and still reverberates until today.)
