THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION The history of the United States and its inception included the slavery of Africans. Africans were either sold to or trapped by their captors and brought to the American Colonies to serve their masters. In the beginning, the Africans were treated as indentured servants, wherein they worked for seven years and were released from service as free persons. Eventually, this policy was ended and the slaves were forced to work without compensation for their entire lifetime.
Eventually, there was a move in the North to industrialized machinery and labor and slaves were no longer necessary for workforce purposes. Also, there was a faction of the population of the Northern states that simply believed that slavery was wrong and should not continue. These persons were known as abolitionists. However, it was the Southern States that continued to thrive on agricultural products. The continuation of this agricultural economic engine needed the labor provided by the slaves. This dependence was increased after the invention and patent of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1794. The “inadvertent result of the cotton gin’s success, however, was that it helped strengthen slavery in the South. Although the cotton gin made cotton processing less labor-intensive, it helped planters earn greater profits, prompting them to grow larger crops, which in turn required more people. Because slavery was the cheapest form of labor, cotton farmers simply acquired more slaves.”1

This disagreement continued among the Northern and Southern states and this division became more apparent after the election of Abraham Lincoln as the President of the United States, who was a Republican and perceived to be against slavery. “Long simmering sectional tensions reached a critical stage in 1860–1861 when eleven slaveholding states seceded and formed the Confederate