This statement was released today by United Steelworkers (USW) International President Leo W. Gerard and USW International Vice President Fred Redmond:

Issued almost two years into the Civil War on January 1, 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation authorized the Union army to recruit black soldiers and it declared that all slaves in the rebel states of the Confederacy “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

The Proclamation did not apply to slaves in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, the border slave states that remained within the Union and were not in rebellion.  Full emancipation would come almost three years later after separate state actions and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which made slavery illegal everywhere in the United States ... more