Authority
Lincoln issued the Proclamation under his authority as "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution. As such, he claimed to have the martial power to suspend civil law in those states which were in rebellion. He did not have Commander-in-Chief authority over the four slave-holding states that had not declared a secession: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, and so those states were not named in the Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation was never challenged in court.
To ensure the abolition of slavery everywhere in the U.S., Lincoln pushed for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Congress passed it by the necessary 2/3 vote in February 1865 and it was ratified by the states by December 1865.
Read more about this topic: Emancipation Proclamation
Famous quotes containing the word authority:
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)