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:
“Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority ... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our “white mythology.” Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.”
—Ihab Hassan (b. 1925)
“Women who assume authority are unnatural. Unnatural women are lesbians. Therefore all the leaders of the women’s movement were presumed to be lesbians.”
—Jane O’Reilly, U.S. feminist and humorist. The Girl I Left Behind, ch. 8 (1980)