by Stan Dyer

Created on: January 09, 2010   Last Updated: January 10, 2010

The sad truth in America today is that many Americans believe slavery does not exist.  Taught that the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, and the 13th Amendment outlawed the practice of slavery, many don’t realize that neither document completely accomplished its goals.  People are led to believe that laws ended slavery when all any law ever did was alter the perception of slavery.  Through a tradition of teaching half-truths and an incomplete history of the subject, an atmosphere of complacency so strong developed that it now acts almost as a force field against the real truth.  The result is that slavery still exists 144 years after it supposedly ended, and we cannot really begin to correct the situation until we correct the way that information is taught.  

To begin with, people need to learn that The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation did not free all the slaves.  That act only allowed for the freeing of “all people held as slaves,” in those states still in rebellion against the United States after January 1, 1863.  Thus, due to these limitations, none of the slaves were freed in any of the non-rebellious areas of the country, which included four slave states, all of the Northern States, all of the Western Territories, and all of the areas specifically excluded by the Proclamation, (Thompson, 2000, p. 136).  Not only was the document far from complete in freeing the slaves, it said nothing about how the transition would take place, or how former slaves who owned nothing were expected to support themselves, (Franklin and Moss, Jr., 2000, p. 233) .  Students need to know that slaves quickly found out, freed or not, that it would take more than a few well-spoken words to effect their complete freedom, and that their pain was just beginning.  

 At the Laura Plantation in Louisiana, for example, the last Matron, Laura Lacoul Gore, commented about the Civil War saying, “The war came and went.”  What she meant was that business on the plantation continued pretty much the same before, during and after the war despite any legal mandates.  Although required to pay wages after the war, those employing slave labor found the wage problem both easy to overcome and very profitable.  Former slaves, now employees, were paid just once a year, but only after the year’s individual personal expenses were subtracted from the year’s earnings of each person. 

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