How many slaves were freed at the end of the Civil War?

Answer 1

Less than 200,000 were freed by Abraham Lincoln after the victory of the civil war and the Emancipation Proclamation, because Lincoln didn't have permission to effect slavery in some southern states.

Updated: It's actually a lot worse than this.

The Emancipation Proclamation (1862) was strictly a political move to punish the secessionist states of the Confederacy, which were economically dependent on slavery. Lincoln was willing to allow slavery to continue in states than did not secede from the Union, or who were willing to return.

There was also some thinking that advancing Union armies would be able to arm freed slaves and turn them against their former masters. This executive order did free about 20,000 slaves in Union occupied Confederate states, many of whom were drafted in to the Union army.

While is it factual the Lincoln and his Republican party campaigned against the expansion of slavery, if the states of the Confederacy had negotiated their position (as the states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware did) instead of seceding (1861), slavery might well have continued for another generation in the United States.

The much lauded Emancipation Proclamation did not really free (all) slaves, nor did it make slavery illegal (everywhere), and was not passed as a result of winning the civil war, but as a political move early in the conflict to facilitate the Union using slaves, both economically and as soldiers, to win the war. It did, eventually (1865), provide the legal framework used to free nearly all of the 4 million -odd slaves in the US after the war, but that decision was very controversial, and was why Lincoln was assassinated (1865).

Answer 2

This is only a partial answer. I know that from 10 to 15 million slaves were sold from Africa (primarily Angola and the Congo in West Africa) to Europeans and the New World (the Americas) between the 15th - 19th centuries (that's 1400s - 1800s). My information comes from a modern textbook used in a class that I teach at a college in Virginia.

Answer 3

There were about three and one half million slaves at the time of the 1860 census. Strictly speaking not every one of them was freed "in the war". Those in the border states which had not seceded, and the few remaining in northern states, were not freed until the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified a few months after the war ended, in the autumn of 1865.

Answer 4

0 - it took the 13th Amendment to free the slaves. Lincoln had no constitutional authority for the Emancipation Proclamation and he knew it.

Answer 5

No slaves were immediatly freed because the confederate states that it applied to were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863

Answer 6

All of them were freed because abe lincion made sure of it himself, because African Americans were people to.

Answer 7

Around 4 million.

Answer 8

300000

Answer 9

All