Part 5:
The effects of the Emancipation Proclamation, Taylor writes,
made one thing clear: place mattered. The president’s January 1863 order, with its carefully worded passages listing which counties in Virginia or parishes in Louisiana would be exempted, or which border states would still be allowed to enslave, was closely attuned to geography.1 It was a particular kind of geography, though—a fundamentally political one. The regions excluded were those deemed “loyal,” and thus no longer (or never) in rebellion against the Union, and those determinations were greatly influenced by the lobbying of local political officials. The places where enslaved people could go in the hope of finding freedom, then, would be determined by the perception of political loyalty and disloyalty among the white people living there.
While many students of the Civil War assume unfreedom for those in the exempted counties and parishes, and many escapees lived in dred of being returned to slavery, other policies prevented mass returns from 1862 onwards of those who had rached Union lines. According to Taylor, the significance of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation;
would come from its ability to do the political work of placating the loyal in exempt regions without stopping the military work of emancipation on the ground. Two policies already on the books would make sure of that. The Second Confiscation Act of 1862, which had declared “forever free” any enslaved person owned by those in rebellion against the Union, could trump the proclamation’s exemptions in some, but not all, cases. But even more significant, yet unheralded in history, was an article of war passed by Congress in March 1862 that had no name but simply declared that all Union officers were “prohibited from employing any of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning fugitives” and that anyone caught and convicted of doing so would be “dismissed from the service.”3 This sweeping order explains why none of the camps in exempt regions would close when the proclamation came down and why there was no mass expulsion of refugees in its wake: once inside Union army lines, all refugees, no matter where they came from or whom they belonged to, could, if officials followed the letter of this policy, stay there. [Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom (Civil War America) (p. 60). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]