It was issued by Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862. And it declared that all slaves in the rebellious Confederate states would be free. But Lincoln didn’t actually free any of the approximately 4 million men, women and children held in slavery in the United States when he signed the formal Emancipation Proclamation the following January. The document applied only to enslaved people in the Confederacy, and not to those in the border states that remained loyal to the Union.
