Is Emancipation stunted by a quick Union victory?

What if prior to January 1863 (the date of the EP) the Union has either already won the American Civil War or is simply in the process of mopping up? Would Lincoln be able to apply Emancipation to his war aims or a full blown abolition of slavery?

IOTL Lincoln was eventually able to weave slavery into his primary war goal, the preservation of the Union and did so very skilfully to avoid alienating Copperheads and the Border States. However a big part of what allowed him to the do this was the length and cost of the war.

Emancipation only effected those slaves still behind enemy lines at first, so even if he does pass it, it might only effect the Deep South.

Could we see slavery survive in various states even with a Union victory?
 
Even with a short war slavery was done. A quickly victorious North would still be anti-slavery but without a long drawn out war they'd be more willing to compromise. I think slavery's end would be a lot less sudden, possibly with some reparations to the slave holders for their loss. The thirteenth amendment would probably have promised to end slavery by 1870 or some period in the future.

I don't think it would have been a good thing. With a more gradual approach Jim Crow and anti-black laws are going to be in place before it ends. They're going to go straight from slavery to an apartheid-like rule.
 

katchen

Banned
De Jure slavery was done. But we need only see how quickly the Southern states went from de jure slavery to de facto slavery OTL once the Northern armies were no longer occupying their soil to see harbingers of what the result of a quick Northern victory and no northern occupation would be. I recommend that EVERYONE READ "Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas Blackmon. It's in all university libraries, in most public libraries and probably assigned reading in a lot of college level US history courses.
Put it this way. It is easy for Southern plantation owners who have received northern University educations to understand how the manor system and serfdom worked in the High Middle Ages and how peonage is working in neighbouring Latin American countries. Plantation owners still own and control the land. And they still control the legislatures. And they will still have representation in Congress.
Without a 14th Amendment, the Southern States will be able to pass their "black codes" , treating any African-American who strays from his or her plantation as a "vagrant" whose labour can be sold by the county for a term of years. And OTL, railroads and mines and some plantations bought up those "convicts". Those of us who have watched "Gone With The Wind" will remember that Scarlett O'Hara buys the slave labor of convicts too, much as she hates to do it.
So yes, there will be a 13th Amendment de jure abolishing slavery ITTL. But no 14th Amendment binding the states to the Bill of Rights (states will still be able to abridge those rights or define citizenship however it pleases them) and no 15th Amendment extending voting rights, which will also be exclusively determined by the States. :(:mad:Abolition of slavery under these circumstances will simply be window dressing. In fact it may be even worse, since without those two Amendments, Northern and Western States will be free to copy whatever aspects of the Southern System northern industrialists may find useful. If anything resembling the 14th Amendment passes Congress and gets sent to the States, in the next 50 to 100 years, it will most likely apply exclusively to corporations--unless the pressures that are bottled up by this retreat to serfdom finally result in revolution. Which would make this a very interesting, if dark and dystopian TL to play out indeed.
 
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