The Emancipation Proclamation freed only 50,000 people while over 2 million stayed enslaved.

Evidence

In the next two years, Lincoln made himself available to writers, artists, photographers, and sculptors who memorialized him for the historical record as the Great Emancipator. With his proclamation, Lincoln emancipated about 50,000 Black people in the Union-occupied Confederate areas that January. He kept enslaved the nearly half-million African people in border states, in order to maintain their owners’ loyalty. He also kept enslaved the roughly 300,000 African people in the newly exempted formerly Confederate areas, in order to establish their owners’ loyalty. More than 2 million African people on Confederate plantations remained enslaved because Lincoln had no power to free them. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 591

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the Great Emancipator myth-making and how self-interest (border-state loyalty) shaped policy — connects to Kendi’s core claim that policy driven by interest precedes the ideas (Great Emancipator) that justify it.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The 50,000 vs 2.8 million problem’ — how a memorialized act of emancipation was in fact almost entirely symbolic, and what that does to hero narratives.