"Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863.
We're still doing it in 2011."
No! No! No!
Abraham Lincoln did not free the slaves in 1863.
On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
He declared that all slaves in state in rebellion against the United States would be henceforth forever free.
He did not touch the status of slavery in the border states, for fear of pushing them into joining the Confederate states, and thus forcing the seat of Federal Government to flee North.
He and his military possessed not police power to enforce this declaration, an act of executive fiat published with the greater interest of dissuading semi-sympathetic causes to the South.
Abraham Lincoln abhorred slavery, and he was politically minded to do everything in his power to end the detestable practice. Yet he was politically minded to do so in a manner which would maintain the integrity and prestige of the United States, a nation fraught with division, nearly destroyed by the near-successful uprising of states-rights forces South of the Mason-Dixon Line.
A precipitous withdrawal from such illiberal immorality was the most expedient and acceptable means fr ending the Peculiar Institution. The Civil War forced him, and the nation, to end slavery once and for all.
Yet Lincoln's Proclamation alone did not effect this grand release of freedom, stalled by two more years of savage resistance from the Confederacy. Following the de jure termination of involuntary servitude in 1865, there followed the Long Night of segregation, upended in the heated protests of the Civil Rights Movement.