It’s been said that not a single slave was freed when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation 152 years ago on January 1, 1863. It’s not true. The act was limited in its scope: Rebel areas that had been under Union control throughout the war, like Tennessee and New Orleans, were exempted. Slave-holding border states that had never joined the Confederacy, like Maryland and Kentucky, were allowed to keep their slaves…at least for the moment. And the vast majority of the 3 million slaves still held as property throughout the South were beyond the reach of Lincoln’s proclamation on the day it took effect.

But there were numerous places throughout the South where the Union had established zones of control within rebellious states. In these places, somewhere between 20,000-50,000 slaves were immediately and forever freed. In places like Corinth, Mississippi; Winchester, Virginia; the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina; and Key West, Florida, freedom celebrations were held as slaves were told about the proclamation on New Year's Day.

Booker T. Washington later recalled the day, when he had been a 9-year-old boy: “As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. … [On January 1] My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.”

The remaining slaves throughout the Confederacy would be freed gradually as the Union Army advanced throughout the South. And exempted areas in the border states and elsewhere saw the writing on the wall as well. The Union had explicitly committed itself to the eradication of slavery, which would become a reality across the entire country by 1865.

For all of the humanitarian good it achieved, the Emancipation Proclamation was first and foremost a political document, with political aims. Lincoln knew that the only real hope the South had to win the war was to pull in foreign aid from Great Britain. As long as the South could be claiming to fight for its own independence, it could plead its cause in Europe. The Union needed a cause more noble than “union” to sideline the Europeans. By committing itself to wiping out slavery, the Union automatically forced the Confederacy into the position of defending it. This made it impossible for England to intervene on the South’s behalf, and inspired countless slaves to flee for Union lines, where they would don blue uniforms and swell the Northern ranks. With England out and slaves in full revolt, the proclamation all but guaranteed victory by the economically and industrially superior North.

This calculation, combined with Lincoln’s own words, have cast his position as the Great Emancipator in a complicated light. But Lincoln seems to have been a genuine abolitionist at heart, if a cautious politician in practice. After the Union victory at Antietam drove out a Confederate invasion of Maryland in 1862, Lincoln saw his opening…a rare window where his moral intuitions and the dictates of his office aligned perfectly. He claimed to have made a bargain with God: If the North could drive the rebels out of Maryland, he would issue the proclamation to free the slaves. (He needed a decisive victory first, so the proclamation wouldn’t seem to be an empty threat issued by a losing army.) God seems to have held up His end of the bargain…and Abraham Lincoln, for whatever combination of reasons, responded by breaking the shackles that had enslaved millions. Happy New Year.

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