Most of the slaves in the South were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, they had to wait until the Union Army got to where they were.
It is often said that no slaves were actually freed by the Proclamation because it only freed slaves that were in areas rebelling against the United States. Because of that, it only freed slaves in areas where the US had no control. This meant that the slaves were supposedly free, but there was no one to force the Southerners to free them.
Some sources (Wikipedia, for example) claim that 20,000 slaves were freed. But one college textbook I've used when teaching says "the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave."
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