Statement from President Joe Biden on the 160th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

January 1, 2023

On New Year’s Day, 160 years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln changed America’s destiny forever.  We were at the height of a raging Civil War, “a house divided” along the dangerous fault line of slavery.  During the one hundred days after the battle at Antietam, where more American soldiers were lost in a single day than in any other war, President Lincoln engaged in months of cautious deliberation.  His duty, he felt, was to do more than what he personally believed was morally right, but to represent the will of a fractured people.