The same year that later contained the infamous Gettysburg conflict, 1863 saw Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st. This document articulated that the slaves in the rebellious states of the Confederate South were forever freed and that the military of the United States would do nothing to hinder their efforts towards freedom (though it had some geographical exceptions like the border states loyal to the Union). Opposing slavery but not racism on moral grounds, Lincoln utilized the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure against the South.
Since the Southern states had seceded, albeit on the asinine grounds of racial supremacy [1], and then formed their own government, the Union, and by extension the Emancipation Proclamation, nonetheless no longer had legal authority over them. Of course, legal authority is not the same as moral validity, so it is no authority at all on its own, and of course, the content of the Emancipation Proclamation would still be valid for all states if it aligned with morality. After all, if something is evil, it should not be done no matter the cultural and legal status of a region, and, if obligatory, it should be done no matter the social landscape.
If the proclamation was in alignment with anything logically and morally true, it could only transcend nations and their laws, despite how it would not legally apply to a breakaway, then-independent yet asinine government. A moral obligation is what one should do, which would make obeying only a morally valid human law obligatory, though Lincoln himself ironically denied the latter. In their efforts to support anti-racism, some people overlook all of this in their irrationalistic objections to a racial ideology that by necessity is logically false. They might indeed welcome appeals to human laws as long as living accordingly would bring about the society they have already assumed is good.
Not many people ever operate on anything more than whatever moral preference or emotion grips them in the moment, rather than on acknowledgement of reason, the logical possibility of any moral system consistent with axioms, and commitment to the only moral framework that actually has evidence pointing to it—that being Christian ethics since not only is Christianity consistent with logical necessities in ways some might not ever realize [2], but it also has a great deal of historical evidences in its favor, including non-Christian documents supporting the seeming historicity of Christ as presented by the Bible. Conscience is purely subjective and has nothing to do with morality itself; social customs and legal decrees are just meaningless cultural constructs unless there are actual, objective obligations they are perfectly rooted in.
Now, racism is logically erroneous either way since the color of someone's skin does not make them more or less human, having no connection to their worldview, personality, and talents. What one person of a given race is like in these regards does not dictate which of the many possible ideological orientations or personalities someone else has (though only some ideologies are logically possible, it is possible for people to believe all sorts of true or false things no matter their skin color). The moral nature of racism and that of slavery would still not be determined by personal or public sentiment or by a a proclamation from any government one way or another.
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