The results of these earlier emancipations of the Negroes and the difficulties of European states in dealing with subject white populations were not such as to afford helpful example to American statesmen.

But since it was the actual situation in the Southern States rather than the experience of other countries which shaped the policies adopted during reconstruction, it is important to examine with some care the conditions in which the Negroes in the South found themselves at the close of the war.
The Negroes were not all helpless and without experience "when freedom cried out."* In the Border States and in the North there were, in 1861, half a million free Negroes accustomed to looking out for themselves.
Nearly 200,000 Negro men were enlisted in the United States army between 1862 and 1865, and many thousands of slaves had followed raiding Federal forces to freedom or had escaped through the Confederate lines.

State emancipation in Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and the practical application of the Emancipation Proclamation where the Union armies were in control ended slavery for many thousands more.
Wherever the armies marched, slavery ended.

This was true even in Kentucky, where the institution was not legally abolished until the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Altogether more than a million Negroes were free and to some extent habituated to freedom before May 1865.
* A Negro phrase much used in referring to emancipation.
Most of these war-emancipated Negroes were scattered along the borders of the Confederacy, in camps, in colonies, in the towns, on refugee farms, at work with the armies, or serving as soldiers in the ranks.
There were large working colonies along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Florida.