The US gov’t was bound by the US Constitution to respect property rights.
When the Union Army recaptured slave territory, it had to respect the property rights under state law, including the property right in enslaved persons.
The Emancipation Proclamation decreed, as a war measure issued under the President’s military authority, that enslaved persons in reclaimed territory were freed.
The Proclamation was enforced in the same way as the Declaration of Independence: by military victories, step by step.
The Proclamation immediately freed about 50000 slaves, and bit by bit freed around 3 million slaves. The “Lost Cause” CSA sympathizers have pushed the idea that the Emancipation Proclamation didnt actually free any slaves. That was a propaganda falsehood.
Not exactly. At the time, Lincoln was playing a delicate game of international law. For example, he almost screwed up when ordered the blockade of Confederate ports … well that’s what we call it now, a blockade. But you only blockade the ports of another country. If it is your own country you close the ports so Lincoln changed this wording at the last second. Similarly, the Emancipation Proclamation was a statement that the Federal Government had a right to free slaves in those area because they were still under the jurisdiction of the United States as the Confederate States did not exist as a legal entity.
As summarised in the Wikipedia article on the proclamation:
The Proclamation applied to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country, though it excluded states not in rebellion, as well as parts of Virginia under Union control and Louisiana parishes thought to be pro-Union.[8][9][10] Around 25,000 to 75,000 were immediately emancipated in those regions of the Confederacy where the US Army was already in place. It could not be enforced in the areas still in rebellion,[10] but, as the Union army took control of Confederate regions, the Proclamation provided the legal framework for the liberation of more than three and a half million enslaved people in those regions by the end of the war.
It means Abbott is bullshitting (…surprise…). He’s just using the same words Trump uses to impress the rubes even though they are inapplicable to what he’s talking about.
It is a common political trope of the Red Staters that people move away from Liberal dystopias to places like Texas in droves. And that especially when talking of places like NYC or Los Angeles or San Fran EVERY rich Liberal is a hypocrite who’ll flee allegedly high taxes and crime to a low-tax wonderland only to keep being a Liberal hypocrite.