In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln confirmed his shift toward emancipation when he said that he was “highly resolved that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom.”
I paraphrase to say, “My hope is for an accurate chronicling of slavery and Emancipation.” Listening to recent discussions about a proposed National Freedom Day Holiday, I longed for more accuracy to the subject.
John Hope Franklin, 150 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, wrote, “The Emancipation Proclamation is seldom remembered and widely misunderstood.” Much expounded of late bore that out through articulations of the history and the proposed holiday. To unpack for better understanding and fact checking is my intent.
When President Lincoln was elected and sworn in as president in November 1860, seven slave states had already left the Union and formed a new Confederation. A mystic chord snapped — a fateful shot was fired — and secession became the Civil War.
Soon, a total of 11 of 15 slave states left the Union. Keeping the other four within the Union greatly influenced the strategy of the war and Lincoln’s path to issuing the Proclamation.
There were many transactions in the process of freeing the slaves. Lincoln signed legislation in April 1862 – which freed over 3,000 slaves in the District of Columbia. He turned to his executive power and informed his cabinet in July 1862 that he planned to issue an order emancipating the slaves, stating that his decision was firm — because “he had a talk with his Maker – and God decided the question in favor of the slaves.”
For reasons too lengthy to deliberate here, Lincoln delayed until the momentum of the war was more favorable to the Union. When that shift occurred, Lincoln, on Sept. 22, 1862, as promised, issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which included what amounted to an ultimatum to the Confederates — stop fighting and rejoin the Union within 100 days — or he would free the slaves in all states that remained in rebellion.
Excluded were the four border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware — because those four slave states remained in the Union. When Lincoln publicly announced his intentions, slaves began walking off the plantations into union lines.
A few weeks before a Jan. 1 deadline – December 1862 - Lincoln sent a lengthy message to a resisting Congress, asking one more time to pass legislation that would free the slaves. The night before a Jan. 1 deadline Frederick Douglas and others gathered in Boston on New Year’s Eve “to watch - for the dawn of a new day.”
This suggests that Watch Night, observed in many Black communities through the years, may be the oldest continuing celebration of emancipation. The next day, Jan. 1, 1863, word arrived that the Proclamation was signed; there was great joy and jubilation!
Frederick Douglass called the proclamation “a momentous decree.” A Maryland slaveholder said that “news of Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation struck the nation like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky”; an elderly preacher sang “sound the loud trumpets over Egypt’s Red Sea, Jehovah has triumphed, His people are free; another person warned “may God forget my people — if they forget this day.”
The Jan. 1 proclamation did not free all slaves but it unlocked slavery’s door, tilting the moral arc toward emancipation. Over the next two and one half years, wherever Union troops were present to provide protection, as many as 3½ million of 4 million slaves walked out into freedom and nearly 200,000 eagerly joined the Union Army and Navy.
In places where there were no Union troops to provide protection, slavery remained intact for another two years in seven states that were in rebellion and still holding slaves: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. A Union General, accompanied by Union Troops, went into these states to read the Proclamation as an enforcement document.
Union General Edward McCook and Union troops arrived at Tallahassee on May 20, read the Proclamation and began to enforce emancipation in Florida. On June 19, Union General Gordon Granger did likewise in Galveston, Texas. Likewise the other five states, on different dates.
Most noted/known celebrations have occurred in Texas and Florida, thus Juneteenth and 20th of May events. Eight months following Lincoln’s tragic murder, and seven months after Florida’s May 20, 1865 emancipation event and Texas reading, any question about the Proclamation’s legitimacy became null and void because in December 1865 — the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ending all slavery was finally ratified.
Until that day, Jan. 1, 1863, Frederick Douglas said “there stretched away behind us an awful chasm of darkness and despair — of more than two centuries; the American slave, bound in chains, tossed his fettered arms on high — and groaned for freedom’s gift — in vain; the colored people of the United States lived in the shadow of death… and had no visible future; it was doubtful whether liberty and union would triumph, or slavery and barbarism; victory had largely followed the arms of the Confederate army; the mighty conflict between the North and the South appeared to the eye of the civilized world — as destitute of qualities and that the day “should be remembered as if it was a thousand years.”
Within should be the impetus for the much talked about National Freedom Day Holiday.
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