"The Year of Jubilee Has Come" 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

Below is the text of an editorial by Rev. Samuel Chenery Damon. He was the publisher of The Friend, a monthly intelligencer in Honolulu. It refers to the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln. It went into effect on January 1, 1863.

We at History Education Hawaii, Inc., call attention to the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation coming on January 1, 2013. As best as we have been able to find there are no official celebrations scheduled in Honolulu. We'd like to change that by joining with our partners and friends in Hawaii. The significance of the Emancipation Proclamation did not go unnoticed in the Hawaiian Islands.

Please contact History Education Hawaii at our email, historyeducationhawaii@gmail.com, or call 808-721-0306.

Historically yours,

Jeffrey Bingham Mead

The Year of Jubilee has come.

Source: The Friend, Honolulu. January 1, 1863

(Note: Proclamation text appears in the February, 1863 edition)

To-day-January 1^st, 1863, -all the slaves in the rebel states of America are legally free, so declared Abraham Lincoln, as Commander-in-Chief of the military and naval forces of the United States. Near four millions are legally freemen to-day, who were slaves-chattel slaves-yesterday. What Congress could not do, neither the President as civil magistrate of the people, has been done by him as a military commander. Let no one of our readers imagine that we are so sanguine in our opinions, of short-sighted in our views, that we suppose the terrible struggle in America is about to cease. By no means, we are not sure as it has reached its acme. Conflicts in nations usually last in proportion in the length of time that the forces have been gathering, which give life to those conflicts. Now, as we read the history of America, two representative men –a Puritan freeman, from the yeomanry of England, and an African slave, from the coast of Africa-both landed in America in 1620. The one represented voluntary labor, and the other involuntary servitude. During more than two hundred and forty years they have been there at work. The question is now settled-shall freedom or slavery control the destinies of America? This is the question. The freemen of the North cast their vote for freedom. The slave-holders of the South, outvoted, unsheathed the sword, hence this struggle, fierce and bloody. The conflict could not be avoided. Anthony Trollope was right when he said the North must fight.

If there is anything which savors of puerility and childish gossip, it is to refer to the “Morrell Tariff,” or the antipathy of the Northern people to their Southern brethren, or of the Southerners to the Yankees, as the cause of the war. Other countries have their sectional differences far stronger, yet are living in peace. President Lincoln is right when asserting in his late Message, that slavery is the cause of the war. Could anything be more supremely silly than the position assumed by Bishop McCosky, of Michigan, in a sermon which he lately preached in Brooklyn, at the opening of the grave Assembly of the Triennial Episcopal Convention. The Christian Times, an Episcopal paper of New York, reports him to have made this statement, viz., that “our national calamities are all to be ascribed to the denial of the Apostolic Succession in the ministry of the church, and the rejection of the dogma of Baptismal Regeneration, the acceptance of which would go far to redeem us from the perdition to which we are hastening.”

The Editor, who is an Episcopalian, aptly remarks:

“More in sorrow than in anger, we pronounce this sermon an insult to the church; or, if endorsed by the church, then an insult from the church to the nation which protects it and guarantees it in all liberties, so that even such a sermon as this can be preached by one of its chief ministers.”

We cannot speak for others, but for ourself we can obtain views most satisfactory relating to the probably issue of the present struggle, by reading Hume, Alison, Hallam, Bancroft and other historians, who are deeply versed in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race and its branches. The Puritan element is more potent in the United States than some imagine. To suppose the leaders of the Southern rebellion will succeed in establishing permanently a confederacy of states with Negro slavery as the corner-stone, is to suppose them capable of throwing a dam across the stream of civil liberty, which has been running broader and deeper for hundreds of years- that stream commenced flowing more than a thousand years ago- “as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes.” The barons of England tried it in the days of the “wars of the Roses,” and in the language of Alison, “they watered the English plains with blood, from which has arisen a harvest of glory.” On one battlefield, thirty-six thousand Britons fell by mutual slaughter.

The Barons of the South,” (to apply to the slave-holders of the Southern States, an epithet coined by old John Adams,) have declared that they would decide the present “irrepressible conflict” by an appeal to arms. The freemen of the North accepted the challenge, and now the contest is raging. How long it will rage, no mortal can foresee-but longer, we fear, than some imagine. The political cancer –SLAVERY- which has been so long eating away the vitals of the nation, must be cut out. We hope there is vitality sufficient in the nation to survive the operation. If not, then Ichabod-thy glory has departed-must be written upon the nation’s ruins.

President Lincoln, speaking in the name of liberty, the age and the Gospel, proclaims freedom to the slaves in the Rebel States; and to the Loyal Slave States he would offer adequate pecuniary compensation for their slaves. What he has done, we believe the highest interests of humanity and the national welfare demanded, and had he done less, we fear it would have driven him from the White House. “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish,” we are for supporting the President of the United States in this important measure. He has but endorsed the Declaration of Independence. He has but renewed his oath to support the Constitution. We have no fears of the ultimate results.