Emancipation Proclamation's 150th Commemoration

This month marked the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A number of our regular visitors to our news-blog have submitted a number of web-based resources we share here.

The National Archives and Records Administration features this page with commentary and images of the hand-written document. Click here.

"As early as 1849," according to PBS.org, "Abraham Lincoln believed that slaves should be emancipated, advocating a program in which they would be freed gradually. Early in his presidency, still convinced that gradual emancipation was the best course, he tried to win over legistators. To gain support, he proposed that slaveowners be compensated for giving up their "property." Support was not forthcoming." This resource is featured on the Africans in America section, along with a Teacher's Guide. Click here. 

Janell Ross of The Huffington Post on January 1, 2013 wrote in part, "After a few minutes, he took a pen, signed the Emancipation Proclamation and ushered in the beginning of the end of two and a half centuries of American chattel slavery, some of its attendant violence and human degradation. Exactly 150 years ago today, the Emancipation Proclamation -- a monumental document written on both sides of an ordinary sheet of White House paper -- declared slaves living in most of the South “forever free.” Click here for the text of her comments. 

Also in The Huffington Post we were forwarded this piece by Andre E. Johnson, The Rhetorical Meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Click here for the text of his words. 

The Virtual Services section of the Library of Congress has dedicated a section of the LOC web source to the Emancipation Proclamation and related documents and resources. Click here to view those. 

In an op-ed piece that appeared recently in the New York Times, Historian Eric Foner wrote, "ONE hundred and fifty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln presided over the annual White House New Year’s reception. Late that afternoon, he retired to his study to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. When he took up his pen, his hand was shaking from exhaustion. Briefly, he paused — “I do not want it to appear as if I hesitated,” he remarked. Then Lincoln affixed a firm signature to the document."  Click here for the full text of Mr. Foner's piece. 

National Review Online published this article by Gettysburg College Professor Allen C. Guelzo, on July 20, 2012. In part he wrote, "Granted, the 22nd of July has never been much of a red-letter day. No great battles to commemorate, no horrifying cataclysms, no lily-gilding birthdays. The one event that does hang a laurel around July 22 will still go largely unnoticed — despite being at the heart of great battles, a national cataclysm, and a new birth of freedom — and that is Abraham Lincoln’s unveiling of the Emancipation Proclamation to the startled members of his cabinet, exactly 150 years ago this Sunday." Click this link for the text of his comments. 

And finally (for now, at least), we'd like to share the text of an editorial that appeared here in Honolulu in The Friend, published by Rev. Samuel C. Damon:


The Year of Jubilee has come.
Source: The Friend, Honolulu. January 1, 1863
(Note: Proclamation text in 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.”