I cannot remember having slept in a bed until after our family was declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation. Three children--John, my older brother, Amanda, my sister, and myself--had a pallet on the dirt floor, or, to be more correct, we slept in and on a bundle of filthy rags laid upon the dirt floor.
I found that this man had made a contract with his master, two or three years previous to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the effect that the slave was to be permitted to buy himself, by paying so much per year for his body; and while he was paying for himself, he was to be permitted to labour where and for whom he pleased.
The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was that some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper--the Emancipation Proclamation, I think.
As the final
Emancipation Proclamation states it: "by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion." The nation had moved from peace to war since his inauguration, which legitimated his war-making authority; in addition, Lincoln judged that the uneven progress of the war now called for eliminating the support that slavery gave to the southern war effort.
This goes as far as a reprinting of the
Emancipation Proclamation as the third appendix.
The volumes are "The Declaration of Independence" (9780761449133), "The Constitution" (9780761449171), "The Bill of Rights" (9780761449126), and "The
Emancipation Proclamation" (9780761449157).
Guelzo is Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President(1999) and Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004).
I founded Lemon City in 1865 after the
Emancipation Proclamation. I made its original inhabitants the beneficiaries of "the forty acres and a mule" promise, which awarded them free land in Virginia, and I made them descendants of white plantation owners, African Americans and Powhatan Indians.
Even vaguer and more frustrating to the British was the North's inchoate stance on slavery; for while a very small minority of abolitionists from the North were loudly pushing the war as a crusade against slavery, its president claimed to have "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists." (2) Indeed, the Federal government's position on slavery would remain unclear until the fall of 1862, when President Lincoln, freed from concern over the possible secession of the four slave-owning Border States, issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, which would go into effect 1 January 1863.