COMMENTARY
Freeing black slaves changed tide of Civil War and the nation
"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom."
Signed
Abraham Lincoln, President
By Marsha Joyner
President of the Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition in Hawai'i
The sky, a pale blue-gray, greeted guests to the White House on New Year's Day 1863. The crisp, cold, bone-chilling north wind blew with the undertone of a dirge as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war.
Associated Press library photo
The Cabinet members, diplomats, high Army brass, naval officers, congressmen, federal judges and other dignitaries shaking hands with President and Mrs. Lincoln could not know of the pivotal moment in history that Thursday was to become. Everyone at the annual reception knew of the impending signing of the Emancipation Proclamation later that evening; not everyone was pleased.
The legacy of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863 to free America's black slaves, will be recalled as Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed tomorrow.
Long before President Lincoln had ever dreamed of issuing an edict of freedom, African Americans had been hoping and praying for such a measure.
Lincoln originally had conceived of the proclamation as a measure for the self-preservation, rather than for the regeneration, of America. But the proclamation, almost in spite of its creator, changed the tone and character of the war.
Blacks sensed this more quickly than did Lincoln.
Despite the proclamation's limitation, African Americans hailed it with much joy. The war, wrote Frederick Douglass, was now "invested with sanctity."
The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some very substantial practical results, for it gave the go-ahead signal to the recruiting of black soldiers. By midsummer 1863, Lincoln reported that "the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion."
The esteem that African Americans had for the proclamation helped to make it one of the most far-reaching pronouncements ever issued in the United States.
The proclamation soon assumed the role that African Americans had given it at the outset, and became to millions a fresh expression of one of man's loftiest aspirations — the quest for freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation did not have to await the verdict of posterity: Within six months, most Americans had come to regard it as a milestone in the long struggle for human rights.
"As affairs have turned, it is the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century," Lincoln reflected, as he sat in a pensive mood for portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter in February 1865. Later that spring, in the waning days of his life, in what was to be a rare moment of self-revelation, Lincoln confided to lifelong friend Joshua F. Speed that he had come to believe that his chief claim to fame would rest upon the proclamation. It was the one thing, he felt, that would make people remember that he had lived.
As we commemorate the 140th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, we must remember.
Those of us who come from an oral tradition must tell this story in every generation.
