Tonya Bolden - Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty

Hilton Head, South Carolina, May 1862. Photograph by Henry P. Moore. The black people were the property of CSA general Thomas F. Drayton. The white man is most likely a Union soldier.

forHOWARD REEVES,
who truly cares about those
agonizing prayers of centuries

This book grew out of my article The Trump of Jubilee, published in ASALHs 2007 edition of The Woodson Review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bolden, Tonya.
Emancipation Proclamation : Lincoln and the dawn of liberty / Tonya Bolden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4197-0390-4 (alk. paper)
eISBN 978-1-6131-2977-7
1. United States. President (18611865 : Lincoln). Emancipation ProclamationJuvenile literature. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Juvenile literature. 3. SlavesEmancipationUnited States Juvenile literature. 4. United StatesPolitics and government18611865Juvenile literature. I. Title.
E453.B68 2012
9737.14dc23
2012000845

Text copyright 2013 Tonya Bolden
For illustration credits, see .
Book design by Maria T. Middleton

Published in 2013 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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CONTENTS

A birds-eye view of Old Point Comfort in Hampton Virginia (1861). The peninsula is dominated by Fort Monroe, known during the Civil War as Freedoms Fort. Lithograph by E. Sachse & Co.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN WASperhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century.... And I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed....

[P]ersonally I revere him the more because up out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacles of earth and his fight was within as well as without.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis (September 1922)

A HIGHLY SECRETIVEman, easy to underestimate, whose inner musings were for the most part unknowable, Lincoln remains endlessly fascinating to school children, scholars and all those who view his life in epic terms.

Larry Jordan, Midwest Today (February 1993)

THE PROBLEM ISthat we tend too often to read Lincolns growth backward, as an unproblematic trajectory toward a predetermined end. This enables scholars to ignore or downplay aspects of Lincolns beliefs with which they are uncomfortable.

Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (2010)

Tremont Temple, a Baptist church in Boston (ca. 1857). Lithograph by J. H. Bufford.

PART I

THE AGONIZING PRAYERS OF CENTURIES

WE WERE WAITING AND LISTENING AS FOR A BOLT FROM the sky... we were watching, as it were, by the dim light of the stars, for the dawn of a new day; we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries.

So remembered Frederick Douglass, speaking of a we that included the electric lecturer Anna E. Dickinson, the riveting Reverend J. Sella Martin, and some three thousand other anxious souls packed into Tremont Temple, a Boston church.

This we was waiting for word that Abraham Lincoln had John Hancocked a proclamation of liberation.

It was Thursday, January 1, 1863.

Blocks south of Tremont Temple, in snowy Bostons Music Hall, another crowd of abolitionists was waiting. Ralph Waldo Emerson was there. So were William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Absent from both great gatherings was the relentless Wendell Phillips, a lawyer by trade. He was in nearby Medford, waiting at the home of friends George and Mary Stearns.

ON NEW YEARS DAY, 1863, THE WAITING WE WASNT LIMITED to the Boston area.

Washington, D.C., had Henry McNeal Turner, the pastor of Israel Bethel, a church at the foot of Capitol Hill.

Waiting.

On a farm near Columbus, Ohio, there was the writer Frances E. W. Harper, ever poised to pen another poem.

Waiting.

As was Charlotte Forten, a schoolteacher on a South Carolina sea island, not far from Beaufort, where Harriet Tubman was based.

Waiting.

Just like Sandy Cornish in Key West, Florida, a man who had bought his liberty in the 1840s but who later lost his freedom papers in a fire. Worse, one night Cornish was jumped by fiends intent on selling him back into slavery. By dint of will and brute strength, Cornish broke loose. Then, the next day in the public square, he attacked himself.

Cornish slashed his Achilles tendons, drove a knife into a hip, and in other ways butchered his body. All to make himself useless for slavery. As he told the cowed crowd, he was willing to do worseanything but be a slave agin, for I was free.

Now, some twenty years later, like others who stood against slavery, the scarredbut freeSandy Cornish, about seventy, was waiting for that dawn of a new day.

FOR THE TRUE BELIEVERS in freedomthe enslaved, the freed, and those who had always lived in libertyit had been a very long wait indeed.

Since 1641, when Massachusetts became Englands first North American colony to legalize slavery.

Since 1770, when Crispus Attucks took two musket balls to the chest during the Boston Massacre.