(Host) New Year’s Day one hundred and fifty years ago was unlike any
other in American history. With the stroke of a pen, four million humans
stopped being under the law pieces of property owned by other people.
The slaves in the Confederacy won their freedom. Commentator and Vermont
Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert has the story.
(Gilbert)
January 1, 1863 was the date slaves and abolitionists had been waiting
for. A hundred days earlier, Lincoln had issued a preliminary
proclamation stating that he would order the emancipation of all slaves
in any Confederate state that didn’t return to Union control by January
1st. No states returned, and Lincoln issued the order.
In those
days presidents traditionally hosted a public New Year’s Day reception
at the White House; any citizen could attend and shake his hand. Lincoln
shook hands for three hours. After the reception, when he picked up the
pen to sign the proclamation, his hand shook. Lincoln remarked, "I
never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in
signing this paper," adding in jest that in future years people would
see his shaky signature and think he "has some compunctions." But, he
said, "If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my
whole soul is in it."
Not everyone was supportive. Historian
Carol Berkin tells us that the First Lady of the Confederacy, Varina
Davis, considered the proclamation an outrageous attack on property,
which, far from "disheartening Southerners… would produce a new,
steely determination among Confederate troops." Vermonter George Perkins
Marsh, Lincoln’s ambassador to Italy, didn’t like the means by which
the slaves were to be emancipated. He had written his wife, "The
proclamation is as foolish in form – not substance – as possible, and is
technically speaking, unconstitutional. Common sense would have
dictated an unobjectionable way of doing the same thing."
In
Vermont, just before New Years, the editors of the Burlington Sentinel, a
Democratic newspaper, wrote that with the proclamation, "the abolition
experiment will have been completed – its last card played out. With the
utter failure of that measure to bring the rebellion any nearer its
close… what will remain to Mr. Lincoln but to perceive and realize the
mistakes of his Administration."
But when news reached St. Johnsbury that Lincoln had issued the proclamation, bells rang for nearly an hour.
And
abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood that the Proclamation was a
revolutionary document that turned the war to preserve the Union into a
war to abolish slavery. He knew it spelled the end of slavery everywhere
in America. For him it was a "sacred text," along with the Declaration
of Independence.
In Boston’s Tremont Temple, a former theater
converted into a church, Douglass led an enormous congregation in the
hymn "Blow Ye the Trumpet Blow," with its refrain, "The year of jubilee
is come." And nearby, in Music Hall, Ralph Waldo Emerson recited a poem
he’d written for the occasion. In it, Randall Fuller points out,
"Emerson turns on its head the debate about whether slaveholders should
be compensated for their lost ‘property.’" The speaker in the poem, who
is God himself, says:
Pay ransom to the owner
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.