150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

I apologize for the lack of posts of late. However, quantity over quality has always been a motto of mine (except I’d prefer to have a quantity of trillions of dollars; but we can’t all have what we want).

Today, January 1, 2013, is a historic day. It has been 150 years since Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States of America, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation / The Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati, 1888 lithograph. Original image at the Library of Congress.

The National Archives exhibited the original document Sunday, December 30, 2012-January 1, 2013. There were other programs there in December and some others coming later in January.

The Emancipation Proclamation perhaps was best summed up by former slave turned abolitionist-writer/orator, Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass, circa 1850

“THE first of January, 1863, was a memorable day in the progress of American liberty and civilization. It was the turning-point in the conflict between freedom and slavery. A death-blow was given to the slaveholding rebellion. Until then the federal arm had been more than tolerant to that relic of barbarism. It had defended it inside the slave States; it had countermanded the emancipation policy of John C. Fremont in Missouri; it had returned slaves to their so-called owners; it had threatened that any attempt on the part of the slaves to gain their freedom by insurrection, or otherwise, should be put down with an iron hand; it had even refused to allow the Hutchinson family to sing their anti-slavery songs in the camps of the Army of the Potomac; it had surrounded the houses of slaveholders with bayonets for their protection….”

 

Much has been made about Lincoln’s motivations. Be not confused, Lincoln was opposed to slavery. Being opposed to slavery did not make him a racial equality person throughout his whole life. However, by the release of this Emancipation Proclamation, much about Lincoln’s feelings regarding enslaved people and their immediate future (at least) had been altered.

Lincoln’s final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was something different in American political discourse and in Lincoln’s own thought process for this document (points I summarize from Eric Foner’s book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010):

• The proclamation did not seek slave owners’ cooperation in emancipation.
• There was no mention of loyal versus disloyal owners.
• It was immediate and offered no financial compensation for the slaveholders.
• There was no mention of colonization or action from the specific states.
• For the first time really in American history, the Federal government would actively seek, train, uniform, train, and arm black soldiers. This is an often ignored portion of the document but by the end of the Civil War, of the approximately, 179,000 black men who served in United States Colored Troop regiments or in the few state regiments of black men, some 150,000 were former slaves (the remainder being free-born persons from North and South).

So with this in mind, I encourage all my readers to take a re-read of the Emancipation Proclamation (which you can find here along with the preliminary draft, a former slave’s interview, and a thoughtful commentary from the respected and revered historian John Hope Franklin.)

Twelve Years a Slave, One Year to Wait

I generally do NOT get excited about movies regarding historical subject matter; however, the subject of slavery, the true nitty-gritty aspects such as slave catchers stealing free blacks, whippings, sexual assault, rage of slaveholders and their wives, black women becoming what I like to call “common practice wife” (whereas it was illegal for whites and blacks to marry and yet it was not uncommon for white men to have an enslaved woman or women to have children with). The agricultural labors and in this case, the rarity of emancipation before the end of the American Civil War means that I am excited that a friend and coworker informed me today through her interest in  Benedict Cumberbatch (the new Sherlock Holmes TV series) that Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 will be turned into a full length film.

Northup was born free though his father had been enslaved in Rhode Island. He was looking for work when unfortunately he made a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1841 with two men who said they could find him work. Instead those men sold him to a slave trader and Northup ended up with a variety of slaveholders. Finally through a rare and unique way, he was able to communicate back to his family in the North and regain his non-slave status in 1853.

This image facing page 256 in Northup’s narrative illustrates what happened to an enslaved young woman named, Patsey.

Not much about the film yet but some details of who is playing who is here. The cast is composed of a mixture of veteran and well-known actors and actresses such as Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, and Alfre Woodard; and relatively new but good actors and actresses such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Chewetal Ejiofor (who will portray Solomon Northup). New to the scene in an American film is Lupita Nyong’o, who is a native of Kenya who has been involved with exploring the lives of young Kenyans through documentaries.

I am hoping  that Lupita’s portrayal of Patsey (read Northup’s memoir, it is a gripping account) will be as powerful as Denzel Washington’s portrayal of Trip in Glory (1989).

In the midst of the 150th anniversary of the end of legal slavery and the American Civil War, I truly hope that Hollywood will get this story right. They have the source and so do you if you didn’t know about this account before.