At Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church, the celebration of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation continues until after the sun rises. Today’s Boston Journal thus describes the scene of the prior night (at the Tremont Baptist Church) and early morning hours of this day (at the Twelfth Baptist Church): the grand demonstration in this city, yesterday,…
“Freedom’s Eve” has given way to the morning of January 1, the day U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln arises in anticipation of signing the Proclamation, only to be distracted by a message from General Ambrose Burnside who, following his defeat at Fredericksburg two weeks earlier, is offended by a…
Candles burn late into the night, signifying the coming of a new era in American history: “freedom’s eve,” the beginning of the exodus story of African slaves. Northern free blacks and abolitionists, as well as thousands of freedmen in Union-controlled areas of the South, unable to sleep in anticipation of the morrow’s Emancipation Proclamation, gather…