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…
Anticipation grows ever greater among free blacks of the North and Union-controlled South, as well as among many enslaved blacks in the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation is only two days away. Salvation from physical bondage is near, if only on paper for enslaved blacks within the Confederacy. Salvation of another kind is also on the…
Today the complicated dynamics of African slavery are on vivid display when, three days prior to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln‘s much-anticipated Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, now devoted to defending human bondage in the Confederacy, is forced by law to free some 200 slaves previously-owned by his wife’s (Mary Anna Custis) father, George…