“The cause of human freedom and the cause of our common country,” Douglass said, that Sunday, “are now one and inseparable.” Ninety-seven, ninety-eight. But Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, suggested a new ending, which Lincoln did adopt: “I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of almighty God.”ĭay ninety-six. Cabinet members suggested an amendment, urging “those emancipated, to forbear from tumult.” This Lincoln did not add. Was the President still planning on declaring an end to slavery, as promised? Lincoln reassured him: “He would not stop the Proclamation if he could, and he could not if he would.” On December 29th, Lincoln read a draft of the Proclamation to his Cabinet and he discussed it with them again, two days later. On Christmas Eve, day ninety-two, a worried Charles Sumner visited the White House. In October, slaves caught planning a rebellion in Culpeper, Virginia, were found to have in their possession newspapers in which the Proclamation had been printed seventeen of those men were executed. One hundred days? Not everyone was willing to wait that long. Isaac Lane took a newspaper from his master’s mailbox and read it aloud to every slave he could find. The Richmond Examiner called it “the inauguration of a reign of hell upon earth!” Within days, the news made its way to slaves in the South. The New York Times deemed the Preliminary Proclamation as important as the Constitution.
(The District of Columbia’s thirty-one thousand slaves had already been emancipated, by an act of Congress, in April.) Elsewhere, the response was mixed. “But will that deed be done? Oh! That is the question.”Īs soon as word got out, though, a crowd came to the White House and spontaneously serenaded the President. “The first of January is to be the most memorable day in American Annals,” answered Frederick Douglass. And not everyone was sure the President would stand by his pledge.
The hundred days free#
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln signed a document called the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that he would free every slave held in every Confederate state in exactly one hundred days, on New Year’s, 1863. Weary of the one-hundred-day-a-palooza? Not every span of one hundred days is as arbitrary as this one.
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