The City of St. Augustine and local groups might wish to consider sponsoring an annual event in honor of the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation here in our town.
In the name of healing, let's do it.
From St. Augustine Record, 2014 article by Stuart Korfhage:
Where History Lives: Emancipation Proclamation read here in 1862
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This lot on Cordova Street, across from the Lightner Museum, is where witnesses say the first reading of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation took place in 1862. By Taka Hamada, Special to The Record
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Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, left, greets Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., after at an event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Howard University to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Monday, Sept. 17, 2012, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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This lot on Cordova Street, across from the Lightner Museum, is where witnesses say the first reading of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation took place in 1862. By Taka Hamada, Special to The Record
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Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, left, greets Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., after at an event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Howard University to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Monday, Sept. 17, 2012, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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This lot on Cordova Street, across from the Lightner Museum, is where witnesses say the first reading of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation took place in 1862. By Taka Hamada, Special to The Record
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By Stuart Korfhage
Posted Sep 24, 2012 at 12:40 AM
Saturday marked the 150th anniversary of the release of President Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and evidence shows that slaves in St. Augustine were probably among the first to hear about it.
It’s impossible to prove whether St. Augustine was the first city in Florida where the proclamation was read publicly. However, Charles Tingley of the St. Augustine Historical Society said there are two credible sources that confirm the reading here in the fall of 1862.
“In Union-occupied southern areas that had slave populations, it would have been read then (September 1862) or shortly thereafter,” Tingley said. One of the accounts of the reading here comes from a personal eyewitness - although in 1934, 72 years after the event.
According to an article in The St. Augustine Evening Record, a then-85-year-old Mary Ann Murray remembered when “word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached here and, she said, all the slaveholders were ordered to release their slaves and allow them to gather in a large vacant lot west of St. Joseph’s Academy, where they were officially freed.”
Another account was relayed from a Union soldier to The Circular in Oneida, N.Y.
Local author and historian David Nolan referenced Murray’s account as well as the soldier’s in a 2004 article in The Record about the reading of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in St. Augustine.
That soldier’s description was detailed in Nolan’s article: “With the owners of the slaves, this announcement of freedom created the greatest excitement, for they felt its consequences. They had subsisted upon the earnings of the slaves, and it was a serious matter to them that their riches should take legs and run away.”
In his article, Nolan explained that not all slaves were freed by Lincoln’s proclamation. Basically, it was just the slaves in Confederate lands who were freed. Of course, the citizens of most of those areas were no longer acknowledging the authority of the federal government.
Therefore, Nolan states that St. Augustine, which was in Union hands in 1862 despite its location, was one of the few places where the slaves were actually freed.
“This was because the Union was a coalition of free and slave states, and Lincoln was afraid that if he freed the slaves in states like Maryland that had stayed in the Union, then they would immediately switch and join the Confederacy - resulting in a military disaster for Lincoln’s side,” Nolan wrote.
Although Emancipation Day is currently celebrated in April, there are other dates just as important to the ending of slavery in the United States.
The official Emancipation Proclamation was issued Jan. 1, 1863, and that made the first of the year an accepted day for the celebration of freedom.
That was the case in St. Augustine, and there is photographic evidence of a parade here in 1922 celebrating emancipation. Photographs of the event from Richard Aloysius Twine, a noted Lincolnville photographer, can be found in the state archives at www.floridamemory.com.
The only surviving copy of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting will be displayed in eight New York cities this fall.
According to The Associated Press, the preliminary proclamation served as a warning that if the Confederacy did not end its “rebellion” against the United States and voluntarily abolish slavery, then Lincoln would order the slaves freed on the first day of 1863. Lincoln believed it was a way to use his military powers to push to end slavery.
Lincoln drafted the preliminary proclamation over the summer of 1862 but held off on releasing it because of Union defeats. He felt there was enough of a victory when Confederate forces turned back after the Battle of Antietam in late August that he went ahead.
- The Associated Press contributed to this story
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Footnote: On my rounds as an undergraduate intern in the office of Senator Ted Kennedy, carrying press releases to three Senate press galleries, I often took the Senate subway to the Capitol Building, took the elevator to the second floor, walking up the marble steps to the third floor, past this venerable painting of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation:
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