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However, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, though word of the edict would not officially reach Texas for another two and half years — June 19, 1865. This essay traces the road to the proclamation and also looks at how Texas was affected and why freedom for Texas slaves was so much longer in coming. On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln had established that all enslaved people in Confederate states in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” But in reality, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t instantly free any slaves. The proclamation only applied to places under Confederate control and not to slave-holding border states or rebel areas already under Union control. However, as Northern troops advanced into the Confederate South, many slaves fled behind Union lines.
The great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass called the Emancipation Proclamation, “The nation’s apocalyptic regeneration,” and it’s doubtful that anyone today can fully appreciate the enormity of that moment or the rush of emotions for the four million black people who destruction of an institution that was an affront to humanity gave new life and hope to a long-suffering people in a land predicated on freedom and justice for all. The document itself, barely 700 words in length, carried moral, political, religious and military meanings and is revered as one of the most dynamic in world history and the man who brought it to be, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is largely revered as the great emancipator – outside of the South.However, having defiantly watched as their ways of life and economy forever changed, Southerners solidly laid blame on Lincoln and viewed the president in much less glowing terms. However, while Southerners were the most vocal about keeping transplanted Africans in bondage – for agricultural and social reasons, most citizens of the New World that would grow into the United States of America had begun cultivating attitudes about the slavery from the moment the first slave ships docked in this country in the Virginia Colony at Point Comfort, on the James River, late in August 1619. There, “20. and odd Negroes,” as the manifest read, from the English ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some (if not all) of the Africans were then transported to nearby Jamestown and sold.And so began our sad relationship with the peculiar institution, as slavery has been called. The Virginians put Africans to work cultivating tobacco crops because of its similarity to farming methods Africans had developed in their home country, in this case probably Angola, in West Central Africa. As the colonies grew, so did the need for more field labor to grow the crop, but so too did the weight on the moral conscious of the burgeoning country begin to increase. The debate over human bondage vs. human rights in the name of the economy was a spirited one though the underlying and real debate was certainly about the value of one man’s existence and whether that man, because of his color, was inherently inferior in all matters, social, moral, and intellectual.
“Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” Genesis 1:26-27 (NKJV).
“For there is no partiality with God.For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law (for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified; for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them) in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel” Romans 2:11-16 (NKJV).
“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together” Romans 8:16-17 (NKJV).
“For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” Galatians 3:26-28 (NKJV).