A Bolt from the Sky
Seated at his desk in the afternoon, the president was fatigued. His right hand swollen and trembling from three hours of handshaking, Abraham Lincoln mustered the strength to write, slowly and unusually, his full name at the bottom of a document that he had pondered for several years.
It was Thursday, January 1, 1863, and America’s most sincere and vocal anti-slavery president—a man whose name and election had led to a secession crisis—had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in the rebel states “thenceforward, and forever free.”
It was an action that some of the founding generation wished but did not realize. In February 1790, Benjamin Franklin, aged and dying, implored the First Congress to secure “the blessings of liberty” to “those unhappy men” who were “groaning in servile subjection” by devising “means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people.” Summoning his inner fire, South Carolina’s Thomas Tudor Tucker rose to defend slavery and dismissed any talk of emancipation, warning presciently, “This would never be submitted to by the Southern States without a civil war.”
Seventy years later, South Carolina, citing “an increasing hostility… to the institution of slavery,” declared secession in response to the ascendancy of “Black republicanism,” and, believing that the Union and Constitution “rests on slavery,” urged her neighbors to form “a confederacy of slaveholding states.”
Now, for the first time since taking office, Lincoln could be justly condemned in the South for actually striking a blow at slavery. In the concluding paragraph, Lincoln wrote, “upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
“I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right,” Lincoln recalled. “My whole soul is in it.”
The proclamation was, at its core, a military policy. Those “of suitable condition” would be “received into the armed service of the United States.” In March, Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson that the black population “is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,” adding, “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled Black soldiers on the bank of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.”
A week before signing the proclamation, Lincoln laid out his vision for slavery’s end in his annual message to Congress. “The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation,” he had written. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” The president concluded, “The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”
Hours before the signing, Americans throughout the country, white and black, free and enslaved, awaited the midnight hour when the founding ideals would be a little more realized. “We waited and listened, as for a bolt from the sky,” Frederick Douglass recalled of New Year’s Eve in Boston, “which should rend the fetters of four million slaves.” When the news arrived, “Men, women, young and old, were up.” In celebration, “hats and bonnets were in the air, and we gave three cheers for Abraham Lincoln.”
“Whatever may be its immediate results, it changes entirely the relations of the national government to the institution of slavery,” one newspaper wrote. The military, “hitherto employed in hunting and returning to bondage the fugitive… are to be employed in maintaining his freedom… This change of attitude is itself a revolution.”
In the South, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who had two years earlier boasted of the rebel “cornerstone” of white supremacy and slavery, admitted that “the proclamation utterly destroys all prospects of a restored Union with slavery as it was.” Jefferson Davis, meanwhile, scoffed that “millions of human beings of an inferior race,” who lived “peaceful and contended” lives, were now encouraged to flee the rightful dominion of their masters. In the following months, the Confederacy threatened to execute any Union officer found to command black troops.
The proclamation was not a magic wand that at once burst apart the shackles of slavery from all who wore them. Until the day of Union victory, slaves “will work for their masters and wait for deliverance.”
More than two years after the proclamation, on Monday, June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas. “The people of Texas are informed that all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights,” Granger declared. Those freed “spent that night singin’ and shoutin’,” one contemporary recalled. “They wasn’t slaves no more.”
Thereafter, Black Americans held emancipation celebrations commemorating Lincoln’s “bolt from the sky”; by 1890, “Juneteenth” replaced “Jubilee Day” to describe June 19. “The old plantation melodies were transformed into a new song,” a Galveston paper wrote of celebrations in 1878, “and the sunshine of the dreams that once dwelt in their hearts burst full and fair.”
Socially measured, imperfect in scale, and militarily motivated, Lincoln’s act was, at the very least, an unprecedented step down the path toward slavery’s “ultimate extinction.” It was, as Jon Meacham wrote, “a battle against slavery gained, and not a war for full equality won.” Ratified by a prostrate Georgia on December 6, 1865, it was the Thirteenth Amendment that forever abolished slavery throughout all the land of hope.
On Thursday, June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Act, making June 19 a federal holiday. “We celebrate the centuries of struggle, courage, and hope that have brought us to this time of progress and possibly,” he said in a proclamation two days later. “Juneteenth not only commemorates the past. It calls us to action today,” reminding us to “make real the ideals of our founding.”