Fifty Years of Freedom
FIFTY YEARS OF FREEDOM.
On the twenty-second of September, 1862, President Lincolnissued his Preliminary Proclamation, which was in the nature of anotice to the states in rebellion, that unless they returned to theirallegiance within a specified time the slaves within their borderswould be declared free. The time expired without accomplishingthe desired result. Accordingly on January 1, 1863, the Presidentissued his Supplemental Proclamation manumitting the slaves withinthe rebellious states. This did not, of course, set them free.They were still slaves and continued to be as long as the war lasted.Freedom did not come, as a matter of fact, until the surrender ofLee at Appomattox Courthouse April 9, 1865. The effectivenessof the Proclamation depended upon crushing the rebellion. It wasthe victorious army of the North, under the leadership of GeneralGrant, that gave efficacy to the Proclamation. For all practicalpurposes, however, we may assume that fifty years have elapsedsince freedom came to us as a race. Fifty years is a long timein the history of an individual, but not very long in that of a race.It is sufficiently long, however, to make it worth while for us tostop and think a little about what these fifty years have meant tous, and to see if there are any lessons in them that may be helpfulto us as we enter upon the second half of a century of freedom.
At the end of these fifty years we find:
I. That we have made considerable progress. We are notnow where we were fifty years ago. We are not as