I hope you caught my post in December 2011 when I described my visit to Beaufort, South Carolina, for the Gullah Heritage Festival held at the Penn Center on the Sea Island of St. Helena. Reading the article below presented an interesting arc of Life for me: to connect two points on a continuum and imagine being present January 1, 1863 at the moment in time pictured in the article below~ the first day of the new year that the Emanicipation Proclamation went into effect ~ to the Life I Am today. Kindof like being in an Octavia Butler novel....smile.
During my visit, it's possible that I met descendents of those that were there in the oak grove that day in 1863. All I know is that the region, it's culture and history and the people it produced are wonderful and wonder-filled. I can equate their feelings in 1863, with my moment of joy and contentment, at being in the land of my father's foreparents, amongst my people, grounded in the land.
Beloveds~May your 2013 be rich in Health, Joy, Love, Laughter and constantly expanding Prosperity.
lovu,
Kentke
Don't miss the special Comment following the author's sources below.
The Grove of Gladness
By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE
As dawn broke across a cloudless New Year’s Day sky over the South Carolina Sea Islands, Charlotte Forten, a black Pennsylvania missionary who had come south to teach local freed people, set out for Camp Saxton, a waterside settlement on Port Royal Island, near the town of Beaufort. After a short ride on an old carriage that was pulled by “a remarkably slow horse,” Forten boarded a ship for the trip up the Beaufort River.
A band entertained the white and back passengers on the warm winter morning as they steamed toward the headquarters of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment made up of former slaves. By midday a crowd of thousands — comprising not only teachers like Forten but also Union soldiers, northern ministers and ex-slaves — had gathered in the largest live-oak grove Forten had ever seen. Located on a plantation a few miles outside of Beaufort, Camp Saxton was, according to Thomas D. Howard, another Northern missionary teaching in the Sea Islands, “ideal for the occasion.”
Why had they come? It was the first day of 1863, yes, but more important, it was the day that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was scheduled to take effect. It was, in other words, the moment in which Sea Island bondspeople — indeed, nearly all of the more than three million slaves who resided in rebellious Southern states — were to be officially declared “thenceforward, and forever free.”
Critics have long dismissed the Emancipation Proclamation as a minor document. It had, they say, no immediate impact on, or did not apply to, the vast majority of American slaves. By freeing bondspeople living behind Confederate lines, while exempting slaves who resided in the four loyal border states as well as in Tennessee and Union-occupied portions of Virginia and Louisiana, the president promised liberty only where he could not deliver it. The Emancipation Proclamation “is practically a dead letter,” wrote the conservative New York Herald on Jan. 3, 1863, “and for the present, at least, amounts to nothing as a measure of emancipation.”
Such criticism, however, overlooks several important facts about the Emancipation Proclamation. For one, it fused together the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery, at least in Lincoln’s mind. The president had spent the first year of the war insisting that he would not touch slavery where it already existed. His only goal was to restore the nation as it was. Now, Lincoln committed the United States to the idea that the preservation of the Union demanded an end to the institution of slavery. Most Confederate slaves would not realize emancipation on Jan. 1, but, with their future linked to the formidable Union Army, they would not have to wait long.
What is more, some bondspeople did not have to wait at all. The New York Herald admitted as much, conceding that “a few hundred slaves, here and there within the lines of our armies” had been liberated on Emancipation Day. In fact, Lincoln’s proclamation formally freed tens of thousands of slaves in Union-controlled areas of Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and North Carolina — as well as the South Carolina Sea Islands.
Library of Congress
The Emancipation Day celebration at Camp Saxton, S.C., Jan. 1, 1863.
At Camp Saxton and elsewhere, then, the first of January signaled something more than a promise: the Emancipation Proclamation was a tangible move toward the imminent death of an institution that had thrived in the region since the 17th century.
Emancipation Day ceremonies — which occurred across the North and Union-occupied South, from New Orleans to the nation’s capital — testified to the thrill of the news. Four thousand blacks paraded through the streets of Norfolk, Va., while runaway slaves, free blacks and leading abolitionists like William C. Nell and Frederick Douglass held a day-long observance at the Tremont Temple in Boston. Douglass later described the meeting as “one of the most affecting … occasions I ever witnessed.”
None of the celebrations, however, matched the ceremony at Camp Saxton. “When some future Bancroft or Motley writes with philosophic brain and poet’s hand the story of the Great Civil War,” wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, “he will find the transition to a new era in our nation’s history to have been fitly marked by one festal day, — that of the announcement of the President’s Proclamation, upon Port-Royal Island, on the first of January, 1863.”
The Massachusetts abolitionist presided over the day’s events from his perch on a platform erected at the center of the plantation grove. It was a remarkable scene, he later recalled: “The moss-hung trees, with their hundred-feet diameter of shade; the eager faces of women and children in the foreground; the many-colored headdresses; the upraised hands; the neat uniforms of the soldiers; the outer row of mounted officers and ladies; and beyond all the blue river, with its swift, free tide.”
Sitting next to Higginson on the platform were a dozen Union officers, musicians and dignitaries, mostly white. They stared out at a sea of black faces, many of whom were now Union soldiers. It was a stark reminder that even emancipation celebrations could not entirely escape the racial hierarchy of the day.
But at times, they did, as these were no ordinary commemorations. In fact, just a few hours earlier, the racial dynamic captured on stage had been symbolically challenged. As a ship full of emancipated slaves arrived at Camp Sexton, Northern soldiers, teachers, reformers and reporters — most of whom were white — gave way to the newly arrived crowd. “For one day, the tables were turned,” wrote Thomas D. Howard to The Christian Inquirer. “You know who have to wait, according to the general rules.” But “on the 1st of January, 1863, the steamer Boston was the boat of the colored people. The white passengers patiently waited until the small boats had carried them to the shore of their grove of gladness.” “Let them go first,” said one white passenger, “the day will be too short for them.”
The program began just before noon with a musical selection, a prayer and a recitation of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation — the final version was not sent out until later that day — by a local planter who had freed his slaves a quarter-century earlier. On paper, Lincoln’s proclamation may have had, in the historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous description, “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading,” but when read aloud to the crowd at Camp Saxton — who repeatedly interrupted the recitation with loud cheers — it was plenty powerful.
The real emotional chord that day, however, was struck by the freedpeople themselves when, midway through the program, they broke out in an impromptu rendition of “My country ‘Tis of Thee.” Just as Higginson formally accepted regimental “colors” — a silk American flag and a regimental banner made of a lightweight wool fabric called bunting — from the New York minister Mansfield French, “there suddenly arose, close beside the platform, a strong but rather cracked & elderly male voice, into which two women’s voices immediately blended, singing as if by an impulse that can no more be quenched than the morning note of the song sparrow.”
Soon hundreds of voices joined in. The singing eventually spread to the white officers and missionaries seated behind Higginson on the platform, before the colonel curtly commanded, “Leave it to them.”
By the end of the song, sobbing men and women erupted in applause. An Army surgeon, Seth Rogers, wrote that the freedmen and women “sang it so touchingly that every one was thrilled beyond measure,” while Forten deemed it “a touching and beautiful incident.” Higginson was more effusive. “I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap,” he observed in his journal. “Art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it.” It was “the key note to the whole day.”
Just one day earlier, Higginson had wondered whether locals even cared about Emancipation Day. “They know that those in this Department are nominally free already,” he noted, “and also they know that this freedom has yet to be established on any firm basis.” But the ceremony at Camp Sexton put an end to such doubts. “Just think of it,” Higginson wrote that evening, “the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people, — & here while others stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words these simple souls burst out in their lay, as if they were squatting by their own hearths at home.”
The spontaneity of the moment seemed to inspire the colonel, who offered lengthy off-the-cuff remarks from the platform. “I have for six weeks listened to the songs of these people,” he told the crowd, songs that more often than not evoked “sadness and despair.” Higginson had never heard them utter this hopeful hymn. “How could they sing it before to-day? Was it their country? Was it to them a land of liberty? But now, with this flag unfurled, ‘the day of jubilee has come,’” he announced.
Higginson then called the regiment’s color guard, Sgt. Prince Rivers and Cpl. Robert Sutton, to the front of the stage. After presenting the Stars and Stripes to Rivers, Higginson reminded his sergeant that it was his solemn duty to defend the flag with his life. “Do you understand?” asked the colonel. Yes, sir, responded Rivers. Next Higginson presented the bunting flag to Sutton and ceded the platform to his men.
Rivers, a freedman whom Higginson compared to the Haitian rebel leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, spoke first. He repeated his pledge that he would “die before surrendering” the flag, adding that he hoped “to show it to all the old masters.” Corporal Sutton focused his remarks on the emancipations that had yet to come. There was not a single person here, he told the assembled freedpeople, “but had sister, brother, or some relation among the rebels still.” The ex-slave then insisted that “he could not rest satisfied while so many of their kindred were left in chains,” before urging the 1st South Carolina to “show their flag to Jefferson Davis in Richmond.” The audience showered both soldiers with shouts of approval.
The program continued with another hour of speeches and songs, before the large group retired to crude tables to enjoy a feast of barbecued oxen, hard bread and molasses-sweetened water.
Then, in a fitting coda to the day’s events, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers demonstrated their newfound freedom in an expertly executed dress parade, their bright red trousers, which Higginson hated, the only reminder that the former slaves were any different than the hundreds of thousands of white Americans who wore Union blue.
By 4 p.m., the crowd began to make their way home from Camp Sexton. They boarded
the Flora, which headed north toward St. Helenaville, and another ship, the Boston, which sailed south for Hilton Head. Music filled the air as the black men and women, leaving “their grove of gladness,” in Howard’s apt phrase, once again broke into song. “The singing,” he wrote, “seemed to come from free hearts.”
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle are assistant professors of history at California State University, Fresno and the authors of the forthcoming book “Struggling with Slavery in the Cradle of the Confederacy: Memory and the ‘Peculiar Institution’ in Charleston, South Carolina.”
Sources:
Rupert S. Holland, ed., “Letters and Diaries of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-1864”; Brenda Stevenson, ed., “The Journal of Charlotte Forten Grimké”; Reminiscences of Thomas Dwight Howard, in “Charles Howard’s Family Domestic History,” 103, No. 3256-z, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Louis P. Masur, “Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union”; New York Herald, Jan. 3, 1863; Eric Foner, “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery”; William C. Harris, “Lincoln’s Last Months”; Allen C. Guelzo, “Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America”; Mitch Kachun, “Festivals of Freedom: Meaning and Memory in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915”; Frederick Douglass, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”; Liberator, Jan. 16, 1863; New-York Tribune, Jan. 14, 1863; New York Times, Jan. 9, 1863; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Regular and Volunteer Officers,” Atlantic Monthly 14 (September 1864) and “Army Life in a Black Regiment”; Christopher Looby, ed., “The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson”; Stephen V. Ash, “Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War”; “Emancipation Day in South Carolina,” Frank Leslie’s Newspaper, Jan. 24, 1863; Christian Inquirer, Jan. 17, 1863; Richard Hofstadter, “The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It”; Elizabeth W. Pearson, ed., “Letters from Port Royal Written at the Time of the Civil War”; Seth Rogers, “War Letters of Dr. Seth Rogers, 1862-3,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 43 (February 1910); John Niven, ed., “The Salmon P. Chase Papers: Correspondence, Vol. III: 1858 – March 1863.”
A noteworthy Comment from the article site I wanted to share with you~
walterrhett
Charleston, SC
For a brief historic description of the first emancipation celebration, began at midnight, Jan. 1, 1863, at Port Royal, South Carolina, see
: "A Glory Over Everything:" History's Invisible Veil: [http://wp.me/p1mBVu-Rl], pp. 41-47, 50. (Adjust the zoom if needed.)
It confirms many of the facts above, but cites family and historic African-American connections, including the presence of Harriet Tubman. Prince Rivers, mentioned above, had formerly been a carriage driver and had driven the Confederate general, New Orleans native, P. G. T. Beauregard into the city of Charleston to take up its defense. Later, in February, 1864, River's regiment, the 33rd USCT, would help drive Beauregard out of the city! After the war, Rivers was appointed a magistrate in the Aiken, SC area.
John Greenleaf Whittier composed an anthem for the emancipation event, sung by a chorus of newly freed school children. A grave site for one of the African-American soldiers, Pvt. David Sparkman, present at the ceremony and celebration (a member of Company K) is marked with a commemorative headstone in the Simmons cemetery on Charleston's Daniel's Island,
Peter Stevens, the bishop of Sparkman's church (Reformed Episcopal) was the Citadel commandant who ordered the firing of the first shot of the Civil War. He later baptized Sparkman's children. Blind in later life, Stevens was dependent upon the blacks he fought to keep enslaved for his care.
Jan. 1, 2013 at 12:42 p.m.
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