Should we celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation’s 150th anniversary?
Posted September 22nd, 2012 by James DeWolf PerryCategory: Public History Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Battle of Antietam, Battle of Sharpsburg, Emancipation Proclamation
Exactly 150 years ago today, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his first Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863:
… all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
Should we celebrate this declaration without reservation? Or should we, instead, see this as the anniversary of a tentative, morally ambiguous step, one which historian Richard Hofstadter declared to have “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading“? ((Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948).))