The Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation
For Juneteenth, a little-known engraving of a world historical moment
Speaking to the National Negro Convention in 1843, pastor and newspaper editor Henry Highland Garnet spoke directly to the slaves of the United States in a controversial speech that would later become known as the “Call to Rebellion.” In it, Garnet conjured the full force of history, placing his addressees in a long tradition of rebellion and freedom:
Many a brave hero fell, but history, faithful to her high trust, will transcribe his name on the same monument with Moses, Hampden, Tell, Bruce and Wallace, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Lafayette and Washington.
It is to the dead that the living are accountable. He continued:
Noble men! Those who have fallen in freedom’s conflict, their memories will be cherished by the true hearted and the God fearing in all future generations; those who are living, their names are surrounded by a halo of glory.
The convention voted against endorsing Garnet’s call for open rebellion. Two decades later, on January 1 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of all enslaved in the rebelling states. It did not abolish slavery entirely — that task would be completed by the 14th Amendment in 1865, followed by the 16th in 1868, which established citizenship, and 16th in 1870 expanding suffrage to freedmen — but it imbued the war to suppress the confederate rebellion with world historical force.
News of emancipation did not reach all enslaved people immediately. Juneteenth, now finally a national holiday, commemorates the 19th of June, 1865 when freedom reached Galveston, Texas. In a war torn South, news from Washington arrived town by town and house by house. This makes it all the more remarkable that the 1864 engraving The Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation is the only known image of its kind. There are other Readings, depicting Lincoln delivering the Proclamation with his advisors (all white men, if it even needs to be said). But this piece, drawn by a bank note artist and published with an accompanying pamphlet by an obscure Connecticut mapmaker, is the only illustration of the delivery of the Proclamation to those for whom it mattered most.
Although Lincoln appears in a medallion at the bottom of the page, the hero of this picture is no individual but the spirit of history herself, moving toward emancipation. An anonymous, partially obscured Union soldier reads from a newspaper by torchlight in a cramped cabin to a group of men, women and children, who, in the instant of the image, discover their liberation. It is a message urgently delivered: the door to the cabin remains open and the soldier has not set down his pack or rifle. Publisher Lucius Stebbins included a description of the family in an accompanying pamphlet:
Old man at the right with folded hands, Grand-father; old lady at the left with cane in hand, Grand-mother; man leaning on the ladder, the father; woman with child in her arms, the mother; lad swings his hat, oldest son; little girl, oldest daughter; infant in the arms of its mother. Young woman with two children, the house servant of the master, not belonging to the cabin but happened to be in on the occasion. Party reading, Union Soldier.
The father, wide eyed and incredulous peers over the soldier’s shoulder at the paper, while his own father in the quiet dark of the right hand corner clasps his hands, eyes closed in a long and peaceful sigh. The young woman has fallen to her knees, her face full of pleading hope and body entwined by her young children who cannot understand that world history is coming into being in the torchlight.
It is a heroic and moving image, befitting the event it depicts. The 19th century revolutions in France are well documented by and thoroughly entwined with visual art, but the documents of America’s second revolution are rarer and more reserved. A 2013 exhibition of the art of the Civil War art the Met argued that the epic idealism of European history painting simply did not align with the messy realities of the American conflict. Modern art was being forged in Paris, not New York, in a pressure cooker of urbanization and rebellion while stateside the Hudson River Valley School discovered beauty in the vastness of the frontier.
American’s have a warped and fuzzy sense of the Civil War, no doubt largely due to the failure of reconstruction and simple racism which has henceforth refused to acknowledge the abolition of slavery as an event deserving of even a bank holiday. The cynic in me will point out that the establishment of the Juneteenth federal holiday is the only federal policy spurred by the massive protests of summer 2020, and that symbolic gestures are for art not politics. But it does seem to restore some faith in the higher trust of history Garnet promised the soldiers of freedom. It’s a recognition of the absolutely monumental accomplishment that was the abolition of slavery and the yawning gap between its promise and reality.