At the height of the Civil War, enslaved men, women, and children sat together in Watch Night services all over America as they eagerly waited for Lincoln’s measure, the Emancipation Proclamation, to go into effect on Jan. 1, 1863. Along with the enslaved were free blacks and abolitionists intent on grasping the freedom they had collectively envisioned and relentlessly pursued through their advocacy, sermons, speeches, and courageous escapes.
They had little idea what their futures held, but the imminent realization of their human dignity in the land of their birth could not wait.
They could not have known that it would still be over two years before some of them were actually freed—after all, June 19, 1865, was when the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, the most western state of secession, with jubilant word of emancipation. It would be almost exactly 100…
