The Great Emancipator

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION:

Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 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...

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued."

NOTE - Slavery was NOT abolished in one Confederate (Tennessee) and four Union states (Maryland, Delaware. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri).

Mountain Roads, Take Me Home

"It may have been the summer of ’85, or may not have been, when I hitchhiked out of Washington, DC, which is the left ventricle of the heart of darkness, toward the coal fields of West Virginia. I was then on the low end of respectability, as I hope I still am. As a veteran of the long-haul thumb in the Sixties, hitchhiking seemed a reasonable way to travel."