Just call her General North Star

Harriet Tubman has (finally!) been posthumously recognized as a one-star brigadier general in Maryland’s National Guard. At a ceremony on Nov. 11, 2024, officials in her home state honored her military service during the American Civil War.

Born Araminta Ross about March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman escaped slavery in 1849 and settled in Philadelphia.

She established the Underground Railroad and guided many "passengers" to freedom. Tubman then acted as a scout, spy, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War, before she led an expedition of 150 Black soldiers of the 2nd South Carolina Infantry on a gunboat raid in South Carolina.

The Combahee River Raid (also known as the Raid on Combahee Ferry) was conducted on June 1-2, 1863, along the Combahee River in Beaufort and Colleton counties in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

There the Union ships rescued and transported more than 750 former slaves freed five months earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation, many of whom joined the Union Army.

Gov. Wes Moore called the Veterans Day occasion not just a great day for Tubman’s home state but for all of the United States.

“She knew that in order to do the work, that meant that she had to go into the lion’s den,” Moore said. “She knew that leadership means you have to be willing to do what you are asking others to do.”

Something many of our current leaders have forgotten.

General Tubman, I salute you.

Henceforward shall be free

I'm more of an email kinda gal myself, but I do like the look of this new stamp.

According to usps.com:

With the 2013 Emancipation Proclamation (Forever®) stamp, the U.S. Postal Service commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln signed on January 1, 1863.

Lincoln's proclamation, issued nearly two years into the Civil War, declared that all slaves in the rebel states of the Confederacy “are, and henceforward shall be free.” In addition, the document authorized the recruitment of black soldiers into the Union army. Their courage in battle and contributions to the Union's ultimate victory greatly influenced the nation to adopt the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, outlawing slavery forever.

“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,” Lincoln wrote in a message to Congress one month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation. A nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” at last began the journey toward true liberty and justice for all.

Art director Antonio Alcalá worked with graphic designer Gail Anderson of New York City to produce the stamp. To evoke the look of broadsides from the Civil War era, they employed Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee, one of the oldest working letterpress print shops in America.

The Emancipation Proclamation stamp is one of a civil rights set being issued in 2013. The Postal Service is issuing two other stamps in 2013 to commemorate significant anniversaries in the struggle for African-American civil rights. One of them celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Parks; the other has not been unveiled at the time of this writing.

The Emancipation Proclamation stamps are being issued as Forever stamps in self-adhesive sheets of 20. Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce rate.

With malice toward none

I don't know about you, but I can not wait to see the new Lincoln moving picture.

Lincoln is a 2012 biographical war drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th United States President Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln.

The film is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and covers the final four months of Lincoln's life.

In a nation divided by war and the strong winds of change, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of generations to come.

Have you seen it yet?

This week in the Civil War: Sept. 23, 1862

Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation

President Abraham Lincoln has just announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862. This week 150 years ago in the Civil War, a nation divided is just beginning to absorb the blunt message that Lincoln's war will now be a war against slavery in addition to a fight to reunite North and South. Lincoln declares that if the rebels do not end their fight and rejoin the Union by Jan. 1, 1862, all slaves in the rebellious states would be deemed "forever free" from that time forward. His move comes a week after the bloody fighting at Antietam. After the battle, The Associated Press reported on Sept. 20, 1862, that hundreds of Confederate stragglers were captured as Robert E. Lee's battered Army of Northern Virginia retreated southward from Maryland across the Potomac River. It added: "The Confederate army has succeeded in making its escape from Maryland." AP's account of the fighting in Maryland gives new details of the harrowing ordeal for local residents, many of whom hid in their cellars to escape heavy shelling. AP also reports the Antietam losses for the rebels in dead and wounded "will not come far from 18,000 to 20,000" casualties. Modern-day estimates of the battle have put the overall casualty count at 23,100 dead, missing and wounded. Elsewhere, Confederates who encroached on Kentucky in the summer of 1862 have skirmished with Union forces. But those engagements are overshadowed by the enormity of the Battle of Antietam. Even so, Union soldiers will eventually force the Confederates in Kentucky to withdraw to Lexington and ultimately leave the state for the most part in October 1862.

This Week in The Civil War: July 22, 1862

First inklings of a future Emancipation Proclamation

President Abraham Lincoln, amid the dawning awareness of a divided nation that the Civil War would not be ended quickly, confides with his cabinet on July 22, 1862, that he was preparing an initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation -- what would become one of the defining documents of his presidency. But his cabinet advised him not to make any public announcement of a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation until after a Union victory -- an opportunity that would not present itself until after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. That September, Lincoln would declare all slaves in those areas still in rebellion against the federal government to be free within 100 days. Essentially, Lincoln signaled to his cabinet, 150 years ago this week in the Civil War, that he would make the conflict as much a war on ending the secession as a war to win the freedom of slaves, adding moral force to the Union cause. This July 150 years ago, the Union was absorbing the reality that its top general had essentially failed in his large-scalle campaign to seize Richmond, Va., capital of the Confederacy. And fighting is continuing elsewhere as the bloody conflict drags on. The Associated Press reported on July 27, 1862, from Nashville that Union forces in Tennessee were being harassed regularly by guerrillas of a bold Confederate cavalry leader, Nathan Bedford Forrest. The tenth Ohio regiment guarding the Memphis and Charleston railroad near Nashville was the latest to fall under attack this week by a "large force of guerillas," AP reported. "Thirty or forty of the regiment are said to have been killed." AP reported. The dispatch added Forrest was reported to be now en route from Tennessee to Kentucky "with the object it is supposed of making a descent on the Louisville railroad."

Juneteenth

Today is one of my favorite holidays.

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is a holiday in the United States commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas in 1865.

Although President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, with an effective date of Jan. 1, 1863, it had minimal immediate effect on most slaves’ day-to-day lives, particularly in the Confederate States of America.

Texas, as a part of the Confederacy, was resistant to the Emancipation Proclamation and while slavery was prevalent in east Texas, it was not as common in west Texas.

Juneteenth commemorates June 18 and 19, 1865. June 18 is the day Union General Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves.

Legend has it that while standing on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa on June 19, 1865 , Granger read the contents of “General Order No. 3”:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Former slaves in Galveston rejoiced in the streets with jubilant celebrations. Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas the following year. Across many parts of Texas, freed people pooled their funds to purchase land specifically for their communities and increasingly large Juneteenth gatherings — including Houston’s Emancipation Park, Mexia’s Booker T. Washington Park, and Emancipation Park in Austin.

As of June 2011, 41 states and the District of Columbia have recognized Juneteenth as either a state holiday or state holiday observance.

Ode to Phillis

On this date in history, my Dear Friend Phillis Wheatley was finally freed from slavery.

Momma's Phillis Wheatley

Phillis was the first published African American poet and first African-American woman whose writing was published. Probably born in Gambia, Senegal, she was made a slave when she was about 7-years-old. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write, and encouraged her poetry.

Phillis' intelligence and writing was an astonishment to many white people and she had to prove in court (including John Hancock) in 1772 that she was smart enough to write! Their signed attestation was later published in the preface of her book. 

Phillis visited England for five weeks in 1773 (accompanying her master's son) where admirers of her poetry raised the funds for the publication of her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. (The book was published in London because Boston publishers refused to.) 

Although relatively well treated by her owners, Phillis was finally freed on Oct. 18, 1773 and she married about three months later. However, her husband was imprisoned for debt in 1784 and she became ill and died on Dec. 5, 1784.

Phillis had to be careful what she said or wrote but stated in her July 1778 poem, On the Death of General Wooster:

But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with th' Almighty mind—
While yet (O deed Ungenerous!) they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric's blameless race?

I like to think I look a little like her.

The Banned Adventures of Huck Finn

It's no wonder Mark Twain laughed at people who read (or claimed to have read) his classic book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and wanted it banned.

Like many of his works, it's a satire.

sat·ire [sat-ahyuhr]
noun 

1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. 

2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.

3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

Twain was an ardent abolitionist who said, “Lincoln's Proclamation ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also." 

He deliberately wrote Huck Finn to illustrate the evils of slavery and racism. (Huck Finn was published 20 years after the end of the Civil War. Slavery was gone but not racism.)

One example was both Huck and Jim run away: Huck from an abusive father and Jim from slavery. This parallel was to draw attention to the fact that while some thought Huck's running away was perfectly justified, Jim's was not.

Huck Finn was banned shortly after its 1885 U.S. publication in many locations. As usual, Twain fired back at his critics,

"I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave."

When his book Eve's Diary was banned in 1906 from the Charlton Public Library Twain said,

"the truth is, that when a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me."

What's funny is that the use of the now controversial N-word was not what made Adventures of Huckleberry Finn controversial back in its day. What made it controversial was Huck actually sweated!

And scratched!

(The proper word would have been "perspired." Uh huh. Obviously the critics hadn't spent much time by the Mississippi River!)

Oh, and as for the above dictionary listing? Did you know the dictionary (the dictionary!) has been banned in some places because it contains words not appropriate for young children?

Kinda makes me want to go read the dictionary next....

I see you shiver with Emanci...pation

One morning, while we were still slaves, Momma woke me by singing:

We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway, yay
And I wonder if I'm really with you now
Or just chasin' after some finer day

Emancipation, emancipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'

With apologies to Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863

and Carly Simon's Anticipation song of 1971.

President Abraham Lincoln first discussed the Emancipation Proclamation with his cabinet in July 1862. He believed he needed a Union victory on the battlefield so his decision would appear positive and strong.

The Battle of Antietam, in which Union troops turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland, gave him that opportunity. Five days after Antietam, Lincoln called his cabinet into session on Sept. 22, 1862 and issued the Preliminary Proclamation.

Lincoln told his Cabinet that he had made a covenant with God - that if the Union drove the Confederacy out of Maryland, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Preliminary Proclamation declared that all slaves (with some exceptions) in states that were still in rebellion as of Jan. 1, 1863, would be free. One hundred days later, with the Confederacy still in full rebellion and the nation approaching its third year of bloody Civil War, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Emancipation Proclamation also allowed for the enrollment of freed slaves into the United States military. During the war nearly 200,000 blacks, most of them ex-slaves, joined the Union Army. Their contributions gave the North additional manpower that was significant in winning the war. The Confederacy did not allow slaves in their army as soldiers until its final months.

Total abolition of slavery was ratified by the Thirteenth Amendment which took effect in December 1865.

One nation indivisible

I have been reading about the Cherokee Freedmen Controversy with increasing interest (and sadness) and finally have to say something.

When will color stop being an issue?

Historically, some members of the Cherokee Nation had African American slaves. At first their slaves were more like indentured servants who were either freed after a certain time or adopted into the Cherokee Nation. Sadly, exposure to U.S. settlers changed their views and the slaves became chattel.

Did those African Americans have a choice? No.

Did they have a choice when told to relocate to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears? No.

About the only choice they seem to have been given was whether or not they wanted to be members of the Cherokee Nation after the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War and the signing of the Treaty of 1866:

"All native born Cherokees, all Indians, and whites legally members of the Nation by adoption, and all freedmen who have been liberated by voluntary act of their former owners or by law, as well as free colored persons who were in the country at the commencement of the rebellion, and are now residents therein, or who may return within six months from the 19th day of July, 1866, and their descendants, who reside within the limits of the Cherokee Nation, shall be taken and deemed to be, citizens of the Cherokee Nation."

So now, 145 years later, the Cherokee Nation wants to remove the Freedmen who have no Cherokee blood.

Who cares if their ancestors were essentially adopted into the Nation. How would you like it if your adopted family said you were no longer part of the family and kicked you out?

Sadly, the Cherokee Nation seems to have learned only one thing about treaties in the past 200 years: they are meant to be broken.

I'm not saying anyone should be able to become Cherokee just by wanting to sign up. You need either a blood tie or be the descendant of one of the Cherokee slaves.

Basically, I think this article sums it up. The rights of the Freedmen have been stripped just before the Sept. 24 special election because Chief Chad Smith apposes their membership while incumbent Bill John Baker supports them.

Hmm....

On the Net: http://newsok.com/attorney-for-cherokee-freedmen-questions-timing-of-tribal-court-ruling/article/3597492

The Show-Me State

Well, two important dates in Missouri's state history have certainly shown me not to judge too quickly.

On Aug. 10, 1821, Missouri entered the United States as the 24th state as part of the Missouri Compromise. Forty years later, on Aug. 10, 1861, the first major Civil War battle west of the Mississippi River was at Wilson's Creek, Mo.

The Missouri Compromise was an agreement between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress. It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30' north except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri.

During the Civil War, Missouri was a border state that sent men and supplies to both sides, had its star on both flags, had separate governments representing each side, and endured an internal war that pitted neighbor-against-neighbor.

Though Confederate troops staged some large-scale raids into Missouri during the Civil War, the fighting in the state was primarily guerrilla warfare by "citizen soldiers" such as Frank and Jesse James.

By the end of the Civil War Missouri had supplied nearly 110,000 troops to the Union and about 40,000 troops for the Confederate Army. There were more than 1,200 battles and skirmishes in all areas of the state. Only Virginia and Tennessee exceeded Missouri in the number of clashes within the state boundaries.

As one of the border states, Missouri was exempt from President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation decreeing the freedom of slaves in Confederate territory. Governor Thomas C. Fletcher ended slavery in Missouri on Jan. 11, 1865, three months before General Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865.

Missouri, I thank you. I did not know.