Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought By Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation by Kirkpatrick Sale

Author:Kirkpatrick Sale [Sale, Kirkpatrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shotwell Publishing LLC
Published: 2015-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

IV. Afterwards

ON APRIL 16, 1888, black leader Frederick Douglass gave a hard-hitting speech in Washington, D.C. on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. He had recently taken a trip to the South and he was appalled at the conditions he found:

I admit that the Negro…has made little progress from barbarism to civilization, and that he is in deplorable condition since his emancipation. That he is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave, I am compelled to admit it, but I contend that the fault is not his, but that of his heartless accusers…Though he is nominally free he is actually a slave.

I here and now denounce his so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud—a fraud upon him, a fraud upon the world.

He went on to denounce the Southern governments for failing to secure the rights and freedoms blacks rightfully and lawfully deserved, but then placed the principal part of the blame on Washington: “Take his [the black person’s] relation to the national government and we shall find him a deserted, a defrauded, a swindled, and an outcast man—in law free, in fact a slave.”

There was none to dispute him. So much for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Seventy-five years after this denunciation another assessment of black progress was offered, this time an even hundred years after the Proclamation, on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, by the leading black activist of his day, Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

There was none to dispute him, either.

It is not necessary to labor through the details of that century of black-white relations in the South to know that the seeds sown by a misconceived, mishandled, and misguided emancipation policy bore bitter, bitter fruit—as how could they not?

Soon after the Democrats regained power in the statehouses of the South they passed increasingly restrictive laws over the black population, and white society found ways of eventually taking away, by subterfuge and practice as well as by legislation, most of the rights—most particularly voting (hence serving on juries and standing for office)—that had once been granted to them. Most blacks were disenfranchised by 1880s, and thereafter Southern states established poll taxes and literacy and property tests that kept almost all blacks (and many poor whites) from the voting booth.

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