The Emancipation Proclamation
| THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION By John Hope Franklin. |
n January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the great charters of freedom in the history of civilized man. In this small book Prof. Franklin traces the pressures and obstacles that attended it, the actual writing of the document, the agonies of waiting for military victory to provide a propitious time for its issuance, its impact upon a people long oppressed, the celebrations and denunciations. It does not present the Proclamation with quite the splendor it rightfully might, nor reject unequivocally as it should all the rationalizations of our forebears for failure to apply the principles of the Declaration of Independence to 3,500,000 slaves; but it should help serve as a corrective to the cheap tawdriness of some of the centennial celebrations and the fact that a whole generation in some areas has grown up on the respectability of treason (for which historians much bear a fair share of responsibility). It does place the event and the document in their proper historical context, leaving little room for criticism.
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