1860s

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.  Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation ...
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Abraham Lincoln’s White House was busy with citizens seeking favors for themselves and others, but on Oct, 29, 1864, he had a remarkable visitor. Sojourner Truth was the most renowned African-American woman of the 19th century, and she had come all the way from Battle Creek, Michigan, because she wanted to thank the president for emancipating the slaves. She had become well known in part for her ...
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The Reconstruction era was the period in American history which lasted from 1863 to 1877. It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights. The term has two applications: the first applies to the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War; the second, to the attempted transformation of the 11 former Confederate states from 1863 to 1877, as directed by Congress, and the role ...
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Secretary of State William Seward wrote it and Abraham Lincoln issued it, but much of the credit for the proclamation should probably go to a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. A prominent writer and editor, Hale had written the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” originally known as “Mary’s Lamb,” in 1830 and helped found the American Ladies Magazine, which she used a platform to ...
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Sarah J. Hale, a writer and the editor of a popular women’s magazine, Godey’s Ladies Journal, was born on October 24th, 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire. Her parents Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell believed in equal education for both genders, so Sarah was home-schooled by her mother. Later, Sarah became a local schoolteacher and in 1813 she married a lawyer, David Hale. Together, Sarah and her husband formed a small literary ...
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See the full 1862 proclamation from Abraham Lincoln, below. A Proclamation Whereas, it has become necessary to call into service not only volunteers but also portions of the militia of the States by draft in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure and from giving aid ...
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Alice was published in 1865, three years after Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (pseudonym Lewis Carroll) and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat, on 4 July 1862 (this popular date of the "golden afternoon" might be a confusion or even another Alice-tale, for that particular day was cool, cloudy and rainy), up the Isis (Thames River) with the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (the Vice-Chancellor ...
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