How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

All slaves are free. The four words circled the room like birds that had been separated from their flock. I watched people’s faces as Stephen said these words. Some closed their eyes. Some were physically shaking. Some clasped hands with the person next to them. Some simply smiled, soaking in the words that their ancestors may have heard more than a century and a half ago. Being in this place, standing on the same small island where the freedom of a quarter million people was proclaimed, I felt the history pulse through my body. General Granger and his forces arrived in Galveston more than two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s famous surrender. A document that is widely misunderstood, Lincoln’s proclamation was a military strategy with multiple aims. It prevented European countries from supporting the Confederacy by framing the war in moral terms and making it explicitly about slavery, something Lincoln had previously backed away from. As a result, France and Britain, which had contemplated supporting the Confederacy, ultimately refused to do so because of both countries’ anti-slavery positions. The proclamation allowed the Union Army to recruit Black soldiers (nearly two hundred thousand would fight for the Union Army by the war’s end), and it also threatened to disrupt the South’s social order, which depended on the work and caste position of enslaved people. The Emancipation Proclamation was not the s...