Emancipation evoked mix of emotions for freed slaves

I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

— Attributed to Harriet Tubman

(Gene Thorp/The Washington Post) - Confederates invade the North and Lincoln takes a big step towards ending slavery.

As soon as Hawkins Wilson, an enslaved African American from the region outside of Galveston, Texas, realized that he was free, he knew exactly what he would do. He would begin a search to find his family — a family he had not seen or heard from since he was sold from a plantation in Caroline County, Va., 24 years earlier. To facilitate his search, Wilson sent a letter seeking assistance from the Richmond office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a crucially important, though short-lived, federal agency created to assist the newly freed in this moment of challenge and possibility.

“I am anxious to learn about my sisters, from whom I have been separated many years,” Wilson wrote. “I am in hopes that they are still living.” He then explained that he “was sold at a Sheriff’s sale to a Mr. Wright of Boydtown Court House,” and that he hoped an additional letter that he enclosed could be delivered to his sister.

The pain of his separation and the strength of his desire to reclaim his family are evident in this second letter. “Your little brother Hawkins is trying to find out where you are and where his poor old mother is,” he wrote. “I shall never forget the bag of biscuits you made for me the last night I spent with you.” He added that he had lived an honorable life, so that if they did not “meet on earth, we might indeed meet in heaven.” He ended his letter by asking his sister to write back quickly and said she should not be surprised if “I drop in on upon you some day.”

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Wilson’s letter was delivered or that he ever reconnected with his family.

To the newly emancipated such as Wilson, freedom was never all that they had hoped, but it was much more than they had ever had.

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Nearly 150 years have passed since the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, the law that formally prohibited slavery in the United States. It is difficult to imagine the enormity of this change for those who suffered generations in bondage. With the joy of emancipation came a dizzying array of concerns and questions. What did freedom mean for the nearly 4 million African Americans who were enslaved when the war began? How would the freedmen and freedwomen find economic stability? Should they stay on the land they knew or seek the possibilities of new places? How would white Southerners react to their freedom? And would the nation embrace or ignore them now that the war was over?

What is clear is that emancipation was a long process, a process that is still unfolding — not simply a day or a moment of jubilee. The changes wrought by emancipation took generations to reveal, and more than a century would pass before African Americans began to reap the full benefits of freedom. While almost all formerly enslaved African Americans remembered the circumstances when they gained or seized their freedom, there was no single emancipation experience. Some self-emancipated by escaping to the Union lines or by joining the army; others learned of their new condition when former owners, often prodded by Union officers, announced that they were free; and others found the promise of freedom clouded by racial hatred, disease and death. Yet there is no denying the impact and emotion that accompanied emancipation.