“Anytime, anytime while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s earth a free woman—I would.” – Elizabeth Freeman (also known as Bet or MumBet, was the first enslaved African American to file for and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts.)

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, with an effective date of January 1, 1863. It declared that all enslaved persons [only] in the Confederate States of America in rebellion and not in Union hands were to be freed.  There is no one reason why there was a 2½-year delay in letting Texas know about the abolition of slavery in the United States. Some accounts place the delay on a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news, while others say the news was deliberately withheld. Despite the delay, slavery did not end in Texas overnight, after New Orleans fell, many slavers traveled to Texas with their slaves to escape regulations enforced by the Union Army in other states.  [Read more…]