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[69]

Chapter 3: the Proclamation.—1863.

Garrison is applauded as part of the occasion at the celebration, on January 1, in Boston, of the issue of the President's irrevocable edict of emancipation. He urges as the next duty the immediate abolition of slavery in the Border States, to which Lincoln lends no encouragement. He makes known through the Liberator the invaluable endeavors of George Thompson and his fellow-garrisonian abolitionists in great Britain to fix popular sentiment on the side of the North, and welcomes an approaching third visit from his old friend and coadjutor. He joins in the notable celebration at Philadelphia of the thirtieth anniversary of the American Anti-slavery Society. His oldest son volunteers for the war as officer in a Massachusetts colored regiment.


Special preparations had been made in Boston to celebrate the promised edict of freedom on the first of January. The impressive watch-meetings held in the colored churches on New Year's eve were followed by meetings in Tremont Temple extending through the day and evening, and a grand jubilee concert in Music Hall was announced for the afternoon. It was confidently expected that the President's Proclamation would reach the city by noon, but as the day wore on without tidings of its issue, fears arose lest it might not, after all, be forthcoming, and the celebrations proceeded under a shadow of doubt and unrest. The Music Hall concert had been hastily but admirably arranged, and audience and musicians seemed alike animated by the occasion. Nothing could have been more uplifting than the fine orchestral and choral rendering of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, alternated with the reading, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, of his ‘Boston Hymn,’ written for the occasion, and the singing of Dr. O. W. Holmes's ‘Army Hymn’;1 but the painful uncertainty about the President's action marred the otherwise perfect enjoyment of the great audience until a gentleman announced from the floor that the Proclamation

1 The verse in Mr. Emerson's poem which won loudest applause was that on compensation:

Pay ransom to the owner,
     And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
     And ever was. Pay him!

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