WALLACE ALCORN
T he G l o r y o f a Hated Man
F ACE T O FA CE
cipation Proclamation. They alone of the thousands enslaved across the southern
They came mostly on foot. They came piled onto buckboards and arrived in skiffs, rowboats and barges. Some rode their master’s mules, able to appropriate them because the planters had fled inland upon the Union Army occupation of the Port Royal region. The black folks did. The whites came on horseback and in carriages. They came from the South C There were free Blacks among them, but most had been enslaved on those plantations. They were slaves—or, to date, had been. The few white people who chose to attend the reading were, for the most part, missionaries from New England. Eastern newspaper reporters would telegraph coverage of this New Year’s Day in 1863 that would
The military governor wanted every slave to hear in person Lincoln’s Eman
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The all-black Union regiment stood proudly in formation as its colonel pre sided over the ceremony. On the plat form under live oaks were white dig nitaries. All were abolitionists to one degree or another, to be sure. But one . white, native Carolinian was chosen to read. It was, the colonel said, “an in finitely appropriate thing.” He had been born and reared in the area, owning a nearby plantation and its slaves. But twenty-six years earlier, he had freed them. No theoretical abolitionist, but one who actually freed slaves, the con sequence being economic impoverish ment as well as suffering personal and political persecution. A modern histo . ry of South Carolina finds: “Among the whites, he was the most hated man in D -
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