Proclamation: American New Year 1863
The American Story
Christopher Flannery
4.6 • 941 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2022
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On New Year’s Day 1863, President Lincoln signed the proclamation he had promised a hundred days before. Lincoln understood better than anyone the constitutional challenges to emancipation. He took the greatest care to draft the proclamation in terms that could be defended before the highest court in the land. Then in the last weeks of his life, he “left no means unapplied” to getting the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, approved by Congress.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful. |
| 0:07.0 | Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting. |
| 0:12.0 | This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute. |
| 0:15.0 | I call this one Proclamation |
| 0:19.0 | American New Year 1863. |
| 0:22.0 | On New Year's 1863. |
| 0:24.2 | On New Year's Day 1863, after a sleepless night and three hours of shaking hands at a New |
| 0:30.2 | Year's reception in the White House. |
| 0:32.9 | President Lincoln returned to his office |
| 0:35.3 | to sign the proclamation he had promised |
| 0:37.4 | a hundred days before. |
| 0:40.4 | On September 22nd, as President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, |
| 0:48.0 | Lincoln had proclaimed that on the first day of January in the year of our Lord 1,863, all persons held as slaves |
| 0:59.3 | within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, |
| 1:07.0 | shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free. |
| 1:13.6 | Now the day it come. |
| 1:16.5 | As he prepared to sign the historic document that would become known as the Emancipation Proclamation, At first his hand was trembling so much from all the |
| 1:25.4 | hand shaking that he couldn't do it. He told those present, I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. |
| 1:38.0 | If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. |
| 1:46.0 | If my hand trembles when I sign the proclamation, |
| 1:49.0 | all who examined the document hereafter |
| 1:52.0 | will say he hesitated. |
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