September 22 · This Day in America
Five days after the carnage at Antietam gives him the victory he needed, Abraham Lincoln puts the country on notice. On January 1, 1863, he declares, every enslaved person in any state still in rebellion shall be "then, thenceforward, and forever free." It is a war measure, careful and lawyerly, and it does not yet touch the loyal border states. But everyone understands what has changed. The war is no longer only about holding the Union together. It is now, openly, a war to end slavery — and every mile the Union army advances becomes a mile of freedom. A nation founded on a promise it had not kept begins, in the middle of its bloodiest year, to keep it. There is no taking it back now.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1776
Captured behind British lines on Manhattan with sketches of fortifications, the young Connecticut schoolteacher is hanged without trial on this morning. By legend his last words were, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" — likely an echo of a play he loved, and unrecorded by any official hand. What is documented is a witness's account that he met death with composure, telling them they were shedding innocent blood. He became America's first spy and its first martyr to the cause.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
“That on the first day of January... all persons held as slaves within any State... in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”Abraham Lincoln, Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 1862