Sept. 22 marks the 150th anniversary of the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The executive order signed by Abraham Lincoln announced that all slaves would be free within the 10 states of the Confederacy on Jan. 1, 1863, and made the abolition of slavery a central goal of the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass correctly predicted that “slavery once abolished in the rebel states will give the death wound to slavery in the border states. When Arkansas is a free state Missouri cannot be a slave state.” Many museums across the United States held commemorations of the event.
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