Letter from Annie Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 8/25/1864. From the Records of the Adjutant General’s Office. See it up close.
April 25, 1864. More than fifteen months after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, a slave in Bel Air, Maryland named Annie Davis wrote President Lincoln. A slave-holding border state loyal to the Union, Maryland was not affected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Davis wrote,
Mr. President
It is my Desire to be free. To go to see my people on the eastern shore [of Maryland].
My mistress wont let me. You will please let me know if we are free. And what I can do. I write to you for advice. Please send me word this week. Or as soon as possible, and oblidge.
Annie Davis
Annie Davis and Maryland’s other enslaved residents remained in limbo.
SOURCE
Union Soldier Convicted of Rape Hanged in ‘a Low-Rape War’
April 25, 1864. “In Against Our Will, [scholar] Susan Brownmiller characterized the Civil War as ‘a low-rape war.’ She conjectured that the reason for this was familial; that the war was fought by brother against brother. . . .
“Nonetheless, a few Union soldiers did rape women while they were in the South. In the spring of 1864, a Massachusetts soldier was convicted of raping a sixty year old woman. On April 25, his whole division was called out to watch the hanging of the rapist. Isaac Hadden described the execution. ‘Some six thousand of us were drawn up in a hollow square around the gallows.’ Even though Hadden believed that ‘hanging is the most disgraceful death a soldier can die,’ he said that ‘hanging was too good for him.’ This particular hanging, however, was inept. ‘When the trap was sprung, his feet touched the ground and three men had to pull him up so as to strangle him.’ Whether it was the execution itself, the sloppy way it was performed, or the idea of a fellow soldier raping an old woman that disturbed Hadden, he reported that April 25th had been ‘a hard day for us.'”
Davis’s Five-Year-Old Son Falls to His Death from Balcony
. . .
“The death of their child erased, for the moment, all the rancor and hostility of Jeff’s critics. In a city that had grown almost immune to news of death and suffering, men and women grieved over the Davis family’s intimate tragedy. A procession of schoolchildren and Confederate dignitaries followed Joseph Evan Davis’s small coffin up a hillside to the Hollywood Cemetery. Each child carried flowers or a leafy bough to toss on the grave. . . .”
– Submitted by Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director Peter A. Gilbert
Vermont Humanities 