What was it like to experience the first taste of freedom after a lifetime in slavery?
Two letters from 1865 help to answer that question by showing both the jubilation that formerly enslaved people experienced immediately after emancipation and the fear they had that they could lose their freedom if they were not given full citizenship rights and the opportunity for political participation.
Freedom is both precious and tenuous, they realized. It’s an exciting privilege, but it has to be carefully guarded. And emancipation from slavery is freedom in name only if it is not accompanied by other civil rights.
So today, 158 years after emancipation, here are two accounts by people who experienced the joy of freedom and the anxiety about keeping it:
Jourdan Anderson’s letter to his former master
Letter from a convention of Blacks in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1865