A Vision for American Citizenship
"In a composite nation like ours, as before the Law, there should be no rich no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights, and a common destiny."
Frederick Douglass
Emancipation Proclamation inkstand
In the summer of 1862 President Abraham Lincoln sat at a desk in the War Department telegraph office and began to draft a presidential order to free the enslaved people held in the Confederacy. While the act was limited in scope, it was revolutionary in impact. With emancipation and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery in 1865, over four million Americans were no longer legally defined as someone’s property and, although their rights would be brutally contested, they became United States citizens.
Transfer from Library of Congress