Rufus Saxton, the author of the New Year’s greeting, was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1824.
The Emancipation Proclamation read in Beaufort, South Carolina, on 1 January 1863, was not the Proclamation that President Lincoln signed that day-his 1 January Proclamation would not arrive in Beaufort until 12 January, but the preliminary Proclamation, dated 22 September 1862, that announced that, if the states in rebellion-the Confederacy-did not return to the Union by 1 January, slaves held in those areas in rebellion would be “forever free.” The thousands of fugitive slaves assembled at Beaufort were part of the small percentage (tens of thousands) of four million slaves in the United States who actually were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation on the day it went into effect.
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