On New Year’s day 1863 the Androscoggin River was “alive with humanity.” After a recent cold spell, noted the Lewiston Daily Evening Journal, “skating was of course in vogue”; “horse trotting” was also “an item of sport” and members of the Universalist Society of Auburn lit out on “Grand New Year’s sleigh ride” culminating in “a feast of good things.” Across the river that morning, students at the Maine State Seminary (now Bates College) rang the chapel bell each hour “as their grateful testimony to the great expected proclamation of Freedom.”

No ordinary New Year’s day, 150 years ago citizens in Androscoggin County anticipated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the words of the Daily Evening Journal, it was “The Day of Jubilee.” “The first day of January, 1863,” its 30 old republican editor, Nelson Dingley Jr. predicted, “will have a place in history hereafter along side of the 4th of July, 1776.”

While elsewhere in the North cannonades and mass meetings commemorated the occasion, the pealing of the seminary bell in Lewiston sufficed to prompt reflection. As one observer wrote, “The general expectation that the day would bring with it the President’s Proclamation of freedom has given increased interest to its observance—not so much by outward ceremonies as in men’s hearts. We find that very many thoughtful men have been thinking deeply, as they moved in their various circles, of the great event which they have good reason to hope will hereafter be referred as the years roll by with increasing thankfulness to the first of January 1863—the initiation of the work of enfranchisement of the Nation from the curse of slavery.”

This reverent embrace of emancipation was a recent development in the community, a reflection of how the accepted aim of the Civil War had evolved over the course of the conflict from a defense of flag and country to a war on slavery.

At the outset of the Civil War the communities along the Androscoggin organized swiftly in defense of the national union. In the first weeks of the crisis, flag-raisings (at a time when few actually owned American flags) and Union rallies symbolized the aim of the war: to reunify the states and preserve the federal union. “Our community is aroused to the highest pitch of excitement that has ever been known here,” observed the Daily Evening Journal. “Men of all parties and all opinions vie with each other in expression of devotion to the Union and the Flag.”

During a typical Union meeting held at Central Hall in Lewiston, audience members joined in singing the “Freeman’s Rallying Song,” penned to the tune of a familiar hymn “at the urgent request of numerous citizens” by a certain Mrs. Lowell, the wife of a local Baptist minister. Her lyrics captured the predominant war spirit: “Rouse ye, Freeman! wake to action!/For your country’s honor, rise!/For your homes so loved and cherished,/For the freedom that ye prize./Union! Union!/Let the war-cry now arise.”

When three dozen Bearce & Co. river drivers arrived at the Great Falls that spring with between seven and eight million logs (“the largest ever swum down the Androscoggin”), they proceeded to stroll the streets “dressed in a gay uniform of red woolen pants, with white stripe, bespangled with stars, and close blue frock, gaily ornamented, with the word ‘Union’ around the waist.” Their extraordinary outfits, too, bespoke a mainspring of northern patriotism.

While “the Stars and Stripes” flew throughout Lewiston—at the post office, from the DeWitt House, and above the seminary—some went as far as to explicitly distinguish the war for Union from a war against slavery. Preaching on “The National Crisis” at the First Baptist Church in Lewiston, Rev. N. M. Wood proclaimed the justness of the Northern cause, but insisted “We go not with armies to liberate slaves. We war upon constitutional grounds and for constitutional rights, for the preservation of our rightful government and free institutions, not for the suppression or destruction of slavery in States.”

Yet even from the earliest moments of the Civil War others unabashedly described the fight for Union as intertwined with a fight against slavery. From the pulpits of the High Street Congregational Church in Auburn, and the Pine Street Congregational Chapel in Lewiston, the Revs. A.C. Adams and U. Balkam perceived “the fiery trial” the nation then faced as borne of an admirable refusal to submit before the accursed alter of slavery.

This perspective likewise found its way into the poem, “Soldier’s Farewell to Home,” an anonymous Auburn resident’s ode to the men then enlisting “to meet dear freedom’s foe.” “Adieu to thee my own true wife—/To thee my children—’tis for thee/Thus cheerfully I give my life/To save our home from slavery./I go to meet our common foe—/Farewell my sister—I must go.”

When the seceeded states made it “their avowed object,” as the Daily Evening Journal asserted, “to found a nation with Slavery for its cornerstone and to uphold oppression instead of liberty, wrong instead of right,” it was to be expected that the fate of the Union would finally pivot around the fate of slavery. “It is impossible not to see that there is a deep, earnest, frowning conviction in the public mind that in this war of sections the fate of slavery is inevitably involved.” Only a particular shortsightedness could convince one that “the institution of slavery will not be ultimately crushed in this death grapple.”

Nelson Dingley Jr. thus took unmistakable satisfaction in assembling examples of how the war undermined slavery. In the ensuing tumult, for instance, it was clear that slaves were freeing themselves. Less than a fortnight after Fort Sumter, the Daily Evening Journal reported that two slaves who had escaped to Boston described their fellow bondsmen as “on the qui vive for the signal. In their opinion the South stands on a magazine ready for a tremendous explosion.”

While rumors of mass rebellion were rife in the northern press, at first scores, then hundreds, and finally thousands of enslaved peoples sought sanctuary behind Union lines. Traveling to the “Seat of War” in early July of 1861, a member of the 5th Maine regiment wrote to the Daily Evening Journal noting the jubilance with which African Americans encountered Union soldiers near Washington, D.C. Further south along the Virginia coast slaves making their way to Union-held Fort Monroe were reportedly seeking “the Fort of Freedom.”

Although President Lincoln was himself hesitant to enact a broad pronouncement of emancipation at this point in the war, Union military leaders and Congress initiated policies in August 1861 to protect such fleeing peoples—or, to be more precise, such fleeing property. Considered human property, escaping slaves were identified as “contrabands.” In Lewiston, the Daily Evening Journal lauded legislation denying rebel slaveowners the right to reclaim their property. Not technically free, former slaves were nonetheless beyond the clutches of enslavement. Indeed, two contrabands apparently accompanied the 1st Maine regiment returning to the Pine Tree State that month; one was “a bright little negro boy” who had been adopted by members of the Portland Light Infantry.

In 1862, Dingley’s newspapers (which also included the Lewiston Falls Journal, a weekly) engaged in an increasingly adament campaign calling for a proclamation of emancipation. The argument had both practical military and broader moral dimensions and indicated how a war on slavery was increasingly understood as necessary for a successful war for Union.

Republicans like Dingley worried that “kid glove” conciliatory policies protecting “property in negroes,” while intended to appease slaveholders, were actually prolonging the war. Demands for emancipation as a military tactic intensified. “We must make up our mind to fight the whole South,” insisted Dingley, “and more particularly all of its population who are directly or indirectly interested in slavery. So long as our enemy can depend upon the labor of their slaves, just so long can they keep every able-bodied white man in the field, not to mention the large number of negroes employed by them. Our only hope is in detaching the negroes from their service—a result which can be accomplished if our government only wills it. Let us be wise in time.”

The accounts Dingley chose to report from the war front underscored the need to enlist the support of the enslaved. A Maine soldier in Virginia bemoaned his being “worn down with work which the slaves of rebels can do just as well.” When the Confederacy was in fact impressing black laborers, a colonel from Searsport—and a lifelong democrat, at that—explained that his men now believed a strike on slavery was necessary. Lewiston’s Alonzo Garcelon, the Maine Surgeon General, contended that Union victory would ultimately depend on emancipating slaves—otherwise their labor would be employed to strengthen the Confederacy, a cause they were emphatically keen to oppose. As a chaplain with the 1st Maine Cavalry observed, “they can assist us if encouraged to do so.”

While many Mainers thought the practical military implications of emancipation paramount, one Danville soldier’s epiphany suggests that the war also compelled contemporaries to consider the morality of ending slavery. After living among former slaves in Port Royal, South Carolina, where he had conversed “for hours in their little huts,” witnessed “their eyes sparkle when you speak of ‘Freedom’ to them,” and seen “how intelligent and quick of apprehension they are in spite of the oppression they have endured,” he declared himself suddenly “an abolitionist! I shall be content to stay in the army, so long as emancipation is the result. So long as the gigantic evil of slavery exists, there can be no permanent peace!”

He was not alone in feeling abolitionist sentiments swell while in the South. Walking the streets of Alexandria, Virginia, a correspondent of Dingley’s beheld the sign, “Price, Birch, & Co., Dealers in Slaves,” and proceeded to venture inside what had once been a slave pen. “Gloomy holes they were. And there many a poor black skin had been locked up to await sale. There many a poor mother had wailed over the children from whom she was about to be parted, and many a poor husband and wife had there taken a last embrace! Dens of tears and sorrows! If those walls could speak, would they convince any cold Northern ‘conservative’ that slavery is a sin, a deep and damnable sin? And would they decrease any the clamor of the land to God against the oppressors who have dwelt in it? Thank God, that slave pen will never be used again for a slave pen, and, thank God, another slave pen will never be built on land over which floats the Stars and Stripes of the Union.”

Though he published such anti-slavery accounts, Dingley himself refrained from making moral appeals until August 1862. When Congress passed legislation declaring all contrabands reaching federal lines forever free, and when rumors in Washington, D.C., suggested that a presidential proclamation of emancipation was imminent, he began to assert the righteousness of the Union’s emancipation policy: “If God ever was with our country, he is with it now.”

When, true to the rumor, President Lincoln indeed announced a preliminary proclamation of emancipation, to be enacted on the first day of 1863, the Lewiston Falls Journal expressed exuberance, hailing a policy that “changes at one fell stroke four millions of people from friends laboring to aid the rebellion, to enemies who must be watched! The morning breaks! The beginning of the end of rebellion is clearly seen. We fight now with God and humanity clearly on our side.”

Predicting the “Death-Knell of Rebellion,” in the final months of 1862 many in Lewiston and Auburn joined Dingley in anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation. The cultural offerings in the city that fall provide a gauge of interest. Days after Lincoln’s announcement, hundreds assembled in Central Hall for a lecture by Rev. A.F. Griffin. Formerly of Montgomery, Alabama, Griffin attested to the tenacity with which Slave Power retained its grasp over the region, and welcomed the coming proclamation that “would deprive the rebels of this strong arm of their power.” Citizens also filled Central Hall for a performance of the Hutchinson Family, the famed New England singers noted for their abolitionism, as well as for a lecture featuring “Aunt Jane,” a contraband from western Virginia who “favored the audience with a relation of her experience as a slave.”

While the topic of slavery drew public attention, Dingley deployed evidence of the efficacy of emancipation—even before its official pronouncement. By one measure, emancipation was succeeding in unnerving southerners; by another, it was steeling northern resolve, especially when it became evident that former slaves were willing to bear arms against the Confederacy.

Union generals, including the Colby-educated Benjamin Butler, supported this development, the Daily Evening Journal reported, as did Maine’s own military men, who praised the black regiments then being formed in Louisiana and South Carolina. An officer in the 12th Maine in New Orleans opined that black soldiers “will fight as well as any troops. They know if the rebels capture them, they will receive no mercy.” From Port Royal, a member of the 8th Maine reported “the negro regiment is a decided success,” having already captured property “from the enemy sufficient to pay all its expenses for one year.” It was the very same regiment that James Fessenden—son of a Maine sentator and nephew of a prominent local republican—was helping to organize.

Confiscation of rebel property, emancipation, and the enlistment of black soldiers. What had been widely dismissed as radical abolitionism at the outbreak of a war to preserve the Union was now thought utterly prudent.

As Jan. 1, 1863, neared, Nelson Dingley Jr. grew rhapsodic. “The year 1862 dies to-night at midnight,” he wrote on New Year’s Eve. “To-morrow the President will declare Freedom to the Oppressed, and put the government unmistakably on the side of Justice and Right. We shall begin to see a true national life—founded on the realization of the Declaration of Independence. Thanks for a year so new and so glorious. A Happy New Year in more respects than any New Year ever was, will it be to the black man. White men who love justice will also greet the dawn of the New Year, as that of a better and happier day.”

When that better day dawned the next morning, bells pealed at the seminary and hopeful citizens awaited word of the presidential proclamation. It arrived on the telegraph later in the afternoon, confirming the conflict as a war for both Union and emancipation. “The prayers of millions will go up to-day and henceforth,” wrote Dingley, “with avail we believe that this measure of righteousness as well as necessity, may be the harbinger of a brighter day to this afflicted nation, and mark the beginning of successes which shall secure liberty to an oppressed people and save the Republic to the advocate and defender of the rights of man.”

With such hopes did many in Lewiston and Auburn commemorate the New Year 150 years ago.

Eben Miller of Lewiston is a graduate of Bates College who teaches history at Southern Maine Community College.

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