Feb 3, 2024 By Brad Hundt 5 min read

When the new year arrived at midnight on Jan. 1, 1863, the quiet of most of the region’s small towns and rural expanses might well have been briefly disturbed by church bells ringing out.

But there’s every likelihood that not many people were in the mood for any kind of raucous celebration.

The United States had, of course, by then become disunited, with a civil war raging that had already killed thousands of men from the North and the South. All the counties surrounding Pittsburgh were sending their fathers and sons to the battlefields, and many were not returning home. They either died in battles like one that unfolded the previous May in Cornith, MIss., which saw about 1,000 Union and 1,000 Confederate soldiers perish, or they were felled by rampant disease.

The Pittsburgh region’s factories were also pumping out armaments and ammunition, so interest in the conflict was high, even if there was not unanimity about the virtues of the war, the abolition of slavery and the country’s leadership under President Abraham Lincoln and the young Republican Party.

Even if many were not aware of it on Jan. 1, 1863, in those days long before radio, television and mass media, that New Year’s Day was one of the most consequential dates in American history – it was the day Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

When Washington County residents got their hands on a copy of the Washington Reporter and Tribune days later, a front page headline shouted “Emancipation Proclamation!” A headline below it read, “Slaves of Rebels Declared Free!” and “Blacks to Be Received into the Army and Navy.”

The Emancipation Proclamation was a crossroads in the eradication of slavery in the United States. It declared that “all persons held as slaves within any states, or designated part of the state … shall be then, thence forward, and forever free.”

In other words, slaves within the Confederacy would be loosened from their chains as Union forces advanced.

The National Archives explains the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation this way: “It captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After Jan. 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of Black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become the liberators.”

Pennsylvania had been critical in delivering Lincoln to the White House two years before. Lincoln won the state by a commanding 19 points over his opponents, with Washington and Fayette counties supporting Lincoln, while Greene County supported the Democratic fusion ticket topped by John Breckinridge, who had been vice president under Lincoln’s predecessor James Buchanan. In those days, when newspapers had a distinctly partisan cast, they were not shy about expressing support or opposition for Lincoln, the war and the abolition of slavery.

In the weeks following the Emancipation Proclamation, the Washington Reporter and Tribune carried additional commentary and reports about it. One article, headlined “No Man Can Own Any Other,” carried the thoughts of The Rev. A.H. Quint, a chaplain of the Massachusetts Second Regiment. He explained that at the beginning of the war he had “no very strong feelings about emancipation,” but had come to see “the infernalism of the institution and the utterly unjustifiable nature of the claim that any man may own another.”

Another piece of commentary countered the notion that the Emancipation Proclamation was engineered to incite slave insurrections. It stated, “A more preposterous and absurd charge could not be made. It has not the shadow of a foundation to rest upon.”

Citizens in West Finley expressed their support for the Emancipation Proclamation at a community meeting on Jan. 23, 1863. A resolution memorialized residents who had died in the war, and hailed Lincoln’s executive order as “a grand means of destroying the prime cause (of the Civil War) and breaking the backbone of the present malignant and unholy rebellion against the best government given to man.”

Not everyone in Washington County was happy with the Emancipation Proclamation, though. The Reporter and Tribune printed a resolution from Washington County’s Democratic Party stating that “we regard the attempt of the president to free the slaves by his proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, as an assumption of power not warranted by the Constitution and the laws of the country – and that said proclamation, inviting as it does servile insurrection and indiscriminate slaughter of men, women and children, can find no parallel in the history except in the most barbarous ages of the world.”

A publication in Fayette County also sounded a dissenting note. Uniontown was the home base of the Genius of Liberty, a newspaper vehemently opposed to Lincoln and strongly supportive of the Democratic Party. Its editor, Edward G. Roddy, believed Lincoln was “an amiable dunce who had only managed to get elected through the dissension of the Democratic Party,” according to historian Kenneth A. Deitreich in a 1999 essay in the journal Pennsylvania History.

Deitreich also pointed out that Roddy used the pages of Genius of Liberty to offer up a predictable reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, summing it up as “evil and disastrous.”

But it was ultimately Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation that carried the day. In the Feb. 8, 1865, edition of the Washington Reporter and Tribune, published after Congress ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited slavery, a headline trumpeted “The Death of Slavery,” with a headline below characterizing it as “The Grandest Act Since the Declaration of Independence.”

The first words of the story?

“The hour has come!”