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REDCLIFFE PLANTATION 181 REDCLIFFE RD BEECH ISLAND, SC 29842 Redcliffe Southern Times (803) 827–1473 V O L U M E UPCOMING EVENTS AT REDCLIFFE African-American Experience Tours Throughout February Th-M @ 11, 1 & 3 $5/Adult, $3/SC Seniors Life, Love & Leisure: Women of Redcliffe Tours Mar 9 & 10 @ 11, 1 & 3 $5/Adult, $3/SC Seniors For more information on these programs please contact the park. Park Staff Park Manager Joy Raintree Park Interpreter Elizabeth Laney Park Technician Doug Kratz Interesting Fact On January 28, 1841 a boy was born to enslaved laborers Coober Shubrick and Henry Fuller at Silver Bluff Plantation. His name? Hardtimes. Unfortunately Hard (as he was nicknamed) died after just 5 months. “Hardtimes” was a boy’s name that can be commonly seen in the records of large slave populations. 7 , I S S U E 8 F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 3 . Redcliffe & the Emancipation Proclamation January 01, 2013 was the 150th year since the passage of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a document whose importance to US History has been compared to the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Abraham Lincoln actually issued a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 following the Union victory at Antietam. This preliminary address made several key points—the first being that Lincoln would officially issue the proclamation on January 1, 1863 if the Confederate states did not return to the Union. He even offered confederate states the option of instituting a measure of “gradual” emancipation of their slaves— a measure that had previously been adopted by many Northern states. The second point that he made was that the war was being fought to restore “constitutional unity.” The irony being that the official proclamation he would release the following year would be critical to supporting the idea that the war was not just about con- stitutional unity but about the emancipation of enslaved human beings as well. The impact of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was felt at Redcliffe. It would not be until the 1920’s however, that Elizabeth Hammond, a teenager at Redcliffe during the Civil War, would finally record the experience. Writing about the Christmas of 1862 she states: “I did not know till long afterwards how uneasy my Mother was. Lincoln had ordered a proclamation setting all negroes free. Nobody knew how they might behave. Ours took no notice of it, till after the close of War. And then very few of them left us.” Lincoln had certainly not set out to free the slaves when he ran for election back in 1860. His republican party campaign ran under a slogan of “Free Speech, Free Homes, Free Territory.” The original intent of his platform was to keep new territories free of slavery. Obviously this focus had changed by late 1862. When none of the southern states took Lincoln up on his offer to return to the Union in September of 1862 he made good on his threat to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 01, 1863. The proclamation, however, freed only slaves in states that were in rebellion against the United States, but not in border states like Kentucky or West Virginia. Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, had this response: "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." It is very likely that many of the Hammond slaves did not know of the proclamation or its promises of freedom and if they did, that, as Seward had predicted, they were beyond the reach of Union forces and protection. So long used to the condition of slavery, when freedom did finally come to many of the people enslaved on the Hammond plantations they didn’t know what to make of their new status. On being offered his freedom, Henry Slow, an enslaved butler at Redcliffe had this to say: “I don’t want no freedom.” February’s African African--American Experience Tours All Month, Thursday—Monday @ 11, 1 & 3 Join Redcliffe Plantation SHS throughout the month of February while we turn our regularly scheduled house tours into African-American Experience tours! The tours will feature prominent Redcliffe families such as the Henleys, Smiths, DeWalts, Wigfalls, Crawfords and many others as we explore the historic slave cabins, 20th century kitchen and historic mansion. How is your attention to detail? Do you know where (and what) these objects are at Redcliffe? Look for them on your next visit! answer: (left to right), birdhouse right above basement to the left of the mansion front porch; soap dish on wall of slave quarters, room on the left; track servicing door to one of stable stalls Document of the Month JH Hammond’s Slave Birth & Death Register James H. Hammond’s register of slave births and deaths consist of eleven pages in two separate locations in Hammond’s daily plantation journal. It is perhaps one of the most important records that documents the enslaved families of African descent on the Hammond Plantations. What kind of information does the register contain? Records of 439 births (including the name of child & parents) Records of 322 deaths Lineages of approximately 70+ families, for multiple generations dating back to 1831 Naming trends in the enslaved community Birth & death rates for the slave population Although the records are held in the James Henry Hammond Papers at USC’s Caroliniana Library, Redcliffe Plantation has scanned copies and a searchable transcription of the records which it makes available to family descendants, researchers and members of the public on request.