The Grove of Gladness

(NYTimes) As dawn broke across a cloudless New Year's Day sky over the South Carolina Sea Islands, Charlotte Forten, a black Pennsylvania missionary who had come south to teach local freed people, set out for Camp Saxton, a waterside settlement on Port Royal Island, near the town of Beaufort. After a short ride on an old carriage that was pulled by "a remarkably slow horse," Forten boarded a ship for the trip up the Beaufort River.
A band entertained the white and back passengers on the warm winter morning as they steamed toward the headquarters of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment made up of former slaves. By midday a crowd of thousands - comprising not only teachers like Forten but also Union soldiers, northern ministers and ex-slaves - had gathered in the largest live-oak grove Forten had ever seen. Located on a plantation a few miles outside of Beaufort, Camp Saxton was, according to Thomas D. Howard, another Northern missionary teaching in the Sea Islands, "ideal for the occasion."
Why had they come? It was the first day of 1863, yes, but more important, it was the day that Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was scheduled to take effect. Continued