Almost directly after Antietam’s battle President Lincoln had electrified the world by issuing the so-called “Provisional Proclamation,” declaring in effect that slavery within the limits of the United States was forever dead, and that every negro in America was henceforth a human being, not a piece of transferable property.
Three months later the more formal “Emancipation Proclamation” was to follow. But its forerunner, the provisional proclamation, quite as effectively struck the slavery shackles from a million wrists.
Lincoln had kept his solemn vow—the vow to free the slaves should the tide of invasion be turned.
All these bits of news as they reached camp were faithfully transmitted to Dad by that most zealous of nurses and entertainers, Battle Jimmie.
The old man listened in wondering gratitude as he realized the boundless fruitage of the finding of “Order 191.”
To Dad the whole thing was a miracle, and most miraculous of all to him was the praise showered on his embarrassed self by his fellow officers.
“I feel like a blackleg, Jimmie,” he confided to his grandson on this his first day of removal from the tent’s interior to the sunshine outside its doorway. “I feel like the original man who stole the original other fellow’s thunder. Here folks keep coming to the tent and shaking hands with me and telling me what a big thing I did in getting that paper to Little Mac and what it’s meant to the country and all.
“And I don’t know which way to look. Anybody’d think I’d ridden up to General Hill and grabbed him by the throat and held him helpless in the presence of all his overawed men while I went through his pockets for the order, instead of our just happening by a miracle of chance to find it lying on the ground. Why, anyone might have happened to pick it up. It’s no credit.”
“That’s right,” bravely agreed Jimmie, scratching Emp’s rough head as the multi-breed dog trotted back from a round of the cook-tents and lay down with a little grunt of repletion at his master’s feet. “That’s right. Anyone might have found it, but ‘anyone’ didn’t. And if most folks had they wouldn’t ’a’ caught the point of it or known what to do with it. And it’s dead sure they wouldn’t ’a’ thought to send it in a rush to Little Mac at the minute a man’s fingers were trying for their throat.
“Oh, I guess there’s one or two worse impostors than you, Dad.”