“Amen, God of our fathers, hear!” The fervent prayer had come from a black man who had dropped to his knees on the platform behind Douglass. There was a responding murmur from the crowd. Douglass stood a moment with his head bowed. Then he continued:
“We are watching for the dawn of a new day. We are waiting for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries. We—” His eyes were caught by a movement in the crowd packed around the doors. He held his breath. A man ran down the aisle.
“It’s coming—It’s coming over the wires! Now!” he shouted.
The shout that went up from the crowd carried the glad tidings to the streets. Men and women screamed—they tossed their hats into the air—strangers embraced one another, weeping. Garrison, standing in the gallery, was cheered madly; Harriet Beecher Stowe, her bonnet awry, tears streaming down her cheeks, was lifted to a bench. After a while they quieted down to hear the reading of the text ... “are, and henceforward shall be, free.” Then the Reverend Charles Rue, the black man behind Douglass, lifted his magnificent voice and led them as they sang,
“Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea,
Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free.”
Cables carried the news across the Atlantic. Crowds thronged the streets of London and Liverpool. Three thousand workmen of Manchester, many of them present sufferers from the cotton famine, adopted by acclamation an address to President Lincoln congratulating him on the Proclamation. George Thompson led a similar meeting in Lancashire, and in Exeter Hall a great demonstration meeting was addressed by John Stuart Mill.
But it was from the deep, deep South that the sweetest music came. It was an old song—old as the first man, lifting himself from the mire and slime of some dark river bed and feeling the warm sun upon his face, old as the song they sang crossing the Red Sea, old as the throbbing of drums deep in the jungles, old as the song of all men everywhere who would be free. It was a new song, the loveliest thing born this side of the seas, fresh and verdant and young, full as the promise of this new America—the Delta’s rich, black earth; the tall, thick trees upon a thousand hills; the fairy, jeweled beauty of the bayous; the rolling plains of the Mississippi. Black folks made a song that day.
They crouched in their cabins, hushed and still. Old men and women who had prayed so long—broken, close to the end, they waited for this glorious thing. Young men and women, leashed in their strength, twisted in bondage—they waited. Mothers grasped their babies in their arms—waiting.
Some of them listened for a clap of thunder that would rend the world apart. Some strained their eyes toward the sky, waiting for God upon a cloud to bring them freedom. Anything was possible, they whispered, waiting.