Forever Free

Halfway through the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. And so it was, more than 150 years ago this month, that every slave living in the Confederacy was declared free. Many of them, however, were unaware of it.

How could they have known? They were behind enemy lines. Most couldn’t read. They continued to live under oppression, in chains, and wrapped in a matrix of injustice that a few words on a faraway piece of paper could do nothing to untangle. Enter a man named John Murray Forbes.

Forbes owned a collection of railroads and founded an investment company that still bears his family’s name. In addition to his great wealth, he was a great abolitionist who was working to see African slaves in America liberated. So, he had thousands of pamphlets printed that contained Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

These little brochures, containing only a few hundred…