It Is My Desire to Be Free: Annie Davis's Letter to Abraham Lincoln and Winslow Homer's Painting "A Visit from the Old Mistress".

The Emancipation Proclamation affected only those parts of the country that were in rebellion against the United States on the date it was issued, January 1, 1863. The slaveholding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri had remained in the Union and were thus exempt from the Proclamation. In Lincoln’s words, all areas under Union control were “left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.”1 Not until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, would slavery be abolished throughout the United States. It is not surprising that Annie Davis would have been confused about her legal status. Living close to Baltimore in Harford County, she likely had heard some mention of Lincoln having freed slaves. She may also have known that those enslaved within the District of Columbia had been freed by an act of Congress. Yet, according to her letter, Davis’s “mistress” was treating her as if she were still a slave, denying Davis’s wish to visit her family. Surely, if she were free, would she not be able to go where she wished? As we see in this article’s featured document, she wanted the certainty that she believed only the president could give her. The Davis letter, found within the records of the Army’s Adjutant General’s Office in the holdings of the National Archives, is rare. Most enslaved persons were illiterate. Indeed, in many states teaching a slave to read and write was illegal.2 Of those who could, few wrote to the president. Rather, hundreds of them took matters of personal freedom into their own hands prior to the issuance of the Proclamation in 1863. Since the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, many had escaped from slavery to Union lines where they hoped they would be safe. While enslaved people escaped wherever Union troops were present, the concentration of forces around Washington, D.C., made escapes particularly common in Maryland and Virginia.3 Based on available sources, we cannot determine whether Davis ever escaped. However, in November 1864 the Maryland state constitution was rewritten. The new version abolished slavery, and Annie Davis was free. A Visit from the Old Mistress is one of several works by Winslow Homer (1836–1910) composed from sketches he made during travels in Virginia in the mid-1870s. It depicts a scene that would have been unlikely when Annie Davis wrote to President Lincoln a decade earlier. Although at first look, the painting seems to portray common daily life activities, the artist conveys much more by muting many of the details and colors of the simple adorned interior and focusing instead on the facial expressions of the figures, their poses, and the overall compositional design. By doing so, Homer straightforwardly explores, through the interactions between black and white figures in this work, the ambiguities and tensions between those newly emancipated and the white families they may have once served. Social Education 74(3), pp 126–130 ©2010 National Council for the Social Studies