Areas covered by the Emancipation Proclamation are in red. Slave-holding areas not covered are in blue.
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Sonnet: History as a Rearview Mirror
by John Hawkins
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The Emancipation Proclamation
was a limited and reversible
executive order, a placation
to abolitionists and merciful
white practitioners of the Golden Rule.
But it only applied to rebel states --
border states and California were cool,
free to keep slavery and its mandates.
It's the root of so much reb resentment:
'How come they get to keep their slaves?' The age
uncivil, passed, and forward, slow, we went,
and, in the curveball words of Satchel Paige,
Don't ever look in the rearview mirror:
you never know what's gaining on you there.
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