This belongs here as well as the #OTD thread...
April 16, 1865
"The Confederate Army abandoned Chapel Hill about 2 PM on 16 April 1865. Cornelia Phillips Spencer’s The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina relates: “A few hours of absolute and Sabbath stillness and silence ensued. The groves stood thick and solemn, the bright sun shining through the great boles and down the grassy slopes, while a pleasant fragrance was wafted from the purple panicles of the Paulownias.”
Toward the end of the day, the Union Army arrived and a delegation led by UNC President David L Swain went out to meet the first Union officer – to discuss the protection of the village and campus. Swain brought to this meeting one of the 17 people he enslaved, a twenty-five year old man named Wilson. But President Swain did not bring home a slave. For at this meeting, the Union officer read them the following words:
“…all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free…”
The last slave would not be liberated by the Emancipation Procalamation until 19 June 1865. But emancipation arrived in Chapel Hill nine weeks earlier – on Easter Sunday – the 16th of April 1865.
One hundred and sixty years ago today, Wilson Swain Caldwell became a free man. He would go on to become the first African-American public official in Chapel Hill, the first black landowner in what we now call the Northside neighborhood, the father of NC’s first African American Medical Doctor, and the grandfather, great grandfather and great-great grandfather to hundreds of people who live here today." (H/T to friend Mark Chilton)
Wilson Caldwell (1841-1898) · Slavery and the University · Carolina Story: Virtual Museum of University History