Senate Resolution 80 Printer's Number 619

PENNSYLVANIA, April 11 - WHEREAS, General Ulysses S. Grant created the terms of

surrender, which allowed 28,000 Confederate soldiers to go home

with pardons; and

WHEREAS, The defeat of the Confederacy led to the

reconstruction of those states that rebelled against the end of

enslavement of Africans and African Americans; and

WHEREAS, Countless memoirs and oral histories testify that

many slaves first learned of and experienced emancipation at the

moment of the Union's triumph at Appomattox; and

WHEREAS, Approximately 4,600 enslaved people were emancipated

in Appomattox County on April 9, 1865, by the surrender; and

WHEREAS, One of the accounts of a formerly enslaved person

living in Appomattox was from a woman named Fannie Berry, who

described the community's reaction to the surrender by stating

"[We] began to sing...'You are free, you are free'... such

rejoicing and shouting, you never heard in your life"; and

WHEREAS, The USCT involvement at Appomattox served as a point

of pride and as vindication to other Black soldiers and

civilians, especially those in Southern states; and

WHEREAS, African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass

reflected on the surrender during a Decoration Day address in

Arlington, Virginia, and is quoted as saying, "When the dark and

vengeful spirit of slavery, always ambitious, preferring to rule

in hell than to serve in heaven, fired the Southern heart and

stirred all the malign elements of discord, when our great

Republic, the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the

world, had reached the point of supreme peril, when the Union of

these states was torn and rent asunder at the center, and the

armies of a gigantic rebellion came forth with broad blades and

bloody hands to destroy the very foundations of American

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