Annie Davis

In Pamela Newkirk's Letters From Black America, she states: "An enslaved woman [Annie Davis] who hoped to reunite with her family wrote this letter to President Lincoln to ask if African Americans had in fact been emancipated a year after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The historic presidential proclamation freed all enslaved African Americans except those in states that were in rebellion and in four Southern states captured by the Union. It was not until 1865 that the Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished slavery in the United States."