In the Wake of Emancipation For many enslaved people, 1863 began not with freedom but with profound uncertainty. The legal and practical effects of the Emancipation Proclamation were a matter of dispute among white critics and observers, as they have been among historians for 150 years. If the proclamation applied only to areas under Confederate control, did it really free anyone right away? What, if anything, did it mean for border states and Union-occupied territory? For slaves who got their news in rumors, the proclamation's details could seem especially unclear. As late as the summer of 1864, an enslaved woman in Maryland, Annie Davis, wrote to Lincoln himself for clarification: "Mr president," she asked, "please let me know if we are free." For men and women still in slavery - and still vulnerable to the abuses of southern masters angered by Lincoln's action - things could get worse before they got better. On Feb. 23, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was not yet two months old, an enslaved man on a plantation near New Orleans wrote a letter to Nathaniel P. Banks, the Union general occupying the city. Gorgener Roman plainly had little education, but he knew some of the niceties of letter-writing: "I Gorgener Roman," he began, "wright a fue lines to ask you if you will be so kind as to send some one to my assistence as soon as posable." Roman had been in prison for about two months (he did not say why) until "one of the fideral ofecers paid me a visit." The jail keeper told Roman's owner about this visit, and the owner evidently was displeased. Roman peremptorily "wasent down on borgars pantation to be struck twenty five lashes and then to be put in chaines." Although his language had been proper and polite near the beginning of the letter, it became urgent and desperate toward the end: "I know that I will not be able to endure such cruel treatments. . . . I beg you for God sak pleas to sen some as soo as posable before they kill me. The southern parishes of Louisiana were among the places Lincoln's proclamation had formally exempted. Despite the Union Army's control of the area, it remained legal to own slaves there. Nevertheless, the northern military occupation had seriously undermined the institution of slavery. The army had begun enlisting free black men in 1862, but many fugitive slaves found that Union recruiters, eager to fill their ranks, didn't pry too deeply into a man's legal status. Gorgener Roman's owner had good reason to believe the federal officer visiting the jail wanted to get Roman out of slavery and into the army. And the Lincoln administration's embrace of emancipation likely intensified the owner's recriminations. Any Yankee in uniform was now a practical abolitionist. Even though someone like Gorgener Roman still was not free - could be beaten perhaps more brutally now than he had been when slavery was intact - something had changed in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. He could write a letter of protest. Most southern blacks were illiterate, owing to the slave South's longstanding prohibitions on education for African Americans. But an estimated 5 to 10 percent of slaves - 200,000 or more - were literate at the outbreak of the Civil War. As the war progressed and slavery crumbled, the prohibitions fell away. White northern missionaries and free blacks opened schoolrooms. Thousands more of the newly freed got the chance to learn. No matter how and when Gorgener Roman learned to write, it would have taken the sea changes of early 1863 for him to believe writing a letter could make a difference. Only six years earlier, the United States Supreme Court had declared in its Dred Scott decision that African-Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Now, a Louisiana slave could set to work with a pen and a piece of paper - probably no small task for someone like Roman - convinced his petition would not fall on deaf ears. It is unknown whether General Banks took any action on Roman's behalf; what's striking is that Roman believed his plight would matter to a powerful white man. Across the South, as the tide of emancipation rose, African Americans were finding that the authority of slave owners was being replaced by the authority of the United States government - military officers, politicians, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. White northerners did not always have freed people's best interests at heart, to be sure, but they were at least supposed to take those interests seriously. So, from the pens of former slaves, whom many white people had presumed were illiterate, came reams of written grievances. By the end of the war, a Freedmen's Bureau official could refer (with exasperation) to the flood of "letter-writing [and] petitioning" that residents of a single North Carolina freed people's camp had generated. In the scores of such writings that survive - and, doubtless, the hundreds or thousands that have been lost to history - black southerners, though barely literate, worked out the ideas and the rhetoric that would stoke the struggle for civil rights for decades to come. Black soldiers poorly treated by the army called out hypocrisy: "Wee are said to be U S Soldiers and behold wee are U S Slaves." Freedmen declared the need for economic opportunity: "the people wont to work they are willing to work they are redy to work & will work, as sure as a liveing offerd is made, to them." The newly liberated sensed the stakes for the future of the race: "if we Ever Expect to be a Pepple & if we Dont Reply to some one of a thourety we Shall for Ever be Troden Down under foot of man." And, with keen scrutiny, they measured the reality of emancipation - indeed, of the nation - against its promise. When a committee of freedmen in Tuscaloosa detailed the abuses their community suffered in the first months after the war, they concluded by saying: "This is not the persuit of happa ness." Sources: Ira Berlin, et al., eds. "Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867," 5 volumes; Louis P. Masur, "Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union"; John Blassingame, "Black New Orleans, 1860-1880"; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, "When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South"; Heather Andrea Williams, "Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom." Christopher Hager, assistant professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., is the author of "Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing."