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- Description is exactly "A series of two newspaper articles reporting on the 1866 Fourth of July celebrations of the freedmen at Seaton's Springs, in Lauderdale County.
According to the Florence Journal of Wednesday, July 11, "Some fifteen hundred of all sorts and conditions of this class" celebrated America's Independence by hearing the Declaration of Independence read by Florence Freedmen's Bureau Agent Capt. Charles A. Tenge followed by a "plenteous dinner," then a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by Prof. EM Meares, with his wife teacher of a school for freedmen in Florence, and finally, by an oration by a man named Laken, supposedly a Methodist minister from Huntsville, Al.
The Memphis Daily Post of Thursday, July 10 reported the attendance of "about two thousand colored and three hundred white people" and that three US flags were flying."
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