Jenny McMillen Sweeney, subject matter expert for records relating to #WomensHistory at the National Archives, discusses a letter from Annie Davis to President Abraham Lincoln. Davis was an enslaved woman who wrote to the most powerful man in the country in August 1864 asking for his advice. She had heard of the Emancipation Proclamation and how it freed others. She wanted to know if she, too, was free, writing, "It is my desire to be free."

View the letter in the National Archives Catalog: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/4662543