JUNETEENTH is the oldest celebration in the nation to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, officially freeing slaves. However, word of the Proclamation did not reach many parts of the country right away, and instead the news spread slowly from state to state. The slow spread of this important news was in part because the American Civil War had not yet ended. However, in 1865 the Civil War ended and Union Army soldiers began spreading the news of the war’s end and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger and Union Army soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas. On his arrival, one of General Granger’s first acts was to publicly read General Order Number 3, which began:
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the [President] of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer…
With this announcement the last 250,000 slaves in the United States were effectively freed.
That’s the version of Juneteenth President Biden just made an official Federal Holiday.
That’s the version that on January 1, 1980 became an official state holiday in Texas.
It is also a whitewashed, sanitized, candy coated half truth, at best.
Slavery is bad was not news. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not news. The North winning the war was not news. That writing was on the wall since before the capture of New Orleans in 1862. Slave owners in Mississippi, Louisiana and other points east had been migrating to Texas to escape the Union Army’s reach. They hurriedly relocated more than 150,000 slaves, according to historian Leon Litwack in his book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. As one former slave he quotes recalled, ” ‘It looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas.’ ”
Slavery did not end with Gen. Granger’s arrival in Galveston. Slave owners did not just go, “oh shucks, we didn’t know”, and then free their slaves.
There were over 250,000 slaves in Texas and they were not all freed immediately, or even soon.
Slave owners, unwilling to give up free labor, often refused to release their slaves until forced to, in person, by the United States Army, and or other representatives of the US government.
Sometimes they wanted to get one final harvest in, other times they just wanted every last second of labor they could squeeze out of “their property” before the Yankees came and gave them their freedom.
In the meantime it was the slaves that suffered. A report by the Texas constitutional convention claimed that between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 Black people; Black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites. Conservative estimates claim that undocumented deaths of Black people could be as high as ten times that number during that period.
General Order No. 3 makes for a nice clean story but it was not the order that Granger gave that ended slavery in Texas, it was the gun at his side, and the 1,800 soldiers that rode with him, another 50,000 on their way, that began the ending of slavery in Texas.
That story was not nice, nor was it clean. In the end the US Army had to set up over 40 outposts/forts across Texas and confront, by the barrel of a gun, all slave owners who refused to release their slaves from bondage. In essence, a second Civil War was fought in Texas.