Juneteenth a Day Late
I was busy with deadlines yesterday and so didn’t get around to mentioning Juneteenth. As little as 5 years ago, I hadn’t even known what this was. It’s a big deal.
I have nothing original to say but Joe Lancaster at Reason says it well:
Next month, America will commemorate the date, 250 years ago, that its founders signed the Declaration of Independence, declaring in the process “that all men are created equal.” And yet it took nearly another century for the new nation to apply those words to African Americans.
As we celebrate our country and its tradition of individual liberty, we should also celebrate June 19, or Juneteenth, the day that freedom finally extended to black Americans.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing everyone held in slavery, but it could only be enforced in places under Union control. As a result, it took time for news of emancipation to reach the entire enslaved population.
Texas was the final Confederate state to surrender, and on June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced the end of the war, and with it, the end of chattel slavery. At the time, Texas’ enslaved population totaled 250,000, and Granger’s announcement freed them all at once.
He gets this part badly wrong, though:
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing everyone held in slavery, but it could only be enforced in places under Union control.
Here’s what I found at the National Archives.
Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.
“Juneteenth” (June 19, 1865) was not the end of slavery in the United States. “Juneteenth … specifically commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that the Civil War had ended and that the last enslaved Black Americans were finally free.” Union troops had reached the last outposts of the Confederacy, where slaves were liberated by the emancipation proclamation. And under pressure from Lincoln and Congress, the states containing areas of the Confederacy exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation (Louisiana and Tennessee) had abolished slavery in their new Constitutions. Two of the four border slave states that did not secede, Maryland and Missouri, had also abolished slavery by early 1865. But slavery still existed legally in Delaware and Kentucky until December 6, 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified.
"was limited in many ways." <--it was passed as a 'war measure' indeed reflecting a different era when the Constitution was interpreted such that slavery was considered an issue left mostly to the states.