This year’s Juneteenth celebration came and went (Friday, June 19) with very little notice or attention in this area. Locally, I knew that there was a remembrance ceremony and community gathering at Historic Smithfield in Blacksburg, and a celebration in Floyd, and we didn’t get mail delivered. But that’s not much for a national holiday. Perhaps the significance of this holiday is being lost in the political turmoil of the day (war in Iran, rising prices on just about everything, skyrocketing national debt, Epstein, etc. etc.), but those events should not mask the significance of this holiday. It marks when slavery finally was over (almost) in the United States.
It seems important for us all to understand the importance of this holiday, and perhaps this little commentary will help. We all probably learned about the Emancipation Proclamation back in the fourth or fifth grade – Lincoln’s declaration that all enslaved people in the states that were trying to secede from the Union were legally free. Often not mentioned was that this declaration was not followed by all the enslaved people becoming free – it was during the middle of a war in which the seceding states wanted to keep slavery! The North had to win the war first. And – the Proclamation did not abolish slavery in the Union states where it was still allowed (largely border states that had relatively few slaves). It included only the (very large number of) slaves in the rebelling southern states. Slavery was not formally abolished everywhere until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on Dec. 6, 1885 (although the border states had largely abolished slavery before this through their state constitutions.)
Texas had a very large slave population – its separation from Mexico was driven at least in part by Mexico not allowing slavery (a prohibition on slavery was part of the Mexican Constitution in 1837). The cotton industry in the U.S. south was looking at Texas as the next place to develop large cotton plantations. Although there were battles between the North and South in Texas during the Civil War (Texas had become the 28th state just 16 years before it tried to secede from the Union), much of Texas was not actively involved in the war. After Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, slavery continued in Texas. Two months later, Union General Gordon Granger came to Galveston with federal troops, and on June 19, 1865, read an order that the Civil War was over. Approximately 250,000 people were set free!
Remarkably – and perhaps fittingly – Texas became the first state to celebrate Juneteenth, as it made it an official state holiday in 1979. Juneteenth became a national holiday only in 2021, passing unanimously in the U.S. Senate, and on a 415-14 vote in the House. Obviously, both parties agreed that freeing about four million people from slavery, including the final freedom of the slaves in Texas, was worth remembering and celebrating. It is an affirmation of our greatness as a nation. We can look at the terrible wrong of slavery and celebrate how we were able to change for the better.
