What Juneteenth Means on a President’s Plantation
An Address in Observance of Juneteenth at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage Plantation on June 18, 2017.
On June 19, 1865, just shy of seven score and twelve years ago, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, a man who was as short as he was unyielding, upon assuming his command of the Department of Texas at Galveston — a command secured by a force of two-thousand Union soldiers, including those who were freedmen — issued the following order:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
— General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865
In doing so, Granger had officially declared that the institution of slavery dead — dead once again, having been symbolically destroyed by the reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
Given that the Emancipation Proclamation “ended” slavery in the Confederacy on paper two-and-a-half years earlier, Granger’s proclamation should have been unnecessary. Richmond, the Confederate capital, had fallen. Lincoln was dead. And the dismantling state-sanctioned slavery in word and in deed vis-à-vis the ratification of 13th Amendment was on the horizon.
Still, the enslaved persons of Texas rejoiced. They were now freedmen; and in issuing his order on that faithful day, Granger also unknowingly offered the basis for Juneteenth — the holiday we are celebrating today. “June” referring to the month, while “teenth” serves a nod to the nineteenth day.
Today, Juneteenth is the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. It beat out several other contenders including but not limited to:
…Sept. 22: the day Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation Order in 1862
…Jan. 1: the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in 1863
…Jan. 31: the date the 13th Amendment passed Congress in 1865, officially abolishing the institution of slavery
…Dec. 6: the day the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865
…or April 3rd, 9th, or 16, the day Richmond, Va., fell, the day Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant and the day slavery was abolished in the nation’s capital in 1862, respectively.
Most obviously, July 4, the nation’s first Independence Day, could have been a contender, given its observance some “four score and seven years” before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (see: Henry Louis Gates, “What is Juneteenth?”)
It could be argued that the rationale for why these bids were unsuccessful was put forth long before their various cases had even been made.
On July 5, 1852, social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the preeminent black orator and writer of his time, gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Held in New York at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. His address “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” answered this question with such exactness its truths still ring true today.
“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” He continued: “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?”
In what historian Philip S. Foner has called “probably the most moving passage in all of Douglass’ speeches,” Douglass declares:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
— Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”
Despite Douglass’ rebuke, in the time from Lincoln’s proclamation in 1863 and Granger’s pronouncement in 1865, to some 200,000 black men, mostly former slaves, had enlisted in the fight — the Civil War, they had decided, was their fight for freedom. The freedmen, including those in Texas, still had to fight for their freedom because their former owners refused to accept their emancipation.
Here in Nashville, on the heels of the Civil War, thousands of freed men and women across the South flocked from the plantations of their former masters to the contraband camps of the Union Army. To them, the contraband camps represented freedom from oppression and served as the dawning of brighter tomorrows.
Despite the many ways in which this was true, contraband camps like those in Nashville were overwhelmed and unprepared for the masses of slaves seeking refuge within their walls. Union officers and soldiers, despite some sympathy for the thousands of enslaved and newly-freed persons they encountered, simply did not know what to do with the throng of people who expected them to help meet their many and manifold needs.
Once combatants, Union soldiers were hailed as emancipators. And as emancipators, they were not only revered for their service, the freedmen and women expected them to help provide, among other things, the necessities of food, housing, and shelter. As assuredly as these demands tested the limits of the Union’s ideological and practical support for black freedoms in word and in deed, they overwhelmed the coffers of the Union Army.
There were, however, additional desires among the ex-slaves. Many of them logged countless miles on foot across the South and beyond to attempt to connect with family members from whom they were forcibly separated and sold away. Others were excited at the possibility of working for themselves and supporting their families. Others, still, wanted to be legally married, and rejoiced in the ability to finally adopt surnames and name their children themselves.
Even if unwelcomed, these desires were likely anticipated. Less predictable was the overwhelming desire of the freed people to learn, which astounded the Union. More than anything else it seemed, the freedmen and women wanted to learn how to read and write in exponentially large numbers, and they had no qualms increasingly expressing this desire following emancipation.
With the knowledge that the ability to read and/or write allowed literate blacks to better transition from slavery to freedom, masses of freed men and women eagerly sought to obtain at least a rudimentary education which would allow them to become literate.
The premium blacks placed on education grew exponentially, but black educational opportunities were still scant until the Union’s occupation of the South. Despite securing the impetus necessary for mass black education across the region, debate over black education was commonplace. It was not new.
The debate over black education could be traced back to the beginnings of slavery in the Americas. By the antebellum period, a rash of slave codes sought to restrict the power slaves tried to wield over their own lives through various types of resistance — resistance that was often attributed and/or connected to black literacy.
In Nashville, where free, quasi-free, and enslaved blacks had enjoyed three decades of independent black education through a series of clandestine native schools, blacks had long experienced an educational autonomy that could be envied by free blacks anywhere in the nation.
Coincidentally, on Monday, March 4, 1833, the same day the nation’s seventh president and Tennessee’s most famous son, Andrew Jackson was sworn in for his second term, Alphonso M. Sumner clandestinely opened a school for black children in Nashville, Tennessee.
The antebellum period, however, was riddled with attempts to curtail advancement among blacks, both free and slave, in cities across the South including in Nashville. Viewed as the most natural path to black self-determination, black education managed to clandestinely survive despite repeated extralegal attempts to put them out of operation. Not even repeated violent attacks on black schools, teachers, and students permanently derailed the three decades-long efforts of black native school owner-operators.
By the close of the Civil War, however, the coming of northern missionaries had dramatically changed the face of black education in Nashville. Gone were the makeshift classrooms in which black teachers had led pupils in synchronized recitation; and in its place, were schools funded by white abolitionists, and led by white missionaries.
An outgrowth of overwhelmed Union contraband camps, and of empathetic white Protestant ethos, white teachers received the financial support of northern financers necessary to establish free schools for blacks. Despite initially looking upon their students as objects to be seized, the financial and moral support they received uniquely positioned white teachers, many of them novice, to commandeer black education in Nashville from their veteran black teacher counterparts. In the process of doing so, whites were also empowered to take black education in Nashville to the next level — to turn their free schools into black colleges.
Dedicated on January 9, 1866, in front of a large crowd, the Fisk School — also known as the Fisk Free Colored School — had unofficially begun classes a month earlier in the one-story barracks of a former Union Army hospital. Its founding was an answer to the desperate call of the almost 11,000 freedmen — 3,500 of them younger than 15 — who called Nashville home in 1865.
The school’s Northern white founders Erastus Milo Cravath, Edward P. Smith and John Ogden, with the support of the American Missionary Association and Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission, used all that they had and borrowed all they could to secure the ideally located land in the heart of Nashville’s largest freedmen settlement.
Its modest buildings were transformed: Officers’ quarters became teachers’ homes, sick wards became schoolrooms, and the death house became a storeroom.
Even with the patronage of Gen. Clinton B. Fisk, assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau for Tennessee and Kentucky, doing so had not been easy.
The postwar years were difficult and frightful ones, riddled with the intimidation, the lynching and the murder of blacks in Southern cities, including Nashville.
Without the protection of federal troops, Republican Gov. W. G. Brownlow was certain that the school would not last “a week, not a week.”
But it lasted. The school’s survival was in no small measure due to the dogged determination of its students, who by the close of 1866 averaged 1,000 daily. They came to learn how to read, write and count.
They came, despite being pelted by rocks and assailed with racist diatribes. Some worked during the day and came for lessons at night. Walking barefoot, they came, until the winter snow proved too frigid to withstand. Ranging in ages from 7 to 70, they came.
Even when the school began charging tuition, they still came.
One student Ella Sheppard, arrived at Fisk arrived in September 1868 with only $6 — which she had saved after five months of work — and with all of her possessions in a trunk so small her male classmates called it a pie box.
Having begun her education in Nashville’s antebellum black schools, her father Simon Sheppard had hurriedly, and clandestinely, moved young Ella and her stepmother Cornelia to Cincinnati, Ohio just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Simon, who had purchased his own freedom as well as that of his wife and daughter, had neglected to manumit them. The omission meant that his creditors could claim his wife and daughter as payment for his sizeable debts.
But settling in the haven of Cincinnati’s black and largely impoverished Ragtown community, a drafty, damp district with open drains, presented the Sheppards with serious challenges. Not only was Simon Sheppard’s business slow to thrive, the Queen City’s often frigid and rainy climate left young Ella prone to respiratory and ear infections.
Still, her musical talent was undeniable, prompting her father to secure private teachers for her instruction until his shocking death from cholera in Cincinnati in 1866 while she and her stepmother were on vacation in Xenia, Ohio at Wilberforce University.
Left destitute in the wake of her father’s death, 15-year old Ella sought work as a seamstress, nurse, maid, and laundress to support she and her stepmother. Despite securing the patronage of James Presley Ball, a free black photographer who paid for her to receive vocal lessons from prominent Glendale Female College music teacher Madame Caroline Révé, Ella soon after accepted a teaching position in Gallatin, Tennessee, where her stepmother had relatives.
Located about twenty-five miles northeast of Nashville, the black school where Sheppard taught — like many country one-room shacks that functioned as schoolhouses — had been built through a combination of white patronage, and black self-help.
Her hard-earned but meager savings were just enough to pay for three weeks of room and board at Fisk. Having supervised the building of the Gallatin schoolhouse, Principal Ogden, provisionally agreed for Sheppard to join the campus. She would need to secure work to support herself and to continue her studies. Like many other students, she hoped for some form of financial aid; but Fisk treasurer and music teacher George L. White told her that no on-campus work was available.
A combination of exceptional musical ability and the aid of friends helped Sheppard secure three music tutors in Nashville. For a monthly fee of $4, Sheppard traveled across the city to each student’s home on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
“Running all the way, over the rough, rocky hills and roads, to get back in time for the last tap of the dinner bell,” Sheppard often arrived too late to receive the evening meal, forcing her to go to bed hungry. Although she was often too sick to attend class, she waited on tables and washed dishes to make ends meet on the remaining days of the week.
Along with several Fisk students, Sheppard spent what little free time she had rehearsing music with Fisk treasurer and music teacher George L. White. Although he was neither a vocalist nor a formally trained musician, White had a knack for getting his pupils to sing well. As treasurer, White was expected to manage the fledgling institution’s problems; Fisk teachers were habitually paid late and suffered from a host of illnesses.
The school’s barracks were rotting and local whites obstructed the board’s efforts to secure a healthier site. Merging his paid work and his talent, he encouraged the small gatherings of student singers in 1867. Amid these difficulties and against the directives of his superiors, White organized a group of his best students to perform at a fundraising concert in Nashville.
Ella Sheppard was included in the select group shortly after arriving at Fisk school. Quickly recognizing her musical talents, White offered Sheppard the position of assistant music teacher. With her acceptance, seventeen-year-old Sheppard became the first African American woman to serve on the faculty of Fisk University and remained the only black member of the Fisk faculty until 1875.
Under White’s instruction, the group’s repertoire consisted primarily of contemporary numbers and abolitionist hymns. Yet during practice or impromptu get-togethers, the students chose to sing Negro spirituals, the songs born of the slave experience.
Still, the student demand for college education continued to be greater than Fisk was able to supply into the following decade. There was not even enough money for food to feed the 400 students enrolled at the school. “The beef was so tough that the boys called it ‘Old Ben’,” reflected Sheppard, “and declared that every time they saw the cow they felt like apologizing.”
Inspired by the applause his small company received in nearby towns as well as the emptiness of Fisk’s coffers, White proposed to take a company of students north to raise money. The Fisk board and many of the school’s teachers remained unconvinced.
When the board refused to help fund the effort, White replied to his dissenters: “Tis time to hog, rot or die: I’m depending on God, not you.”
Ultimately sharing in White’s vision, Fisk faculty divided their clothing with troupe members and principal Adam K. Spence added to their effort by giving all that was in the school’s treasury, reserving only one dollar.
With crying parents and teachers looking on, the company of nine departed Nashville on a train bound for Cincinnati, Ohio on October 6, 1871. That troupe became the world-renown Fisk Jubilee Singers and for its first decade, Ella Sheppard was its most recognizable face and most indispensable member.
But long before she was a member of the world-renown troupe and even longer since her arrival at Fisk, Samuella Sheppard, Ella for short, was a slave born on this very plantation in 1851.
The story of her life is inextricably linked to these grounds and to the nearby Cumberland River, where, “in agony of soul and despair,” with her at her bosom, her mother trekked down the dusty path towards the river’s edge.
As Sarah Hannah Sheppard rushed “to end it all” with the fatal leap, a voice cried out, “Don’t you do it Honey, don’t you see the clouds of the Lord as they pass by?”
Sensing Sarah’s anguish and fatal intent, Mammy Viney raised her eyes towards the heavens. The old woman searched the clouds for the prophecy of the young child’s destiny, and as if reading the heavens like a scroll, she asked Sarah, “Look, Honey, don’t you see the clouds of the Lord as they pass by? The Lord has need of this child.”
Music historian and Fisk alumnus John Wesley Work II offers an even more dramatic rendition of this moment. In his book Folk Song of the American Negro, the old woman, who is called “Aunt Cherry,” foresaw the baby’s future with such clarity and exactness that present-day historians can only make sense of Work’s version of her prophecy by emphasizing that it is “supposed.”
She hastened Sarah to stop, saying “Don’t do it, honey; wait let de chariot of de Lord swing low. God’s got a great work for dis baby to do! She’s goin’ to stand befo’ kings and queens. Don’t you do it.”
Sarah did not; but Ella did.
Ella’s story demonstrates what slavery robbed so many people of — of their hopes and humanity as much as the potentiality of their lives.
But what does this all mean when just two years ago, the world awakened to the news that nine black lives had been cut down in a Charleston Church by a white supremacist who was treated to Burger King on his way to booking?
What does Juneteenth mean today, when two days ago Philando Castile’s police-shooter walked away “scot-free?”
I don’t know. If you do, please tell me.
Further reading: Andrew Ward. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers, Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America; Ella Sheppard Moore. “Historical Sketch of the Jubilee Singers”; Gustavus D. Pike. The Jubilee Singers, and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars; Joe M. Richardson. A History of Fisk University, 1865–1946; and John Wesley Work II. Folk Song of the American Negro.
