On Juneteenth
06.17.22
Laura Smalley, a former slave who grew up on a plantation in Hempstead, Texas, remembered the confusion of her early childhood. “Mama and them didn’t know where to go, you see after freedom broke… [They] turned us out just like, you know, you turn out cattle,” she laughed.
Once the enormity of the event set in (their former master conveniently failed to inform them of their freedom), the date became a cause for celebration. “They turned them loose on the nineteenth of June, and so that’s why, you know, we celebrate that day,” said Smalley.
The date of celebration she recalled was June 19th, 1865, more than two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived with Union Troops in Galveston, Texas, announcing General Order №3, which declared all slaves free. “That’s the day the last American slaves were freed, otherwise known as the last good day in Black history,” said Late Night writer Amber Ruffin. “No, I’m just kidding a bit. It’s the day we celebrate our freedom and see how far we’ve come.”
By the time of Granger’s announcement, Texas was well on its way to becoming a veritable “empire for slavery,” welcoming up to 50,000 slaves from other Southern states as owners desperately tried to evade the coming federal troops. General Granger’s untimely arrival “shattered Texas’s dream of a cotton-based slave economy,” writes Pulitzer-Prize winning author Annette Gordon-Reed in her 2021 release, On Juneteenth. She recalls how older celebrants “joked that the Emancipation Proclamation had actually been signed two years before, but the ‘white people’ wanted to get a few extra harvest seasons in before they told ‘the Negroes’ about it.”
Yet, despite being a federal holiday and the “oldest continuous commemoration of emancipation in America,” many Americans remain ignorant to the larger meaning behind the event. “Though it has long been celebrated among the African-American community, it is a history that has been marginalized and still remains largely unknown to the wider public,” remarked the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
Opal Lee, popularly known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” urges all Americans to celebrate the holiday. “I am so delighted to know that suddenly we’ve got a Juneteenth,” she told CBS. “It’s not a Texas thing or a black thing. It’s an American thing.” This Juneteenth, in honor of Ms. Lee’s wishes, we discuss the history behind Juneteenth, arguably, as one magazine puts it, “Texas’s greatest export of the late 20th century.”
A Creative Use of Military Orders
Many are surprised to learn that more than half the text of General Order №3 hardly adopts a tone of liberation. Instead, it reads like a textbook example of Stockholm Syndrome, urging former slaves to stay with their old masters, continue their old jobs, and, above all, avoid being idle. “The freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages,” reads the order. “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.”
The patronizing language was intentional: one of the primary objectives of the military order was to “maintain order, keep laborers at work in the fields, and prevent the civil unrest that white officers and politicians feared might result from exuberant celebrations by the newly freed people,” writes famed Texan historian Dr. Randolph Campbell. Likewise, the decision to address the general public through a military order — a highly unusual occurrence — was borrowed from earlier precedent set by other Union generals in the Civil War.
Why were military generals left to make proclamations regarding (former) private property to the general public? Because President Lincoln’s inaction forced them to. Despite his personal abhorrence for slavery (Lincoln wrote to Kentucky newspaper editor Albert Hodges in 1864, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel,”), the Lincoln Administration adopted a neutral stance on slavery for much of the war.
Having already lost eleven states to secession, Lincoln was desperate not to alienate the remaining loyal slave states. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” he confessed to his friend Orville Browning in September 1861. “Kentucky gone we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”
He was also loathe to believe that a presidential proclamation represented anything more than a “dictatorship,” and agreed that slavery “was a local, domestic question appertaining to the States respectively, who had never parted with their authority over it.” And yet, the issue of neutrality increasingly came to a head on the military front. How were generals supposed to receive escaped slaves without official guidance?
One of the first military leaders to take matters into his own hands was General Benjamin Butler, who encountered three runaway slaves (Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend) seeking refuge from Confederate troops. “As later events proved, General Butler lacked much as a military commander, but he was an able lawyer, probably one of the most outstanding attorneys of his day,” wrote Campbell. After interviewing the escaped slaves, Butler learned that their owner was a Confederate officer and refused to return them. When John B. Cary, a Confederate officer, came to claim them, he was outfoxed by Butler:
“What do you mean to do with those negroes?” said Cary.
“I intend to hold them,” said [Butler].
“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”
“I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday. I am under no obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”
“But you say we cannot secede,” said Cary, “and so you cannot consistently detain the negroes.”
“But you say you have seceded, so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property. The question is whether they shall be used for or against the Government of the United States.”
Afterwards, Butler relayed the events to Lincoln, and was pleased to see his “contraband of war” argument adopted as the “centerpiece for a War Department strategy on slavery.” Later, when Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he modeled its language after a military act in the hopes of increasing its legitimacy. While this may have sucked the gusto out of the proclamation — the work had, as one modern critic commented, the “moral grandeur of a bill of lading,” aka receipt — he saw it as a necessary act of political pragmatism.
Commercial Interests Drive Legal Recognition of Juneteenth
Ironically, the complaints of former slaveholders cemented Juneteenth’s status as the legally recognized end of slavery in Texas. The 1860 Census placed the value of slave property in the United States at roughly three billion dollars, of which approximately 5% resided in Texas by the end of the war. Depending on when Texas recognized the legal end of slavery, large numbers of property transactions suddenly became suspect.
“In spite of the Confederacy’s waning fortunes as the conflict progressed, Texans continued to deal in slaves as personal chattel until the bitter end,” wrote Campbell. “For many slaveholders, the great majority of whom saw nothing to celebrate anyhow, the date was more important” from a commercial, rather than symbolic standpoint. Could a late-stage buyer, for example, demand a refund for a slave purchased in 1864 or early 1865? Could a lender invalidate their loan?
These were the questions posed to the Supreme Court of Texas in 1868. The “Emancipation Proclamation Cases,” as they came to be called, demanded a definitive date to the end of slavery to determine which contracts were invalid. Three dates seriously contended for the spot: January 1st, 1863 (the Emancipation Proclamation), June 19th, 1865 (Juneteenth Order), and December 18th, 1865 (Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment). The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to enemy territory, effectively freeing zero slaves, whereas the Juneteenth Order is estimated to have freed at least 250,000 people in Texas and the surrounding territories.
Ultimately, the justices concluded that the first date was too soon. Such reasoning would have “ignored the de facto existence of slavery until the late spring of 1865,” writes Campbell, and left the Texas courts “clogged with litigation for years.” On the other hand, the third date was too late. As one justice concluded, it “merely finished the work throughout the entire nation.” Juneteenth was the happy medium, backed by the force of the federal army to finally enact what the Emancipation Proclamation first set out to do.
The Emancipation Proclamation, concluded Justice Lindsay, “required the power of the conquering forces. The liberation in Texas took effect from the date of the surrender of the insurgent forces, and the proclamation of that fact by the commanding general, dated 19th June 1865. By general understanding, that was the day of jubilee of freedom of the slaves in Texas. Until this final surrender in Texas, the traffic in slaves was lawful.”
Juneteenth Becomes a Federal Holiday
Early Juneteenth celebrations revolved around prayer, parades, and food. Many newly freed slaves, such as Jack Yates of Houston, led capital campaigns to purchase “Emancipation Parks,” where the community could explicitly gather to celebrate Juneteenth.
“The main course was — and still is — barbecue,” reports the Texas Monthly. “In small towns all over the state, whole cows, pigs, or goats were roasted over a fire pit dug in the ground, a method of preparation straight from Africa. The favored drink was red soda water, sometimes referred to as strawberry soda; today many Texans both black and white prefer the soft drink Big Red with their barbecue.”
Opal Lee, who took a vested interest in Juneteenth when she was “as old as dirt,” helped gain federal recognition by announcing her intent to walk 1,400 miles from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, D.C. at the age of 89. Over the course of four months, she took the march 2.5 miles at a time to symbolize the gap between the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth (Lee clarifies that she did not walk the entire way: “I did some hundreds of them, but not 1,400.”)
Today, other community organizers are planning the development of an “Emancipation National Historic Trail,” which would extend 51 miles from Galveston to Houston, following the migration route of newly freed slaves migrating to Houston’s Freedman’s Town.
Sam Collins, a Galveston leader of historic preservation, hopes Americans come to see Juneteenth as a worthy companion celebration to Independence Day. “I think people need to realize Juneteenth celebrates freedom, and freedom is something we all value,” said Collins. “Juneteenth is not just an African American holiday, but a day that celebrates the evolution of our country to a more perfect union. We encourage people to celebrate Juneteenth all over the state and world.”
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