Juneteenth
- History Fix Podcast
- 2 hours ago
- 11 min read
Episode 162: How a Day in Galveston, Texas Came to Symbolize the End of Slavery in the United States
Decree read by General Granger in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865
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December 31,1862 was New Years Eve but it was another eve as well, a far more important eve to many. It was Freedom’s Eve. That night, as the stroke of midnight neared, African Americans across the divided country, both free and enslaved, gathered in homes and churches as they were able, awaiting the news. Would Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation really take effect at midnight? Would enslaved people in the Confederate states really be free? The prayers of these Watch Night services were, in fact, answered. In the days that followed, daring Union soldiers, many of them Black, marched onto plantations across the south reading copies of the Emancipation Proclamation “Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: ‘That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.’” But, while it did take effect for some, the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t the smash hit they had been hoping for. It would take almost 3 more years for slavery to actually end in the United States with the passing of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865. And even then, freedom was not immediate for many Black Americans. So, January 1, 1863 we have the Emancipation Proclamation. December 6, 1865 we have the 13th Amendment. So then, what the heck happened on June 19th? Why do we celebrate the end of slavery on June 19th? Juneteenth? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. If you’re listening to this on Patreon, it’s actually coming out on June 19th, which I love. For everyone else, we’re a couple days late. But, no matter. I could not let another Juneteenth pass without getting to the bottom of what exactly that date represents. Because it’s not the Emancipation Proclamation and it’s not the 13th Amendment, the two major slavery ending acts that people know about. What happened on June 19th? What does it have to do with freedom? And why did it end up with its own holiday instead of those other dates?
Well, to tell this story, we have to go back to 1861. This was a very turbulent year for the United States. This was the year that 11 states seceded from the Union, starting with South Carolina in, actually in 1860, at the tail end of 1860. And then followed in 1861, in order by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and finally Tennessee. These 11 states became the Confederate States of America. I have had many debates with many people about the reasons for these states leaving the Union and forming their own thing. But really, at the end of the day, regardless of what you want to believe about state’s rights or whatever, the main reason they seceded was slavery. Specifically, they worried that the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 was a threat to the future of slavery in the south. Now here’s the thing though, Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He was not personally a fan of slavery, but he wasn’t an abolitionist. He wasn’t campaigning on the abolition of slavery. In fact, he planned to allow it to continue in the southern states. However, he did want to restrict it in new territories, potential new states that were being explored and settled and that was not okay with these southern slave owning states. They didn’t like the idea of any restrictions or government meddling when it came to slavery. And they were actually very vocal about that. They made it very clear that the reason they were leaving the Union was disagreements over the future of slavery. It’s in writing in the form of declarations of secession. South Carolina’s declaration of secession repeatedly complained that Northern states were not enforcing laws that protected slavery. Mississippi's Declaration of Secession said quote "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world." Texas’ Declaration of Secession also defended slavery and emphasized that it should continue as a system. Not to mention Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephen’s “Cornerstone Speech” from 1861 stated the literal foundation of the Confederacy as resting on the belief that Black people were inferior to white people and that slavery was their quote “natural condition.” So, yeah it was about slavery.
Now, one thing I don’t think a lot of people realize is that not every slave state left the Union. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri all had slavery and chose not to secede. Also, the western part of Virginia wasn’t really feeling the secession thing. When Virginia seceded in 1861, these western counties broke away from the state and remained on the side of the Union. In 1863 they were officially admitted into the Union as the new state of West Virginia. So there were 5 states with slavery that were still part of the Union.
By 1863, the Union and the Confederacy had been embroiled in the Civil War for a couple of years already and it was a terrible, terrible war. The deadliest war in American history with as many as 850,000 deaths, American deaths. Because every death in the Civil War was an American death. That death toll is higher than the total number of American military deaths from all other US wars before or since combined. Lincoln was desperate for a solution. He needed this war to end as soon as possible. His goal was to put the country he was the leader of back together and for that to happen, the war had to end. It was not about ending slavery, initially. That was not the goal of the Union at all. They did not fight the south to try to end slavery. They fought the south to try to stop them from leaving the Union. Until 1863. That’s when the strategy shifted. Lincoln came up with a plan to cripple the south and hopefully expedite a seemingly inevitable Union victory. That plan was the Emancipation Proclamation, ending slavery in the South. Lincoln didn’t really write the Emancipation Proclamation because he hated slavery, he wrote it because he wanted to hurt the Confederacy, their economy, their military labor force. And, I don’t think a lot of people realize this either but the Emancipation Proclamation only freed enslaved people in Confederate controlled states in active rebellion against the Union. It did not apply to those 5 states in the Union that still had slavery. Those enslaved people were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. It also didn’t apply to Confederate states under Union control, which was just Tennessee. Tennessee was under a Union controlled military government at the time so it was exempt. So that means enslaved people in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee, and also some parts of Louisiana, actually, were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Even in the 10 Confederate states where it did apply, it wasn’t instantaneous. It was very hard to enforce, for obvious reasons. As the Union army gradually took over more and more places throughout the South, they brought the power of the Emancipation Proclamation with them. Many formerly enslaved people fled with the Union army. Many men joined it. And so it wasn’t like, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863 at midnight all of the enslavers were like “okay guys, you’re free now. You can go. Bye.” No. It didn’t work like that at all. Freedom came slowly and gradually to some and not at all to others.
So you can sort of imagine the Union army making its way across the south, freeing of enslaved people as they went, through Virginia, down through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, over to Alabama and Mississippi. Where do they come to last? Texas. Texas was on the outskirts of the Confederacy. There wasn’t any large scale fighting there during the war and no real presence of Union troops. So in Texas, all throughout the Civil War, they just carried on, business as usual so much so that by the end of the war in the spring of 1865, many enslavers from other Confederate states had fled to Texas in order to carry on enslaving and join in their whole business as usual thing they had going over there. So Texas was like this last hold out where, technically the Emancipation Proclamation had freed all enslaved people in Texas but they were just like nah and slavery continued anyway all through the war and even after the war ended. It was a safe haven for slavery.
That would end in June of 1865. June 19th to be exact. So, context, the Civil War ended in spring of that year, 1865 with a series of surrenders, most notably Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9th. It took a couple of months, June before 2,000 Union forces finally made their way to Galveston, Texas led by General Gordon Granger. On June 19th, Granger proclaimed that all 250,000 enslaved people in the state of Texas were officially free. He said quote “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," end quote. So, you know, he’s like stay here, keep doing what you’re doing, just like get paid for it now. Which is like easier said than done right?
This announcement was met with celebration from many enslaved people in Galveston but, just like the Emancipation Proclamation that already freed all these people once two years ago, it was not instantaneous. Many enslavers hid this decree from the people they enslaved until after the harvest season so they could eek the last few drops out of this whole free labor arrangement. Even for those who were freed on June 19th in Texas, it’s not like their former enslavers starting handing over paychecks as Granger had suggested. According to Erin Stewart Mauldin, Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and Civil War expert, in an article by Matthew Cimitile quote “Plantation owners didn’t want to pay their former slaves at all and the former Confederate states were more or less broke after the war, so they didn’t have money to even pay… Though slavery ends, the conditions for many change very little initially,” end quote. Even after the 13th Amendment was passed in December of 1865 formally abolishing slavery in all US states, the circumstances of formerly enslaved people were slow to change.
These newly freed people couldn’t just pick up and go live the lives they’d always dreamed of. They had no money. They had no means of going anywhere. So most stayed on the plantations and just fought like hell to get compensated for the labor they continued to provide. For many that was not monetary. Like Professor Mauldin said, in many cases the former enslavers did not have the money with which to pay them. But they legally had to compensate them somehow and so the era of sharecropping began. Matthew Cimitile explains in that article quote “Laborers would work a plot of land for a share of the crop or profits at the end of the year. Some would begin to amass goods and property, enough to make their own decisions on what to plant, what livestock to buy and even hire additional laborers to farm the land. But many in this new economic system would amass debt, as the only way to receive property and items to farm was to become indebted to landowners. The struggle for freedom morphed into a struggle for economic independence,” end quote.
So, all of that to say that it’s important to remember slavery didn’t just end one day and newly free Black Americans waltzed into fairy tale lives. For many, not much changed at all, at least not in their lifetimes or even in their children’s lifetimes. Professor Mauldin says quote “Freedom was not a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to Juneteenth to the Civil Rights movement. Individuals had to fight for every piece of freedom they experienced and the struggle for justice that started long before the war did not end with emancipation,” end quote.
But let’s go back to June 19th in Galveston, Texas to uncover the roots of the now Federal holiday of Juneteenth. General Granger reads this decree freeing all 250,000 enslaved people in Texas. A year later, in 1866, freedmen in Texas organized an annual celebration commemorating June 19th that would come to be called Jubilee Day. It was a celebration so there would be cook outs, you know barbeques, music, dancing, parades, families and friends gathering together, and also prayer services. This became a yearly celebration among the Black communities in Texas. As many of these freedmen eventually migrated out of Texas and to other parts of the United States, they brought this Jubilee Day celebration of June 19th with them and it spread throughout the US, at least within the Black communities. It morphed into, not just commemorating General Granger’s proclamation in Galveston that day and the freeing of the enslaved people of Texas, but a celebration of freedom in general and the end of slavery in the United States.
Eventually, by the late 1800s, the name Juneteenth was coined as a portmanteau, a blend, of the words June and nineteenth, appearing in newspapers for the first time in 1890. In 1979, Juneteenth, became an official holiday in Texas and in 2021, President Joe Biden signed it into law as a federal US holiday, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day. Which is hugely significant. Because, honestly before that, before 2021, it still wasn’t really all that known about outside of Black communities. When it became a federal holiday in 2021, suddenly everyone is talking about it. Now everyone knows about it as a celebration of freedom, as a celebration of the end of slavery, the end of centuries of oppression. You know we go hard on the 4th of July. We celebrate the heck out of our country’s independence. But that day, July 4, 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, declaring our independence from Great Britain, our freedom, our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That didn’t apply to everyone. And so in many ways, Juneteenth is more of a celebration of freedom than the 4th of July. Because it’s a celebration of freedom, finally, for all. And I could get into women’s rights and economic inequality and what not but we won’t complicate things further. Juneteenth in many ways celebrates the final accomplishment of what July 4th set out and ultimately failed to do.
But why Juneteenth? Why not January 1st when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect? Why not December 6th when the 13th Amendment was ratified? Well, simply because no one made holidays for those. The holiday is Juneteenth because it’s the folks down in Texas who decided to make a holiday commemorating the events of that day. And since then, it’s grown into a country wide celebration of freedom, freedom that didn’t come overnight, freedom that was hard earned over generations. Professor Mauldin says quote “Juneteenth is neither the beginning nor the end of something. The end of the Civil War and the ending of slavery didn’t happen overnight and was a lot more like a jagged edge than a clean cut.” She goes on to say quote “It is immensely important to remember the difficulties of fighting and securing even the smallest measures of freedom. Juneteenth has become a symbol for emancipation and provides a highly visible celebration that does get at these difficult conversations about America’s history,” end quote.
These difficult conversations. Juneteenth is a celebration, but it’s also a sobering reminder of a very dark past. We want holidays to be happy, fun things, right? We want to party. We want hot dogs and fireworks. We don’t want to think about sad things. We don’t want to think about oppression and injustice. And, for far too long, our holidays have been limited to these sort of whitewashed carefree celebrations of a history that’s omitted anything unsavory, everything we wanted to pretend never happened. The 4th of July, Columbus Day. I’m happy to see holidays like Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples Day finally come on the scene. Because, they’re important reminders of where we’ve been and how far we have come and I can’t think of anything more worthy of celebrating than that.
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