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Today is the actual Juneteenth,
and most
explanations of its origins are even more confusing than
the recent Juneteenth political sniping between Republican
Sen. Wayne Allard and his likely opponent next year, Denver
Mayor Wellington Webb.
The usual explanation for Juneteenth goes along the lines that President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, thereby freeing the slaves, but for some reason, they never heard about it in Texas until June of 1865.
It's more complicated than that, since the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free a single slave when it was issued.
When Lincoln was running for president in 1860, he was personally opposed to slavery, and publicly opposed to expansion of slavery into the western territories.
But Lincoln said his goal was to preserve the union, and
to that end, he had pledged to respect the domestic
institutions
of states where slavery was legal. That
wasn't enough to satisfy many people in the South, where
states began passing ordinances of the secession, and then
organizing the Confederate States of America.
And so, when the shooting war erupted in the spring of 1861, the federal army was in theory acting like an immense police force, patrolling to enforce the existing constitution and laws.
That constitution sanctioned slavery, and the Yankee army operated in states where slavery was legal. Early in the war, slaves would flee to Union lines, and Union officers would arrange for returning them to their owners -- that was, after all, the law, and the army was there to uphold the rule of law.
But African-Americans were taking matters into their own hands -- wherever the Union army ventured, escaped slaves appeared (a phenomenon that has yet to be explained by the Southern mythology about how happy they all were on the plantations).
It was one of the great scoundrels of American history who contrived a convenient legal theory to allow the Union army to free slaves. That was Benjamin Butler, a Democratic congressman whom Lincoln had commissioned a general so as to make the war a bipartisan effort.
Butler was in command one Virginia day in 1861 when a slave owner appeared under flag of truce and demanded the return, under the fugitive slave law, of three slaves who had fled to Union lines. Butler replied that since Virginia claimed to be out of the union, then the law didn't apply, and further, under the laws of war, he was entitled to seize enemy property -- in this case, slaves, whom he then freed.
That was the policy that was more or less codified by the Emancipation Proclamation. As written, it did not free any slaves in areas under Union control (Delaware, for instance), and it could not be enforced in areas beyond Union control.
But as areas of the South came under Union control, the slaves were freed so that they could not be put to work for the Confederacy. Lincoln justified the proclamation as a military measure under his powers as commander-in-chief, and said he had no constitutional authority to act against slavery otherwise.
Many freed slaves joined the Union army; if they were captured in battle, the Confederacy refused to treat them as prisoners of war, but instead put them back into slavery -- if they weren't just shot on the spot.
Thus it's hard to see how a Confederate flag stands for a heritage that any decent person would want to celebrate, but at any rate, the effective end of slavery in any area was the arrival of Union soldiers.
And they didn't really get into Texas until the war was essentially over. After U.S. Grant's victory at Vicksburg, Miss., on July 4, 1863, Texas was cut off from the core of the Confederacy and became strategically unimportant. Texas soldiers were also good at repelling the occasional Yankee incursions.
Toward the end of May of 1865, word of other Confederate surrenders (Robert E. Lee, Joe Johnston, Richard Taylor) finally reached Texas. Kirby Smith, the Confederate commander in Texas, realized it was over, and on June 2 he surrendered what was left of his army.
Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with an occupation army on June 19. He immediately proclaimed, in the name of President Andrew Johnson, that the slaves were free.
Or, as Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach put it, This
was the historic 'Juneteenth,' afterward celebrated by
Texas Negroes as Emancipation Day.
Now it's celebrated by all sorts of people in a lot of places besides Texas. And as something from the Civil War to celebrate, it sure beats the Stars and Bars.
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