< PREVIOUS ] [ 2010 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Texas celebrates something that should not be celebrated, Confederate Heritage and History Month, but it also makes a holiday of June 19 -- "Juneteenth," more or less the day that slavery ended in the United States.
That came more than two years after Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It must be the most misunderstood document in American history.
Lincoln's goal, as he often said, was not to eliminate slavery, but to preserve the Union. Even early in the Civil War, slaves escaped to the Union lines. The owner showed up under a flag of truce and got his property returned.
This didn't sit well with Gen. Benjamin Butler, an inept military commander but a shrewd lawyer who devised the "contraband theory."
In wartime, you're allowed to seize "contraband" -- enemy property that can be used against you. The Confederates had slaves digging trenches, building forts and driving wagons. So Butler said it was legal to seize any slaves that came his way. Since his side didn't want to own them, he gave them their freedom and paid them wages to labor for the Union army.
This legal theory spread in 1862 as the Confederacy sought recognition from Great Britain. Lincoln knew that Great Britain didn't care whether the Union stayed intact. But Britain would not intervene to defend slavery, which it had abolished in 1833.
Further, when Lincoln announced in his intention to issue the proclamation, it was a message to seceding states: If you lay down your arms and come back in before Jan. 1, 1863, you can keep your slaves. But you'll lose them if you keep fighting.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to states that had not seceded, or to areas under Union control. Critics pointed out that it applied only in areas where Lincoln had no power to enforce it.
Lincoln did hold an expansive view of executive power, likely unrivaled until Dick Cheney came along.
Even so, Lincoln believed he had no authority to end slavery in loyal slave states like Delaware and Kentucky. As President, he couldn't seize private property without compensation (and his proposals for compensated emancipation were rejected when they weren't ignored).
However, as commander-in-chief, he could order emancipation as a military measure that applied wherever the army advanced, since that would deprive the enemy of resources. And if some former slaves became soldiers and sailors, so much the better.
One ironic result was that Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, a racist who was certainly no abolitionist, likely freed more slaves than any of his colleagues, thanks to his famous 1864-65 marches through Georgia and the Carolinas.
But Sherman did not march into Texas. Nor did any significant Union force after a repulse at Galveston in late 1862. The Union didn't much care about Texas because it was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy after the North captured Vicksburg, Miss., on July 4, 1863.
After Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered in 1865, CSA President Jefferson Davis headed for Texas, but was captured in Georgia. When word reached Confederate Gen. Kirby Smith in Texas, he surrendered because further fighting was useless. On June 19, 1865, Union Gen. Gordon Granger announced that "The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free."
It's certainly an occasion worth commemorating, although slavery remained legal in Delaware and Kentucky until the 13th Amendment was ratified on Dec. 6, 1865.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2010 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >