By 1865, the U.S. Civil War that began to restore the Union had become a war to end slavery. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had taken force in January 1863, freeing “thenceforward and forever” all persons held in bondage in states that did not return to the Union, an action taken as a military necessity.
The enslaved in states that had not seceded from the Union remained in bondage.
The war ended after the last major battle was fought, and the Confederacy surrender took place at Appomattox in April 1865.
Two months later, Union Gen. Gordon Granger was given command of the area near Galveston, Texas, where the fighting continued. His charge was to announce the war's end. He realized upon arriving, according to Denver Brunsman, chair of the History Department in the George Washington University Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, that “Nothing had changed.”
“Life was going on as if the war had never happened, and the Union had not won,” Brunsman said. “So, immediately, he composed General Order No. 3 freeing all enslaved people.”
The order declared “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.”
Juneteenth, Brunsman said, “put an exclamation on the Civil War and on the emancipation that came as a result of the war.”
There was a sense of joy and celebration in Texas as happened wherever slavery had existed. But there were questions and confusion as well. The Freedman’s Bureau was created as part of Reconstruction to assist the formerly enslaved people in areas of the Confederacy to help them integrate into American society.
“There were a lot of successes in Reconstruction, in terms of raising education levels, literacy rates, the election of African American politicians to Congress,” Brunsman said. “But overall, it failed in creating an equal society.”
Galveston was far from the center of American government in Washington, D.C., but in spite of the 1,400-mile distance between the two cities, historians have debated whether enslaved people didn’t already know about the Emancipation Proclamation.
“News travels,” Brunsman said. “They most likely did in some way. The slave owners certainly did, but it would have been in their interest to keep that information from them obviously.”
The Union Army was necessary to enforce Emancipation. It was a process. Enslaved people needed some place to go off plantations. They often followed the Union Army.
Slavery didn’t just end June 19, not in Texas, nor Kentucky, Tennessee, Indigenous tribal lands and other parts of the United States. It continued even in places that had been part of the Union. It took until December 1865 and ratification of the 13th amendment, which outlawed slavery, for people in parts of Kentucky, Delaware and other places to be free from enslavement. Thus, Emancipation is observed at different times in several jurisdictions, for example, in April in the District of Columbia.
It is important to note that Juneteenth didn’t end slavery. The 13th Amendment didn’t quite end it. And many freedmen ended up still working for the same enslavers as before under the system of sharecropping.
“It certainly wasn’t perfect or ideal. It was a difficult freedom,” Brunsman said. “But it wasn’t the same as the conditions of slavery.”
Since 1865, African Americans in Texas have commemorated Freedom Day—Juneteenth—returning to Galveston each year for a celebration or carrying the tradition with them to other parts of the United States. It is common among some Black Texans to protectively guard Juneteenth as their own special holiday. Under Jim Crow, when public parks were closed to Black people, a group of Black Texans purchased land in Houston specifically to have a place to celebrate the day. It is still called Emancipation Park.
For Brunsman, who teaches a summer course in American history covering the Reconstruction Era, Juneteenth falls right when the class is talking about these events. But it is a holiday many Americans may have to grow into because they are very walled off from the issues connected to it.
In 2016, Opal Lee, who was an 89-year-old retired schoolteacher and community activist from Fort Worth, Texas, began a 1,400-mile trek to Washington, D.C., in a campaign to have Juneteenth made a federal holiday. In 2021, in a time of heightened racial tension in the United States after the murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill making Juneteenth a national holiday.
"The importance of making it a national holiday is that it is for all Americans to recognize the importance of freedom, but also to recognize the challenges that African Americans have gone through in American history, to recognize that African American history, Black history, is American history and until all people are free there isn’t true freedom in the country.
“As a historian I kind of marvel at the fact that it is a national holiday. It’s an opportunity to talk about the challenges of the past and how far we’ve come and how far we need to go to realize true equality,” Brunsman said.