Juneteenth

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 14, 2015

We observe the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was not enforced in Texas until two years after it was made. Many enslaved men and women hadn’t heard that the government had declared them free. Juneteenth is the celebration of that good news.

I long to know what the US would be like if it had never been legal to capture, import and own other people. Agriculture would have developed differently. The distribution of wealth amongst us would be different. Most of us carry the psychological scars of it. I grew up for a time, during the early 1960’s, in North Carolina. I was taught about the institution of slavery. “Most people were kind to their slaves,” they said. “After emancipation, many slaves chose to stay with their masters. They didn’t want to leave them.” “Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation.” I always pictured this proclamation being read aloud and great rejoicing going up from the people. Joyous Black faces and emotional White faces of people saying “So long, it’s been great having you.” I didn’t really think about it that much. I had the privilege of not thinking about slavery much.

I remember the first time I heard the phrased “enslaved men and women.” It woke something up in me. Instead of calling people “slaves,” as if this were the kind of human they were, a category, easily made into an abstraction, these were women and men who had been enslaved. I supposed what it says is that I’m not “a slave” now, but the process of being enslaved would make me one. That is what happened to the men and women in that time. They were enslaved. I don’t like to say the word “slaves” any more. It doesn’t tell the story. Juneteenth celebrations in Austin are next Saturday. A parade, a gathering in the park, beauty contests and barbeque. Regular Texans celebrating. It’s a holiday here and in OK. Other states have Juneteenth celebrations too, but it’s not a holiday there.

The celebrations commemorate the beginning of the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. See, the EP didn’t free that many people. Lincoln wanted to free the enslaved men and women gradually, granting financial compensation to the people who had been allowed to think of them as property. The EP was punitive in nature. After the Battle of Antietam, in MD, in Sept. of 1862, where 22,717 young men slaughtered one another in a corn field, Lincoln wrote in his proclamation that, as of Jan 1 of 1863, all enslaved men and women in states still in rebellion against the Union would be freed. Not those enslaved in Union states. Not if any Confederate states repented and rejoined the Union. Needless to say, no one in the rebellious states recognized the authority of Lincoln’s proclamation, so life continued as usual, only with war added, for the enslaved men and women of the South.

The war ended, I always thought, with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. Not really. He surrendered his armies, but there were other Confederate armies still fighting in the West. The spread of slavery across the Mississippi had been resisted. Kansas was in turmoil when about ready to join the US in the 1850’s (ten years before Appaomattox), as “free soil” folks skirmished with pro slavery forces that thought people should be able to bring “their property” with them when they came to farm. Non slave owners weren’t so much horrified, it seems, by the moral cesspool of slavery, as horrified that others would buy up all the good land and work it with people they’d already paid for, so didn’t have to pay. Horace Greeley of the NYTimes, (son of Horace Greeley, the first President of the American Unitarian Association, coined the phrase “Bleeding Kansas.” John Brown, who believed that armed raids were the way to overthrow slavery, was funded and armed by northern abolitionists, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friends. I’m not sure how they felt when the arms they had bought were used by John Brown’s followers to kill five members of a pro slavery farming family in Kansas.

After Lee’s surrender, Union troops supported the enslaved families as they began living in freedom. There were few Union troops in the west, though. Texas had sent 70,000 troops to the war. Kirby Smith surrendered on May 26 (officially signed June 2). The last battle of the American Civil War was the Battle of Palmito Ranch in Texas on May 12 and 13. The last significant Confederate active force to surrender was the Confederate allied Cherokee Brigadier General Stand Watie and his Indian soldiers on June 23. You remember that the Cherokee and other First Nations were slaveholders.

So it wasn’t as if the enslaved people in Texas labored ignorant of the freedom of all others, for two years. No one was free until Appomattox. When General Granger and his 2,000 men sailed into Galveston, the war was still in its last gasps. General Granger began Order No. 3 with the following statement informing slaves of their new status as freed Americans: “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 rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.” Federal troops did not arrive in Texas to restore order until June 19, 1865, when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and 2,000 Union soldiers arrived on Galveston Island to take possession of the state and enforce the new freedoms of former slaves. The Texas holiday Juneteenth commemorates this date. The Stars and Stripes were not raised over Austin until June 25.

We celebrate the freedom of those who were enslaved and were freed. No one helped them. Some freed folks were given land formerly held by plantation owners, but Pres. Andrew Jackson gave that back to the plantation owners after a few years.

It’s land that is the basis of wealth. When there are laws against Black folks owning land, their families, for generations, will not be able to prosper. White settlers were given land, and, with it, the chance to make some wealth. Not all were able to do that, but many were. White folks were able to buy houses wherever they wanted to and it is only recently that Black homeowners have been able to buy in the suburbs.

The brave of old, given a sudden gift of freedom, were sometimes able to make good choices and strike good luck, even though most were not helped, and were, in fact, opposed at every turn by separate but equal schools with old text books and holes in the roof, by Jim Crow laws denying them access to the culture, by racist violence to keep them in their places. My friends, we all know that this is still going on. Let us be the ones to offer help. Let us be the ones who stand against this systematic burdening of the poor and people of color in our midst. It is time for things to be fair.

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