When the Civil War began in 1861, it was not a war of liberation. Many white Americans professed to find slavery abhorrent, but of these only a small number of black and white abolitionists imagined literally fighting to end it. Four million enslaved people stood nearly alone in demanding their immediate and unconditional freedom. But when the United States sent its forces southward to subdue the Confederate rebellion, politicians and soldiers quickly learned that their best (and often their only) allies on the southern ground were enslaved people. The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, recognized this reality, pronouncing freedom to enslaved people in areas still under Confederate rule. And the victory of the U.S. over the rebellion meant that, by the late spring of 1865, the great majority of African Americans could confidently assert that they were free. But months later, slavery survived in Texas, where U.S. forces were slow to arrive. There, sheltered by distance from the main currents of the war and emancipation, slaveholders refused to acknowledge the new reality. There, it was only the arrival of nearly 2,000 U.S. troops in mid-June, 1865, that destroyed the slaveholders’ power and brought freedom to nearly 200,000 Texans.
Juneteenth celebrates the official proclamation of that freedom by U.S. General Gordon Granger on June 19th. It recognizes a rare and powerful moment when freedom came to hundreds of thousands in a matter of days, a moment that Christian ex-slaves understood as the Bible’s promised Jubilee. In the years to come, Juneteenth celebrations became ways for Black communities to assert themselves as free and equal citizens, to honor military veterans, and to draw connections between their struggles and those of their ancestors. Long before the phrase became a rallying cry, Juneteenth became an occasion to affirm that Black Lives Matter.
Stephen D. Kantrowitz | Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History; Affiliate Faculty of the Department of African American Studies and in the American Indian Studies Program