The Hidden History Of Juneteenth
Sorry to be a couple of days late, but this turned in my email last week, and I'm still behind reading all of it.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/hidden-history-of-juneteenth
If Haywood and other enslaved people knew about the Emancipation Proclamation, what exactly did the events of June 19, 1865 mean? Here we face a key forgotten reality about the end of the Civil War and slavery that has been shrouded in the mythology of Appomattox. The internecine conflict and the institution of slavery could not and did not end neatly at Appomattox or on Galveston Island. Ending slavery was not simply a matter of issuing pronouncements. It was a matter of forcing rebels to obey the law. To a very real extent, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment amounted to promissory notes of freedom. The real on-the-ground work of ending slavery and defending the rudiments of liberty was done by the freedpeople in collaboration with and often backed by the force of the US Army.
Granger’s proclamation may not have brought news of emancipation but it did carry this crucial promise of force. Within weeks, fifty thousand U.S. troops flooded into the state in a late-arriving occupation. These soldiers were needed because planters would not give up on slavery. In October 1865, months after the June orders, white Texans in some regions “still claim and control [slaves] as property, and in two or three instances recently bought and sold them,” according to one report. To sustain slavery, some planters systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission. A report by the Texas constitutional convention claimed that between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 black people; black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites. Other planters hoped to hold onto slavery in one form or another until they could overturn the Emancipation Proclamation in court.
Against this resistance, the Army turned to force. In a largely forgotten or misunderstood occupation, the Army spread more than 40 outposts across Texas to teach rebels “the idea of law as an irresistible power to which all must bow.” Freedpeople, as Haywood’s quote reminds us, did not need the Army to teach them about freedom; they needed the Army to teach planters the futility of trying to sustain slavery.
Against that resistance, and in response to freedpeople’s complaints, the Army acted as if the Civil War had not in fact ended. Relying upon its broad war powers to exert control over civilians, the Army attacked slavery by arresting judges and sheriffs, taking control over court cases, running military commissions, and suspending habeas corpus. As Texas’ provisional governor—a white loyalist—tried to build a new state, the Army provided crucial support against a developing insurgency.
Slowly, slavery itself ended. By the winter of 1865-1866, freedpeople, the Army, and white loyalists had extinguished the ‘peculiar institution’ in Texas. Under the threat of continued military occupation, President Andrew Johnson coerced former Confederate states into inscribing this change into the Constitution by ratifying the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
