With Juneteenth being a national holiday and the story of its origins familiar to most, world-renown University of Houston history professor Dr. Gerald Horne wants to not only correct a few errors in the story’s telling but share something even more explosive – a second Juneteenth that is arguably just as impactful as the first.
All enslaved declared free
All enslaved persons in the U.S. were declared free via U.S. General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865 reading of General Order No. 3 in Galveston, saying, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
This is important because the Emancipation Proclamation, read Jan. 1, 1863, specifically only freed those enslaved by the Confederacy. And technically, it didn’t even free them as the states of the Confederacy had broken away from the U.S. and did not consider themselves bound by U.S. laws or proclamations.
So, Granger’s words on June 19, 1865, after the Civil War was over, carried even more weight. But Horne says it wasn’t just Granger’s words that did the trick; it was Black troops with guns.
Black troops made freedom real
In Horne’s book “The Counter Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism,” he identifies the oft-ignored “war” Granger’s roughly 2,000 predominantly Black troops waged against enslavers in Texas and Louisiana who refused to acknowledge the new law of the land that made freedom possible. Horne reveals that Black troops engaged in numerous bloody battles with white enslavers and their armed forces, defeating them on plantations turned battlefields on America soil, and thus making Juneteenth quite literally a Black Liberation holiday.
But wait; the story gets even Blacker!
These same Black troops that accompanied Granger and went to war in 1865 to enforce the original Juneteenth’s proclamation, saving America from its anti-democratic and enslaving ways, again saved the nation two years later, on June 19, 1867.
Yes, there was a second Juneteenth.
Second Juneteenth – Blacks save America… again
Granger’s Black troops put down an insurrection led by ex-Confederate soldiers working with the French, who moved their base of operations to Mexico with plans of re-taking Texas for the Confederacy as step one in restarting the Civil War.
“The Confederates would surrender in April 1865. Many of them were headed to Mexico where they planned to continue enslavement. In fact, some made it to Mexico with some of our ancestors in tow… And what happens is General Granger was accompanied by thousands of African troops, Negro troops. It was part of an effort to keep the Confederates from continuing slavery south of the border, which was the plan, and continuing to wage war against the United States from Mexico. And our ancestors who were armed helped to squash that particular plan.
“In fact… it’s not only June 19, 1865, that we should mark, but also June 19, 1867, because that’s when the French leader Maximillian was killed, which marks the end of the attempt to continue our enslavement in Mexico,” said Horne.
In essence, Black troops made the first Juneteenth real and tangible by going to war with enslavers who refused to let Black people go. Those same troops, in 1867, ventured into Mexico to destroy the Confederacy’s attempt to restart the Civil War and re-institute slavery.
It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that without the victory of that second Juneteenth, the impact of the first one would have been squashed in 1867, and the history of this nation might have looked drastically different.
That said, Horne wants to make sure the original Juneteenth gets a proper reading with the removal of certain falsehoods that have lingered for too long.
The fairytale version of Juneteenth
The fairy tale version of Juneteenth we know begins with the assertion that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all enslaved persons on Jan. 1, 1863. The mythic telling of the Juneteenth tale continues by asserting that after the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved in Texas were oblivious to the news because they were not notified until over two years later on June 19, 1865 when
Horne calls BS.
“I support this new holiday,” Horne said during a 2023 Activist News Network interview, “but I also support historical accuracy.”
Emancipation Proclamation’s limited reach
Horne points to the Emancipation Proclamation’s “limited reach,” referring to two facts. First, it declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the Confederacy “are, and henceforward shall be free. The problem with this assertion is that President Abraham Lincoln’s words carried no weight in the treasonous Confederacy, as those states were no longer part of the U.S. and were not bound by U.S. laws.
“It would be as if the U.S. Congress passed a law tomorrow illegalizing whatever slavery still exists in Mauritania in West Africa. It might be a nice and noble gesture, but the U.S. government’s [power] does not reach, at least in a formal sense to Mauritania,” said Horne.
Not all freed
Additionally, the proclamation did not free enslaved beings in states loyal to the Union. All enslaved persons in the U.S. were declared free via U.S. General Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865 reading of General Orders No. 3 in Galveston, saying, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” that “freedom” came.
However, the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December, 1865 constitutionally abolished slavery. And even then, Delaware was among the last states to ratify the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, waiting until February 1901, more than 35 years after the end of the Civil War
Grapevine real
Moreover, Horne asserts the idea that the enslaved knew nothing of the Emancipation Proclamation, whether it technically applied to them or not, is fiction.
“It belies the point that there was this grapevine, that is well-known and well-documented, amongst the enslaved where certainly they had received news of the Emancipation Proclamation. But what were they going to do about it when they were having to work for free under gunpoint?”
And as has been stated, countless scholars verified the existence of a grapevine amongst the enslaved. So, the idea that enslaved beings in Texas knew nothing of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation until June 19, 1865, is a misread of history.
