Juneteenth, a Day of Jubilee!
Juneteenth ma rks the day in 1865 when 250,000 enslaved Blacks in Texas were to ld they were free. Although President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Eman cipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 proclaiming freedom for all individuals who were enslaved in rebellious states, the South refused to obey the order. Many Confederate states transported their slaves further west to Texas in order to prevent Union troops from enforcing the order of emancipation. The nation was in the middle of a bloody Civil War that had begun on April 12, 1861 when Confederate troops fired on Fort S umter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. As the war raged on and Union troops battled in southern strongholds, many slaves were captured as contraband by Union troops and relocated to camps or neighborhoods in northern states. A fine example of this was a group of 110 formerly enslaved individuals who arrived in Elgin, Illinois from a small city in Mississippi in...