Juneteenth, a Day of Jubilee!

      

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when 250,000 enslaved Blacks in Texas were told they were free. Although President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation 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 Sumter 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 the winter of 1862. Many of the families remained in Elgin.

Some slaves chose the distraction of the war to escape to the North in search of freedom. Others were recruited to fight for Union, and a smaller number of slaves fought for the South after being ordered to do so, and in some cases in exchange for their freedom if the South was victorious.

When the great Civil War that had divided the nation came to an end on April 9, 1865, Union troops were dispatched throughout the Confederacy to liberate all slaves in Confederate territory.

Texas, bitter over its losses to the Union and angry that its Confederate money was worthless, refused the federal order to release its slaves. After all, the South still had crops to get out and they were unwilling to forego the free labor which the African slaves had provided for hundreds of years.

On June 19, 1865 Union troops led by U.S. Army General Gordon Granger marched into Galveston and enforced the order of abolition for all slaves being held in the Confederate states. Less than six months later, on December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified abolishing slavery in all the United States, including Kentucky and Delaware.