JUNETEENTH

While America celebrates its birthday on July 4, African Americans celebrate another Independence Day on June 19 the day in 1865 that enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were told they were free.

The end of the Civil War

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865. Various other Confederate armies surrendered shortly after — the final one was the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, which surrendered to Union forces on June 2.

That ended the fighting. But it didn’t end slavery just yet. President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation much earlier in the war, on Sept. 22, 1862, and it had taken effect the next Jan. 1. The proclamation declared all slaves in states that were in rebellion — meaning slaves in Confederate hands at the time — were freed.

But border states such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri were not covered by the proclamation. Nor were the western counties of Virginia, which would later secede from the state and be admitted to the United States as the state of West Virginia. Nor were states that were already occupied by Union forces. That included Tennessee and parts of Louisiana and Virginia. Texas had seceded on February 2, 1861, but was far to the west of where most of the war had taken place. Slaveowners from all over Dixie, in fact, had moved to Galveston Island — 40 miles or so southeast of what would become Houston — and had taken their slaves with them to work rice plantations there.

So while slaves found themselves freed by Union armies passing through the

South, there were pockets where nothing had changed for them. And Galveston — with a slave population of about a quarter-million — was the largest remaining pocket, even two months after the war had ended for the rest of the South.

Enter Union Gen. Gordon Granger. He and an occupying force of about 2,000 men arrived on Galveston Island on June 18, 1865. The next day, Granger stood on the balcony of Ashton Villa, the home where he set up his headquarters, and read General Order No. 3. While some slave populations in those border states wouldn’t be freed until December 1865, when the 13th Amendment became law, African-Americans in Texas began celebrating June 19 each year as a day to celebrate their independence.