06/19/2026
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JUNETEENTH: THE LAST TO KNOW IN TEXAS
"It was June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and his Union troops arrived [on Galveston Island] with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved there were free. Before then, no one on that island informed the slaves of the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect nearly two and a half years earlier, opting instead to keep them unknowingly toiling in bo***ge while continuing to treat them as mere chattel property."
Granger delivered General Order No. 3, which recited:
"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor."
"The next year, the now-freed slaves started celebrating [what is called] Juneteenth in Galveston, and the celebration has continued around the nation and the world since ... The term Juneteenth is a blend of the words June and nineteenth. The holiday has also been called Juneteenth Independence Day or Freedom Day ... Black Texans took the holiday with them as they moved around the country and overseas ... and what started as a local celebration went international. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday or day of recognition, like Flag Day. Countries like South Korea, Ghana, Israel, Taiwan, France, and the U.S. territory of Guam have held or now hold Juneteenth celebrations." Juneteenth did not become a legal state holiday in Texas until 1980."
It is now a national holiday thanks to an act of Congress. At the state level, more than half of the states and the District of Columbia legally recognize Juneteenth as a public holiday. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/11/more-than-half-of-states-will-recognize-juneteenth-as-a-legal-holiday-in-2026/.
"Laura Smalley, who was freed from a plantation near Bellville, Texas, remembered in a 1941 interview that her former master had gone to fight in the Civil War and came home without telling his slaves what had happened. “Old master didn’t tell, you know, they was free,” Smalley said. “I think now they say they worked them, six months after that. Six months. And turn them loose on the 19th of June. That’s why, you know, we celebrate that day.”
Former slave Felix Haywood recounted:
“Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes ... just like that we were free. It didn't seem to make the whites mad, either. They went right on giving us food just the same. Nobody took our homes, but right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get close to freedom ... like it was a place or a city. We knew freedom was on us, but we didn't know what was to come with it. We thought we were going to get rich like the white folks. We thought we were going to be richer than the white folks, because we were stronger and knew how to work, and the whites didn't, and we didn't have to work for them any more. But it didn't turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn't make them rich.” https://www.pvamu.edu/tiphc/exhibits/juneteenth-2016/
On Feb. 23, 1860, the territorial legislature of Kansas abolished slavery. Kansas became a free state when it entered the Union. During the war, slaves were emancipated in Washington, D. C. (on April 16, 1862), Tennessee (on Oct. 24, 1864), Maryland (on Nov. 1, 1864), Missouri (on Jan. 11, 1865), and West Virginia (on Feb. 3, 1865) by various means -- all prior to the war’s conclusion.
The outlier border states were Delaware (1,798 slaves as of 1860) and Kentucky (3rd largest number of slaveholders in the country as of 1860; slaves were then just under 20% of its population — about 225,000). Residents thereof who hadn’t gained their freedom by enlisting in the Union Army were legally freed only by the ratification of the 13th Amendment by the requisite number of states on December 6, 1865. (Delaware formally ratified that Amendment in 1901; Kentucky waited until 1976; Mississippi held out until 2013). New Jersey had 16 slaves within its borders when the 13th Amendment was ratified. The Louisiana Constitution abolished slavery in 1864, but only in the Union occupied parishes. The other parishes of Louisiana were subject first to the Emancipation Proclamation and, eventually, the 13th Amendment.
https://www.apnews.com/2cc89e3baa5b4fb9823abf60937a2d8d
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth
You have to wonder if any of the freed slaves of Texas made it to Washington, D.C. later in 1865 and posed there in any photographs?
IMAGES:
Library of Congress DIG-ppmsca-34584, Arlington, Va., November 1865, 107th U.S. Colored Infantry, Guard and guard house shown at Fort Corcoran.
Juneteenth Officers at Wheelers Grove, 1900.
https://www.pvamu.edu/.../juneteenth-officers-at-wheelers...
Library of Congress B813- 6366 B, studio image detail of Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger.
By Craig Heberton IV
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https://www.civilwarphotography.org/upcoming-events/
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Dispatch by BORA President
George Nelson Ridings
