A BIT OF HISTORY
©2021 SARAH BECKER
Mural Artist: Reginald C. Adams
O
n June 19th, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, and announced the end of the Civil War, the belated end of southern slavery. General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a [January 1, 1863] proclamation from the Executive of the United States [President Abraham Lincoln], 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 Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Texans celebrated Juneteenth beginning in 1866. It was revived in 1979 and became an official state holiday in 1980. The Commonwealth of Virginia first acknowledged the June 19th jubilee in 2007—the 44th state to do so. Why so late to the table? Virginia—for more than 150 years—has championed southern history: Confederate Generals, Lee-Jackson Day, and the Lost Cause. “The lessons that negroes make a bad use of liberty is taught daily in the police court of this and all other cities in
Old Town Crier
which they are numerous,” the Alexandria Gazette wrote on August 1, 1895. “Nearly all the cases before such courts are those of negroes, the parties to which are either sent to jail or the work house, put on the chain gang, or impoverished by fines. Before the Negroes were freed it was a rarity for one of them to be arrested…their money spent in the payment of fines.” “Between the idea of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the notion of popular sovereignty, between the demands of nationalism and the intimacies of community, between the bumptious sense of manifest destiny of a growing nation and the hard rock of slavery…stood an old and enduring tension in American life,” author Jay Winik penned. “Since 1619, when representative democracy and enslaved African people arrived in Virginia—within a month of each other—we have said one, but done another,” Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said in 2020. “It’s time we elevate Juneteenth not just as a celebration by and for some Virginians, but one acknowledged and commemorated by all of us.” “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty ‘Negars,’” Virginia colonist and Pocahontas husband-tobe John Rolfe noted in 1619. The first “Negars” entered as “indentured servants who could theoretically be freed
in five years.” The remainder came as slaves. According to Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln the earliest Congresses viewed slavery “in the narrowest limits of necessity.” Declared Lincoln in 1854: “When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia—to their own native land [by way of the American Colonization Society]. That said…When the white man governs himself that is self-government. But when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government— that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another. In 1794 [Congress] prohibited an out-going slavetrade—that is, the taking of slaves from the United States to sell. In 1798 [Congress] prohibited the bringing of
slaves from Africa into the Mississippi Territory—this territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and Alabama. In 1800 [Congress] prohibited American citizens from trading in slaves between foreign countries— as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 [Congress] passed a law…in restraint of the internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, [Congress] passed the law… prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties. [Finally] in 1820, finding these provisions ineffectual, [Congress] declared trade piracy, and annexed to it, the extreme penalty of death…Thus we see the plain unmistakable spirit of that age was hostility to the principle of slavery and toleration of it only by necessity.” U.S. Representative Abraham Lincoln [Whig-IL] first tried to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia—the shameful slave trade—in 1849. He unsuccessfully “reported a bill for the abolition of slavery… with the consent of the voters of the District, and with compensation to owners.” Twelve years later President Abraham Lincoln [R-IL] signed the 37th Congress’ District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act. The Act, as signed on April 16, 1862: Sec. 1: “Be it enacted That all persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African dissent are hereby discharged
...When the white man governs himself that is self-government. But when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than selfgovernment— that is despotism. —Abe Lincoln, 1854 and freed of and from all claim to such service or labor and from and after the passage of this act neither slavery nor involuntary servitude—except for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted—shall hereafter exist in said District.” The 1862 Act immediately emancipated “2,989 former slaves; compensated former owners who were loyal to A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 10
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