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The Birth of Juneteenth Wasn’t Big News in 1865

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Betty Bormer stands outside a wood-frame house in Fort Worth, wearing a simple dress, looking at the camera., in 1937.
Betty Bormer, who was freed by the military order that founded Juneteenth. Fort Worth, Texas. June 26, 1937. Photo: Works Progress Administration. Prints and Photographs Division.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. As any writer can tell you, first drafts are often messy.

So on this momentous day, the first federal holiday of Juneteenth, let’s look at how 19th-century media covered the birth of what would become the nation’s official holiday marking the end of slavery. That was the June 19, 1865, order by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, that abolished slavery in that state, the last Confederate holdout.

Granger did not bury the lead. He established the legal authority to assume military command in the state and named his staff in two brief general orders, or military proclamations. Then he cut to the heart of the matter in “General Orders, No. 3.”

“The people 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.”

Clear and concise. Not a word wasted. Black people in Texas, the last in America to find out that the Emancipation Proclamation applied to them, were out of bondage. Slavery was dead. A terrible era was over.

Today, we mark that announcement as a very big deal. The nation, founded on the ideal of equality, fought the deadliest war in its history over slavery, yet waited 156 years to officially mark the demise of the institution. There’s a lot to unpack in that, and we, as a nation, continue to do so.

But how did newspapers report it at the time?

By and large, they didn’t. Or just barely.

Maj. Gen. George Granger, trim, bearded and balding, sits for a portrait in his military uniform.
Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger. Photo: Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Galveston Tri-Weekly News, the Galveston News and the Houston Telegraph all reported Granger’s orders on June 20. These notices would, in the coming weeks, be picked up by other newspapers across the country. “The Slaves Declared Free,” ran a small front-page headline in the New-York Daily Tribune on July 7, prioritizing that declaration above the other four that Granger issued that day.

But by and large, most newspapers that can be found in the Library’s Chronicling America archives and in other databases available on-site show that most newspapers paid scant attention. The slavery order, if mentioned at all, was often just a one-sentence notice, deep in the sea of tiny type that characterized newspapers of the era, a pointillist’s dot in a newspaper mural.

Surprisingly, the only major dispatch from Galveston that week, which focused on the mood of the city, didn’t mention the orders.

“Jatros,” a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, on June 20 filed a first-person account of walking through Galveston. He seemed unaware the order had been issued the previous day. “Galveston is a city of dogs and desolation,” Jatros wrote, in a colorful piece that would take two weeks to be printed in his own paper, then be republished by several others. He noted that “colored” Union troops kept the peace, but still referred to the local black population as “slaves.”

William Moore, with gray hair, wearing a suit coat, vest and slacks, stands by a front porch, looking at the camera.
William Moore, who was freed by the military order that founded Juneteenth. Dallas, Texas. Dec. 21, 1937. Photo: Works Progress Administration. Prints and Photographs Division.

Jatros noted that livestock roamed the streets at will, that the city’s low-slung houses were often painted yellow, that the stores were dingy and devoid of merchandise, that the people were “stunted and scraggy” like the local trees. It was, by far and away, the most in-depth report from the place where Juneteenth originated, and yet it did not note that Black people were now free.

On Saturday, July 1, the weekly Dallas Herald printed all of Gordon’s orders but buried the item on the paper’s second page, along with noting that there had been a fine rain recently. On July 8, the Cincinnati Daily Inquirer reported the “all slaves are free” passage in a news round-up under the headline of “Afternoon Telegraph From the South-West.”

While all this might today seem a historical omission, that wasn’t necessarily true at the time.

Almost everyone outside of Texas already knew that slavery was over. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the secessionist states, had gone into effect on January 1, 1863. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had passed the U.S. Congress in January, 1865, and was being ratified by the states. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate military leader, had surrendered his army at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.

By June, Lincoln had been assassinated and the trial for his killers was underway. Debate raged about the fate of former Confederate troops and politicians. The new president, Andrew Johnson, was in the midst of appointing provisional governors to take control of the rebellious states.

In this turbulent, pell-mell of violence and the after-shocks of four years of war, the fact that a little-known military officer read a proclamation reiterating that slavery was indeed over in one far-flung state was not exactly earth-shaking.

“While it is difficult to know precisely why Gen. Granger’s General Orders No. 3 did not receive more press coverage, it coincided with a time when other national news likely took precedence for newspaper editors,” says Michelle Krowl, the Library’s Civil War and Reconstruction specialist.

Besides, whites in Texas did not exactly regard Granger’s orders as good news, as a New York Times piece on July 16 made clear. The paper reported that nine days after Granger’s orders were issued, the mayor of Galveston called a meeting of the city council to address the “altered condition of the colored population, which required new regulations for the protection of the citizens.”

Granger took quick action. The next day, he decreed that “No persons formerly slaves will be permitted to travel on the public thoroughfares without passes or permits from their employers, or to congregate in buildings or in camps at or adjacent to any military post or town.”

In less than 10 days after obtaining “absolute equality,” Black Texans were ordered – by the federal government, their supposed liberators – to get permission from their former owners to so much as walk down the street. It was a harbinger of the false promises of Reconstruction.

Still, for the one group of people who did regard Granger’s order as a revelation — Black Texans — the news was earth-shaking. They staged celebrations on the first anniversary of Granger’s order and, by 1872, a group had pooled resources to buy what is now known as Emancipation Park in Houston for their observation of what became known as Juneteenth.

It seems plain that is the spirt which today, a century and a half later, marks this as a federal holiday. Juneteenth is not a holiday simply because of Granger’s order. It exists because black Texans celebrated it for years, decades, more than a century, in the teeth of Jim Crow segregation and racist violence, in the unyielding belief that the United States might someday become a land of the free.

Anderson and Minerva Edwards, an elderly couple, on the side porch of a house, in sunlight.
Anderson and Minerva Edwards, who were freed by the military order that founded Juneteenth. Marshall, Texas, Aug. 3, 1937. Photo: Works Progress Administration. Prints and Photographs Division. 

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Comments (11)

  1. After researching the Library since 2008, I’m curious to know why is it that their no mention in this article that it was the Republicans sought to end the slavery. I began doing so myself by posting those all important documents which brings to light the truth.

    • Hi Thomas,

      Thanks for writing. The history of political parties during the Civil War is extremely well documented in the Library’s collections and documents. There were no political parties mentioned in this story because the actions were those of (a) a military commander, (b) the federal government and (c) Black Texans, who had never been allowed to vote.

      All best,
      Neely

  2. This is a great post! thank you!

    Just a suggestion that you make these posts easily “shareable” I wanted to share to Twitter and it doesn’t work, neither with the Share button on the page above or by posting the page URL. It’s a shame because these types of posts you publish are very valuable and should be widely shared!

    • Hi Gabriela,

      Thanks for the kind note. Not sure about about the posting problem. I just posted it both ways — both by the Share button and by copy/pasting the URL — so I’m note sure what the issue might be. Maybe try again? It would be very odd if you’re copying the URL into a Tweet and it just won’t post.

      Let me know how that works,
      Neely

  3. Thank you so much Neely. I’m 72 y.o. that had no idea of this subject. In fact, I really think that I only knew about slavery from reading Gone with the Wind while in high school. Not that I paid much attention in high school history classes… These days I love to learn about U.S. history and thankful that the LOC has a blog!

  4. Thank you very much for this interesting article, Neely. I think it answers questions people may have about why June 19 was chosen as the holiday rather than another date. I also enjoyed looking at the photos of people who celebrated the holiday, taken by WPA photographers. Are their stories in the Library of Congress collections? If so, I would love to read a future blog post about them.

  5. Hi Neely,

    That response misses the point of the question posed by Thomas. Saying it was the “military” and the “government” begs the question of under what political administration the military and government was acting. Then, as now, that was a big deal. A more responsive answer might have mentioned that the Republicans and Democrats of 1865 bore little resemblance to their current selves. Back then, the Republicans were heavily influenced by leftist agitators, led by the Stevens Radical wing of the party, seeking to extinguish all traces of racial inequality, root and branch. Pretty radical stuff for 1865, given that we’re still struggling with that issue today. The Democrats were the status quo conservatives of the day. Also, a suggestion: It would be nice to see some links to the cited primary sources (the newspapers). Given the wholesale, Orwellian rewrite of history we’re now seeing from the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, it’s more important than ever to look to primary source documents to best inform our current understanding of events past and present. If the LOC won’t do that, who will?

    • Hi,

      The link to Chronicling America is in the story, which readers may follow and search, not just for those specific stories, but any material of interest. The LOC provides access to all of its holdings, nearly 200 million items, across a variety of platforms. It’s neither journalistically feasible nor desirable to link to every item we mention in every blog post. Asserting that the Library “won’t do that” (provide links) is not a factual statement. But, as the story makes plain, nearly all of those “stories” mentioned in the Juneteenth blog are actually just new briefs that are a few sentences long, if that. Several are quoted. The Library’s chief historian for the era is also quoted, explaining why what seems like big news now wasn’t regarded as such then. If you’d like to verify that, please use the Chronicling America link.

      -n

  6. The “Spirit of Juneteenth” still lives!

  7. It is simply not true that Texans did not learn about Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation until June 19, 1865.

    As early as the Fall of 1862, before the Proclamation even took effect, Texas newspapers were already reporting that President Lincoln had issued the proclamation. Some newspapers even printed the text of the proclamation in its entirety.

    The reason why slaves in East Texas weren’t emancipated until 6/18/1865 is because Union troops had not arrived there yet.

    Even though the EP took effect on January 1, 1863, slaves in the Confederacy weren’t set free until Union troops invaded and took over the territory in which they were being held.

    With the exception of El Paso, which the Union took early in the war, the Civil War wasn’t really fought on Texas soil.

    That is the reason why the slaves in East Texas weren’t emancipated until the war was over.

    • Thanks for writing!

      To clarify, the story doesn’t say “Texans” found out about the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865. It says that’s when “Black people in Texas” found out that the EP finally applied to them. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, and the war was officially over, but Confederates in Galveston (and thus Texas) held out until June. There was a surrender ceremony in Galveston Bay on June 2, U.S. troops took over and Granger issued his order two weeks later. This was the first time enslaved Black people in Texas were told they were now free, etc.

      Cheers,
      Neely

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