Emancipation Day to Juneteenth: The Origins of a Texas Celebration

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• Emancipation Day to Juneteenth:The Origins of a Texas Celebration
• Carl H. Moneyhon (bio)

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A popular print of the Emancipation Proclamation produced in May 1886 by William B. Burford of Indianapolis, IN. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

On June 17, 2021, Pres. Joseph R. Biden signed a bill that designated Juneteenth National Independence Day as a legal public holiday. In doing so, he recognized a long-standing Texas celebration on June 19 that remembered the day in 1865 when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, which informed Texans that slavery was at an end. The day was so widely celebrated in the state that the Texas Legislature made it a state holiday in 1979. In his remarks, President Biden pointed to that date as an important day to commemorate the end of slavery while at the same time consider the work that still needed to be done to bring about racial justice and equality in American society. "[I]t's not enough," he said, "just to commemorate Juneteenth. After all, the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans didn't mark the end of America's work to deliver on the promise of equality. To honor the true meaning of Juneteenth, we have to continue toward that promise because we've not gotten there yet."¹ Even though it thus became a national holiday, a Gallup Poll taken in 2022 showed that only seventeen percent of Americans knew a lot about Juneteenth, while the remaining eighty-three percent knew little or nothing.²

This lack of knowledge exists despite the fact that historians have written extensively about the celebration, especially since the creation of the state [End Page 1] holiday. Studies have examined how Juneteenth was perceived and remembered by Black Texans, what events led to Granger's action, in what way slavery did not actually end in Texas on that day, and how viewing the state's history through the lens of Juneteenth alters historical perspectives. Much of this work focuses on Juneteenth events staged later in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries; however, less attention has been paid to how these events developed in their earliest stages. This is true especially from 1866, when the first events were held, up to the development of the modern forms in the 1870s and 1880s. This essay seeks to fill in that gap, asking how Texans settled on June 19 as the day to celebrate, who organized and supported Emancipation Day events (as they were called into the 1890s and will be so referred to in this article), and how the memory of emancipation and the celebrations themselves changed through those years.³

That June 19 would become the day that Black Texans celebrated emancipation was not initially apparent. No agreement existed in the years following the end of the Civil War as to when emancipation legally took place in Texas. Many of the Union troops and federal officials who arrived in 1865 considered slavery to have ended on January 1, 1863, the effective date of Pres. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. It declared those enslaved people free who lived in areas that remained in rebellion against the national government at that time. That meant most of the enslaved people in Confederate Texas. In some other former Confederate states, this date became the one celebrated. At the time, even White Confederates believed that the national government intended to recognize that date. The editor of the Galveston News, for example, assured his readers in May 1865 (when the war had not ended in Texas), that the Republican Party was "determined to carry out the emancipation proclamation" and concluded that this threat required Texans to keep fighting. Reinforcing the idea that slavery had ended in 1863 was the fact that where Confederate troops had surrendered elsewhere, the Union Army had "refused to make terms for gradual emancipation," apparently assuming it had already taken place." This understanding of Texans was confirmed further in early June when Confederate agents Ashbel Smith and Brig. Gen. Thomas Harrison returned from New Orleans, where they had negotiated a surrender...