Juneteenth, 2023

[Readers: this essay originally appeared last year; I am re-running it today. — Ed.]

It’s June 19th, or Juneteenth, our newest Federal holiday, commemorating the day — June 19, 1865 — when liberation finally came to the enslaved people of Texas, who were the last to be liberated in what, during the 19th century, was often called The War of the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.

Despite the late arrival of emancipation in Texas, in other parts of the rebellious states, word of emancipation spread with remarkable rapidity. Communication networks were incredibly intricate and advanced among the enslaved peoples of the US South, the Caribbean, and Latin America; when the Haitian Revolution broke out, for instance, the slaves of what was then the French colony of St. Domingue were able to coordinate a colony-wide, overnight uprising that included burning en masse of sugarcane fields and plantations. What Juneteenth marked was the fact that the legal promise of Emancipation was now coming to fruition with the military defeat of the Confederacy and the arrival of Federal authority.

I think the remarkable thing about emancipation, in this and other countries, was the multitude and diversity of the different factions and forces involved. Between 1777, when revolutionary Vermont incorporated the abolition of slavery into its radically democratic constitution, and 1888, when what was then the Empire of Brazil abolished slavery, emancipation of slaves affected places as disparate as the Barbados and Baltimore, Louisville and Liverpool, St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Louis du Senegal, the French “slave factory,” or slave-trading settlement, at the mouth of the Senegal River — essentially the entirety of what historians have come to call The Atlantic World.

What ended slavery in the United States was a mighty combination of factors, including, but not limited to what its foes called the Slaveocracy of the South’s intransigence and extremism; the growing sentiment in favor of abolition in the North; and, via the exigencies of war, the vast power of the North’s economic, industrial, and demographic capacity.

But one supremely important factor that ought to be celebrated today is the resistance of the slaves themselves. Historians have begun to tell the stories of how slaves throughout the Atlantic world — from Haiti, with its successful slave revolution in the 1790s (the only one in world history), to the US South during the Civil War, to the very slave ships themselves abroad on the sea — fiercely and ultimately successfully resisted their enslavement. 

Indeed, approximately 200,000 African American men, most of them Freedmen, served in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War, about 10% of the 2 million men the Union had under arms by the end of the conflict. This was a critical advantage for the Union.

( African American soldiers of the United States Army in action, Virginia, 1864. Photo credit — Wikimedia Commons. )

Very early in the war, even before Lincoln embraced emancipation in the autumn of 1862 — following the cataclysmic violence at the Battle of Antietam, still the bloodiest single day in American history — Union officers acted upon their own initiative, declaring slaves “contraband of war” by virtue of their labor aiding the Southern war effort, and declared them free if they came under Union control. This had the effect of causing a mass exodus whenever Union lines approached a district — typically, when Union lines were within 20 to 40 miles, many slaves would simply leave their plantations, hoping to reach the Northern lines and freedom (cf. Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.)

It’s also important to note that the South was not a monolith: many white Southerners in fact rejected secession, probably about 25% on the whole and much higher in some places. Sentiment against Secession and the new Confederacy’s war (“a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” was the saying among poor and middle class white Southerners) was particularly high in the upland regions of Appalachia — so much so that West Virginia seceded from Virginia after the latter seceded from the Union, joining the nation in 1863.

When the Emancipation Proclamation came into force on January 1st of that year, what had always been implicit became explicit: the war was about slavery.

Needless to say, “the new birth of freedom” that Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address remains imperfectly realized. But on this day, it is important to remember that in the 1860s, through a combination of the arrogance of the slaveholders, the righteous fury of the aggrieved nation, and the heroic sacrifices of the Freedpeople, Slavery ended in this country, and that is worth remembering, and worth celebrating.