On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

The choice for slavery was deliberate, and that reality is hard to square with a desire to present a pristine and heroic origin story about the settlement of Texas. There is no way to do that without suggesting that the lives of African Americans, and their descendants in Texas, did not, and do not, matter.

As painful as it may be, recognizing—though not dwelling on—tragedy and the role it plays in our individual lives, and in the life of a state or nation, is, I think, a sign of maturity.

Africans were all over the world, doing different things, having all kinds of experiences. Blackness does not equal inherent incapacity and natural limitation.

W. E. B. Du Bois, in his masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk,

General Provisions of the Constitution,

The language of General Order No. 3 not only announced the end of slavery; it used a concept familiar to Americans from the very beginning, though as we know, it was not carried forward. After stating “all slaves are free,” the order continues: “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”

But Confederates had explicitly rejected the concept of equality announced in the Declaration, as the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made clear in March 1861 in his infamous “Cornerstone Speech.” The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted.

The Framers could reach a compromise over slavery, and allow for the formation of the American Union because Providence, in the form of progress, would solve the problem. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. . . . That is the basis upon which Texas and other members of the Confederacy had formulated their society.

The fear of the Black imagination was strong all throughout slavery. That was one of the reasons free African Americans posed such a problem and was one of the reasons the Texas Constitution prevented the immigration of free Black people into the republic. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves. Making life as hard as possible for free African Americans, impairing their movement and economic prospects—even if that meant the state would forgo the economic benefits of talented people who wanted to work—was designed to prove that Blacks could not operate outside of slavery.

Gregory noted, with seeming surprise, that black Texans, in the face of this hostility, went about the business of making new lives in the state, when they could have, in some places, unleashed carnage on their former enslavers. They, like freed people throughout the South, focused on other things: solemnizing their marriages keeping away from the violence of Whites, trying to reunite with family members who had been sold during slavery, working, and, very happily, taking advantage of the schools the Bureau created. Adults sat in classrooms with children, all eager to learn to read and write. In the midst of all this, any false step by a Black person, any wrong decision by the Bureau—and there definitely were some—was taken as proof that the whole effort was a grievous mistake.

In his will, freeing the five men, however, Jefferson petitioned the legislature of Virginia to allow them to remain in the state. He had to do this because, according to Virginia law, an enslaved person who did not get permission to remain in Virginia within a year after emancipation, could be sold back into slavery.