On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

June 19, 1865, shortened to “Juneteenth,” was the day that enslaved African Americans in Texas were told that slavery had ended, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed, and just over two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.

Granger’s order did not end slavery in the country. That did not happen officially until December 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the necessary number of states.

Significantly, my wide-ranging approach to Juneteenth reveals that behind all the broad stereotypes about Texas is a story of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration. It is the American story, told from this most American place.

Until Alaska became a part of the United States in 1959, Texas was the largest state in the Union—268,580 square miles; larger than Kenya, almost three times the size of the United Kingdom.

The Mexican government continued to nod toward ending slavery, while the Anglos and their supporters kept resisting.

Instead, as with the claim “The American Civil War was not about slavery. It was about states’ rights,”

There is no way to get around the fact that, whatever legitimate federalism-based issues were at play, slavery was a central reason Anglo-Texans wanted out of Mexico.

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. It should come as no surprise that my teachers were not inclined to deal with all of this and likely did not know much of this story.

No other state brings together so many disparate and defining characteristics all in one—a state that shares a border with a foreign nation, a state with a long history of disputes between Europeans and an indigenous population and between Anglo-Europeans and people of Spanish origin, a state that had existed as an independent nation, that had plantation-based slavery and legalized Jim Crow.

All the major currents of American history flow through Texas.

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.

Disentangling those threads and viewing them critically has been, in fact, a good thing in the context of our national history, broadening our understanding of who we were and who we are now.

The civil rights movement was about opening opportunities to Blacks.

The legacy of that time, and its baked-in racial hierarchy, survived long after enslaved people were freed.

Texans who had enslaved Blacks and been defeated in the Civil War turned on the freed people with a vengeance, seeking to maintain the control they had during slavery. Along with Jim Crow, one of the chief means of doing this was extralegal violence. Private citizens, along with law enforcement, either directly or by looking the other way, often resorted to this mechanism of control.

The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers.

Empowered Black people made the intangible benefits derived from Whiteness less valuable.

Patriarchy, which is not only about the subjugation of women but about competition between males, is so central to this story.

Historians study those earliest years to, among other things, pinpoint the beginning of American slavery (what was the status of those first 20?) and to find early traces of cultural memories from Africa.

Estebanico, who was wandering (actually) around Texas—eventually across Texas—in the 1520s with the famous Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, appeared as a singular figure.

hadn’t been told that other people of African descent—some enslaved, some not—arrived with the Spanish when they came to the Americas.

to St. Augustine, Florida,

It was there, in fact, that racially based slavery, as an organized system, began on American soil, established by the Spanish as early as 1565.

The settlement of free Blacks existed until the Spanish sold Florida to the United States in 1817.

Because slavery in the United States was racially based, it was easy to graft the legally imposed incapacities of slavery onto Black people as a group, making incapacity an inherent feature of the race.

So much of racism is about announcing, in various ways, the agreed-upon fictions about Black people that justify attempting to keep them in a subordinate status; like the inanity that children produced from the union of a Black person and a White person were sterile, like a mule, in either the first or a later generation.

Cabeza de Vaca, who lived to produce a wildly popular memoir of the extraordinary adventure, wrote about Estebanico as having played a key role as the chief translator between the Spaniards and the Indigenous people because of his great talent for learning and speaking languages.

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

As has been said many times, Black history is American history. People of African descent, however, occupy a special place regarding the narrative of the rise and fall of European nations in North America.

Common Law instead of adopting a system based upon European Civil Law, making a thing called Anglo-American law that ordered the society in the newly constituted United States.

What enslaved Africans had in common, however, what really ordered their lives, was the experience of enslavement in a world in which the notion of White supremacy was ascendant. The echoes of that world have reverberated from the 1500s through to my classrooms in the 1960s and ’70s, and continue to reverberate today.

Thinking of these interactions as part of a global system makes even more clear that the origin story of Africans in North America is much richer and more complicated than the story of twenty Africans arriving in Jamestown in 1619.

Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—had enslaved Black people, that some Native people held (and hold) the same racist attitude toward Black people that many Whites do.

As happened to Cynthia Parker’s family, taking people from other groups, most often women and children, was a common act of warfare. Indeed, the capacity to successfully raid was a show of strength. But the English desire for Indian slaves who could be sold to the West Indies spurred the market in human beings, transforming the practice and destabilizing southeastern societies overall. Captured people were now commodities.

What has it meant (what does it mean) for Blacks to claim Americanness while substantial numbers of their fellow Americans reject the idea that Blacks can be true Americans?

But there is no question that violence has been at the heart of the Texas story, or I should say violence has been foregrounded in the origin stories of Texas, in ways it is not in other states.

What the Texas Declaration very pointedly does not take from Jefferson are any words about “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” There was no place for such language in a battle in which race and culture were central.

Any concerns about the property rights in enslaved people were allayed. Slavery was to be a permanent state for Blacks. This actually interfered with the right to dispose of property as the owner saw fit. Enslavers could not free the people they enslaved without permission.

would take a concerted effort not to consider and analyze the subject, and I realize that evasion is exactly what happened in many of the textbooks that Americans used in their school social studies and history classes. This, in part, accounts for the pained accusations about “revisionist” history when historians talk about things that people had never been made aware of in their history educations.

Travis left behind in Alabama a young mother—she was sixteen when they married—with his two small children, to escape his debts and the arrest warrant that was about to be issued for him.

Jim Bowie, with his shady deals and slave trading.

we should refrain from idealizing human beings.

We can accept what we think are the good things they did—and there will always be differences of opinion about what “good” means—and not treat t...

The difficulty is that not many European-Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were what we would consider to be “right” on the question of race, which, at a minimum, requires believing in the equal humanity of African Americans.

Some African Americans in Galveston, and likely other residents, already knew the gist of the general order prior to June 19.

Galveston, the largest city in Texas, was a port through which most of the cotton picked and processed in the state was shipped out to the world.

Port cities are perfect vehicles for transmission of information to people of ...

While it copied the form of the American Declaration, as noted, it left out the language of equality.

The idea that the society that oppressed them might be transformed into one based upon equality influenced Black Texans in much the same way that the Declaration of Independence influenced Blacks in the early American 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.