It took over two years for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas and the enslaved people living there. But while the Juneteenth national holiday celebrates the day that the news of freedom reached Galveston, June 19, 1865 was not the last day of American slavery.
The date has been significant for Texans ever since hundreds of Black soldiers accompanied Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger to Galveston, where he read a general order which said that the 250,000 enslaved people in Texas now had “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” with their former enslavers.
Juneteenth was amplified on the national stage when, in 2019, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and U.S. Senator John Cornyn pushed for a federal study of a proposed Emancipation Trail, stretching from Houston to Galveston.
But as its national prominence has grown, so have public misconceptions.
Texas was the last Confederate state to get the news, over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, but at that time slavery remained legal in other states.
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The Emancipation Proclamation was limited
The proclamation, famously issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1. 1863, did say that “all persons held as slaves” were free.
But Lincoln was not talking about the whole country. Rather, the proclamation itself specified that it only applied to those localities “in rebellion against the United States”: the Confederacy.
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And though Lincoln said that enslaved people in Confederate states were freed from the time of his declaration in 1863, that meant little to most enslaved Texans until soldiers arrived in Galveston in 1865 to publicize and enforce their freedom.
Texas was not the last state to free enslaved people
While Texas was the last Confederate state where enslaved people officially gained their freedom, there were holdouts elsewhere in the country.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to members of the wartime Union, five states where slavery was still legal in January 1863 were unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation: Maryland, Missouri, West Virginia, Delaware and Kentucky.
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By the time of Granger’s Galveston speech in 1865, three of those states had abolished the practice through their legislatures. But in Delaware and Kentucky, slavery continued to be legal until the 13th amendment to the United States constitution took effect six months later, on Dec. 15, 1865.
Even the 13th Amendment left a loophole: it banned all slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime.” Texas law now requires the state’s Department of Criminal Justice to use the labor of the prison population as much as possible without pay, Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson writes.
Juneteenth did not mean automatic freedom, even in Texas
In 2021 Khloe Thibodeaux, a high school teacher and board member of the Re-Education Project, told the Chronicle that Texas’ emancipation story did not end that June.
“On June 19, 1865, yes, there was this word that slaves were free. But it took a lot longer for it to get across Texas,” Thibodeaux said at the time.
Many people across the state continued living as if they were still enslaved long after they had been declared free.
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But Juneteenth offers an opening for people like Thibodeaux to offer context on the broader history.
Descendants of emancipated Texans fight for preservation
Plans for an Emancipation Trail from Galveston to Houston would follow the route formerly enslaved families traveled, after the Juneteenth declaration, to build new lives in the big city.
Many settled in Freedmen’s Town, a Fourth Ward enclave that became one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country.
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Freedmen’s Town would later become Houston’s first official Heritage District in 2019. But now, a fraction of the area’s original homes are still standing, and descendants of its emancipated founders are fighting to keep some of what remains.
rebekah.ward@houstonchronicle.com
Rebekah F. Ward, Staff writer
HPS Magazine 