Juneteenth in America

On today's date (June 16) in 1865, the Marshall Republican, a prominent newspaper in east Texas, editorialized about the "ruinous effects" of abolishing slavery, which, it said, meant abolition probably would not happen. The 13th Amendment, the newspaper pointed out, "has not been ratified by three-quarters of the States, nor is it likely to be in the ensuing ten years. When the State governments, therefore, are reorganized it is more than probable that slavery will be perpetuated."

On that June 16, Texas was in anarchy. The state had successfully resisted federal occupation over four years of warfare, and while the Confederate government had collapsed, the sentiments of the white population were largely unreconstructed and hostile to abolition or any assertion of black rights.

The next day, US Army Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston harbor with 1,800 troops. Two days later, he issued three public orders, the third of which made that date, June 19, famous through its rendition in African-American dialect: Juneteenth.

Granger had of course discussed in advance what he would do with his military superior (and former subordinate) Philip Sheridan, who was based in New Orleans. His instructions were to announce the abolition of slavery on the legal basis of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. But Granger, in Galveston, saw the need to go further, to send an unambiguous message. His short order strengthened Sheridan's suggested language in a couple of key aspects, notably by adding a crucial explanatory sentence: "This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor."

Such notions would remain controversial in Texas and much of the South for the next 100 years.

On today's date, however, in 2018, not far from where I write this, there are Juneteenth celebrations scheduled in Albany and Schenectady, and all over America.

In writing a biography of Granger, I took the opportunity to correct the historical record, most significantly at the Battle of Chattanooga (where Granger was not responsible for delaying the attack on Missionary Ridge). Nor, after that, did he tarry in obeying orders to march to the relief of Knoxville for as long as Grant contends in his Memoirs. Grant appears to have erred by a day in the date he cites for Granger's departure. That doesn't mean I am a better historian or writer than Grant, whose book is a masterpiece and as honest as he could make it. But no work of history is beyond challenge.

While Granger is barely mentioned, I do try to get inside Grant's head as he worked on the Memoirs in my new novel, The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant.