Juneteenth started with handbills proclaiming freedom. Here's what they said

Winnipeg Free Press

3 days ago

DALLAS (AP) — The origin of the Juneteenth celebrations marking the end of slavery in the U.S. goes back to an order issued as Union troops arrived in Texas at the end of the Civil War. It declared that all enslaved people in the state were free and had 'absolute equality.'
Word quickly spread of General Order No. 3 — issued on June 19, 1865, when U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landed in the South Texas port city of Galveston — as troops posted handbills and newspapers published them.
The Dallas Historical Society will put one of those original handbills on display at the Hall of State in Fair Park starting June 19.
Juneteenth became a federal holiday in the U.S. in 2021 but has been celebrated in Texas since 1866. As time passed, communities in other states also started to mark the day.
'There'd be barbecue and celebrations,' said Portia D. Hopkins, the historian for Rice University in Houston. 'It was really an effort for people to say: Look at how far we've come. Look at what we've been able to endure as a community.'
Progression of freedom
On Jan. 1, 1863, nearly two years into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of 'all persons held as slaves' in the still rebellious states of the Confederacy. But it didn't mean immediate freedom.
'It would take the Union armies moving through the South and effectively freeing those people for that to come to pass,' said Edward T. Cotham Jr., a historian and author of the book 'Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration.'
The proclamation didn't apply to the border states that allowed enslavement but didn't leave the Union, nor the states occupied by the Union at the time, said Erin Stewart Mauldin, chair of southern history at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg.
'You have to think of emancipation as a patchwork,' she said. 'It doesn't happen all at once. It is hyper local.'
Still, she said, the proclamation 'was recognized immediately as this watershed moment in history.'
'The Emancipation Proclamation is the promise that the end of slavery is now a war aim,' Mauldin said.
Texas at the end of the war
As the war progressed, many enslavers from the South fled to Texas, causing the state's enslaved population to balloon from about 182,000 in 1860 to 250,000 by the end of the war in 1865, Mauldin said.
Cotham said that while enslaved people were emancipated 'on a lot of different dates in a lot of different places across the country,' June 19 is the most appropriate date to celebrate the end of slavery because it represents the 'last large intact body of enslaved people to be freed.'
He said many enslaved people across the South knew of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that it didn't mean anything until troops arrived to enforce it.
About six months after General Order No. 3 was issued, the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified.
General Order No. 3
The order begins by saying 'all slaves are free' and have 'absolute equality' of rights. Going forward, the relationship between 'former masters and slaves' will be that of employer and hired laborer.
It advises freedmen to 'remain at their present homes and work for wages,' adding that they must not collect at military posts and 'will not be supported in idleness.'
The handbills were also handed out to church and local officials. Cotham said Union chaplains would travel from farm to farm to explain the order to workers, and many former enslavers read the order to the people they had enslaved, emphasizing the part about continuing to work.
The Dallas Historical Society's handbill came from the collection of newspaperman George Bannerman Dealey, who founded the society, said Karl Chiao, the society's executive director. Dealey began working at a Galveston newspaper in 1874 before being sent to Dallas by the publisher to start The Dallas Morning News.
Chiao said their handbill is the only one they know of that still exists. The National Archives holds the official handwritten record of General Order No. 3.
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'Some of the people who were set free stayed on the plantations and worked for their former owners, others left, they went to Houston, to Dallas, or they went to San Antonio seeking work,' said W. Marvin Dulaney, deputy director of the African American Museum of Dallas.
While there was excitement, the newly freed people knew they had to 'build up what citizenship looked like for them,' Hopkins of Rice University said, and that there was still 'a lot of work to do.'
'You changed the relationship between the enslaver and the enslaved but you didn't change the culture or the societal norms with how enslavers treated enslaved people,' she said.
Mauldin said participants in early Juneteenth celebrations were 'incredibly brave,' noting that by 1868, the Ku Klux Klan was established in Texas. They were celebrating their freedom, she said, 'under constant threat of violence.'
'It does take time for sort of what freedom is going to look like to be made real, and in large part the reason that freedom is made real is because of ex-slaves pushing for what they think freedom should be,' Mauldin said. 'It's not being given to them, they are actively fighting for it.'