June 19 is a U.S. national holiday known as Juneteenth. It combines the words June and Nineteenth, the day in 1865 on which the last enslaved African Americans in the United States were freed.
When the United States declared its independence from the British empire in 1776, slavery was legal in all the thirteen American colonies. But many Americans recognized the evil of slavery and began a powerful movement to end it.
By the time of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, five of the northern states had abolished slavery. Slavery continued in eight other states, mostly in the south. As America expanded westward, the issue of slavery in the western territories became contentious. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President on a promise to oppose slavery in the federal territories.
In response, 11 of the slaveholding southern states seceded from the union and formed the Confederate states of America. President Lincoln called secession unconstitutional and an act of rebellion. He called up troops to suppress it. The rebel states called up their forces and war erupted in April 1861. The bloodiest conflict in U.S. history – the Civil War – had begun. When it was ended more than 600,000 Americans were dead.
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all persons enslaved in the rebellious Confederate states were free. Slavery would be abolished in all the remaining states with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in December 1865.
By June of 1865, Confederate forces in all the rebel states had surrendered. The last of these were in Texas.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Texas to enforce the emancipation of its enslaved population and carry out the reconstruction of the union. This date was celebrated henceforth by the Texas African American community as “Juneteenth.”
On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
In his Black History Month proclamation in February of this year, President Donald Trump declared:
“Since the great Prince Estabrook became the first black man to shed his blood for our emerging nation at the Battle of Lexington more than 250 years ago, heroic black Americans have valiantly fought for our liberty on the fields of battle, in the pews of our churches, and in our shops, restaurants, and businesses. Across every generation, legendary black Americans have fiercely defended the values set forth in our Declaration of Independence and helped to make our Republic the greatest country in the history of the world.”