Even after losing the war, Southern slave holders tried to keep blacks as property, and had to be disabused of that notion by the threat of lethal force: (H\/T Bear who Swims for the link)<\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
My change in emotion comes after learning from historian friends that the oft-repeated tale of Union soldiers arriving in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free is pure fiction. Not because they weren\u2019t legally freed 2-\u00bd months earlier when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Or technically freed 2-1\/2 years before when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slavery null and void in areas under rebellion, very much including Texas.<\/p>\n
Rather, I now know, the big lie is the incessantly repeated canard that Galveston\u2019s po\u2019 ignant Black folks didn\u2019t know they was free, and that U.S. Major Gen. Gordon Granger had to read a proclamation to spell it out for them. <\/p>\n
In fact, they most certainly did know. <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
If Galveston\u2019s Blacks already knew they were free, obviously so too did their slaveholders, who nonetheless kept them in bondage \u2014 not by cunning or deceit or ignorance, but by the brute force and tactics of dehumanizing torture they had been using for 200 years. <\/p>\n
Gen. Granger didn\u2019t bring liberation by words on a scroll but by troops with fixed bayonets. <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
On the outside chance that Down\u2019s 2015 essay may have been superseded by new historical research, I spoke with him this week. It hasn\u2019t been, he said, reiterating; \u201cIt\u2019s not that Gen. Granger was giving information to the enslaved people. He was giving it to the masters\u201d \u2014 at the barrel of a gun. <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n
None of this is to say that African Americans, or all Americans, shouldn\u2019t celebrate the well-intentioned holiday to Black freedom just created. But if you\u2019re still clutching to any vestige of the popular myth, consider that well before Lee\u2019s surrender, with the Confederacy clearly losing the war, slaveholders from throughout the South relocated their human property to Texas in advance of Union troops to preserve slavery for as long as they could. <\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n
For them, I\u2019ll explain: It\u2019s called teaching what actually happened, and what didn\u2019t. And what happened in Galveston on June 19, 1865, is that Gen. Granger arrived to forcibly liberate Black people from intransigent slaveholders who everyone knew were free. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s the true history of Juneteenth \u2014 along with a message that somehow has eluded the South and their white supremacist inheritors today: <\/p>\n
You lost the damned war. Surrender already.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.imgur.com\/ljYyJbC.jpg\")
<\/a>You lost. Get over it.<\/p>\n