Juneteenth (one day late)

As a student of history I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I didn't know the significance of June 19 until this year. For the first time ever I displayed a flag in recognition of this holiday. The photo above shows the 35-star banner the represented our nation at the end of the Civil War. It's under that flag that federal officials proclaimed freedom to the freedmen of Texas. Amen. Certainly a day worth celebrating every year. 

Dates can be messy things in history. And marking the end of slavery involves one of the messiest examples of pinning a date to mark the end or beginning of an institution. My Gmail address includes the date I most often associate with the end of slavery, January 1, 1863. That was the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation took effect (more on that in a few moments). Others might go to the previous September when, on the 22nd of that month, President Lincoln first promulgated the policy decision. Or, one could go to the previous month: it was during a cabinet meeting in August 1862 that Lincoln shared his desire to announce an end to slavery in the rebellious portions of the country. 

Dates like those put emphasis on policy makers as the shapers of events. If one wants to take a perspective that's looks at the role of common people in moving great change, then look to the summer of 1861 when runaway slaves prompted an obnoxious Union general named Benjamin Butler into hiring contraband. 

Or maybe we should look at the masses who make the tearing down of great institutions possible. Was the end of slavery the day of Lincoln's House Divided speech, when political sentiment suggested to a political leader that the time to resolve the issue of slavery was nigh. Or perhaps we could go to the previous decade when Congress split over sectional rather than partisan lines over the consideration of the Wilmot Proviso. 

Institutions collapse messily and spectacularly. That was certainly the case with slavery. And I chuckle at the irony that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't technically free a single slave, but that it ended slavery. And in reality, the Thirteenth Amendment freed those slaves in Texas on June 19 (but that Amendment wasn't ratified until six months later). A somewhat amusing irony, but appropriate for an act made possible and necessary by a war that fought between two countries one of which, technically, never was a country. 

Of course there are the tragic ironies in this story as well: the redemption of white supremacist governments and the imposition of Jim Crow Laws, the long-delayed delivery of voting rights, the persisting economic inequalities . . . All the more reason for the nation to take seriously a holiday that too many of us ignored for too long. After all, June 19 is a great way for an imperfect nation to celebrate a decisive step it took toward correcting an injustice, a sin with which this nation was born and by which we still suffer.