On this day

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On this day, June 19, 1865 -- two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation -- word finally reached the last of the enslaved people that “all slaves are free.” Union General Gordon Granger read these words from the balcony of the former Confederate Army headquarters in Galveston, Texas, 80 miles west of the Louisiana line.

There are several theories as to the two-and-a-half year delay that left slaves in Texas toiling for under the lash for so much longer than they should have. One theory is that a messenger had been killed on the way to read the Proclamation. Another is that slave owners purposely withheld the news (which would have been all too easy in the days before the technology we now take for granted).

In the end, it took 2,000 union troops to capture the state to enforce the law. Only then could General Gordon read the Proclamation stating that the enslaved people were now to be employees rather than property. The reactions among the newly freed people ranged from shock to jubilation. Some stayed to see what employment would mean. Others left the plantations immediately and set out to find family members spread out over the region.

Slavery was quickly replaced with sharecropping and a Jim Crow caste system that would hold formerly enslaved people and their descendants in the grip of a brutal new social order which millions would ultimately flee.

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