Juneteenth
On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger, who had arrive with Union troops on Galveston Island the day before, read General Order #3, which began as follows:
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.This was the first news in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation, in which Abraham Lincoln had declared that all slaves in territory still in rebellion against the United States as of January 1, 1863, were liberated. Starting with Texas the following year, states and localities began to commemorate the day as marking the end of slavery. It is worth noting that the Emancipation had at the moment it went into effect freed no slaves - it did not apply to border states that had stayed in the Union or to territory already reconquered by the Union Army. Its purpose was less the freeing of the slaves than it was setting a marker that prevented Britain from entering the Civil War on behalf of the South - remember that Britain had already moved against slavery, to which much
