Today is Juneteenth - Marks End of US Slavery

Good stuff, Steph02.

I would add that:

.... Juneteenth, the name believed to be a merging of the month and the date, commerates when 250,000 enslaved persons of African descent and others in Galveston, Texas were read General Order 3 and informed of the Emancipation Proclamation, a document that had been first read to the public on January 1, 1863, a document that, as it was written, had freed the enslaved in Texas and other states and parts of states that had seceded from the Union, two years, five months and eighteen days earlier.

All gathered were told the War Between the States had ended and it was proclaimed that the enslaved were now free. However, the enslaved were encouraged to remain on the plantations where they found themselves, to be inexplicably transformed from unpaid slave to paid worker.

No official reason or excuse for the late reading and pronouncement of the Emancipation Proclamation to the people of Galveston, Texas has ever been given, and is quasi dismissed with a nonchalant shrug and a 'who knows?' attitude.

It is worth considering, when seeking an answer for the delay in notification that, in those days, most of Texas existed as a sparsely settled frontier.

However, Galveston, as a port city, was of tremendous value, for commercial and military reasons, to both the North and the South, which resulted in a fight for control and the blockade of the port by the Union Army forces.

During the Civil War, Galveston Harbor was taken by Union forces for a short time but was retaken by the Confederacy and remained under Confederate control until the end of the war.

The reasons for the delay in informing the inhabitants of Galveston, Texas, free and enslaved, lie within the historical facts pertaining to when Texas entered the Union of the United States of America, on October 13, 1845, its importance as a Union state and its secession to join the Confederate States of America on February 1, 1861, almost two years before the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Inside the Eye of the Storm

Juneteenth - June 2006