"The Origin of Juneteenth: When Freedom Reached Texas at Last"

​President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." While it didn't abolish slavery nationwide, it led to the eventual passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, which permanently outlawed slavery in the United States.

Extending freedom to enslaved people in Confederate states depended on military victories by the U.S. Army and an ongoing presence to enforce them.

​​Actual progress happened more than two years later, on June 19, 1865, when U.S. Army troops led by Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, where Granger announced and enforced federal orders proclaiming that all enslaved people were now free in Texas -- the last state of the Confederacy with institutional slavery.

How was Texas the last holdout? When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, enslavers in Mississippi, Louisiana, and other Confederate states fled with humans they considered their chattel for Texas, a state that afforded them greater chances of escaping the Union’s reach, according to Mitchell S. Jackson in Juneteenth: A Primer. "That dark exodus (all told, 150,000 enslaved people), initiated by those who paid Old Abe’s proclamation no damn nevermind, included processions so large that some witnesses described them as the second coming of the Middle Passage."

By 1865, there were some 250,000 enslaved people living in Texas in 1865, none of whom knew that their freedom had been granted two years prior. 
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Read Jackson's primer here.

When Granger arrived in Galveston, he assumed command of the Department of Texas and the almost 2,000 members of the 13th U.S. Army Corps. He and his men marched through Galveston reading the then assassinated president's General Orders, No.3:

"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 personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."

Jackson wrote that the president’s order was read in various places -- at an antebellum home in the center of town, at Union headquarters, at the Custom House, at the courthouse, at the local AME Church, and, in time, at the farther-flung properties of enslavers. "Their audiences were sometimes stupefied to silence over freedom that must’ve seemed chimeric, but were more often animated into hoots and hollers and hallelujahs."

​He added: "Some waited, as was advised, to learn of the new employer-employee relationship. But there were also a number of freed people who grabbed whatever they could carry and, with the quickness, footed right off their plantations. That mass leaving became known as 'the scatter.' Those who opted for that alacritous pursuit of freedom faced peril. Some of them were caught on roads and beaten or bushwhacked or lynched.

"Even after Granger and the blue coats galloped into Galveston, scores of should’ve-been-freed Blacks were hoodwinked into working months or even years more for their enslavers; victims of, among other factors, the state’s large size, and the obstinance and audacity of its lost-cause racists, as well as a lack of enough Union troops to enforce the order."

Austin American-Statesman – June 19, 1900.

A celebration of freedom in 1900.

Before it was inaugurated as Juneteenth, the unofficial freedom holiday was often called"Jubilee Day" and celebrated by thousands of people with music, prayer and feasting. It was held on the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, January 1, but later corresponded with the date of General Granger's order on June 19.  During the Jim Crow era, those revelers had to move their socializing to the banks of rivers and lakes because segregation laws left them without public venues. Nonetheless, in 1872, enterprising local leaders raised $1000, purchased a 10-acre plot of land in Houston, and built their own public space: Emancipation Park.

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History.

Juneteenth, which combines the words June and nineteenth, was unofficially celebrated by African Americans as early as 1866 and in 2021 was declared a national holiday. Today, Juneteenth is a day acknowledged as the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of legal slavery in the U.S. ​​

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​When did slavery end in North Carolina?

Despite its expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. While it did apply to enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union, North Carolina did not officially recognize it. And like Texas, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

African American workers on a Cape Fear rice plantation, etching, date and artist unknown. Courtesy, Library of Congress

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​In Wilmington, NC, with its easy and safe access via the Cape Fear River, the port city was a popular destination for slave ships. Wilmington was actively engaged in slave trading and slave auctions were regularly held on the steps of the county courthouse. Although it lacked the large slave market of cities such as Richmond and Charleston, it still conducted a noteworthy interstate slave trade, according to James Redpath's Roving Editor: Or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. The firm of D.J. Southerland and James C. Coleman, with a second office in Mobile, AL, was the leading slave trading company in Wilmington in the 1850s and early 60s. The 1860-61 city directory identifies the firm as a "negro mart."

In a July 2020 StarNews article entitled "Wilmington has a long history of injustice, exclusion of Black residents," historian Chris E. Fonvielle Jr. explained that slaves made up the principal workforce in every industry in Wilmington. And it wasn’t just individuals who held slaves. “Institutions of all kinds owned slaves in Wilmington, including railroad companies and even churches." He added: "The town relied on slaves' abilities in carpentry, masonry, and construction, as well as their skill in sailing and boating, for its growth and success.”

John D. Bellamy.

Bellamy's 10,000 square-foot townhome on Market Street in Wilmington.

Then identified as a "Negro House," the Bellamy slave quarters housed the enslaved domestic workers.

​One of Wilmington's wealthiest citizens, John Dillard Bellamy, was among the largest slaveholders in North Carolina with 115 enslaved men, women and children spread across three eastern counties -- Brunswick, New Hanover and Columbus. His townhome on Market Street was built primarily by enslaved Black artisans and served mainly by enslaved women and children.​​ Bellamy's turpentine operation thrived from the back-breaking work of young enslaved Black men and boys, and his sprawling Grovely plantation on the banks of Town Creek were tended by some 80 enslaved workers. As with other slaveholders across the Confederate states, not a single Bellamy slave was freed as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. (And, by the way, the proclamation did not apply to slaveholders in the states that remained loyal to the Union!)  ​​

​In a June 23, 1864 advertisement in the local newspaper, Bellamy offered a $1,000 reward for the capture of five of his enslaved workers from his Brunswick County plantation. He provided their names, ages, dispositions and skin color to aid in their apprehension, in addition to the locations where they may have gone. Such ads were quite common and continued nearly three years after the Emancipation Proclamation. 

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, over 360,000 enslaved people in North Carolina were freed, thanks to the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in North Carolina later that year on December 4.​