America 250: Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth, and it’s an awesome holiday. It stands right there alongside July 4th as one of the greatest days in the cause of freedom the world has ever seen
On June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, Union troops announced that the Civil War was over and the enslaved people of Texas were free. For them, it was the true day of emancipation.
America was the first nation in history to declare, in its founding document, that all men are created equal. That radical idea challenged thousands of years of accepted practice across the world. Many of the men and women of the Founding generation genuinely believed slavery would wither away over time. They made compromises to protect the institution for a couple of decades, giving slaveholders time to adjust their economies and transition away from it.
Two things upended that expectation: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, which made large-scale cotton production enormously profitable, and England’s Industrial Revolution, which created a massive new market for cotton. What had been a dying institution suddenly became hugely lucrative. The moral arc that many Founders assumed would bend toward freedom was disrupted and altered by countervailing forces.
The United States did not invent slavery. Slavery had existed in nearly every society throughout human history. And still does in many places. Slavery is not specific to race, tribe, or culture. All have practiced it and some still do. What was new was a country that explicitly rejected it as a moral wrong in its founding charter and eventually fought a war to end it.
It took eighty years and a brutal civil war to fully live up to the founding promise, but we did live up to it. America ended the sin of chattel slavery on its soil. Men, women, and children who had been held in bondage were freed.
Juneteenth is worth celebrating because it marks one of the great moral achievements in human history. A nation founded on the idea of liberty took that idea seriously enough to eventually extend it to everyone within its borders.
As we approach America’s 250th birthday, Juneteenth is a reminder that this country was built on the greatest expansion of human freedom the world had ever seen. We didn’t always live up to our ideals immediately, but we did move toward them — often at great cost.
That’s something to be proud of.
Happy Juneteenth.
#America250 #Juneteenth #AmericanHistory
Thanks for this. Many states have had Juneteenth on the books for a long time.