The Quintessential Americanness of Juneteenth
Juneteenth has always been touched with irony. Although it is the most popular Emancipation Day holiday in the country, it marks neither the legal nor the de facto end of slavery in the country.
The lesser-known Jubilee on New Year’s Day more properly commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1863 executive order that technically freed enslaved people in the rebel states. Memorial Day—first celebrated by freedmen in April 1865—commemorates the end of that war and the lives lost fighting over the scourge of slavery. The end of slavery as it had been practiced came with the Thirteenth Amendment, which on December 6, 1865, officially ended the institution and freed the last few humans who remained in chattel bondage under its bloody regime.
Juneteenth, rather, celebrates, after a proclamation by General Gordon Granger in Galveston solidified the emancipation of the quarter million enslaved people in the state.
