CONCERNING JUNETEENTH:
The Great White Father, Union General, came to Texas and notified the slaves that they were now free, to their great jubilation.
The fact is that the enslaved throughout the South had a great system of communication of news, called the “grapevine”. They often knew more about what was going on than the majority of whites.
The issue in Texas wasn’t that they didn’t know they were free, that the Civil War had ended, but that the Texas slaveholders continued their military resistance even after Lee’s surrender.
So the enslaved were being held and forced to work because of the Confederate’s continued military control of the region.
When the Union Army came to Texas it put an end to the final pocket of resistance, and that marked the real and final emancipation of the enslaved which, by the way, they had secured primarily by their own efforts elsewhere.
