Our newest national holiday is celebrated on June 19, one all too few Americans were aware of until recently. In essence, Juneteenth is a second Independence Day.

After 2½ bloody years of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ending slavery in the rebellious states. Escaped slave and brilliant orator Frederick Douglass quickly praised the act that he had fought so hard for.

“We are all liberated by this proclamation,” he wrote.

“The white man is liberated, the black man is liberated, the brave men now fighting the battles of their country against rebels and traitors are now liberated,” he wrote, calling it an “amazing approximation toward the sacred truth of human liberty.”

An approximation, since it would take 2½ more years of carnage unparalleled in U.S. history. And even when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his sword to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, it took months to break the last chains.

Informal celebrations in Texas spread nationwide

Texas was a backwater to the war and news was late to arrive. Seventy-one days after the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived on Galveston Island and delivered General Order 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,” it read. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”

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Finally, the slaves in Texas knew that the long war was over, as was their far longer bondage. It still took time for slavery to officially end when 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified six months later.

Tragically, too many old confederates held to their racist ways, despite the law.

Black Codes hampered freed Americans’ right to conduct business, own property or move freely, thanks to so-called “vagrancy laws.”

During the Jim Crow era, racial segregation was enforced across much of the old south in voting booths, public transportation and education. This so-called “separate but equal” America reigned until 1965 — a century after General Granger stepped onto that dock in Galveston.

From that day, informal celebrations were held in Texas and eventually spread across the south and then to the industrial centers of the north. The Lone Star State officially recognized Juneteenth as a holiday in 1980, and it was finally declared a federal holiday just three years ago.

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Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom for all

Juneteenth is a truly American holiday — a second Fourth of July, honoring the long-awaited triumph of individual liberty and equal rights first promised in 1776.

The author of the Declaration of Independence knew that a reckoning for slavery was only a matter of time.

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever,” Thomas Jefferson wrote of his fellow slaveholders. The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

Lincoln presided over that contest, remarking, “if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

The heaviest price, of course, was paid by the slaves themselves, and their descendants who lived only partially free.

This Juneteenth, all Americans should celebrate our freedom just like on Galveston Island so many years ago. As Douglass wrote, “no man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

We’re free at last.

Jon Gabriel is editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com and a contributor to the USA Today Network. On X, formerly Twitter: @exjon.

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