By David Harmer, National Director of Founding Forward
Today we celebrate Juneteenth (a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth”)—the newest federal holiday, but one whose roots reach back 159 years, to June 19, 1865.
At that moment in history, the last major Confederate army had surrendered just two months prior (April 9, 1865) and the Emancipation Proclamation had been in effect for two years (January 1, 1863). Yet in Texas, some 250,000 people remained enslaved and unaware of their freedom.
Accordingly, Major General Gordon Granger, U.S. Army, issued General Order No. 3. His first general order announced his appointment to command all troops in Texas, and his second announced his senior staff. Having established his authority and theirs, he announced the reason for their arrival:
Head Quarters District of Texas
Galveston Texas June 19th – 1865.
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.
Thus were the last of those enslaved within the United States finally freed.
Marking the occasion, Juneteenth is now celebrated nationwide, and deservedly so.
In recent years it has been asserted by some that the United States was founded on a lie, that those who promulgated the Declaration of Independence never really believed that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. While the founders didn’t abolish slavery, the assertion that they founded this nation to preserve slavery withers before the facts. From the beginning, slavery was incompatible with the Declaration of Independence, but enslavement was never, as some now argue, part of America’s foundation. It is true that this continent once hosted a new nation conceived in slavery—but that was the Confederate, not the United, States of America.
South Carolina justified its secession from the Union on the basis that the free states “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery,” “permitted open establishment” of manumission societies, refused to enforce fugitive slave laws, and elected a president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery,” who “declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explicitly repudiated America’s founding ideals, grounding the Confederacy in racism:
The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. . . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. . . .
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
Contrast President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address: “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.”
Later, dedicating the Gettysburg battlefield as a cemetery, Lincoln explained why the Union fought: to vindicate the founding of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
The great abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, having suffered the brutality of slavery himself, once asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” and answered, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
Yet Douglass came to see racism and slavery not as purposes or consequences of America’s founding, but contradictions and betrayals of it. Their incompatibility with the Declaration of Independence was obvious, though Douglass argued that they were equally incompatible with the Constitution. “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT,” Douglass said (capitalization his), encompassing “principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”
Although not unique in having tolerated slavery, the United States was unique in having articulated, in its Declaration of Independence, ideals utterly incompatible with it:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The wonder is not that America took time to live up to its founding ideals; the wonder is that those ideals—bold, universal, timeless, admitting no exceptions—were promulgated in the first place. As the Reverend Martin Luther King said,
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men —yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. . . .
So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
That’s America’s story: continually striving to put our creed into practice. Miraculous though it was, the Constitution left that work unfinished. Ambitious though it was, the Emancipation Proclamation left that work unfinished. Transformational though they were, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (abolishing slavery, extending to all the equal protection of the laws, and ensuring the right to vote regardless of race or color) left that work unfinished. Even the civil rights movement left that work unfinished.
In these days of disunion and discord, when sober observers fear that the nation is more bitterly divided than at any time since the Civil War, Founding Forward focuses on what unites us as Americans—or used to, and still should: our founding ideals, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and as pursued from the Revolution through the present day.
In a time when higher education, popular culture, and political leadership alike seem to have lost respect for the institutions and traditions that made this country great and free, Founding Forward educates students and teachers about the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship, including the civility and mutual respect that must characterize fellow citizens in a free Republic.
In a time of poisonous partisanship and pervasive polarization, Founding Forward answers Benjamin Franklin’s challenge, issued upon emerging from the Constitutional Convention: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
We aim to keep it.
We envision an America where the rising generation loves their country and understands, appreciates, and defends its founding ideals. It is out of that understanding of those ideals that we can work toward fulfilling the American creed.
You are our indispensable partner in this vital work. Your support enables us to provide the civic education so urgently needed now. Join us to inspire Americans of all parties and persuasions to preserve and build on the best of our past as we aspire to a better future.
