Juneteenth

By Gould Hagler · Originally published November 2018 · p. 9

By Gould Hagler Is Galveston in Texas, or Outer Mongolia? Last June I encountered a few newspaper articles on the Juneteenth holiday. One piece was in a major national newspaper, and in this account I learned some very interesting things. On June 19, 1865, Gen. Gordon Granger brought news of the Emancipation Proclamation to Galveston and to Texas. He came to inform the community that two years earlier Lincoln had freed the slaves. Why did the news take so long to reach Texas? That is a good question for the paper to pose, but, I learned, there was no one clear answer. Some believe the delay was caused by a messenger who was murdered en route. Some say the news was deliberately withheld. Texas, you see, must have been far more remote than we ever imagined. News of the Proclamation was borne by a single messenger, who didn’t make it, so everyone remained in the dark. Or, if the news was deliberately withheld, somebody somewhere had the remarkable ability to black out the news over an entire state, and a very large state at that. CWN readers don’t have to be told how far off base this reporting is. I don’t expect general interest newspapers to report on Civil War-related matters with the same level of detail and accuracy that readers get, say, in CWN. Nor do I expect a sophisticated understanding of the Emancipation Proclamation (which, of course, did not actually abolish slavery). However, I am disappointed that any American who writes for or edits a newspaper would not know that in 1863 there were ships, railroads, telegraphs and newspapers, such as the ones in Texas that carried news of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the very month

Lincoln issued the Proclamation. That is when the news got to Texas. I am not sure when Outer Mongolia got the word. I read once about a scientist who reviewed a paper submitted to a learned journal, a paper that was deficient in every way imaginable. What he put in his report to the journal’s editors is appropriate for the article on Juneteenth: “Not only is it not right,” wrote the scientist, “it is not even wrong.” I sent a letter to the editor (via email, as I thought that better than sending a lone messenger), submitting some information in a very polite manner (as I hope people will do when they find fault with my scribblings). I didn’t expect the letter to be published, but I did get a nice auto-email thanking me. I hope someone other than a computer read my letter. If so, perhaps next year we will see a report on Juneteenth that, if it can’t be right, can at least be wrong. Gould Hagler is a retired lobbyist living in Dunwoody, Ga. He is a past president of the Civil War Round Table of Atlanta and is the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation, published by Mercer University Press in 2014. He speaks frequently on this topic and others related to different aspects of the Civil War and has been a regular contributor to CWN since 2016. He can be reached at [email protected].