Race is so central to this country’s past and present, and on this Juneteenth Plus One, I want to explore some aspects of it, and explain some of my continual confusion about it.

Let’s start with the Emancipation Proclamation. I understand that I am looking at it with the eyes of someone in 2023, and not 1863, but……..isn’t it a bit overblown? Starting in 1860, eleven states seceded from the United States. So my first question is: during the Civil War, were these states part of the United States, or not? Was their secession successful only to be ended by a war and readmission, or were the Confederate troops fighting against the Union rebels against their own government for the duration of the war (i.e., was the secession itself invalid)? Is that a simple question that everyone but me can answer?

From what I have read, I believe the better answer is that the seceding states did successfully secede and had to be brought back into the Union. That, during the Civil War period, the eleven Southern states were not part of the United States.

Assuming this to be the case, the Emancipation Proclamation was a declaration with no legal effect whatsoever. It only “emancipated” enslaved persons in states which were no longer part of the United States, and therefore emancipated no one.

There were at this time, of course, also slaves in four states that did not join the South. They were the four “border states”, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, to be effective on January 1, 1863, he did nothing to outlaw slavery in the border states. Okay, maybe this was a tactical necessity. Perhaps an Emancipation Proclamation that purported to end slavery in the entire country would have led one or more of the border states to secede and join the Confederacy. That’s possible. I understand that.

But, and this is what is key: After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1862, slavery remained untouched in the eleven Southern states where it purported to have effect, but actually had no effect at all, and slavery remained untouched in the four Union border states because the Emancipation Proclamation did not even pretend to abolish slavery there. In fact, Maryland retained slavery until some time in 1864, Missouri until January 1865, and Delaware and Kentucky kept slavery as the law of the land until the 13th Constitutional Amendment was fully ratified on December 6, 1865.

So on June 19, 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, when the Black population of Galveston Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation and realized they were free (perhaps not by law yet), slavery continued to exist unabated in Delaware and Kentucky.

Not only that, but the end of the Civil War did not mean that the eleven states of the Confederacy were all of a sudden readmitted to the United States slave-free. There were conditions of readmission, one of which was the state’s ratification of the 13th Amendment, which wasn’t part of our Constitution until December 1865, seven months following Appomattox. And, the ratification of this amendment by the Confederate states could not occur in December 1865, but had to wait until certain preconditions involving the establishment of new state governments were met.

The first southern state to be readmitted back into the Union was Tennessee which was admitted in 1866, and most were readmitted in 1868. But Georgia was not fully readmitted until 1870. To be sure, during that interim period, slavery was not continuing as as it had been in the southern states. But this is because these states were occupied by Union armies. I don’t think that the Emancipation Proclamation itself controlled these still-formerly states of the Union and, until they were readmitted to the Union, we cannot say that slavery was fully, legally abolished there.

So it seems to me that June 19, 1865, the Juneteenth day that is now celebrated as a federal holiday, is an artificial day, and that slavery continued de facto in the United States until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, and until the last seceding state was readmitted to the Union in 1870.

As I said yesterday, more power to the Black community of the United States if they want to celebrate Juneteenth as a traditional day of celebration. But I don’t think it should be the basis of a federal holiday. If we want to have a federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery (and I think that is a great idea), it should be December 6, not June 19th.

Just sayin’