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Juneteenth and Other Lesser Known African-American Historical Culture

Khalid Elhassan June 15, 2020 34 min

Colonel Tye - American Revolutionary War — Colonel Tye as portrayed in a PBS documentary. PBS

39. Freedom Belatedly Reaches Texas

Slave holding areas covered by the Emancipation proclamation in red, those not covered in blue. Wikimedia

Of the slave states, none was as remote as Texas. So during the Civil War, many planters and other slaveholders from the rest of the Confederacy migrated to Texas to flee the fighting, and brought their black bondsmen with them. As a result, Texas’ slave population exploded during the war, and by the time the conflict ended, the Lone Star State had over a quarter million slaves.

News of the surrender at Appomattox, April 9^th, 1865, did not reach Texas until the end of April, and the Confederacy’s Army of the Trans-Mississippi, within whose area of operations Texas lay, did not surrender until June 2^nd. It was not until June 18^th that US General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Island with 2000 Union troops to occupy Texas. Until then, many of the state’s black population did not know that they were free. The following day, June 19^th, Granger read aloud a general order, announcing the total emancipation of black Texans.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.