Juneteenth

General Order No. 3 came two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The National Archives describes it as the federal government’s final execution and fulfillment of the Proclamation’s terms: the people it addressed were the last group of Americans to be informed that all formerly enslaved persons were free.

Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger commanded the Union army’s District of Texas. His troops arrived in Galveston on June 18, 1865, and the next day he issued the order.

General Order No. 3 begins: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” It declared an absolute equality of personal and property rights between former masters and the formerly enslaved, and turned their relationship into that of employer and hired labor. But it also advised the freedpeople to stay quietly at their present homes and work for wages, and warned that they would not be allowed to gather at military posts or be “supported in idleness.”

The order made freedom official across Texas. Its closing lines, the National Archives notes, used racist language that foreshadowed how long the fight for equal rights would continue.

African American communities in Texas began celebrating the day in 1866, and the celebration later spread to other states. Nearly all states and the District of Columbia came to recognize Juneteenth, and on June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation making it a national holiday. The original handwritten order survives at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.