The Following Interesting News from Texas: The Slaves All Free

Published in the New York Times on July 7, 1865 and reproduced online with one absolutely massive typo:

Our New-Orleans files bring us the following interesting news from Texas:

IMPORTANT ORDERS BY GEN. GRANGER.

THE SLAVES ALL FREE.

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 tree.” 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.

The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts, and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, General Gordon Granger, a native New Yorker, delivered this message from the wrought-iron balcony of a mansion in Galveston, TX, prompting immediate jubilation in the town’s beach-salted streets. (Rumors about the reason for this delay include murdered messengers and slaveowners bribing officials to give them time for one more cotton harvest.) By 1903, June 19th became known by the portmanteau “Juneteenth,” and 42 states now recognize the holiday. Across Texas and the rest of the country, people are celebrating — many of them on land purchased by freed slaves in the early 20th century specifically to commemorate this day — and a statue of Frederick Douglass is being unveiled in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

See also: Miss Juneteenth pageants, the painful reminder that more black men are currently “in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in 1850,” and the map from the last U.S. Slave Census, in which Beaufort County in South Carolina has nearly 80% of its population enslaved.

Photo via Mike Licht/flickr.