Today, the U.S. observes Juneteenth the federal holiday “suspended,” since Juneteenth proper, June 19, 2022, occurred on a Sunday.
Yesterday, Juneteenth historical context provided in various articles, commemorations, tweets, blog posts, and other media brought the town of Galveston, Texas, to the fore.
As Andréa Bolt, social media and communications manager for Texas A&M University at Galveston, summarized yesterday in her article “History of Juneteenth Seen & Felt Throughout Galveston”:
It was here on June 19, 1865, that Union Army General Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived to formally inform the enslaved Black and African American people of Galveston and Texas – about a quarter of a million people — that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed them.
The order read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. 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.”
The problem was that President Lincoln had passed the proclamation more than two years prior. Geographically and culturally, Texas was a removed slave state whose slave owners were loath to accept defeat and the forced change it represented. Combined with a low number of Union troops, acknowledgment, and enforcement of the proclamation were both slow and inconsistent. This changed that fateful day 157 years ago.
According to legend, Gen. Gordon read aloud the contents of General Order No. 3 from the wrought-iron balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa.
…..
Gen. Granger and his men rode through the island, announcing the news via horseback and at several historical locations with rich cultural significance across Galveston. Many of these locations are still visible and visitable today.
It’s a stirring scene to no doubt millions, albeit blemished by the order’s patronizing “idleness” language, of course, which was admittedly unsurprising rhetoric for the time.
But now, one day later, racing into the headlines like a miasmic cloud to blot out Juneteenth, comes the morally obtuse and retrograde acts of the Republican Party of Texas.
Khalendra Rahman on June 20, 2022, reports in Newsweek that, according to her article’s headline, “Texas Could Vote to Secede From U.S. in 2023 as GOP Pushes for Referendum.”
It’s true.
What is more, the Texas Republican Party’s platform includes a call for the full repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In other words, Texas Republicans would prefer to take America back to the era of the bigoted “separate but equal” racist philosophy, which began to greatly weaken under the weight of Supreme Court rulings like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 but wasn’t duly ash-heaped until the ‘65 Voting Rights Act.
I will post more in the future about secession in the era of Ulysses S. Grant’s lifetime. But for now, on Juneteenth observed, I will assert that the Union is perpetual. The Union’s bindings are inherent in the fact that the Constitution is legally a replacement of the Articles of Confederation. There is no mechanism for secession in the Constitution; the U.S. Constitution does not presuppose secession’s legal plausibility. (In theory, a Constitutional amendment could create a new mechanism for secession.)
Secession as desired by Texas’ Republicans could only be attempted as an illegal act to which the rest of the nation can by right respond strenuously within the law, including through the federal government’s war powers as granted by U.S. Constitution in the event of insurrection or foreign invasion.
I reckon that no one state or small grouping of states would be permitted by the American majority to wreck the republic in a fit of pique.
In other words, “Don’t mess with the rest of us.”
IMAGE
Statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park, photograph by Sidvics, August 13, 2011. Statue by Thomas Ball, 1876, bronze, Quincy granite, figure 14′ ht., with pedestal 20, total weighs 125 tons, New York City.
