Grant and Juneteenth

There is no record of the word “Juneteenth” appearing in print during the lifetime of Ulysses S. Grant, and he probably never heard it. It was an African-American dialect word deriving from the date, June 19, 1865, on which General Order No. 3 was issued by Major General Gordon Granger, the new commander of the District of Texas.

Granger had arrived by ship in Galveston two days previously with 1,800 troops to assert federal control over the largest American state. Texas, unlike most of the Confederacy, had not been conquered by the Union Army. Its ruling class, as shown by contemporary newspapers, remained unconvinced that the U.S. government would actually enforce the abolition of slavery, and thought some system of forced labor would remain in place. The enslaved people of Texas, many of whom had been brought there from other Confederate states, were unsure what would happen.

On his own authority, Granger’s order used language strong enough to make clear to everyone, White and Black, the position of the U.S. government: “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 between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. …” For the next decade and more, Republican politicians and the U.S. Army and law enforcement, including General and President Grant, tried to turn expressions such as “absolute equality” into law and reality, in which efforts they were partly successful.

A relatively small number of northerners in 1861, including the Kansas jayhawker James Montgomery, had thought a civil war was necessary to destroy slavery. Montgomery volunteered for the Union Army on that basis, and served for most of the next four years. In 1863 and 1864, most of the troops he commanded were Black, and they, like him, did become soldiers with the purpose and expectation of abolishing slavery.

But most northern soldiers at the beginning of the war saw their cause as defending the Union, and did not call themselves abolitionists. Nor did most northern leaders, including anti-slavery politicians such as Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward. Those leaders had tried to prevent the war from happening, reasonably fearing its terrible cost. And after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, they still did not embrace abolition, fearful of losing the support of border-state and other Unionists who recoiled from radicals like Montgomery.

Grant had married into a slave-holding family, with whom he lived, struggling to earn a living in civilian life, in the mid-to-late 1850s. He briefly owned a slave in that period, whom he could have sold at a time when he was chronically short of money. But Grant did not sell the man, William Jones, instead signing a manumission document to free him.

Grant, like Lincoln, Seward and Granger, and unlike Montgomery, would not have described himself as an abolitionist before the war started. The North was radicalized on this issue through the course of the war, with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which became effective on Jan. 1, 1863, as the key turning point. Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist whose son Lewis would fight under Montgomery’s brigade command, thought January 1 should be celebrated forever as the end date of slavery. By 1864, most Union soldiers and most northern voters supported Lincoln’s re-election on an abolitionist platform.

Grant and Granger were not friends, and had a tense professional relationship. A month after Juneteenth, for unrelated reasons, Grant had Granger ousted from his Texas command. To protect his career, Granger cultivated his friendship with President Andrew Johnson, who was no supporter of Black civil rights. Later, commanding U.S. troops in New Mexico Territory, Granger negotiated with the Apache leader Cochise in accordance with President Grant’s Indian peace policy.

As Johnson’s successor, Grant arguably became a great civil rights president, but many of the gains achieved under his administration were lost after he left office.

In Texas, however, Juneteenth was celebrated annually in Black churches, picnics and parades, becoming a focus of community self-help and empowerment. It spread slowly through the South, and contributed to a new civil rights movement, led by nonviolent African-Americans, which in the mid-20th century succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow abuses and restoring – almost a century later -- the rights lost after the collapse of Reconstruction.

Douglass, an admirer and ally of Grant’s, did not live to see a national holiday adopted to celebrate the end of slavery. When it did happen in 2021, 156 years after the end of the war, June 19 was chosen and not January 1, as Douglass had proposed. I don’t think either he or Grant would have quarreled with the date.

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This guest blog post was written by Grant Cottage volunteer and former staff member Robert C. (Bob) Conner, who has written biographies of James Montgomery and Gordon Granger, and a historical novel The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant.