Juneteenth and General Order 3

 From the National Archives:

On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation, U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, which informed the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free. Granger commanded the Headquarters District of Texas, and his troops had arrived in Galveston the previous day.

This day has come to be known as Juneteenth, a combination of June and 19th. It is also called Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, and it is the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

The official handwritten record of General Order No. 3, is preserved at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC.

“The National Archives safeguards many of the nation's most important records related to African American history and civil rights, and General Order Number 3 is one of those records,” said Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero. "We know from history that certain events took place, and it's always a delight when we can help make history come alive by sharing the actual documentation of those events.”

General Order No. 3 states:

“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.”

While the order was critical to expanding freedom to enslaved people, the racist language used in the last sentences foreshadowed that the fight for equal rights would continue. Visit our exhibit The Enduring Chronicle: Civil Rights Documents at the National Archives at Atlanta to review the “Early Gains and Losses” in the ongoing fight for Civil Rights.

Terminology: "Slave" v. "Enslaved Person"

 Jay Nordlinger quotes historian Barbara Fields:

Here’s how I put it to my students. The most famous of all abolitionist speeches is probably the one that Frederick Douglass delivered in Rochester, New York, in 1852. (My grandmother told me that her teachers required pupils to memorize it.) Douglass called the speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” He did not call it “What to the Enslaved Person Is the Fourth of July?” If it was good enough for Douglass, I tell my students, it’s good enough for me.

It is misguided to believe that “enslaved” tells more truth than “slave” because “slave” defines the victim by the perpetrator’s crime. This makes as much sense as rejecting the word “hostage” because it defines the hostage by the crime of the hostage-taker.

When I was a graduate student, it was Herbert Gutman from whom I learned an important distinction. When he spoke about slaves doing work, being punished, choosing spouses, having children, taking care of families, mourning the dead, worshiping God, and so on — in short, acting as human beings — he referred to them as “men and women.” What a powerful statement he made by that simple choice of concrete nouns. I pity the person who imagines herself achieving the same result by substituting “enslaved person” for “slave.

Fort Liberty

Andrea Salcedo at WP:

Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the United States, has officially been renamed Fort Liberty, following a ceremony Friday. The North Carolina post’s new name is part of a congressionally mandated plan to rename military bases, ships and streets that previously honored Confederate leaders.

The plan is the culmination of a years-long effort that intensified in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning it brought over the nation’s history of racism. A panel established by Congress recommended the Army rename nine installations that honored Confederate military officers.

“Welcome to Fort Liberty, the center of the universe,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and the newly christened Fort Liberty, said during the ceremony Friday. “We were given a mission to re-designate our installation, no small task with its history. We seized this opportunity to make ourselves better and to seek excellence. That is what we always have done and always will do.”

The other eight Army bases selected to be renamed are Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Polk in Louisiana; Fort Rucker in Alabama; and Fort Hood in Texas.

The nine Army posts were all built during the first half of the 20th century in former Confederate states. Fort Bragg had been named in honor of Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general who was relieved of command after losing the battle for Chattanooga in 1863, though he remained active in the rebel cause, serving as an adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Slavery and GWTW

 At The Ankler, historian David Vincent Kimel writes about deleted scenes in the script of GoneWith the Wind.

Remarkably, much of the excised material in my Rainbow Script was a harsh portrayal of the mistreatment of the enslaved workers on Scarlett's plantation, including references to beatings, threats to throw “Mammy” out of the plantation for not working hard enough, and other depictions of physical and emotional violence. Had these scenes remained in the final film, they would have stood in startling juxtaposition to the pageantry on display at the premiere in Atlanta. At the time of production, GWTW’s romanticization of slavery led African American thinkers like Ben Davis to call it “dangerous poison covered with sugar.” William L. Patterson went even further, describing it as “a weapon of terror against black America.” These voices were in the critical minority in the twentieth century, but over time, scholars have increasingly emphasized GWTW’s promulgation of the mythology of the Lost Cause, an interpretation of the Civil War that romanticizes the struggle as a war of Northern aggression that desecrated Southern honor and culture.

The article starts with a remarkable revelation about MLK: 

At the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind on December 15, 1939, the 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was dressed as a slave. It was the second night of an official three-day holiday proclaimed by the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia. King’s choir was serenading a white audience, directed to croon spirituals to evoke an ambiance of moonlight and magnolias for the benefit of the movie’s famous producer, David O. Selznick.

MLK Day

 Daniel Stid:

We have to avoid the temptation to domesticate Martin Luther King Jr. It is comforting to see him only as the aspirational dreamer of a color-blind society, a vision especially reassuring to white Americans, and leave things at that. But there was a prophetic radicalness to King’s statesmanship, and a telling critique of the American political tradition, that we also must reckon with, learn from, and respond to.

The great political scientist Herbert Storing made this point more broadly in introducing a volume of political writings by African Americans (including King) that he edited and published in 1970. Using the language of that era, Storing observed that,

“When young Frederick Douglass, speaking before the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847, asked, “What Country Have I?”, he put a question that circumstances compel every black American to ask. And when Douglass affirmed that he had no love for America and that, indeed, he had no country, he gave an answer that every thoughtful black in America has had to consider. This was not Douglass’s final answer, as it has not been the final answer of most blacks in America; but the question does not thereby lose its potency [Storing’s emphasis]....In important respects, then, black Americans are like a revolutionary or, more interestingly perhaps, a founding generation. That is, they are in the difficult but potentially glorious position of not being able to take for granted given political arrangements and values, of having to seriously canvass alternatives, to think through their implications, and to make a deliberate choice. To understand the American polity, one could hardly do better than to study, along with the work and thought of the founders, the best writings of the blacks who are at once its friends, enemies, citizens, and aliens.”

It is thus fitting for us to reflect on the writings, speeches, and acts of Martin Luther King Jr. on the national holiday we have established to honor this great American statesman. It is also fitting that the United States has built a memorial to King on our National Mall, poised on a line between the memorials honoring Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. It is especially fitting that, backed by Lincoln, King looks across the Tidal Basin toward Jefferson with the steadfastness of one who has come to collect an outstanding debt.

Taney: Good Riddance

 Amy B Wang and Marianna Sotomayor at WP:

The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would remove a bust at the U.S. Capitol of Roger B. Taney, the chief justice who authored the majority Supreme Court opinion protecting slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The House passed the measure by voice vote, and it now heads to President Biden for his signature. The Senate had passed it by voice vote last week.

If signed into law, as expected, the bill would direct the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library to remove Taney’s bust not more than 45 days after the bill is signed into law. The bill would also direct the committee to replace Taney’s bust with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice.

In 1857, Taney wrote the decision in the case of Scott — a Black man born into slavery who used the courts to demand his freedom — that Black people were not U.S. citizens and could not expect protections from the federal government.

The Last Day of the Lost Cause

The Confederacy was dedicated to slavery.

Everyone who fought for the Confederacy was committing treason.

Ned Oliver at Axios:

Workers in Richmond, Virginia removed the last city-owned Confederate statue from its pedestal on Monday morning.

Why it matters: The moment marks the close of a two-year effort to remove memorials to the Confederacy in its former capital. City and state leaders had long resisted calls to take down Confederate iconography.

What’s happening: A crane lifted a statue of Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill from the center of a busy intersection just before 10am.

Context: While most city-owned Confederate memorials came down in the summer of 2020 amid widespread protests against police misconduct, Hill’s removal was delayed because his body is buried beneath the statue.

What they’re saying: “This is, I would say, the last day of the Lost Cause,” Mayor Levar Stoney said as workers loaded the statue onto a flatbed trailer.

Juneteenth 2022

Maria Cramer at NYT:

Last June, President Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday, proclaiming it as a day for all Americans to commemorate the end of slavery.

One year later, only 18 states have passed legislation that would provide funding to let state employees observe the day as a paid state holiday, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Opponents of bills that would create funding for the permanent holiday have complained of the costs associated with giving workers another paid day off. Some have said that not enough people know about the holiday to make the effort worthwhile.

For supporters, such arguments are painful to hear, especially as more Americans said they were familiar with Juneteenth. In June 2022, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they knew about the holiday, compared with 37 percent in May 2021, according to a Gallup poll.

“This is something that Black folk deserve and it was like we had to almost prove ourselves to get them to agree,” said Anthony Nolan, a state representative in Connecticut, where legislators argued for hours earlier this year before passing legislation to fund the holiday.

Juneteenth commemorates the events of June 19, 1865, when Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom after the Civil War had ended.

The day has been commemorated by Black Americans since the late 1800s. Though all 50 states have recognized Juneteenth by enacting some kind of proclamation celebrating it, its full adoption as an American holiday has yet to take root.

...

The Juneteenth commemoration marks the legal end of slavery in the United States, a hard-fought achievement of the Civil War. General Granger’s announcement in 1865 put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued more than two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, on Jan. 1, 1863.

Database of Slaveholders in Congress

Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez at WP:

From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation’s laws were current or former slaveowners.

More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.

The country is still grappling with the legacy of their embrace of slavery. The link between race and political power in early America echoes in complicated ways, from the racial inequities that persist to this day to the polarizing fights over voting rights and the way history is taught in schools.

The Washington Post created a database that shows enslavers in Congress represented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states.

See database here. 

Emancipation and Freedom Monument

Gregory S. Schneider at WP:

The man stands 12 feet tall, eyes closed in what might be pain or transcendence, chains falling off his outstretched arms, scars striped across his muscled back. Opposite him, a woman on a pedestal cradles an infant and thrusts a document into the air, her face calm and resolute.

Richmond unveiled a new Emancipation and Freedom Monument on Wednesday — commemorating a far different set of rebels than the Confederate statues that have been coming down for the past year.

Just two weeks after the titanic effigy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed from Monument Avenue, city and state officials dedicated a monument that honors the struggle for freedom and equality by centuries of African Americans.

In addition to the large symbolic figures, the monument features names and likenesses of five Black Virginians who fought for equal rights and five who resisted the bonds of slavery. Among the latter group are Nat Turner and the man known as Gabriel, both executed for planning or carrying out slave rebellions.

Juneteenth

 From POTUS:

On June 19, 1865 — nearly nine decades after our Nation’s founding, and more than 2 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally received word that they were free from bondage. As those who were formerly enslaved were recognized for the first time as citizens, Black Americans came to commemorate Juneteenth with celebrations across the country, building new lives and a new tradition that we honor today. In its celebration of freedom, Juneteenth is a day that should be recognized by all Americans. And that is why I am proud to have consecrated Juneteenth as our newest national holiday.

Juneteenth is a day of profound weight and power.

A day in which we remember the moral stain and terrible toll of slavery on our country –- what I’ve long called America’s original sin. A long legacy of systemic racism, inequality, and inhumanity.

But it is a day that also reminds us of our incredible capacity to heal, hope, and emerge from our darkest moments with purpose and resolve.

As I said on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, great nations don’t ignore the most painful chapters of their past. Great nations confront them. We come to terms with them.

On Juneteenth, we recommit ourselves to the work of equity, equality, and justice. And, we celebrate the centuries of struggle, courage, and hope that have brought us to this time of progress and possibility. That work has been led throughout our history by abolitionists and educators, civil rights advocates and lawyers, courageous activists and trade unionists, public officials, and everyday Americans who have helped make real the ideals of our founding documents for all.

There is still more work to do. As we emerge from the long, dark winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, racial equity remains at the heart of our efforts to vaccinate the Nation and beat the virus. We must recognize that Black Americans, among other people of color, have shouldered a disproportionate burden of loss — while also carrying us through disproportionately as essential workers and health care providers on the front lines of the crisis.

Psalm 30 proclaims that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Juneteenth marks both the long, hard night of slavery and discrimination, and the promise of a brighter morning to come. My Administration is committed to building an economy — and a Nation — that brings everyone along, and finally delivers our Nation’s founding promise to Black Americans. Together, we will lay the roots of real and lasting justice, so that we can become the extraordinary country that was promised to all Americans.

Juneteenth not only commemorates the past. It calls us to action today.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 19, 2021, as Juneteenth Day of Observance. I call upon the people of the United States to acknowledge and celebrate the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of Black Americans, and commit together to eradicate systemic racism that still undermines our founding ideals and collective prosperity.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

Three-Fifths Update

 Oliver Willis at The American Independent:

On Tuesday, during a debate on the floor of the Tennessee General Assembly, state Rep. Justin Lafferty, a Republican claimed that the Three-Fifths Compromise was about "ending slavery."

"We ended up biting a bitter, bitter pill that haunts us today. And we did it to lay the foundation for all this that we enjoy in this country," Lafferty said, referencing the compromise.

He added, "The Three-Fifths Compromise was a direct effort to ensure that southern states never got the population necessary to continue the practice of slavery everywhere else in the country."

Additionally, Lafferty argued that not counting enslaved Blacks as a whole person was a praiseworthy achievement.

"By limiting the number of population in the count, they specifically limited the number of representatives that would be available in the slaveholding states, and they did it for the purpose of ending slavery," he said. "Well before Abraham Lincoln. Well before Civil War."

The claim is inaccurate and ahistorical. The Three-Fifths Compromise, in which enslaved Black people were counted as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of counting the American population, further enshrined the institution of slavery in America.

After the compromise was agreed to in 1787, millions of human beings lived in bondage until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and the abolition of slavery through the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Nathan Bedford Forrest Was a Racist and a Traitor

 Matt Shuham at TPM:

In 1978, a bust of the slave trader, Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest was installed in the Tennessee capitol building, immediately prompting protests.

Forty-three years later, the effort to remove the bust has some state Republicans grinding every bureaucratic lever at their disposal to a halt, the latest in a long line of fights on the general’s behalf. This week, several Republicans backed a bill to sack members of a historical commission that voted to remove the bust.

Larry McCluney, commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, thinks the solution is simple: those offended by the Forrest’s likeness should simply look away.

“We’re dealing with a time period now where everybody is offended by something,” McCluney told TPM. “They talk about the issues of slavery, racism, white supremacy — well, you know, our nation has a history of that, and it’s been around a lot longer than people realize.”

Nowadays, it’s a bit more difficult for elected Republican politicians to stick up for Forrest, whose presence in the capitol is at the center of the fight over the legislation to replace the historical commission.

“I don’t know that it’s specifically related to the three statues that are up on the second floor, but that could be the motivation behind it,” Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R) told reporters Thursday when asked about the bill.

“But overall, not looking at the motivation, I think it’s a good thing,” he added.

McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R) have written to the state’s attorney general, raising concerns that the commission didn’t follow the legal requirements for issuing its decision.

Justin Jones, a young activist who has pushed for years for the statue’s removal, said the vote to move the bust out of the Capitol felt like a victory. To Jones, the bust has a clear purpose.

“It’s meant to remind us that, even though they did remove those ‘colored’ and ‘white’ signs in the 1960s and 70s, they never replaced it with a ‘you’re welcome’ sign,” he said. “This symbol is a reminder that we’re not welcome there.”

Civic Nationalism v. Ethno-Nationalism

 Colin Woodard at Zocalo Public Square:

[Historian George] Bancroft’s vision—laid out over four decades in his massive, 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms, following a plan that history had laid out for them. Americans, Bancroft argued, would implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom. This promise was open to people everywhere: “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “Of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.”

...

But Bancroft’s vision of American civic cohesion was not the only national narrative on offer from the 1830s onward, or even the strongest one. From the moment Bancroft articulated his ideas, they met a vigorous challenge from the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country, who had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the federation’s purpose was to be. People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the Antebellum South’s leading man of letters; the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people, which conquers, also educates the inferior,” Simms proclaimed in 1837, “and their reward, for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter.”

Slavery was endorsed by God, declared the leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, in 1861. It was one of many Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideas he imbued on his loyal son, Woodrow. The younger Wilson spent the 1880s and 1890s writing histories disparaging the racial fitness of Black people and Catholic immigrants. On becoming president in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal government. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House—a film that quoted his own history writings to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction.

Simms, the Wilsons, and Birth of a Nation producer D.W. Griffith offered a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group, and in the 1910s and 1920s, this model reigned across the United States. Confederate monuments popped up across former Confederate and Union territory alike; Jim Crow laws cemented an apartheid system in Southern and border states. Directly inspired by the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation, a second Klan was established to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, assaulting, or killing a wide range of non-Anglo Saxons; it grew to a million members by 1921 and possibly as many as 5 million by 1925, among them future leaders from governors to senators to big-city mayors, in addition to at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. The Immigration Act of 1924 established racial and ethnic quotas devised to maintain Anglo-Saxon numerical and cultural supremacy.

Discourse About Race

Adolph Reed Jr. at The New Republic:

Discourse about race and politics in the United States has been driven in recent years more by moralizing than by careful analysis or strategic considerations. It also depends on naïve and unproductive ways of interpreting the past and its relation to the present. I’ve discussed a number of the political and intellectual casualties of what we might call this Great Awokening, among them a tendency to view the past anachronistically, through the lens of the assumptions, norms, and patterns of social relations of the present.

That inclination has only intensified with proliferation of notions like Afropessimism, which postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal “anti-blackness.” Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world. Most famously, The New York Times’ award-winning 1619 Project, under the direction of Nikole Hannah-Jones, asserts that slavery and racial subordination have defined the essence of the United States since before the founding—a brand of ahistorical moralizing that is now being incorporated into high school history curricula.

Yet, as I have argued, the premise that subordination to white supremacy has been black Americans’ definitive and unrelenting experience in the United States is undone by the most casual observation. As just one instance, I recall a panel at an early 1990s conference on black politics at Harvard Law School, organized by the school’s black student group, on which a distinguished black Harvard Law professor declaimed—with no qualification or sense of irony—that nothing had changed for black Americans since 1865. Until recently, this obviously false contention could make sense as a rhetorical gambit, indeed one that depended on its falsity for its effectiveness. It was a jeremiad dressed up as an empirical claim; “nothing has changed” carried a silent qualifier—that whatever racial outrage triggered the declaration makes it seem as though nothing had changed. This kind of provocation pivots on the tacit rhetorical claim that the offense it targets is atavistic—but in order for it to gain any significant traction, it requires that we understand that things have changed to the extent that such offenses should no longer be condoned, accepted, or taken in stride.

Hamilton and Slavery

Jennifer Schuessler at NYT:

The question has lingered around the edges of the pop-culture ascendancy of Alexander Hamilton: Did the 10-dollar founding father, celebrated in the musical “Hamilton” as a “revolutionary manumission abolitionist,” actually own slaves?

Some biographers have gingerly addressed the matter over the years, often in footnotes or passing references. But a new research paper released by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, N.Y., offers the most ringing case yet.

In the paper, titled “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, examines letters, account books and other documents. Her conclusion — about Hamilton, and what she suggests is wishful thinking on the part of many of his modern-day admirers — is blunt.

“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes.

...

But Ron Chernow, whose 2004 biography calls Hamilton an “uncompromising abolitionist,” said the paper presented a lopsidedly negative view.

The paper, he said in an email, “seems to be a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways.” But he said he was dismayed at the relative lack of attention to Hamilton’s antislavery activities. And he questioned what he called her sometimes “bald conclusions,” starting with the claim that slavery was “essential to his identity.”

“I don’t fault Jessie Serfilippi for her tough scrutiny of Hamilton and slavery,” he said. “The great figures in our history deserve such rigor. But she omits all information that would contradict her conclusions.”

Obama on the Constitution

Obama 2020 convention speech:

I'm in Philadelphia, where our Constitution was drafted and signed. It wasn't a perfect document. It allowed for the inhumanity of slavery and failed to guarantee women -- and even men who didn't own property -- the right to participate in the political process. But embedded in this document was a North Star that would guide future generations; a system of representative government -- a democracy -- through which we could better realize our highest ideals. Through civil war and bitter struggles, we improved this Constitution to include the voices of those who'd once been left out. And gradually, we made this country more just, more equal, and more free.

...
You can give our democracy new meaning. You can take it to a better place. You're the missing ingredient -- the ones who will decide whether or not America becomes the country that fully lives up to its creed.

Hamilton on Natural Rights

Tony Williams at RealClearPublicAffairs:

After serving a brief time in Congress, Hamilton became an attorney in New York. His dedication to natural-law justice prompted his courageous defense of the rights of unpopular Tories who had had their property confiscated under New York law. He believed that the laws violated equal justice, the rights of minorities, and the Peace Treaty of 1783. In January 1784, he wrote "Letter from Phocion," stating that a natural-rights republic “holds the rights of every individual sacred” and “punishes no man without regular trial.” Most famously, he represented a widow in Rutgers v. Waddington, making a case for judicial review when state laws conflicted with national ones, individual rights, and natural law.

During the 1780s, Hamilton joined the antislavery New York Manumission Society. He believed that slavery was a moral evil and a contradiction of any natural-rights regime. During the war, he had backed friend John Lauren’s plan to emancipate slaves in South Carolina if the slaves would bear arms for the patriot cause. Ultimately, though, abolition was not Hamilton’s main cause. He adopted a longer view, one devoted to building a well-governed republic that protected the inalienable rights of all.

Juneteenth

From Juneteenth.com:

Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All of which, or none of these versions could be true. Certainly, for some, President Lincoln's authority over the rebellious states was in question. Whatever the reasons, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.

General Order Number 3

One of General Granger’s first orders of business was to read to the people of Texas, General Order Number 3 which began most significantly with:

"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 rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer."

U.S. Grant on the Confederacy

As he was dying in a house near Saratoga Springs, NY (my hometown), U.S. Grant wrote the final pages of his memoirs.

He recalled Appomattox and the cause of the Civil War:

What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.

...
The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.