on January 1st 1863. When they arrived, the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, positioned themselves for a public reading of the news. General Order Number 3 declared:
"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 free laborer."
One must stop to imagine the situation faced by slaves who suddenly were free. Not only were these people enslaved since childbirth, but their entire ancestry-untraceable for the most part since-were slaves in the centuries leading up to the civil war. Slaves who knew about relatives in neighboring states attempted to reunite and settled and remained in the southern states.[2] There were also a significant number of freed slaves who chose to go North, North being one of the primary associations with the word 'freedom.' In the years after 1865, former slaves turned free laborers were occupying a new social position that prior to that point in history had not existed. Faced with one setback after another, African Americans preserved Juneteenth as a day for prayer and commemoration, as well as reunion, and many Texans travel to Galveston on a pilgrimage each year to the site where Major General Granger read the order.[3]
The problem in the post-Civil War south became obvious quickly. Plantation owners were now out of a key financial asset in their systems of production. Former slaves, having known the
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