I was busy yesterday ....

[butlersrangers]

.... celebrating the 'new' holiday!

[waterman]

Surely some sensitive individual will take offense.

For several years, I worked in a professional capacity on an Indian Reservation. The Tribal Council asked me to take the job, I didn't as them.

The inhabitants (Reservees?) took great exception when Martin Luther King's birthday was made a national holiday. It does not take too much imagination to figure out what the Reservees called it.

A few weeks later, one of the more virulent and outspoken Reservees spent a morning saying "Let's kill all the white guys". Coming back from lunch, I noticed the trunk of his car was open. Looked like 3 M-16s, probably stolen, with 2 dozen mags. I left without giving notice, just drove home. Never been back.

I've been gone for 25 years. Racial tensions are higher now than then. Juneteenth is not a grand idea.

[butlersrangers]

I think a Holiday should have been established to commemorate the Battles of the CW,
the issues and sacrifices of the national crisis, and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
A Holiday and a month of observations, history and awareness.

[Dick Hosmer]

I've always been struck by the fact(?) that the exact date was (apparently) not important enough back in the day to be remembered. There's never been any doubt about July 4th. And, while the slavery-ending event is certainly worthy of commemoration, to suggest that it replace our national day is ludicrous, if not insulting. Just another 'woke' example of the tail wagging the dog. . . .

[waterman]

The real purpose of the Emancipation Proclamation apparently escapes today's Americans. The Union position was that the Confederate states were still members of the Union. Therefore, the US Constitution was still the principal law of the land. Slaves were property. Because a man's property cannot be taken without due process, slaves could not be drafted. By 1863, the Union needed infantry replacements, cannon fodder, and the 1863 draft did not produce enough warm bodies. The Army held large numbers of slaves, seized as Confederate spoils of war, but technically still the property of their owners. The Emancipation Proclamation legally severed the ownership of said slaves, an act of due process. It was a necessary legal step to freeing them and making male slaves eligible for military service and the draft. It was simply a ploy to get more cannon fodder.

No one cared a hoot about the slaves as people. And the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to slaves held in Union states where slavery was still legal; Maryland, Kentucky, or Missouri.

The same legal principal is what killed the "40 acres and a mule" gifts to freed slave heads of households. Someone already held legal title to those 40 acres. That ownership was protected by the Constitution. The occupying Army could not legally seize it and redistribute it.

[butlersrangers]

I don't totally agree with 'watermans' perception.

Black leaders and Abolitionists were pushing for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Yes, it did only apply to States in Rebellion. The Proclamation was officially issued, January 1, 1863.
It was 'preliminarily' put into motion, following the Battle of Antietam, in September 1862.
It was a hollow threat, to bring the South to the bargaining table.
It eventually created a new mission for the Union war effort.

Union commanders like Ben Butler, in occupied Louisiana, and others in 'Union Occupied' Virginia, and the Carolinas, were ahead of the Federal Government,
by refusing to recognize slavery and by making Freed Slaves "Contraband of War". Efforts were made to hire (especially for construction), feed, house, and educate the now liberated Blacks, who sought refuge in Union held territory.

It was a real political "hot potato" to allow 'Freed Blacks' to take up arms as soldiers.

There were a lot of people, North and South, who persisted in thinking a negotiated Peace could be arrived at, (mainly Democrats).

A lot of the pressure, to allow former slaves to become Union Soldiers, came from Black leaders and Abolitionists.

IMO - This is all a great and complicated story that deserves a better rendering than just "Juneteenth". It sure is not being taught in most schools.