Juneteenth: Celebrating Freedom
How America ended an ancient evil
Andrew Weir | AI Generated
On June 19, 1865, Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas, to close the final chapter on American institutional slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was two years old by then; the war had ended months earlier. Juneteenth doesn’t celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution alone. It celebrates the moment that those laws became reality across the United States.
As teachers, students, and citizens, we should reflect on how this moment can teach us not just about the American story but also about America’s place in the story of the world.
Slavery is older than recorded history.
For most of human civilization, slavery was a fact of life, just another evil that humanity did to each other. Power alone didn’t keep slavery intact. Formal laws and institutionalized customs alike were tied to slavery.
Today, we celebrate the end of that institution. Juneteenth is an opportunity to reflect on America’s decision to destroy slavery as an institution—forever. The abolition of slavery was not inevitable. For millennia, most people thought it was foolish or impossible.
We did it anyway. We did it because America was founded on the words of the Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That radical idea is easy to write and hard to practice. Breaking the ancient chains of slavery was not easy; it took a civil war. But it was necessary for the nation to live up to its founding principles.
When we celebrate Juneteenth, we celebrate our eternal fight to live by the words of the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate the slaves who were freed on that day in 1865, of course, but we choose their freedom to point to the triumph of freedom over slavery for all Americans. All of us are made freer by it. It is not only a victory of one time and place, but of the American spirit over an ancient evil.
The Ancient Institution
Slavery was not a uniquely American institution.
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Around the year 450 AD, a man named Patrick wrote a short autobiography. He was from Roman Britain, from an upstanding family: his father was a deacon, his grandfather was a priest. But at sixteen, Irish raiders captured him and carried him into slavery in Ireland, “along with thousands of others.” The raid was not a fluke or an individual accident. It was a deliberate act of slave-taking. The man who became known as Saint Patrick did not begin his career as an illustrious missionary. He began as a slave.
Slavery had been a fact of life for people like Saint Patrick for centuries. While he was a victim of slave-taking by the Irish, slavery was an institution of Rome itself as well. There were few innocent participants, and many millions of victims, of slavery as it existed in the ancient world. The wealth of a man might be measured in cattle. It could also be measured in slaves. (The famous Spartacus was a slave!)
Through a combination of brutality, self-justifications, and outlets such as manumitting (freeing) some slaves, the institution was able to persist for millennia in the Western tradition just as it did globally. The ways that societies justified slavery varied, but they often conveniently discovered that the powerful, the slaveholder, turned out to be doing everything right all along. And all the time, people labored, unfree, beneath the whip.
When Europeans first came to North America, slavery’s trajectory was upward. The ancient urge to deny people the fundamental right to determine their own destiny had taken many forms in the years since St. Patrick wrote his Confessio. Yet there were innovations. The New World, modern state capacity, global trade, and technological advances did not change the nature of slavery. They accelerated slavery’s impact and scale.
To keep up with modernity’s rush, Europe adopted Africa as the most convenient source of slaves. Arab slave-traders had long-standing relationships with African nations that, like the Irish raiders who had taken St. Patrick centuries before, made their fortunes by selling those they kidnapped. The ancient Arab slave trade had affected millions of African nations for centuries. Much like ancient Rome’s conquests, raiding and war between African nations included slave-taking on a massive scale. By the Age of Exploration, the Arab slave trade was a centuries-old outlet for African slaves, with as many as 18 million victims. When Europe created more demand for slavery in the New World, the Transatlantic slave trade was born.
The ideas that eventually led to abolition began to form in Europe, but remained out of power. John Locke’s philosophy argued for innate human rights. Adam Smith’s Glasgow lectures criticized slavery on economic grounds: its inefficiencies and atrocities would never be as effective as voluntary labor. On the European continent, the French theorist Montesquieu argued slavery was inherently against human nature. All three would go on to influence the American mind.
At the time they wrote, however, the majority of European colonies in the Americas relied on the institution of slavery.
American Principles and Founding Fears
When the colonies became a nation, the Founders knew that slavery would have to be dealt with, sooner or later. They hoped that it would go away on its own. In some of their lifetimes, it seemed like it might. George Washington, who freed his slaves when he died, hoped that his example might be followed by many more, and the evil would end without bloodshed.
Thomas Jefferson was among those slaveowners who believed that slavery was evil. He even went as far as to say, in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, that God would side against the United States if the slaves revolted:
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
Despite the American Founders’ hopes that slavery would end peacefully, it was not to be.
Some believed that the end of the slave trade would end slavery in the United States. But other factors, like the invention of the cotton gin and the redoubling of white supremacist ideology in the South, kept the institution alive and spreading West.
Others argued that a more direct approach would be necessary, while also recognizing that pushing the issue in 1776 or even 1789 would have made it impossible to unify the colonies to fight for independence and to form the United States.
John Adams’ own opposition to slavery conflicted with his fears of what might happen if abolition were achieved through violence, as he wrote to an abolitionist in 1801:
“The Abolition of Slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection. Violent means and measures would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice.”
Some of America’s Founders benefited from slavery and kept their slaves for personal benefit, even if they knew it was evil. We see this attitude clearly in Patrick Henry’s letter to Robert Pleasants of 1773. Two years before he would famously declare, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Henry wrote:
“And believe m[e], I shall honour the Quakers for their noble Effort to abolish Slavery. It is equally calculated to promote moral & political Good.
Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by [the] general inconvenience of living without them, I will not, I cannot justify it.”
The most influential American Founders knew that slavery was evil, directly opposed to the principles of the Revolution that they fought for. Many slaveholders in the southern states were not so self-aware as Patrick Henry, however. Slavery did not, contrary to the hopes of the Founders, whither away in the face of a better understanding of human rights. It festered, calcified, and at last went into open rebellion.
To defeat the institution of slavery would require more than good ideas. Ultimately, it would require a devastating war that killed more than 600,000 Americans. The American Civil War did not begin solely because of slavery. Still, it became clear quickly that so long as slavery persisted, the nation would be divided and in conflict with its own founding principles.
The Genius of Frederick Douglass
Slavery could silence millions, but it could not silence everyone.
The abolitionist movement was small for decades, sustained by a few principled individuals and by the stories of slaves who escaped north. One such fugitive was Frederick Douglass, whose story should be in every American history classroom. Born a slave, probably fathered by his white master, and separated early from his mother, Douglass’s life is a perfect example of the brutality and evil of slavery in the antebellum South. It is also a perfect example of the importance of education.
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Douglass was a genius—a brilliant thinker, writer, and speaker who began his life on a Maryland plantation and ended it as a free man who had helped his whole country, influenced Presidents, and seen the institution of slavery finally defeated. Without the good fortune that gave him a chance to escape and survive, we would never have had his story, his gifts as a writer, or his influence in improving the lives of millions of Americans. Slavery robbed the world of untold thousands like Douglass.
The tale of slavery is ugly. To the degree that a student is capable of understanding its ugliness, we have to be honest about what slavery really was. Douglass spent decades telling his story and the realities of other slaves. A woman beaten within an inch of her life for pursuing a romance with another slave — that horror was not just the personal pique of her master or an unusual event. Douglass introduced the story by saying that it was “very common in our slave-holding community.”
Douglass recognized that the institution of slavery could make even men who thought of themselves as good do great evils. When he told a story of his cousin’s mistreatment by their master, he concluded that “This treatment was a part of the system, rather than a part of the man.” As long as slavery persisted, masters would mistreat their slaves.
These facts flew in the face of popular white supremacist narratives at the time, which pretended that slavery was perfectly tolerable and that mistreatment was an abnormality. Men like Senator John C. Calhoun called slavery a “positive good,” pretending that slaves benefited from being enslaved.
Once people like Douglass escaped north, they were able to tell the truth about slavery. They could break down that false, pro-slavery narrative. Today, we are lucky enough to have the words of escaped slaves at our fingertips. Both Frederick Douglass and St. Patrick have autobiographies available on Lexandria.
The best way to understand the evils of slavery is to read the stories of slaves—in their own words, when we can.
Taking Juneteenth to the Classroom
Too often, when we talk about Juneteenth and the abolition of slavery, the story is one of shame. People ask, “How could this great evil have existed?” They treat the abolition of slavery as an indictment of the American Founding. Teachers can correct this by talking about the ancient, global nature of institutional slavery. Students need to know that freedom is an exception, not the rule, of human history.
Then, some people take the opposite approach: They treat abolition as a dry fact—just another thing to memorize for a quiz. Teachers can correct this by telling students the truth of slavery through stories like those of Douglass and St. Patrick. The evils of slavery should not be forgotten.
It’s also wrong to see Juneteenth as a politicized holiday. Across the United States, many people believe that Juneteenth somehow belongs to black people and leftists, or that white people and conservatives should not celebrate it. That is a deeply false narrative.
Juneteenth is an American celebration, not an American shame. It matters because slavery was one of the greatest evils that has continually reared its head over the centuries. It is not partisan, it is not limited to one race, and it does not belong to any political side.
Today, slavery is no longer a global institution. Where it persists, it hides, it disguises itself, it shrinks in shame.
When the Founding Fathers declared their independence, they did not do so by appealing only to the importance of self-government. They appealed to human rights. They appealed to liberty.
It was the ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that upturned the narrative that slavery was inevitable. Once, it seemed as if the ancient evil was never going away. The Founders hoped that it might die a slow death of time and modernity. When their hopes proved incorrect, the nation was left with a fundamental question: Would we keep slavery, or would we keep the Declaration of Independence?
