Juneteenth: The Struggle and Celebration of Emancipation

In recognition of Juneteenth, National Park Partners has invited National Park Service Interpretive Ranger, Christopher Young to be a guest blogger this month. Ranger Young works in the Division of Interpretation & Resource Education of the Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park. He began working at CHCH in 2009 and previously taught history and education courses in secondary and higher education institutions. Ranger Young holds a B.A. in History, a M.S.Ed. in Social Science, and an Ed. S. in Social Science from Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama. He has been studying various aspects of the American Civil War for the past 26 years.

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The Struggle and Celebration of Emancipation
by Christopher Young, Park Ranger, Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park

Reading the Emancipation Proclamation / H.W. Herrick, del., J.W. Watts, sc. [Hartford, Conn. : S.A. Peters and Co.] c 1864. 1 print : steel engraving. This print accompanied a pamphlet published by Lucius Stebbins, Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1864 [sic]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

As the sun rose on a new year, January 1, 1863, US soldiers awoke to a new calling, one of which, at least for some, meant fighting for a loftier purpose than merely preserving the Union. That purpose was rooted in the emancipation of approximately four million men, women, and children being held in bondage throughout the South. However, a political caveat existed within the Emancipation Proclamation. The president’s proclamation stated that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The document continued by listing the states in open rebellion affected by the proclamation, with exceptions for certain parishes and counties. One glaring state, with active troops still in open rebellion, and with what amounted to a Confederate governor in exile, was Tennessee. The proclamation’s section concerning exempt areas closed by stating that the “excepted parts, are for present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.”

So, what did that mean for Tennessee, and closer to home, what did it mean for Chattanooga? Essentially, all enslaved persons within the state, including those in the Gateway City (still in Confederate hands until September 1863), found themselves no closer to actual freedom than when they lay down their heads on December 31, 1862. The nation’s laws, which affected those enslaved, including the 3/5 Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision, and all the state and local slave codes, remained in effect and enforceable within the Volunteer State.(1)

Metzner, Adolph, Artist. Captain Louis von Trebra at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, November 25. Tennessee United States, 1863 Source: Library Of Congress

On November 25, 1863, as blue-clad US soldiers planted their colors along the heights of Missionary Ridge and Confederates skedaddled into Georgia, slavery’s demise seemed one step closer in Chattanooga. Unfortunately, slavery’s death was incomplete in the eyes of the law. Thousands of enslaved people, looking for hope promised under Lincoln’s proclamation, flocked to Union forces as they marched through the South. However, when they fled to marching armies traversing Tennessee, that promise became muddied. Once enslaved men, they now occupied positions as teamsters, cooks, laborers, and officers’ body servants, but what of them now, as part of an occupying force within a city and state still enforcing fugitive slave laws and slave codes?

It certainly mattered if the once-enslaved person working for the army lived in Tennessee or any other area not mentioned in the president’s proclamation. Chattanooga’s US quartermaster found that honoring labor contracts became a very “delicate case.”  After some thirty letters poured in from masters living in eastern Tennessee and eastern Kentucky “claiming the pay due said slaves and giving references in regard to their loyalty,” he asked his superiors in Washington, “What am I to do? Shall I continue to pay the Slaves, or if the masters are loyal – am I to pay the masters?” He soon received his answer, that “if a contact is made with their masters, they are entitled to the wages.” Essentially, if an enslaved person was owned by a loyal citizen, the Army of Emancipation was required to pay masters for renting the very people seeking the freedom provided through emancipation.(2)    

Even with the issues of legality continuing to plague the army, Chattanooga became a beacon of freedom for those fleeing slavery within states affected by the Emancipation Proclamation. With the formal establishment of the United States Colored Troops (May 1863) and Chattanooga now in Union hands, the US army began recruiting efforts in the city, with more than 2,000 African Americans joining its ranks, many of whom enlisted in the city’s most well-known unit, the 44th USCT.(3)

Now, with the help of hundreds of thousands of USCT, the war seemed to be on its last leg. Yet, the supposed freedoms inherently endowed upon mankind in the Declaration of Independence were now being endowed through the shedding of blood from white and black soldiers on near and distant fields of battle.  However, in early 1865, Confederate armies remained in the field, and men, women, and children remained enslaved. Then, Tennessee did something fanatical, denuding the Emancipation Proclamation before an actual end to the war. In February, the state passed a constitutional amendment to its existing constitution, which specifically focused on slavery’s abolition within its borders. The previous questions wrestled with by Tennessee’s enslaved people, their owners, and the US army suddenly ground to a screeching halt – the state was free. Though, a new problem emerged from slavery’s ashes. The state became an island of freedom nestled among states in which slavery still existed and which was, for the moment, still protected by the either the US Constitution or the CS Constitution and the various slaveholding states’ constitutions. By mid-June, most Confederate forces surrendered, signaling the war’s end.

Gen. Gordon Granger, (between 1860 and 1870), Civil war photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

On June 19, 1865, US Major General Gordon Granger, who helped save the Union Army of the Cumberland from disaster at Chickamauga, issued his General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, which stated, “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.” To add to this proclamation, on December 6, 1865, Georgia became the final state to ratify the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, striking the final deathblow to slavery within the United States.(4)

General Granger’s proclamation became the catalyst for “Juneteenth” celebrations, which are now commemorated in neighborhoods, communities, and cities throughout the nation. Historically, it is difficult to trace any immediate post-war celebrations through Chattanooga’s newspapers. However, Juneteenth was certainly celebrated within the city’s African American communities, which has grown outwardly, permeating the Gateway City and its continued steps as being a beacon of freedom by pursuing equality within its bounds.  

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(1) Lincoln, Abraham, and William Seward. First emancipation proclamation, Facsimile. January 4, 1864. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/scsm000921/.

(2) Wilma Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207-208.

(3) General Order No. 143, May 22, 1863; Orders and Circulars, 1797-1910; Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780s-1917; Record Group 94; National Archives.

(4) Sam Elliot “The 1865 Constitutional Amendments and the Return of Civil Government in Tennessee”, Tennessee Bar Association Law Blog 53, no. 12 (December 2017), https://www.tba.org/index.cfm?pg=LawBlog&blAction=showEntry&blogEntry=29528; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 250.