Dear Freedom Seekers

Today’s Monday Musing comes to us on the first Federal celebration of Juneteenth, a day set aside to recall the long-delayed announcement of emancipation to a quarter of a million slaves tucked away in Galveston Bay, Texas on June 19th, 1865. Technically slavery had been abolished January 1, 1863, by Executive Order 95 in which President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of all slaves held in the United States, but the Confederacy was formed to reject such foreign interference in their self-proclaimed sovereignty; so, for obvious reasons plantation owners failed to share the memo with their chattel. For southern slaveholders the Emancipation Proclamation was an unwarranted intrusion