Who really freed the slaves?

Juneteenth National Independence Day, our new federal and Idaho holiday, has a misleading name. Juneteenth — short for June Nineteenth — is about emancipation. It has nothing to do with national independence.

Traditional U.S. history-telling holds that President Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves” in the South. This is an example of “Great Man” history. It emphasizes a prominent individual and leaves out the critical role of common folks.

In the early 19th century, hundreds of slaves freed themselves by fleeing to Northern states and Canada. The escape routes, safe houses, and sympathizers along the way were known, collectively, as the “underground railroad.”

In the 1850s, Southern politicians became increasingly concerned about antislavery sentiment. Northerners were disobeying federal laws which required them to capture and return fugitive slaves. Harriet Stowe’s popular antislavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, included a heart-breaking runaway scene. The “underground railroad” inspired John Brown’s violent attacks on slaveowners. In short, self-emancipation was causing tension between Southern defenders of slavery and their Northern critics.

On July 5, 1852, in a speech to an antislavery group in New York, escaped slave Frederick Douglass asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” His answer: “To him, your celebration is a sham. … There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States.”

The North-South tension came to a head after Abraham Lincoln, an antislavery Northerner, won the 1860 presidential election. Southern state legislatures began declaring “secession.” They were breaking away from the USA, they announced, and forming an independent country — the Confederate States of America.

Lincoln had promised not to interfere with Southern slavery. But Southern politicians feared the more populous North would eventually have congressional majorities large enough to abolish slavery nationwide. They believed secession was the only way to preserve their racist slave system.

In April 1861, Confederate troops attacked U.S. forts, starting the Secession War. (I don’t like calling it the “Civil War,” as warfare is the very opposite of civility.)

Just to be clear, secessionists were not “states’ rights” advocates. They loudly complained when Northern states ignored federal fugitive slave laws.

Ironically, the Confederate war for slavery hastened the end of slavery. Thousands of slaves freed themselves and took refuge in U.S. Army camps. Their presence forced U.S. officers to decide whether to employ the runaways — chopping wood, digging ditches — or return them to slaveowners.

Lincoln tried to make the war only about preserving the United States, not about ending slavery. After a year of battlefield slaughter, though, he realized his approach wasn’t working. Harriet Tubman, the most famous of self-freed slaves, predicted that “God won’t let Master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing.”

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This wasn’t a U.S. law ending slavery. Rather, it was an order from the U.S. commander-in-chief, telling his troops to liberate all slaves in CSA territory. Also, Lincoln, for the first time, permitted the enlistment of black soldiers. Over the next two years, approximately 200,000 men went from being slaves, producing food and cotton for the Confederacy, to battling against the Confederacy.

So, slave self-emancipation was a major factor, first in leading to the war, then it changing its course. In spring 1865, with their troops defeated and deserting, Confederate officers across the South surrendered. On June 19, U.S. soldiers finally delivered the good news to slaves in faraway Texas.

Juneteenth commemorates a tremendous accomplishment: U.S. soldiers, white and black, freeing four million humans from bondage. Juneteenth Emancipation Day would be a more accurate name for the holiday.

I could stop here, but it’s important to consider how the past shapes the present.

To regain statehood, Southern legislatures had to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery. Sort of. The constitutional amendment, enacted in December 1865, contained a loophole: “except as a punishment for crime.”

Seeing this, Southern courts used new laws to convict former slaves of loitering, vagrancy, rambling, swearing, impudence, having outstanding debts, and other such “crimes.” Punishments included unpaid labor in fields or prisons.

Today, the USA has the world’s highest incarceration rate, and inmates typically work for less than a dollar an hour. They don’t have the protection of health and safety laws. Prisons lease out convict labor to private companies. This hurts free workers as it drives down wages. It motivates employers to lobby for harsher prison sentences.

But only Southern states force prisoners into unpaid labor. Combined with significant racial disparities in arrests, convictions, and sentencing—worse for blacks and Hispanics than for whites — this looks a lot like Southern slavery.

This column brought to you by the Boundary County Human Rights Task Force. Timothy Braatz is a professor of history and nonviolence and the author of "Peace Lessons".