Referring to Juneteenth as formerly enslaved people’s Fourth of July establishes a faulty analogy between the freedom white men gained after Independence Day and the emancipation from chattel slavery. No such parallel can be drawn. The comparison is a farce that is reminiscent of the lie enslavers told their newly freed slaves after emancipation, “You’re as free as me now.”
“The Master he says we are all free, but it don’t mean we is white,” said George G. King, who was enslaved in South Carolina. “And it don’t mean we is equal. Just equal for to work and earn our own living and not depend on him for no more meats and clothes.”
W.E.B Du Bois captured this sentiment when he quoted Carl Schurz, a German immigrant and General of the Union Army, who traveled to the South to document conditions after the civil war and gave the following report: “The emancipation of slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up; but, although the freedman is no longer considered the property of an individual master, he is considered the slave of society, and all independent State legislation will show a tendency to make him such.”
As Schurz documented, Blacks had been reappraised from the property of an individual to the slave of society. Efforts made during Reconstruction to transition formerly enslaved Blacks into freedom were swiftly repudiated by the former Confederate leaders Andrew Johnson appointed to Congress. As Governor Perry of South Carolina said, “They forget that this is a white man’s government, and intended for white men only.” This sentiment was codified in legislation called “Black Codes.” Black Codes restricted the movement, property ownership, and employment of Black Americans. Black Codes defined Black heritage and made interracial marriage illegal; the terror of lynching proved that “free” Blacks were not free to own their bodies.
After enslaved Blacks were freed in Galveston, white slaveowners faced an existential crisis—freedom was a white man’s endeavor. Had white people allowed “freedmen” to fully engage in their freedom, it would have ruptured the stability of the American caste system—if there are no slaves, it doesn’t work.
When General Granger arrived in Galveston, Tex., to execute General Order No. 3, informing the local citizenry that “all slaves are free,” white people refurbished their identity to steward their whiteness and freedom—and to keep Black citizens as slaves.