Laughlin appeased many of the mayor’s concerns, and as Leonard was leaving, he met a cotton merchant who had under his charge three men who had escaped from plantations nearby.
Laughlin, Union provost marshal general for the state of Texas. On June 18, hours before Granger’s arrival, Galveston’s mayor C.H. Granger appeared to go a step further, or perhaps it is better said that he regressed a step back. Despite their various attitudes on slavery itself, many Union commanders nonetheless did not want to also have to now manage the large contraband camps that sprung up in their districts. Union military authorities and the Lincoln administration grappled with the issue of “what shall be done with the slave?” Morality aside, the solution popularly evolved from confiscation as a military necessity to outright emancipation. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”Īlmost from the moment Union soldiers entered the southern states in 1861, the enslaved population sought them out as a means to freedom. “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. Knowing what we do now about the establishment of sharecropping to take the place of slavery, we can already see the foundation being established that little would change for some of Texas’s Black population, except their compensation. 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.”įrom the outset, and with the benefit of hindsight, we see a glimpse of the expectation that slaves would remain on their former plantations. “The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. The by-now commonly known first section of Granger’s General Orders Number 3 read: A closer look at those orders and the ones he issued immediately thereafter, however, reveal that Granger complicity approved of a limited definition of freedom.
The next day he issued orders asserting that emancipation applied to the area. Once occupied by Union forces, Major General Gordon Granger established his headquarters for the District of Texas on the island on June 18, 1865, and set to work establishing control over the state’s interior. Galveston, Texas, held out as a Confederate stronghold after Robert E. Juneteenth is recognized as the symbolic end of slavery in the United States. Galveston Central Wharf in 1861 (Rosenberg Library)
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