It has long been clear that the leftist activists who succeeded in getting “Juneteenth” added as a federal holiday meant to strip Independence Day of some of its moral and historical significance. The timing of Juneteenth, only a fortnight and change before the Fourth of July, is intended to usurp some of the Fourth’s glory. At the same time, the theme of the new holiday is designed to suggest that slavery, rather than liberty, is the defining feature of our founding. It’s an attempt to make 1776 vie with 1619, with the abolition of slavery being portrayed as our real moment of independence, in place of the moment when we actually proclaimed our independence and declared that “all men are created equal.” //
Per the Office of Personnel Management, the official name of the holiday to be observed on June 19 is “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” The official name of the holiday to follow 15 days later is “Independence Day.” It could hardly be clearer that Juneteenth was intended to compete with, and partially marginalize, the Fourth of July.
America does not need, should not have, and does not legitimately have, two Independence Days. Designating Juneteenth as “National Independence Day” intrudes upon our actual Independence Day. It suggests that Americans’ freedom doesn’t really trace to the Declaration of Independence but rather to the Emancipation Proclamation — or, more exactly, to awareness of that proclamation (more than two years after it was issued). It also suggests that our actual Independence Day doesn’t apply to all Americans. //
PBS writes, “Juneteenth commemorates when the last enslaved African Americans learned they were free.” This, however, is false. After Juneteenth, which marks the moment when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in June 1865 and announced that all slaves in Texas were free, people were still held in slavery in Delaware and Kentucky, border states unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. //
Only Congress and the states, through the passage of a constitutional amendment, had the power to end slavery on a national basis.
This fact, and the fact that slavery remained in existence in Delaware and Kentucky after Juneteenth, likely would have been raised in the Senate had it bothered to engage in a genuine debate over whether Juneteenth should be a federal holiday. Instead, that body, which once prided itself on its vigorous deliberations, passed the Juneteenth bill under a unanimous consent agreement in the wake of the George Floyd riots, an act of true irresponsibility and political cowardice.
Since Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in Texas, rather than the end of slavery in the U.S., it a much more sensible holiday for Texas than for the U.S. as a whole.
On a national basis, a date truly worth commemorating would be December 6, the day on which the 13th Amendment was ratified, marking our constitutional triumph over an inherited evil that clashed with our founding principles. On that day in 1865, Americans successfully amended their Constitution to read, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” That is a day, and those are words, worth celebrating.
Congress should make December 6 a federal holiday to celebrate America’s abolition of slavery, while eliminating Juneteenth as a federal holiday and thereby confirming that we have but one Independence Day.
