Last week was Independence Day, but I was still celebrating Juneteenth.
The June 19th date hasn’t quite kicked in as a holiday for many Americans, despite a bipartisan House and unanimous Senate effort — along with President Biden’s signature — making it the “Juneteenth National Independence Day” and giving federal workers the day off.
It marks the day in 1865 when federal troops landed in Galveston, Texas, a rebel state, to announce that slavery had ended and the enslaved must be freed.
The day is about freedom. Other days could have been chosen, but for years it has served as an apt enough marker for the end of chattel slavery in America.
And slavery’s cessation is worth celebrating!
Americans are used to big July 4th celebrations, having reveled for nearly 250 years in our wonderful Declaration, announcing our separationfrom the British Empire on that day!
Actually, it was two days earlier that the Continental Congress voted to secede — and August 2, 1776, that the Declaration was finally signed. There was no sure separateness until Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, and it took nearly two years for the official peace treaty to be signed.
There are many dates we could have chosen to honor. We settled on July 4.
We liked the words of the document.
Similarly with Juneteenth. We need a holiday commemorating the end of slavery and I like the play on words in the very name.
Arguably, the 15 days from the 19th of June to the Fourth of July should be a celebratory period for liberty more generally, starting with slavery’s abolition and ending with the creation of an independent America dedicated to equal liberty. (Backwards, of course.)
Maybe somewhere in the middle we can find a date to push the necessary third step, the cessation of “demoktesis,” the institutional philosophy of our time where “everyone owns everyone else.”*
Until personal freedom is generally respected — where nobody, not even the government, owns pieces of others — the American experiment in independence is incomplete.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The term was coined by Robert Nozick (1974, p. 290), who defined it as “ownership of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
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2 replies on “Up from Demoktesis”
Indeed, the core meaning of “slavery” is a personal condition of being property of another person or of a group of persons, where “property” is properly understood in terms of right of control.
Both the political left and right try to insinuate definitions of “slavery” very different from the proper definition. The left usually does so in terms of some level of material well-being; but both the left and right will claim that people are born with positive obligations to some community, and that being owned in this way is somehow not slavery.
We commemorate Juneteenth because it ended slavery in the United States.
Well, no it didn’t! It purported to end slavery in Texas, but due to slow 19th century communications it actually only ended slavery in the city of Galveston. It has already been ended in other places, and would be ended later in still others.
Slavery officially ended in the United States with ratification of the Thirteenth amendment on December 6, 1865. It had been legal in five Northern states, and even the District of Columbia, during or after the conflict. In fact, West Virginia was even admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1863.
So, in essence, we celebrate the rather meaningless Juneteenth instead of the Thirteenth amendment because a summer holiday is more convenient than a cold winter holiday that would be so close to Christmas.