The African American Civil War Museum in D.C. marked Juneteenth Thursday with a celebration to honor the estimated 6,000 Black soldiers who went to Galveston, Texas, 160 years ago to tell the last holdouts of the Confederacy that the Civil War, and slavery, were officially over.
Juneteenth came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln freed an estimated four million Black people when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that all persons held as slaves in the rebellious Confederate states were free.
At the museum in Northwest D.C. Thursday, dozens of volunteers stood in front of a statue honoring Black Union soldiers and read out loud the names of these men in a process that took more than 45 minutes from start to finish. It was a wall of sound as the names were read in unison, and the sound could be heard blocks away.
The statue is surrounded by a circular plaza that honors the 209,145 Black soldiers who served in the Union Army and Navy in the 175 regiments of what was called the United States Colored Troops.
In mid-June 1865, more than two months after General Robert E. Lee signed the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, some Confederate soldiers were still fighting in Texas, Frank Smith, the executive director of the African American Civil War Museum said.
Texas was extremely isolated at the time as the furthest Confederate state from the East Coast, and telegraph lines were damaged during the war, so troops there were unaware of the war’s end. Also, Smith said some soldiers said they would not put down their weapons and continued to fight.
The Union didn’t fully occupy Texas when Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. Confederate troops continued to fight, until the last significant battle of the war was fought in Texas at Palmito Ranch, May 12, 1865, Smith said.
Union General Gordon Granger lead the 20th, 28th, 30th and 32nd USCT regiments to Texas to put down the rebellion.
Some of those USCT soldiers had earlier helped the Union Army secure the Confederate Capitol of Richmond. Others were actually with General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox during the Confederacy’s surrender, traveling another 1,400 miles by ship or railroad to make the long journey.
Longtime D.C. Civil Rights leader Smith said we owe these soldiers a debt of gratitude for serving their county and finally putting an end to the war.
“So, the war was over. The whole direction of the country changed. There was a new country, a new direction and it was time for these guys to join the new Union,” he said. The USCT troops helped wipe the last vestiges of slavery out of the United States lexicon, and “it’s important to celebrate that,” Smith said.
