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.”
Now the National Park Service has sent out an email celebrating Juneteenth as “National Independence Day.” If Juneteenth is that, then what is the Fourth of July? The email conveys that the NPS is “thrilled to announce that all national parks … will offer free entry on June 19th.” It adds, “On Juneteenth, we honor the enduring journey toward freedom and equality.” Most Americans would associate such language with the Fourth.
While the NPS now regularly denigrates or marginalizes our founding — witness its ongoing efforts to make the Jefferson Memorial woke — its communication about Juneteenth, unfortunately, is not really an example of the agency’s having gone rogue. 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.
The author of the Emancipation Proclamation viewed these matters quite differently. In his wonderful 1858 Chicago speech, Abraham Lincoln said, “Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, somewhere about the 4th of July, for some reason or other.” He began examining that reason by referencing the direct ancestors of many in attendance: “We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years, and we discover … a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers.” These “were iron men … and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity which we now enjoy has come to us.”
Lincoln subsequently added, “But after we have done all this, we have not yet reached the whole.” He then connected the Declaration to those — “perhaps half our people” — who had no blood ties to the men who wrote it:
If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none … but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
Lincoln concluded, “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.”
In other words, the Declaration of Independence is for all Americans. Indeed, less than five years after giving his Chicago speech, Lincoln concluded his Emancipation Proclamation by hearkening back to 1776.
It is entirely appropriate that we should have a holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in our country, but that holiday should not compete with the one that marks the beginning of our country. What’s more, a holiday celebrating our triumph over slavery should commemorate a significant historical moment in that triumph and serve as a reminder that it took both a bloody war and a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery on our shores.
The mainstream press often claims that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in America. For example, 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.
The constitutional justification for the Emancipation Proclamation was as a military measure — as Lincoln was encouraging slaves in the Confederacy to support the Union while discouraging foreign nations from supporting the rebels. He issued the proclamation “upon military necessity” and “as Commander-in-Chief … in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” But Lincoln was not a king, and thus his power was properly limited. 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. The fact that the Left would oppose this change would reveal why they wanted Juneteenth added as a holiday in the first place. It would also confirm the worthiness and importance of undertaking such an action.
