Recently, Juneteenth was passed as a federal holiday marking the end of slavery. The date June 19, 1865 was when the slaves in Texas – the last Confederate state to surrender – were informed that they were free. I believe we should celebrate the end of slavery but we should celebrate it when slavery actually legally ended forever and that isn’t Juneteenth.

I have a Bachelor of Science degree in History, a Master of Arts degree in Social Studies Education and a second Master’s degree in American History. I’ve taught history for nearly four decades at both the high school and the collegiate level. Abraham Lincoln is the Great Emancipator but not because of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation did not legally free anyone and if the South had the wit God gave geese, the Emancipation Proclamation would have ended the Civil War with slavery still intact in 1862.

Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, took Lincoln to task during the Civil War for not abolishing slavery. This was at a time when Lincoln was seriously contemplating the Emancipation Proclamation in private but the public knew nothing about it yet. Lincoln wrote an open letter to Greeley that was widely published. The letter said in part, “…If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union…”

Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 with the full text available to the public and the announcement that the Proclamation would go into full force on January 1, 1863. Any State still in a state of rebellion on January 1, 1863 would lose their slaves. Lincoln had made an offer in the very early days of the war to allow Confederate states to return to the Union while keeping their slaves. That offer was rebuffed in part because the South believed Lincoln to be a radical abolitionist. Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist per se. He thought slavery was repugnant but recognized that the Constitution (specifically the 5th Amendment and the 3/5ths clause) protected slavery. Lincoln was against slavery’s expansion in those territories that eventually became new states of the United States but would have left it alone where it already existed in established states like Alabama. He supported buying southern slaves from their owners voluntarily, freeing them and sending them back to Africa or – later in the Civil War – to Panama. Lincoln told the great African-American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass that black people were the reason for the Civil War and that whites and blacks could not live together in harmony. Lincoln grew, changed and revised his opinion about slavery and Black people that is why we shouldn’t be so quick with cancel culture or to judge people on an isolated incident instead of the totality of their career. If the South had taken the Emancipation Proclamation seriously the war would have been over in October of 1862 and no slaves would have been freed.

That’s because the preliminary Proclamation was a wartime measure, a kind of metaphorical warning shot across the bow of the South. Give up the war; come back to the Union and do it before January 1, 1863 and you can keep your slaves. There were a handful of slave states that stayed in the Union, Kentucky for example, that would have kept their slaves even after the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect. However, if the Confederate States remained recalcitrant and remained in rebellion then the armed forces of the Union would deprive them of their slave property in due course.

The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves the way a bank robber makes a withdrawal, with the threat of violence and by force. President Lincoln knew that the Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional and when the war was over and cooler heads prevailed, it would be overturned. Lincoln is the Great Emancipator not because of the Emancipation Proclamation but rather because he initiated the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery everywhere in the United States forever. That Amendment was ratified December 6, 1865 and then proclaimed December 18, 1865. If we are to have a national holiday celebrating the end of slavery we should be doing it in December not in June.

To celebrate Juneteenth is like your parents telling you in June that you were born in December so instead of celebrating the day of your birth in December, you celebrate your birthday the day you were told in June about the December date of your birth. I think it is important to honestly teach about America’s past, warts and all. However that means being accurate as to why and when things actually took place. Perhaps Juneteenth is an appropriate date after all since we have so much to celebrate in December already even though slavery did not end officially, legally and constitutionally for another six months after the proclamation of Juneteenth.