June 19 · This Day in America
Major General Gordon Granger steps ashore at Galveston and, the next morning, his men post General Order No. 3. The Emancipation Proclamation is two and a half years old. Lee has surrendered. The war is effectively over. But Texas is the deep edge of the Confederacy, far from Union armies, and slaveholders there have kept the news from the people they hold. The order is plain: "all slaves are free." In a single sentence, a quarter million people in Texas learn that the law now says what should always have been true. Word moves from plantation to plantation, sometimes withheld until one more harvest is taken. But it cannot be unsaid. The people who heard it called the day Juneteenth, and they did not wait for permission to celebrate it. A century and a half later the nation made it a federal holiday — the country, at last, keeping a day the freed had kept all along.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1953
At the height of the Cold War, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg die in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison, convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. They are the only American civilians ever executed for espionage in peacetime. Crowds keep vigil; clemency appeals reach the Supreme Court and fail. The case still divides historians — over guilt, over Ethel's role, over a country's fear of itself.
Source: www.history.com
“The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”General Order No. 3, Galveston, 1865