The New Yorker:

By the time word of freedom had drifted west to Texas, it was old news elsewhere. On June 19, 1865, the nearly two hundred thousand men, women, and children enslaved in Texas learned of their emancipation, two and a half years after Lincoln had issued the proclamation terminating slavery in states rebelling against the union. The institution of slavery was essentially an open-air prison, and proved remarkably successful, at least in this instance, at the kind of information control that exploitation relies on. Juneteenth, the annual celebration marking the day that this postponed freedom arrived in Texas, occupies a strange niche in American culture, isolated as a black tradition, as if the currents of slavery and its death did not shape the direction of the nation in its entirety.

It’s convenient to think of these kinds of moral felonies as the prerogatives of the South. But, as the eminent historian Ira Berlin, who died earlier this month, pointed out in his book “The Long Emancipation,” based on a series of his lectures, the politics of freedom were fraught everywhere in the nation. In some Northern states, where a system of graduated emancipation had begun decades earlier—a person was manumitted upon reaching adulthood—slaveholders had a perverse incentive to sell off slaves while they were still children. Slave patrols often kidnapped free blacks in the North and sold them into bondage in the Southern states. In Washington, D.C., where emancipation was adopted in 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the federal government reimbursed slaveholders for the cost of their human property, which is to say that the only time that the United States paid reparations for slavery it did so to the benefit of white people. The boundaries surrounding slavery were not geographic; they were moral.

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