There's a lot more to the story than that, however.

Fort Sumpter was a federal fort under construction at a time when harbor protection was still forefront on the minds of military strategists. (See the Revolutionary War and War of 1812.) Furthermore, Charleston was also the ONLY southern port in operation except for New Orleans, so it was strategically important.

South Carolina issued its Letter of Secession even prior to Lincoln taking office. That didn't authorize them to take ownership of the Fort, however, which was a federal emplacement. Negotiations went back and forth for more than a month all while the engineers at the fort were running out of food. The South (Jefferson Davis) dithered about whether or not to allow the fort to be resupplied despite Lincoln's assurances it would only be food. (Keep in mind that the fort wasn't complete and didn't have its full complement of guns let alone the personnel or ammunition to operate them.) Knowing the men were starving and without any word from Davis, Lincoln told them to resupply the men in the fort. Seeing this, the South decided to shell the fort. The engineers quickly surrendered.

South Carolina and three other Southern States all seceded prior to Lincoln being elected and after election he kept sending envoys to them to talk. They refused. Fort Sumpter was initiated by the South knowing they were attacking a Federal installation. Those who say the North instigated the war must turn a blind eye to these events to their own logical frustration, not to mention the explicit language in these Letters of Secession specifically naming their support for their "peculiar institution" as their primary motivation for doing so.

As to the Constitutionality of the Southern Secession, it's at best a gray area. There are no provisions in the Constitution allowing a State to unilaterally secede, so any such action is prima faciae unConstitutional no matter what one wants to argue. Most Constitutional scholars agree that an exit clause written into the Constitution would have illustrated weakness. Putting that aside, however, if one views the Constitution as a pact or contract the States signed onto, then it was binding and no individual State possessed unilateral authority to alter that contract - especially when a process existed for Amending it.

I can't find anything which justifies the South. I just can't. I read their support for slavery in their letters of Secession. I read the history since 1820 of the Southern States threatening to secede if various acts like the Missouri Compromise or Kansas-Nebraska act weren't ratified or if the Northern States didn't fulfill sketchy writs claiming that free blacks were actually runaway slaves. If you want to support them, that's on you. I look at it and find zero justification in history.

I’m 73 and I remember my mother warning me to “maintain a low profile” on Juneteenth, just in case there were any problems. That was in the fifties. She didn’t go into great detail but did mention that it had to do with blacks and them not learning of their emancipation. It’s taken a ton of years for it to actually become a “thing.” At least in my circles.

And to this day the Democrats want to hide and erase that the entirety of the southern Democrats were pro slavery, the return of Democrats to government in the south creating wwka Jim crow laws, etc.

Didn't he have the power after the war? The slaves were in Texas. The war was over. But the slave owners in Texas did not tell the slaves until Juneteenth.

I also was threre for Texas history, with no mention of this "special day." Now we have it all over the US, why? If they were free prior to this, then they should wonder who forgot to tell them, as claim the original day. We have stupid leaders, basically, that will sell a natl. holiday for loyalty and votes. My question is, why do Blacks seem so unconcerned their "free" children are geing graduated with kindergarten level reading skills, no math sckills and little science! That is getting worse, not better. Why is the IQ in general falling for the last several decade, for the US in general? Freedom only matters if you know how to handle it, otherwise you are a pawn to someone waiting to tell you what to do. I grew up aound Blacks who were smart, in the ways of life, as well as professions. We had poor whites then, dumb as blacks are being crated to be now. Maybe Sarte was correct in "No Exit," perhaps "Hell is other people."

I think simple "I don't wanna" played a big role. The fact that a Texan killed a black woman with a sword on riding back after the General's announcement is pretty good evidence,

Not to mention the Irish. England abandoned black slaves long before the United States because they became too "expensive." The English enslaved nearly every Irish male on the island.

Panem et Circenses

Pass the Free Beer and Hot Wings!

first slave owner in the Colonies was black
Native American owned slaves

Indentured Servants were of all colors

Lincoln did not free them

you want a holiday to celebrate surrendering??
/s

:-)

I hereby proclaim the entire month of June to be “Go outside and touch grass!” month.
As is the custom nowadays if you do not celebrate this arbitrary declaration whole-heartedly and with much fanfare I declare you a “???-ist”. Guilty of “???-ism”. And your bank accounts will be frozen in the name of “democracy”.
Have a nice day!

All true, but largely irrelevant, as an Amendment only has to be ratified by 3/4 of the States to become effective law for all.

Several factors which probably played in here...
1) Texas was a long way from Washington, D.C. and the standard communications lines terminated in New Orleans.
2) Texas was a member of the Confederacy.
3) Population-wise, Texas was almost inconsequential, both in terms of slave and non-slave populations.
4) The Emancipation Proclamation was an Executive Order which specifically applied to slaves in the rebelling States, i.e. the Confederacy, which had a vested interest in suppressing the dissemination of this information.
5) 1864 was when the Northern States (the Union) began winning militarily under Grant and effected their naval cordon - including the Mississippi River - of the Southern States (the Confederacy). Prior to that, the South was effectively "independent."

Funny thing is that Texas was a member of the Confederacy. They were barely involved in the Civil War because Texas wasn't strategic in the overall war plan.

We should have perpetual creation of new special holidays, three or five every year, each one to honor some small group. Being of partial Danish blood, I should get Dannebrog Day (June 15th) to celebrate the Danish Flag. Germans and Swedes should be forced to pay me restitution for their invasion of (or resistance to) Denmark. Everyone should sing in Danish that day, and Jul (Christmas) should be properly Danish as well. Jultomtar (Scandinavian Christmas elves) will be mandatory decoration for all, irregardless of faith or grammar.

Almost forgot the food: Rødgrød med fløde på. Try to pronounce it.

If I were French I would get July 14th.

Eventually the calendar will be so full of "sorry, we're closed" holidays that it'll inadvertently become Galt's Gulch everywhere, year 'round.

I recently read an article that FOX personnel were ordered to treat Juneteenth as a credible good thing. There were some other demands of FOX presenters related to blacks, LGBT2tect.ect.ect., and something else. I’ll be darned if I can’t find any reference again to what I read. Someone pulled it? It’s like it magically disappeared. Either the left thinks it’s a good thing and does not need to get out to the people, or that it might hurt FOX in such a way that will hurt their agenda. Usually they figure a way of letting the Truth get out, and make it look good or bad, making it fit their agenda no matter what it says.

And the black national anthem, I can not go there. What if they force a LGBTQ+ national anthem. Think about it, you'd never be able to sit down at a professional sports event again.

This is just another phony-baloney federal grifters holiday.
I do my best to ignore this sort of crap.
And as recognized by others in the Gulch, the very word June-teenth is some pidgeon-shamble-sub-literate word.
We are all being had.
Whether it's the plandemic, climate-change, the insurrection, non-binary, white-supremacy, systemic-racism, 2% annual inflation is good, 80M voted for Biden, or these absurd govt created holy-days... it's all pure bunk.
My antidote to bunk is reality ... next weekend, June 24-25th, my best friend is running the Western States 100 miler ultra in California ... he has asked me to pace him from mile 56 to 80. I ran Western States in 2017 and 18. It is 100 miles of amazing trails with an outstanding band of event volunteers. I've been looking forward to the road trip and race for a few months. In the meantime, I avoid the "news" and get as much reality (the objective indifferent outdoors) as is possible.
Cheers to an ample dose of reality, my fellow Gulchers.

People will never realize slaves came in all colors, it's just not what they have been taught. And, have you ever seen a Hollywood production (a movie) that depicted slaves in any other color than black? It gives a lot of credence to the adage, “The truth shall set you free”. We can’t have anything like that, “The Truth”, it just doesn’t work with our politics. And with the truth there might not even be a news media. No foul, no harm. It’s just much easier to make new laws to control people to believe in what “they” tell us to believe when we go astray and try to reason the truth about anything. It's what "makes the world go around.”

Addlebrain Joe Biden proclaimed this racist holiday, probably in honor of ConrPop. "I had a bigger knife than CornPop." What's offensive to me is the gutter, illiterate language: "juneteenth" but mainly it's another racist divide in what used to be a great country

A friend summarized it this way recently:

The emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in states of rebellion as an effort to weaken the confederacy. This is an ancient war tactic. The union would free slaves in areas they occupied, but not wholly and not as some gesture of equality. After June 19th there were still slaves and the last slave state was actually Delaware. The one singular piece of legislation to free the slaves was the 13th amendment, passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. Why we don't celebrate it I have no idea. If we're looking for important figures, it would be Representative James Mitchell Ashley, Representative James F. Wilson, and Senator John B. Henderson.

For those interested, I would suggest you look up the history of Delaware. The state did not ratify the 13th amendment outlawing slavery until 1901. 35 years (+ ?months) after Juneteenth in Galveston.

And they were part of the Union, the "North" that is so boldly proclaimed to have fought those horrible slavers in the "South". After all, the Civil War was only about slavery, not economics or taxation without remedy, or rights of any states being overridden. Public school history class told me so. The fact that states like Tennessee freed slaves long before being required to do so, and four separate Union states kept slaves is just coincidence. Put all those contrary thoughts into the memory hole, and prepare for your universal basic income paycheck.

When will people realize slaves came in all colors. Most people who were too poor to pay the boat fare to escape to America to get away from the poverty of their home country lived in indentured servitude for anywhere from 5 to 25 years, depending on how much they owed.
Actual slaves, involuntarily stolen from their homeland, were in fact captured by their neighboring tribes and sold on the beaches of Africa, Egypt, Libya, Sudan... Slave traders never had to leave the beach. In fact it was too dangerous for them to do so. Today, just as it was yesterday, most of mens biggest threats tend to come from their own kind.

I was stationed at Ft. Hood, when I was in the Army; that's when I first heard of Juneteenth.
After I left Texas, I never heard any more about it, until Brandon made it a Federal holiday.

Let me get this straight. Someone is saying Texas (or Galvaston/Houston in particular) was unaware of the Emancipation Proclamation, and "found out" on June 19th?

Bullshit!