Democrats established Juneteenth as a federal holiday as part of their ongoing effort to rewrite their own history.
I am not at all opposed to having a holiday celebrating civil rights, but it should be a major achievement such as the Fifteenth Amendment, not federal soldiers finishing months of work by enforcing the law in one state. (Of course, June 19 is always a holiday in my house, because it’s my dad’s birthday.) To clarify, June 19 or Juneteenth “marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed.” To the slaves in Galveston, it was, of course, an incredibly important day. For the rest of the country, it was part of the close of the monumental work begun months or even years before.
The reality is that Democrats cannot find a truly meaningful civil rights achievement from the 19th century to celebrate that doesn’t expose the fact that Republicans were the party of civil rights and Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow. Republican Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and approved federal troops to free slaves and welcome escaped slaves as refugees. Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment against strong Democrat opposition.
The only date that Democrats can find to give credit to a Democrat is this anniversary of federal soldiers freeing slaves in Galveston while Andrew Johnson was still president. But Johnson was a rabid racist who fought civil rights even while claiming to oppose slavery. He wasn't from the Democrat faction that founded the Confederacy, but like them, he despised black Americans. He wanted a "white man's government."
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Had Abraham Lincoln lived, the civil rights movement and Reconstruction would’ve been very different in the years following the Civil War. It is a great tragedy that Lincoln died, and his Democrat vice president took over running the country. Johnson broke many of Lincoln's promises, and he contributed to, rather than calming, partisan hatred and divisions.
One racist president named Johnson (Lyndon) signed a Civil Rights Act. But a hundred years before, another racist president named Johnson (Andrew) had vetoed a Civil Rights Act. Andrew Johnson sneered to Congress that the newly freed slaves certainly did not possess the "requisite qualifications" to entitle them to citizenship. He contrasted "large numbers of intelligent, worthy and patriotic foreigners" seeking citizenship to "the negro," whom he thought of as mentally inferior. Johnson claimed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 would be unconstitutional, even though the Constitution puts no racial limits on citizenship. But he then let slip his real fear: "...the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race."
In reality, Johnson (a former slaveowner) knew what so many other Democrats knew: that their political reign in states filled with former slaves would be over as soon as those freedmen could vote. For Johnson, there was no question of the equality of all men. He saw any civil rights concession to black people as injurious to white people, especially his particular faction of white people. Like the Democrats of today, he saw freedom as a zero-sum game, which shifts a limited amount of liberty from one tribe or class to another.
This is actually opposed to America's founding documents, as the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, and, as noted, the Constitution does not limit citizenship by race or sex. As former slave Frederick Douglass said, "Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race." Douglass would go on to hold office in the administration of Johnson's successor, Republican U.S. Grant, who did support civil rights.
In February 1866, Johnson received a delegation of black leaders — including Douglass — who wanted consideration of allowing black Americans the full rights of citizenship. Again, Johnson claimed this legal and political equality was somehow a threat to white people, and returned the following ridiculous answer:
I have owned slaves and bought slaves, but I never sold one. I might say, however, that practically, so far as my connection with slaves has gone, I have been their slave instead of their being mine. Some have even followed me here, while others are occupying and enjoying my property with my consent. For the colored race my means, my time, my all has been perilled; and now at this late day, after giving evidence that is tangible, that is practical, I am free to say to you that I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, Who never perilled life, liberty, or property. This kind of theoretical, hollow, unpractical friendship amounts to but very little. While I say that I am a friend of the colored man, I do not want to adopt a policy that I believe will end in a contest between the races, which, if persisted in, will result in the extermination of one or the other.
For Johnson, giving black Americans the right to vote was tantamount to enslaving white people. The above was a somewhat softened version of his pre-war sentiment that allowing black men the vote "would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man." He argued white people were inherently intellectually superior.
In an 1864 speech, Johnson declared, "I am for a white man's government, and in favor of free white qualified voters controlling this country, without regard to negroes." In his Third Annual Message to Congress in 1867, Johnson sneered, "The blacks of the South are... so utterly ignorant of public affairs that their voting can consist in nothing more than carrying a ballot to the place where they are directed to deposit it."
The truth was that freed slaves (when they received the right to vote) overwhelmingly voted Republican, which threatened Johnson and his party, the Democrats. Thank God, even though Johnson halted civil rights progress during his presidency, enough white Americans were disgusted with his opinions that he lost his reelection bid. And we would do well to remind all the Democrats celebrating "Juneteenth" of their party's shameful history.
