“Be Jubilant My Feet!”
On June 19th, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union Army came ashore at Galveston, the Texas barrier Island and slave colony. Granger took to the balcony at Ashton Villa (the newly built home of a wealthy slave-owner and hardware store mogul) to read the contents of his “General Order No. 3”:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
That day came to be known as Juneteenth—to commemorate the moment when the those who were the subject of remote political engagements became aware of their newly won freedoms. For people who had never been recognized by the state as anything other than chattel Juneteenth signified the instantiation of a new set of political ideas that until then had been the stuff of abolitionist fantasies. While Galveston may not have been the first jurisdiction to reorient itself to the new freedoms, it came to signify the entire process of translating political vision, through warfare, into the substance of daily life—in short, Juneteenth was the day that the new freedoms achieved a corporeal existence in the minds and activities of the freedmen themselves. Juneteenth was the day it became real.
Of course these freedoms were in some sense already “real” and had material force in the minds and activities those who protested against slavery and fought in the Civil War, on either side. In their book, Labor’s Untold Story, Boyer and Morais quote a newspaper article from the Boston Daily Evening Voice:
Capital knows no difference between white and black laborers; and labor cannot make any, without undermining its won platform and tearing down walls of its defense. The whole united power of labor is necessary to the successful resistance of the united power of capital.
Clearly the deeper ideas of freedom and labor were already in circulation among even the working classes. That people who held these ideas were willing to make a principled defense against every incentive to ignore their enslaved counterparts and fight what remains America’s most costly war draws uneasy comparisons with our situation today. Juneteenth 2006 brings into relief how the US projection of military force in the War on Terror is starved of ideas. Beneath the stage-crafted freedomspeak there is no official declaration of political principles in this war. Mere pragmatism rules the day, and even then it is hard to see the how the arguments for war could stimulate human agency into changing something. The enemy is vague, the Iraq war is grey, and there is no particular enemy against whom we can build a strategy for instantiating a political vision that our leaders have yet to enumerate. To celebrate Juneteenth in 2006 is to have nostalgia for a moment when the political conditions were laid bare, revealing us all to be freedmen.
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
That day came to be known as Juneteenth—to commemorate the moment when the those who were the subject of remote political engagements became aware of their newly won freedoms. For people who had never been recognized by the state as anything other than chattel Juneteenth signified the instantiation of a new set of political ideas that until then had been the stuff of abolitionist fantasies. While Galveston may not have been the first jurisdiction to reorient itself to the new freedoms, it came to signify the entire process of translating political vision, through warfare, into the substance of daily life—in short, Juneteenth was the day that the new freedoms achieved a corporeal existence in the minds and activities of the freedmen themselves. Juneteenth was the day it became real.
Of course these freedoms were in some sense already “real” and had material force in the minds and activities those who protested against slavery and fought in the Civil War, on either side. In their book, Labor’s Untold Story, Boyer and Morais quote a newspaper article from the Boston Daily Evening Voice:
Capital knows no difference between white and black laborers; and labor cannot make any, without undermining its won platform and tearing down walls of its defense. The whole united power of labor is necessary to the successful resistance of the united power of capital.
Clearly the deeper ideas of freedom and labor were already in circulation among even the working classes. That people who held these ideas were willing to make a principled defense against every incentive to ignore their enslaved counterparts and fight what remains America’s most costly war draws uneasy comparisons with our situation today. Juneteenth 2006 brings into relief how the US projection of military force in the War on Terror is starved of ideas. Beneath the stage-crafted freedomspeak there is no official declaration of political principles in this war. Mere pragmatism rules the day, and even then it is hard to see the how the arguments for war could stimulate human agency into changing something. The enemy is vague, the Iraq war is grey, and there is no particular enemy against whom we can build a strategy for instantiating a political vision that our leaders have yet to enumerate. To celebrate Juneteenth in 2006 is to have nostalgia for a moment when the political conditions were laid bare, revealing us all to be freedmen.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home