Woke up this morning to a new federal holiday, Juneteenth. Not much discussion but a lot of chatter on what or why, but now soldiers and other federal employees get another paid day off, so from their perspective this must be a good thing, but for the real world, is Juneteenth just a summertime version of Kwanzaa?

Most of what I have been hearing and reading in the media about the 19th of June, 1865 is factually incorrect – not that having their facts straight is of very great import when it comes to reportage from either Left or Right – so a little American history is in order.

June 19th is the day the Union Army entered Galveston, Texas under the command of Major General Gordon Granger after the surrender of the Confederate Army in Texas on June 2. Upon entry he issued a General Order that was read throughout Galveston Island declaring that the Emancipation Proclamation that had gone into effect on January 1st, 1863 was now the law of the land in the regions of Texas that he controlled. And that is an important distinction. We don’t celebrate VJ day on December 7th when Japan attacked the United States, we note that our war with Japan ended on September 2 – that’s when they laid down their arms. (But the conflict did not end even then. The last Japanese soldier didn’t surrender until 1974 – that’s when his war with the United States ended.)

So follow me closely here: The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in Confederate States and not in slave states that remained loyal to the Union or Indian tribes, and only in Confederate States under Union control. Emancipation was a gradual process and not a once-for-all event. As Union armies conquered the territory of states that had left the Union and after January 1st, 1863, the slaves in those regions were emancipated. (As an historical note as long as we’re doing history here, the Choctaw Indian tribe in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) did not free their slaves until 1866, a full year after the Civil War had ended and the 13th Amendment ratified.)

Got it? Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9th, 1865 is the date on which we can mark the end of the Civil War even though it continued until June in parts of the Confederate States. The emancipation of the slaves throughout the Confederate States was a gradual process that began on January 1, 1863 almost two years after the secession of the seven major slave states (eventually eleven) from the Union. So from an historial perspective, Juneteenth marks a very minor event in that greatest of all American wars. It doesn’t even mark the end of slavery in the territory of the United States at large. December 18th, 1865 would be that date. That was the day the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and slavery officially ended.

So why has Juneteenth suddenly become a federal holiday? Because some people want it to be. It’s as simple as that. General Granger’s order may have been a minor event in a major conflict, but those who want to keep the matter of ethnicity front and center in the American mind find it important. Those of us who are part of the dominant ethnic group here in the United States can never say we or our ancestors have treated those of other ethnicities with the dignity and respect that should be theirs as fellow descendants of Adam. While we might think ourselves and our system of government to be the most wonderful the world has ever seen, the truth is we have behaved little differently than every other people in every other part of the world who have shared this planet and Adam’s corrupted nature. The strong oppress the weak and the majority lord it over the minority.

You can grumble and complain that the ruling elites are just shoving the 1619 Project down your unwilling throat with this new federal holyday (yes, I purposefully spelled it that way). Or you can, like me, use Juneteenth to say that slavery officially ended here almost 150 years ago and its time to let it go and start judging men and women, boys and girls, not by the condition of their ancestors but by the content of their characters and their comportment in their daily lives and then to work to make certain that every ethnicity has equal access to the benefits of American citizenship.