Juneteenth

[oldgraylady]

www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth


What Is Juneteenth?
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root
The First Juneteenth

“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. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” —General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865

When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. After all, by the time Granger assumed command of the Department of Texas, the Confederate capital in Richmond had fallen; the “Executive” to whom he referred, President Lincoln, was dead; and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was well on its way to ratification.

But Granger wasn’t just a few months late. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, ending slavery in the Confederacy (at least on paper), had taken effect two-and-a-half years before, and in the interim, close to 200,000 black men had enlisted in the fight. So, formalities aside, wasn’t it all over, literally, but the shouting?

It would be easy to think so in our world of immediate communication, but as Granger and the 1,800 bluecoats under him soon found out, news traveled slowly in Texas. Whatever Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi had held out until late May, and even with its formal surrender on June 2, a number of ex-rebels in the region took to bushwhacking and plunder.

That’s not all that plagued the extreme western edge of the former Confederate states. Since the capture of New Orleans in 1862, slave owners in Mississippi, Louisiana and other points east had been migrating to Texas to escape the Union Army’s reach. In a hurried re-enactment of the original Middle Passage, more than 150,000 slaves had made the trek west, according to historian Leon Litwack in his book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. As one former slave he quotes recalled, ” ‘It looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas.’ ”

When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.

Those who acted on the news did so at their peril. As quoted in Litwack’s book, former slave Susan Merritt recalled, ” ‘You could see lots of n-words hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em swimmin’ ‘cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.’ ” In one extreme case, according to Hayes Turner, a former slave named Katie Darling continued working for her mistress another six years (She ” ‘whip me after the war jist like she did ‘fore,’ ” Darling said).

Hardly the recipe for a celebration — which is what makes the story of Juneteenth all the more remarkable. Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865), now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866.

” ‘The way it was explained to me,’ ” one heir to the tradition is quoted in Hayes Turner’s essay, ” ‘the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed. But that’s the day they told them that they was free … And my daddy told me that they whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light and that would be their blast for the celebration.’ ”

[oujour76]

Jun 19, 2017 1:21:23 GMT -5 oldgraylady said:

www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth


What Is Juneteenth?
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root
The First Juneteenth

“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. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” —General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865

When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. After all, by the time Granger assumed command of the Department of Texas, the Confederate capital in Richmond had fallen; the “Executive” to whom he referred, President Lincoln, was dead; and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was well on its way to ratification.

But Granger wasn’t just a few months late. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, ending slavery in the Confederacy (at least on paper), had taken effect two-and-a-half years before, and in the interim, close to 200,000 black men had enlisted in the fight. So, formalities aside, wasn’t it all over, literally, but the shouting?

It would be easy to think so in our world of immediate communication, but as Granger and the 1,800 bluecoats under him soon found out, news traveled slowly in Texas. Whatever Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi had held out until late May, and even with its formal surrender on June 2, a number of ex-rebels in the region took to bushwhacking and plunder.

That’s not all that plagued the extreme western edge of the former Confederate states. Since the capture of New Orleans in 1862, slave owners in Mississippi, Louisiana and other points east had been migrating to Texas to escape the Union Army’s reach. In a hurried re-enactment of the original Middle Passage, more than 150,000 slaves had made the trek west, according to historian Leon Litwack in his book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. As one former slave he quotes recalled, ” ‘It looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas.’ ”

When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.

Those who acted on the news did so at their peril. As quoted in Litwack’s book, former slave Susan Merritt recalled, ” ‘You could see lots of n-words hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em swimmin’ ‘cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.’ ” In one extreme case, according to Hayes Turner, a former slave named Katie Darling continued working for her mistress another six years (She ” ‘whip me after the war jist like she did ‘fore,’ ” Darling said).

Hardly the recipe for a celebration — which is what makes the story of Juneteenth all the more remarkable. Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865), now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866.

” ‘The way it was explained to me,’ ” one heir to the tradition is quoted in Hayes Turner’s essay, ” ‘the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed. But that’s the day they told them that they was free … And my daddy told me that they whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light and that would be their blast for the celebration.’ ”

It's an very interesting story...Juneteenth was covered in my high school history classes, but this goes into lots more depth.

[Deleted]

Good post, OGL.  Thanks for posting this.

I was not aware of the history of Confederate slave owners fleeing to Texas with their chattel during the Civil War.   I know that Benjamin Butler had managed to impose some semblance of Constitutional law in New Orleans during and after the Civil War, and that the same was not as true for Texas.  (Didn't General Phillip Sheridan go down to Texas during Grant's Presidency to protect the freed Texas slaves from the white terror?)

I do recall, while reading a biography of President Rutherford B. Hayes, that Hayes had a close friend from his school days at Yale (or, possibly Kenyon College-- he attended both) who was a wealthy Southern slave owner from Texas.

Sadly, his Texas friend managed to convince Hayes for years that the freed slaves were being treated justly in Texas-- before and after Radical Reconstruction.

Of course, we now know that the claim was complete horseshit.

When Radical Reconstruction ended in 1877 a truly genocidal reign of white terror began throughout the South that persisted for over a century.

[oldgraylady]

Jun 19, 2017 14:09:06 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

Good post, OGL.  Thanks for posting this.

I was not aware of the history of Confederate slave owners fleeing to Texas with their chattel during the Civil War.   I know that Benjamin Butler had managed to impose some semblance of Constitutional law in New Orleans during and after the Civil War, and that the same was not as true for Texas.  (Didn't General Phillip Sheridan go down to Texas during Grant's Presidency to protect the freed Texas slaves from the white terror?)

That I do not know. So, off I go into Wikipedia land:

"After Gen. Lee's surrender, and that of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, the only significant Confederate field force remaining was in Texas under Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith. Sheridan was supposed to lead troops in the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C., but Grant appointed him commander of the Military District of the Southwest on May 17, 1865,[6] six days before the parade, with orders to defeat Smith without delay and restore Texas and Louisiana to Union control. However, Smith surrendered before Sheridan reached New Orleans.

Grant was also concerned about the situation in neighboring Mexico, where 40,000 French soldiers propped up the puppet regime of Austrian Archduke Maximilian. He gave Sheridan permission to gather a large Texas occupation force. Sheridan assembled 50,000 men in three corps, quickly occupied Texas coastal cities, spread inland, and began to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. The Army's presence, U.S. political pressure, and the growing resistance of Benito Juárez induced the French to abandon their claims against Mexico. Napoleon III withdrew his troops in 1866,[37] and the following year Emperor Maximilian was executed for treason. Sheridan later admitted in his memoirs that he had supplied arms and ammunition to Juárez's forces: "... which we left at convenient places on our side of the river to fall into their hands".[38]

On July 30, 1866, while Sheridan was in Texas, a white mob broke up the state constitutional convention in New Orleans. Thirty-four blacks were killed. Shortly after Sheridan returned, he wired Grant, "The more information I obtain of the affair of the 30th in this city the more revolting it becomes. It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre."[39] In March 1867, with Reconstruction barely started, Sheridan was appointed military governor of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana). He severely limited voter registration for former Confederates and ruled that only registered voters (including black men) were eligible to serve on juries. Furthermore, an inquiry into the deadly New Orleans riot of 1866 implicated numerous local officials; Sheridan dismissed the mayor of New Orleans, the Louisiana attorney general, and a district judge. He later removed Louisiana Governor James M. Wells, accusing him of being "a political trickster and a dishonest man". He also dismissed Texas Governor James W. Throckmorton, a former Confederate, for being an "impediment to the reconstruction of the State", replacing him with the Republican who had lost to him in the previous election. Sheridan had been feuding with President Andrew Johnson for months over interpretations of the Military Reconstruction Acts and voting rights issues, and within a month of the second firing, the president removed Sheridan, stating to an outraged Gen. Grant that, "His rule has, in fact, been one of absolute tyranny, without references to the principles of our government or the nature of our free institutions."[40]

If Sheridan was unpopular in Texas, neither did he have much appreciation for the Lone Star State. In 1866U his quip was widely reported: "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell."[41]


Union General Philip H. Sheridan
During the Grant administration, while Sheridan was assigned to duty in the West, he was sent to Louisiana on two additional occasions to deal with problems that lingered in Reconstruction. In January 1875, federal troops intervened in the Louisiana Legislature following attempts by the Democrats to seize control of disputed seats. Sheridan supported Republican Governor William P. Kellogg, winner of the 1872 state election, and declared that the Democratic opponents of the Republican regime who used violence to overcome legitimate electoral results were "banditti" who should be subjected to military tribunals and loss of their habeas corpus rights. The Grant administration backed down after an enormous public outcry. A headline in the New York World newspaper shrieked "Tyranny! A Sovereign State Murdered!" In 1876, Sheridan was also sent to New Orleans to command troops keeping the peace in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election in 1876.[42]"


Prior to the Civil War, many Southerners relocated to Texas, bringing their slaves with them. Texas had several incentives that encouraged slavery and land development.. Sometimes the new settlers aquired land according to the number of slaves they brought to live in Texas. East Texas had an explosion in the population of black slaves during this time.

You are right about freedmen in Texas having a hard time during Reconstruction. There was resistance to the newly-freed blacks and they had to struggle to stay alive. Some blacks fled Texas to relocate to the West or Lower Midwest, Mexico--anywhere they could stay alive and support their families.

These days, Juneteenth is a state holiday in Texas. Celebrations occur in Oklahoma and elsewhere. It has become, for the most part, a day of picnics, parades, speeches, contests,
reunions, etc.

[Deleted]

Denver has had a Juneteenth celebration for as long as I can remember.

As for Phillip Sheridan, he was respected around here.  We have a major boulevard in west Denver named after him.

President Andrew Johnson was racist to the core, and played a big role in the delay of meaningful reconstruction, and in the protection of the freed slaves from the white Confederate terrorists.

His whiskey swilling tenure in the White House was a national tragedy.

[oldgraylady]

Jun 20, 2017 0:23:47 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

Denver has had a Juneteenth celebration for as long as I can remember.

As for Phillip Sheridan, he was respected around here.  We have a major boulevard in west Denver named after him.

President Andrew Johnson was racist to the core, and played a big role in the delay of meaningful reconstruction, and in the protection of the freed slaves from the white Confederate terrorists.

His whiskey swilling tenure in the White House was a national tragedy.

Yes, Andrew Johnson was one the worst POTUSES ever.

[oldgraylady]

Jun 20, 2017 0:23:47 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

Denver has had a Juneteenth celebration for as long as I can remember.

As for Phillip Sheridan, he was respected around here.  We have a major boulevard in west Denver named after him.

President Andrew Johnson was racist to the core, and played a big role in the delay of meaningful reconstruction, and in the protection of the freed slaves from the white Confederate terrorists.

His whiskey swilling tenure in the White House was a national tragedy.

Yes, Andrew Johnson was one the worst POTUSES ever.

[Deleted]

Jun 20, 2017 15:00:44 GMT -5 oldgraylady said:

Jun 20, 2017 0:23:47 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

Denver has had a Juneteenth celebration for as long as I can remember.

As for Phillip Sheridan, he was respected around here.  We have a major boulevard in west Denver named after him.

President Andrew Johnson was racist to the core, and played a big role in the delay of meaningful reconstruction, and in the protection of the freed slaves from the white Confederate terrorists.

His whiskey swilling tenure in the White House was a national tragedy.

Yes, Andrew Johnson was one the worst POTUSES ever.

You can say that again... 

[Lee The Locksmith]

Jun 20, 2017 20:53:58 GMT -5 DrSchadenfreude said:

You can say that again...

Alright, I will....The Democrats tried to buy an election last night and it didn't work...Back to SQUARE ONE for them !!!

www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2017/06/21/

[vindex]

Jun 19, 2017 8:41:34 GMT -5 oujour76 said:

Jun 19, 2017 1:21:23 GMT -5 oldgraylady said:

www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/what-is-juneteenth


What Is Juneteenth?
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root
The First Juneteenth

“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. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” —General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865

When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. After all, by the time Granger assumed command of the Department of Texas, the Confederate capital in Richmond had fallen; the “Executive” to whom he referred, President Lincoln, was dead; and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was well on its way to ratification.

But Granger wasn’t just a few months late. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, ending slavery in the Confederacy (at least on paper), had taken effect two-and-a-half years before, and in the interim, close to 200,000 black men had enlisted in the fight. So, formalities aside, wasn’t it all over, literally, but the shouting?

It would be easy to think so in our world of immediate communication, but as Granger and the 1,800 bluecoats under him soon found out, news traveled slowly in Texas. Whatever Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi had held out until late May, and even with its formal surrender on June 2, a number of ex-rebels in the region took to bushwhacking and plunder.

That’s not all that plagued the extreme western edge of the former Confederate states. Since the capture of New Orleans in 1862, slave owners in Mississippi, Louisiana and other points east had been migrating to Texas to escape the Union Army’s reach. In a hurried re-enactment of the original Middle Passage, more than 150,000 slaves had made the trek west, according to historian Leon Litwack in his book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. As one former slave he quotes recalled, ” ‘It looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas.’ ”

When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.

Those who acted on the news did so at their peril. As quoted in Litwack’s book, former slave Susan Merritt recalled, ” ‘You could see lots of n-words hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em swimmin’ ‘cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.’ ” In one extreme case, according to Hayes Turner, a former slave named Katie Darling continued working for her mistress another six years (She ” ‘whip me after the war jist like she did ‘fore,’ ” Darling said).

Hardly the recipe for a celebration — which is what makes the story of Juneteenth all the more remarkable. Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865), now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866.

” ‘The way it was explained to me,’ ” one heir to the tradition is quoted in Hayes Turner’s essay, ” ‘the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed. But that’s the day they told them that they was free … And my daddy told me that they whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light and that would be their blast for the celebration.’ ”

It's an very interesting story...Juneteenth was covered in my high school history classes, but this goes into lots more depth.

Let me add just a little more depth, Oujour. Juneteenth applied in Texas because President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation applied to all States then in rebellion against the U.S. Government, as of 1/1/1863. Texas at that time was unoccupied by any Federal troops; thus all of its slaves had been legally emancipated 2 and half years earlier and General Granger was simply announcing to them a fait accompli. But it was an excellent idea for the Federal Govt to make a public proclamation of emancipation, as opposed to letting the Southern States do it themselves (the intelligent mind shudders at that idea and how it might have turned out). The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution took legal effect on 12/31/1865. On that date, all remaining slaves in the USA became free, mo matter what their ignorant, benighted States had to say. This affected a few dozen slaves left in Delaware, and between 100K and 200K in Kentucky, whose State Legislature had refused to ratify the 13th Amendment but had also never seceded from the Union - so in the eyes of the Federal Government, Kentucky was never "in rebellion". Let me add that 70 years ago a bigoted but canny segregationist historian at UGA, E. Merton Coulter, said that Kentucky was actually a Confederate State "which had finally joined the Confederacy at the moment of its passing." I think he was right.
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs

[AlaCowboy]

Jun 23, 2017 17:14:00 GMT -5 vindex said:

Jun 19, 2017 8:41:34 GMT -5 oujour76 said:

It's an very interesting story...Juneteenth was covered in my high school history classes, but this goes into lots more depth.

Let me add just a little more depth, Oujour. Juneteenth applied in Texas because President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation applied to all States then in rebellion against the U.S. Government, as of 1/1/1863. Texas at that time was unoccupied by any Federal troops; thus all of its slaves had been legally emancipated 2 and half years earlier and General Granger was simply announcing to them a fait accompli. But it was an excellent idea for the Federal Govt to make a public proclamation of emancipation, as opposed to letting the Southern States do it themselves (the intelligent mind shudders at that idea and how it might have turned out). The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution took legal effect on 12/31/1865. On that date, all remaining slaves in the USA became free, mo matter what their ignorant, benighted States had to say. This affected a few dozen slaves left in Delaware, and between 100K and 200K in Kentucky, whose State Legislature had refused to ratify the 13th Amendment but had also never seceded from the Union - so in the eyes of the Federal Government, Kentucky was never "in rebellion". Let me add that 70 years ago a bigoted but canny segregationist historian at UGA, E. Merton Coulter, said that Kentucky was actually a Confederate State "which had finally joined the Confederacy at the moment of its passing." I think he was right.
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs

It is an interesting, but generally overlooked, fact that Lincoln did not free the slaves in Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, or any other northern state or territory. Lincoln's choice would have been either to not free the slaves or to send them back to Africa or to South America. His only purpose for the Emancipation Proclamation was to hopefully incite a slave rebellion in the Confederacy, or at the least, further disrupt the economy. Most of the northern states freed their slaves soon after the Revolutionary War. But many former slaves were then induced to become indentured servants to their former masters, some for terms as long as 25 years.
During the Revolutionary War, wealthy northern slave owners "freed" some of their slaves by "enlisting" them in the army to fight in place of their privileged sons.
Most history books in northern schools refused to mention slavery in the north, instead making it a Southern issue and whitewashing their own history.

[oujour76]

Jun 23, 2017 17:14:00 GMT -5 vindex said:

Let me add just a little more depth, Oujour. Juneteenth applied in Texas because President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation applied to all States then in rebellion against the U.S. Government, as of 1/1/1863. Texas at that time was unoccupied by any Federal troops; thus all of its slaves had been legally emancipated 2 and half years earlier and General Granger was simply announcing to them a fait accompli. But it was an excellent idea for the Federal Govt to make a public proclamation of emancipation, as opposed to letting the Southern States do it themselves (the intelligent mind shudders at that idea and how it might have turned out). The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution took legal effect on 12/31/1865. On that date, all remaining slaves in the USA became free, mo matter what their ignorant, benighted States had to say. This affected a few dozen slaves left in Delaware, and between 100K and 200K in Kentucky, whose State Legislature had refused to ratify the 13th Amendment but had also never seceded from the Union - so in the eyes of the Federal Government, Kentucky was never "in rebellion". Let me add that 70 years ago a bigoted but canny segregationist historian at UGA, E. Merton Coulter, said that Kentucky was actually a Confederate State "which had finally joined the Confederacy at the moment of its passing." I think he was right.
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs

Always a pleasure to hear from you Vin. Thanks for the further information. Never really stopped to think about why the news got to Texas so slowly...always just assumed it was because Texans were just slower upstairs than most people.