Free
On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, officially ending slavery in the Confederate states. From that day on, all people who had been enslaved there were free—well, sort of.
In those days, without mass communications and social media, news spread slowly. And this news in particular. The Union didn’t have enough soldiers to enforce the proclamation. So in many places slavery continued. Texas was the last state to abandon the institution. All that changed, however, on June 19, 1865. That’s when General Gordon Granger and almost 2,000 troops arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3. The order ended slavery in Texas.
