Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton wrote about Illinois’s newest state government and banking holiday Monday.
She observes,
The legislation for this new summer three-day holiday passed without opposition.
Glanton notes that slavery only stopped in Texas that day, that the abominable institution continued in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri , Tennessee and West Virginia until December 6, 1865.
That’s when the 13th Amendment was ratified.
In fact native Americans still owned slaves long after that on their reservations.
A cool Cherokee:
Stand Watie (Cherokee: ᏕᎦᏔᎦ, romanized: Degataga, lit. ’Stand firm’) (12 December 1806 – 9 September 1871), also known as Standhope Uwatie, Tawkertawker, and Isaac S. Watie, was a leader of the Cherokee Nation.
The nation allied with the Confederacy, and he was the only Native American to attain a general’s rank in the Civil War, Confederacy or Union.
He commanded the Confederate Indian cavalry of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, made up mostly of Cherokee, Muskogee and Seminole.
He was the last Confederate general in the field to cease hostilities at war’s end.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_Watie
“It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.”
-Robert Lewis Dabney
The columnist is correct about Juneteenth being the anniversary of the end of slavery in Texas, but she is wrong about some other details.
Most of the states that she lists outlawed slavery on their own well before the 13th Amendment came into effect.(It was on December 18th of 1865, not December 6th. December 6th was the day it was ratified.)
Kentucky and Delaware were the only states that held on to the bitter end.
I believe Joe Biden was serving his first term in the Senate back then.
Columnists for the Chicago Tribune have more courage than Republican legislators and military veterans like Craig Wilcox.
Security guards have more courage than Republican politicians and businessmen like Mike Buehler.
Buehler: go blow!