This is an opinion column.
Roughly 2,000 Union troops marched into Galveston Bay, Texas on June 19, 1865, and declared that more than 250,000 enslaved Black Texans were free. The promise made more than two years earlier took nothing less than a war to realize. As we celebrate Juneteenth, we seem to have forgotten the consequences of dehumanizing our fellow Americans.
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that “all persons held as slaves” in areas of the country “in rebellion against the United States” were “thenceforward, and forever free.” He promised that the federal government would “recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons” and would not “repress such persons” striving to secure their “actual freedom.”
Liberty and justice for all is threatened whenever we sacrifice human dignity on the altar of economic, social, or political expediency. That hasn’t changed for the last century and a half.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” reads the Declaration of Independence, “that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Like the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration’s virtue has taken generations to manifest because we have repeatedly treated certain classes of people as less than men. Such was the systemic evil of slavery.
Black Americans were relegated to the role of units of economic production. They were assets to be bought and sold. In an unsuccessful bid for the United States Senate in 1858, even Abraham Lincoln regarded Blacks as lesser beings:
I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermingling with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
Only three days before his assassination in 1865 would Lincoln call for some Black men, including the “very intelligent and…those who serve our cause as soldiers,” to have the right to vote. The Great Emancipator never fully embraced the humanity of those he freed at such a tremendous national and personal cost.
Too many of us are again willing to reduce the humanity of our fellow man for our own expediency. We laud American civil liberties, but we impose speech codes on college campuses and limit protests with which we disagree. With the same mouths we praise the value of human life, we speak of migrants like animals. We don’t merely disagree with our political opponents, we gleefully call for them to be incarcerated.
Our fellow Americans are increasingly limited to those who think, act, and believe as we do. Everyone else is an enemy…or at least their liberties ought to be subordinated to our own. We cannot maintain such a view and construct a more perfect union. We may not even be able to keep our republic.
As we celebrate Juneteenth, we should consider the blood and effort expended to restore liberty, let alone human dignity, once it is lost.
Smith is a recovering political attorney with four boys, two dogs, a bearded dragon, and an extremely patient wife. He’s a partner in a media company, a business strategy wonk, and a regular on talk radio. Please direct outrage or agreement to csmith@al.com or @DCameronSmith on X or @davidcameronsmith on Threads.
