Book Review | ‘On Juneteenth’ by Annette Gordon-Reed

While Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth is, in part, about the new national holiday inspired by the events of June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in that state — more than two months after the official end of the Civil War — the true subject of the book is the treatment of African-descended people by white Texans, and it is not a happy chronicle.

“History,” Gordon-Reed writes in the opening chapter, “is, to say the least, complicated,” but in this short book, which is as much memoir as it is historical analysis, the record of interactions between white and Black Texans doesn’t, in fact, seem especially complicated. Mostly, it’s just one long testament to how badly the former group has treated the latter.

One of Gordon-Reed’s central projects is upending the myth of “heroic” white Texas males like Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, and Stephen F. Austin. Austin, for instance, “told everyone who would listen that, without slavery, the Anglo colonies would never fully succeed and Americans who came to Texas would surely be poor for the rest of their lives.” Her chapter entitled “Remember the Alamo” is a particularly poignant reminder that the men who fought for Texas independence — “Who could not want Texas to be independent?” — were doing so for less than noble reasons. In its brief life as an independent country (1836–1846), the Republic of Texas enshrined “the right to enslave,” and Texas entered the United States as an unequivocal “slave state.”