How long, oh Lord, how long

That two-year gap was a lifetime

The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, That proclamation, which declared slavery illegal in the U.S., had been put into place the previous September.

Because the print is so small in the above photo, here is the text of the proclamation. In terms of landmark legislation, it’s fairly short.

It was also mostly un-enforceable in the Confederacy, so the idea of freedom for people held captive by the secessionists was strictly theoretical until federal troops rode into Galveston on June 19, 1865, to announce that the quarter-million people held in slavery in Texas were now, in fact, free.

This was more than two years after the Civil War ended and it’s hard not to think about the people who lived and died in slavery for two more years simply because of where they were forced to make their homes.

I also think about the vagaries of calendar dates. Prior to the Civil War, Connecticut subscribed to a weird gradual abolition that granted freedom based on the birthdates of the enslaved. Gradual abolition freed children who’d been born into slavery after March 1, 1784 — but not for a generation. The boys were declared freed on their 25th birthday, the girls on their 21st. For babies born that year in January and February, well, sorry about that. Nothing changed.

The law did not apply to people held in slavery and traveling through the state with the people who purported to own them.

This gradual freedom was meant as a sop to slave- and business owners in the Nutmeg State, but its supporters presented it as a kindness to people held in slavery. The sentiment from the gradualists was that people who’d been held in slavery would not be able to handle all the glories of freedom if they came to them all at once, and so it was best for them — and the rest of the culture — to ease into it.

Connecticut gradualists included Noah Webster, he of the famous dictionary, who said:

“An attempt to abolish it [slavery] at a single blow would expose the whole political body to dissolution.”

That meant that slavery didn’t effectively end in the state until 1848.

This backing into freedom was considered a good idea by no less than Pres. Lincoln, who in 1862 held up Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut as good examples of easing into freedom the nearly 4 million people held into slavery.

But please. Imagine freedom being so close you could taste it, while the powers that be argue against rushing too fast for the sake of political expediency.

And so it has ever been, fear that changing the culture will do more harm than good. For a country still in its teens, we certainly are conservative and protective about our power structure.

Gradual change was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now. Change like this cannot be gradual. It must come like a clap of thunder and urge us into the world we want and the world we deserve.

Happy Juneteenth, however you celebrate.