Letters from an American

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June 19, 2022
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

June 19, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson
Jun 20, 2022
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June 19, 2022
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement on June 19th, 1865, in Texas that enslaved Americans were free. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.

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