When Freedom Came to Galveston

On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read aloud General Order No. 3: all enslaved people in the state were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier, but the news had never reached this far corner of the Confederacy. Now, at last, it arrived. The response was immediate. Men and women who had spent their entire lives in bondage dropped their tools, left the fields, and wept openly in the streets.…