A Freedom Day Reid: Lincoln and the Contrabands

President Lincoln didn't exactly free the slaves. But the slaves still got free.

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris was born in Philadelphia in 1863, the year the Civil War broke out. His father was a portrait painter who so admired the prolific “Orientalist” French portrateur Jean-Léon Gérôme that he named his son after him. Ferris, like the man who inspired his name, was among the most prolific painters of his time — painting idyllic scenes of American life: The First Thanksgiving 1621, Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, and more. His depiction of Abraham Lincoln and “the Contrabands,” painted in 1900, was by far his most reproduced image. It depicts President Abraham Lincoln standing among a group of enslaved Black people presenting themselves to the Union to gain their freedom — which was the definition of “contrabands” at the time. It was a less polite was of saying “people who wished to not be enslaved and were willing to take up arms and fight for their freedom.”

Lincoln and the Contrabands, painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1900

Imagine your joy, if you were an enslaved person at the end of the civil war and you were no longer “owned” by other person. What further joy would you feel had you been among the more than 100,000 who had the opportunity to let your former “owner” know how you felt about them utilizing a bayonet? That is the level of joy that Freedom Day is meant to celebrate. It’s a day that celebrates the two years belated joy of the enslaved in Texas — a rebelling state — who nobody bothered to inform about Lincoln’s executive order freeing the enslaved in any state that was committing insurrection. (The non-rebellious states were still permitted to enslaved fellow humans until the 13th Amendment was ratified, after Lincoln was quite dead.)

Emancipation Day (or Freedom Day) was celebrated almost exclusively in Texas, and in Texas culture-adjacent states like Colorado, when I was growing up there. In fact, my sister June (whose work you can read on this Substack and on her own) was once crowned Miss Juneteenth in Denver, following a beauty pageant in the Five Points area downtown — which at the time was considered “the hood,” which of course means that it is now a gentrified homeland for super rich white transplants from Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

President Biden made Juneteenth a national holiday, which means even maga get to have the day off — and I’ll bet they take it. Trump refuses to acknowledge the holiday, and he snidely stopped our national parks from offering free admission on the holiday. Here is somebody’s mother, Karoline Leavitt, once again dismissing the federal holiday, on behalf of her creepy boss.

But no matter. Juneteenth — AKA Freedom Day — is officially a “thing,” even if Larry Pittman doesn’t like it…

Ok grandpa.

And this Juneteenth, America is celebrating the opening of the Obama presidential library on the South Side of Chicago, where every living president except one, was invited to the star-studded celebration (if you missed it, you can watch it all here.) Because A list stars actually want to be around the Obamas.

But back to Emancipation Day. I would argue that in a fundamental sense, it is the true celebration of America’s founding; whereas July 4th celebrates rich, slaveholding planters’ divorce from the British Crown.

There is something much more compelling for me about celebrating the full freedom of all Americans, rather than pretending that to a slave, the Fourth of July is a thing.

So happy Freedom Day, everyone! Celebrate, commemorate, and let’s all look forward to our freedom from the grip of our current presidential nightmare.