(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to "The Bookmark."

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Edward Cotham, Jr., author of "Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration" and "A Busy Week in Texas: Ulysses S. Grant's 1880 Visit to the Lone Star State."

Ed, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- I'm excited to talk about both these books, which are related because we have a similar character in both.

Grant kind of has a crossover in both stories, but we're gonna start with "Juneteenth" and I'd like you to just introduce the book to us.

- Sure, the book came about because I knew that there was a story down in Galveston that had not ever really been told.

And I've been studying the Civil War in Galveston for close to 40 years, and I always give tours down there and I show people things.

And one of the things I would always show them is that there's a parking lot there that didn't even have a historical mark originally.

And I would say something incredibly important happened here, and this is where Juneteenth happened.

And for many years nobody knew what that was, and it was a very confused thing.

And then all of a sudden it started getting a lot more attention.

And I thought to myself, "This needs to be written about in a scholarly fashion."

So I started writing this book many decades ago and finally got it ready to go, and just as dumb luck would have it, the book came out and three weeks later it was declared a national holiday.

So the timing was very strange in one way, but very fortuitous in another because it is important.

If we're gonna have a national holiday, we need to have a common understanding of what the historical events were behind that holiday.

And that's why I wrote the book.

- I was gonna bring that up.

This book came out at the perfect time, and as our watchers can see, we've got the paper back here because you sold out of the first edition.

- Right.

- And you had to move the paper back.

But that doesn't happen by accident necessarily.

You'd put a lot of work and research into this and it just happened to hit at that lucky moment.

- That's right.

- Now when you talk about that place in Galveston, what was that moment or that order that sparked Juneteenth?

- At 22nd and Strand, there was a building called the Osterman Building, and it lasted well after the Civil War.

In fact, into the 1960s was destroyed in a storm, and it's today a parking lot.

But in that building, General Gordon Grange's headquarters was issued General Orders No.

3, which is the source of Juneteenth because it was dated June 19th of 1865.

And again, that order, because of the way it was written and distributed, came to basically symbolize emancipation first in Texas and now throughout the country and indeed in many places throughout the world.

And so that's why it's so important, I think, to understand that this didn't come out of thin air.

There was a place where this order came and where it started, and ground zero for Juneteenth is 22nd and Strand in Galveston, Texas.

And you can go there today.

Today we have a historic marker.

Today we have a giant colorful mural illustrating some of the events of Juneteenth.

It's really a spectacular place to come, but it's the kind of thing that you need to understand and know about.

And again, that's why I think books, not only this one, but other books on this subject are important for everybody to read.

- Of course.

You start the book with describing and giving the full text of the order, which is a little, I don't wanna say ironic, but it's interesting because they weren't writing something that they thought would be this grand proclamation that would be celebrated 150 years later.

It was, as you say, a kind of a routine, "This is the orders that I'm putting out.

I'm the new general in town, here's what I say."

So the language isn't very flowery or oratory in that way.

- It's a strange thing.

The order, nobody at the time thought it was very important.

This is something that the importance only grew over time, and in particular the way it was distributed.

The first sentence, the order says, "All slaves are free."

And of course that language was picked up and presented on the first page of the New York Times as important order from Texas, all slaves are free.

But it then goes down and the last two sentences in the order are very strange because they say basically to the enslaved people, you're free, but what you're free to do is stay exactly where you are, keep working for exactly the same people, but now we're gonna call you employees instead of slaves.

It's very insulting language.

And the odd thing about that is because you had those two elements in this order.

It went out, it was printed in the newspapers, it was put on handbills all across the state.

And the overseers ended up, and the former masters ended up actually reading this order to their enslaved people to say, "You're free, but again, they're telling you to stay here and keep working."

And because of that odd language and the fact that it was read, the enslaved people later associated that order with emancipation.

And many, many years afterwards, they always spoke about the day that the Freedom Paper was read to them, the Freedom Paper.

And when I started reading those accounts and tracing down what the Freedom Paper was, it was eerie because you could always trace it back to being this very strange order that was issued on 22nd and Strand in Galveston, Texas on June 19th of 1865.

And I think that's why eventually the enslaved people that were freed chose to associate their freedom with this order, because not all of 'em were freed on June 19th.

This went all over the state and indeed all over the country, and they were physically freed on many different days and different places.

But you have to have some date to kind of mark that freedom.

It's kinda like we do with the 4th of July.

We weren't really technically completely free as a country on the 4th of July.

We chose that to memorialize an important complex event.

And that's what Juneteenth is.

It is the date that was commonly chosen by the liberated people to mark the day on which practical, real freedom came to them.

And many of 'em said, even many decades after this could say, "I remember that when the Freedom Paper was read to me like it was yesterday."

It's just really thrilling to them to remember that day and associate it with this one event.

- You describe it in the book as like how we in their modern times have a memory of Kennedy being shot or the trade (indistinct).

I mean there are those cultural moments where we just had that flashbulb memory, and for them that was when they heard that paper regardless of what the date was.

- That's exactly right.

And again, we don't need to pretend that this order suddenly made everything okay.

We were heading into reconstruction, which was gonna be an incredibly violent time for the liberated people, not only in Texas, but all across the south.

And we're still not over the things that were there, but one of the things that's really interesting about the Juneteenth orders, I talked about the first sentence and the last two sentences, there's another sentence in the middle that we know was not written by General Grange.

It was written by a staff officer named Frederick Emery, who's the order officer that actually signed the Juneteenth order.

And it talks about absolute equality and what that means and kind of tries to give definition to what liberation and freedom really meant.

And to me, that is the part of the language in the order that really stands out and that resonates through the centuries.

Sure it had the practical effect of liberation, but it also kind of started a conversation that we're continuing today.

What does freedom mean?

What does being a citizen of the country mean?

What does absolute equality really mean?

And those are issues that we need to understand the history of and then we need to take it into our own thoughts and figure out what it means to us today.

- Speaking of understanding the history, what I like about this book too is that you start with that order, you start with that moment on June 19th, and then we kind of go back into the Civil War to really contextualize.

If there's one thing this book I think does so well is it puts everything in context, how we got to that moment, because there are a lot of books about Civil War history, that cover Civil War history, but the focus here on the enslaved people and the orders and the Emancipation Proclamation, just kind of focusing all that together, I think, provides a lot of interesting context.

- Thank you for that.

I wrote the book with that in mind, because I knew that this order didn't just suddenly spring out and was by itself.

There were a lot of similar orders, although not quite the same throughout the south because when President Lincoln decided to declare emancipation, he did it in a way that basically put the responsibility on the military to define emancipation and to carry it out and make sure that it was carried out.

And that was a troublesome issue for the military and for the country.

And so when we talk about the Juneteenth order, you have to go back to, there's some things in North Carolina and Virginia and Alabama and Louisiana where they're all kind of trying to feel their way about how are we going to, first, subdue the Confederacy, and second, bring liberation to these enslaved people?

Because it was certainly a very difficult job for the United States military to fight and win a war while simultaneously freeing people and then keeping them free.

And that keeping them free was a real task.

- Yeah, there are a lot of instances and anecdotes and stories in the book of Union soldiers coming across, that enslaved people are coming to them to seek their freedom or they're finding places where the enslavers have just abandoned their property.

I mean, there's a lot of situations they weren't prepared for and they weren't getting great direction from Washington on what to do with these people who suddenly needed care maybe, or assistance, or food, or in some cases they could be put to work.

I mean, it was a question all the way around.

- It was, and keep in mind that in Texas, the enslaved people had a much more difficult road of that than they did in other places in the south, because, for example, up in the bordering areas of the Confederacy, enslaved people could, if they persisted, perhaps get across the river through the underground railroad, get to the north, get even to Canada and associate their freedom here.

But in Texas, you have a coast, you can't get out that way very easily.

You could get down and maybe cross the border at Mexico, but that was a long way to go and very, very difficult road.

So the enslaved people in Texas had a very, very difficult road of it.

And Juneteenth comes June 19th of 1865.

That is well after Robert E. Lee's surrender.

This is the last large intact group of enslaved people in the Confederacy.

And so I think that's one of the reasons that Juneteenth particularly deserves celebration because it kind of is the milestone that now the United States has finally achieved full liberation of the enslaved people in the Confederacy.

- I do wanna talk about Lincoln just a bit because of course he's in the book, he was the president, his Emancipation Proclamation is what kind of started that ball rolling.

But his views on that changed over his presidency.

He wasn't always necessarily publicly for emancipation.

Can you talk about that?

- Abraham Lincoln is a complicated man in many ways, and he's certainly complicated on the issue of slavery.

I think it's fair to say that he was anti-slavery himself, but he wasn't sure how that could be practically accomplished.

He didn't think the country was ready for it when he first became president, and in fact went out of his way to say that he thought it was perfectly legal under the state laws and that he did not think that he had the authority to do away with it unilaterally.

He hoped that the states would do something themselves.

He hoped that the federal government, the Congress would step in and do something.

All that did not prove workable.

And he kind of had some odd ideas about it.

He thought, "Well, maybe we can liberate these people, but then we can send them off as colonists in some other place and send them to Liberia or other Caribbean islands and things."

Lincoln's ideas were, as you say, not really what you would hold out as paragons of virtue today.

But his heart was in the right place, and when he finally got to the place where he thought that he could actually do something and that he had to do something, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation at a time of great personal risk to his political career and to his country, but he knew it was the right thing to do and he knew that if he was ever gonna do it, it had to be now.

And he stepped in and did that.

And for that I think he deserves the country's lasting credit and appreciation.

- I have to compliment you again.

If I say the word context too many times in this, I'm sorry, but the nuance to which, we just...

I think it's easy in these days to just wanna read a Wikipedia article or just get the like bullet points about a person or a historical moment.

But seeing the evolution that he's going through, the decisions he's making, the political choices he's making, 'cause sometimes he's having to say something publicly when he's drafting the proclamation privately.

It's masterful and it's a good reminder that he's a complex person just doing his best to do what's right and to try to keep his country together.

And I think that's so important for us to remember that there's always nuance, there's always more to the story than just the Wikipedia page.

- That's right.

And one of the interesting things is when Lincoln is actually drafting the final version of the Emanation Proclamation, he reads it to his cabinet and says, "I don't really want any changes, but does anybody have any suggestions?"

And William Stewart, his secretary of state says, "I don't like one of the language pieces in there.

Where you say that the United States is going to recognize the freedom of these enslaved people, why don't you put recognize and maintain?"

And Lincoln thinks about that for a little moment.

And you can see the handwritten draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

And he writes, and maintain.

You could see the little character where he inserted that in the language.

And nobody at the time thought that was an important thing, but that changed everything.

When you see that the United States government, in particularly, the military, is not only gonna recognize the people around them as being free, but they have to maintain that freedom, ooh, that's a tough job.

And that would complicate the Army's life for the remainder of the Civil War.

And again, just that little sort of a last minute change to me is one of the direct ancestors that leads to Gordon Grange arriving in Galveston on June 19th and issuing that order.

He has to recognize and maintain the freedom.

And those words, and maintain, are inserted at the last moment.

Nobody knew what they were really gonna do.

Nobody thought they were all that important, but they changed everything.

- We're gonna have to jump forward a little bit again.

I hope people would read this book because, like I say, the context and the nuance is also important, but Juneteenth becomes a celebration in Texas quite quickly for the former enslaved people.

They started celebrating that date not too long after it happened.

- Correct, in fact, they first started celebrating emancipation on January 1st of 1866, not Juneteenth, because the Emancipation Proclamation had originally been effective in January 1st, 1863.

But the enslaved people in Texas said, "No, that's not really where we wanna celebrate it."

And so by June of 1866, there are huge parades in Galveston and in Houston, thousands of people filing up and down Main Street.

And these become enormous celebrations of the event.

And Juneteenth becomes the oldest continuously commemorated celebration of emancipation anywhere.

- And now it's a national holiday.

And I think as Texans, that's something we can be proud of that we started this... Well, not we, but our ancestors, our forebearers started this celebration, continued it maybe sometimes during times of strife.

I'm sure in maybe the 50s and 60s or 20s, it wasn't a popular holiday, but the determination of people to celebrate their freedom endured.

- It is.

I talk about this subject all over the country, and many times when I'm up in places like Michigan or New York or California or something, they say, "I like Juneteenth and I like the celebration and everything, but it's kind of a Texas thing.

Why is it important to me up here what happened in Texas?"

And my response is always, you have to look at this as sort of the culmination of the entire Civil War.

That Civil War ends up being fought to ensure that people are free throughout the Confederacy.

And this is the last large intact body of enslaved people.

So this is sort of the bell that signals that accomplishing that whole task, not just for Texas, but for the whole country.

And so I think since it's the last and the largest, that it is appropriate to celebrate for everybody.

- Well, that's the perfect place to end our conversation on Juneteenth.

And now we're gonna switch gears here and talk about "A Busy Week in Texas."

I avoided talking too much about Grant, although he is featured very prominently in the Juneteenth book as a general, but tell us about how you found out about this week and why it was important enough to you to wanna write a book about it.

- Again, I do a lot of my work down in Galveston, and I knew that Grant had been in Galveston and I knew where he'd spent the night and where parades were and all that sort of thing.

And I was researching it and found out that he'd not only been in Galveston, he'd been in Houston, he'd been in San Antonio.

He had this one busy week when he came in 1880.

And it was the biggest social event that ever happened in Galveston and probably Houston because when Grant came, he was an incredible celebrity at the time.

He'd been, of course, the general chief of the United States Army and won the Civil War.

He'd been president of the United States twice.

He traveled all around the world.

And so when he came to Texas, there were rumors that he was gonna be nominated for a third term as the president of the United States.

And so his arrival in Texas was like the pope and Elvis Presley arrived on the same day.

I mean, he had a celebrity that nobody could even touch.

And so when he arrived, everybody wanted to see him, everybody wanted to meet him, everybody wanted to shake his hand.

And this is the story of how Grant came here and basically handled these enormous social functions and his interactions with people all across the state.

And it's amazing, you wouldn't believe it today.

No president of the United States could come anywhere without a security detail.

Grant had no security detail.

And keep in mind, this is only 15 years after the end of the Civil War in a confederate state that had been really heavily invested in the Confederacy.

This is the general that defeated him, and yet everybody's waiting in line to shake his hand and think he's a great guy.

And when he dies, not too many years later, there's huge celebration.

I mean, there's huge funeral events in Galveston and Houston to commemorate the life of this man that they regarded so highly even though he had been a former enemy.

- I was gonna bring that up.

It's remarkable that this is 15 short years.

That's not that long- - It's not.

- After the war.

And maybe it's a testament to the power of the presidency or maybe it's a testament to Grant himself, but people were lining up just to see the train go by as he was riding through.

I mean, his popularity cannot be understated as you say.

- It is not.

And of course Grant is to me one of the most unique figures in all of American history, just inherently.

I mean, keep in mind that in 1861, he is a depressed and disappointed store clerk in a store he doesn't own in Galena, Illinois.

And by 1869, eight years later, he's become general and chief of the United States Army, the highest rank in the Army.

And he's been elected president of the United States in less than a decade.

I don't know of another country where something like that could even happen.

It's almost inconceivable that he had that kind of mediocre rise.

And it wasn't because he was some bombastic character on TV with strange hair and loud voices (Christine laughs) and making sound bites.

That was not his style at all.

He was very authentic, he was, personally very shy and sort of introverted, but he had this air about him that drew people to him and they could see that he was a genuine and a decent man.

And I think that was one of the things that made him a success in the Army and a success in some ways as a president, and after that when he toured the world and then when he came to Texas, 'cause the people in Texas just fell in love with him.

- I also wanna highlight, too, even if you're maybe not a Grant scholar, this book is such an interesting slice of life.

Like the trip is so well documented.

There's so much information printed in the newspapers down to the menus of the dinners he had.

And to me, that was my favorite part to see, what were people eating in a fancy dinner in 1880?

- That's the thing about it.

This is, like you said, so well documented.

I mean, everything that Grant did, said, everywhere he went, everything he ate was written down and was in newspapers, not just in Texas, but all across the country.

And so we have this incredible time capsule that shows us what was happening in a both formal and informal settings in Texas during this one week in 1880s.

So you can know what he ate.

There's a thing in there where they talk about where he went to church, what songs did he sing?

What songs did he not sing?

What kind of food did he like?

He went back for two plates at one meal.

What was that about?

And then the other thing I love is there are basically word by word transcriptions of these toasts after each of these dinners.

And this is something we don't do today and don't really remember, but back then this was the thing you did.

You had a big dinner, many, many courses, and then you had these toasts.

And they were very formal things that people posed, people responded to.

And Grant didn't respond to many of these things typically, but in Texas, he went out of his way to do that on two occasions and actually deliver a small speech, which we were lucky enough to have and get recorded.

- Yeah, he wasn't known for being very loquacious.

So to have those words is important history.

- It is.

- Well, we are unfortunately running short on time.

So in our final like three minutes, could you maybe sum up what you'd like the takeaway to be from both of these books?

- I think that the takeaway from these books is that there is a lot of history out there that you might think you understand, but you really don't because... And I didn't understand the history of these two events until I started really digging into them.

And the more you dig into almost any historic event, you'll find that there's some things that are associated with some place or something else and things that you thought were right that are not right, and things that are very, very interesting when you dig into 'em and you read about 'em and you say, "Golly, that's such an interesting story.

How would I have handled that event?

Or if that person were alive today, what would he think of things today?"

And so to me, I think that's the role of history.

And I hope that people will come away with looking at books like this and think, history is something that we need to study, we want to study.

These are stories that help define our lives.

They're where we came from.

They're where we aspire to be.

They tell us a lot about our ourselves and what we're about as a country.

- Well, I have to say, I think both books do such a wonderful job at that.

I tend to read a lot of history books for this program, but I learned something from both of them.

And I'm gonna say it again, it put a lot of things into context.

It informs how we got to where we are.

So I have to say job well done on both of them.

- Thank you very much.

- Well, that is all the time we have for today.

Thank you so much for joining me.

The books again were "Juneteenth" and "A Busy Week in Texas."

I will see you again soon.

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