Don’t expect a big celebration on Juneteenth (June 19) from author Clyde W. Ford, who explains in A High Price for Freedom.

“What a wonderful day that first Juneteenth must have been. Fetters gone. Shackles removed. Whips silenced. Uninformed formerly enslaved men and women reveling in their newly-found freedom. But there’s a problem with this idyllic picture of Juneteenth—most of the above events never happened, even though they are taken as unquestioned truth by Americans Black and white,” stated Ford.

The facts, the author declares, are that, first of all, slaves in Texas were aware of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. “We had papers just like we have now,” said Felix Haywood, a former slave who was in Texas for the first Juneteenth, when interviewed in the 1930s at the age of 92. The 2,000 Union troops that went to Texas after the Civil War didn’t go to tell the slaves they were free, but to remind the white Texas slaveholders that they had to release those they continued to enslave, said Ford.

Texas is where a lot of slaves wound up because, during the Civil War, a number of southern slaveholders marched as many as 150,000 Black men and women to Texas in order to keep them out of the Union Army’s hands, stated Ford, describing that movement as the second slavery trail of tears. The first one involved the transfer of slaves from tobacco states like Virginia and Maryland to the deep South in the 1830s when cotton became the chief crop.

At about the same time that Major General George Granger was delivering his Juneteenth message to Texan slaveholders, President Andrew Johnson, having taken over that spring for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, was derailing compensation plans for slaves worked out while Lincoln was still in office.

“Union General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton seemed to recognize that President Lincoln needed a plan to deal with the four to five million men and women who would be freed by the Emancipation Proclamation if the Union prevailed in the war,” noted Ford.

Rev. Garrison Frazier, himself a former slave, replied to questions from Sherman and Stanton on the evening of Jan. 12, 1865 at a meeting that sought to find an answer to a looming problem as the war drew to a close: the huge population of former slaves “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it or make it our own,” said Frazier.

Four days after the meeting, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, accepted by Lincoln and otherwise known as “40 acres and a mule,” said Ford. That order sought to redistribute 400,000 acres of prime Southern coastline to emancipated slaves, land that formerly belonged to Southern slaveholders. The plan was to allow African Americans to organize and govern their own communities, Ford said.

But Johnson had other ideas. Shortly after Lincoln died in April 1865, Johnson issued 14,000 pardons to wealthy Southern slaveholders, and, within seven weeks of taking office, coinciding almost exactly with the first Juneteenth, Johnson rescinded Special Field Order No. 15.

Any lands that had been confiscated were returned to their original owners, said Ford, recalling a quote from W.E.B. DuBois: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”

By June 1865, 40,000 Black Americans who had been awarded land were formally displaced, forced into becoming sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

“Personally, as a Black Man, I find it very difficult to celebrate Juneteenth because what are we celebrating?” asked Ford. “Are you celebrating the fact that Black folks learned they were free? They already knew that. Or are you celebrating the fact that white folks were told to stop killing and brutalizing Black folks?"

A High Price for Freedom features a number of other essays by Ford addressing the struggle for freedom by African Americans in the United States.