However much they contributed to abolition and emancipation, the slaves didn’t free themselves. Without enforcement, there is no law.

Today is Juneteenth. It is still relatively new as a federal holiday, and is unfamiliar in a lot of the country. But it is an old holiday. As I explained in 2021, it has been popularly celebrated in some parts of the country since Reconstruction, and while I generally dislike the expansion of the list of mandatory holidays, its topic — the liberation of American slaves – is a fit one for celebration, especially given that we scandalously fail to observe Lincoln’s birthday as a national holiday.

One facet we should bear in mind: Juneteenth celebrates the enforcement of law. Slaves were freed by law in the northern states on a variety of dates; the federal government did so in the nation’s capital on April 16, 1862, in the combatant parts of the Confederacy by the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and nationwide by the 13th Amendment, which passed Congress on January 31, 1865, and was ratified by the states on December 6, 1865, with its ratification in Georgia.

Juneteenth celebrates none of those dates of legislative activity or presidential proclamation. It instead commemorates when the freedom of slaves became a practical reality in Texas, where the holiday originated. That happened not by votes but by enforcement of the law. In mid-June 1865, with the last Confederate armies were surrendering, Union Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and declared by General Order No. 3 an end to slavery in Texas — the westernmost Confederate state and thus the last to be subdued. There’s an important lesson there: Laws promise lots of things, but until men with guns show up to require compliance, they are just so much wind on parchment. In a broader sense, that’s what law enforcement and the military are for: While their immediate function may be violence, their goal is protection from predators. That’s what slavery was: predatory. It might wither over time if its protection in law was withdrawn, but to stop it immediately required uniformed force. That’s how the writ of the law has always been.

Which is not to say that black Americans were only passive observers in all of this. They had served in the Union army, and it was the freedmen who made Juneteenth a popular celebration (first recognized in law in Texas in 1980 over a century after the holiday’s grassroots birth), and it was black activists who got it recognized in federal law four years ago. But however much they contributed to abolition and emancipation, the slaves didn’t free themselves. Without enforcement, there is no law. Without enforcement of law, there is no freedom from predators and enslavement.