Juneteenth

At Carter Farms we honor and lift up the 209,145 registered as members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and the approximate 23,000 sailors of African Descent  who served and composed of about 25% of the U.S. Navy. People of African descent made up less than 1% of the Northern population but 10% of the Army and 25% of the Navy. They fought valiantly for their freedom while saving the Union.

157 years ago, June 15, 1865 approximately 20,000 United States Colored Troops (USCT) valiantly and bravely chased the governor of Texas, Gov. Pendleton Murrah into Mexico after he refused to surrender after the head of the army of his maligned nation, Gen. Robert E. Lee, surrendered to the Army of the Potomac lead by the USCT.
Please don’t believe the false and popular narrative that Gen. Gordon Granger read a document, General Order #3 and made the enslaved free. The emancipation proclamation was an executive order that had to be enforced by force and only pertained to enslaved Africans in Confederate States who were brought back into the Union. For it to take affect, a confederate state had to be brought back into the union, by surrendering to Union forces. There were USCT stationed in Texas as early as November  1863, and the telegraph worked in all of the states of the confederacy, so it didn’t take 2 months for word to get to enslaved Africans. (https://www.utrgv.edu/civilwar-trail/civil-war-trail/colored-troops/index.htm) It took some days for the brothers and sisters of the USCT to travel to Texas from Appomattox, Virginia by horseback, fight various factions of the Texas rangers and remnants of the confederacy and ultimately run the 40 year old governor into Monterey Mexico. Where he died less than 60 days later.
As well, the emancipation proclamation only freed the enslaved in confederate states and Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, 12 parishes in Louisiana and 7 counties in Virginia still practiced some form of slavery until Dec. 31, 1865. June 15, 1865 was the day the last state was brought into the Union and every enslaved African in the confederate states were legally no longer enslaved.
The USCT are the reason for the season, not Gen Grainger, not Abraham Lincoln but the 209,145 USCT , the over 20,000 African descent men and women who served as sailors and the multiplicity of spies, guides, saboteurs, nurses, servants, confederate body servants and others that fought and acquired their own freedom while also securing the union of the United States as we know it.

The Spies who shaped and won the War for the Union

https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041023182059/http://cia.gov/csi/books/dispatches/dispatch.html