 On June 19th of 1865, enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas finally got the news that more than two years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had already emancipated three and a half million enslaved people in the Confederate States in rebellion against the Union. By the way, it would take until nearly the end of 1865 for slavery to be outlawed by the 13th Amendment of the Constitution in the remaining slaveholding states like Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey that had not left the Union.