20 June—The big news today is that the very first two contestants to enter have correctly answered The Monitor’s virtuoso brain teaser, “In the name of the holiday being observed today, what syllable is missing from between June and teenth?” What are the odds of that? I’m astounded! I can’t, of course, reveal the elusive answer, as the contest for free lifetime subscriptions to LitchfieldMonitor.com hasn’t ended and may never end.

Sadly, I’ve been asked by both lucky winners of lifetime subscriptions to not reveal their identities. I fully understand their need for anonymity. One of the thrilled winners gushed, “It’s like winning the Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot and I just don’t want to be bugged by the envious and needy!”

In other news, then, while yesterday was Connecticut’s first official observance of Juneteenth as a state legal holiday, Gov. Lamont, to his credit, hasn’t mandated that municipalities observe it in the traditional way by giving employees yet another day off. Yet.

As it happens, Litchfield is among the majority of Connecticut’s towns and cities that wisely chose not to close down for Juneteenth. So is Waterbury. And retiring Waterbury Mayor Neil O’Leary is taking heat for it. It seems that nobody at City Hall had even brought up the subject. With all the other crap going on there, that’s no surprise.

But since the woke brigade are “heartbroken” and “appalled,” as well as just plain pissed off, they’ve been reassured by an alderman running for mayor that “the steps that are necessary to have it in place for next year” will be taken.

So you can bet Waterbury will be shut down next Juneteenth come hell or high dudgeon. Even though Juneteenth really has nothing at all to do with any state but Texas. Nor is Juneteenth anything like Independence Day, which it’s also mischaracterized as. In fact, given the rebellious, secessionist states the Emancipation Proclamation affected and what it did, Juneteenth would be quite the opposite of an independence day if people knew what they were talking about.

Brief history: There were actually two Emancipation Proclamations, principally military war-time measures in the form of executive orders issued by President Abraham Lincoln—the preliminary one on 22 September 1862 and the final one issued a hundred days later on 1 January 1863. It was the final one (of course) that was hand-delivered to Galveston in 1865. For all the good they did, the Proclamations had freed the slaves as of New Year’s Day 1863—but only in the states and parts of states that were still in rebellion, like Texas.

That stipulation exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control. Specifically, Tennessee and portions of Virginia and Louisiana that were occupied at issuance by Union forces were able to keep their slaves, as were the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri.

So what did the Emancipation Proclamations really do? William Seward, Lincoln’s (and Johnson’s) secretary of state, succinctly and wryly put it this way: “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

To be sure, Lincoln was aware of the sad irony, but it was politically expedient because, being a practical and brilliant politician, he didn’t want to antagonize the slave states loyal to the Union by setting their slaves free.

The fact is, then, that slavery wasn’t actually abolished until the 13^th Amendment was ratified in December 1865. So, like it or not, Juneteenth is bupkes.

And in 1867 Secretary of State William Seward agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. That would be only about $150 million today. What a deal!