Our newest federal holiday, now celebrated annually on June 19, marks a critical moment: the end of slavery in the United States.

That jubilation, though, is tempered by the reality of the generations of slavery that preceded it — and the hardships that followed in the wake of freedom.

There is no civic tradition stretching back to the 1860s to help people in Maine and elsewhere mark the day. It’s not only that we haven’t figured it out yet; since Congress established the holiday in 2021, we’ve barely begun to try.

The first specific reference to Juneteenth that I could find in a Maine newspaper didn’t show up until 1937, more than seven decades after the events it honored. The mention came in response to a question in the Morning Sentinel: “What is Juneteenth?”

The newspaper answered, “This is an expression common among colored people in the South for Emancipation Day.”

That answer made it plain that in Maine, at least, Emancipation Day (April 16) carried a historical weight that the Texan roots of Juneteenth did not. For decades, people marked the occasion on different dates, depending on what mattered most to their community.

Many in the Pine Tree State and beyond celebrated the freeing of enslaved Americans on Jan. 1, the day President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (signed on April 16, 1862) took effect in 1863. In April 1866, the Daily Evening Journal in Lewiston provided what appears to be the first account of any such celebration published in Maine. It told of a procession of Black Americans in the nation’s capital that included 20 bands and many flags. The marchers also carried pictures of some of the men who helped them secure their freedom.

They weaved their way from the White House to Capitol Hill and beyond, giving and receiving cheers from senators, justices of the Supreme Court and many residents, though not skeptical President Andrew Johnson, from whom they received “no enthusiastic greeting.” Among those who addressed the crowd was Major Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, a Mainer born in Leeds who won fame during the Civil War and was placed in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau afterward.

In “an earnest and animated speech,” Howard said he considered it his duty to enforce the Golden Rule by “carrying into practical effect the spirit of Christ.”

From childhood, the Bowdoin College graduate said, he had taken it for granted that one should “love thy neighbor as thyself” and that it applied to both Black and white people. “He believed there would be a great body of negroes in heaven,” the Journal reported, adding, “nevertheless, he wanted to go there himself.”

Howard expressed hope that the president and Congress would adopt policies and finances that showed their commitment to “liberty, truth and love.”

It wasn’t just in Washington and across the South that newly freed Black Americans celebrated that freedom. It happened in Maine, too.

On Jan. 2, 1867, to mark the fourth anniversary of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Lewiston’s newspaper mentioned that “the colored people in this city celebrated New Year’s Day — Emancipation Day — with unique, characteristic and lively jubilations.” Another celebration took place in Thomaston, according to the Rockland Gazette. A crowded meeting with prayers, music and speeches managed to fill its union hall. Fireworks followed.

Even as the Civil War grew more distant and events to mark the day faded in Maine, emancipation was not forgotten. In 1878, for instance, a Kittery man named Daniel Austin left $500 to the Overseers of the Poor in nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to fund an annual celebration of Emancipation Day for that city’s Black population.

And today? Juneteenth provides us with a chance to celebrate the hard-won liberty of so many Americans; to cheer the millions who struggled then — and struggle now — to remake our nation so that Howard’s “liberty, truth and love” can flourish.