AFRICAN
AMERICAN
HISTORY
HIST 244
Christopher Collins
Skyline College
African American History for HIST 244 is a collection of selected readings from African
American History (Lumen), American Yawp, Boundless US History, and US History by Chris
Collins for Skyline College ZTC Early Adopter Program and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0,
unless otherwise indicated.
African American History for HIST 244 is a collection of selected readings from African American
History (Lumen), American Yawp, Boundless US History, and US History by Chris Collins for
Skyline College ZTC Early Adopter Program and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, unless
otherwise indicated.
©2020
Skyline College ZTC Early Adopter Program
African American History (Lumen) on LibreTexts, unless otherwise noted, LibreTexts content is
licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/History/National_History/Book%3A_African_Americ
an_History_(Lumen)
American Yawp. Located at: http://www.americanyawp.com/index.html. Project: American
Yawp. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
US History. Authored by: P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul
Vickery, and Sylvie Waskiewicz. Provided by: OpenStax College. Located
at: http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/us-history. License: CC BY: Attribution. License Terms:
Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/latest/
Boundless US History courseware includes resources copyrighted and openly licensed by
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2
Table of Contents
READING WEEK/MODULE 1: African Origins – History and Culture _____________________ 7
1.1: Introduction __________________________________________________________________ 7
1.2: Africans before Captivity ________________________________________________________ 8
1.3: Medieval West Africa __________________________________________________________ 11
1.4: West Africa, 1300 – 1800AD _____________________________________________________ 13
1.5: West Central Africa, 14th – 18th Centuries _________________________________________ 15
READING WEEK 2: The African Slave trade and the Atlantic World ____________________ 19
2.1: Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 19
2.2: The Transatlantic Slave Trade ___________________________________________________ 21
2.3: Which Europeans Trafficked in Slaves? ____________________________________________ 28
2.4: Summary ____________________________________________________________________ 30
2.5: Primary Sources ______________________________________________________________ 31
READING MODULE 3: The Development Indentured Servitude and Racial Slavery in the
American Colonies ___________________________________________________________ 32
3.1: Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 32
3.2: The Settling of Virginia _________________________________________________________ 33
3.3: Tightening the Bonds of Slavery __________________________________________________ 40
3.4: Africans in the Low Country _____________________________________________________ 43
READING MODULE 4: African Americans and the American Revolution _________________ 51
4.1: Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 51
4.2: African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution ___________________________________ 52
4.3: Fighting Their Way to Freedom __________________________________________________ 59
4.4: The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery ___________________________________________ 64
3
4.5: Primary Sources ______________________________________________________________ 69
READING MODULE 5: Creating an African-American Culture _________________________ 70
5.1: Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 70
5.2: Language ____________________________________________________________________ 71
5.3: Spiritual Life: Public & Secret ____________________________________________________ 74
5.4: Performing Culture in Music & Dance _____________________________________________ 80
READING MODULE 6: The Abolitionist Movement __________________________________ 87
6.1: Introduction _________________________________________________________________ 87
6.2: The Abolitionist Movement _____________________________________________________ 88
6.3: Atlantic Origins of Reform ______________________________________________________ 92
6.4: William Lloyd Garrison _________________________________________________________ 94
6.5: Frederick Douglass ____________________________________________________________ 97
6.6: Primary Sources _____________________________________________________________ 102
READING MODULE 7: The Westward Expansion of Slavery __________________________ 103
7.1: Introduction ________________________________________________________________ 103
7.2: The Creation Of The Cotton Kingdom ____________________________________________ 104
7.3: The Domestic Slave Trade _____________________________________________________ 112
7.4: Life as a Slave in the Cotton Kingdom ____________________________________________ 117
7.5: The Free Black Population _____________________________________________________ 122
READING MODULE 8: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis ______________________________ 126
8.1: Introduction ________________________________________________________________ 126
8.2: The Sectional Crisis ___________________________________________________________ 127
8.3: The Crisis Joined _____________________________________________________________ 132
4
8.4: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men _________________________________________________ 135
8.5: From Sectional Crisis to National Crisis ___________________________________________ 144
READING MODULE 9: African Americans and the Civil War __________________________ 148
9.1: Introduction ________________________________________________________________ 148
9.2: The Election of 1860 and Secession ______________________________________________ 149
9.3: A War for Union? (1861—1862) _________________________________________________ 153
9.4: War for Freedom (1863—1865) _________________________________________________ 157
9.5: Black Soldiers and Union War Victories (1864—1865) _______________________________ 162
9.6: Primary Sources _____________________________________________________________ 166
READING MODULE 10: Reconstruction __________________________________________ 168
10.1: Introduction _______________________________________________________________ 168
10.2: Politics of Reconstruction _____________________________________________________ 169
10.3: Racial Violence in Reconstruction ______________________________________________ 182
10.4: The End of Reconstruction ____________________________________________________ 188
READING MODULE 11: African Americans and Jim Crow ____________________________ 191
Overview ______________________________________________________________________ 191
11.1: Jim Crow and African American Life ____________________________________________ 192
11.2: Jim Crow Laws ______________________________________________________________ 199
11.3 Exodusters _________________________________________________________________ 201
READING MODULE 12: Great Migration, World War I, Great Depression_______________ 206
Overview ______________________________________________________________________ 206
12.1: Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance ________________________________________ 207
12.2: The Nadir of Race Relations ___________________________________________________ 212
5
12.3: Theodore Roosevelt and Race _________________________________________________ 215
12.4: Marcus Garvey _____________________________________________________________ 222
12.5: The Depths of the Great Depression ____________________________________________ 225
12.6: Great Depression and the Democratic Party ______________________________________ 228
READING MODULE 13: African Americans and World War II _________________________ 232
Overview ______________________________________________________________________ 232
13.1: Race and World War II _______________________________________________________ 233
13.2: African Americans in WWII____________________________________________________ 234
READING MODULE 14: African Americans and the Civil Rights Movement _____________ 240
Overview ______________________________________________________________________ 240
14.1: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights ____________________________________ 241
14.2: The Role of Religion in the Civil Rights Movement _________________________________ 248
14.3: Martin Luther King, Jr. _______________________________________________________ 253
14.4: Women of the Civil Rights Movement ___________________________________________ 256
14.5: Sit-In and Freedom Rides _____________________________________________________ 261
14.6: Black Power ________________________________________________________________ 265
READING MODULE 15: African Americans Post Civil Rights Movement ________________ 271
Module 15 Overview _____________________________________________________________ 271
15.1: Continuing Challenges _______________________________________________________ 272
15.2: The Obama Administration ___________________________________________________ 273
15.3: Racial Tensions and Black Lives Matter __________________________________________ 276
ATTRIBUTIONS _____________________________________________________________ 281
Module Attributions _____________________________________________________________ 281
6
READING WEEK/MODULE 1: African
Origins – History and Culture
1.1: Introduction
African Origins—History and Culture
Module Introduction
Module 1 explores the rich histories and diverse cultures of West African peoples from
antiquity to the early nineteenth-century. In the process, it addresses such questions as:
•
•
•
•
Who were the African people who migrated to the Americas, voluntarily and involuntarily?
What regions of Africa did they come from?
What were their African societies like?
What were their cultural patterns and everyday lives like before they came? (3)
It is important to learn about the history and heritage of African Americans that extends back
into antiquity because throughout slavery and afterwards, people of European descent
advanced what anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits called the “Myths of the Negro Past. (Drake
1990:1–14).” These myths were advanced particularly and primarily about African Americans as
rationales to justify slavery, and later discrimination and segregation. (3) They advanced these
myths, which portrayed Africa as a primitive and backward place, a ’Dark Continent,’ to justify
slavery and create ideas of race and racial inferiority. Module 1 reveals how erroneous these
myths were. It demonstrates how West Africa, the area that became the center of the Atlantic
slave trade, nurtured and grew technologically and intellectually advanced, and economically
powerful, civilizations well before the arrival of European slave traders. (1)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
7
•
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
•
•
Discuss the distinguishing features of West African civilizations.
Refute ideas of Africa as a “Dark Continent.” (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: West African Histories and Cultures (see below)
1.2: Africans before Captivity
West African Histories and Cultures
Africans before Captivity
Most Africans who came to North America were from West Africa and West Central Africa. (See
Figure 1-1) Western Africa begins where the Sahara Desert ends. A short erratic, rainy season
supports the sparse cover of vegetation that defines the steppe like Sahel. The Sahel serves as a
transition to the Sudan and classic savanna where a longer rainy season supports baobab and
acacia trees sprinkled across an open vegetative landscape dominated by bushes, grasses and
other herbaceous growth. Next comes another narrow transitional zone, where the savanna
and forest intermingle, before the rain forest is reached. Finally, there is the coast, fringed with
mangrove swamps and pounded by heavy surf (Newman 1995:104). The Sahara is likened to a
sea lying north of West Africa and the Sahel to its shore. The desert and the Sahel form
geographical barriers to sub-Saharan West Africa that, like of the Atlantic Ocean, contributed to
the comparative isolation of the region from civilizations in Europe and the Middle East until
the 15th century.
8
Figure 1-1 : African Slave regions by Grin20 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 . Map depicting
major slave trading regions of Africa.
9
Figure 1-2 : Niger river map , a derivative of Niger river map by Wizardist is licensed under CC
BY-SA 3.0 . Map of the Niger River Basin and its inland delta.
Knowledge of sub-Saharan West Africa is limited for the period before 800 A.D., after which the
rise of Islam made Arabic records available, according to Phillip Curtin (1990:32). Evidence from
Dar-Tchitt, an archeological site in the area of Ancient Ghana, suggests agricultural expansion
and intensification gave rise to walled villages of 500–1000 inhabitants as early as 900–800 B.C.
By 700 B.C. the settlement patterns changed to smaller, somewhat more numerous and
unwalled villages.
Jenne-Jeno, a second archeological site, was first settled around 250 B.C. Located around the
inland delta of the Niger river, Jenne-Jeno probably started out as a place where local farmers,
herders, and fisher folk brought produce to exchange with one another. (See Figure 1-2) Over
time the location became an interregional trade center. It might have been the first one in the
region, but if so others soon followed and several of these became sites for a series of
kingdoms and empires in the Sahel and Sudan. Eventually the region was densely populated by
people who had a social organization based on kinship ties and political forms that are properly
called states, and cities based on Saharan trade, at least as far south as modern day Djenne,
which is between Timbuktu and Bamako in southern Mali.
What we know comes from Berber travelers, who made their first visits to the region in the 8th
century (Curtin 1990:45; Newman 1995:109–110). Oral sources included African poems, praise
songs, and accounts of past events usually passed on through official oral historians such as
Griots, who recite the histories from Ancient Mali and Songhai often while playing stringed
instruments unique to West Africa such as the Kora and Ngoni.
10
1.3: Medieval West Africa
Medieval West Africa
Figure 1-3 : African-civilizations-map-pre-colonial by Jeff Israel is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .
Map depicting major slave trading regions of Africa.
When the Portuguese first explored the West African coastline, the cultures of African societies
were highly evolved and had been so for centuries. In the millennium preceding Portuguese
exploration, three large centers of medieval African civilization developed sequentially along
the west coast of sub-Saharan Africa. (See Figure 1-3)
The first polity that is known to have gained prominence was Ancient Ghana. Between 500 AD–
1250 AD, Ancient Ghana flourished in the southern Sahel north of the middle Niger and middle
Senegal Rivers. Ancient Ghana had a civil service, strong monarchy based on a matrilineal
system of inheritance, a cabinet, an army, an effective justice system and a regular source of
income from trade as well as tribute from vassal kings (Boahen 1966:4–9).
11
As Ghana declined over the next 200 years, the ancient Mali Empire arose in the same area but
descended territorially further along the Niger River. Mali encompassed a huge area stretching
from the Lower Senegal and Upper Niger rivers eastward to the Niger bend and northward to
the Sahel.
Its great size made Mali an even more diverse state than Ghana. The majority of the people
lived in small villages and cultivated rice or sorghums and millets, while some communities
specialized in herding and fishing. Trade flourished in the towns, which housed a wide array of
craftspeople, along with a growing number of Islamic teachers and holy men. The main
commercial centers were its capitals Niani, Timbuktu, and Gao.
Mansa Musa is the most remembered of the kings of Mali. During Musa’s reign 1307–1337,
Mali’s boundaries were extended to their farthest limits. There were fourteen provinces ruled
by governors or emirs who were usually famous generals. Berber provinces were governed by
their own sheiks . They all paid tribute to Musa in gold, horses and clothes. Musa instituted
national honors for his provincial administrators to encourage devoted service. He ruled
impartially with a great sense of justice. To help in this work he had judges, scribes and civil
servants. Musa established diplomatic relationships with other African states, especially
Morocco, with whom he exchanged ambassadors.
Mansa Musa is probably best known as the ruler who firmly established the Islamic religion in
Mali along with peace, order, trade and commerce. Mansa Musa started the practice of sending
students to Morocco for studies and he laid the foundation for what later became the city of
Timbuktu, the commercial and educational center of the western Sudan (Boahen 1966:17–22).
Present day Mande people trace their ancestry back to the great 13th century. Learn more
about what archeology has uncovered in Jeno-Jenne about the past of the Mande people ,
Africans who helped settle America during the 17th and 18th centuries (Hall 1992:45).
Around 1375, Gao, a small tributary state of Mali, broke away under the leadership of Sunni Ali
and thus began the rise of the Songhai Empire. Over the next 28 years, Sunni Ali converted the
small kingdom of Gao into the huge empire of Songhai. Songhai encompassed the geographic
area of ancient Ghana and Mali combined and extended into the region of the Hausa states of
ancient and contemporary northwest Nigeria.
Mandinka, Wolof, Bamana, (also called Bambara) peoples, and others lived in the western
reaches of the Songhai in the Senegambia area. Hausa and Fulani people lived in the region that
is now northwest Nigeria. All of these cultures still exist.
Islamic scholars and African oral traditions document that all of these states had centralized
governments, long distance trade routes, and educational systems. Between the 13th and 17th
centuries Mande and Mande-related warriors established the dominance of Mande culture in
the Senegambia geographical region. Throughout the West African savanna where people
migrated in advance of the Mande warriors, people spoke mutually intelligible Mandekan
12
languages, and had a strong oral history tradition. In the 18th century people of the Mande
culture were highly represented among those enslaved in the French Louisiana colony in North
America (Hall 1992).
By the time, Portugal and Spain embarked on exploration and conquest of the Western
Hemisphere, Mohammed Askia I ruled over Songhai. Askia completed Mansa Musa’s project to
create a great center of learning, culminating with the establishment of the Sankore University
in Timbuktu. Sankore teachers and students were from all over sub-Saharan Africa and from the
Arabic nations to the east. Leo Africanus, an eyewitness described Sankore University thus:
“[H]ere are great stores of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men that are bountifully
maintained at the King’s (Muhammad Askia) costs and charges ([1600] 1896).”
Leo Africanus was born, El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyati in the city of Granada
in 1485, but was expelled along with his parents and thousands of other Muslims by Ferdinand
and Isabella in 1492. Settling in Morocco, he studied in Fez and as a teenager accompanied his
uncle on diplomatic missions throughout North Africa. During these travels, he visited
Timbuktu.
As a young man he was captured by pirates and presented as an exceptionally learned slave to
the great Renaissance pope, Leo X. Leo who freed him, baptized him under the name “Johannis
Leo de Medici,” and commissioned him to write in Italian a detailed survey of Africa. His
accounts provided most of what Europeans knew about the continent for the next several
centuries.
1.4: West Africa, 1300 – 1800AD
West Africa, 1300 — 1800AD
From the 14th through the 18th century, three smaller political states emerged in the forests
along the coast of Africa below the Songhai Empire. The uppermost groups of states were the
Gonja or Volta Kingdoms, located around the Volta River and the confluence of the Niger, on
what was called the Windward Coast, now Sierra Leone and Liberia. Most of the people in the
upper region of the Windward Coast belonged to a common language group, called Gur by
linguists. They also held common religious beliefs and a common system of land ownership.
They lived in decentralized societies where political power resided in associations of men and
women.
Below the Volta lay the Asante Empire in the southeastern geographical area of the
contemporary nations of Cote d’Ivoire, Togo and modern Ghana. By the 15th century the Akan
peoples, who included the Baule, and Twi-speaking Asante, reached dominance in the central
13
region. Akan culture had a highly evolved political system. One hundred years or more before
the rise of democracy in North America, the Asante governed themselves through a
constitution and assembly. Commercially the Asante-dominated region straddled the African
trade routes that carried ivory, gold and grain. As a result, Europeans called various parts of the
region the Ivory Coast, Grain Coast and Gold Coast. The transatlantic slave trade was fed by the
emergence of these Volta Kingdoms and the Asante Empire. During the 17th and early 18th
centuries African people called from these regions were predominately among those enslaved
in the British North American mainland colonies (Boahen 1966).
Just below the Gold Coast lay the Bights of Benin and Biafra. Oral history and findings in
archeological excavation attest that Yoruba people have been the dominate group on the west
bank of the Niger River as far as their historical memory extends and even further into the past.
The 12th century found the Yoruba people beginning to coalesce into a number of territorial
city-states of which Ife, Oyo, and Benin dominated. Old loyalties to the clan or lineage were
subordinated to allegiance to a king or oni. The Oni was chosen on a rotating basis by the clans.
Below him was an elected state hierarchy that depended on broad support from the
community. The people were subsistence farmers, artisans, and long distance traders in cloth,
kola nuts, palm oil, and copper. Trade and the acquisition of horses were factors in the
emergence of Oyo as the dominant political power among the Yoruba states by late 14th and
early 15th century (Boahen 1966).
Dahomey, or Benin, created by the Fon ruling dynasty, came to dominance in the 17th century
and was a contemporary of the Asante Empire. As early as the 17th century the Oyo kingdom
had an unwritten constitution with a system of political checks and balances. Dahomey, located
in Southern Nigeria, east of Yorubaland and west of the Niger River also claimed to have
obtained kingship from the Yoruba city of Ife. Oyo and Ife not only shared a common cultural
history but also shared many other cultural characteristics, such as religious pantheons,
patrilineal descent groups, urbanized settlement patterns, and a high level of artistic
achievement by artisans, particularly in ivory, wood, brass and bronze sculpture.
Relatively few Yoruba and Fon people, the two principal ethnic groups in the Oyo kingdoms,
were enslaved in North America. Most were carried to Santa Domingo (Haiti) and Brazil. During
and after the Haitian Revolution, some of the Fon people who were enslaved in Haiti
immigrated voluntarily or involuntarily to New Orleans (Hall 1992).
The Ibo people, the third principal group found around the Bight of Biafra in the southeastern
part of the region, predominated among those enslaved in the Chesapeake region during the
late 17th and early 18th century. Later in the 18th century Africans, whom the Europeans called
the “Congos,” i.e. Kongos, and “Angolas,” predominated among those enslaved in Virginia and
the Low Country plantations of colonial South Carolina (Curtin, 1969; Morgan 1998:63; Eltis et
al 2002). (3)
14
1.5: West Central Africa, 14th – 18th Centuries
West Central Africa, 14th — 18th Centuries
In the century before Portuguese exploration of West Africa, the Kongo was another Kingdom
that developed in West Central Africa. In the three hundred years from the date Ne Lukeni Kia
Nzinga founded the kingdom until the Portuguese destroyed it in 1665, Kongo was an
organized, stable, and politically centralized society based on a subsistence economy. The
Kongo is significant in exploring the historic contexts of African American heritage because the
majority of all Africans enslaved in the Southern English colonies were from West Central Africa
(Curtin 1969; Eltis et al 2001).
The Bakongo (the Kongo people), today several million strong, live in modern Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, neighboring Cabinda, and Angola. The present
division of their territory into modern political entities masks the fact that the area was once
united under the suzerainty of the ancient Kingdom of Kongo, one of the most important
civilizations ever to emerge in Africa, according to Robert Ferris Thompson. The Kings of the
Kongo ruled over an area stretching from the Kwilu-Nyari River, just north of the port of
Loango, to the river Loje in northern Angola, and from the Atlantic to the inland valley of the
Kwango. (See Figure 1-4)
Thompson estimates the Kongo encompassed an area roughly equaling the miles between New
York City and Richmond, Virginia, in terms of coastal distance and between Baltimore and Eire,
Pennsylvania, in terms of inland breadth. Birmingham comments that by 1600, after a century
of overseas contact with the Portuguese, the “complex Kongo kingdom…dominated a region
more than half the size of England which stretched from the Atlantic to the Kwango (1981:29).”
15
Figure 1-4 : KingdomKongo1711 by Happenstance is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Genericlicense. The Kingdom of Kongo
The Bakongo shared a common culture with the people of eight adjoining regions, all of whom
were either part of the Kongo Kingdom during the transatlantic slave trade or were part of the
kingdoms formed by peoples fleeing from the advancing armies of Kongo chiefdoms. In their
records slave traders called the Bakongo, as well as the people from the adjoining regions,
“Congos” and “Angolas” although they may have been Mbembe, Mbanda, Nsundi, Mpangu,
Mbata, Mbamba or Loango.
Ki-Kongo-speaking groups inhabited the West Central African region then known as the Loango
Coast. The term Loango coast describes a historically significant area of West Central Africa
extending from Cape Lopez or Cape Catherine in Gabon to Luanda in Angola. Within this region,
Loango has been the name of a kingdom, a province, and a port. Once linked to the powerful
Kongo Kingdom, the Loango Kingdom was dominated by the Villi, a Kongo people who migrated
to the coastal region during the 1300s. Loango became an independent state probably in the
late 1300s or early 1400s. With two other Kongo-related kingdoms, Kakongo, and Ngoyo
(present day Cabinda), it became one of the most important trading states north of the Congo
River.
A common social structure was shared by people in the coastal kingdoms of Loango, Kakongo,
Ngoyo, Vungu, and the Yombe chiefdoms; the Teke federation in the east and the Nsundi
societies on either side of the Zaire River from the Matadi/Vungu area in the west to Mapumbu
of Malebo pool in the east. The provincial regions, districts, and villages each had chiefs and a
hierarchical system through which tribute flowed upward to the King of the Kongo and rewards
flowed downward. Each regional clan or group had a profession or craft, such as weaving,
basket making, potting, iron working, and so on. Tribute and trade consisted of natural
resources, agricultural products, textiles, other material cultural artifacts and cowries shells
(Vansima 1962; Birmingham, 1981:28–30; Bentley, 1970:75).
The “Kongos” and “Angolas” shared a “ lingua franca ” or trade language that allowed them to
communicate. They also shared other cultural characteristics such as matrilineal social
organization and a cosmology expressed in their religious beliefs and practices.
Woman-and-child figures are visual metaphors for both individual and societal fertility among
Kongo Peoples and reflect their matrilineal social organization, that is, tracing their kinship
through their mother’s side of the family. (See Figure 1-5)
Cosmology is a body of collective representations of the world as a whole, ordered in space and
time, and a human’s place in it.
Fu-Kiau, the renowned Kongo scholar, was the first writer to make Kongo cosmology explicit
(Fu-Kiau 1969). According to Fu Kiau Bunseki,:
16
“The Kongo cosmogram is the foundation of Kongo society. The circle made by the sun’s
movement is the first geometric picture given to human beings. We move the same way the
sun moves: we wake up, are active, die, then come back. The horizon line is the kalunga line
between the physical and spiritual world. It literally means ‘the line of God.’ When you have a
circle of the Kongo cosmogram, the center is seen as the eternal flame. It is a way to come
closer to the core of the community. If someone is suffering, they say ‘you are outside the
circle, be closer to the fire.’ To stand on the cosmogram is to tie a social knot, bringing people
together. Dikenga is from the verb kenga, which means ‘to take care, to protect,’ but also the
flame or fire from inside the circle, to build and give life” (Fu-Kiau 2001).
Figure 1-5 : KongoFemaleFigure by Cliff1066 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Before the 1920s, male
and female figures carved in stone served as Kongo funerary monuments commemorating the
accomplishments of the deceased. The mother and child was a common theme representing a
woman who has saved her family line from extinction. Kongo mortuary figures are noted for
their seated postures, expressive gestures and details of jewelry and headwear that indicate
the deceased’s status. The leopard claw hat is worn by male rulers and women acting as
regents.
Matrilineal social organization and certain cosmological beliefs expressed in religious
ceremonies and funerary practices continue to be evident in the culture of rural South Carolina
17
and Florida African Americans who are descendants of enslaved Africans (Brown 1987, 1988,
1989, 1994, 2000, 2001; Thompson 1984; Thompson and Cornet 1981).
European slave trade led to internal wars, enslavement of multitudes, introduction of major
political upheavals, migrations, and power shifts from greater to lesser-centralized authority of
Kongo and other African societies. Most notably the slave trade destroyed old lineages and
kinship ties upon which the basis of social order and organization was maintained in African
societies (MacGaffey 1986).
The history and culture of West Central African peoples is important to the understanding of
African American people in the present because of their high representation among enslaved
peoples. It has been estimated that 69 % of all African people transported in the Transatlantic
Slave Trade between 1517–1700 A.D. were from West Central Africa and, between 1701–1800,
people from West Central Africa comprised about 38% of the all Africans brought to the
West to be enslaved (Curtin 1969). In South Carolina, by 1730, the number of Africans or “saltwater negroes,” mostly from West Central Africa, and “native-born” African Americans, many
descendant from West Central Africans, exceeded the white population.
18
READING WEEK 2: The African Slave trade
and the Atlantic World
2.1: Introduction
The African Slave Trade and the Atlantic World
Module Introduction
According to W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the preeminent black intellectuals and activists of the late
19th and 20th centuries, the African slave trade, which transported between 10 and 15 million
Africans across the Atlantic to work as slaves in the Americas, was the most important “drama
in the last thousand years of human history.” The trade tore Africans away from “the dark
beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended
into Hell.” Module 2 examines the tragic history of the transatlantic slave trade that occurred
between European and African traders along the west coast of Africa from the late fifteenth
through the nineteenth century. It addresses why Europeans came to Africa to acquire slave
labor, why powerful African kingdoms who controlled trade along the coast of Africa sold
human beings to European traders in exchange for foreign commodities, how the trade
generated early ideas of racial difference and systems of racism, and how the trade
transformed Africa and the lives of the Africans who found themselves ensnared in a slave
system sustained by cold, calculating economic rationality and human brutality.
Rather than a primitive, archaic system, the transatlantic slave trade, and the labor performed
by African and African-American slaves, created the modern Western world – one characterized
by a global, interconnected system of capitalist expansion. The trade regarded human beings as
commodities who themselves labored to produce commodities – gold, silver, sugar, tobacco,
cotton – that generated profits for plantation owners, manufacturers, and merchants. African
and African-American slaves resisted enslavement at every stage and found ways to create new
communities, new kinship networks, and new cultures in defiance of an inherently
dehumanizing system of racial slavery that survived for more than four hundred years. (1)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
19
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical resources to analyze a topic relevant to Europeans, Africans, and the
Transatlantic Slave Trade. (1)
Readings and Resources
•
•
Learning Unit: Exchanging People for Trade Goods (see below) (1)
Primary Source Documents (see below)
o Olaudah Equiano excerpt
o Thomas Phillips excerpt
20
2.2: The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Exchanging People for Trade Goods
Introduction
Figure 2-1: Ottoman Empire by André Koehne is in the Public Domain . Map of the Ottoman
Empire’s geographical reach in the Mediterranean world from 1481 to 1683.
Europeans made the first steps toward an Atlantic slave trade in the 1440s when Portuguese
sailors landed in West Africa in search of gold, spices, and allies against the Muslims and the
Ottoman Empire who dominated Mediterranean trade. (2) ( See Figure 2-1 )
When the Portugese landed on the coasts of Africa they found societies engaged in a network
of trade routes that carried a variety of goods back and forth across sub-Saharan Africa. Some
of those goods included kola nuts, shea butter, salt, indigenous textiles, copper, iron and iron
tools, and people for sale as slaves within West Africa. The arrival of European slave traders in
Africa also followed Muslim traders by some eight centuries. As early as the seventh century,
Muslims from North African and other areas of the Mediterranean world established trade
routes into Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa and acquired gold, pepper, ivory, dried meat and
hides, and slaves, which they transported to North Africa, the Middle East and beyond (Curtin
1990:40–41, Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (2014), 202).
As a result of the early West African slave trade by the Portuguese, a sizeable number of
Africans ended up in Portugal and Spain. By the middle of the 16th century, 10,000 black people
21
made up 10 percent of the population of Lisbon. Some had been freed while others purchased
their freedom. Some were the offspring of African and Portuguese marriages and liaisons.
Seville, Spain had an African population of 6,000. Some of these Africans accompanied Spanish
explorers to the North American mainland. (Curtin 1990:40–11).
All of the sub-Saharan African societies discussed in Module 1 participated in the slave trade as
the enslaved or as slavers or brokers. While Europeans created the demand side for slaves,
African political and economic elites did the primary work of capturing, transporting and selling
Africans to European slave traders on the African coast (Thornton 2002:36). Since European
traders were vastly outnumbered by West Africans who controlled trade along the coast, they
first had to negotiate with powerful African chiefs who often demanded tribute and fair trading
terms. Only then could European traders acquire African slaves.
The reason why Africans participated in the slave trade, given its drain on the most productive
adults from Africa’s populations, is complex.
The violence and war sown by the slave trade greatly disrupted African societies. One answer is
that the institution of slavery already existed in African societies. Slavery in Africa, however,
was different from the kind of slavery that evolved in the New World, particularly the English
colonies, a topic discussed in Module 3. (Curtin 1990:40–41).
Most legal systems in Africa recognized slavery as a social condition. Slaves constituted a class
of people, captives or their descendants, over whom private citizens exercised the rights of the
state to make laws, punish, and control. Although these rights could be sold, in practice people
of the slave class who had been settled in one location for a sufficient time came to possess a
number of rights, including immunity from resale or arbitrary transfer from one owner or
location (Thornton 2002:43). In Kongo in west central Africa, there was no such thing as a class
of slaves but many people belonged to a transitory group of servile subjects. “These were
people of foreign origin, people who had been outlawed for criminal acts, people who had lost
the protection of their kinfolk, or become irredeemably indebted to others,” argues one
historian. “They differed from those enslaved by Europeans in that under normal conditions
they were likely to be reabsorbed into society (Birmingham 1981:32).”
Many of those enslaved and brought to the New World were people who had participated in
local and long-distance trade. Depending upon their resources, they were skilled agriculturists;
artisans of textiles, bronze, gold, ivory sculpture, jewelry and sacred objects; craftsmen of
wooden tools, furniture, and architectural elements; as well as potters and blacksmiths. Others
were skilled linguists in more than one African language and often one or more European
languages as well. In some cases, they had developed trade languages that facilitated intergroup communication even among African people whose language they did not know.
Even though those who were enslaved became part of one of the most heinous of historical
tragedies, Africans enslaved in North American also became part of one of the greatest
22
triumphs of human history. African people and their descendants helped to develop the
modern Western world and create a new nation in the process. (3)
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
The ninth through the fifteenth centuries were times of great struggle in Europe. The European
powers struggled with one another for territorial and commercial dominance. Western and
Eastern Christendom struggled with one another and with Islam for religious and
cultural dominance.
The struggle for religious dominance resulted in North African Berbers, Mid-Eastern Arabs and
other Muslim peoples from Morocco occupying the Iberian Peninsula for 700 years from 712
A.D. to 1492 A.D. During this time, while the Iberian powers sought to free themselves of
Moorish occupation, England and France embarked on the Crusades to retake the Holy Land
from Muslims, whom Christians called the “infidels.”
The periods of the ninth to fifteenth centuries were also times of external warfare among
European powers over trade, the decline of chiefdoms, and of internal consolidation, all leading
to the emergence of new European states. This era was marked by the loss of agricultural
productivity, famine, disease, and epidemics. Peasants rebelled against increased demands by
nobility for tribute to pay for the wars. To resolve the emerging crisis, European nations
increased the scale and intensity of Old World wars for commercial dominance. These
circumstances combined to deplete the wealth of European nobility and the Church (Wolf
1982:108–125). (3)
Economic Factors Leading to the Enslavement of Africans
23
Figure 2-2: Map of the Atlantic to illustrate colonization in America (1888) by Charles P. Lucas is
in the Public Domain . Map showing the Atlantic world, including the places in African where
European traders acquired slaves and the regions in the Americans where Europeans used
them for labor.
As the fifteenth century came to a close, Europeans embarked upon exploration of the New
World and Africa in search of expanded territory, new goods, precious metals, and new
markets. All of these enterprises required manpower to explore, clear land, build colonies, mine
precious metals, and provide the settlers with subsistence. In the New World, Europeans first
tried to meet these needs by enslaving American Indians and relying on European indentured
laborers. Nevertheless, war, disease and famine among Native Americans and European settlers
depleted the colonies’ already limited labor supply. When both of these sources proved
inadequate to meet the needs for labor, Europe turned to Africa (Wolf 1982:108–125).
The development of economies based on production of sugar, tobacco and eventually rice were
contingent upon workers with particular attributes of material cultural knowledge, agricultural
skills and the physical capability to acclimate to the New World environment. Africans first
enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese demonstrated that they were people who fulfilled
these requirements (Wolfe 1982:108–125).
In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadores sailed to the Americas lured by the prospects
of finding gold. They brought a few Africans as slaves with them. Early Spanish settlers soon
were reporting that in mining operations the work of one African was equal to that of four to
eight Indians. They promoted the idea that Africans as slaves would be essential to production
of goods needed for European colonization.
Several factors combined to give impetus to the Spanish demand for an African work force.
Native Americans died in large numbers from European diseases for which they had no
immunity. At the same time, the Spanish clergy interceded to the Spanish Crown to protect
exploitation of Indians in mining operations.
The introduction of sugarcane as a cash crop was another factor motivating the Spanish to
enslave Africans. In order to turn a profit, Spanish planters needed a large, controllable work
force, they turned to Africa for laborers (Reynolds 2002:14).
Once Portugal and Spain established the profitability of the African slave trade, other European
nations entered the field. The English made an initial foray into the African slave trade in 1530
when William Hawkins, a merchant of Plymouth, visited the Guinea Coast and left with a few
slaves. Three decades later Hawkins’ son, John, set sail in 1564 for the Guinea Coast. Supported
by Queen Elizabeth I, he commanded four armed ships and a force of one hundred and seventy
men. Hawkins lost many of these men in fights with “Negroes” on the Guinea coast in his
attempts to secure Africans to enslave. Later through piracy he took 300 Africans from a
Spanish vessel, making it profitable for him to head for the West Indies where he could sell
them for money and trade them for provisions. Queen Elizabeth I rewarded him for opening the
24
slave trade for the English by knighting him and giving him a crest that showed a Negro’s head
and bust with arms bound secure (Hale [1884] 1967 Vol. 3:60).
For more than a century after Columbus’s voyages, only Spain and Portugal established New
World settlements. England did not establish its first enduring settlement in Jamestown,
Virginia, until 1607. France founded a settlement in Quebec in 1608. Henry Hudson brought
Africans with him in his Dutch sponsored exploration of the river that came to bear his name.
Africans also accompanied the Dutch in 1621 when they established a trading post in the area
of present day Albany. (3)
Race as a Factor
European participation in African enslavement can only be partially explained by economics. At
the end of the medieval period, slavery was not widespread in Europe. It was mostly isolated in
the southern fringes of the Mediterranean. Iberian Christians mostly enslaved Muslims, Jews,
Gypsies, and Slavs who were “white” non-Christian eastern Europeans from whose name the
word “slave” derives. When the transatlantic slave trade in Africans began in 1441, Europeans
placed Africans in a new category. They deemed them natural slaves — a primitive, heathen
people whose dark skin confirmed their God-ordained inferiority and subservience to Christian
Europeans. (Gomes 1936 in Sweet 2003:5). Europeans thus created an emergent understanding
of “race” and racial difference from their participation in the transatlantic slave trade and a
system of racism codified in law and policy and driven by a desire for wealth and profit. The first
transnational, institutional endorsement of African slavery occurred in 1452 when the Pope
granted King Alphonso V of Portugal the right to reduce all the non-Christians in West Africa to
perpetual slavery (Saunders 1982:37–38 in Sweet 2003:6).
By the second half of the fifteenth century, the term “Negro” had become essentially
synonymous with “slave” across the Iberian Peninsula and had literally come to represent a
race of people, most often associated with black Africans and considered to be inferior (Sweet
2003:7). In the seventeenth century, Spanish colonizers created a sistema de castas, or caste
system, that ranked the status, and power, of peoples based on their “purity of blood.” Spanish
elites born in Spain sat the top of this racial classificatory system while African slaves occupied
the bottom. Skin color thus correlated with status and power. Race-based ideas of European
superiority and religious beliefs in the need to Christianize “heathen” peoples contributed to a
culture in which enslavement of Africans could be rationalized and justified. These
explanations, however, do not answer the question of why some Africans participated in the
enslavement of other Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. (3)
25
Figure 2- 3: Las castas mexicanas by Ignacio María Barreda is in the Public Domain .
26
Internal African Conflicts and Complexities
Western and African historians agree that war captives, condemned criminals, debtors, aliens,
famine victims, and political dissidents were subject to enslavement within West African
societies. They also agree that during the period of the transatlantic slave trade, internal wars,
crop failure, drought, famine, political instability, small-scale raiding, taxation, and judicial or
religious punishment produced a large number of enslaved people within African states,
nations and principalities. There is general agreement among scholars that the capture and sale
of Africans for enslavement was primarily carried out by the Africans themselves, especially the
coastal kings and the elders, and that few Europeans ever actually marched inland and
captured slaves themselves (Boahen, 1966; Birmingham 1981; Wolf 1985; Mintz 2003). African
wars were the most important source of enslavement. (3) It is important to recognize, however,
that there did not exist a common shared “African” identity among African peoples during the
early stages of the transatlantic slave trade along the coast of West Africa. Consequently, when
traders from West African kingdoms sold men, women, and children to Europeans slave traders
most would have thought they were selling outsiders, rather than fellow Africans, from their
societies and kingdoms — people who spoke different languages, people who were prisoners of
war or criminals, debtors and dissidents. (1)
Just as there were wars between Europeans over the right to slave catchment areas and points
of disembarkation, there were increasing numbers of wars between African principalities as the
slave trade progressed. Whatever the ostensible causes for these wars, they resulted in
prisoners of war that supplied slave factories at Goree and Bance Islands, Elmina, Cape Coast
Castle, and James Forts and at Fernando Po along the West and West Central African coast.
The fighting between African societies followed a pattern. Wars weakened the centralized
African governments and undermined the authority of associations, societies, and the elders
who exercised social control in societies with decentralized political forms. The winners and
losers in wars both experienced the loss of people from niches in lineages, secret societies,
associations, guilds and other networks that maintained social order. Conflict brought about
loss of population and seriously compromised indigenous production of material goods, cash
crops and subsistence crops.
Winners and losers in the African wars came to rely upon European trade goods more and
more. Eventually the European monetized system replaced cowrie shells as a medium of
exchange. European trade goods supplanted former African reliance on indigenous material
goods, natural resources and products as the economic basis of their society. At the same time
Europeans increasingly required people in exchange for trade goods. Once this stage was
reached an African society had little choice but to trade human lives for European goods and
guns; guns that had become necessary to wage wars for further captives in order to trade for
goods upon which an African society was now dependent (Birmingham 1981: 38).
While the slave trade often enriched the West African kingdoms that controlled the trade along
the coast, it had a devastating impact on the societies as a whole. African societies lost kinship
27
networks, agricultural laborers and production. The loss of people meant the loss of indigenous
artisans and craftsmen, along with the knowledge of textile production, weaving and dying,
metallurgy and metalwork, carving, basket making, potting skills, architectural, and agricultural
techniques upon which their societies depended. Africa’s loss was the New World’s gain. These
were the same material cultural expertise and skills that Africans brought to the New World
along with their physical labor and ability to acclimate to environmental conditions that made
them indispensable in the development of the Western Hemisphere. (3)
2.3: Which Europeans Trafficked in Slaves?
Which Europeans Trafficked in Slaves?
The Portuguese dominated the first 130 years of the transatlantic African slave trade. After
1651 they fell into second position behind the British who became the primary carriers of
Africans to the New World, a position they continued to maintain until the end of the trade in
the early nineteenth century.
Based on data concerning 86% of all slaving vessels leaving for the New World, historians
estimate that the British, including British colonials, and the Portuguese account for seven out
of ten transatlantic slaving voyages and carried nearly three quarters of all people embarking
from Africa destined for slavery (Eltis et al 2001).
France joined the traffic of slaves in 1624, Holland and Denmark soon followed. The Dutch
wrested control of the transatlantic slave trade from the Portuguese in the 1630s, but by the
1640s they faced increasing competition from French and British traders. England fought two
wars with the Dutch in the 17 th century to gain supremacy in the transatlantic slave trade.
Three special English companies were formed, including the Royal African Company, to operate
in the sale of slaves. They were given the exclusive rights to trade between the Gold Coast and
the British colonies in America. As the 17 th century came to a close in 1698, English merchants’
protests led to the English crown extending the right to trade in slaves more generally.
Colonists in New England immediately began to engage in slave trafficking. Vessels left Boston,
Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island laden with hogsheads of rum that were exchanged
for people in Africa consequently enslaved in North American and Caribbean colonies.
Beginning with the Spanish demand for slave labor, a demand that continued and expanded in
the other colonies and the United States even after abolition of the trade in 1807, the
Transatlantic Slave Trade brought between 9.6 to 11 million Africans to the New World (Curtin
1969; Donnan [1930]2002; Eltis et. al 2001; Hall 1992).
28
Greater numbers of people were sold into slavery from some regions as compared to other
regions. Some European nations transported more Africans than others and some regions in
the New World received more Africans from certain regions than others. The British and
Portuguese account for seven out of every ten transatlantic slaving voyages and carried nearly
three quarters of all people embarking from Africa destined for slavery (Eltis et al 2001). (3)
The Middle Passage
European slavers transported millions of Africans across the ocean in a terrifying journey known
as the Middle Passage. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano, a former
slave and abolitionist whose memoir helped end the British slave trade in 1807, recalled the
fearsomeness of the crew, the filth and gloom of the hold, the inadequate provisions allotted
for the captives, and the desperation that drove some slaves to suicide. (Equiano claimed to
have been born in Igboland in modern-day Nigeria, but he may have been born in colonial
South Carolina, where he collected memories of the Middle Passage from African-born
slaves.) (2)
In the same time period, Alexander Falconbridge, a slave ship surgeon, described the sufferings
of slaves from shipboard infections and close quarters in the hold. Dysentery, known as “the
bloody flux,” left captives lying in pools of excrement. Chained in small spaces in the hold,
slaves could lose so much skin and flesh from chafing against metal and timber that their bones
protruded. (2) Other sources detailed rapes, whippings, and diseases like smallpox and
conjunctivitis aboard slave ships. (1) One historian has referred to conditions Africans endured in
the Middle Passage as “probably the purest form of domination in the history of slavery as an
institution.” (Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, 117). (2)
“Middle” had various meanings in the Atlantic slave trade. For the captains and crews of slave
ships, the Middle Passage was one leg in the maritime trade in sugar and other semi-finished
American goods, manufactured European commodities, and African slaves. For the enslaved
Africans, the Middle Passage was the middle leg of three distinct journeys from Africa to the
Americas. First was an overland journey in Africa to a coastal slave-trading factory, often a trek
of hundreds of miles. Second—and middle—was an oceanic trip lasting from one to six months
in a slaver. Third was acculturation (known as “seasoning”) and transportation to the American
mine, plantation, or other location where new slaves were forced to labor. (2)
29
Figure 2-5: Slaveshipposter by Plymouth Chapter of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the
Slave Trade is in the Public Domain . This diagram of the British slave ship, Brookes, showing
how traders stowed African slaves in order to maximize capacity. Recent estimates count
between 11 and 12 million Africans forced across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries, with about 2 million deaths at sea as well as an additional several million
dying in the trade’s overland African leg or during seasoning.
2.4: Summary
Summary of Transatlantic Slave Trade
30
It was the labor of enslaved Africans who extracted the gold and silver from South American
mines, who grew the sugar cane on Caribbean plantations, and later tobacco, rice, indigo, and
cotton on North American plantations that helped power an entire system of capitalism.
European capital funded slave ships who carried European goods to the coast of Africa in
exchange for human beings who became slaves and by extension commodities who were
bought and sold to other traders and plantation owners.
These African slaves then produced commodities grown in European colonies that traders
exported to Europe for manufacturing and sale to consumers across the continent. Africans and
their labor were the beating heart of this interconnected system of global trade and capitalist
expansion. For instance, in one single year, 1807, Britain imported 297.9 million pounds of
slave-produced sugar, 72.74 million pounds of cotton, and 16.4 million pounds of tobacco —
virtually all of it produced by slaves.
In the year 1800 alone, historian Robin Blackburn estimates that about one million slaves
performed labor on British controlled plantations that amounted to about “2,500,000,000
hours of toil” combined. (Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery , 581, Rediker, The Slave
Ship , 347–348). That same African slave labor in 1800 produced the equivalent of over 4 billion
American dollars when adjusted for inflation in 2018.
Despite the exploitation and dehumanization they endured as slaves, Africans created new
cultures and kinship ties that drew from their roots in Africa and their new experiences and
contacts in the Americas. These African-American cultures would become the basis of black
resistance and resilience for generations of slaves while, later, also becoming a fundamental
part of the history and culture of the United States of America.
2.5: Primary Sources
Primary Source Document: Olaudah Equiano Excerpt
Document File Link
Primary Source Document: Thomas Phillips Excerpt
Document File Link
A Brief Guide to Analyzing and Writing about Primary Sources
Document File Link
31
READING MODULE 3: The Development
Indentured Servitude and Racial Slavery in
the American Colonies
3.1: Introduction
Servitude and Slavery in the American Colonies
Module Introduction
African and African-American slave labor helped transform European colonies in North America
into important producers of coveted commodities such as tobacco, rice, indigo, and, later,
cotton and sugar. Nevertheless, a colonial economy based in part on racial slavery was not
inevitable in North America. Initially, colonists relied mostly on European and even African
indentured servants for labor in the tobacco fields of places like Virginia and Maryland. But as
these colonial societies developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fluid labor
arrangements and racial categories began to solidify into the race-based, chattel slavery that
increasingly defined the economy of the Britain’s North American empire. The North American
mainland originally occupied a small and marginal place in that broad empire, as even the
output of its most prosperous colonies paled before the tremendous wealth of Caribbean sugar
islands. And yet the colonial backwaters on the North American mainland, ignored by many
imperial officials, were nevertheless deeply tied into these larger Atlantic networks. A new and
increasingly complex Atlantic World connected the continents of Europe, Africa, and the
Americas. Patterns and systems established during the colonial era would continue to shape
American society for centuries. And none, perhaps, would be as brutal and destructive as the
institution of slavery. (2)
Module Three focuses on the development of racial slavery, and slave societies, in the
Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland and the Low Country colonies of South Carolina
and Georgia. It addresses how the growth of a tobacco economy in the Chesapeake, and the
decline of indentured servitude, led to an increasing demand for and reliance on African slave
labor. It also discusses how the slave societies in the tobacco based colonies of the Chesapeake
differed from the rice based economies of the Low Country. Module Three also discusses how
colonies like Virginia and Maryland created new laws to make racial slavery a legal category and
increasingly define blackness as associated with bondage and whiteness linked with freedom.
Finally, Module Three demonstrates how Africans and African-Americans in these new slave
societies created enduring family bonds and kinship networks despite their legal status as
chattel property. (1)
32
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
•
•
Discuss the important differences between various slave societies in North America in the 17th
and 18th centuries.
Formulate an opinion as to the inevitability of racial slavery in North America. (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: Slavery in Colonial America (see below)
3.2: The Settling of Virginia
Slavery in Colonial America
The Settling of Virginia: The Development of a Tobacco Economy and the Arrival of the
Colony’s First Africans
The English failed in their first attempt to establish a colony in 1585 on Roanoke Island, one of
the barrier islands off what would become North Carolina. They left little more than terrain
named Virginia for the virgin Queen Elizabeth the First. Twenty-two years later, in 1607 they
established a settlement they called, Jamestown, further north along the Atlantic coast at the
confluence of the James River and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
33
The Powhatan Confederacy of Native Americans populated the land surrounding the
Chesapeake and from the start the natives resisted the invading English colonists. In time,
Native Americans made friendly gestures to the settlers such as trading foods and introducing
the English to tobacco. While the English offered the Native Americans friendship, they also
brought them decimating diseases, occupied their territory, and sought to enslave or kill them.
When the first Africans arrived in 1619, the colony was still under intermittent Indian attacks.
The pressing need for laborers shaped the Virginia Colony from the very beginning. More than
half of the first 104 Jamestown colonists were gentlemen, scholars, artisans, and tradesmen.
There were no laborers or yeomen farmers among the original settlers, people whose skills
would have been invaluable in creating a foothold in the wilderness. (3)
Colliding Cultures
Little improved over the next several years. By 1616, 80 percent of all English immigrants that
arrived in Jamestown had perished. England’s first American colony was a catastrophe. The
colony was reorganized, and in 1614 the marriage of Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief
Powhatan, to John Rolfe eased relations with the Powhatan, though the colony still limped
along as a starving, commercially disastrous tragedy. The colonists were unable to find any
profitable commodities remained dependent upon the Indians and sporadic shipments from
England for food. But then tobacco saved Jamestown.
By the time King James I described tobacco as a “noxious weed,… loathsome to the eye, hateful
to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs,” it had already taken Europe by
storm. In 1616 John Rolfe crossed tobacco strains from Trinidad and Guiana and planted
Virginia’s first tobacco crop. In 1617 the colony sent its first cargo of tobacco back to England.
The “noxious weed,” a native of the New World, fetched a high price in Europe and the tobacco
boom began in Virginia and then later spread to Maryland. Within fifteen years American
colonists were exporting over 500,000 pounds of tobacco per year. Within forty, they were
exporting fifteen million.
Tobacco changed everything. It saved Virginia from ruin, incentivized further colonization, and
laid the groundwork for what would become the United States. With a new market open,
Virginia drew not only merchants and traders, but also settlers. Colonists came in droves. They
were mostly young, mostly male, and mostly indentured servants who signed contracts called
indentures that bonded them to employers for a period of years in return for passage across
the ocean. But even the rough terms of servitude were no match for the promise of land and
potential profits that beckoned English farmers. But still there were not enough of them.
Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop and ambitious planters, with seemingly limitless land before
them, lacked only laborers to escalate their wealth and status. The colony’s great labor vacuum
inspired the creation of the “headright policy” in 1618: any person who migrated to Virginia
would automatically receive 50 acres of land and any immigrant whose passage they paid
would entitle them to 50 acres more.
34
In 1619 the Virginia Company established the House of Burgesses, a limited representative
body composed of white landowners that first met in Jamestown. That same year, a Dutch
slave ship sold 20 Africans to the Virginia colonists. Southern slavery was born. (2)
The First Africans in Jamestown
The Africans’ arrival would not only change the course of Virginia history but the course of what
would become the United States of America (See Figure 3-1). There were both men and women
in this first group of Africans. Three or four days later, a second ship arrived. One additional
African woman disembarked in Virginia. (Travels and Works of Captain John Smith [1910]
1967:541 as cited in Russell [1913] 1969:22 ftn.21).
The first Africans to arrive in Jamestown were welcome additions to the labor force. They were
needed for the tasks of opening the wilderness, clearing land, and building settlements around
the Chesapeake Bay. The first Africans, as few as they were, fulfilled a sorely needed and
relatively empty labor niche in Virginia society. They and the African immigrants that followed
also served another equally important purpose. Under the head-right system, they enabled the
growth of a new landowning middle class located socially between the gentleman who had
been granted the Virginia Company land by the Crown and the laboring class of indentured
servants and slaves who worked the colony’s expanding tobacco lands (See Figure 3-2).
Nine months after the arrival of the first Africans, the Census of March 1620 listed 892 English
colonists living in Virginia, males outnumbering females, seven to one. Also present were 32
Africans, 15 men and 17 women, a more equal sex distribution that lent it to family formation.
(Ferrar Papers 1509–1790 as cited in McCartney 2000 Vol. I: 52).
35
Illustration titled “Landing Negroes at Jamestown from Dutch man-of-war, 1619”; signed H.
Pyle in lower left-hand cornerFigure 3-1 – AfricansatJamestown1619 by Howard Pyle is in
the Public Domain .
36
Illustration from 1670 showing African slaves curing and drying tobacco in the Virginia
colony.Figure 3-2 — 1670 Virginia tobacco slaves by Unknown is in the Public Domain .
Most of the Africans who arrived in Jamestown in August 1619, remain virtually anonymous.
There were three Negro men and two Negro women listed later as servants living in the
Yeardley Household. Angelo, a Negro woman who disembarked from the Treasurer three or
four days after the first group became a member of the Captain William Pierce household
(Hotten 1874 as cited in McCartney 2000:174). Antoney, Negro and Isabell, Negro arrived in
1621 with a newborn son they immediately had baptized. Although these people and the other
first African settlers are mostly lost to history, the act of baptizing their son allows us a small
window into the cultural patterns and beliefs of these earliest African in America (Russell [1913]
1969:24 ftn.34).
Nearly three quarters of the Africans disembarking in the lower-Chesapeake (York and Upper
James Basin) came from more southerly parts of Africa from the Bight of Biafra (Present day
eastern Nigeria) and West Central Africa, then called Kongo and Angola. The inheritance
practices of the Virginia gentry, especially those in York and Rappahannock districts,
perpetuated the concentration of enslaved African people who had common cultural
characteristics. The resulting ethnic concentration of enslaved communities originally from
West Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra in these regions facilitated continuity of family and
kinship networks, settlement patterns, and intergenerational transmission of African customs
and languages.
Among the Africans who came, were “Antonio a Negro” in 1621 aboard the James and in 1622
the Margaret and John brought “Mary a Negro Woman (Hotten 1874 as cited in Russell [1913]
1969:24 ftn.34).” Once in Jamestown, Mary was taken to Bennett’s Welcome Plantation. There
she met Antonio, one of only five survivors of a recent Tidewater Indian attack that had killed
350 colonists in a single morning. Their meeting was as fortuitous as Antonio’s survival of the
Indian attack.
37
When Antonio appears in the 1625 muster of Bennett’s Welcome with the anglicized name
Anthony Johnson, Mary appears too as the only woman living at Bennett’s plantation.
Sometime after 1625, Mary and Anthony Johnson married. Once indentured servants, they
were now free and owned their own land on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. They soon acquired their
own servants and even slaves. In 1655, Johnson won a court ruling allowing him to keep a black
man named John Casar as an indentured servant despite Casar’s contention that Johnson kept
him as a slave (See Figure 3-3).
Image shows a handwritten 1655 court ruling in favor of Anthony Johnson and who was
accused of keeping one of his servants as a slave. The court allowed him to continue to keep a
black man, named John Casar, as an indentured servant.Figure 3-3 — Court Ruling on Anthony
Johnson and His Servant by Northampton County, VA Deeds, Will, etc. is in the Public Domain .
38
The freedom Johnson and his wife maintained, as well as their acquisition of their own land and
servants and, sometimes, slaves, provides an example of the fluidity of social and race relations
in Virginia’s early decades. In the ensuing years and decades, as the colony’s tobacco economy
expanded, requiring more and more labor, legislators would pass new laws restricting black
freedom and increasingly defining black people as slaves. A series of new laws passed in the
late seventeenth and eighteenth century in Virginia and Maryland would slowly but surely chip
away at freedom and autonomy black people like Anthony Johnson and his wife, Mary,
experienced in the early and middle seventeenth before all but disappearing. (3)
The Peopling of Maryland Colony
Within twenty years following the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, the Calvert family
obtained a charter from King Charles I for land along the Chesapeake north of the Potomac
River. The colony was named in honor of the king’s consort, Henrietta Maria. King Charles I was
deeply concerned about the presence of the Dutch in North America and decided to establish
Maryland as a buffer between Virginia and the Dutch controlled New Netherlands colony in
what is today the state of New York.
In the 1660s, less than 25% of Maryland’s bound laborers were enslaved Africans. By 1680 the
number had increased to 33% and by the early 1700s, three quarters of laborers were enslaved
Africans. About 300 arrived each year between 1695 and 1708. During this time, at least half of
Maryland’s enslaved population lived in Calvert, Charles, Prince George’s, and St. Mary’s
counties. The others lived in Annapolis and Baltimore.
From the beginning, the Maryland population was religiously, socially and racially diverse.
Unlike the Virginians, the Maryland colonists brought Africans with them. At least two men of
African descent were aboard the Ark and the Dove , ships that brought Leonard Calvert, son of
George Calvert, first Lord of Baltimore, up the Chesapeake Bay in 1634. One of these first
African Marylanders was Mathias de Sousa. A passenger on the Ark , De Sousa was of African
and Portuguese descent and, like the Calvert family, he was a Catholic.
Maryland never experienced protracted Indian warfare or a “starving time” like its neighbor
Virginia. Maryland was able to trade with Virginia for needed items and the Calvert family
personally supported the settlers’ early financial needs. However, like Virginia, Maryland
suffered from a labor shortage. In order to stimulate immigration, in 1640 Maryland adopted
the head-right system that Virginia had instituted earlier.
While interested in establishing a refuge for Catholics who were facing increasing persecution
in Anglican England, the Calverts were also interested in creating profitable estates. To this end,
they encouraged the importation of Africans and to avoid trouble with the British government,
they encouraged Protestant immigration.
Indentured laborers, mostly white, dominated the Maryland workforce throughout the
seventeenth century. As the laws infringing upon the rights and status of servitude for Africans
39
grew more stringent in Virginia in the late seventeenth century, free Africans from Virginia, like
Anthony and Mary Johnson and their family, migrated to Maryland. Enslavement was not
absent in seventeenth century Maryland but it was not the principal form of servitude until the
early eighteenth century (Yentsch 1994).
As the seventeenth century closed there were far fewer enslaved Africans in Maryland than in
Virginia. In the four counties along the lower Western shore of Maryland, there were only 100
enslaved Africans in 1658, about 3% of the population. By 1710, their numbers had increased to
3500 making up about 24% of the population, most were still “country-born,” that is born in
Africa, and most were men. Between 1700 and 1780, new generations of African people born in
the colony expanded the enslaved population (Menard 1975).
3.3: Tightening the Bonds of Slavery
Tightening the Bonds of Slavery
In the early years of slavery, especially in Virginia and Maryland, the distinction between
indentured servants and slaves was initially unclear. In 1643, however, a law was passed in
Virginia that made African women “tithable.” This, in effect, associated African women’s work
with difficult agricultural labor. There was no similar tax levied on white women; the law was an
attempt to distinguish white from African women. The English ideal was to have enough hired
hands and servants working on a farm so that wives and daughters did not have to partake in
manual labor. Instead, white women were expected to labor in dairy sheds, small gardens, and
kitchens. Of course, due to the labor shortage in early America, white women did participate in
field labor. But this idealized gendered division of labor contributed to the English conceiving of
themselves as better than other groups who did not divide labor in this fashion, including the
West Africans arriving in slave ships to the colonies. For many white colonists, the association
of a gendered division of labor with Englishness provided a further justification for the
enslavement and subordination of Africans. (2)
Because of legislation in both Maryland and Virginia, life for those enslaved changed drastically
in the 1660’s. As European servants became scarce and expensive, African labor came to
dominate the labor force. Legislation slowly sealed the fate of African immigrants and their
descendants removing opportunities for freedom and advancement. Laws that made slavery
hereditable came to pass in Virginia in 1662 and in Maryland in 1663. (3)
Virginia law’s, for example, stated that an enslaved woman’s children inherited the “condition”
of their mother. This economic strategy on the part of planters created a legal system in which
all children born to slave women would be slaves for life, whether the father was white or
black, enslaved or free. These new laws also gave legal sanction to the enslavement of people
of African descent for life. The permanent deprivation of freedom and the separate legal status
40
of enslaved Africans facilitated the maintenance of strict racial barriers. Skin color became
more than superficial difference; it became the marker of a transcendent, all-encompassing
division between two distinct peoples, two races, white and black. (2)
The transformation of the “Negro” servant into the “Negro” slave was completed with the
Virginia General Assembly passage of the Slave Codes of 1705 . Thus, as the eighteenth century
opened, most Africans and their American-born descendants lived and worked as slaves
growing tobacco on “quarters” or “plantations” in rural, lower Chesapeake. They eventually
improved their lives and by the 1720’s, there were enough American-born Africans in Maryland
to create their own African-American culture.
Inventories taken in Calvert, Charles, Prince George’s and St. Mary’s counties Maryland
between 1658 and1710 found the slave population grew at an extraordinary rate increasing
from about 100 enslaved people or 3% of the total counties’ population in 1658 to over 3,500
people, composing 24% of the region’s population in 1710. Almost all of these enslaved adults
were African immigrants (Menard 1975:30–31). Within sixty-five years, almost all enslaved
adults would be American-born, or as referred to here, African-Americans. (3)
Slave Life in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake
Throughout the eighteenth century, most Africans came to the upper Chesapeake from two
West African coast regions near what is today the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast,
and Ghana. (Walsh 1997:6). The continued importation of Africans from the same areas
throughout the eighteenth century probably accounts for the fact that along with people born
in African, many Maryland-born people of African descent continued to use African naming
patterns. For example, a Maryland plantation’s property inventory from 1734 lists a six-monthold child named Cusey, an African name. Cubit, Nom, Mingo or Tydoe are other African names
found in the inventory. In other cases, Africans had English names that sounded like African
names, for example: Jenny for Heminah, Patty for Pattoe or Sam for Samba. The Dulaney
family’s plantation inventories from 1720 to 1740 also included enslaved people with the
African names: Toader, Abuer, Jam, Ockery, Hann, Southey, Cuffey, and Sango. (Yentsch 1994).
Most eighteenth-century Chesapeake Africans, and their native-born descendants, lived and
worked as slaves growing tobacco on “quarters” or “plantations” in the eastern part of Virginia,
although some were “industrial slaves” working at iron forges and others were hired out to
work in gristmills and other industries. As plantation sizes increased, 40% or more of enslaved
people lived in quarters away from the home plantation and the slave owner’s direct
supervision. On the largest plantations people lived in small villages on “quarters” of the
plantation holdings (See Figure 3-4). An enslaved man was often responsible for the work in the
quarter that was designated by his name, such as “Mingo’s Quarter.” Relatively few enslaved
people lived in urban areas with the slave owner’s family.
By the last decades of the eighteenth century, 44% of the 46,547 enslaved people in the
Chesapeake region lived in groups of more than 20 people in ten Tidewater counties: Anne
41
Arundel, Prince George’s, St. Mary’s in Maryland and Essex, Gloucester, Lancaster, Middlesex,
James City, Warwick, Charles City and York in Virginia. Another 34,000 enslaved people lived in
similar sized groups on quarters or plantations in the Piedmont area of Virginia.
(Kulikoff 1986:338).
Even though those in Maryland were more isolated and with limited social contact as compared
to Virginian Africans, in both locales they formed families that slave owners recognized and
recorded as family units in inventories (Menard 1975:33–37). Family and community formation
was compromised from 1710 to 1730, the period of heaviest African immigration to the
Chesapeake. During this time, African or “country-born” men, as they were called, competed
with “native born” men for wives. Disproportionate sex ratios, resulting from the importation of
greater numbers of African men than women, fostered internal conflicts and competition
between African and African American men. In 1712, one African American complained “his
country-men had poysened [sic] him for his wife.” Another killed himself because he could not
have more than one wife (Kulikoff 1986:334). At Carter’s Grove plantation in 1733, “countryborn” men lived in sex-segregated barracks. “Seasoned immigrants,” as one historian refers to
them, lived in conjugal units but without children, while native-born African Americans lived as
families. These were optimal conditions. Native-born women at Carter’s Grove preferred
native-born men as husbands, limiting their opportunities for marriage.
42
A photograph from the 1930s showing an old slave quarter. Figure 3-4 — Old Quarters,
Wisconsin Avenue & State Route 193, Bethesda, Montgomery County, MD by Thomas
Waterman has no known copyright restriction.
Newly enslaved African-born women often waited two or three years before taking a husband
(Kulikoff 1986). These personal preferences impeded formation of families.
Some families were polygamous, a sanctioned form of marriage in West Africa. Fictive kin
families were formed of children sold onto a plantation community or left behind when their
parents were sold or sent off to work in a far quarter of the plantation. Many enslaved people
also participated in “abroad marriages,” that is they were married to someone on another
plantation or in another city. (Chambers 1996:121).
From 1736 to the end of the colonial period, kinship ties increasingly figured into enslaved
people’s decisions to run away, where they would run and with whom they would flee slavery.
People ran away to their kin in other parts of the Chesapeake. The texts of some newspaper
advertisements for runaways support the contention that knowledge Africans gained through
travel must have been communicated throughout the African community and used to facilitate
running away to distant places. In September 1776, James Scott, Jr. who lived in Fauquier
County, Virginia, advertised in the Virginia Gazette for a woman named Winney who in the
past, as a runaway, traveled as far as “Maryland, near Port Tobacco, where she passed for a
free woman, and hired herself in that neighbourhood [sic] several months.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Chesapeake landscape was a network of large and
small plantations. Although many planters on Maryland’s western shore still held fewer than a
dozen enslaved people, as the colonial period came to a close, African American family and kinbased social networks spread across several counties.
3.4: Africans in the Low Country
Africans in the Low Country
Unlike the Virginia and Maryland colonies, the Carolina colony essentially imported a
preexisting slave system from the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. King Charles II of
England chartered the Carolina colony in 1663 and it quickly developed a thriving economy
based on African, African-American, and Native American slave labor. Nearly half of the
colony’s first white settlers came from Barbados in the eastern Caribbean where English
landowners used African slaves on their sugarcane plantations. By the early 1700s, white
plantation owners in Carolina relied almost exclusively on African and African-American slaves
for labor on their rice and indigo plantations. Founded in 1670, Charles Town (later Charleston),
soon became the colony’s capital, a center of culture, commerce, and political power rooted in
43
slavery. During the eighteenth century, more than half of all enslaved Africans who came to
British North America would pass through the city. (Carson, The Struggle for Freedom , 54–55)
In 1712, Carolina split into two colonies, North and South Carolina (See Figure 3–5). Later, in
1733, James Oglethorpe settled the Georgia colony with a charter from King George the II to
the land between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers. The Low Country, an area of fertile fields
and swampy salt marshes, includes 79 barrier islands or “Sea Islands” along the Atlantic coast
from southeastern North Carolina to the St. John River in northeast Florida.
Map of the colonies of North and South Carolina and Georgia and their origin dates.Figure 3-5
— Carolinacolony by Kmusser is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5
Rivers and tidewater streams lace the coastal plain creating widespread wetland landscapes.
For Africans arriving in the Low Country, the climate and the wetlands, rivers and winding
streams, if not the pine forests, must have seemed familiar, reminiscent of the landscapes they
left behind in the wetlands of West or West Central Africa.
From the very earliest years of the colony, 20 to 30% of the settlers were Africans of diverse
ethnic origins. During the first twenty-five years, about one in every four settlers was African.
By 1720, Africans had outnumbered the Europeans for more than a decade. South Carolina was
the one British colony in North America in which settlement and African slavery went hand in
hand (Wood 1974; South Carolina 2004a).Over 40% of the Africans reaching the British colonies
44
before the American Revolution passed through South Carolina. Almost all of these enslaved
people entered the Charleston port. After a brief quarantine on Sullivan’s Island they were sold
in Charlestown, later called Charleston, slave markets (See Figure 3-6). Many of these enslaved
people were almost immediately put to work in South Carolina’s rice fields. Writers of the
period remarked that there was no harder, or unhealthier, work possible. In fact, colonial
travelers described the Carolina rice fields as charnel houses for enslaved African-Americans
(Wood 1974; Morgan 1998).
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction, in Charleston, South Carolina, in
1769Figure 3-6 — Slave Auction Ad by Unknown is in the Public Domain .
In spite of the high death toll, a fortuitous combination of geographic and demographic factors,
allowed these enslaved African peoples to shape their daily lives and customs according to
African cultural traditions and to produce new African American cultural patterns. The first
wave of Africans had more freedom to shape their culture than in any other part of the North
American mainland (Morgan 1998:19). Not only did they live in autonomous units, in society as
a whole, they made up a significantly large proportion of the population. As the eighteenth
century opened Africans in South Carolina numbered 2,444, making up 75% of the total
45
population. Within thirty years, there were 20,000 Africans, out-numbering Europeans 2:1. This
was still the case in 1740. (Adams and Barnwell 2002). (3)
Rice Cultivation and Slavery in the Low Country
The second wave of African slaves brought to Carolina and Georgia after 1750 came from the
Windward Coast of West Africa, a region stretching from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and
Liberia. Traders acquired and sold Africans from this region because they came from rice
growing cultures and brought with them technological and agricultural skills that were crucial
to developing a thriving rice plantation system in the Low Country.
Geographer Judith Carney makes the case that Africans introduced sophisticated soil and water
management techniques to Carolina and Georgia plantations. For tidal rice cultivation, an
elaborate system of irrigation works—levees, ditches, culverts, floodgates, and drains—had to
be constructed (and maintained) to control and regulate the flow of water onto and off of the
fields. Carney explains that this agricultural technology and the hollow cypress logs known as
“trunks” or “plugs,” used to control water flow in embankments, were African innovations in
Low Country rice cultivation.
In the ten years following the Stono Rebellion, a 1739 slave uprising near Charleston that
resulted in the deaths of more than two dozen whites, the colony developed indigo as a second
cash crop. Indigo, like rice, was labor intensive and its cultivation and processing for trade was
well also known to Africans from the Windward Coast.
With both indigo and rice production depending upon the importation of Africans skilled in
their cultivation and processing, economics won out over fear of more slave rebellions. In the
aftermath of the Stono Rebellion in 1739, the South Carolina legislature began a ten year
moratorium on the importation of slaves from Africa, which ended in 1750. Over 58,000
Africans entered South Carolina in the twenty-five years from 1750 and 1775 making South
Carolina the largest direct importer of Africans for enslavement on the North American
mainland. (Carney 2001:89). Over time, descendants of these early generations of Africans
came to be known as the Gullah-Geechee people who had and continue to have distinctive
cultural characteristics and a shared heritage.
Between 1730 and 1774, Low Country rice exports increased from 17 million pounds of rice
annually to 66 million pounds. For the enslaved African people, particularly the women upon
who successful rice production depended, there was an accompanying increase in hard labor
and physical disability.
Rice cultivation and processing were mainly women’s work. So it was in Africa and so it was on
South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. Enslaved men carried out skilled work making
barrel staves for the crop’s shipment. Men also monopolized blacksmithing, and cooperage and
performed the hard work of preparing rice embankments and ditches (Carney 2001:199–120).
46
Ultimately, however, it was the labor of African women and their daughters that made the
phenomenal growth of the Low Country rice economy possible (See Figure 3-7).
Figure 3-7 — Rice Culture on the Ogeechee, near Savannah, Georgia by A.R. Waud is in
the Public Domain .
African women brought three rice cultivation techniques to Low Country plantations: sowing in
trenched ground, open trench planting, and tidal rice cultivation. A description of enslaved
people’s preparation of rice for open trench planting in the nineteenth century corresponds
with the contemporary rice planting system in Sierra Leone in West Africa as well as with
descriptions of late eighteenth early nineteenth centuries methods used in South Carolina:
Young men brought the clay water in piggies[sic] from the barrel and poured it over the rice,
while young girls, with bare feet and skirts well tied up, danced and shuffled the rice about with
their feet until the whole mass was thoroughly clayed,…When it is completely covered with
clay, the rice is shovelled [sic] into a pyramid and left to soak until the next morning, when it is
measured out into sacks, one and one-fourth bushels to each half acre…(Pringle 1914:375–
376).
Enslaved women pressed the rice seeds into the muddy ground with their heels. Afterwards
men called “trunk minders” flooded the fields to encourage seed germination.
“It is literally casting one’s bread on the waters … for as soon as the seed is in the ground the
trunk door is lifted and the water creeps slowly up and up until it is about three inches deep on
the land. That is why the claying is necessary; it makes the grain adhere to the earth, otherwise
it would float (Pringle 1914:12–13).”
47
Once the seeds sprouted, enslaved men drained the fields and the women weeded them.
Weeding the rice fields had to be done by hand. The fields were then alternately flooded and
drained to keep the soil moist and the weeds under control, and to deter the birds and other
animals. The final flooding took place under the watchful eye of the “trunk minder,” who was
responsible for gradually raising the water level in the fields to support the top-heavy rice stalk.
After harvesting the rice, allowing for a short period during which it dried, the enslaved women
processed the rice. First, they threshed the rice to remove the rice grains from the stalks.
Threshing entailed beating the rice with a stick or having the farm animals trampling the stalks.
Next, they pounded the rice using a hand-pounding mortar and pestle to separate the
indigestible hulls from the rice.
Pounding rice required great skill to insure that the majority of the end product was clean
whole grains rather than partially broken or small broken pieces of rice. African women were
highly skilled in pounding rice. However, processing rice for subsistence use as they had done in
their West African homeland was quite different from processing rice as a cash crop.
Pounding rice was grueling work. In West Africa, women pounded enough rice for a family’s
meals. In the Low Country, throughout the eighteenth century, enslaved women pounded
about 44 pounds of rice a day, cumulatively millions of pounds of rice for export.
After pounding, they then poured the rice onto a fanner for winnowing. Then they removed the
indigestible hulls, or chafe, by tossing the rice up and down in the wide shallow fanner basket.
During this process the basket was gently tilted back and forth, tossing the rice upward and
outward, allowing the husk to be blown away by the wind. (Careny 2001)
In eighteenth century South Carolina, African women made the winnowing baskets from light
grasses and palmetto leaf. Anthropologist Dale Rosengarten has established that the weaving
style of winnowing baskets and the process of winnowing passed down from South Carolina
slaves to their Low Country-born African Americans descendants, are West African, not Native
American, in origin (Rosengarten, 1986; Carney 2001:114). Coiled grass baskets are a tradition
in many parts of West Africa. Descendants of enslaved Africans who came to the Low Country
made baskets for winnowing and other purposes in the 1700s, and the tradition continues
among many Low Country African-Americans today.
After harvest, men and women both worked to prepare the fields for the next rice crop. This
was arduous work but none was as arduous as processing the millions of pounds of rice for
shipment overseas, mostly within a few months when the crop was in greatest demand.
As onerous as pounding seven mortars of rice or splitting 100 poles for fences, trenching,
hoeing, or plowing 1 / 4 to a 1 / 2 acre of land per day must have been, the burden was mitigated
by the knowledge that at the end of the task was “free time.” The task system of work
assignment was perhaps the most distinctive and central feature of enslaved African life in the
Low Country. By the end of the eighteenth century, the task system was firmly entrenched from
48
South Carolina to Florida, wherever rice was cultivated, and planters extended the system to
organization of labor in raising Sea Island cotton.
Under the task system, a person was assigned a certain amount of work for the day after which
he or she could use their time as they pleased (Morgan 1982:566). “Owning” time, making
one’s own decisions, owning the products of one’s labor, were powerful ideas, empowering
incentives and in the end led to positive outcomes for enslaved low country Africans.
After they [slaves] finished “their required day’s work, they were given as much land as they
could handle on which they planted corn, potatoes, tobacco, peanuts, sugar, watermelons, and
pumpkins and bottle pumpkins… They plant for themselves on Sundays…They sell their own
crops and buy some necessary things…” wrote Johan Bolzius of low country slaves in the mid18 th century (Bolzius 1750:259–60, Translated and edited by Loewald, Starika and Taylor,
1957).
Once gained, “free” time expanded allowing enslaved people not only the opportunity to tend
their own crops but also to socialize, grow and sell surplus products, gain personal property
through such sales and ultimately to accumulate money to purchase their own freedom and
that of their family members.
In South Carolina a series of laws passed between 1686 and 1751 reflect the growing concern of
slave holders over the ways in which the Africans chose to spend their “own time.” A 1686 law
prohibited the exchange of goods between slaves or slaves and freemen without their master’s
permission. Ten years later the lawmakers tried to prohibit slaves felling and carrying away
timber on lands other than their masters. In 1714, the legislature prohibited that “slaves plant
for themselves any corn, peas, or rice,” apparently to no avail since 20 years later another act
was passed allowing patrollers to confiscate all fowls and other provisions found in the
possession of “stragling [sic] negroes.” Many planters came to depend upon the foods, goods
and services provided to them by the Africans. At best, their dependency must have made them
ambivalent about enforcing the prohibitive laws.
Low Country slaves raised crops that reflected their African origins such as okra, groundnuts
(peanuts) sesame seed, called Benni, and “Read {sic} peppers.” African vegetables and rice
became part of the staple diet of new generations of African Americans and were eaten by
planters as well. Both Elias Ball and Eliza Lucas Pinckney mention, for example, “negro” grown
peppers in their letters (Morgan 1982:574). Enslaved entrepreneurs branched out from
huckstering foods to making and selling other commodities such as canoes, baskets and wax
(Ball, 1837).
Over time, enslaved people used surplus income from the internal economy to buy livestock,
including horses, and one at least negotiated his own freedom (Morgan 1982:580). After
completing their tasks for the slave master, the African men hunted, fished, worked as
carpenters and in other trades to earn money. The women washed clothes, prepared food and
cooked for their families, raised chickens and vegetables to eat and to sell. These activities
49
allow the Africans to participate in trade and cash sales through which some men and women
earned and saved money to buy themselves and their kin out of slavery. By the time of the
Revolutionary War, two or more generations of native-born African Americans, had a variety of
occupational skills that they used to earn enough money to buy freedom. However, even those
who continued enslavement gained a degree of autonomy through internal economies that
developed throughout the colonies. (3)
Conclusion
By late eighteenth century, before the colonies convulsed during the American Revolution,
racial slavery had become rooted in the soil and law of colonies stretching from Georgia north
to New England. But nowhere was slavery more important to British North American economy
than in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, and the Low Country colonies of
South Carolina and Georgia. The extraordinary wealth African and African-American slaves
produced for white plantation owners not only created an economic aristocracy, but a political
ruling class who also cherished the liberty and freedom slave labor made possible for them.
As colonists began to revolt against British rule during the 1760s and 1770s, they often viewed
their plight through the lens of slavery. They saw Parliament’s infringement upon their rights
and privileges as British subjects as akin to enslavement and many colonial leaders in turn used
the language of natural rights, of liberty and freedom, in their fight for independence
from Britain.
During the American Revolution, many African-American slaves would seize upon this language
to demand their own freedom from slavery. Others would flee their masters during the chaos
of war and fight alongside the British against the rebellious colonists or else join the patriot
cause and fight in the Continental Army and Navy in hope of securing their freedom at the end
of the war. Regardless of the side they fought on, African-Americans forced whites to confront
the ironies and contradictions of fighting a revolution in the name of natural rights and liberty
while choosing to maintain slavery.
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READING MODULE 4: African Americans
and the American Revolution
4.1: Introduction
African Americans and the American Revolution
Module Introduction
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Samuel
Johnson, the great English writer and dictionary maker, posed this question in 1775, the year
the American Revolutionary War broke out. He was among the first, but certainly not the last,
to contrast the noble aims of the American Revolution with the presence of 450,000 enslaved
black men, women, and children in the 13 colonies. (4)In America, the freedom of some, it
seemed, was inextricably linked to the enslavement of others. The creation of a system of racial
slavery not only generated wealth for plantation owners, merchants, and traders, it secured the
freedom and liberty of whites colonists. The presence of slavery created a common bond
among white colonists regardless of their origin and class. As European indentured servitude
declined in America during the eighteenth century, whites, regardless of their socio-economic
status, shared a racial identity that guaranteed their freedom and legal superiority over black
people. Whiteness became associated with freedom and liberty, including independence from
being a slave or a servant. Blackness became associated with dependence, bondage, and racial
inferiority. White freedom was thus dependent on black slavery. (1)
During the Revolutionary era in America (1765–1783), black people, both slave and free,
questioned and resisted the logic and legality of slavery and racial inequality. They understood
and harnessed the language of natural rights, including those “yelps for liberty” that whites
used in their revolt against British colonial rule. Black people made claims to these rights by
petitioning courts for their freedom, by joining or forming anti-slavery societies, by running
away from their masters, and by fighting for their freedom in both the British and American
armies during the Revolutionary War. The Revolution was a war for freedom and equality for
African Americans rather than simply independence from Great Britain. Their actions forced
Americans to debate the morality and legality of slavery, and its compatibility with
revolutionary ideals. America’s social and economic investment in racial slavery was too deeply
rooted to remove, however. Slavery not only survived the Revolution but continued to thrive
and spread like a virus into new lands in the west and the Deep South in the ensuing years and
decades. (1)
51
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture.
The student will be able to describe how African-Americans, during times of war, have forced
America to live up to its promise of freedom and equality. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical documents to explain why and how black people used the language of
revolution and natural rights in petition for freedom and the abolition of slavery. (1)
Readings and Resources
•
•
Learning Unit: African Americans and the American Revolution (see below) (1)
Primary Historical Documents
o Petition of Slaves in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay by Felix
o Freedom Petition of Prince Hall
4.2: African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution
African Americans and the American Revolution
African Americans and the Rhetoric of Revolution
Thomas Jefferson, and other leaders of the Revolution, studied and borrowed ideas of natural
rights from European Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke. They then incorporated
natural rights theory into documents like the Declaration of Independence that not only
justified the Revolution but served, in Jefferson’s words, as “an expression of the American
52
mind.” Natural rights, such as the right to be free and pursue one’s own “happiness,” are rights
all human beings possess that are not granted by government and cannot be revoked or
repealed. As it says in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, natural rights are
“truths” that are “self-evident” and “unalienable” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.”
How could a group of people feel so passionate about these unalienable rights, yet maintain
the brutal practice of human bondage? Somehow slavery would manage to survive the
revolutionary era despite fervent arguments about its incompatibility with the new nation’s
founding ideals.(5) Nevertheless, black people in particular seized on the rhetoric of the
American Revolution to highlight the contradiction between the colonists’ cries for freedom
and liberty from British oppression and the existence of racial slavery in the colonies. (1)
African Americans, both slave and free, immediately jumped into the fray when white colonists
began to protest British colonial rule for the first time in 1765 in response to the Stamp Act,
which imposed a tax on newspapers, pamphlets, and legal documents. Many colonists viewed
the act as an arbitrary tax designed only to generate revenue to pay down debt Britain accrued
during the French and Indian War, which colonists helped the British win in the 1750s and
1760s. Colonists also resented that this tax was imposed on them without having a voice in
Parliament, which led to cries of “No taxation without representation!”
In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves saw white protesters take to the streets and chant,
“Liberty! Liberty! And stamp’d paper.” The issue of taxation, of course, mattered far less to
slaves than the language whites used in their protests. Soon after Charleston’s white residents
protested the Stamp Act, some of the city’s slaves responded with their own chants of “Liberty!
Liberty!,” which shocked and frightened white residents. “If most slaves were illiterate,” writes
historian David Brian Davis, “white leaders knew or soon discovered that the slaves’ networks
of communication passed on every kind of news almost as quickly as horses could gallop.”
(Davis, 2006, p.144–146)
53
A visual protest against the Stamp Act printed in a colonial American newspaper.Figure 4-1: O!
the fatal stamp by Pennsylvania Journal is in the Public Domain .
African Americans, and some whites opposed to slavery, also recognized the curious irony of
statements made by some white colonists that characterized British policies as a conspiracy
that threatened to turn free white people into “slaves,” that is, people lacking the same rights
and liberties as British citizens overseas. In 1774, George Washington characterized the plight
of colonists under British rule as analogous to that of black slaves ruled over by white slaves
masters like himself. Writing after Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts to punish rebellious
colonists for the Boston Tea Party, Washington said, “the crisis is arrived when we must assert
our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall
make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” (Jordan,
1968, p. 262)
At the time, Washington was a political leader in Virginia and the master of a large plantation
along the Potomac River, Mt. Vernon, where he personally owned more than one hundred
slaves. In the late 1760s, the famous Philadelphia physician, Benjamin Rush, wrote a
correspondent in France about how the Revolution’s rhetoric of liberty and freedom, and the
potential for enslavement or servitude, forced American colonists to reckon with the hypocrisy
of fighting for liberty and rights while countenancing racial slavery. “It would be useless for us
to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us, while
we continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their color is different from
ours.” (Davis, 2006, p. 145).
54
George Washington and his family depicted at Washington’s Mt. Vernon plantation home in
Virginia.Figure 4-2: The Washington Family by Edward Savage is in the Public Domain .
In 1773, Phyllis Wheatley, an eighteen-year-old poet who had been born in West Africa but now
lived as a slave in Massachusetts, reflected on the same contradictions Rush highlighted a few
years earlier. “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of
Freedom,” Wheatley wrote. How then can white colonists reconcile the “Cry of Liberty” with
the “Exercise of Oppressive Power over others?” (Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019, p.
94)
That same year, which saw a record number of antislavery pamphlets published and sermons
given in the America colonies, a slave named Felix sent a freedom petition on behalf of himself
and other slaves in Massachusetts to the colonial governor and legislature. Freedom petitions,
or freedom suits, had existed in the American colonies since the late 1600s and allowed slaves
to ask courts or legislatures to free them from bondage on the basis of legal violations. While a
small number of slaves petitioned courts for their freedom, the number of petitions rose during
the American Revolution. In his petition, Felix argued that slavery left black people in bondage
for life without the hope of acquiring property and freedom for themselves or their progeny.
No matter how devoted slaves were to their masters “neither they, nor their Children to all
Generations, shall ever be able to do so, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no, not even Life
itself, but in a Manner as the Beasts that perish.” Since the law deprived slaves of property and
instead made them into property, their condition resembled that of an animal and not a human
being. This was a violation of natural rights. “Relief” from the legislature of Massachusetts that
would not harm their masters, and free them from slavery, would be “to us… as Life from the
dead.” (Davis, 2006, p. 146)
55
Black Americans continued to petition for their freedom during the Revolutionary War, which
broke out in 1775 in Massachusetts, while others free blacks protested on behalf of the
enslaved by highlighting the contradictions between a war fought for freedom and the
persistence of slavery. In 1777, a former slave, named Prince Hall, declared that the ideals
Americans fought for “in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads
stronger than a thousand arguments… [that black people] may be restored to the enjoyments
of that which is the natural right of all men.” (Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019, p. 94).
Two years earlier, Hall founded the first African American branch of Freemasonry and started
the first black Masonic Lodge in Boston. (1)
Copper Engraving of Phyllis Wheatley that appears in her book of poetry, Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral, which was published in 1773.Figure 4-3: Phyllis Wheatley
frontispiece by Scipio Moorhead is in the Public Domain .
Thomas Jefferson
No one embodied the contradictions that lay at the heart of the Revolution’s rhetoric more
than Thomas Jefferson. Like George Washington, Jefferson was part of Virginia’s slaveholding
56
aristocracy. Slavery afforded Jefferson the opportunity and freedom to pursue a career as a
lawyer and political leader in Virginia before and during the American Revolution. When the
Revolution broke out, Jefferson owned just under 200 slaves on his central Virginia plantation,
Monticello. As a student of the European Enlightenment, and a scholar of treatises on natural
rights written by Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke, Jefferson saw slavery as a
regrettable institution and hoped a process of gradual emancipation would eventually lead to
its permanent demise.
When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, he used the
language of natural rights to justify the revolution and, in so doing, composed some of the most
important, and potentially radical, words in American history that carried anti-slavery
overtones:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that there are endowed
by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness. (US, 1776)
Since he was writing about natural rights, and not political or civil rights, Jefferson saw this
equality and desire for freedom and “happiness” (i.e. property) as applying to all people, even
Africans and African Americans. Jefferson made this belief clear in a passage he wrote in an
early draft of the Declaration that was eventually removed because it threatened the support
of the states of South Carolina and Georgia in the cause of independence. In this passage,
Jefferson blamed the African slave trade and slavery on King George rather than on colonial
slaveholders like himself. King George, he argued, “has waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating the most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people [i.e.
Africans] who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” (Davis, 2006, p. 146)
Despite Jefferson’s recognition that slavery violated the natural rights of Africans and African
Americans, he only freed a very small number of his slaves during his life and left hundreds still
in bondage at his death in 1826. After the Revolution, Jefferson recognized that an explanation
was in order. How could the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most
eloquent statements of the natural rights of all people, not free his own slaves or advocate for
the immediate abolition of slavery? Jefferson wrote his explanation in his only published
book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1782). In Jefferson’s mind, abolition carried grave threats
and risks to the young United States. He envisioned an apocalyptic race war in which former
slaves would slaughter former slave owners out of revenge. He also borrowed pseudo-scientific
racist ideas from the European Enlightenment that argued that Africans were inferior to
Europeans, particularly in terms of intellectual capacities, which made them unfit as citizens.
“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks,
of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has
made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions
57
which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race,” Jefferson
wrote.
He also feared racial “mixture” and the corruption of white racial purity, despite maintaining a
sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, a woman who bore him five children and who
herself was the product of a sexual encounter between Jefferson’s father-in-law and Hemings’s
mother, Betty. Jefferson still hoped emancipation would happen at some distant date in the
future and when it occurred all former slaves will have to be “removed beyond the reach of
mixture.” For Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, eventual emancipation
could only occur with a plan for the colonization of African Americans outside of the United
States where they could have their own country separate from white Americans. (1)
A caricature of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.Figure 4-4: A Philosophic Cock attributed to
James Akin is in the Public Domain .
58
4.3: Fighting Their Way to Freedom
Fighting Their Way to Freedom
In addition to filing freedom petitions and writing pamphlets advocating for the abolition of
slavery, African Americans fought for their freedom during the colonial and revolutionary era by
serving in the military. African and African American men, enslaved and free, from the South
and the North, served in every war of consequence during the colonial period. Sometimes
slaveholders sent enslaved men to the front to fight in their place or to do the menial labor
entailed in building fortifications and supporting fighting troops. In other cases, African
runaways posed as free persons in order to serve on ships or to enlist as soldiers. The
newspapers of the colonial period often mention these facts in their advertisements of
fugitive slaves.
Before the Revolution, between 1675 and 1739, the southern colonies were almost constantly
involved in fighting Native Americans or the Spanish. Southern planters were hesitant about
arming Africans, as evidenced by the legislation they passed prohibiting “Negro[es], mulatto[s]
or Indian[s] from the military or bearing arms.”
However, expedience required that equally as often the Virginians and South Carolina planters
recruited black men to fight in a militia or serve as “pioneers”, or “slave cowboys” to protect
their settlements. In 1703, the South Carolina assembly offered to free any slave who captured
or killed hostile Native Americans. Beginning as early as 1705, free blacks became eligible for
enrollment in the militia. Unlike white persons, they were required to muster for service
without bringing arms. Several acts passed by the colonial assembly between 1723 and 1757,
said that black men could serve as drummers, fifers, trumpeters, or “pioneers,” but not as
regular soldiers (Jackson 1942:251). The rank of “pioneer” gave them a special place as laborers
and menial servants. Many were freed for their services, but not all.
During the Revolutionary War some Africans and African Americans fought on the side of the
patriots while others fought on the side of the Loyalists. All enslaved people fought in order to
gain freedom. (3)
59
Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War
A member of Dunmore’s “Ethiopian” or black regiment that fought for the British or loyalist
side during the Revolutionary War.Figure 4-5: Ethiopian Regiment Uniform by Bantarleton is
licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The British made the first move to enlist black soldiers. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the
British colonial governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that all slaves belonging to rebels
would be received into the British forces and freed for their services. African Americans ran
away to fight with the British in search of promised freedom for their services. Dunmore
organized an “Ethiopian” regiment of about 300 African Americans, who saw action at the
Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775. (4)
The hope of freedom in return for service led many enslaved African Americans to leave the
plantation to follow the British Army. No exact statistics are available on the number of
enslaved people who reached British sanctuaries, but Thomas Jefferson estimated the number
at 30,000 in 1778 alone (Tate 1865:119). In South Carolina, some 5,000 enslaved people left the
60
plantation to follow the British. The British confiscated other enslaved people from patriots.
The British organized the Africans following them as laborers, paying them small sums in
principal, although they charged them for clothes and upkeep, thus leaving them with little
actual monetary gain. The act of paying for labor defused the potential for rebellion and led to
many courageous acts on the part of black people.
During the final months of the British Occupation of South Carolina, in 1781, General Leslie
Clark formed black men into unit called Leslie’s “Black Dragoons.”
From the patriots’ point of view, one historian comments, “The knowledge that hundreds of
self-liberated slaves were in possession of weapons caused resentment and detestation (Frey
1991:125–167).” The British went on to form autonomous “Negro” units for service in Florida
and the West Indies. Their service convinced others that the best solution to British military
problems in the West Indies was to enlist slaves by offering them freedom. The British
subsequently sent black regiments for service in Saint Domingue during the French Revolution
and Napoleonic Wars (Frey 1991). (3)
At the war’s end in 1783, some 20,000 blacks left with the British, preferring an uncertain
future elsewhere to returning to their old masters and plantations. (4) They hoped that the
British government would uphold the promise of freedom and help them establish new homes
elsewhere in the Empire. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, demanded that British
troops leave runaway slaves behind, but the British military commanders upheld earlier
promises and evacuated thousands of freedmen, transporting them to Canada, the Caribbean,
or Great Britain. They would eventually play a role in settling Nova Scotia, and through the
subsequent efforts of David George, a black loyalist and Baptist preacher, some settled in Sierra
Leone, in Africa. Black loyalists, however, continued to face social and economic
marginalization, including restrictions on land ownership within the British Empire. (2)
Black Patriots in the Revolutionary War
In the 1850s, the free black abolitionist, William C. Nell of Boston, published the nation’s first
histories of African Americans that addressed the military service on the Patriot side during the
American Revolution. In his 1855 publication, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution , he
singled out Crispus Attucks, a black man of African and Native American ancestry who worked
on whaling ships in Massachusetts, as the first man to die in the American fight for
independence. Five years before war broke out between colonists and Britain, Attucks had
been one of five Americans killed in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. Attucks became
something of martyr and a symbol of British oppression. A century after the massacre, a
Massachusetts poet honored and memorialized Attucks in a long poem that praised him as the
“first to defy, and the first to die.” (Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019, p.98) (1)
61
A lithograph created by John Bufford made during the mid-nineteenth century depicting the
Boston Massacre of 1770. Crispus Attucks is shown in the center foreground of the image after
being shot by a British solider.Figure 4-6: Boston Massacre by John H. Bufford is in the Public
Domain .
Despite the patriotic fervor Attucks’s death may have inspired, far fewer black people fought
alongside the Americans against the British during the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, some
black men in New England rallied to the patriot cause and were part of the militia forces that
were organized into the new Continental Army. Approximately 5 percent of the American
soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775) were black. New England blacks mostly
served in integrated units and received the same pay as whites, although none held a rank
higher than corporal.
Historians estimate that about 5,000 black soldiers ultimately fought on the patriot side. The
exact number will never be known because eighteenth century muster rolls usually did not
indicate race. Careful comparisons between muster rolls and church, census, and other records
have recently helped identify many black soldiers. Additionally, various eyewitness accounts
provide some indication of the level of African Americans’ participation during the war. Baron
von Closen, a member of Rochambeau’s French army at Yorktown, wrote in July 1781, “A
quarter of them [the American army] are Negroes, merry, confident and sturdy.”
The use of black men as soldiers, whether freemen or slaves, was avoided early in the war by
Congress and George Washington, General of the Continental Army. The prospect of armed
slave revolts proved more threatening to white American society than British redcoats. General
62
Washington allowed the enlistment of free blacks with “prior military experience” in January
1776, and extended the enlistment terms to all free blacks in January 1777 in order to help fill
the depleted ranks of the Continental Army. Because the states constantly failed to meet their
quotas of manpower for the army, Congress authorized the enlistment of all blacks, free and
slave, in 1777. Of the southern states, only Maryland permitted African Americans to enlist. In
1779, Congress offered slave masters in South Carolina and Georgia $1,000 for each slave they
provided to the army, but the legislatures of both states refused the offer. Thus, the greatest
number of black soldiers in the American army came from the North.
Although most Continental regiments were integrated, a notable exception was the elite First
Rhode Island. Mustered into service in July 1778, the First Rhode Island numbered 197 black
enlisted men commanded by white officers. Baron von Closen described the regiment as “the
most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.” The
regiment received its baptism of fire at the battle of Rhode Island (Newport) on August 29,
1778, successfully defeating three assaults by veteran Hessian troops. At the siege of Yorktown,
on the night of October 14, 1781, the regiment’s light company participated in the assault and
capture of Redoubt 10. On June 13, 1783, the regiment was disbanded, receiving high praise for
its service. Another notable black unit, recruited in the French colony of St. Domingue (presentday Haiti), fought with the French and patriots at the Battle of Savannah (October 9, 1779). (4)
In Maryland the other part of the Chesapeake region, black men were not considered to be
among the optional sources for filling quotas in the Continental Army or the militia units until
enlistment shortfalls made it expedient to broaden the base of eligible persons. A “Return of
the Negroes in the Army, August 24, 1778” indicates there were about 95 “Negroes” among the
Maryland troops. However, finding the identification of these men is difficult because they
were rarely identified by race on muster rolls. By 1780 Maryland was ready to accept
enlistments from any source and more “negroes” enlisted. In 1781 Charles Carroll wrote his
father “we shall pass a law tomorrow for raising a Negro regiment of 750—every person having
six Negroes between fourteen and forty-five years of age may have a Negro taken from him if
the Negro should be willing to enlist for the war (Maryland State Archives, 84:297 as cited by
Kreinheder and Schmidt 2001:121).
The North Carolina General Assembly initiated a draft in 1777 providing “that all men within the
ages of 16 and 50 were liable to serve…[in the Continental Army]…or find an able bodied man
to take their place” There were no color qualifications made in the act. The fact that men of
“mixed colors” participated in North Carolina military units is evident from many sources
(Schmidt 2001:159).
Georgia, not even 50 years a colony at the onset of the War, had about 18,000 enslaved people
in its population even though they declared their “abhorrence of the unnatural practice on
slavery,” in their 1775 declaration of support for the patriots in Boston and Massachusetts and
for the Revolutionary War to come. Georgia used the conflict to try to improve relationships
with Native Americans in the colony. The Georgia records of minorities’ service in the military
are not always clear. The National Society of the daughters of the American Revolution
63
authenticated records identify four “Black” soldiers and one “Indian” soldier from Georgia
(2001:1181–182). The Revolutionary War was not exclusively a “Man’s World.” Four women
have been authenticated in southern colonial records of Africans and Indians serving in the
Revolutionary War. Sarah, a “Black” woman, worked in the lead mines of Virginia, Catherine the
Grenadier, also known as the Shawnee woman, served in the Continental Army as did Nancy
Ward another Native American woman from North Carolina. Patty was a “Black” seamstress,
whose name is found in the papers of Henry Laurens, performed military service for South
Carolina (African American and American Indian Patriots of the American Revolution, 2001:148,
153,166, 182).
After the war, the black soldiers and seamen of Virginia were liberally rewarded in money, land
bounties, and granted them pensions. In common with other states, Virginia also provided for
the manumission of some slaves who fought. However, they had to petition the courts to gain
freedom and were not successful until ten or more years after the struggle. In the next century,
the children of African American Revolutionary War veterans who did not receive land,
petitioned the State of Virginia for land, and received it (Jackson 1942).
4.4: The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery
The Impact of the Revolution on Slavery
The American Revolution generated unprecedented debates about morality of slavery and its
compatibility with the founding creeds of the new nation. Though the Revolution did not lead
to abolition of slavery, it set off a process of both immediate and gradual emancipation in
northern states. The South’s slave system suffered because of the war, which resulted in a
decline in production and a loss of thousands of slaves to the British. Though a small number of
slaveholders, particularly in Virginia, emancipated their slaves after the Revolution, slavery
remained entrenched in the southern states and would only become more profitable and
spread further to the west and south during the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth
century.
In 1775, the year the Revolutionary War began, Quakers founded the world’s first antislavery
society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, are a
pacifist Christian sect that believe all humans possess an inner light, that God dwells inside
everyone. Consequently, most Quakers have espoused historically controversial ideas of racial
and gender equality, and viewed slavery as an immoral and dehumanizing institution, despite
the fact that some Quakers still owned slaves before the Revolution. Following the Quaker’s
example, at least thirteen of anti-slavery societies came into existence in America by 1788. (5)
The fight for liberty led some American slaveholders to free their slaves, and most northern
states soon passed gradual emancipation laws. (2) In 1777, Vermont created a new state
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constitution that outlawed slavery making it first place in the New World to do so. Six years
later, Massachusetts and New Hampshire also outlawed slavery through judicial decisions.
Further to the south, Pennsylvania passed a law outlining a process of gradual emancipation
that said that the children born after March 1, 1780 to mothers who were slaves would be
considered indentured servants and be completely free from their masters when they turned
28. New York and New Jersey, where slavery was more prevalent, did not pass gradual
emancipation laws until 1799 and 1804, respectively. (Davis, 2006) While the state of Delaware
would not abolish slavery until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, 31 percent
of its African American population were free by 1790 because of the anti-slavery activism of
Quakers and Methodists. (Carson, 2019)
Some manumissions also occurred in the Upper South, most notably in Virginia. In 1782, near
the end of the Revolution, the Virginia Assembly passed a law that removed restrictions on
masters to free their slaves. The next year, the Assembly freed any slaves who had fought on
behalf of the Continental Army during the war. These new laws led to the rapid growth of
Virginia’s free black population. In 1780, there were 2,800 free black people and by 1810 there
were 30,000 living in Virginia. Virginia also banned the foreign importation of slaves in 1778,
though more out of fear of a growing black population and concern that a large surplus of
slaves would diminish the market value of those the state’s slaveholders already owned. (Ford,
2009) (1)
On the other hand, the Lower South, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, remained
passionately committed to the African slave trade and some masters in the region revoked their
offers of freedom for war service while others forced freed black people back into bondage. (2)
Perhaps the most significant step to address the issue of slavery taken by the Continental
Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and before the ratification of the new United
States Constitution, was the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, which organized new
territory west of the Appalachian Mountains and north of the Ohio River. The Northwest
Ordinance also prohibited slaveholders from bring in slaves into the Northwest Territory while
permitting slaveholders who already lived in the area to maintain their human property.
(Carson, Lapansky-Werner & Nash, 2019) (1)
65
A map that shows the land in black designated as the Northwest Territory by the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787. The map also shows the years that individual territories in the region were
admitted into the union as states.Figure 4-7: Northwest territory usa 1787 by Unknown is
licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported .
The Revolution’s rhetoric of equality also created a “revolutionary generation” of slaves and
free black Americans that would eventually galvanize the antislavery movement well into the
nineteenth century. (2) The growing class of free blacks established their own social institutions
including churches, schools, and benevolent societies. Black people associated with these
institutions fought for the manumission of their less fortunate brothers and sisters, lobbied for
an end to the slave trade and of the institution of slavery. They rooted their arguments in the
language of natural rights and democratic principles and became the conscience of the
nation. (3)
Although the rise of the free black population is one of the most notable achievements of the
Revolutionary Era, it is important to note that the overall impact of the Revolution on slavery
had negative consequences. In rice-growing regions of South Carolina and Georgia, the patriot
victory confirmed the power of the master class. Doubts about slavery and legal modifications
that occurred in the North and Upper South never took serious hold among whites in the Lower
South. Even in Virginia, the move toward freeing some slaves was made more difficult by new
legal restrictions in 1792. In the North, where slavery was on its way out, racism still persisted,
as in a Massachusetts law of 1786 that prohibited whites from legally marrying African
Americans, Indians, or people of mixed race. (5)
66
The Revolution clearly had a mixed impact on slavery and contradictory meanings for African
Americans. (5) It failed to reconcile slavery with these new egalitarian republican societies, a
tension that eventually boiled over in the 1830s and 1840s and effectively tore the nation in
two in the 1850s and 1860s. (2)
Slavery and the Constitution
In the summer of 1787, political leaders of the United States met in Philadelphia to debate the
creation of a new federal constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of
Confederation reflected the ideals of the revolutionary generation who distrusted concentrated
power and wanted to create a new nation that in no way resembled the monarchy they fought
to overthrow. Ten years after America declared its independence from Britain, the intractable
problems and glaring weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation were on full display. Rather
than a strong union, the United States of America resembled thirteen separate countries each
concerned about its own sovereignty and well-being rather than that of the nation. Now that
the Revolutionary War was over, what common cause and purpose held the states together?
The nation, it seemed, was fraying apart at the seams, threatening to splinter into a series of
regional confederacies rather than a united nation.
The ardent nationalists, such as Virginia’s James Madison, met in Philadelphia in 1787 to
propose a new federal constitution they hoped would create “a more perfect union.” They also
had an opportunity to address the issue of slavery directly and, perhaps, set it on a path toward
extinction since it clearly violated the principles of the American Revolution. Instead, the
framers of the Constitution swept the problem of slavery under the rug with a series of
compromises demanded by representatives from southern states in exchange for their support
of the new constitution. These compromises ensured the constitutional protection of slavery
while also setting the stage for future divisive debates over slavery that would threaten to
break the union apart along sectional lines.
Of all the compromises that formed the Constitution, perhaps none would be more important
than the compromise over the slave trade. Americans generally perceived the trans-Atlantic
slave trade as more violent and immoral than slavery itself. Many Northerners opposed it on
moral grounds. But they also understood that letting southern states import more Africans
would increase their political power. The Constitution counted each black individual as threefifths of a person for purposes of representation, so in districts with many slaves, the white
voters had extra influence.
On the other hand, the states of the Upper South also welcomed a ban on the Atlantic trade
because they already had a surplus of slaves. Banning importation meant slave owners in
Virginia and Maryland could get higher prices when they sold their slaves to states like South
Carolina and Georgia that were dependent upon a continued slave trade.
New England and the Deep South agreed to what was called a “dirty compromise” at the
Constitutional Convention in 1787. New Englanders agreed to include a constitutional provision
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that protected the foreign slave trade for twenty years; in exchange, South Carolina and
Georgia delegates had agreed to support a constitutional clause that made it easier for
Congress to pass commercial legislation. As a result, the Atlantic slave trade resumed until 1808
when it was outlawed for three reasons. First, Britain was also in the process of outlawing the
slave trade in 1807, and the United States did not want to concede any moral high ground to its
rival. Second, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), a successful slave revolt against French
colonial rule in the West Indies, had changed the stakes in the debate. The image of thousands
of armed black revolutionaries terrified white Americans. Third, the Haitian Revolution had
ended France’s plans to expand its presence in the Americas, so in 1803, the United States had
purchased the Louisiana Territory from the French at a fire-sale price. This massive new
territory, which had doubled the size of the United States, had put the question of slavery’s
expansion at the top of the national agenda. Many white Americans, including President
Thomas Jefferson, thought that ending the external slave trade and dispersing the domestic
slave population would keep the United States a white man’s republic and perhaps even lead to
the disappearance of slavery.
The ban on the slave trade, however, lacked effective enforcement measures and funding.
Moreover, instead of freeing illegally imported Africans, the act left their fate to the individual
states, and many of those states simply sold intercepted slaves at auction. Thus, the ban
preserved the logic of property ownership in human beings. The new federal government
protected slavery as much as it expanded democratic rights and privileges for white men. (2)
Conclusion
The Revolution brought change for some black people, although nothing approaching full
equality. The courageous military service of African Americans and the revolutionary spirit
ended slavery in New England almost immediately. The middle states of New York,
Pennsylvania, and New Jersey adopted policies of gradual emancipation from 1780 to 1804.
Many of the founders opposed slavery in principle (including some whose wealth was largely in
human property). Individual manumissions increased following the Revolution.
Still, free blacks in both the North and South faced persistent discrimination in virtually every
aspect of life, notably employment, housing, and education. Many of the founders hoped that
slavery would eventually disappear in the American South. When cotton became king in the
South after 1800, this hope died. There was just too much profit to be made working slaves on
cotton plantations. The statement of human equality in the Declaration of Independence was
never entirely forgotten, however. It remained as an ideal that could be appealed to by
abolitionists and civil rights activists through the following decades.
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4.5: Primary Sources
Primary Source Document: Petition of Slaves in Boston, Province
of Massachusetts Bay by Felix
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Freedom Petition of Prince Hall
Document Download Link
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READING MODULE 5: Creating an AfricanAmerican Culture
5.1: Introduction
Creating an African-American Culture
Module Introduction
People express cultural meaning through their language, food, sacred and secular rites,
ceremonies, rituals, art, music, dance, personal adornment, celebrations and many other sociocultural customs and practices. (3)
Despite slavery’s strictures, African Americans created their own unique culture and cultural
identity, particularly through language and religion, during the eighteenth and nineteenth
century.
This module explores how black people created an African American culture and identity, how
they used language, literacy, religion, and music, such as spirituals, hymns, and hollers, to
navigate and resist a dehumanizing slave system and strengthen the bonds of their
communities. (1)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
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•
•
Discuss the role of language and religion as they relate to the creation of a unique African
American culture.
Analyze the roles of language and religion in shaping cultural identities in America today. (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: Creating an African-American Culture: Language, Religion, and Music (see
below).
5.2: Language
Creating an African-American Culture—Language, Religion, and
Music
Language
For the first generations of Africans enslaved in the colonies, language accommodation and
acculturation were a necessity for their survival in the Western world. Depending upon when
and where they came from in Africa, in addition to their own languages, different African
people had varying degrees of language competence in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.
As a result of trade with the Portuguese in the middle fifteenth century, bilingualism arose
among West Africans along the coast. In succeeding centuries, as West Africans traded with the
Dutch, French and English, some Africans continued to at least understand, and many to speak,
some form of one or more European languages. Even though they spoke many different African
languages, many Africans who had participated in long distance trading on the African
continent spoke a “lingua franca” or trade language that allowed them to communicate among
themselves (Abrahams 1983:26). African sailors on European vessels may have also spoken a
“maritime jargon” (Berlin 1998; Birmingham 1981; McWhorter 1997, 2000a). The first
generations of Africans and Europeans who came into contact with one another, like all people
of different language groups, spoke their own language and developed apidgin , language.
Pidgins included words and meaning from both languages that allowed them to communicate.
Over time, both Africans and Europeans communicated in some form of creole . People of
Angola and West Central Africa developed Angolar Creole Portuguese , a language still spoken
by descendants of maroon slaves who escaped from Portuguese plantations on São Tomé
beginning in the middle sixteenth century. People who were enslaved by the Spanish developed
Spanish-based creoles, called Papiamentu Creole Spanish .Palenquero is another Spanish creole
developed by Africans in maroon settlements of what is now Colombia, South America.
Enslaved Africans in New Netherlands, later New York, developed a Dutch-based
creole, Negerhollands Creole Dutch , in Haiti and later in Louisiana people spoke a French-based
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creole, today called Haitian Creole French . In the English colonies Africans spoke an Englishbased Atlantic Creole , generally called plantation creole. Lowcountry Africans spoke an Englishbased creole that came to be called Gullah . Gullah is a language closely related to Krio a creole
spoken in Sierra Leone. (3)
Enslaved African American Language
Gullah and other creoles emerged because enslaved Africans greatly outnumbered whites on
colonial plantations as occurred in the Lowcountry, especially on the sea islands
where Gullah developed. John McWhorter, a linguist, advances an “ Afrogenesis Theory ” of
creole origins, stressing the importation of most plantation creoles from West African trade
settlements. There creole languages originated in interactions between white traders and
slaves, some of whom were eventually transported overseas (McWhorter 2000a, 2000b).
The Afrogenesis Theory helps explain whyGullah and Krio are similar creoles.
Historian Lorena Walsh notes that, “ Gullah ,” attained creole status during the first decades of
the 1700s, and was learned and used by the second generation of slaves as their mother
tongue. Around the same time, in the 1720 and 1730s, Anglican clergy were still reporting that
Africans spoke little or no English but stood around in groups talking among themselves in
“strange languages (Walsh 1997:96–97).”
In the past, enslaved Africans from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida along the
coast and 100 miles inland spoke Gullah . In the present, many of the descendants of the
early Gullah speakers continue to speak a form of the language (Hancock 1992:70–72; Geraty
1997). African American heritage preservation efforts in the sea islands include attempts to
maintain Gullah as a living language.
Runaway advertisements noted enslaved people’s distinctive language characteristics and level
of language proficiency as identifiers. A search of runaway advertisements 1736–1776 in the
Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, Virginia yielded advertisements for five men described as
“Angola negroes” or born in Angola. Two could speak very good English, two “ speak English
tolerably good ” and one was described as stammering. Two advertisements identified “Eboe
negroe.” One could “speak tolerable good English.” Jemmy, John and Boston in this image
illustrate the range of English language competency among African-born men in
eighteenth century Virginia.
As part of a more extensive study of comments on language found in runaways advertisements
in eight colonies and, later, states, historian Michael Gomez examined the quality of English
spoken by 99 Africans in Virginia from 1736 to 1836. He found that the advertisement’s
descriptions said 39 Africans spoke “none, little or very little, 36 spoke “bad,” “very bad” or
“broken” English and 24 spoke “good” or very good” English (1998:177–180).
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Figure 5-1: Virginia Gazette (Rind), Williamsburg, November 30, 1769 by Virginia Gazette is in
the Public Domain .An advertisement published by a subscriber looking for one of his runaway
slaves named Bristol.
According to Gomez, those African runaways 30 years of age or older or who had been in North
America more than 3 years were most likely to speak good English. Like the Virginia Africans,
over 70 percent of Africans running away from South Carolina, Georgia were also described as
speaking “bad, very bad, very little, or no English.” Among Louisiana runaways, they were about
equally divided between those who could speak French and those that could not. Gomez found
the few women in the study were slightly more likely than the men to speak French or English
(1998:179).
Many enslaved people were multi-lingual. “Without a doubt,” historian Philip Morgan
contends, “blacks were the most linguistically polyglot and proficient ethnic group
in the Americas (2002:139).”
The continuous arrival of new African slaves influenced the language spoken by American-born
Africans in the rural colonial Chesapeake and Lowcountry regions up until 1807. Even after this
date, smugglers sold Africans in the region, right up until the Civil War (Kashif 2001). In
contrast, many free African Americans in the southern colonies became more acculturated in
speech and literate, along with all other European cultural customs, as they consciously sought
to differentiate themselves from their enslaved sisters and brothers.
73
5.3: Spiritual Life: Public & Secret
Spiritual Life: Public & Secret
Along with language, black people also created a unique African American culture through
religious expression and practices. By the eighteenth century, many of the people brought from
West Central African to be enslaved in the Americas were familiar if not converted to
Catholicism. Before the American Revolution most black Catholics lived in Maryland and in the
areas that were to become Florida and Louisiana. In the American colonies controlled by
Catholic powers—the Portuguese, Spanish and French—African slaves were baptized as
Christians from the earliest days of slavery. But in the British-controlled Protestant colonies,
planters showed little interest in converting their slaves. Many feared that to accept slaves as
Christians was to acknowledge that “Negroes” were entitled to rights accorded other
Christians—a dangerous message as far as they were concerned.
As early as 1654, the English made provisions for “negro” servants to receive religious
instruction and education. Some planters made provisions in their will that their “negro
servants be freed, that they should be taught to read and write, make their own clothes and be
brought up in the fear of God.” By 1770, it had become the duty of masters acquiring free
“negro children as apprenticed to agree to teach them reading, writing and arithmetic” (Russell
[1913] 1969:138).
Despite owner opposition, and the inability of some Africans to speak or understand English, by
1724 Anglican clergymen had established small groups of African converts to Protestant
Christianity in a number of parishes in Virginia and Maryland. Their greatest success was in
Bruton parish, Williamsburg, eight miles north of Carter’s Grove, where approximately 200
Africans were baptized.
The slaves who lived at Carter’s Grove apparently chose to attend Bruton Parish church over
other Anglican churches located nearer to their homes and attended by the Burwell Family.
Although the journey to Willamsburg was longer it was also an occasion when they could meet
with friends or relatives from Bray and Kingsmill Farm or other surrounding plantations or
farms (Russell [1913] 1969:138). In the last half of the eighteenth century 1,122 “negrobaptisms were recorded” in Bruton Parish by the Anglican church (Wilson 1923:49).
The motivation for attending church was as likely to be a rare chance to meet without fear of
planter intervention as it was spiritual. Christians came from different generation groups and
were as likely to be field hands as they were to be domestic servants in the great houses.
Christians included Africans and native-born African Virginians. For some, the motivation was a
reward of larger food rations or additional clothing. For others it was an opportunity
to learn to read.
74
South Carolinian colonists were the first to make systematic efforts to Christianize enslaved
Africans and African Americans in the early eighteenth century. Anglicans believed literacy was
essential. As Anglican missionaries reached out to enslaved Africans in South Carolina and
Georgia they tried to teach at least a few to read. Planters were hostile to the idea of slave
literacy. They resisted by passing a law in 1734 that slaves could not leave the plantation on
“Sundays, fast days, and holy days without a ticket,” that is a pass. Fears of insurrections led by
literate slaves, such as the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, resulted in passage of the New
Negro Act of 1740, which curtailed the missionaries’ freedom to teach slaves to read and write
English. In spite of the law, Alexander Garden, an Anglican missionary, established the
Charleston Negro School in 1743. The school lasted twenty years. Garden purchased and taught
two African American boys to read and write and they became teachers of others. Over the
next four years Garden graduated forty “scholars.” At its peak in 1755, the school enrolled
seventy African American children. This was a miniscule number considering there were about
50,000 Africans and African Americans in the colony. It was, however, a start (Frey 1991:20–
24).
Figure 5-2: DE Unitas Fractum Bild 04 by David Cranz is in the Public Domain .A 1757 drawing
titled, “Exorcism-Baptism of the Negroes,” that shows African American slaves being baptized in
a Moravian Church in North Carolina.
Other Protestant sects also reached out to African slaves in southern colonies. The
Presbyterians established a church on Edisto Island, South Carolina between 1710 and 1720.
Thirty years later, Moravians, mostly missionaries to American Indians, established a North
Carolina church that received African slaves into the congregation.
75
During the first Great Awakening of the 1740s, itinerant Baptist and Methodist preachers
spread the Gospel into slave communities. The Baptists and Methodists did not insist on a welleducated clergy. They believed true preachers were called and anointed by the spirit of God,
not groomed in institutions of higher learning. If a converted slave demonstrated a call to
preach, he could potentially preach to both black and white audiences. Consequently, African
American slaves tended to most often join or attend Baptist and Methodist churches.
(Raboteau 1978:133–134; Creel 1988; 78–80). (3) The first independent African American
churches that slaves established in the 1770s were a part of the Baptist denomination: Silver
Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina, First Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia, and First
African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia. (1)
Family Worship in a Plantation in South Carolina (page 561) by unknown is in the Public
Domain .From The Illustrated London News , December 5, 1863, p. 561.
A recording of a prayer from a Baptist church in Livingston, Alabama (1939)
An audio element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can listen to it online
here: http://pb.libretexts.org/aahistory/?p=72
Prayer by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no known copyright restrictions. (8)
(Transcript)
Additional link to audio.
76
Public and Secret Religious Experience
The first Great Awakening accelerated the spread of Christianity and a Christian culture among
African Americans. The Presbyterians launched the first sporadic revivals in the 1740s. Baptist
revivals began in the 1760s followed ten years later by the Methodists. With religious
conversion came education for the enslaved, at least education to read the Bible. By 1771,
itinerant African American Baptist preachers were conducting services, sometimes secretly, in
and around Williamsburg, Virginia.
Aside from the names of a small number of runaway slaves who were described as fond of
preaching or singing hymns, many of the early African American preachers remain anonymous.
The few names in the historical record were men of uncommon accomplishments in organizing
churches, church schools, and mutual aid societies in the South and as missionaries in Jamaica
and Nova Scotia. All were born into slavery in Virginia. All were Baptists. George Liele, born in
1737 was the first African American ordained as a Baptist minister. He preached to whites and
slaves on the indigo and rice plantations along the Savannah River in Georgia. He was freed
during the Revolutionary War in the will of his owner. Liele was forced to flee with the British to
Jamaica in order to escape re-enslavement by his owner’s heirs. Before he left, he baptized
several converts, including Reverend Andrew Bryan, who would continue his work in Georgia
and as missionaries extend it abroad.
“Our brother Andrew was one of the black hearers of George Liele, … prior to the departure of
George Liele for Jamaica, he came up the Tybee River … and baptized our brother Andrew, with
a wench of the name of Hagar, both belonging to Jonathon Bryan, Esq.; these were the last
performances of our Brother George Liele in this quarter, About eight or nine months after his
departure, Andrew began to exhort his black hearers, with a few whites… (Letters showing the
Rise of Early Negro Churches 1916:77–78)
Liele also baptized David George, a Virginia runaway. These men, and others, formed the
nucleus of slaves who were organized by a white preacher as the Silver Bluff Baptist Church
between 1773 and 1775. George began to preach during the Revolutionary War, but later fled
with the British to Nova Scotia where he established the second Baptist church in the province
(Frey 1991:37–39).
In 1782, Andrew Bryan organized a church in Savannah that was certified in the Baptist Annual
Register in 1788 as follows:
“This is to certify, that upon examination into the experiences and characters of a number of
Ethiopians, and adjacent to Savannah it appears God has brought them out of darkness into the
light of the gospel… This is to certify, that the Ethiopian church of Jesus Christ, have called their
beloved Andrew to the work of the ministry….” (Letters showing the Rise of Early Negro
Churches 1916:78).
77
As the eighteenth century ended, the First African Baptist Church in Savannah erected its first
building. By 1800, Bryan’s congregation had grown to about 700, leading to a reorganization
that created the First Baptist Church of Savannah. Fifty of Bryan’s adult members could read,
having been taught the Bible and the Baptist Confession of Faith. First African Baptist
established the first black led Sunday school for African Americans, and Henry Francis, who had
been ordained by Bryan, operated a school for Georgia’s black children. (3)
Cultural Resistance: “Gimmee” That Old Time Religion!
Not all Africans and African Americans embraced Christianity, however. Some resisted by
retaining their native African spiritual practices or their Islamic faith. Historians point out that a
number of Africans who arrived in America were Muslims and that they never relinquished
their faith in Islam.
There is relatively little historical documentation on eighteenth century enslaved Muslims in
North America making discussion of them less conclusive than that about enslaved Africans
who were Christians or who practiced indigenous traditional African religions. Some scholars
believe that perhaps as many as 10% of Africans enslaved in North America between 1711 and
1715 were Muslims and that the majority probably were literate (Deeb 2002).
Islam was firmly established as a religion in Ancient Mali as early as the fourteenth century. As
in other parts of the world, Islamic conversion occurred through trade and migration far more
often than by force. In West Africa, prior to the eighteenth century, much of this conversion
occurred through interaction of West Africans with Berber traders who controlled the transSaharan trade routes. From the early seventeenth century through the late eighteenth century,
the influence of Islam spread among the people in many parts of the Senegambia region, the
interior of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and as far south as the Bight of Benin.
According to historian Michael Gomez, the widespread influence of Islam in West Africa makes
it highly likely that the numbers of Muslim Africans enslaved was probably in the thousands
(1998:86). The recurrence of Muslim names among American-born Africans running away from
enslavement in eighteenth century South Carolina offers some evidence of Muslim people’s
presence and their efforts to continue their faith (Gomez 1998:60).
Historian Sylviane A. Diouf estimates at least 100,000 Africans brought to the Americas were
Muslims, including political and religious leaders, traders, students, Islamic scholars, and judges.
In some cases, these enslaved African Muslims were more educated than their American
masters. According to Diouf, the captivity of several of the notable Muslim slaves who left
narratives of their experiences grew out of complex religious, political, and social conflicts in
West Africa after the disintegration of the Wolof Empire. Diouf argues, the religious principles
and practices of African Muslims, including their literacy, made them resistant to enslavement
and promoted their social differentiation from other enslaved Africans. As slaves, they were
prohibited from reading and writing and had no ink or paper. Instead they used wood tablets
and organic plant juices or stones to write with. Some wrote, in Arabic, verses of the Koran they
78
knew by heart, so as not to forget how to write. According to Diouf, Arabic was used by slaves
to plot revolts in Guyana, Rio de Janeiro and Santo Domingo because the language was not
understood by slave owners. Manuscripts in Arabic of maps and blueprints for revolts also have
been found in North America, Jamaica and Trinidad (Diouf 1998).
Diouf contends many enslaved Muslims went to great efforts to preserve the pillars of Islamic
ritual because it allowed them “to impose a discipline on themselves rather than to submit to
another people’s discipline” (1998:162). Diouf identifies references in the historical literature of
slavery to the persistence of Islamic cultural practices among enslaved Muslims such as the
wearing of turbans, beards, and protective rings; the use of prayer mats, beads, and talismans
( gris-gris ); and the persistence of Islamic dietary customs. For Diouf, saraka cakes cooked on
Sapelo Island in Georgia were probably associated with sadakha or meritorious alms offered in
the name of Allah. She speculates that the circular ring shout performed in Sea Island praise or
prayer houses might have been a recreation of the Muslim custom of circumambulation of the
Kaaba during the pilgrimage in Mecca. Arabic literacy, according to Diouf, generated powers of
resistance because it served as a resource for spiritual inspiration and communal organization,
“A tradition of defiance and rebellion (1998:145).”
Priests of African traditional religions also often continued to hold their beliefs. Even though
over time the majority of Africans and African Americans became Christians, African Christianity
and church rituals often incorporated African beliefs and rituals. Some scholars suggest that
Africans readily acculturated to Christianity, especially those from West Central Africa, because
of prior exposure to Christianity. Old ways died hard and some never died out. Historian John
Thornton points out that none of the Christian movements in the Kongo brought about a
radical break with Kongo religious or ideological past. Instead African Christianity simply
emphasized already active tendencies in the worldview of the Kongo people (Thornton
1983:62–63).
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Figure 5-4: Kongo Crucifix by Cliff1066 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .Image of a seventeenth
century crucifix made by Portuguese missionaries that combines the Kongo custom of using
scepters and staffs as emblems of power with the representation of Christ as an African.
One of the central beliefs of the Kongo, for example, emphasizes that human beings move
through existence in counterclockwise circularity like the movement of the sun, coming into life
or waking up in the east, grow to maturity reaching the height of their powers in the north, die
and pass out of life in the west into life after death in the south then come back in the east
being born again (Fu-Kiah 1969; Thompson 1984; McGaffey 1986). Many West African groups
believe in life after death and some believes that people are reborn in their descendants. These
ideas, although in a different context, blended well with Christian beliefs in life after death and
with the Christian belief being born again.
5.4: Performing Culture in Music & Dance
Performing Culture in Music & Dance
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Not only did African Americans often blend traditional West African spirituality with Christian
beliefs, they also wove together West African rhythms, shouts, and melodies with European
American tunes to create spiritual songs drawn from images and stories found in Bible. African
Americans also put their own unique cultural and musical stamp on a style of hymn singing
called lined-out hymnody. Lined-out hymn singing has roots in sixteenth and seventeenth
century England and Scotland. Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries taught lining
out to slaves and poor whites in the South where literacy was low and hymnbooks were few.
Taken together, African American spirituals and hymns represent a profound cultural
expression and contribution that laid the foundation for future forms of American music
including the blues, soul, jazz, and even rock n’ roll and hip-hop.
African American spiritual songs took a variety of forms including shouts, anthems, and jubilees.
“Styles ranged from the exciting tempo and rhythmic stamp of the shout to the slow, drawn-out
‘sorrow songs’ which usually come to mind when the spirituals are mentioned,” observes
historian Albert J. Raboteau. “While the lyrics and themes of the spirituals were drawn from
Biblical verses and Christian hymns, and although the music and melodies were strongly
influenced by the sacred and secular songs of white Americans, the style in which the slaves
sang the spirituals was African.” (Raboteau, 74). The influence of West Africa could be heard in
the spirituals’ call-and-response form, syncopated rhythms, and the use of “blue” notes, which
are tones in the major and pentatonic scale that are “bent” into minor tones. African Americans
also demonstrated their West African heritage in their body movements, including handclapping, foot-stomping, and dance. (Darden, 2004) (1)
The Ring Shout
The heritage of West Africa found perhaps its fullest expression in the spiritual form called the
ring shout, which seemed to thrive on the sea islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
The ring shout combines singing or shouting stories from the Bible with a religious form of
dance that resembles shuffling. In a religious setting, the shouters shuffle and stomp in a
counterclockwise motion while clapping their hands to the shout’s rhythm. Some African
American slaves believed the ring shout was a central part of worship, often a prerequisite to
receiving the spirit or having a conversion experience. The ring shout, argues Raboteau, was
thus a “two-way bridge connecting the core of West African religions—possession by the
gods—to the core of evangelical Protestantism—experience of conversion.” (Raboteau, 73)
During the Civil War, William Francis Allen, a northern educator, heard the religious singing of
newly freed slaves while in the Low Country of South Carolina. He later helped edit and publish
the first collection of African American religious songs in American history, Slave Songs of the
United States . In an 1867 article in The Nation , Allen described the ring shout in the following
manner:
“…the true ‘shout’ takes place on Sundays or on ‘praise’ nights through the week, and either in
the praise-house or in some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held… The
benches are pushed back to the wall when the meeting is over, and old and young men and
81
women… boys… young girls barefooted, all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the
[spiritual] is struck, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a
ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking,
hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration.
Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual,
and sometimes they song itself is also sung by the dancers…. Song and dance alike are
extremely energetic, and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the
monotonous thud, thud, thud of feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house… It is
not unlikely that this remarkable religious ceremony is a relic of some African dance…” (Allen
quoted in Rabotaeu, 71)
During the 1930s, the folklorists Alan and John Lomax, found evidence of the ring shout still
practiced in Louisiana, Texas, Georgia, and the Bahamas, and versions of it in Haiti. (Rabotaeu,
1978, 70) The ring shout is still performed today by the descendants of slaves, particularly in
McIntosh County, Georgia. Versions of the ring shout can also be seen today in some African
American Primitive Baptist churches in Georgia and Florida. Congregants often sing spirituals
during the offering portion of the service and some will move toward the front of church and
“rock” counter-clockwise around the communion table while singing old spirituals like
“Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” (1)
Lined-Out Hymns
As Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries spread the gospel during the eighteenth
and nineteenth century, including into African American slave communities, they brought with
them hymns composed by English hymn writers such as Issac Watts, William Cowper, and
Charles Wesley. In many poor white and slave communities, church attendees could not read or
afford hymnbooks. As a result, missionaries taught church congregations the practice of lining
out hymns. Lining out involved a preacher or deacon standing before a congregation and
reading the first lines of a hymn from a hymnbook or speaking them from memory. The
congregation, which most likely did not have hymnbooks or were usually unable to read them if
they did, would hear the lines intoned by the presenter and then respond by singing them,
often very slowly, to a familiar tune that fit the hymn’s meter. The practice of lining out
originated in England following the Protestant Reformation and spread to Scotland and then
North America where the Puritans lined out the Psalms from their Bay Psalm Book. Lining out
quickly took hold among white and black Baptists in particular during the eighteenth century
and nineteenth century.
One slave master, and Presbyterian missionary, from Liberty County, Georgia, Charles Colcock
Jones, emphasized the importance of teaching hymns and psalms to slaves as way to dissuade
them from singing the “extravagant and nonsensical chants” and shouts “of their own
composing.” Ironically, however, black slaves used these European hymn and psalm texts to
learn literacy. And by creating their own melodies, tunes, and speech patterns when lining out
the hymns, African Americans effectively “blackened” what was originally a European form of
82
singing. African American slaves in turn created a unique African American musical sound and
culture that became the bedrock of later secular genres such as the blues. (Dargan, 2006)
William Francis Allen, who described the ring shout tradition among African American slaves
during the Civil War, also provided one of the most detailed and evocative descriptions of linedout hymn singing among slaves during the same time period:
“I went to the Praise House in the Quarters…. They were just beginning a hymn, which the
preacher deaconed [lined] out, two lines at a time. The tune was evidently Old Hundred, which
was maintained throughout by one voice or another, but curiously varied at every note so as to
form an intricate intertwining of harmonious sounds. It was something very different from
anything I ever heard, and no description I have read conveys any notion of it. There were no
parts properly speaking, only now and then a hint of a base or tenor, and the modulation
seemed to be just the inspiration of the moment—no effort at regularity, only that one or two
voices kept up the air—but the ears are so good, and the time is so perfectly kept… that there
was very seldom a discordant note. It might be compared to the notes of an organ or orchestra,
where all harmony is poured out in accompaniment of the air.” (Allen quoted in Dargan, 112–
13)
Lined-out hymns in the black church also became known as long meter hymns, metered hymns,
or “Dr. Watts” because of the large number of hymns penned by Issac Watts. Until the late
twentieth century, lined-out hymns were almost always sung a capella—that is with voices only
and without musical accompaniment.
George Pullen Jackson, a folklorist and professor, visited black Primitive Baptist churches in
Alabama and Jacksonville, Florida in the 1940s and heard congregants still singing lined-out
hymns, which he sometimes called “surge songs,” with great power and beauty:
“The ‘long meter’ hymns (absolute opposites of the spirituals in every sense) are sung in
thousands of unspoiled [black] congregations usually, but not exclusively, at the opening of the
service. A deacon or the elder ‘lines out’ a couplet of the text in a sing-song voice and at a fair
speaking pace ending on definite tone. This ‘tones’ the tune. The deacon then starts singing,
and by the time he has sung through the elaborately ornamented first syllable the whole
congregation has joined in on the second syllable with a volume of florid sound which ebbs and
flows slowly, powerfully and at times majestically in successive surges until the lined-out words
have been sung…. No instrument is ever used.” (Jackson, 248)
The lined-out hymn singing tradition still thrives in some black churches, particularly in
Missionary and Primitive Baptist congregations. Black Primitive Baptists maintain the strongest
tradition, however. They sing numerous hymns from their hymnbook, The Primitive Hymns,
which contains only texts and no musical notations, during all parts of their church services. The
Primitive Baptists also draw from the deepest well of hymn tunes, which have been passed
down orally over many generations. Primitive Baptist associations in states such as Alabama,
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Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia also have their own unique hymn tunes and
rhythms while sharing the same hymn texts and manner of lining out. (1)
Below are two examples of lined-out hymns:
An audio element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can listen to it online
here: http://pb.libretexts.org/aahistory/?p=74
Go Preach My Gospel by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no know copyright restrictions. (9)
Additional link to audio.
Lyrics:
“Go preach my gospel,” saith the Lord, “Bid the whole earth my grace receive, Explain to them
my sacred word, Bid them believe, obey, and live.” “I’ll make my great commission known, And
ye shall prove my gospel true.
An audio element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can listen to it online
here: http://pb.libretexts.org/aahistory/?p=74
Jesus, My God, I Know His Name by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no know
copyright restrictions. (10)
Additional link to audio.
Lyrics:
Jesus, my God I know his name His name is on my soul He will not put my soul to shamebr Oh
let my holy Lord)
Black Secular Music
African Americans also created their own body of secular songs during the trials of slavery.
These included work songs and hollers as well as drum rhythms and songs composed on
stringed instruments like banjos. Work songs helped to ease the drudgery of plantation labor
while hollers resembled laments that provided emotional release or allowed slaves to
communicate covert messages that might spread from plantation to plantation. These songs
showed the individual and collective creativity of black people and their desire to create and
maintain a sense of community and resist the dehumanizing and destructive forces of
slavery. (1)
One example of how black people used music to create a sense of community is from
Charleston, South Carolina where African Americans would travel to rural areas to participate in
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countryside dances where they danced all night. Slaves continued to hold countryside dances at
night throughout the eighteenth century, even after the Stono Rebellion in 1730 when slave
dances were outlawed along with use or ownership of drums, horns and other loud instruments
(Morgan 1998:580–582).
Enslaved African Americans communicated with one another in hollers or calls derived from
their musical tradition of call and response. Callsare as musical ways “to communicate
messages of all kinds-to bring people in from the fields, to summon them to work, to attract the
attention of a girl in the distance, to signal hunting dogs, or simply to make one’s presence
known Courlander 1963:81).” Calls convey simple messages, or merely make one’s
whereabouts known to friends working elsewhere in the fields. Many slave calls were modeled
on African drumming. Slaves also copied the drum rhythms by ‘patting juba.’ This procedure
involved “foot tapping, hand clapping, and thigh slapping, all in precise rhythm (Southern
1971:168).” Patting juba was incorporated into an early twentieth century dance called the
Charleston. This “Africanism,” reappeared in the late twentieth century in the dance
choreography of the Broadway musical “Bring on the Noise, Bring on the Funk.”
Figure 5-5: Slave dance to banjo by Anonymous is in the Public Domain .The Old Plantation
(anonymous folk painting late 1700s). Depicts African-American slaves dancing to banjo and
percussion
African Americans also made and played banjos made out of gourds. The banjo is a musical
instrument that originated in Senegal and the Gambia region of West Africa. By the end of the
eighteenth century banjos had become the most common musical accompaniment used by
Africans for their dances. The first mention of it in North America is found in a 1749 account of
a Christmas celebration of Africans from plantations along the Cooper River playing the banjo,
dancing and making merry (Ravitz 1960:384; Coolen 1984:117–132). This famous watercolor
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painting The Old Plantation which portrays a slave dance in eighteenth century South Carolina
illustrates one slave playing a banjo and another beating a drum. The musical instruments and
styles of dress reveal the intertwining of influences from African and Europe.
Enslaved Africans learned to play European instruments as well. “A black Virginia born Negro
fellow named Sambo,” who ran away in 1766, was a carpenter who made fiddles and played
them. Gabriel, a weaver by trade…is fond of reading and plays well the violin,” so said his owner
in a 1776 newspaper advertisement seeking his capture and return. A number of these
advertisements for runaway musicians also note that they could read and some could write
well enough to have possibly forged a pass. Other runaways were drawn to a different kind of
cultural performance in the Christian church. Jemmy, a dark mulatto man was fond of singing
hymns, Jupiter alias Gibb was a “great New Light preacher.” Charles, a sawyer and shoemaker
by trade also “reads tolerable well, and is a great preacher, from which I…[his owner]…imagine
he will endeavour [sic] to pass for a freeman (Virginia Runaways, 2004; Jupiter, October 1,
1767; Charles, October 27, 1765; Jemmy, September 8, 1775).” (3)
Conclusion
The creation of a unique African American culture through language and religion not only
allowed black people to resist the brutality of slavery and create a cohesive sense of
community, it also helped spark an abolitionist movement in America. In the second half of the
eighteenth century, following the spread of evangelical Christianity during and after the Great
Awakening, runaway slaves, such as Jemmy, Gibb, and Charles, embodied important
characteristics of a new African American culture, including religion and music, and, it seems,
drew from them the inspiration and courage to flee bondage for freedom.
In the nineteenth century, black abolitionists, including David Walker, Frederick Doulgass, Nat
Turner, and Sojourner Truth, used their literacy, language and religion to make forceful pleas
for the humanity of black people and the immediate end of slavery. They became the vanguard
of the most radical abolitionist movement in American history. (1)
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READING MODULE 6: The Abolitionist
Movement
6.1: Introduction
The Abolitionist Movement
Module Introduction
During the first half of the nineteenth-century, a vocal if marginalized abolitionist movement
developed in the United States. It was a diverse and occasionally fractious movement. Slaves
fought for their freedom, and the end of slavery, by organizing and leading rebellions or
running away to freedom in the North or Canada. Some of those former slaves, like Frederick
Douglass, became leaders in the abolitionist movement by the force of their oratory and
writing.
The transatlantic religious revivals of the early nineteenth-century, often referred to as the
Second Great Awakening in the United States, inspired others, including some white men and
women, to become abolitionists. They saw slavery as a grave American sin that the nation must
purge to redeem itself and to prepare the way for Christ’s return and 1,000-year rule on Earth.
Rather than just relying on natural rights arguments, nineteenth-century abolitionists often
used moral arguments – moral suasion – to highlight the immorality of slavery. In keeping with
the religious fervor of the era, abolitionists hoped to bring about a mass conversion in public
opinion to end slavery. Nevertheless, the vast majority of white Americans, even in the North,
saw abolitionism as a radical, irrational, and dangerous threat, not only to slavery but to white
supremacy and the union.
Though abolition would only come about because of the Civil War, the abolitionist movement
left behind a revolutionary legacy. It used new means of communication, including mass
printing presses, and new forms of literature in America, such as the slave narrative and novel,
to organize its movement and spread ideas that indelibly changed the nation and the world. (1)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
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Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical resources to analyze the Abolitionist Movement. (1)
Readings and Resources
•
•
Learning Unit: The Abolitionist Movement (see below) (1)
Primary Source Documents (see below)
o David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, 1829
o William Lloyd Garrison Introduces The Liberator
6.2: The Abolitionist Movement
The Abolitionist Movement
Slave Uprisings
Abolitionism in North America began when enslaved Africans ran away from their masters or
organized rebellions in name of freedom. Well before a religiously motivated, transatlantic, and
interracial abolitionist movement developed in the nineteenth-century, numerous slave
rebellions and insurrections occurred during the preceding centuries. Rebellions were rooted in
the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. There is evidence of more than 250
uprisings or attempted uprisings, each involving 10 or more slaves from the seventeenthcentury up to the Civil War.
One of the largest slave rebellions in U.S. history took place in 1811. The German Coast Uprising
took place outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, and involved some 500 slaves, according to
accounts; however, it only was responsible for the casualties of two white men. Volunteer
militias and a detachment of the U.S. Army suppressed the rebellion. Ninety-five black people
were killed as a result of executions and direct confrontations with opposing militia forces. In
the weeks following the uprising, an additional forty-four accused insurgents were captured,
tried, and executed.(12)
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Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Wood-cut depiction of the various stages of Nat Turner’s Rebellion from the first massacres to
the search and capture of Turner’s conspirators.Figure 6-1: Horrid Massacre in Virginia by
Library of Congress has no known copyright restriction.
Another large slave uprising, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, took place in 1831, in Southampton
County, Virginia. Like many slaves, Nat Turner was inspired by the evangelical Protestant fervor
sweeping the republic. He preached to fellow slaves in Southampton County, gaining a
reputation among them as a prophet. He organized them for rebellion, awaiting a sign to begin,
until an eclipse in August signaled that the appointed time had come.
Turner and as many as seventy other slaves killed their masters and their masters’ families,
murdering a total of around sixty-five people. Turner eluded capture until late October, when
he was tried, hanged, and then beheaded and quartered. Virginia put to death fifty-six other
slaves whom they believed to have taken part in the rebellion. White vigilantes killed two
hundred more as panic swept through Virginia and the rest of the South.
Thomas R. Gray was a lawyer in Southampton, Virginia, where he visited Nat Turner in jail. He
published The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection in Southampton,
Va., as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray in November 1831, after Turner had been
executed:
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“For as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the
salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew… it was plain to
me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the
great day of judgment was at hand… And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the
heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ
had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight
against the Serpent, … Ques. Do you not find yourself mistaken now? Ans. Was not Christ
crucified. And by signs in the heavens that it would make known to me when I should
commence the great work—and on the appearance of the sign, (the eclipse of the sun last
February) I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”
“Discovery of Nat Turner”Figure 6-2: Nat Turner Captured by William Henry Shelton is in
the Public Domain .
Nat Turner’s Rebellion provoked a heated discussion in Virginia over slavery. The Virginia
legislature was already in the process of revising the state constitution, and some delegates
advocated for an easier manumission process. The rebellion, however, made that reform
impossible. Virginia and other slave states recommitted themselves to the institution of slavery,
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and defenders of slavery in the South increasingly blamed northerners for provoking their
slaves to rebel. (12)
One of those northerners who instilled fear among white southerners was David Walker, a free
black man who, like Turner, advocated for rebellion if slavery did not immediately end. Walker
was born a free in North Carolina in 1796. He moved to Boston in the 1820s, lectured on
slavery, and promoted the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal . (11) In 1829, he
published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World , one of the most radical and
impassioned abolitionist pleas in American history. Walker highlighted the nation’s hypocrisies,
including its promise of freedom and its sanctioning of slavery. He also called out some of the
nation’s Christians for their complicity in the system of slavery and their willingness to use and
distort scripture from the Bible to sanction it. Walker also warned whites who practiced or
tolerated slavery that their day of reckoning was close at hand. There is no evidence Nat Turner
ever read An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World , but Walker’s apocalyptic words
foreshadowed Turner’s looming rebellion. (1)
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Frontispiece from the 1830 edition of David Walker’s AppealFigure 6-3: David Walker Appeal by
Britannica Encyclopedia is in the Public Domain .
“I count my life not dear unto me, but I am ready to be offered at any moment. For what is the
use of living, when in fact I am dead. But remember, Americans, that as miserable, wretched,
degraded and abject as you have made us in preceding, and in this generation, to support you
and your families, that some of you, (whites) on the continent of America, will yet curse the day
that you ever were born. You want slaves, and want us for your slaves!!! My colour will yet,
root some of you out of the very face of the earth!!!!!!” (13)
Walker died months after the publication of his Appeal, and debate continues to this day over
the cause of his death. Many believe he was murdered. Regardless, Walker became a symbol of
hope to free people in the North and a symbol of the terrors of literate, educated blacks to the
slaveholders of the South.
6.3: Atlantic Origins of Reform
Atlantic Origins of Reform
A broader, interracial abolitionist movement, one connected to the era’s religious revivalism
and reform campaigns that were designed to rid the nation of its moral sins, began to grow in
the years after Walker published his Appeal . Like Walker, these abolitionists rejected attempts
to gradually end slavery by colonizing black people in West Africa. They took a far more radical
approach using moral arguments and persuasion to advocate slavery’s immediate elimination.
They publicized the atrocities committed under slavery and aimed to create a society
characterized by equality of blacks and whites. In a world of intense religious fervor, they hoped
to bring about a mass awakening in the United States of the sin of slavery, confident that they
could transform the national conscience against the South’s peculiar institution. (11)
The reform movements that emerged in the United States during the first half of the
nineteenth century were not American inventions, however. Instead, these movements were
rooted in a transatlantic world where both sides of the ocean faced similar problems and
together collaborated to find similar solutions. Many of the same factors that spurred American
reformers to action equally affected Europe. Reformers on both sides of the Atlantic visited and
corresponded with one another. Exchanging ideas and building networks proved crucial to
shared causes such as abolition.
Improvements in transportation, including the introduction of the steamboat, canals, and
railroads, connected people not just across the United States, but also with other like-minded
reformers in Europe. (Ironically, the same technologies also helped ensure that even after the
abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the British remained heavily invested in slavery, both
92
directly and indirectly.) Equally important, the reduction of publication costs created by new
printing technologies in the 1830s allowed reformers to reach new audiences across the world.
Almost immediately after its publication in the United States, for instance, the escaped slave
and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s autobiography was republished in Europe and translated
into French and Dutch, galvanizing Douglass’s supporters across the Atlantic.
Abolitionist and anti-slavery work had a decidedly transatlantic cast from its very beginnings.
American Quakers began to question slavery as early as the late seventeenth century, and
worked with British reformers in the successful campaign that ended the slave trade. Before,
during, and after the Revolution, many Americans continued to admire European thinkers.
Influence extended both east and west. By foregrounding questions about rights, the American
Revolution helped inspire British abolitionists, who in turn offered support to their American
counterparts. American antislavery activists developed close relationships with abolitionists on
the other side of the Atlantic, such as Thomas Clarkson, Daniel O’Connell, and Joseph Sturge.
Prominent American abolitionists such as Theodore Dwight Weld, Lucretia Mott, and William
Lloyd Garrison were converted to the antislavery idea of immediatism—that is, the demand for
emancipation without delay—by British abolitionists Elizabeth Heyrick and Charles Stuart.
Although Anglo-American antislavery networks reached back to the late eighteenth century,
they dramatically grew in support and strength over the antebellum period, as evidenced by
the General Antislavery Convention of 1840. This antislavery delegation consisted of more than
500 abolitionists, mostly coming from France, England, and the United States. All met together
in England, united by their common goal of ending slavery in their time. Although abolitionism
was not the largest American reform movement of the antebellum period (that honor belongs
to temperance), it did foster greater cooperation among reformers in England and the United
States. (2)
Antislavery and Abolitionism
The revivalist doctrines of salvation, perfectionism, and benevolence led many evangelical
reformers to believe that slavery was the most God-defying of all sins and the most terrible
blight on the moral virtue of the United States. While white interest in and commitment to
abolition had existed for several decades, organized antislavery advocacy had been largely
restricted to models of gradual emancipation (seen in several northern states following the
American Revolution) and conditional emancipation (seen in colonization efforts to remove
black Americans to settlements in Africa).
The colonization movement of the early nineteenth century had drawn together a broad
political spectrum of Americans with its promise of gradually ending slavery in the United States
by removing the free black population from North America. By the 1830s, however, a rising tide
of anti-colonization sentiment among northern free black Americans and middle-class
evangelicals’ flourishing commitment to social reform radicalized the movement. Baptists such
as William Lloyd Garrison, Congregational revivalists like Arthur and Lewis Tappan and
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Theodore Dwight Weld, and radical Quakers including Lucretia Mott and John Greenleaf
Whittier helped push the idea of immediate emancipation onto the center stage of northern
reform agendas.
Inspired by a strategy known as “moral suasion,” these young abolitionists believed they could
convince slaveholders to voluntarily release their slaves by appealing to their sense of Christian
conscience. (2) Moral suasion relied on dramatic narratives, often from former slaves, about the
horrors of slavery, arguing that slavery destroyed families, as children were sold and taken
away from their mothers and fathers. Moral suasion resonated with many women, who
condemned the sexual violence against slave women and the victimization of southern white
women by adulterous husbands. (11)
6.4: William Lloyd Garrison
William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionist Movement in America
William Lloyd Garrison’s early life and career famously illustrated this transition
toward immediatism . As a young man immersed in the reform culture of antebellum
Massachusetts, Garrison had fought slavery in the 1820s by advocating for both black
colonization and gradual abolition. Fiery tracts penned by black northerners David Walker and
James Forten, however, convinced Garrison that colonization was an inherently racist project
and that African Americans possessed a hard-won right to the fruits of American liberty. So, in
1831, he established a newspaper called The Liberator, through which he organized and
spearheaded an unprecedented interracial crusade dedicated to promoting immediate
emancipation and black citizenship. (2)
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The Liberator. Volume VII. 1837. Edited by William Lloyd Garrison. Published by Isaac Knapp,
Cornhill, Boston, MassachusettsFigure 6-4: 1837 Liberator Cornhill Boston by William Lloyd
Garrison is in the Public Domain .
In Garrison’s first edition of The Liberator he declared:
“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for
severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to
give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher;
tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge
me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I
will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” (14)
White Virginians blamed Garrison for stirring up slaves and instigating slave rebellions like Nat
Turner’s.
The same year Garrison started publishing The Liberator he founded the New England AntiSlavery Society. Two years later, he founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). The
AASS rested their mission for immediate emancipation “upon the Declaration of our
Independence, and upon the truths of Divine Revelation,” binding their cause to both national
95
and Christian redemption. Abolitionists fought to save slaves and their nation’s soul. (2) By 1838,
the AASS had 250,000 members, sometimes called Garrisonians. (11)
In order to spread their arguments against slavery based on moral suasion, abolitionists
employed every method of outreach and agitation. At home in the North, abolitionists
established hundreds of other antislavery societies and worked with long-standing associations
of black activists to establish schools, churches, and voluntary associations. Women and men of
all colors were encouraged to associate together in these spaces to combat what they
termed “color phobia.”
Harnessing the potential of steam-powered printing and mass communication, abolitionists
also blanketed the free states with pamphlets and antislavery newspapers. They blared their
arguments from lyceum podiums and broadsides. Prominent individuals such as Wendell
Phillips and Angelina Grimké saturated northern media with shame-inducing exposés of
northern complicity in the return of fugitive slaves, and white reformers sentimentalized slave
narratives that tugged at middle-class heartstrings. Abolitionists used the United States Postal
Service in 1835 to inundate southern slaveholders’ with calls to emancipate their slaves in order
to save their souls, and, in 1836, they prepared thousands of petitions for Congress as part of
the “Great Petition Campaign.” In the six years from 1831 to 1837, abolitionist activities
reached dizzying heights.
Such efforts encountered fierce opposition, however, as most Americans did not share
abolitionists’ particular brand of nationalism. In fact, abolitionists remained a small,
marginalized group detested by most white Americans in both the North and the South.
Immediatists were attacked as the harbingers of disunion, rabble-rousers who would stir up
sectional tensions and thereby imperil the American experiment of self-government.
Particularly troubling to some observers was the public engagement of women as abolitionist
speakers and activists. Fearful of disunion and outraged by the interracial nature of
abolitionism, northern mobs smashed abolitionist printing presses and inflicted violence on the
movement’s leaders. (2)
Garrison nearly lost his life in 1835 when a Boston anti-abolitionist mob dragged him through
the city streets. A mob in Illinois killed an abolitionist named Elijah Lovejoy in 1837, and the
following year, ten thousand protestors destroyed the abolitionists’ newly built Pennsylvania
Hall in Philadelphia, burning it to the ground. (11) White southerners, believing that abolitionists
had incited Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, aggressively purged antislavery dissent from the
region.
Violent harassment threatened abolitionists’ personal safety. In Congress, Whigs and
Democrats joined forces in 1836 to pass an unprecedented restriction on freedom of political
expression known as the “gag rule,” prohibiting all discussion of abolitionist petitions in the
House of Representatives. Two years later, mobs attacked the Anti-Slavery Convention of
American Women, throwing rocks through the windows and burning the newly constructed
Pennsylvania Hall to the ground.
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In the face of such substantial external opposition, the abolitionist movement began to splinter.
In 1839, an ideological schism shook the foundations of organized antislavery. Moral
suasionists, led most prominently by William Lloyd Garrison, felt that the United States
Constitution was a fundamentally pro-slavery document, and that the present political system
was irredeemable. They dedicated their efforts exclusively towards persuading the public to
redeem the nation by re-establishing it on antislavery grounds. However, many abolitionists,
reeling from the level of entrenched opposition met in the 1830s, began to feel that moral
suasion was no longer realistic. Instead, they believed, abolition would have to be effected
through existing political processes. So, in 1839, political abolitionists formed the Liberty Party
under the leadership of James G. Birney. This new abolitionist society was predicated on the
belief that the U.S. Constitution was actually an antislavery document that could be used to
abolish the stain of slavery through the national political system.
Another significant shift stemmed from the disappointments of the 1830s. Abolitionists in the
1840s increasingly moved from agendas based on reform to agendas based on resistance.
Moral suasionists continued to appeal to hearts and minds, and political abolitionists launched
sustained campaigns to bring abolitionist agendas to the ballot box. Meanwhile the entrenched
and violent opposition of both slaveholders and the northern public encouraged abolitionists to
find other avenues of fighting the slave power. Increasingly, for example, abolitionists focused
on helping and protecting runaway slaves, and on establishing international antislavery support
networks to help put pressure on the United States to abolish the institution. (2)
6.5: Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass is one prominent example of how these trends: helping and protecting
runaway slaves; and establishing international antislavery support networks to help put
pressure on the United States to abolish the institution, came together. (2) Douglass was born a
slave in Maryland in 1818 and escaped to New York in 1838. He later moved to New Bedford,
Massachusetts, with his wife.
After escaping from slavery, Douglass soon came to the forefront of the abolitionist movement
as a gifted orator and a powerful narrator of his experiences as a slave. Douglass’s commanding
presence and powerful speaking skills electrified his listeners when he began to provide public
lectures on slavery. He came to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and others who
encouraged him to write his story. In 1845, he published his autobiography, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself , in which he told about his life
of slavery in Maryland. It was perhaps the most powerful and famous piece of African American
literature from the nineteenth century. It was so widely read that it was reprinted in nine
editions and translated into several languages. In it, Douglass identified by name the whites
97
who had brutalized him, and for that reason, along with the mere act of publishing his story,
Douglass had to flee the United States to avoid being murdered. (11) He traveled to Great Britain
and met with famous British abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson, drumming up moral and
financial support from British and Irish antislavery societies. He was neither the first nor the last
runaway slave to make this voyage, but his great success abroad contributed significantly to
rousing morale among weary abolitionists at home. (2)
British abolitionist friends ultimately bought his freedom from his Maryland owner, and
Douglass returned to the United States. He began to publish his own abolitionist
newspaper, North Star , in Rochester, New York. During the 1840s and 1850s, Douglass fought
to bring about the end of slavery by telling the story of his life and highlighting how slavery
destroyed families, both black and white. (11)
In this excerpt from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , he explains the consequences
for the children fathered by white masters and slave women:
“Slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in
all cases follow the condition of their mothers… this is done too obviously to administer to their
own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable…
the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and
father… Such slaves [born of white masters] invariably suffer greater hardships… They are… a
constant offence to their mistress… she is never better pleased than when she sees them under
the lash, … The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to
the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell
his own children to human flesh-mongers, … for, unless he does this, he must not only whip
them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades
darker … and ply the gory lash to his naked back.” (11)
Other abolitionists also spread word of the horrors of slavery in an attempt to win more
supporters for their cause. A prominent example of this is Harriet Beecher Stowe, author
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin , or Life Among the Lowly . Stowe, a white woman from a pious
Connecticut family, had strong moral convictions that slavery as an institution was evil and
unnatural. Her book depicted the harsh conditions in which slaves lived, the danger they were
willing to place themselves in to escape, and the detrimental ways in which the institution of
slavery effected slave owners.Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a success in the North, selling more than
300,000 copies in the first nine months of its publication, and more than a million copies by
1853. Nonetheless, it was met with protest and alarm in the South. (12)
The Underground Railroad
Many American abolitionists also took an active role in opposing slavery by supporting the
Underground Railroad. Though illegal under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, participants such as
former slaves Harriet Tubman, Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, Amos Noë
Freeman, and others put themselves at risk to help slaves escape to freedom. (12)
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The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by nineteenthcentury black slaves in the United States to escape to Northern free states and Canada with the
aid of abolitionists and those sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the
abolitionists—black and white, free and enslaved—who aided the fugitives. Some routes led to
Mexico or overseas. The network was formed in the early nineteenth century and reached its
height between 1850 and 1860. One estimate suggests that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had
escaped via the “Railroad.”
The origins of the Underground Railroad go back to the Compromise of 1850, passed by
Congress after the Mexican-American War, which created a more stringent Fugitive Slave Act.
The Fugitive Slave Act compelled officials of free states to assist slave catchers if there were
runaway slaves in the area and granted slave catchers national immunity when in free states to
do their job. Additionally, it made it possible that free blacks of the North could be forced into
slavery even if they had been freed earlier or never been slaves at all because suspected slaves
were unable to defend themselves in court and it was difficult to prove a free status. As a de
facto bribe, judges were paid more ($10) for a decision that forced a suspected slave back into
slavery than for a decision finding the slave to be free ($5). Thus, many Northerners who would
have otherwise been able and content to ignore the persistence of slavery in the South chafed
under what they saw as a national sanction on slavery, comprising one of the primary
grievances of the Union cause during the Civil War.
The various routes to freedom on the Underground Railroad.Figure 6-5: Underground
Railroad by Unknown is in the Public Domain .
The escape network of the Underground Railroad was not literally underground or a railroad. It
was figuratively “underground” in the sense of being a covert form of resistance. It came to be
referred to as a “railroad” due to the use of rail terminology in the code used by its participants.
The Underground Railroad consisted of meeting points, secret routes, transportation, safe
houses, and assistance provided by abolitionists and sympathizers. Individuals were often
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organized in small, independent groups. These small groups helped to maintain secrecy
because individuals knew some connecting “stations” along the route but few details of their
immediate area. Escaped slaves would move north along the route from one way station to the
next. “Conductors” on the railroad came from various backgrounds and included free-born
blacks, white abolitionists, former slaves (both runaways and manumitted), and Native
Americans. Churches often played a role, especially the Society of Friends (Quakers),
Congregationalists, Wesleyans, and Reformed Presbyterians, as well as certain sects of
mainstream denominations such as the Methodist church and American Baptists.
To reduce the risk of infiltration, many people associated with the Underground Railroad knew
only their part of the operation and little to nothing of the whole scheme. Written directions
were discouraged for the same reason. Additionally, because many freedom seekers could not
read, visual and audible clues such as patterns in quilts, song lyrics, and star positions provided
directional cues along the way. Conductors moved the runaways from station to station. Often
the conductor would pretend to be a slave to enter a plantation. Once a part of a plantation,
the conductor would direct the runaways to the North. Slaves would travel at night around 10
to 20 miles to each station or “depot,” resting spots where the runaways could sleep and eat.
The stations were out of the way places such as barns and were held by “station masters” who
would provide assistance such as sending messages to other stations and directing fugitives on
the path to take to their next stop. There were also those known as “stockholders” who gave
money or supplies for assistance.
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Figure 6-6: A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves by Eastman Johnson has no known copyright
restrictions.
Due to the risk of discovery, information about routes and safe havens was passed along by
word of mouth. Southern newspapers of the day were often filled with pages of notices
soliciting information about escaped slaves and offering sizable rewards for their capture and
return. Federal marshals and professional bounty hunters known as “slave catchers” pursued
fugitives as far as the Canadian border.
The risk was not limited solely to actual fugitives. Because strong, healthy black people in their
prime working and reproductive years were treated as highly valuable commodities, it was not
unusual for free blacks—both freedmen and those who had never been slaves—to be
kidnapped and sold into slavery. “Certificates of freedom”—signed, notarized statements
attesting to the free status of individuals—easily could be destroyed and thus afforded their
holders little protection. Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, when suspected
fugitives were seized and brought to a special magistrate known as a “commissioner,” they had
no right to a jury trial and could not testify on their own behalf. The marshal or private slave
catcher needed only to swear an oath to acquire a writ of replevin for the return of property.
Estimates vary widely, but at least 30,000 slaves, and potentially more than 100,000, escaped
to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The largest group settled in Upper Canada, called
Canada West from 1841 and known today as Southern Ontario, where numerous black
Canadian communities developed. Upon arriving at their destinations, many fugitives were
disappointed. Despite the British colonies’ abolition of slavery in 1834, discrimination
was still common.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, many black refugees enlisted in the
Union Army, and while some later returned to Canada, many remained in the United States.
Thousands of others returned to the American South after the war ended. The desire to
reconnect with friends and family was strong and most were hopeful about the changes
emancipation and Reconstruction would bring. (12)
Conclusion
As the 1850s progressed, abolitionist reform took a backseat as armed mobs protected
runaway slaves in the North and fortified abolitionists engaged in bloody skirmishes in the
West. Culminating in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, the violence of the 1850s
convinced many Americans that the issue of slavery was pushing the nation to the brink of
sectional cataclysm. After two decades of immediatist agitation, the idealism of revivalist
perfectionism had given way to a protracted battle for the moral soul of the country.
For all of the problems that abolitionism faced, the movement was far from a failure. The
prominence of African Americans in abolitionist organizations offered a powerful, if imperfect,
model of interracial coexistence. While immediatists always remained a minority, their efforts
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paved the way for the moderately antislavery Republican Party to gain traction in the years
preceding the Civil War. It is hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln could have become
president in 1860 without the ground prepared by antislavery advocates and without the
presence of radical abolitionists against whom he could be cast as a moderate alternative.
Though it ultimately took a civil war to break the bonds of slavery in the United States, the
evangelical moral compass of revivalist Protestantism provided motivation for the embattled
abolitionists. (2)
6.6: Primary Sources
Primary Source Document: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored
Citizens of the World 1829
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: William Lloyd Garrison Introduces The
Liberator
Document Download Link
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READING MODULE 7: The Westward
Expansion of Slavery
7.1: Introduction
The Westward Expansion of Slavery
Module Introduction
The creation of the cotton kingdom during the first half of the nineteenth century transformed
the lives of African Americans, often for the worse. One of the most consequential inventions in
American history, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin from 1794, made large-scale cotton agriculture
profitable. White planters and farmers from eastern seaboard states such as Virginia and North
Carolina coveted lands in newer states to the southwest such as Alabama and Mississippi for
their fertile soils and long growing seasons. Due in part to the growth of the cotton kingdom,
nine new slave states entered the Union between 1789 and 1860, rapidly expanding and
transforming the South into a region of economic growth built on slave labor. (4)
In addition to new land, white farmers and planters demanded large numbers of slaves for
clearing land and planting and picking cotton. Since the international slave trade was outlawed
in 1808, planters now purchased slaves internally from traders in a process known as the
domestic slave trade. African-American slave labor in the South’s cotton fields generated
tremendous wealth for the region’s small slave-holding elite. By the 1850s, slaves in the South
produced 75% of the world’s cotton. (Roche, 9) (1)
The creation of the cotton kingdom intensified the strain and trauma endured by slaves who
feared being sold into the Deep South to work on often brutal cotton plantations and separated
from family and friends. As always, African-Americans resisted slavery’s dehumanizing forces by
creating strong kinship or social networks and maintaining unique cultural traditions. (4)
Works Cited
Julian Roche, The International Cotton Trade (Cambridge, England: Woodhead Publishing,
1994), 9.
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
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•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
•
•
Discuss two ways that the cotton kingdom transformed the lives of African Americans.
Examine the legacy of cotton slavery. (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: The Creation of the Cotton Kingdom (see below). (1)
7.2: The Creation Of The Cotton Kingdom
The Creation of the Cotton Kingdom
The Importance of Cotton
In November of 1785, the Liverpool firm of Peel, Yates, & Co. imported the first seven bales of
American cotton ever to arrive in Europe. Prior to this unscheduled, and frankly unwanted,
delivery, European merchants saw cotton as a product of the colonial Caribbean islands of
Barbados, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Martinique, Cuba, and Jamaica. The American South,
though relatively wide and expansive, was the go-to source for rice and, most
importantly, tobacco.
Few knew that the seven bales sitting in Liverpool that winter of 1785 would change the world.
But they did. By the early 1800s, the American South had developed a niche in the European
market for “luxurious” long-staple cotton grown exclusively on the Sea Islands off the coast of
South Carolina. But this was only the beginning of a massive flood to come, and the foundation
of the South’s astronomical rise to global prominence. Before long, botanists, merchants, and
planters alike set out to develop strains of cotton seed that would grow further west on the
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Southern mainland, especially in the new lands opened up by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803—
an area that stretched from New Orleans in the South to what is today Minnesota, parts of the
Dakotas, and Montana. (2)
Figure 7-1: Patent for Cotton Gin by Eli Whitney is in the Public Domain .
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Model of Whitney’s cotton gin displays cotton after the gin has removed the seeds from its
boll.Figure 7-2: Cotton gin EWM 2007 by Tom Murphy VII is in the Public Domain .
The discovery of Gossypium barbadense—often called “Petit Gulf” cotton—near Rodney,
Mississippi, in 1820 changed the American and global cotton markets forever. “Petit Gulf,” it
was said, slid through the cotton gin—a machine developed by Eli Whitney in 1794 for
deseeding cotton—more easily than any other strain. It also grew tightly, producing more
usable cotton than anyone had imagined to that point. Perhaps most importantly, though, it
came up at a time when Native peoples were being removed from the Southwest—southern
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana. After Indian removal, land became
readily available for white men with a few dollars and big dreams. Throughout the 1820s and
1830s, the federal government implemented several forced migrations of Native Americans,
establishing a system of reservations west of the Mississippi River upon which all eastern
peoples were required to relocate and settle. This, enacted through the Indian Removal Act of
1830, allowed the federal government to survey, divide, and auction off millions of acres of
land for however much bidders were willing to pay. Suddenly, farmers with dreams of owning a
large plantation could purchase dozens, even hundreds, of acres in the fertile Mississippi River
Delta for cents on the dollar. Pieces of land that would cost thousands of dollars elsewhere sold
in the 1830s for several hundred, at prices as low as 40¢ per acre.
Thousands of people, each with his or her own dream of massive and immediate success,
rushed to the “Cotton Belt.” Joseph Holt Ingraham, a writer and traveler from Maine, called it
“mania.” William Henry Sparks, a lawyer living in Natchez, Mississippi, remembered it as “a new
El Dorado” in which “fortunes were made in a day, without enterprise or work.” The change
was astonishing. “Where yesterday the wilderness darkened over the land with her wild
forests,” he recalled, “to-day the cotton plantations whitened the earth.” Money flowed from
banks, many newly formed, on promises of “other-worldly” profits and overnight returns. Banks
in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and even London offered lines of credit to anyone
looking to buy land in the Southwest. Some even sent their own agents to purchase cheap land
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at auction for the express purpose of selling it, sometimes the very next day, at double and
triple the original value, a process known as “speculation.”
The explosion of available land in the fertile cotton belt brought new life to the South. By the
end of the 1830s, “Petit Gulf” cotton had been perfected, distributed, and planted throughout
the region.
Advances in steam power and water travel revolutionized Southern farmers’ and planters’
ability to deseed, bundle, and move their products to ports popping up along the Atlantic
seaboard. Indeed, by the end of the 1830s, cotton had become the primary crop not only of the
Southwestern states, but of the entire nation.
The numbers were staggering. In 1793, just a few years after the first, albeit unintentional,
shipment of American cotton to Europe, the South produced around five million pounds of
cotton, again almost exclusively the product of South Carolina’s Sea Islands. Seven years later,
in 1800, South Carolina remained the primary cotton producer in the South, sending 6.5 million
pounds of the luxurious long-staple blend to markets in Charleston, Liverpool, London, and New
York. But as the tighter, more abundant, and vibrant “Petit Gulf” strain moved west with the
dreamers, schemers, and speculators, the American South quickly became the world’s leading
cotton producer. By 1835, the five main cotton-growing states—South Carolina, Georgia,
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—produced more than 500 million pounds of “Petit Gulf”
for a global market stretching from New Orleans to New York to London, Liverpool, Paris and
beyond. That 500 million pounds of cotton made up nearly 55 percent of the entire United
States export market, a trend that continued nearly every year until the outbreak of the Civil
War. Indeed, the two billion pounds of cotton produced in 1860 alone amounted to more than
60 percent of the United States’ total exports for that year.
“Petit Gulf” cotton grew relatively quickly on cheap, widely available land. With the invention of
the cotton gin in 1794, and the emergence of steam power three decades later, cotton became
the average man’s commodity, the product with which the United States could expand
westward, producing and reproducing Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an idyllic republic of small
farmers—a nation in control of its land, reaping the benefits of honest, free, and self-reliant
work, a nation of families and farmers, expansion and settlement. But this all came at a violent
cost. With the democratization of land ownership through Indian Removal, federal auctions,
readily available credit, and the seemingly universal dream of cotton’s immediate profit, one of
the South’s lasting “traditions” became normalized and engrained. And by the 1860s, that very
“tradition,” seen as the backbone of Southern society and culture, would split the nation in
two. The heyday of American slavery had arrived. (2)
Cotton and Slavery
The rise of cotton, and the resulting upsurge in the United States’ global position, wed the
South to slavery. Without slavery there could be no “Cotton Kingdom,” no massive production
of raw materials stretching across thousands of acres worth millions of dollars. Indeed, cotton
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grew alongside slavery. The two moved hand-in-hand. The existence of slavery, and its
importance to the Southern economy, became the defining factor in what would be known as
the “Slave South.” Although slavery arrived in the Americas long before cotton became a
profitable commodity, the use and purchase of slaves, the moralistic and economic
justifications for the continuation of slavery, even the urgency to protect the practice from
extinction before the Civil War all received new life from the rise of cotton and the economic,
social, and cultural growth spurt that accompanied its success.
Slavery had existed in the South since at least 1619, when a group of Dutch traders arrived at
Jamestown with 20 Africans. Although these Africans remained under the ambiguous legal
status of “unfree,” rather than actual slaves, their arrival set in motion a practice that would
stretch across the entire continent over the next two centuries. Slavery was everywhere by the
time the American Revolution created the United States, although Northern states began a
process of gradually abolishing the practice soon thereafter. In the more rural, agrarian South,
slavery became a way of life, especially as farmers expanded their lands, planted more crops,
and entered into the international trade market. By 1790, four years after the ratification of the
Constitution, 654,121 slaves lived in the South—then just Virginia, North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia, and the “Southwest Territory” (now Tennessee). Just twenty years later, in
1810, that number had increased to more than 1.1 million individuals in bondage.
The massive change in the South’s enslaved population between 1790 and 1810 makes sense,
though. During that time, the South went from a region of four states and one rather small
territory to a region of six states (Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and
Tennessee) and three rather large territories (Mississippi, Louisiana, and Orleans). The free
population of the South also nearly doubled over that period—from around 1.3 million in 1790
to more than 2.3 million in 1810. It is important to note here that the enslaved population of
the South did not increase at any rapid rate over the next two decades, until the cotton boom
took hold in the mid-1830s. Indeed, following the constitutional ban on the international slave
trade in 1808, the number of slaves in the South increased by just 750,000 in twenty years.
But then cotton came, and grew, and changed everything. Over the course of the 1830s, 40s,
and 50s, slavery became so endemic to the “Cotton Belt” that travelers, writers, and
statisticians began referring to the area as the “Black Belt,” not only to describe the color of the
rich land, but also to describe the skin color of those forced to work its fields, line its docks, and
move its products.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Southern slavery during this so-called “Cotton
Revolution” was the value placed upon both the work and the body of the slaves themselves.
Once the fever of the initial land rush subsided, land values became more static, and credit less
free-flowing. For Mississippi land that in 1835 cost no more than $600, a farmer or investor
would have to shell out more than $3,000 in 1850. By 1860, that same land, depending on its
record of production and location, could cost as much as $100,000. In many cases, cotton
growers, especially planters with large lots and enslaved workforces, put up slaves as collateral
for funds dedicated to buying more land. If that land, for one reason or another, be it weevils, a
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late freeze, or a simple lack of nutrients, did not produce a viable crop within a year, the planter
would lose not only the new land, but also the slaves he or she put up as a guarantee of
payment.
So much went into the production of cotton, the expansion of land, and maintenance of
enslaved workforces that by the 1850s, nearly every ounce of credit offered by Southern, and
even Northern, banks dealt directly with some aspect of the cotton market. Millions of dollars
changed hands. Slaves, the literal and figurative backbones of the Southern cotton economy,
served as the highest and most important expense for any successful cotton grower. Prices for
slaves varied drastically, depending on skin color, sex, age, and location, both of purchase and
birth. In Virginia in the 1820s, for example, a single female slave of childbearing years sold for
an average of $300; an unskilled man above the age of 18 sold for around $450; and boys and
girls below 13 years sold for between $100 and $150.
By the 1840s, and into the 1850s, prices had nearly doubled—a result of both standard inflation
and the increasing importance of enslaved laborers in the cotton market. In 1845, “plow boys”
under the age of 18 sold for more than $600 in some areas, measured at “five or six dollars per
pound.” “Prime field hands,” as they were called by merchants and traders, averaged $1,600 at
market by 1850, a figure that fell in line with the rising prices of the cotton they picked. For
example, when cotton sat at 7¢ per pound in 1838, the average “field hand” cost around $700.
As the price of cotton increased to 9¢, 10¢, then 11¢ per pound over the next ten years, the
average cost of an enslaved male laborer likewise rose to $775, $900, and then more than
$1,600. (2)
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An African-American family picking cotton in a field near Savannah, Georgia in 1867 – two years
after the abolition of slavery.Figure 7-3: Picking Cotton, Savannah, Ga, early Negro life by
Launey & Goebel has no known copyright restrictions.
The key is that cotton and slaves helped define each other, at least in the cotton South. By the
1850s, slavery and cotton had become so intertwined, that the very idea of change—be it crop
diversity, anti-slavery ideologies, economic diversification, or the increasingly staggering cost of
purchasing and maintaining slaves—became anathema to the Southern economic and cultural
identity. Cotton had become the foundation of the Southern economy. Indeed, it was the only
major product, besides perhaps sugar cane in Louisiana, that the South could effectively market
internationally.
As a result, Southern planters, politicians, merchants, and traders became more and more
dedicated—some would say “obsessed”—to the means of its production: slaves and slavery. In
1834, Joseph Ingraham wrote that “to sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more
cotton to buy more negroes, ‘ad infinitum,’ is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations
of the thorough going cotton planter; his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit.” Twentythree years later, such pursuit had taken a seemingly religious character, as James Stirling, an
Englishman traveling through the South, observed, “[slaves] and cotton—cotton and [slaves];
these are the law and the prophets to the men of the South.”
The Cotton Revolution was a time of capitalism, panic, stress, and competition. Planters
expanded their lands, purchased slaves, extended lines of credit, and went into massive
amounts of debt because they were constantly working against the next guy, the newcomer,
the social mover, the speculator, the trader. A single bad crop could cost even the wealthiest
planter his or her entire life, along with those of his or her slaves and their families. Although
the cotton market was large and profitable, it was also fickle, risky, and cost intensive. The
more wealth one gained, the more land he or she needed to procure, which led to more slaves,
more credit, and more mouths to feed. The decades before the Civil War in the South, then,
were not times of slow, simple tradition. They were times of high competition, high risk, and
high reward, no matter where one stood in the social hierarchy. But the risk was not always
economic in nature.
The most tragic, indeed horrifying, aspect of slavery was its inhumanity. All slaves had
memories, emotions, experiences, and thoughts. They saw their experiences in full color, felt
the pain of the lash, the heat of the sun, and the heartbreak of loss, whether through death,
betrayal, or sale. Communities developed upon a shared sense of suffering, common work, and
even family ties. Slaves communicated in the slave markets of the urban South, and worked
together to help their families, ease their loads, or simply frustrate their owners. Simple actions
of resistance, such as breaking a hoe, running a wagon off the road, causing a delay in
production due to injury, running away, or even pregnancy, provided a language shared by
nearly all slaves in the agricultural workforce, a sense of unity that remained unsaid, but was
acted out daily.
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Beyond the basic and confounding horror of it all, the problem of slavery in the cotton South
was twofold. First, and most immediate, was the fear and risk of rebellion. With nearly four
million individual slaves residing in the South in 1860, and nearly 2.5 million living in the
“Cotton Belt” alone, the system of communication, resistance, and potential violence among
slaves did not escape the minds of slaveholders across the region and nation as a whole. As
early as 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that black and white
people were “two warring nations” held at bay by the existence of slavery. If white slaveholders
did not remain vigilant, Jefferson wrote, the presence of Africans in the Americas would
“produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the
other race.”
Southern writers, planters, farmers, merchants, and politicians expressed the same fears more
than a half century later. “The South cannot recede,” declared an anonymous writer in an 1852
issue of the New Orleans-based De Bow’s Review. “She must fight for her slaves or against
them. Even cowardice would not save her.” To many slaveholders in the South, slavery was the
saving grace not only of their own economic stability, but also the maintenance of peace and
security in everyday life. Much of pro-slavery ideology rested upon the notion that slavery
provided a sense of order, duty, and legitimacy to the lives of individual slaves, feelings that
Africans and African Americans, it was said, could not otherwise experience. Without slavery,
many thought, “blacks” (the word most often used for “slaves” in regular conversation) would
become violent, aimless, and uncontrollable.
Some commentators recognized the problem in the 1850s, as the internal, or domestic, slave
trade, the legal trade of slaves between states, along rivers, and along the Atlantic coastline.
The internal trade picked up in the decade before the Civil War. The problem was rather simple.
The more slaves one owned, the more money it cost to a) maintain them, and b) extract
product from their work. As planters and cotton growers expanded their lands and purchased
more slaves, their expectations increased.
And productivity, in large part, did increase. But it came on the backs of slaves with heavier
workloads, longer hours, and more intense punishments. “The great limitation to production is
labor,” wrote one commentator in the American Cotton Planter in 1853. And many planters
recognized this limitation, and worked night and day, sometimes literally, to find the furthest
extent of that limit. According to some contemporary accounts, by the mid 1850s, the expected
production of an individual slave in Mississippi’s Cotton Belt had increased from between four
and five bales (weighing about 500 pounds each) per day to between eight and ten bales per
day, on average. Other, perhaps more reliable sources, such as the account book of Buena Vista
Plantation in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, list average daily production at between 300 and 500
pounds “per hand,” with weekly averages ranging from 1,700 to 2,100 pounds “per hand.”
Cotton production “per hand” increased by 600 percent in Mississippi between 1820 and 1860.
Each slave, then, was working longer, harder hours to keep up with his or her master’s
expected yield. (2)
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Stereograph image from Florida cotton circa 1870 Figure 7-4: A pyramid of cotton seed,
Florida by B.W. Kilburn is in the Public Domain .
Here was capitalism with its most colonial, violent, and exploitative face. Humanity became a
commodity used and worked to produce profit for a select group of investors, regardless of its
shortfalls, dangers, and immoralities. But slavery, profit, and cotton did not exist only in the
rural South. The Cotton Revolution sparked the growth of an urban South. The region’s
burgeoning cities served as Southern hubs of a global market, conduits through which the work
of slaves and the profits of planters met and funded a wider world. (2)
7.3: The Domestic Slave Trade
The Domestic Slave Trade
The South’s dependence on cotton was matched by its dependence on slaves to harvest the
cotton. Despite the rhetoric of the Revolution that “all men are created equal,” slavery not only
endured in the American republic but formed the very foundation of the country’s economic
success. Cotton and slavery occupied a central—and intertwined—place in the
nineteenth-century economy.
In 1807, the U.S. Congress abolished the foreign slave trade, a ban that went into effect on
January 1, 1808. After this date, importing slaves from Africa became illegal in the United
States. While smuggling continued to occur, the end of the international slave trade meant that
112
domestic slaves were in very high demand. Fortunately for Americans whose wealth depended
upon the exploitation of slave labor, a fall in the price of tobacco had caused landowners in the
Upper South to reduce their production of this crop and use more of their land to grow wheat,
which was far more profitable. While tobacco was a labor-intensive crop that required many
people to cultivate it, wheat was not. Former tobacco farmers in the older states of Virginia and
Maryland found themselves with “surplus” slaves whom they were obligated to feed, clothe,
and shelter. Some slaveholders responded to this situation by freeing slaves; far more decided
to sell their excess bondsmen. Virginia and Maryland therefore took the lead in the domestic
slave trade, the trading of slaves within the borders of the United States. (11)
A group of slaves, also known as a coffle, being marched from Virginia to Tennessee by white
slave traders in the domestic slave trade.Figure 7-5: Slave Trader, Sold to Tennessee by
Unknown is in the Public Domain .
The text on the image above reads:
(top of drawing)
Arise! Arise! and weep no more dry up your tears, we shall part no more. Come rose we go to
Tennessee, that happy shore, to old Virginia never—never—return.
(bottom of drawing)
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The Company going to Tennessee from Staunton, Augusta county, – the law of Virginia suffered
them to go on. I was astonished at this boldness, the carrier stopped a moment. Then ordered
the march, I saw the play it is commonly in this state, with the negro’s in droves Sold.
The domestic slave trade offered many economic opportunities for white men. Those who sold
their slaves could realize great profits, as could the slave brokers who served as middlemen
between sellers and buyers. Other white men could benefit from the trade as owners of
warehouses and pens in which slaves were held, or as suppliers of clothing and food for slaves
on the move. Between 1790 and 1859, slaveholders in Virginia sold more than half a million
slaves. In the early part of this period, many of these slaves were sold to people living in
Kentucky, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina. By the 1820s, however, people in
Kentucky and the Carolinas had begun to sell many of their slaves as well. Maryland slave
dealers sold at least 185,000 slaves. Kentucky slaveholders sold some seventy-one thousand
individuals. Most of the slave traders carried these slaves further south to Alabama, Louisiana,
and Mississippi. New Orleans, the hub of commerce, boasted the largest slave market in the
United States and grew to become the nation’s fourth-largest city as a result. Natchez,
Mississippi, had the second-largest market. In Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and elsewhere
in the South, slave auctions happened every day. (11)
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An 1840 advertisement by a slave trader for the sale of slaves at an auction in New Orleans,
Louisiana.Figure 7-6: ValuableGangOfYoungNegroes1840 by Jos. A. Beard is in the Public
Domain .
An 1853 painting by the English artist Eyre Crowe showing African American slaves in a slave
market in Richmond, Virginia being auctioned to slave traders. Figure 7-7: Slaves Waiting for
Sale – Richmond , Virginia by Eyre Crowe is in the Public Domain .
All told, the movement of slaves in the South made up one of the largest forced internal
migrations in the United States. In each of the decades between 1820 and 1860, about 200,000
people were sold and relocated. The 1800 census recorded over one million African Americans,
of which nearly 900,000 were slaves. By 1860, the total number of African Americans increased
to 4.4 million, and of that number, 3.95 million were held in bondage. For many slaves, the
domestic slave trade incited the terror of being sold away from family and friends. (11)
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A map issued by the US Coast Guard showing the percentage of slaves in the population in each
county in the slave-holding states of the United States in 1860. The note reads: It should be
observed, that several counties appear comparatively light. This arises from the Preponderance
of white and free blacks in the large towns in those counties, such as Henrico Co. Va…
Charleston Co. S/C, etc. The figures in each county represent the percentage of slaves viz:
Amherst Co, Va 46-7/10 are slaves in every 100 inhabitants; Wayne Co, N. Carolina 38-5/10 are
slaves in every 100 inhabitants.Figure 7-9: SlavePopulationUS1860 by E. Hergesheimer and Th.
Leonhardt is in the Public Domain .
Solomon Northup Remembers the New Orleans Slave Market
Solomon Northup was a free black man living in Saratoga, New York, when he was kidnapped
and sold into slavery in 1841. He later escaped and wrote a book about his experiences: Twelve
Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington
City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853 (the basis of a 2013 Academy Award–winning film). This
excerpt derives from Northup’s description of being sold in New Orleans, along with fellow
slave Eliza and her children Randall and Emily.
One old gentleman, who said he wanted a coachman, appeared to take a fancy to me… The
same man also purchased Randall. The little fellow was made to jump, and run across the floor,
and perform many other feats, exhibiting his activity and condition. All the time the trade was
going on, Eliza was crying aloud, and wringing her hands. She besought the man not to buy him,
unless he also bought her self and Emily… Freeman turned round to her, savagely, with his whip
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in his uplifted hand, ordering her to stop her noise, or he would flog her. He would not have
such work—such snivelling; and unless she ceased that minute, he would take her to the yard
and give her a hundred lashes… Eliza shrunk before him, and tried to wipe away her tears, but it
was all in vain. She wanted to be with her children, she said, the little time she had to live. All
the frowns and threats of Freeman, could not wholly silence the afflicted mother.
7.4: Life as a Slave in the Cotton Kingdom
Life as a Slave in the Cotton Kingdom
In addition to cotton, the great commodity of the antebellum South was human chattel. Slavery
was the cornerstone of the southern economy. By 1850, about 3.2 million slaves labored in the
United States, 1.8 million of whom worked in the cotton fields. Slaves faced arbitrary power
abuses from whites; they coped by creating family and community networks. Storytelling, song,
and Christianity also provided solace and allowed slaves to develop their own interpretations of
their condition.
Southern whites frequently relied upon the idea of paternalism—the premise that white
slaveholders acted in the best interests of slaves, taking responsibility for their care, feeding,
discipline, and even their Christian morality—to justify the existence of slavery. This grossly
misrepresented the reality of slavery, which was, by any measure, a dehumanizing,
traumatizing, and horrifying human disaster and crime against humanity. Nevertheless, slaves
were hardly passive victims of their conditions; they sought and found myriad ways to resist
their shackles and develop their own communities and cultures. (11)
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Figure 7-10: Cotton planter and pickers 1908 by H. Tees is in the Public Domain .
Slaves often used the notion of paternalism to their advantage, finding opportunities within this
system to engage in acts of resistance and win a degree of freedom and autonomy. For
example, some slaves played into their masters’ racism by hiding their intelligence and feigning
childishness and ignorance. The slaves could then slow down the workday and sabotage the
system in small ways by “accidentally” breaking tools, for example; the master, seeing his slaves
as unsophisticated and childlike, would believe these incidents were accidents rather than
rebellions. Some slaves engaged in more dramatic forms of resistance, such as poisoning their
masters slowly. Other slaves reported rebellious slaves to their masters, hoping to gain
preferential treatment. Slaves who informed their masters about planned slave rebellions could
often expect the slaveholder’s gratitude and, perhaps, more lenient treatment. Such
expectations were always tempered by the individual personality and caprice of the master.
Slaveholders used both psychological coercion and physical violence to prevent slaves from
disobeying their wishes. Often, the most efficient way to discipline slaves was to threaten to sell
them. The lash, while the most common form of punishment, was effective but not efficient;
whippings sometimes left slaves incapacitated or even dead. Slave masters also used
punishment gear like neck braces, balls and chains, leg irons, and paddles with holes to produce
blood blisters. Slaves lived in constant terror of both physical violence and separation from
family and friends.
Under southern law, slaves could not marry. Nonetheless, some slaveholders allowed marriages
to promote the birth of children and to foster harmony on plantations. Some masters even
forced certain slaves to form unions, anticipating the birth of more children (and consequently
greater profits) from them. Masters sometimes allowed slaves to choose their own partners,
but they could also veto a match. Slave couples always faced the prospect of being sold away
from each other, and, once they had children, the horrifying reality that their children could be
sold and sent away at any time.
Slave parents had to show their children the best way to survive under slavery. This meant
teaching them to be discreet, submissive, and guarded around whites. Parents also taught their
children through the stories they told. Popular stories among slaves included tales of tricksters,
sly slaves, or animals like Brer Rabbit, who outwitted their antagonists. Such stories provided
comfort in humor and conveyed the slaves’ sense of the wrongs of slavery. Slaves’ work songs
commented on the harshness of their life and often had double meanings—a literal meaning
that whites would not find offensive and a deeper meaning for slaves. (11)
Work Song Example 1: Slow Drag Work Song by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no known
copyright restrictions. (17)
Work Song Example 2: Long Hot Summer Day by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no known
copyright restrictions. (18)
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Gordon, pictured here with scars and welts on his back from whippings he received as a slave,
endured terrible brutality from his master before escaping to Union Army lines in 1863. He
would become a soldier and help fight to end the violent system that produced the horrendous
scars on his back.Figure 7-11: Gordon, scourged back by Mathew Brady is in the Public Domain .
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African beliefs, including ideas about the spiritual world and the importance of African healers,
survived in the South as well. Whites who became aware of non-Christian rituals among slaves
labeled such practices as witchcraft. Among Africans, however, the rituals and use of various
plants by respected slave healers created connections between the African past and the
American South while also providing a sense of community and identity for slaves. Other
African customs, including traditional naming patterns, the making of baskets, and the
cultivation of certain native African plants that had been brought to the New World, also
endured. (4)
The concept of family, more than anything else, played a crucial role in the daily lives of slaves.
Family and kinship networks, and the benefits they carried, represented an institution through
which slaves could piece together a sense of community, a sense of feeling and dedication,
separate from the forced system of production that defined their daily lives. The creation of
family units, distant relations, and communal traditions allowed slaves to maintain religious
beliefs, ancient ancestral traditions, and even names passed down from generation to
generation in a way that challenged enslavement. Ideas passed between relatives on different
plantations, names given to children in honor of the deceased, and basic forms of love and
devotion created a sense of individuality, an identity that assuaged the loneliness and
desperation of enslaved life. Family defined how each plantation, each community, functioned,
grew, and labored.
Marriage served as the single most important aspect of cultural and identity formation, as it
connected slaves to their own pasts, and gave some sense of protection for the future. By the
start of the Civil War, approximately two-thirds of slaves were members of nuclear households,
each household averaging six people—mother, father, children, and often a grandparent,
elderly aunt or uncle, and even “in-laws.” Those who did not have a marriage bond, or even a
nuclear family, still maintained family ties, most often living with a single parent, brother, sister,
or grandparent.
Many slave marriages endured for many years. But the threat of disruption, often through sale,
always loomed. As the domestic slave trade increased following the constitutional ban on slave
importation in 1808 and the rise of cotton in the 1830s and 1840s, slave families, especially
those established prior to the slaves’ arrival in the United States, came under increased threat.
Hundreds of thousands of marriages, many with children, fell victim to sale “downriver”—a
euphemism for the near constant flow of slave laborers down the Mississippi River to the
developing cotton belt in the Southwest. In fact, during the Cotton Revolution alone, between
one-fifth and one-third of all slave marriages were broken up through sale or forced migration.
But this was not the only threat. Planters, and slaveholders of all shapes and sizes, recognized
that marriage was, in the most basic and tragic sense, a privilege granted and defined by them
for their slaves. And as a result, many slaveholders used slaves’ marriages, or the threats
thereto, to squeeze out more production, counteract disobedience, or simply make a gesture of
power and superiority.
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Threats to family networks, marriages, and household stability did not stop with the death of a
master. A slave couple could live their entire lives together, even having been born, raised, and
married on the slave plantation, and, following the death of their master, find themselves at
opposite sides of the known world. It only took a single relative, executor, creditor, or friend of
the deceased to make a claim against the estate to cause the sale and dispersal of an entire
slave community.
Enslaved women were particularly vulnerable to the shifts of fate attached to slavery. In many
cases, female slaves did the same work as men, spending the day—from sun up to sun down—
in the fields picking and bundling cotton. In some rare cases, especially among the larger
plantations, planters tended to use women as house servants more than men, but this was not
universal. In both cases, however, female slaves’ experiences were different than their male
counterparts, husbands, and neighbors. Sexual violence, unwanted pregnancies, and constant
childrearing while continuing to work the fields all made life as a female slave more prone to
disruption and uncertainty.
Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman from North Carolina, chronicled her master’s attempts to
sexually abuse her in her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs suggested that
her successful attempts to resist sexual assault and her determination to love whom she
pleased was “something akin to freedom.” But this “freedom,” however empowering and
contextual, did not cast a wide net. Many enslaved women had no choice concerning love, sex,
and motherhood. On plantations, small farms, and even in cities, rape was ever-present. Like
the splitting of families, slaveholders used sexual violence as a form of terrorism, a way to
promote increased production, obedience, and power relations. And this was not restricted
only to unmarried women. In numerous contemporary accounts, particularly violent
slaveholders forced men to witness the rape of their wives, daughters, and relatives, often as
punishment, but occasionally as a sadistic expression of power and dominance.
As property, enslaved women had no recourse, and society, by and large, did not see a crime in
this type of violence. Racist pseudo-scientists claimed that whites could not physically rape
Africans or African Americans, as the sexual organs of each were not compatible in that way.
State law, in some cases, supported this view, claiming that rape could only occur between
either two white people or a black man and a white woman. All other cases fell under a silent
acceptance. The consequences of rape, too, fell to the victim in the case of slaves. Pregnancies
that resulted from rape did not always lead to a lighter workload for the mother. And if a slave
acted out against a rapist, whether that be her master, mistress, or any other white attacker,
her actions were seen as crimes rather than desperate acts of survival. For example, a 19-yearold slave named Celia fell victim to repeated rape by her master in Callaway County, Missouri.
Between 1850 and 1855, Robert Newsom raped Celia hundreds of times, producing two
children and several miscarriages. Sick and desperate in the fall of 1855, Celia took a club and
struck her master in the head, killing him. But instead of sympathy and aid, or even an honest
attempt to understand and empathize, the community called for the execution of Celia. On
November 16, 1855, after a trial of ten days, Celia, the 19-year-old rape victim and slave, was
hanged for her crimes against her master.
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Life on the ground in cotton South, like the cities, systems, and networks within which it rested,
defied the standard narrative of the Old South. Slavery existed to dominate, yet slaves formed
bonds, maintained traditions, and crafted new culture. They fell in love, had children, and
protected one another using the privileges granted them by their captors, and the basic
intellect allowed all human beings. They were resourceful, brilliant, and vibrant, and they
created freedom where freedom seemingly could not exist. And within those communities,
resilience and dedication often led to cultural sustenance. Among the enslaved, women, and
the impoverished-but-free, culture thrived in ways that are difficult to see through the bales of
cotton and the stacks of money sitting on the docks and in the counting houses of the South’s
urban centers. But religion, honor, and pride transcended material goods, especially among
those who could not express themselves that way. (2)
7.5: The Free Black Population
The Free Black Population
Complicating the picture of the slavery in the antebellum South was the existence of a large
free black population. In fact, more free blacks lived in the South than in the North; roughly
261,000 lived in slave states, while 226,000 lived in northern states without slavery. Most free
blacks did not live in the Lower, or Deep South: the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. Instead, the largest number lived in
the upper southern states of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and later Kentucky,
Missouri, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia.
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A late 18 th century collage painting of a free black woman with her quadroon daughter. They
are wearing elaborate dresses that signify their relatively high social status as free people.Figure
7-12: Free Woman of Color with daughter by Unknown is in the Public Domain .
Part of the reason for the large number of free blacks living in slave states were the many
instances of manumission—the formal granting of freedom to slaves—that occurred as a result
of the Revolution, when many slaveholders put into action the ideal that “all men are created
equal” and freed their slaves. The transition in the Upper South to the staple crop of wheat,
which did not require large numbers of slaves to produce, also spurred manumissions. Another
large group of free blacks in the South had been free residents of Louisiana before the 1803
Louisiana Purchase, while still other free blacks came from Cuba and Haiti.
Most free blacks in the South lived in cities, and a majority of free blacks were lighter-skinned
women, a reflection of the interracial unions that formed between white men and black
women. Everywhere in the United States blackness had come to be associated with slavery, the
station at the bottom of the social ladder. Both whites and those with African ancestry tended
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to delineate varying degrees of lightness in skin color in a social hierarchy. In the slaveholding
South, different names described one’s distance from blackness or whiteness: mulattos (those
with one black and one white parent), quadroons (those with one black grandparent), and
octoroons (those with one black great-grandparent). Lighter-skinned blacks often looked down
on their darker counterparts, an indication of the ways in which both whites and blacks
internalized the racism of the age.
Some free blacks in the South owned slaves of their own. Andrew Durnford, for example, was
born in New Orleans in 1800, three years before the Louisiana Purchase. His father was white,
and his mother was a free black. Durnford became an American citizen after the Louisiana
Purchase, rising to prominence as a Louisiana sugar planter and slaveholder. William Ellison,
another free black who amassed great wealth and power in the South, was born a slave in 1790
in South Carolina. After buying his freedom and that of his wife and daughter, he proceeded to
purchase his own slaves, whom he then put to work manufacturing cotton gins. By the eve of
the Civil War, Ellison had become one of the richest and largest slaveholders in the entire state.
The phenomenon of free blacks amassing large fortunes within a slave society predicated on
racial difference, however, was exceedingly rare. Most free blacks in the South lived under the
specter of slavery and faced many obstacles. Beginning in the early nineteenth century,
southern states increasingly made manumission of slaves illegal. They also devised laws that
divested free blacks of their rights, such as the right to testify against whites in court or the
right to seek employment where they pleased. Interestingly, it was in the upper southern states
that such laws were the harshest. In Virginia, for example, legislators made efforts to require
free blacks to leave the state. In parts of the Deep South, free blacks were able to maintain
their rights more easily. The difference in treatment between free blacks in the Deep South and
those in the Upper South, historians have surmised, came down to economics. In the Deep
South, slavery as an institution was strong and profitable. In the Upper South, the opposite was
true. The anxiety of this economic uncertainty manifested in the form of harsh laws that
targeted free blacks. (11)
Conclusion
Cotton transformed the South into the most profitable and powerful slave society in world
history. The commodity opened a previously closed society to the grandeur, the profit, the
exploitation, and the social dimensions of a larger, more connected, global community. By
1860, not only did the South produce three quarters of the world’s cotton it held in bondage
nearly 4 million slaves worth more than 3 billion dollars, or 13 trillion in 2016 dollars. Nothing
was more valuable in the United States other than the land itself. The cotton kingdom
generated not only tremendous wealth, it also deepened the sectional fault lines between
North and South during the first half of the nineteenth-century. Northern states looked on with
dread as slavery continued spread and threatened to dominate land out west that Thomas
Jefferson and other founders envisioned as an “empire of liberty,” a land reserved free white
farmers. As slavery spread into new territories and then states, Northern politicians feared that
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slaveholders and their interests would dominate Congress and corrupt American democracy.
Southerners argued vehemently that the Constitution protected their property rights, which
included slaves, and allowed them to spread slavery anywhere they wished. The cotton
kingdom, and with it the westward expansion of slavery, thus set the stage for the sectional
crisis of the nineteenth century. (Huston, 27) (1)
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READING MODULE 8: Slavery and the
Sectional Crisis
8.1: Introduction
Slavery and the Sectional Crisis
Module Introduction
Slavery’s western expansion created problems for the United States from the very start. Battles
emerged over the westward expansion of slavery and over the role of the federal government
in protecting the interests of slaveholders. Northern workers felt that slavery suppressed wages
and stole land that could have been used by poor white Americans to achieve economic
independence. Southerners feared that without slavery’s expansion, the abolitionist faction
would come to dominate national politics and an increasingly dense population of slaves would
lead to bloody insurrection and race war.
Constant resistance from enslaved men and women required a strong proslavery government
to maintain order. As the North gradually abolished human bondage, enslaved men and women
headed North on an underground railroad of hideaways and safe houses. Northerners and
Southerners came to disagree sharply on the role of the federal government in capturing and
returning these freedom seekers. While Northerners appealed to their states’ rights to refuse
capturing runaway slaves, Southerners demanded a national commitment to slavery. Enslaved
laborers meanwhile remained vitally important to the nation’s economy, fueling not only the
southern plantation economy but also providing raw materials for the industrial North.
Differences over the fate of slavery remained at the heart of American politics, especially as the
United States expanded. After decades of conflict, Americans north and south began to fear
that the opposite section of the country had seized control of the government. By November
1860, an opponent of slavery’s expansion arose from within the Republican Party. During the
secession crisis that followed, fears, nearly a century in the making, at last devolved into bloody
war. (2)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
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current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
•
•
Identify issues related to slavery that divided the north and south in the 19th century.
Discuss the sectional crisis between the north and the south. (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: The Sectional Crisis (see below)
8.2: The Sectional Crisis
The Sectional Crisis
Sectionalism in the Early Republic
Slavery’s history stretched back to antiquity. Prior to the American Revolution, nearly everyone
in the world accepted it as a natural part of life. English colonies north and south relied on
enslaved workers who grew tobacco, harvested indigo and sugar, and worked in ports. They
generated tremendous wealth for the British crown. That wealth and luxury fostered seemingly
limitless opportunities, and inspired seemingly boundless imaginations. Enslaved workers also
helped give rise to revolutionary new ideals, ideals that in time became the ideological
foundations of the sectional crisis. English political theorists, in particular, began to re-think
natural law justifications for slavery. They rejected the longstanding idea that slavery was a
condition that naturally suited some people. A new transatlantic antislavery movement began
to argue that freedom was the natural condition of man.
Revolutionaries seized onto these ideas to stunning effect in the late eighteenth century. In the
United States, France, and Haiti, revolutionaries began the work of splintering the old order.
Each revolution seemed to radicalize the next. Bolder and more expansive declarations of
equality and freedom followed one after the other. Revolutionaries in the United States
declared, “All men are created equal,” in the 1770s. French visionaries issued the “Declaration
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of Rights and Man and Citizen” by 1789. But the most startling development came in 1803. A
revolution led by the island’s rebellious slaves turned France’s most valuable sugar colony into
an independent country administered by the formerly enslaved. (2)
Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot—1803 Battle of Vertiéres. Haitian rebel forces, comprised
of liberated slaves, fight Napoleon’s expeditionary forces.Figure 8-1: Haitian Revolution by
Auguste Raffet is in the Public Domain .
The Haitian Revolution marked an early origin of the sectional crisis. It helped splinter the
Atlantic basin into clear zones of freedom and un-freedom, shattering the longstanding
assumption that African-descended slaves could not also be rulers. Despite the clear limitations
of the American Revolution in attacking slavery, the era marked a powerful break in slavery’s
history. Military service on behalf of both the English and the American army freed thousands
of slaves. Many others simply used the turmoil of war to make their escape. As a result, free
black communities emerged—communities that would continually reignite the antislavery
struggle. For nearly a century, most white Americans were content to compromise over the
issue of slavery, but the constant agitation of black Americans, both enslaved and free, kept the
issue alive.
The national breakdown over slavery occurred over a long timeline and across a broad
geography. Debates over slavery in the American West proved especially important. As the
United States pressed westward, new questions arose as to whether those lands ought to be
slave or free. The framers of the Constitution did a little, but not much, to help resolve these
early questions. Article VI of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance banned slavery north and west of
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the Ohio River. Many took it to mean that the founders intended for slavery to die out, as why
else would they prohibit its spread across such a huge swath of territory?
Debates over the framer’s intentions often led to confusion and bitter debate, but the actions
of the new government left better clues as to what the new nation intended for slavery.
Congress authorized the admission of Vermont (1791) and Kentucky (1792), with Vermont
coming into the Union as a free state, and Kentucky coming in as a slave state. Though
Americans at the time made relatively little of the balancing act suggested by the admission of a
slave state and a free state, the pattern became increasingly important. By 1820, preserving the
balance of free states and slave states would be seen as an issue of national security.
New pressures challenging the delicate balance again arose in the West. The Louisiana Purchase
of 1803 more than doubled the size of the United States. Questions immediately arose as to
whether these lands would be made slave or free. Complicating matters further was the rapid
expansion of plantation slavery fueled by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Yet even with
the booming cotton economy, many Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, believed that
slavery was a temporary institution and would soon die out. Tensions rose with the Louisiana
Purchase, but a truly sectional national debate remained mostly dormant.
That debate, however, came quickly. Sectional differences tied to the expansion of plantation
slavery in the West were especially important after 1803. The Ohio River Valley became an
early fault line in the coming sectional struggle. Kentucky and Tennessee emerged as slave
states, while free states Ohio, Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) gained admission along the
river’s northern banks. Borderland negotiations and accommodations along the Ohio River
fostered a distinctive kind of white supremacy, as laws tried to keep blacks out of the West
entirely. Ohio’s so-called “Black Laws,” of 1803 foreshadowed the exclusionary cultures of
Indiana, Illinois, and several subsequent states of the Old Northwest and later, the Far West.
These laws often banned African American voting, denied black Americans access to public
schools, and made it impossible for non-whites to serve on juries and in local militias, among a
host of other restrictions and obstacles.
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Map showing the distribution of slaves in the United States in 1820.Figure 8-2: Slavery US
1820 by Allen Johnson is in the Public Domain .
The Missouri Territory, by far the largest section of the Louisiana Territory, marked a turning
point in the sectional crisis. Saint Louis, a bustling Mississippi River town filled with powerful
slave owners, loomed large as an important trade headquarters for networks in the northern
Mississippi Valley and the Greater West. In 1817, eager to put questions of whether this
territory would be slave or free to rest, Congress opened its debate over Missouri’s admission
to the Union. Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed laws that would gradually
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abolish slavery in the new state. Southern states responded with unanimous outrage, and the
nation shuddered at an undeniable sectional controversy.
Congress reached a “compromise” on Missouri’s admission, largely through the work of
Kentuckian Henry Clay. Maine would be admitted to the Union as a free state. In exchange,
Missouri would come into the Union as a slave state. Legislators sought to prevent future
conflicts by making Missouri’s southern border at 36° 30′ the new dividing line between slavery
and freedom in the Louisiana Purchase lands. South of that line, running east from Missouri to
the western edge of the Louisiana Purchase lands (near the present-day Texas panhandle)
slavery could expand. North of it, encompassing what in 1820 was still “unorganized territory,”
there would be no slavery.
(1820) Slave states, including Missouri, in red and the free states in blue. The green line is the
Missouri Compromise line.Figure 8-3: Missouri Compromise Line by Júlio Reis is licensed
under CC BY-SA 3.0 .
The Missouri Compromise marked a major turning point in America’s sectional crisis because it
exposed to the public just how divisive the slavery issue had grown. The debate filled
newspapers, speeches, and Congressional records. Antislavery and pro-slavery positions from
that point forward repeatedly returned to points made during the Missouri debates. Legislators
battled for weeks over whether the Constitutional framers intended slavery’s expansion or not,
and these contests left deep scars. Even seemingly simple and straightforward phrases like “All
Men Are Created Equal” were hotly contested all over again. Questions over the expansion of
slavery remained open, but nearly all Americans concluded that the Constitution protected
slavery where it already existed.
Southerners were not yet advancing arguments that said slavery was a positive good, but they
did insist during the Missouri Debate that the framers supported slavery and wanted to see it
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expand. In Article 1, Section 2, for example, the Constitution enabled representation in the
South to be based on rules defining enslaved people as 3 / 5 of a voter, meaning southern white
men would be overrepresented in Congress. The Constitution also stipulated that Congress
could not interfere with the slave trade before 1808, and enabled Congress to draft fugitive
slave laws.
Antislavery participants in the Missouri debate argued that the framers never intended slavery
to survive the Revolution and in fact hoped it would disappear through peaceful means. The
framers of the Constitution never used the word “slave.” Slaves were referred to as “persons
held in service,” perhaps referring to English common law precedents that questioned the
legitimacy of “property in man.” Antislavery activists also pointed out that while the Congress
could not pass a law limiting the slave trade by 1808, the framers had also recognized the flip
side of the debate and had thus opened the door to legislating the slave trade’s end once the
deadline arrived. Language in the Tenth Amendment, they claimed, also said slavery could be
banned in the territories. Finally, they pointed to the due process clause of the Fifth
Amendment, which said that property could be seized through appropriate legislation. The
bruising Missouri debates ultimately transcended arguments about the Constitution. They
became an all-encompassing referendum on the American past, present, and future.
Despite the furor, the Missouri Crisis did not yet inspire hardened defenses of either slave or
free labor as positive good. Those would come in the coming decades. In the meantime, the
uneasy consensus forged by the Missouri Debate managed to bring a measure of calm.
The Missouri debate had also deeply troubled the nation’s African Americans and Native
Americans. By the time of the Missouri compromise debate, both groups saw that whites never
intended them to be citizens of the United States. In fact, the debates over Missouri’s
admission had offered the first sustained debate on the question of black citizenship, as
Missouri’s State Constitution wanted to impose a hard ban on any future black migrants.
Legislators ultimately agreed that this hard ban violated the Constitution, but reaffirmed
Missouri’s ability to deny citizenship to African Americans. Americans by 1820 had endured a
broad challenge, not only to their cherished ideals but also more fundamentally to their
conceptions of self. (2)
8.3: The Crisis Joined
The Crisis Joined
Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1821 exposed deep fault lines in American society. But the
Compromise created a new sectional consensus that most white Americans, at least, hoped
would ensure a lasting peace. Through sustained debates and arguments, white Americans
agreed that the Constitution could do little about slavery where it already existed and that
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slavery, with the State of Missouri as the key exception, would never expand north of the
36°30′ line.
Once again westward expansion challenged this consensus, and this time the results proved
even more damaging. Tellingly, enslaved southerners were among the first to signal their
discontent. A rebellion led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 threatened lives and property throughout
the Carolinas. The nation’s religious leaders also expressed a rising discontent with the new
status quo. (9) The Second Great Awakening further sharpened political differences by
promoting schisms within the major Protestant churches, schisms that also became increasingly
sectional in nature. Between 1820 and 1846, sectionalism drew on new political parties, new
religious organizations, and new reform movements.
As politics grew more democratic, leaders attacked old inequalities of wealth and power, but in
doing so many pandered to a unity under white supremacy. Slavery briefly receded from the
nation’s attention in the early 1820s, but that would change quickly. By the last half of the
decade, slavery was back, and this time it appeared even more threatening.
Inspired by the social change of Jacksonian democracy, white men regardless of status would
gain not only land and jobs, but also the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to
attend public schools, and the right to serve in the militia and armed forces. In this postMissouri context, leaders arose to push the country’s new expansionist desires in aggressive
new directions. As they did so, however, the sectional crisis again deepened.
The Democratic Party initially seemed to offer a compelling answer to the problems of
sectionalism by promising benefits to white working men of the North, South, and West, while
also uniting rural, small town, and urban residents. Indeed, huge numbers of western,
southern, and northern workingmen rallied during the 1828 Presidential election behind
Andrew Jackson. The Democratic Party tried to avoid the issue of slavery and instead sought to
unite Americans around shared commitments to white supremacy and desires to expand the
nation.
Democrats were not without their critics. Northerners seen as especially friendly to the South
had become known as “Doughfaces” during the Missouri debates, and as the 1830s wore on,
more and more Doughfaced Democrats became vulnerable to the charge that they served the
Southern slave oligarchs better than they served their own northern communities. Whites
discontented with the direction of the country used the slur and other critiques to help chip
away at Democratic Party majorities. The accusation that northern Democrats were lap dogs for
southern slaveholders had real power.
The Whigs offered an organized major party challenge to the Democrats. Whig strongholds
often mirrored the patterns of westward migrations out of New England. Whigs drew from an
odd coalition of wealthy merchants, middle and upper class farmers, planters in the Upland
South, and settlers in the Great Lakes. Because of this motley coalition, the party struggled to
bring a cohesive message to voters in the 1830s. Their strongest support came from places like
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Ohio’s Western Reserve, the rural and Protestant-dominated areas of Michigan, and similar
parts of Protestant and small-town Illinois, particularly the fast-growing towns and cities of the
state’s northern half.
Whig leaders stressed Protestant culture, federal-sponsored internal improvements, and
courted the support of a variety of reform movements, including temperance, nativism, and
even antislavery, though few Whigs believed in racial equality. These positions attracted a wide
range of figures, including a young convert to politics named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln admired
Whig leader Henry Clay of Kentucky, and by the early 1830s, Lincoln certainly fit the image of
developing Whig. A veteran of the Black Hawk War, Lincoln had re-located to New Salem,
Illinois, where he worked a variety of odd jobs, living a life of thrift, self-discipline, and sobriety
as he educated himself in preparation for a professional life in law and politics.
The Whig Party blamed Democrats for defending slavery at the expense of the American
people, but antislavery was never a core component of the Whig platform. Several abolitionists
grew so disgusted with the Whigs that they formed their own party, a true antislavery party.
Activists in Warsaw, New York organized the antislavery Liberty Party in 1839. Liberty leaders
demanded the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, the end of the interstate slave trade,
and the prohibition of slavery’s expansion into the West. But the Liberty Party also shunned
women’s participation in the movement and distanced themselves from visions of true racial
egalitarianism. Few Americans voted for the party. The Democrats and Whigs continued to
dominate American politics.
Democrats and Whigs fostered a moment of relative calm on the slavery debate, partially aided
by gag rules prohibiting discussion of antislavery petitions. Arkansas (1836) and Michigan
(1837) became the newest states admitted to the Union, with Arkansas coming in as a slave
state, and Michigan coming in as a free state. Michigan gained admission through provisions
established in the Northwest Ordinance, while Arkansas came in under the Missouri
Compromise. Since its lands were below the line at 36° 30′ the admission of Arkansas did not
threaten the Missouri consensus. The balancing act between slavery and freedom continued.
Events in Texas would shatter the balance. Independent Texas soon gained recognition from a
supportive Andrew Jackson administration in 1837. But Jackson’s successor, President Martin
Van Buren, also a Democrat, soon had reasons to worry about the Republic of Texas. Texas
struggled with ongoing conflicts with Mexico and Indian raids from the powerful Comanche.
The 1844 democratic presidential candidate James K. Polk sought to bridge the sectional divide
by promising new lands to whites north and south. Polk cited the annexation of Texas and the
Oregon Territory as campaign cornerstones. Yet as Polk championed the acquisition of these
vast new lands, northern Democrats grew annoyed by their southern colleagues, especially
when it came to Texas.
For many observers, the debates over Texas statehood illustrated that the federal government
was clearly pro-slavery. Texas President Sam Houston managed to secure a deal with Polk, and
gained admission to the Union for Texas in 1845. Antislavery northerners also worried about
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the admission of Florida, which entered the Union as a slave state in 1845. The year 1845
became a pivotal year in the memory of antislavery leaders. As Americans embraced calls to
pursue their “Manifest Destiny,” antislavery voices looked at developments in Florida and Texas
as signs that the sectional crisis had taken an ominous and perhaps irredeemable turn.
The 1840s opened with a number of disturbing developments for antislavery leaders. The 1842
Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania ruled that the federal government’s Fugitive Slave
Act trumped Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law. Antislavery activists believed that the federal
government only served southern slaveholders and were trouncing the states’ rights of the
North. A number of northern states reacted by passing new personal liberty laws in protest in
1843.
The year 1846 signaled new reversals to the antislavery cause, and the beginnings of a dark new
era in American politics. President Polk and his Democratic allies were eager to see western
lands brought into the Union and were especially anxious to see the borders of the nation
extended to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Critics of the administration blasted these efforts
as little more than land-grabs on behalf of slaveholders. Events in early 1846 seemed to justify
antislavery complaints. Since Mexico had never recognized independent Texas, it continued to
lay claim to its lands, even after the United States admitted it to the Union. In January 1846,
Polk ordered troops to Texas to enforce claims stemming from its border dispute along the Rio
Grande. Polk asked for war on May 11, 1846, and by September 1847, the United States had
invaded Mexico City. Whigs, like Abraham Lincoln, found their protests sidelined, but
antislavery voices were becoming more vocal and more powerful.
After 1846, the sectional crisis raged throughout North America. Debates swirled over whether
the new lands would be slave or free. The South began defending slavery as a positive good. At
the same time, Congressman David Wilmot submitted his “Wilmot Proviso” late in 1846,
banning the expansion of slavery into the territories won from Mexico. The Proviso gained
widespread northern support and even passed the House with bipartisan support, but it failed
in the Senate. (2)
8.4: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
The conclusion of the Mexican War gave rise to the 1848 Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. The
treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the United States. The spoils gained from the Mexican
War were impressive, and it was clear they would help expand slavery. The United States
required Mexican officials to cede the California and New Mexico Territories for $15 million
dollars. With American soldiers occupying their capital, Mexican leaders had no choice but sign
or continue fighting a war they could not win. The new American territory included lands that
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would become the future states of California, Utah, Nevada, most of Arizona, and well as parts
of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.
Map showing the states and territories of the United States in 1848, including the Mexican
Cession—land acquired from Mexico following the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (1848). Figure 8-4: United States 1848 by Golbez is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .
The acquisition of so much land made it imperative to antislavery leaders that these lands not
be opened to slavery. But knowing that the Liberty Party was not likely to provide a home to
many moderate voters, leaders instead hoped to foster a new and more competitive party,
which they called the Free Soil Party. Antislavery leaders entered the 1848 election hoping that
their vision of a federal government divorced from slavery might be heard. But both the Whigs
and the Democrats, nominated pro-slavery southerners. Left unrepresented, antislavery Free
Soil leaders swung into action.
Demanding an alternative to the pro-slavery status quo, Free Soil leaders assembled so-called
“Conscience Whigs.” The new coalition called for a national convention in August 1848 at
Buffalo, New York. A number of ex-Democrats committed to the party right away, including an
important group of New Yorkers loyal to Martin Van Buren. The Free Soil Party’s platform
bridged the eastern and the western leadership together and called for an end to slavery in
Washington DC and a halt on slavery’s expansion in the territories. The Free Soil movement
hardly made a dent in the 1848 Presidential election, but it drew more than four times the
popular vote won by the Liberty Party earlier. It was a promising start. In 1848, Free Soil leaders
claimed just 10% of the popular vote, but won over a dozen House seats, and even managed to
win one Senate seat in Ohio, which went to Salmon P. Chase. In Congress, Free Soil members
had enough votes to swing power to either the Whigs or the Democrats.
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The admission of Wisconsin as a free state in May 1848 helped cool tensions after the Texas
and Florida admissions. But news from a number of failed revolutions in Europe alarmed
American reformers. As exiled radicals filtered out of Europe and into the United States, a
women’s rights movement also got underway at Seneca Falls, New York. Representing the first
of such meetings ever held in United States history, it was led by figures like Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women with deep ties to the abolitionist cause. Frederick Douglass
also appeared at the convention and took part in the proceedings, where participants debated
the Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances and Resolutions.
By August 1848, it seemed plausible that the Free Soil Movement might tap into these reforms
and build a broader coalition. In some ways that is precisely what it did. But come November,
the spirit of reform failed to yield much at the polls. Whig candidate Zachary Taylor bested
Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan.
The upheavals signaled by 1848 came to a quick end. Taylor remained in office only a brief time
until his unexpected death from a stomach ailment in 1850. During Taylor’s brief time in office,
the fruits of the Mexican War began to spoil. While he was alive, Taylor and his administration
struggled to find a good remedy. Increased clamoring for the admission of California, New
Mexico, and Utah pushed the country closer to the edge. Gold had been discovered in
California, and as thousands continued to pour onto the West Coast and through the transMississippi West, the admission of new states loomed. In Utah, Mormons were also making
claims to an independent state they called Deseret. By 1850, California wanted admission as a
free state. With so many competing dynamics underway, and with the President dead and
replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the 1850s were off to a troubling start.
Congressional leaders like Henry Clay and newer legislators like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois
were asked to broker a compromise, but this time it was clear no compromise could bridge all
the diverging interests at play in the country. Clay eventually left Washington disheartened by
affairs. It fell to young Stephen Douglas, then, to shepherd the bills through the Congress,
which he in fact did. Legislators rallied behind the “Compromise of 1850,” an assemblage of
bills passed late in 1850, which managed to keep the promises of the Missouri Compromise
alive.
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Henry Clay (‘The Great Compromiser’) addresses the U.S. Senate during the debates over the
Compromise of 1850. The print shows a number of incendiary personalities, like John C. Calhoun,
whose increasingly sectional beliefs were pacified for a time by the Compromise. (2)Figure 85: Henry Clay Senate by Peter F. Rothermel is in the Public Domain .
The Compromise of 1850 tried to offer something to everyone, but in the end, it only worsened
the sectional crisis. For southerners, the package offered a tough new fugitive slave law that
empowered the federal government to deputize regular citizens in arresting runaways. The
New Mexico territory and the Utah Territory, would be allowed to determine their own fates as
slave or free states based on popular sovereignty. The Compromise also allowed territories to
submit suits directly to the Supreme Court over the status of fugitive slaves within its bounds.
The admission of California as the newest free state in the Union cheered many northerners,
but even the admission of a vast new state full of resources and rich agricultural lands was not
enough. In addition to California, northerners also gained a ban on the slave trade in
Washington, D.C., but not the full emancipation abolitionists had long advocated. Texas, which
had already come into the Union as a slave state, was asked to give some of its land to New
Mexico in return for the federal government absorbing some of the former republic’s debt. But
the Compromise debates soon grew ugly.
After the Compromise of 1850, antislavery critics became increasingly certain that slaveholders
had co-opted the federal government, and that a southern “Slave Power” secretly held sway in
Washington, where it hoped to make slavery a national institution. These northern complaints
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pointed back to how the 3 / 5 compromise of the Constitution gave southerners more
representatives in Congress. In the 1850s, antislavery leaders increasingly argued that
Washington worked on behalf of slaveholders while ignoring the interests of white working
men.
None of the individual 1850 Compromise measures proved more troubling to national and
international observers than the Fugitive Slave Act. In a clear bid to extend slavery’s influence
throughout the country, the act created special federal commissioners to determine the fate of
alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even court testimony. Under its provisions,
local authorities in the North could not interfere with the capture of fugitives. Northern
citizens, moreover, had to assist in the arrest of fugitive slaves when called upon by federal
agents. The Fugitive Slave Act created the foundation for a massive expansion of federal power,
including an alarming increase in the nation’s policing powers. Many northerners were also
troubled by the way the bill undermined local and state laws. The law itself fostered corruption
and the enslavement of free black northerners. The federal commissioners who heard these
cases were paid $10 if they determined that the defendant was a slave and only $5 if they
determined he or she was free. Many black northerners responded to the new law by heading
further north to Canada.
The 1852 Presidential election gave the Whigs their most stunning defeat and effectively ended
their existence as a national political party. Whigs captured just 42 of the 254 electoral votes
needed to win. With the Compromise of 1850 and plenty of new lands, peaceful consensus
seemed on the horizon. Antislavery feelings continued to run deep, however, and their depth
revealed that with a Democratic Party misstep, a coalition united against the Democrats might
yet emerge and bring them to defeat. One measure of the popularity of antislavery ideas came
in 1852 when Harriet Beecher Stowe published her bestselling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin . ((Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: 1852).)) Sales for Uncle Tom’s
Cabin were astronomical, eclipsed only by sales of the Bible. The book became a sensation and
helped move antislavery into everyday conversation for many northerners. Despite the
powerful antislavery message, Stowe’s book also reinforced many racist stereotypes. Even
abolitionists struggled with the deeply ingrained racism that plagued American society. While
the major success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin bolstered the abolitionist cause, the terms outlined by
the Compromise of 1850 appeared strong enough to keep the peace.
Democrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had
reasons to act with confidence. Voters had returned them to office in 1852 following the bitter
fights over the Compromise of 1850. Emboldened, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas
introduced a set of additional amendments to a bill drafted in late 1853 to help organize the
Nebraska Territory, the last of the Louisiana Purchase lands. In 1853, the Nebraska Territory
was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian Border. Altogether, it
encompassed present-day Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado and
Montana. Douglas’s efforts to amend and introduce the bill in 1854 opened dynamics that
would break the Democratic Party in two and, in the process, rip the country apart.
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Fullpage illustration from Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Characters Eliza, Harry, Chloe, Tom, and Old
Bruno. Eliza is coming to tell Uncle Tom he is to be sold and that she is running away with her
child.Figure 8-6: ElizaEngraving by Hammatt Billings is in the Public Domain .
Democrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had
reasons to act with confidence. Voters had returned them to office in 1852 following the bitter
fights over the Compromise of 1850. Emboldened, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas
introduced a set of additional amendments to a bill drafted in late 1853 to help organize the
Nebraska Territory, the last of the Louisiana Purchase lands. In 1853, the Nebraska Territory
was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian Border. Altogether, it
encompassed present-day Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado and
Montana. Douglas’s efforts to amend and introduce the bill in 1854 opened dynamics that
would break the Democratic Party in two and, in the process, rip the country apart.
Douglas proposed a bold plan in 1854 to cut off a large southern chunk of Nebraska and create
it separately as the Kansas Territory. Douglas had a number of goals in mind. The expansionist
Democrat from Illinois wanted to organize the territory to facilitate the completion of a national
railroad that would flow through Chicago. But before he had even finished introducing the bill,
opposition had already mobilized. Salmon P. Chase drafted a response in northern newspapers
that exposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a measure to overturn the Missouri Compromise and
open western lands for slavery. Kansas-Nebraska protests emerged in 1854 throughout the
North, with key meetings in Wisconsin and Michigan. Kansas would become slave or free
depending on the result of local elections, elections that would be greatly influenced by
migrants flooding to the state to either protect or stop the spread of slavery.
Ordinary Americans in the North increasingly resisted what they believed to be a pro-slavery
federal government on their own terms. The rescues and arrests of fugitive slaves Anthony
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Burns in Boston and Joshua Glover in Milwaukee, for example, both signaled the rising
vehemence of resistance to the nation’s 1850 fugitive slave law. The case of Anthony Burns
illustrates how the Fugitive Slave Law radicalized many northerners. On May 24, 1854, 20-yearold Burns, a preacher who worked in a Boston clothing shop, was clubbed and dragged to jail.
One year earlier, Burns had escaped slavery in Virginia, and a group of slave catchers had come
to return him to Richmond. Word of Burns’ capture spread rapidly through Boston, and a mob
gathered outside of the courthouse demanding Burns’ release. Two days after the arrest, the
crowd stormed the courthouse and shot a Deputy U.S. Marshall to death. News reached
Washington, and the federal government sent soldiers. Boston was placed under Martial Law.
Federal troops lined the streets of Boston as Burns was marched to a ship where he was sent
back to slavery in Virginia. After spending over $40,000, the United States Government had
successfully reenslaved Anthony Burns. A short time later, Burns was redeemed by abolitionists
who paid $1,300 to return him to freedom, but the outrage among Bostonians only grew. And
Anthony Burns was only one of hundreds of highly publicized episodes of the federal
governments imposing the Fugitive Slave Law on rebellious northern populations. In the words
of Amos Adams Lawrence, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative,
compromise Union Whigs & woke up stark mad Abolitionists.”
As northerners radicalized, organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Society provided
guns and other goods for pioneers willing to go to Kansas and establish the territory as
antislavery through popular sovereignty. On all sides of the slavery issue, politics became
increasingly militarized.
The year 1855 nearly derailed the northern antislavery coalition. A resurgent anti-immigrant
movement briefly took advantage of the Whig collapse, and nearly stole the energy of the antiadministration forces by channeling its frustrations into fights against the large number of
mostly Catholic German and Irish immigrants in American cities. Calling themselves “KnowNothings,” on account of their tendency to pretend ignorance when asked about their
activities, the Know-Nothing or American Party made impressive gains in 1854 and 1855,
particularly in New England and the Middle Atlantic. But the anti-immigrant movement simply
could not capture the nation’s attention in ways the antislavery movement already had.
The antislavery political movements that started in 1854 coalesced as the coming Presidential
election of 1856 accelerated the formation of a new political party. Harkening back to the
founding fathers, this new party called itself the Republican Party. Republicans moved into a
highly charged summer expecting great things for their cause. Following his explosive speech
before Congress on May 19-20 in which he castigated Southern Democrats their complicity in
the “crimes” occurring in Kansas, Charles Sumner was beaten by congressional representative
Preston Brooks of South Carolina right on the floor of the Senate chamber. Among other
accusations, Sumner accused Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina of defending slavery so
he could have sexual access to black women. Butler’s cousin, representative Brooks felt that he
had to defend his relative’s honor, and nearly killed Sumner as a result.
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An 1856 Lithograph showing Democratic Representative Preston Brooks beating Republican
Senator Charles Sumner with a cane.Figure 8-8: Southern Chivalry by John L. Magee is in
the Public Domain .
The violence in Washington pales before the many murders occurring in Kansas. Proslavery
raiders attacked Lawrence, Kansas. Radical abolitionist John Brown retaliated, murdering
several pro-slavery Kansans in retribution. As all of this played out, the House failed to expel
Brooks. Brooks resigned his seat anyway, only to be re-elected by his constituents later in the
year. He received new canes emblazoned with the words “Hit him again!”
With sectional tensions at a breaking point, both parties readied for the coming Presidential
election. In June 1856, the newly named Republican Party held its nominating convention at
Philadelphia, and selected Californian John Charles Frémont. Frémont’s antislavery credentials
may not have pleased many abolitionists, but his dynamic and talented wife, Jessie Benton
Frémont, appealed to more radical members of the coalition. The Kansas-Nebraska Debate, the
organization of the Republican Party, and the 1856 Presidential Campaign all energized a new
generation of political leaders, including Abraham Lincoln. Beginning with his speech at Peoria,
Illinois, in 1854, Lincoln carved out a message that encapsulated better than anyone else the
main ideas and visions of the Republican Party. Lincoln himself was slow to join the coalition,
yet by the summer of 1856, Lincoln had fully committed to the Frémont campaign.
Frémont lost, but Republicans celebrated that he won 11 of the 16 free states. This showing,
they urged, was truly impressive for any party making its first run at the Presidency. Yet
northern Democrats in crucial swing states remained unmoved by the Republican Party’s
appeals. Ulysses S. Grant of Missouri, for example, worried that Frémont and Republicans
signaled trouble for the Union itself. Grant voted for the Democratic candidate, James
Buchanan, believing a Republican victory might bring about disunion. In abolitionist and
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especially black American circles, Frémont’s defeat was more than a disappointment. Believing
their fate had been sealed as permanent non-citizens, some African Americans would consider
foreign emigration and colonization. Others began to explore the option of more radical and
direct action against the Slave Power. (2)
A bust portrait of the twenty-four-year-old Burns is surrounded by scenes from his life. These
include (clockwise from lower left): the sale of the youthful Burns at auction, a whipping post
with bales of cotton, his arrest in Boston on May 24, 1854, his escape from Richmond on
shipboard, his departure from Boston escorted by federal marshals and troops, Burns’s
“address” (to the court?), and finally Burns in prison. Copyrighting works such as prints and
pamphlets under the name of the subject (here Anthony Burns) was a common abolitionist
143
practice. This was no doubt the case in this instance, since by 1855 Burns had in fact been
returned to his owner in Virginia.Figure 8-7: Anthony Burns by R.M. Edwards is in the Public
Domain.
8.5: From Sectional Crisis to National Crisis
From Sectional Crisis to National Crisis
White antislavery leaders hailed Frémont’s defeat as a “glorious” one and looked ahead to the
party’s future successes. For those still in slavery, or hoping to see loved ones freed, the news
was of course much harder to take. The Republican Party had promised the rise of an
antislavery coalition, but voters rebuked it. The lessons seemed clear enough.
Kansas loomed large over the 1856 election, darkening the national mood. The story of voter
fraud in Kansas had begun years before in 1854, when nearby Missourians first started crossing
the border to tamper with the Kansas elections. Noting this, critics at the time attacked the
Pierce administration for not living up to the ideals of popular sovereignty by ensuring fair
elections. From there, the crisis only deepened. Kansas voted to come into the Union as a free
state, but the federal government refused to recognize their votes and instead recognized a
sham pro-slavery legislature.
The sectional crisis had at last become a national crisis. “Bleeding Kansas” was the first place to
demonstrate that the sectional crisis could easily, and in fact already was, exploding into a fullblown national crisis. As the national mood grew increasingly grim, Kansas attracted militants
representing the extreme sides of the slavery debate.
In the days after the 1856 Presidential election, Buchanan made his plans for his time in office
clear. He talked with Chief Justice Roger Taney on inauguration day about a court decision he
hoped to see handled during his time in office. Indeed, not long after the inauguration, the
Supreme Court handed down a decision that would come to define Buchanan’s Presidency. The
Dred Scott decision, Scott v. Sandford , ruled that black Americans could not be citizens of the
United States. This gave the Buchanan administration and its southern allies a direct
repudiation of the Missouri Compromise. The court ruled that Scott, a Missouri slave, had no
right to sue in United States courts. The Dred Scott decision signaled that the federal
government was now fully committed to extending slavery as far and as wide as it might want.
The Dred Scott decision seemed to settle the sectional crisis by making slavery fully national,
but in reality it just exacerbated sectional tensions further. In 1857, Buchanan sent U.S. military
forces to Utah, hoping to subdue Utah’s Mormon communities. This action, however, led to
renewed charges, many of them leveled from within his own party, that the administration was
abusing its powers. Far more important than the Utah invasion, however, was the ongoing
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events in Kansas. It was Kansas that at last proved to many northerners that the sectional crisis
would not go away unless slavery also went away.
The Illinois Senate race in 1858 put the scope of the sectional crisis on full display. Republican
candidate Abraham Lincoln challenged the greatly influential Democrat Stephen Douglas.
Pandering to appeals to white supremacy, Douglas hammered the Republican opposition as a
“Black Republican” party bent on racial equality. The Republicans, including Lincoln, were
thrown on the defensive. Democrats hung on as best they could, but the Republicans won the
House of Representatives and picked up seats in the Senate. Lincoln actually lost his contest
with Stephen Douglas, but in the process firmly established himself as a leading national
Republican. After the 1858 elections, all eyes turned to 1860. Given the Republican Party’s
successes since 1854, it was expected that the 1860 Presidential election might produce the
nation’s first antislavery president.
In the troubled decades since the Missouri Compromise, the nation slowly tore itself apart.
Congressman clubbed each other nearly to death on the floor of the Congress, and by the
middle of the 1850s Americans were already at war on the Kansas and Missouri plains. Across
the country, cities and towns were in various stages of revolt against federal authority. Fighting
spread even further against Indians in the Far West and against Mormons in Utah. The nation’s
militants anticipated a coming breakdown, and worked to exploit it. John Brown, fresh from his
actions in Kansas, moved east and planned more violence. Assembling a team from across the
West, including black radicals from Oberlin, Ohio, and throughout communities in Canada
West, Brown hatched a plan to attack Harper’s Ferry, a federal weapon’s arsenal in Virginia
(now West Virginia). He would use the weapons to lead a slave revolt. Brown approached
Frederick Douglass, though Douglass refused to join.
Brown’s raid embarked on October 16. By October 18, a command under Robert E. Lee had
crushed the revolt. (2) Five black men joined Brown’s cause, including a former slave from
Virginia named Dangerfield Newby who was the first man killed in the raid. Newby fought for
the freedom of all slaves but particularly for the freedom of his wife, Harriet, and their children
who remained enslaved in Prince William County, Virginia about fifty miles from Harper’s Ferry.
Discovered in Newby’s pocket following the raid were letters Harriet had written to him. In one
from August 1859 she told her husband of the dread she felt at the possibility of her master
selling her soon and her fervent desire to be reunited with him soon. (1)
I want you to buy me as soon as possible for if you do not get me somebody else will… it is said
Master is in want of monney [sic] if so, I know not what time he may sell me an then all my
bright hops [sic] of the futer [sic] are blasted for there has ben [sic] one bright hope to cheer
me in all my troubles that is to be with you for if I thought I shoul [sic] never see you this earth
would have no charms for me… (qtd. in Williams 51) (1)
Nine other of Brown’s raiders were killed, including his own sons, were killed, but Brown
himself lived and was imprisoned. Brown prophesied while in prison that the nation’s crimes
would only be purged with blood. He went to the gallows in December 1859. Northerners made
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a stunning display of sympathy on the day of his execution. Southerners took their reactions to
mean that the coming 1860 election would be, in many ways, a referendum on secession and
disunion. (1)
Republicans wanted little to do with Brown and instead tried to portray themselves as
moderates opposed to both abolitionists and proslavery expansionists. In this climate, the
parties opened their contest for the 1860 Presidential election. The Democratic Party fared
poorly as its southern delegates bolted its national convention at Charleston and ran their own
candidate, Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. Hoping to field a candidate who
might nonetheless manage to bridge the broken party’s factions, the Democrats decided to
meet again at Baltimore, and nominated Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
The Republicans, meanwhile, held their boisterous convention in Chicago. The Republican
platform made the party’s antislavery commitments clear, also making wide promises to its
white constituents, particularly westerners, with the promise of new land, transcontinental
railroads, and broad support of public schools. Abraham Lincoln, a candidate few outside of
Illinois truly expected to win, nonetheless proved far less polarizing than the other names on
the ballot. Lincoln won the nomination, and with the Democrats in disarray, Republicans knew
their candidate Lincoln had a good chance of winning.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 contest on November 6, gaining just 40% of the popular vote
and not a single southern vote in the Electoral College. Within days, southern states were
organizing secession conventions. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky proposed a series of
compromises, but a clear pro-southern bias meant they had little chance of gaining Republican
acceptance. Crittenden’s plan promised renewed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and
offered a plan to keep slavery in the nation’s capital. Republicans by late 1860 knew that the
voters who had just placed them in power did not want them to cave on these points, and
southern states proceed with their plans to leave the Union. On December 20, South Carolina
voted to secede, and issued its “Declaration of the Immediate Causes.” The Declaration
highlighted failure of the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act over competing
personal liberty laws in northern states. After the war many southerners claimed that secession
was primarily motivated by a concern to preserve states’ rights, but the primary complaint of
the very first ordinance of secession, listed the federal government’s failure to exert its
authority over the northern states.
The year 1861, then, saw the culmination of the secession crisis. Before he left for Washington,
Lincoln told those who had gathered in Springfield to wish him well and that he faced a “task
greater than Washington’s” in the years to come. Southerners were also learning the challenges
of forming a new nation. The seceded states grappled with internal divisions right away, as
states with slaveholders sometimes did not support the newly seceded states. In January, for
example, Delaware rejected secession. But states in the lower south adopted a different course.
The State of Mississippi seceded. Later in the month, the states of Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
and Louisiana also all left the Union. By early February, Texas had also joined the newly seceded
states. In February, southerners drafted a constitution protecting slavery and named a
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westerner, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, as their President. When Abraham Lincoln acted upon
his constitutional mandate as Commander in Chief following his inauguration on March 4,
rebels calling themselves members of the Confederate States of America opened fire on Fort
Sumter in South Carolina. Within days, Abraham Lincoln would demand 75,000 volunteers from
the North to crush the rebellion, and the American Civil War began. (2)
Conclusion
Slavery had long divided the politics of the United States. In time, these divisions became both
sectional and irreconcilable. The first and most ominous sign of a coming sectional storm
occurred over debates surrounding the admission of the State of Missouri in 1821. As westward
expansion continued, these fault lines grew even more ominous, particularly as the United
States managed to seize even more lands from its war with Mexico. The country seemed to
teeter ever closer to a full-throated endorsement of slavery. But an antislavery coalition arose
in the middle 1850s calling itself the Republican Party. Eager to cordon off slavery and confine it
to where it already existed, the Republicans won the presidential election of 1860 and threw
the nation on the path to war.
Throughout this period, the mainstream of the antislavery movement remained committed to a
peaceful resolution of the slavery issue through efforts understood to foster the “ultimate
extinction” of slavery in due time. But as the secession crisis revealed, the South could not
tolerate a federal government working against the interests of slavery’s expansion and decided
to take a gamble on war with the United States. Secession, in the end, raised the possibility of
emancipation through war, a possibility most Republicans knew, of course, had always been an
option, but one they nonetheless hoped would never be necessary. By 1861 all bets were off,
and the fate of slavery, and of the nation, depended upon war. (2)
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READING MODULE 9: African Americans
and the Civil War
9.1: Introduction
African Americans and the Civil War
Module Introduction
When the Civil War began in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln’s paramount goal was the
preservation of the union not the abolition of slavery. Though Lincoln detested slavery, viewed
it as a moral sin, and believed it should not expand into new territories in the West, he, like
many of his predecessors, hoped slavery would die a slow, natural death in the future. He
regarded immediate abolition as too radical and unconstitutional. During the early years of the
war, Lincoln also believed that any slaves freed as a consequence of the war, or by the volition
of their masters, should be resettled outside of the United States. Not only did Lincoln not
endorse abolition during the first year of the war, he did not believe freed black people could or
should become citizens of the United States.
During the war, African-Americans—slave and free, in the North and South—forced President
Lincoln to reconsider the meaning of the war. Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass
challenged Lincoln to fight not just the Confederate Army but the lifeblood of the Confederate
states – their slave system. At the same time, slaves ran away from their masters into Union
Army camps forcing the United States to develop policies that led to their emancipation during
the war. Close to 200,000 black men, both former slaves and people born free, fought in allblack Union Army regiments during the war and distinguished themselves on and off the
battlefield. Their bravery and commitment also eventually forced Lincoln to recognize the
necessity of ensuring their freedom when the war ended as well as the freedom of all slaves.
Before his assassination in April 1865, Lincoln had dispensed with his proposal to colonize black
people abroad and began to make provisional plans for Reconstruction that included extending
voting rights to some black men, including Union Army veterans. African-Americans played a
crucial role in shifting the meaning of the Civil War. Rather than a war simply about union, their
actions made it into a war about emancipation, freedom, and citizenship. (1)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
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•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture.
The student will be able to describe how African-American, during times of war, have forced
America to live up to its promise of freedom and equality (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical documents to explain why and how African Americans fought to make
the Civil War about freedom and emancipation. (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: African Americans and the Civil War (see below) (1)
9.2: The Election of 1860 and Secession
African Americans and the Civil War
The Election of 1860 and Secession
The 1860 presidential election was chaotic. In April, the Democratic Party convened in
Charleston, South Carolina, the bastion of secessionist thought in the South. The goal was to
nominate a candidate for the party ticket, but the party was deeply divided. Northern
Democrats pulled for Senator Stephen Douglas, a pro–slavery moderate championing popular
sovereignty, while Southern Democrats were intent on endorsing someone other than Douglas.
The parties leaders’ refusal to include a pro–slavery platform resulted in Southern delegates
walking out of the convention, preventing Douglas from gaining the two-thirds majority
required for a nomination. The Democrats ended up with two presidential candidates. A
subsequent convention in Baltimore nominated Douglas, while southerners nominated the
current Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential candidate. The
nation’s oldest party had split over differences in policy toward slavery.
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Initially, the Republicans were hardly unified around a single candidate themselves. Several
leading Republican men vied for their party’s nomination. A consensus emerged at the May
1860 convention that the party’s nominee would need to carry all the free states—for only in
that situation could a Republican nominee potentially win. New York Senator William Seward, a
leading contender, was passed over. Seward’s pro–immigrant position posed a potential
obstacle, particularly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as a relatively
unknown but likable politician, rose from a pool of potential candidates and was selected by
the delegates on the third ballot. The electoral landscape was further complicated through the
emergence of a fourth candidate, Tennessee’s John Bell, heading the Constitutional Union
Party. The Constitutional Unionists, comprised of former Whigs who teamed up with some
southern Democrats, made it their mission to avoid the specter of secession while doing little
else to address the issues tearing the country apart.
A photograph taken in May/June 1864Figure 9-1: African Americans collecting bones by John
Reekie is in the Public Domain .
Abraham Lincoln’s nomination proved a great windfall for the Republican Party. Lincoln carried
all free states with the exception of New Jersey (which he split with Douglas). 81.2% of the
voting electorate came out to vote—at that point the highest ever for a presidential election.
Lincoln received fewer than 40% of the popular vote, but with the field so split, that percentage
yielded 180 electoral votes. Lincoln was trailed by Breckinridge with his 72 electoral votes,
carrying 11 of the 15 slave states, Bell came in third with 39 electoral votes, and Douglas came
in last, only able to garner twelve electoral votes despite carrying almost 30% of the popular
vote. Since the Republican platform prohibited the expansion of slavery in future western
states, all future Confederate states, with the exception of Virginia, excluded Lincoln’s name
from their ballots.
The election of Lincoln and the perceived threat to the institution of slavery proved too much
for the deep Southern states. South Carolina acted almost immediately, calling a convention to
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declare secession. On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina convention voted unanimously
169–0 to dissolve their Union with the United States. The other states across the Deep South
quickly followed suit. Mississippi adopted their own resolution on January 9, 1861, Florida
followed on January 10, Alabama January 11, Georgia on January 19, Louisiana on January 26,
and Texas on February 1. Texas was the only state to put the issue up for a popular vote, but
secession was widely popular throughout the South.
Confederates quickly shed their American identity and adopted a new Confederate nationalism.
Confederate nationalism was based on several ideals, foremost among these being slavery. As
Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated, the Confederacy’s “foundations are
laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery… is his natural and normal condition.”
The election of Lincoln in 1860 demonstrated that the South was politically overwhelmed.
Slavery was omnipresent in the pre-war South, and it served as the most common frame of
reference for unequal power. To a Southern man, there was no fate more terrifying than the
thought of being reduced to the level of a slave. Religion likewise shaped Confederate
nationalism, as southerners believed that the Confederacy was fulfilling God’s will. The
Confederacy even veered from the American constitution by explicitly invoking Christianity in
their founding document. Yet in every case, all rationale for secession could be thoroughly tied
to slavery. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest
material interest of the world”, proclaimed the Mississippi statement of secession. Thus for the
original seven Confederate states (and those who would subsequently join), slavery’s existence
was the essential core of the fledging Confederacy.
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A five dollar and a one-hundred-dollar Confederate States of America interest bearing banknote,
c. 1861 and 1862. The emblems of nationalism on this currency reveal much about the ideology
underpinning the Confederacy: George Washington standing stately in a Roman toga indicates
the belief in the South’s honorable and aristocratic past; John C. Calhoun’s portrait emphasizes
the Confederate argument of the importance of states’ rights; and, most importantly, the image
of African Americans working in fields demonstrates slavery’s position as foundational to the
Confederacy. (2)Figure 9–2: Confederate 5 and 100 Dollar by Confederate States of America is in
the Public Domain .
Not all southerners participated in Confederate nationalism. Unionist southerners, most
common in the upcountry where slavery was weakest, retained their loyalty to the Union.
These southerners joined the Union army and worked to defeat the Confederacy. Black
southerners, most of whom were slaves, overwhelmingly supported the Union, often running
away from plantations and forcing the Union army to reckon with slavery.
The seven seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4th to organize a new
nation. The delegates selected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president and established a
capital in Montgomery, Alabama (it would move to Richmond in May). Whether other states of
the Upper South would join the Confederacy remained uncertain. By the early spring of 1861,
North Carolina and Tennessee had not held secession conventions, while voters in Virginia,
Missouri, and Arkansas initially voted down secession. Despite this temporary boost to the
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Union, it became abundantly clear that these acts of loyalty in the Upper South were highly
conditional and relied on a clear lack of intervention on the part of the Federal government.
This was the precarious political situation facing Abraham Lincoln following his inauguration on
March 4, 1861. (2)
9.3: A War for Union? (1861—1862)
A War for Union? (1861—1862)
In his inaugural address, Lincoln declared secession “legally void.” While he did not intend to
invade Southern states, he would use force to maintain possession of federal property within
seceded states. Attention quickly shifted to the federal installation of Fort Sumter in Charleston,
South Carolina. The fort was in need of supplies, and Lincoln intended to resupply it. South
Carolina called for U.S. soldiers to evacuate the fort. Commanding officer Major Robert
Anderson refused. On April 12, 1861, Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard fired
on the fort. Anderson surrendered on April 13th and the Union troops evacuated. In response
to the attack, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve three months to
suppress the rebellion. The American Civil War had begun.
The assault on Fort Sumter and subsequent call for troops provoked several Upper South states
to join the Confederacy. In total, eleven states renounced their allegiance to the United States.
The new Confederate nation was predicated on the institution of slavery and the promotion of
any and all interests that reinforced that objective. Some southerners couched their defense of
slavery as a preservation of states’ rights. But in order to protect slavery, the Confederate
constitution left even less power to the states than the United States constitution, an irony not
lost on many.
While Lincoln, his cabinet, and the War Department devised strategies to defeat the rebel
insurrection, black Americans quickly forced the issue of slavery as a primary issue in the
debate. As early as 1861, black Americans implored the Lincoln administration to serve in the
army and navy. Lincoln initially waged a conservative, limited war. He believed that the
presence of African American troops would threaten the loyalty of slaveholding border states,
and white volunteers might refuse to serve alongside black men. However, army commanders
could not ignore the growing populations of formerly enslaved people who escaped to freedom
behind Union army lines. These former enslaved people took a proactive stance early in the war
and forced the federal government to act. As the number of refugees ballooned, Lincoln and
Congress found it harder to avoid the issue.
In May 1861, General Benjamin F. Butler went over his superiors’ heads and began accepting
fugitive slaves who came to Fortress Monroe in Virginia. In order to avoid the issue of the
slaves’ freedom, Butler reasoned that runaway slaves were “contraband of war,” and he had as
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much a right to seize them as he did to seize enemy horses or cannons. Later that summer
Congress affirmed Butler’s policy in the First Confiscation Act. The act left “contrabands,” as
these runaways were called, in a state of limbo. Once a slave escaped to Union lines, her
master’s claim was nullified. She was not, however, a free citizen of the United States.
Runaways lived in “contraband camps,” where disease and malnutrition were rampant. Women
and men were required to perform the drudgework of war: raising fortifications, cooking meals,
and laying railroad tracks. Still, life as a contraband offered a potential path to freedom, and
thousands of slaves seized the opportunity.
Fugitive slaves posed a dilemma for the Union military. Soldiers were forbidden to interfere
with slavery or assist runaways, but many soldiers found such a policy unchristian. Even those
indifferent to slavery were reluctant to turn away potential laborers or help the enemy by
returning his property. Also, fugitive slaves could provide useful information on the local terrain
and the movements of Confederate troops. Union officers became particularly reluctant to turn
away fugitive slaves when Confederate commanders began forcing slaves to work on
fortifications. Every slave who escaped to Union lines was a loss to the Confederate war
effort. (2)
Runaway slaves fording the Rappahannock River in Virginia and into Union Army lines. Taken in
August 1862.Figure 9–3: Fugitive African Americans fording the Rappahannock by Timothy
O’Sullivan is in the Public Domain .
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The title of this political cartoon is “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine. “Fort” is placed in parentheses,
an allusion to President James Monroe’s famous Monroe Doctrine, which prohibited European
interference and colonialism in the Americas starting in 1823. (1)Figure 9–4: Fort Monroe
doctrine cartoon by Unknown is in the Public Domain .
Despite the growing number of runaway slaves in Union Army camps, the Confederate Army
won decisive battles against the Union during the summer of 1861, most notably at the Battle
of Bull Run in July. The loss at Bull Run ruined Northern morale and destroyed any lingering
hope that the war would be brief, relatively bloodless, and an inevitable Union victory. In
response, Northern abolitionists, black and white, demanded that Republican congressmen,
and the Lincoln Administration, make emancipation a primary war aim. “The result of [Bull Run]
was a fearful blow,” wrote one abolitionist, but “I think it may prove the means of rousing this
stupid country to the extent & difficulty of the work it has to do.” Frederick Douglass argued
that a Confederate war for the defense of slavery must be met with a Union war for its
destruction. (1)
To fight against slaveholders, without fighting against slavery, is but a half-hearted business,
and paralyzes the hands engaged in it … Fire must be met with water…. War for the destruction
of liberty must be met with the war for the destruction of slavery. (McPherson, “Battle Cry”
354) (1)
This decisive moment that prompted the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation would
occur in the fall of 1862 along Antietam creek in Maryland. Emboldened by their success in the
previous spring and summer, Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis planned to win a
decisive victory in Union territory and end the war. On September 17, 1862, McClellan and
Lee’s forces collided at the Battle of Antietam near the town of Sharpsburg. This battle was the
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first major battle of the Civil War to occur on Union soil. It remains the bloodiest single day in
American history with over 20,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in just twelve hours.
Soldiers killed on the battlefield at Antietam on September 17, 1862.Figure 9–5: Confederate
dead by a fence on Hagerstown Road by Alexander Gardner is in the Public Domain .
Despite the Confederate withdrawal and the high death toll, the Battle of Antietam was not a
decisive Union victory. It did, however, result in enough of a victory for Lincoln to issue the
Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in areas under Confederate control. There were
significant exemptions to the Emancipation Proclamation including the border states, and parts
of other states in the Confederacy. A far cry from a universal end to slavery, the Emancipation
Proclamation nevertheless proved vital shifting the war aims from simple union to
Emancipation. Framing it as a war measure, Lincoln and his Cabinet hoped that stripping the
Confederacy of their labor force would not only debilitate the Southern economy, but also
weaken Confederate morale. Furthermore, the Battle of Antietam and the issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation all but ensured that the Confederacy would not be recognized by
European powers. Nevertheless, Confederates continued fighting. Union and Confederate
forces clashed again at Fredericksburg, Virginia in December 1862. This Confederate victory
resulted in staggering Union casualties.(2)
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A steel engraving from 1864.Figure 9–6: Reading the Emancipation Proclamation by H.W.
Herrick & J.W. Watts is in the Public Domain .
9.4: War for Freedom (1863—1865)
War for Freedom (1863—1865)
As United States armies penetrated deeper into the Confederacy, politicians and the Union high
command came to understand the necessity, and benefit, of enlisting black men in the army
and navy. Although a few commanders began forming black units in 1862, such as
Massachusetts abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s First South Carolina Volunteers (the
Civil War’s first black regiment), widespread enlistment did not occur until the Emancipation
Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. “And I further declare and make known,”
Lincoln’s Proclamation read, “that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the
armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and
to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”
The language describing black enlistment indicated Lincoln’s implicit desire to segregate African
American troops from the main campaigning armies of white soldiers. “I believe it is a resource
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which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest. It works doubly, weakening the
enemy and strengthening us,” Lincoln remarked in August 1863 about black soldiering.
Although more than 180,000 black men (ten percent of the Union army) served during the war,
the majority of United States Colored Troops (USCT) remained stationed behind the lines as
garrison forces, often laboring and performing non–combat roles. (2)
When black soldiers did fight on the battlefield they distinguished themselves. Colonel
Higginson, the white commander of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, wrote a report about
their valor and bravery following a skirmish along the South Carolina coast in January 1863 that
was eventually published in Northern newspapers. “Nobody knows anything about these men
who has not seen them in battle,” Higginson wrote. “No officer in this regiment now doubts
that the key to the successful prosecution of the war lies in the unlimited employment of black
troops”
Soon thereafter, Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts received permission from the War
Department to create an all-black regiment. Men enlisted in droves, which required creating
two regiments, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. (McPherson, “Battle Cry” 564–65) The 54th
became one of the most recognized regiment’s in the entire war. A 1989 film, Glory, starring
Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, told a fictionalized version of the 54th’s history and
helped renew the regiment’s renown in the twentieth century.
Figure 9–7: Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln by William Morris Smith has
no known copyright restrictions.
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The courage and commitment of black soldiers did not, however, generate immediate
enthusiasm or acceptance from white Northerners, including civilians and enlisted men.
(McPherson, “Battle Cry” 565)
Black soldiers in the Union army endured rampant discrimination and earned less pay than
white soldiers, while also facing the possibility of being murdered or sold into slavery if
captured. James Henry Gooding, a black corporal in the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteers,
wrote to Abraham Lincoln in September 1863, questioning why he and his fellow volunteers
were paid less than white men. Gooding argued that, because he and his brethren were born in
the United States and selflessly left their private lives and to enter the army, they should be
treated “as American SOLDIERS, not as menial hirelings.” (2) In addition to protesting in letters to
Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and black run newspapers in the North such as
Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder, the soldiers of the 54th highlighted the injustice of unequal
pay by refusing their paychecks while still fighting for their freedom and citizenship on the
battlefield. (1)
African American soldiers defied the inequality of military service and used their positions in
the army to reshape society, North and South. The majority of USCT (United States Colored
Troops) had once been enslaved, and their presence as armed, blue-clad soldiers sent
shockwaves throughout the Confederacy. To their friends and families, African American
soldiers symbolized the embodiment of liberation and the destruction of slavery. To white
southerners, they represented the utter disruption of the Old South’s racial and social
hierarchy. As members of armies of occupation, black soldiers wielded martial authority in
towns and plantations. At the end of the war, as a black soldier marched by a cluster of
Confederate prisoners, he noticed his former master among the group. “Hello, massa,” the
soldier exclaimed, “bottom rail on top dis time!”
The majority of USCT occupied the South by performing garrison duty, other black soldiers
performed admirably on the battlefield, shattering white myths that docile, cowardly black men
would fold in the maelstrom of war. Black troops fought in more than 400 battles and
skirmishes, including Milliken’s Bend and Port Hudson, Louisiana; Fort Wagner, South Carolina;
Nashville; and the final campaigns to capture Richmond, Virginia. Fifteen black soldiers received
the Medal of Honor, the highest honor bestowed for military heroism. Through their
voluntarism, service, battlefield contributions, and even death, black soldiers laid their claims
for citizenship. “Once let a black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.” Frederick
Douglass, the great black abolitionist, proclaimed, “and there is no power on earth which can
deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
Many slaves accompanied their masters in the Confederate army. They served their masters as
“camp servants,” cooking their meals, raising their tents, and carrying their supplies. The
Confederacy also impressed slaves to perform manual labor. There are three important points
to make about these “Confederate” slaves. First, their labor was almost always coerced.
Second, people are complicated and have varying, often contradictory loyalties. A slave could
159
hope in general that the Confederacy would lose but at the same time be concerned for the
safety of his master and the Confederate soldiers he saw on a daily basis.
Finally, white Confederates did not see African Americans as their equals, much less as soldiers.
There was never any doubt that black laborers and camp servants were property. Though
historians disagree on the matter, it is a stretch to claim that not a single African American ever
fired a gun for the Confederacy; a camp servant whose master died in battle might well pick up
his dead master’s gun and continue firing, if for no other reason than to protect himself. But
this was always on an informal basis. The Confederate government did, in an act of
desperation, pass a law in March 1865 allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers, but only a
few dozen African Americans (mostly Richmond hospital workers) had enlisted by the war’s
end. (2)
In 1861, A.M. Chandler enlisted in the “Palo Alto Confederates,” which became part of the 44th
Mississippi Infantry Regiment. His mother, Louisa Gardner Chandler, sent Silas, one of her 36
slaves, with him. On September 20, 1863, the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment was engaged
in the Battle of Chickamauga, where A.M. Chandler was wounded in his leg. A battlefield
surgeon decided to amputate the leg but, according to the Chandler family, Silas accompanied
him home to Mississippi where his leg was saved. His combat service ended as a result of the
wound, but Silas returned to the war in January 1864 when A.M.’s younger brother, Benjamin,
enlisted in the 9th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment (19)Figure 9–8: Sergeant A.M. Chandler and Silas
Chandler (family slave) by Library of Congress is in the Public Domain .
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The Draft Riots
An 1863 drawing that appeared in Harper’s Weekly magazine titled, “Hanging a Negro,
Clarkson Street.”Figure 9–9: New York Draft Riots by Harper’s Weekly is in the Public Domain .
By the end of the first week of July 1863, the North won significant, decisive battles against the
South that seemed to turn the tide of the war. On July 3, after three days of brutal fighting, the
Union Army finally defeated the Confederates led by General Robert E. Lee. The Union victory
thwarted the Confederate invasion into the North and forced Lee and his troops to retreat back
to Virginia. At the same time Union General Ulysses S. Grant finally wrested Vicksburg,
Mississippi from Confederate forces and took control of the Mississippi River, effectively cutting
the Confederacy in two.
Despite these advantages, Northern discontent over the war continued to grow, especially
among portions of the white populace who did not favor fighting a bloody war for
emancipation. This was particularly true in the wake of the Enrollment Act—the first effort at a
draft among the northern populace during the Civil War. The working class citizens of New York
felt especially angered as wealthy New Yorkers paid $300 for substitutes, sparing themselves
from the hardships of war. “A rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight,” became a popular
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refrain. The Emancipation Proclamation convinced many immigrants in northern cities that
freed people would soon take their jobs. This frustration culminated in the New York City Draft
Riots in July 1863. Over the span of four days, the white populace killed some 120 citizens
including the lynching of at least eleven black New Yorkers. Property damage was in the
millions, including the complete destruction of more than fifty properties—most notably that of
the Colored Orphan Asylum. In an ultimate irony, the largest civil disturbance to date in the
United States (aside from the war itself) was only stopped by the deployment of Union soldiers,
some of whom came directly from Gettysburg. (2)
9.5: Black Soldiers and Union War Victories (1864—1865)
Black Soldiers and Union War Victories (1864—1865)
Following the victory at Vicksburg, President Abraham Lincoln wrote to General Ulysses S.
Grant, encouraging him to expand recruit of freed slaves into the Union Army. Lincoln now
recognized that black soldiers were critical to eventual Union victory. He told Grant that they
were “a resource which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest. It works doubly,
weakening the enemy and strengthening us.” Grant agreed. He conveyed his “hearty support”
for “arming the negro” to Lincoln.
This, with emancipation of the negro, is the heavyest [sic] blow yet given the Confederacy…. By
arming the negro we have added a powerful ally.(McPherson, “Tried by War” 202)
In May of 1864 African American soldiers accompanied Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman as he fought to take Atlanta, Georgia from Confederate forces and then began his
march through the heart of Georgia and to the Atlantic coast where he captured Savannah and
eventually Charleston, South Carolina in the winter of 1864 and 1865. Sherman and his troops
burned and destroyed nearly everything in their path and freed thousands of slaves in the
process. Further to the west, a black soldier from a Rhode Island regiment wrote about the fury
he saw in the eyes of the white population of another occupied Southern city, New Orleans,
Louisiana, when they saw black troops. At the same time, he expressed the pride he felt as he
walked the streets of the occupied city:
In the city of New Orleans, we could see signs of smothered hate and prejudice to both our
color and present character as Union soldiers. But, for once in his life, your humble
correspondent walked fearlessly and boldly through the streets of a southern city! And he did
this without being required to take off his cap at every step, or to give all the side–walks to
those lordly princes of the sunny south, the planters’ sons! (McPherson, “Negro’s Civil War”:
213–14; Carson et al. 226)
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Lincoln arriving in the abandoned Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.Figure 9–
10: President Lincoln Riding through Richmond, April 4, Amid the Enthusiastic Cheers of the
Inhabitants by Library of Congress is in the Public Domain .
In early April 1865, the Confederacy was in its death throes. The President of the Confederate
States of America, Jefferson Davis, evacuated Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital on
Sunday, April 2 as Union forces approached. Two days later, President Abraham Lincoln walked
through the streets of the vanquished city. Black slaves celebrated the arrival of the President
and the Union army. Black Union soldiers, many of them former slaves, joined the slaves near a
former slave auction site and jail. While the crowd listened to a black army chaplain preach a
message of universal freedom, they suddenly heard the shouts of imprisoned slaves who were
left behind when the Confederates evacuated. The black soldiers released the men and women
who praised God or “master Abe” as they walked the streets of Richmond as free people.(Davis,
298)(1)
Soon after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at
Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865, black soldiers returned home in jubilation.
In West Chester, Pennsylvania black soldiers rang the courthouse bell. In the New York, they led
a parade. A black journalist from Philadelphia reported that, “The colored population was wild
with enthusiasm. Old men thanked God in a very boisterous manner, and old women shouted
upon the pavement as high as they ever had done at a religious revival.” (Carson et al. 227–28)
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Even before the war came to an official end African Americans envisioned a world without
slavery, one in which they owned their own labor and land and determined their future. In
January 1865, soon after the capture of Savannah, Georgia, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
traveled to the city to talk with General Sherman and local black leaders about how the Union
Army could best support newly freed black families. “The way we can best take care of
ourselves,” they responded to Stanton, “is to have land, and turn in and till it by our labor…. We
want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own.” Sherman and
Stanton agreed. Sherman responded by issuing his now infamous “Special Field Orders, No. 15,”
which set aside the Sea Islands along the Atlantic coast from Charleston south to Jacksonville,
once the heart of the South’s rice cotton growing region, for settlement by newly freed
slaves. (1)
Under the order, each family could be given title to forty acres of land. Eventually, the Union
Army settled some 40,000 free black people on lands once owned by white planters and
slaveholders. The hope and promise offered by Sherman’s order was short lived, however.
Following Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, less than a week after the war’s conclusion,
his Vice President Andrew Johnson, a conservative Democrat from Tennessee, became
president. Johnson eventually revoked Sherman’s order and restored the land rights of former
Confederates by arguing that the lands had never been truly abandoned and legally seized.
Therefore, Sherman’s order, which was merely a war measure, could be overturned during
peacetime. The dream of an independent black yeomanry living on lands where they once
worked as slaves quickly faded. (McPherson, “Battle Cry” 841–42; Freehling 166; Weigley, 410;
Carson et al, 227)
Freedom continued to bring African-Americans mixtures of joy and sorrow as they struggled to
survive in a region devastated and impoverished in the aftermath of the war. They also faced
hostility and resistance from whites who could not imagine or tolerate black freedom or even
the suggestion of equality. “Nobody had his bearings,” according to one former slave from
Florida. Frank Bell, a black man from New Orleans, recalled how whites tried to reinstitute
control and even ignore the legal abolition of slavery. His former master would not free him
and told him, “Nigger, you’s supposed to be free but I’ll pay you a dollar a week and iffen you
runs off I’ll kill you.” (Carson et al. 228)
To ensure the permanent legal end of slavery, Republicans drafted the Thirteenth Amendment
during the war at President Lincoln’s behest. (2)Lincoln’s fervent desire to amend the
Constitution in order to forever end slavery in the United States, something the Emancipation
Proclamation could not do since it was only a war measure, was in many ways a result of the
dedication and courage black soldiers displayed on the battlefield in 1863 and 1864. Lincoln
received frequent pressure from conservative Northern Democrats to negotiate a peace to end
the brutal war without guaranteeing the abolition of slavery. The president refused by pointing
out the sacrifices made by black Union troops. “If they stake their lives for us they must be
prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being
made, must be kept.” If he turned his back on these “black warriors,” he said, he “should be
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damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to
friends & enemies, come what will.” (Lincoln quoted in McPherson, “Battle Cry” 769) (1)
Yet the end of legal slavery did not mean the end of racial injustice. After the war, the
Republican Reconstruction program of guaranteeing black rights succumbed to persistent
racism and southern white violence. Long after 1865, most black southerners continued to
labor on plantations, albeit as nominally free tenants or sharecroppers, while facing public
segregation and voting discrimination. The effects of slavery endured long after
emancipation. (2)
This 1865 colored illustration celebrates the emancipation of slaves with the end of the Civil
War. “Nast envisions a somewhat optimistic picture of the future of free blacks in the United
States.”Figure 9–11: Emancipation by Th. Nast, King & Baird is in the Public Domain .
Conclusion
As battlefields fell silent in 1865, the question of secession had been answered, slavery had
been eradicated, and America was once again territorially united. (2) African-Americans, North
and Slave, slave and free, soldiers and civilians, had effectively forced President Abraham
Lincoln, and the United States, to recognize emancipation and freedom as central to the
military effort and meaning of the Civil War. As Lincoln said in his immortal Gettysburg Address
on November 19, 1863 at the dedication of a Union cemetery there, “We here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth
of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
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from the earth.” (Lincoln, 1863) But the war’s end brought questions about how to secure that
freedom and construct a new bi–racial democracy. (1) Northern and southern soldiers returned
home with broken bodies, broken spirits, and broken minds. Plantation owners had land but
not labor. Recently freed African Americans had their labor but no land. Former slaves faced a
world of possibilities–legal marriage, family reunions, employment, and fresh starts—but also a
racist world of bitterness, violence, and limited opportunity. The war may have been over, but
the battles for the peace were just beginning. (2)
9.6: Primary Sources
Primary Source Document: Slaves—Thirty Years a Slave: From
Bondage to Freedom by Louis Hughes
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Slaves—Selections from the WPA
Interviews of Formerly Enslaved African Americans on Slavery
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Soldiers—Selections from the WPA
Interviews of Formerly Enslaved African Americans on Being a Civil
War Soldier.
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Soldiers—I Hope to Fall With My Face
to the Foe by Lewis Douglas.
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Soldiers—Letters from Spotswood
Rice.
Document Download Link
166
Primary Source Document: Soldiers—Letter to President Lincoln
by Hannah Johnson
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Soldiers—Jacob Stroyer: My
Experience in the Civil War
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Emancipation—Selections from the
WPA Interviews of Formerly Enslaved African Americans on
Emancipation
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Emancipation—Maryland Slave to the
President
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Emancipation—George W. Hatton:
Retaliation in Camp
Document Download Link
Primary Source Document: Emancipation—Black Residents of
Nashville to the Union Convention
Document Download Link
See individual documents for correct attributions.
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READING MODULE 10: Reconstruction
10.1: Introduction
Reconstruction
Module Introduction
After the Civil War, much of the South lay in ruins. “It passes my comprehension to tell what
became of our railroads,” one South Carolinian told a Northern reporter. “We had passably
good roads, on which we could reach almost any part of the State, and the next week they were
all gone—not simply broken up, but gone. Some of the material was burned, I know, but miles
and miles of iron have actually disappeared, gone out of existence.” He might as well have been
talking about the entire antebellum way of life. The future of the South was uncertain. How
would these states be brought back into the Union? Would they be conquered territories or
equal states? How would they rebuild their governments, economies, and social systems? What
rights did freedom confer upon formerly enslaved people?
The answers to many of Reconstruction’s questions hinged upon the concepts of citizenship
and equality. The era witnessed perhaps the most open and widespread discussions of
citizenship since the nation’s founding. It was a moment of revolutionary possibility and violent
backlash. African Americans and Radical Republicans pushed the nation to finally realize the
Declaration of Independence’s promises that “all men were created equal” and had “certain,
unalienable rights.” White Democrats granted African Americans legal freedom but little more.
When black Americans and their radical allies succeeded in securing citizenship for freed
people, a new fight commenced to determine the legal, political, and social implications of
American citizenship. Resistance continued, and Reconstruction eventually collapsed. In the
South, limits on human freedom endured and would stand for nearly a century more. (2)
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
The student will be able to discuss the origins, evolution, and spread of racial slavery.
168
•
The student will be able to describe the creation of a distinct African-American culture and how
that culture became part of the broader American culture. (1)
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
•
•
Analyze the long-term implications of Reconstruction for African Americans.
Judge the legacy of the Reconstruction. (1)
Readings and Resources
Learning Unit: Reconstruction (see below)
10.2: Politics of Reconstruction
Reconstruction
Politics of Reconstruction
169
An 1862 photograph of former slaves from Virginia.Figure 10-1: Cumberland Landing, Va. Group
of ‘contrabands’ at Foller’s house by James F. Gibson is in the Public Domain .
Reconstruction—the effort to restore southern states to the Union and to redefine African
Americans’ place in American society—began before the Civil War ended. President Abraham
Lincoln began planning for the reunification of the United States in the fall of 1863. With a
sense that Union victory was imminent and that he could turn the tide of the war by stoking
Unionist support in the Confederate states, Lincoln issued a proclamation allowing Southerners
to take an oath of allegiance. When just ten percent of a state’s voting population had taken
such an oath, loyal Unionists could then establish governments. These so-called Lincoln
governments sprang up in pockets where Union support existed like Louisiana, Tennessee, and
Arkansas. Unsurprisingly, these were also the places that were exempted from the liberating
effects of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Initially proposed as a war aim, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation committed the United
States to the abolition of slavery. However, the Proclamation freed only slaves in areas of
rebellion and left more than 700,000 in bondage in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and
Missouri as well as Union-occupied areas of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia.
To cement the abolition of slavery, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31,
1865. The amendment and legally abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted.” Section Two of the amendment granted Congress the
“power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” State ratification followed, and by the
end of the year the requisite three-fourths states had approved the amendment, and four
million people were forever free from the slavery that had existed in North America
for 250 years.
170
An 1867 political drawing depicts newly enfranchised black men voting during Reconstruction.
Figure 10-2: The First Vote by Alfred R. Waud is in the Public Domain
Lincoln’s policy was lenient, conservative, and short-lived. Reconstruction changed when John
Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, during a performance of “Our American Cousin” at
the Ford Theater. Treated rapidly and with all possible care, Lincoln succumbed to his wounds
the following morning, leaving a somber pall over the North and especially among African
Americans.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln propelled Vice President Andrew Johnson into the
executive office in April 1865. Johnson, a states’ rights, strict-constructionist and unapologetic
racist from Tennessee, offered southern states a quick restoration into the Union. His
Reconstruction plan required provisional southern governments to void their ordinances of
secession, repudiate their Confederate debts, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. On all
other matters, the conventions could do what they wanted with no federal interference. He
pardoned all Southerners engaged in the rebellion with the exception of wealthy planters who
possessed more than $20,000 in property. The southern aristocracy would have to appeal to
Johnson for individual pardons. In the meantime, Johnson hoped that a new class of
Southerners would replace the extremely wealthy in leadership positions.
171
Many southern governments enacted legislation that reestablished antebellum power
relationships. South Carolina and Mississippi passed laws known as Black Codes to regulate
black behavior and impose social and economic control. These laws granted some rights to
African Americans, like the right to own property, to marry or to make contracts. But they also
denied fundamental rights. White lawmakers forbade black men from serving on juries or in
state militias, refused to recognize black testimony against white people, apprenticed orphan
children to their former masters, and established severe vagrancy laws. Mississippi’s vagrant
law required all freedmen to carry papers proving they had means of employment. If they had
no proof, they could be arrested and fined. If they could not pay the fine, the sheriff had the
right to hire out his prisoner to anyone who was willing to pay the tax. Similar ambiguous
vagrancy laws throughout the South reasserted control over black labor in what one scholar has
called “slavery by another name.” Black codes effectively criminalized black leisure, limited
their mobility, and locked many into exploitative farming contracts. Attempts to restore the
antebellum economic order largely succeeded.
These laws and outrageous mob violence against black southerners led Republicans to call for a
more dramatic Reconstruction. So when Johnson announced that the southern states had been
restored, congressional Republicans refused to seat delegates from the newly reconstructed
states.
Republicans in Congress responded with a spate of legislation aimed at protecting freedmen
and restructuring political relations in the South. Many Republicans were keen to grant voting
rights for freed men in order to build a new powerful voting bloc. Some Republicans, like United
States Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, believed in racial equality, but the majority were
motivated primarily by the interest of their political party. The only way to protect Republican
interests in the South was to give the vote to the hundreds of thousands of black men.
Republicans in Congress responded to the codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first
federal attempt to constitutionally define all American-born residents (except Native peoples)
as citizens. The law also prohibited any curtailment of citizens’ “fundamental rights.”
The Fourteenth Amendment developed concurrently with the Civil Rights Act to ensure its
constitutionality. The House of Representatives approved the Fourteenth Amendment on June
13, 1866. Section One granted citizenship and repealed the Taney Court’s infamous Dred Scott
(1857) decision. Moreover, it ensured that state laws could not deny due process or
discriminate against particular groups of people. The Fourteenth Amendment signaled the
federal government’s willingness to enforce the Bill of Rights over the authority of the states.
Based on his belief that African Americans did not deserve rights, President Johnson opposed
both the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and vetoed the Civil Rights Act, as he believed
black Americans did not deserve citizenship. With a two-thirds majority gained in the 1866
midterm elections, Republicans overrode the veto, and in 1867, they passed the first of two
Reconstruction Acts, which dissolved state governments and divided the South into five military
districts. Before states could rejoin the Union, they would have to ratify the Fourteenth
172
Amendment, write new constitutions enfranchising African Americans, and abolish black codes.
The Fourteenth Amendment was finally ratified on July 9, 1868.
The first African American Senator and members of the House of Representatives in
Washington, D.C.Figure 10-3: First Colored Senator and Representatives by Currier and Ives is in
the Public Domain .
In the 1868 Presidential election, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant ran on a platform that
proclaimed, “Let Us Have Peace” in which he promised to protect the new status quo. On the
other hand, the Democratic candidate, Horatio Seymour, promised to repeal Reconstruction.
Black Southern voters helped Grant him win most of the former Confederacy.
Reconstruction brought the first moment of mass democratic participation for African
Americans. In 1860, only five states in the North allowed African Americans to vote on equal
terms with whites. Yet after 1867, when Congress ordered Southern states to eliminate racial
discrimination in voting, African Americans began to win elections across the South. In a short
time, the South was transformed from an all-white, pro-slavery, Democratic stronghold to a
collection of Republican-led states with African Americans in positions of power for the first
time in American history.
173
Through the provisions of the Congressional Reconstruction Acts, black men voted in large
numbers and also served as delegates to the state constitutional conventions in 1868. Black
delegates actively participated in revising state constitutions. One of the most significant
accomplishments of these conventions was the establishment of a public school system. While
public schools were virtually nonexistent in the antebellum period, by the end of
Reconstruction, every Southern state had established a public school system. Republican
officials opened state institutions like mental asylums, hospitals, orphanages, and prisons to
white and black residents, though often on a segregated basis. They actively sought industrial
development, northern investment, and internal improvements.
African Americans served at every level of government during Reconstruction. At the federal
level, Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce were chosen as United States Senators from
Mississippi. Fourteen men served in the House of Representatives. At least two hundred
seventy other African American men served in patronage positions as postmasters, customs
officials, assessors, and ambassadors. At the state level, more than 1,000 African American men
held offices in the South. P. B. S. Pinchback served as Louisiana’s Governor for thirty-four days
after the previous governor was suspended during impeachment proceedings and was the only
African American state governor until Virginia elected L. Douglass Wilder in 1989. Almost 800
African American men served as state legislators around the South with African Americans at
one time making up a majority in the South Carolina House of Representatives.
African American office holders came from diverse backgrounds. Many had been born free or
had gained their freedom before the Civil War. Many free African Americans, particularly those
in South Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, were wealthy and well educated, two facts that
distinguished them from much of the white population both before and after the Civil War.
Some like Antione Dubuclet of Louisiana and William Breedlove from Virginia owned slaves
before the Civil War. Others had helped slaves escape or taught them to read like Georgia’s
James D. Porter.
The majority of African American office holders, however, gained their freedom during the war.
Among them were skilled craftsman like Emanuel Fortune, a shoemaker from Florida, minsters
such as James D. Lynch from Mississippi, and teachers like William V. Turner from Alabama.
Moving into political office was a natural continuation of the leadership roles they had held in
their former slave communities.
By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, more than 2,000 African American men had served in
offices ranging from mundane positions such as local Levee Commissioner to United States
Senator. When the end of Reconstruction returned white Democrats to power in the South, all
but a few African American office holders lost their positions. After Reconstruction, African
Americans did not enter the political arena again in large numbers until well into the twentieth
century. (2)
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The Meaning of Black Freedom
An 1862 photograph showing a family of former slaves on a South Carolina plantation.Figure
10-4: Family of African American slaves on Smith’s Plantation Beaufort South Carolina by
Timothy O’Sullivan is in thePublic Domain .
175
In an 1866 sketch, black women learning a trade (sewing) in a school run by the Freedmen’s
Bureau in Richmond, Virginia during Reconstruction.Figure 10-5: Glimpses at the Freedmen by
Jas. E. Taylor is in the Public Domain .
176
A photograph from the late nineteenth century of African-American church members in Georgia
standing in front of their church. Figure 10-6: African Americans standing outside of a church by
unknown photographer and prepared by W. E. B. DuBois is in thePublic Domain .
Land was one of the major desires of the freed people. Frustrated by responsibility for the
growing numbers of freed people following his troops, General William T. Sherman issued
Special Field Order No. 15 in which land in Georgia and South Carolina was to be set aside as a
homestead for the freedpeople. Sherman lacked the authority to confiscate and distribute land,
so this plan never fully took effect. One of the main purposes of the Freedmen’s Bureau,
however, was to redistribute lands to former slaves that had been abandoned and confiscated
by the federal government. Even these land grants were short lived. In 1866, land that exConfederates had left behind was reinstated to them.
Freedpeople’s hopes of land reform were unceremoniously dashed as Freedmen’s Bureau
agents held meetings with the freedmen throughout the South, telling them the promise of
land was not going to be honored and that instead they should plan to go back to work for their
former owners as wage laborers. The policy reversal came as quite a shock. In one instance,
Freedmen’s Bureau Commissioner General Oliver O. Howard went to Edisto Island to inform the
black population there of the policy change. The black commission’s response was that “we
177
were promised Homesteads by the government… You ask us to forgive the land owners of our
island…The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my
mother and my sister… that man I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me,
seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?”
In working to ensure that crops would be harvested, agents sometimes coerced former slaves
into signing contracts with their former masters. However, the Bureau also instituted courts
where African Americans could seek redress if their employers were abusing them or not
paying them. The last ember of hope for land redistribution was extinguished when Thaddeus
Stevens and Charles Sumner’s proposed land reform bills were tabled in Congress. Radicalism
had its limits, and the Republican Party’s commitment to economic stability eclipsed their
interest in racial justice.
Another aspect of the pursuit of freedom was the reconstitution of families. Many freedpeople
immediately left plantations in search of family members who had been sold away. Newspaper
ads sought information about long lost relatives. People placed these ads until the turn of the
20 thcentury, demonstrating the enduring pursuit of family reunification. Freedpeople sought to
gain control over their own children or other children who had been apprenticed to white
masters either during the war or as a result of the Black Codes. Above all, freedpeople wanted
freedom to control their families.
Many freedpeople rushed to solemnize unions with formal wedding ceremonies. Black people’s
desires to marry fit the government’s goal to make free black men responsible for their own
households and to prevent black women and children from becoming dependent on the
government.
Freedpeople placed a great emphasis on education for their children and themselves. For many,
the ability to finally read the Bible for themselves induced work-weary men and women to
spend all evening or Sunday attending night school or Sunday school classes. It was not
uncommon to find a one-room school with more than 50 students ranging in age from 3 to 80.
As Booker T. Washington famously described the situation, “it was a whole race trying to go to
school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”
Many churches served as schoolhouses and as a result became central to the freedom struggle.
Free and freed black southerners carried well-formed political and organizational skills into
freedom. They developed anti-racist politics and organizational skills through anti-slavery
organizations turned church associations. Liberated from white-controlled churches, black
Americans remade their religious worlds according to their own social and spiritual desires.
One of the more marked transformations that took place after emancipation was the
proliferation of independent black churches and church associations. In the 1930s, nearly 40%
of 663 black churches surveyed had their organizational roots in the post-emancipation era.
Many independent black churches emerged in the rural areas and most of them had never
been affiliated with white churches.
178
Many of these independent churches were quickly organized into regional, state, and even
national associations, often by brigades of northern and midwestern free blacks who went to
the South to help the freedmen. Through associations like the Virginia Baptist State Convention
and the Consolidated American Baptist Missionary Convention, Baptists became the fastest
growing post-emancipation denomination, building on their anti-slavery associational roots and
carrying on the struggle for black political participation.
Tensions between Northerners and Southerners over styles of worship and educational
requirements strained these associations. Southern, rural black churches preferred worship
services with more emphasis on inspired preaching, while northern urban blacks favored more
orderly worship and an educated ministry.
Perhaps the most significant internal transformation in churches had to do with the role of
women—a situation that eventually would lead to the development of independent women’s
conventions in Baptist, Methodist and Pentecostal churches. Women like Nannie Helen
Burroughs and Virginia Broughton, leaders of the Baptist Woman’s Convention, worked to
protect black women from sexual violence from white men. Black representatives repeatedly
articulated this concern in state constitutional conventions early in the Reconstruction era. In
churches, women continued to fight for equal treatment and access to the pulpit as preachers,
even though they were able to vote in church meetings.
Black churches provided centralized leadership and organization in post-emancipation
communities. Many political leaders and officeholders were ministers. Churches were often the
largest building in town and served as community centers. Access to pulpits and growing
congregations, provided a foundation for ministers’ political leadership. Groups like the Union
League, militias and fraternal organizations all used the regalia, ritual and even hymns of
churches to inform and shape their practice.
Black Churches provided space for conflict over gender roles, cultural values, practices, norms,
and political engagement. With the rise of Jim Crow, black churches would enter a new phase
of negotiating relationships within the community and the wider world. (2)
Reconstruction and Women
Reconstruction involved more than the meaning of emancipation. Women also sought to
redefine their roles within the nation and in their local communities. The abolitionist and
women’s rights movements simultaneously converged and began to clash. In the South, both
black and white women struggled to make sense of a world of death and change. In
Reconstruction, leading women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw an
unprecedented opportunity for disenfranchised groups. Women as well as black Americans,
North and South could seize political rights. Stanton formed the Women’s Loyal National
League in 1863, which petitioned Congress for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
The Thirteenth Amendment marked a victory not only for the antislavery cause, but also for the
Loyal League, proving women’s political efficacy and the possibility for radical change. Now, as
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Congress debated the meanings of freedom, equality, and citizenship for former slaves,
women’s rights leaders saw an opening to advance transformations in women’s status, too. On
the tenth of May 1866, just one year after the war, the Eleventh National Women’s Rights
Convention met in New York City to discuss what many agreed was an extraordinary moment,
full of promise for fundamental social change. Elizabeth Cady Stanton presided over the
meeting. Also in attendance were prominent abolitionists with whom Stanton and other
women’s rights leaders had joined forces in the years leading up to the war. Addressing this
crowd of social reformers, Stanton captured the radical spirit of the hour: “now in the
reconstruction,” she declared, “is the opportunity, perhaps for the century, to base our
government on the broad principle of equal rights for all.” Stanton chose her universal
language—“equal rights for all”—with intention, setting an agenda of universal suffrage. Thus,
in 1866, the National Women’s Rights Convention officially merged with the American
Antislavery Society to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). This union marked
the culmination of the longstanding partnership between abolitionist and women’s rights
advocates.
The AERA was split over whether black male suffrage should take precedence over universal
suffrage, given the political climate of the South. Some worried that political support for
freedmen would be undermined by the pursuit of women’s suffrage. For example, AERA
member Frederick Douglass insisted that the ballot was literally a “question of life and death”
for southern black men, but not for women. Some African-American women challenged white
suffragists in other ways. Frances Harper, for example, a free-born black woman living in Ohio,
urged them to consider their own privilege as white and middle class. Universal suffrage, she
argued, would not so clearly address the complex difficulties posed by racial, economic,
and gender inequality.
These divisions came to a head early in 1867, as the AERA organized a campaign in Kansas to
determine the fate of black and woman suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her partner in the
movement, Susan B. Anthony, made the journey to advocate universal suffrage. Yet they soon
realized that their allies were distancing themselves from women’s suffrage in order to advance
black enfranchisement. Disheartened, Stanton and Anthony allied instead with white
supremacists that supported women’s equality. Many fellow activists were dismayed by
Stanton and Anthony’s willingness to appeal to racism to advance their cause.
These tensions finally erupted over conflicting views of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments. Women’s rights leaders vigorously protested the Fourteenth Amendment.
Although it established national citizenship for all persons born or naturalized in the United
States, the amendment also introduced the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.
After the Fifteenth Amendment ignored “sex” as an unlawful barrier to suffrage, an omission
that appalled Stanton, the AERA officially dissolved. Stanton and Anthony formed the National
Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), while those suffragists who supported the Fifteenth
Amendment, regardless of its limitations, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association
(AWSA).
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The NWSA soon rallied around a new strategy: the ‘New Departure’. This new approach
interpreted the Constitution as already guaranteeing women the right to vote. They argued that
by nationalizing citizenship for all persons, and protecting all rights of citizens—including the
right to vote—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed women’s suffrage.
Broadcasting the New Departure, the NWSA encouraged women to register to vote, which
roughly seven hundred did between 1868 and 1872. Susan B. Anthony was one of them and
was arrested but then acquitted in trial. In 1875, the Supreme Court addressed this
constitutional argument: acknowledging women’s citizenship, but arguing that suffrage was not
a right guaranteed to all citizens. This ruling not only defeated the New Departure, but also
coincided with the Court’s broader reactionary interpretation of the Reconstruction
Amendments that significantly limited freedmen’s rights. Following this defeat, many suffragists
like Stanton increasingly replaced the ideal of ‘universal suffrage’ with arguments about the
virtue that white women would bring to the polls. These new arguments often hinged on
racism and declared the necessity of white women voters to keep black men in check.
Advocates for women’s suffrage were largely confined to the North, but southern women were
experiencing social transformations as well. The lines between refined white womanhood and
degraded enslaved black femaleness were no longer so clearly defined. Moreover, during the
war, southern white women had been called upon to do traditional man’s work, chopping
wood and managing businesses. While white southern women decided whether and how to
return to their prior status, African American women embraced new freedoms and a
redefinition of womanhood.
Southern black women sought to redefine their public and private lives. Their efforts to control
their labor met the immediate opposition of southern white women. Gertrude Clanton, a
plantation mistress before the war, disliked cooking and washing dishes, so she hired an African
American woman to do the washing. A misunderstanding quickly developed. The laundress,
nameless in Gertrude’s records, performed her job and returned home. Gertrude believed that
her money had purchased a day’s labor, not just the load of washing, and she became quite
frustrated. Meanwhile, this washerwoman and others like her set wages and hours for
themselves, and in many cases began to take washing into their own homes in order to avoid
the surveillance of white women and the sexual threat posed by white men.
Similar conflicts raged across the South. White Southerners demanded that African American
women work in the plantation home and instituted apprenticeship systems to place African
American children in unpaid labor positions. African American women combated these
attempts by refusing to work at jobs without fair pay or fair conditions and by clinging tightly to
their children.
African American women formed clubs to bury their dead, to celebrate African American
masculinity, and to provide aid to their communities. On May 1, 1865, African Americans in
Charleston created the precursor to the modern Memorial Day by mourning the Union dead
buried hastily on a race track-turned prison. Like their white counterparts, the 300 African
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American women who participated had been members of the local Patriotic Association, which
aided freed people during the war. African American women continued participating in Federal
Decoration Day ceremonies and, later, formed their own club organizations. Racial violence,
whether city riots or rural vigilantes, continued to threaten these vulnerable households.
Nevertheless, the formation and preservation of African American households became a
paramount goal for African American women. (2)
10.3: Racial Violence in Reconstruction
Racial Violence in Reconstruction
Violence shattered the dream of biracial democracy. Still steeped in the violence of slavery,
white Southerners could scarcely imagine black free labor. Congressional investigator, Carl
Schurz, reported that in the summer of 1865, Southerners shared a near unanimous sentiment
that “You cannot make the negro work, without physical compulsion.” Violence had been used
in the antebellum period to enforce slave labor and to define racial difference. In the postemancipation period it was used to stifle black advancement and return to the old order.
Much of life in the antebellum South had been premised on slavery. The social order rested
upon a subjugated underclass, and the labor system required unfree laborers. A notion of white
supremacy and black inferiority undergirded it all. Whites were understood as fit for freedom
and citizenship, blacks for chattel slave labor. The Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court
House and the subsequent adoption by the U.S. Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment
destroyed the institution of American slavery and threw the southern society into disarray. The
foundation of southern society had been shaken, but southern whites used black codes and
racial terrorism to reassert control of former slaves.
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Figure 10-7: Visit of the Ku-Klux by Frank Bellew is in the Public Domain .
Racial violence in the Reconstruction period took three major forms: riots against black political
authority, interpersonal fights, and organized vigilante groups. There were riots in southern
cities several times during Reconstruction. The most notable were the riots in Memphis and
New Orleans in 1866, but other large-scale urban conflicts erupted in places including Laurens,
South Carolina in 1870; Colfax, Louisiana in 1873; another in New Orleans in 1874; Yazoo City,
Mississippi in 1875; and Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876. Southern cities grew rapidly after the
war as migrants from the countryside—particularly freed slaves—flocked to urban centers.
Cities became centers of Republican control. But white conservatives chafed at the influx of
black residents and the establishment of biracial politics. In nearly every conflict, white
conservatives initiated violence in reaction to Republican rallies or conventions or elections in
which black men were to vote. The death tolls of these conflicts remain incalculable, and
victims were overwhelmingly black.
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Figure 10-8: The Union as It Was by Thomas Nast is in the Public Domain .
Even everyday violence between individuals disproportionally targeted African Americans
during Reconstruction. African Americans gained citizenship rights like the ability to serve on
juries as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. But southern
white men were almost never prosecuted for violence against black victims. White men beat or
shot black men with relative impunity, and did so over minor squabbles, labor disputes,
longstanding grudges, and crimes of passion. These incidents sometimes were reported to local
federal authorities like the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau, but more often than not such
violence was unreported and unprosecuted.
The violence committed by organized vigilante groups, sometimes called nightriders or
bushwhackers was more often premeditated. Groups of nightriders operated under cover of
darkness and wore disguises to curtail black political involvement. Nightriders harassed and
killed black candidates and office holders and frightened voters away from the polls. They also
aimed to limit black economic mobility by terrorizing freedpeople who tried to purchase land or
otherwise become too independent from the white masters they used to rely on. They were
terrorists and vigilantes, determined to stop the erosion of the antebellum South, and they
were widespread and numerous, operating throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan emerged in
the late 1860s as the most infamous of these groups.
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee and had spread to nearly every
state of the former Confederacy by 1868. The Klan drew heavily from the antebellum southern
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elite, but Klan groups sometimes overlapped with criminal gangs or former Confederate guerilla
groups. The Klan’s reputation became so potent, and its violence so widespread, that many
groups not formally associated with it were called Ku Kluxers, and to “Ku Klux” meant to
commit vigilante violence. While it is difficult to differentiate Klan actions from those of similar
groups, such as the White Line, Knights of the White Camellia, and the White Brotherhood, the
distinctions hardly matter. All such groups were part of a web of terror that spread throughout
the South during Reconstruction. In Panola County, Mississippi, between August 1870 and
December 1872, twenty-four Klan-style murders occurred. And nearby, in Lafayette County,
Klansmen drowned thirty black Mississippians in a single mass murder. Sometimes the violence
was aimed at “uppity” black men or women who had tried to buy land or dared to be insolent
toward a white southerner. Other times, as with the beating of Republican sheriff and tax
collector Allen Huggins, the Klan targeted white politicians who supported freedpeople’s civil
rights. Numerous, perhaps dozens, of Republican politicians were killed, either while in office or
while campaigning. Thousands of individual citizens, men and women, white and black, had
their homes raided and were whipped, raped, or murdered.
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1872 drawing of the Ku Klux Klan members from Tishamingo County, Mississippi. Figure 109: Mississippi ku klux klan by Unknown is in the Public Domain .
The federal government responded to southern paramilitary tactics by passing the Enforcement
Acts between 1870 and 1871. The acts made it criminal to deprive African Americans of their
civil rights. The acts also deemed violent Klan behavior as acts of rebellion against the United
States and allowed for the use of U.S. troops to protect freedpeople. For a time, the federal
government, its courts, and its troops, sought to put an end to the KKK and related groups. But
the violence continued. By 1876, as southern Democrats reestablished “home rule” and
“redeemed” the South from Republicans, federal opposition to the KKK weakened. National
attention shifted away from the South and the activities of the Klan, but African Americans
remained trapped in a world of white supremacy that restricted their economic, social, and
political rights.
White conservatives would assert that Republicans, in denouncing violence, were “waving a
bloody shirt” for political opportunity. The violence, according to many white conservatives,
was fabricated, or not as bad as it was claimed, or an unavoidable consequence of the
enfranchisement of African Americans. On December 22, 1871, R. Latham of Yorkville, South
Carolina wrote to the New York Tribune , voicing the beliefs of many white Southerners as he
declared that “the same principle that prompted the white men at Boston, disguised as Indians,
to board, during the darkness of night, a vessel with tea, and throw her cargo into the Bay,
clothed some of our people in Ku Klux gowns, and sent them out on missions technically illegal.
Did the Ku Klux do wrong? You are ready to say they did and we will not argue the point with
you… Under the peculiar circumstances what could the people of South Carolina do but resort
to Ku Kluxing?”
Victims and witnesses to the violence told a different story. Sallie Adkins of Warren County,
Georgia, was traveling with her husband, Joseph, a Georgia state senator, when he was
assassinated by Klansmen on May 10, 1869. She wrote President Ulysses S. Grant, asking for
both physical protection and justice. “I am no Statesman,” she disclaimed, “I am only a poor
woman whose husband has been murdered for his devotion to his country. I may have very
foolish ideas of Government, States & Constitutions. But I feel that I have claims upon my
country. The Rebels imprisoned my Husband. Pardoned Rebels murdered him. There is no law
for the punishment of them who do deeds of this sort… I demand that you, President Grant,
keep the pledge you made the nation—make it safe for any man to utter boldly and openly his
devotion to the United States.”
The political and social consequences of the violence were as lasting as the physical and mental
trauma suffered by victims and witnesses. Terrorism worked to end federal involvement in
Reconstruction and helped to usher in a new era of racial repression.
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An early 1900s photograph from Florida.Figure 10-10: A Southern Chain Gang by Detroit
Publishing Co. has no known copyright restrictions.
African Americans actively sought ways to shed the vestiges of slavery. Many discarded the
names their former masters had chosen for them and adopted new names like “Freeman” and
“Lincoln” that affirmed their new identities as free citizens. Others resettled far from their
former plantations, hoping to eventually farm their own land or run their own businesses. By
the end of Reconstruction, the desire for self-definition, economic independence, and racial
pride coalesced in the founding of dozens of black towns across the South. Perhaps the most
well-known of these towns was Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a Delta town established in 1887 by
Isaiah Montgomery and Ben Green, former slaves of Joseph and Jefferson Davis. Residents of
the town took pride in the fact that African Americans owned all of the property in town,
including banks, insurance companies, shops, and the surrounding farms. The town celebrated
African American cultural and economic achievements during their annual festival, Mound
Bayou Days. These tight-knit communities provided African Americans with spaces where they
could live free from the indignities of segregation and the exploitation of sharecropping on
white-owned plantations.
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Freedom also empowered African Americans in the South to rebuild families, make contracts,
hold property and move freely for the first time. Republican’s in the South attempted to
transform the region into a free-labor economy like the North. Yet the transition from slave
labor to free labor was never so clear. Well into the twentieth century, white Southerners used
a combination of legal force and extra-legal violence to maintain systems of bound labor.
Vagrancy laws enabled law enforcement to justify arrest of innocent black men and women,
and the convict-lease system meant that even an arbitrary arrest could result in decades of
forced, uncompensated labor. This new form of slavery continued until World War II.
Re-enslavement was only the most extreme example of an array of economic injustices. In the
later nineteenth-century, poor whites would form mobs and go “white-capping” to scare away
black job-seekers. Lacking the means to buy their own farms, black famers often turned to
sharecropping. Sharecropping often led to cycles of debt that kept families bound to the
land. (2)
10.4: The End of Reconstruction
The End of Reconstruction
Reconstruction concluded when national attention turned away from the integration of former
slaves as equal citizens. White Democrats recaptured southern politics. Between 1868 and
1877, and accelerating after the Depression of 1873, national interest in Reconstruction
dwindled as economic issues moved to the foreground. The biggest threat to Republican power
in the South was violence and intimidation by white conservatives, staved off by the presence
of federal troops in key southern cities. But the United States never committed the manpower
required to restore order, if such a task was even possible. Reconstruction finally ended with
the contested Presidential election of 1876. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was given the
presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. But by 1876, the
vast majority of federal troops had already left.
Republicans and Democrats responded to the economic declines by shifting attention from
Reconstruction to economic recovery. War weary from nearly a decade of bloody military and
political strife, so-called Stalwart Republicans turned from idealism, focusing their efforts on
economics and party politics. They grew to particular influence during Ulysses S. Grant’s first
term (1868-1872). After the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868 and the political alienation of
Charles Sumner by 1870, Stalwart Republicans assumed primacy in Republican Party politics,
putting Reconstruction on the defensive within the very party leading it.
Meanwhile, New Departure Democrats gained strength by distancing themselves from proslavery Democrats and Copperheads. They focused on business, economics, political corruption,
and trade, instead of Reconstruction. In the South, New Departure Democrats were called
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Redeemers, and were initially opposed by Southerners who clung tightly to white supremacy
and the Confederacy. But between 1869 and 1871, their home rule platform, asserting that
good government was run by locals—meaning white Democrats, rather than black or white
Republicans—helped end Reconstruction in three important states: Tennessee, Virginia, and
Georgia.
In September 1873, Jay Cooke and Company declared bankruptcy, resulting in a bank run that
spiraled into a six-year depression. The Depression of 1873 destroyed the nation’s fledgling
labor movement and helped quell northerners’ remaining idealism about Reconstruction. In the
South, many farms were capitalized entirely through loans. After 1873, most sources of credit
vanished, forcing many landowners to default, driving them into an over-saturated labor
market. Wages plummeted, contributing to the growing system of debt peonage in the South
that trapped workers in endless cycles of poverty. The economic turmoil enabled the
Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives after the 1874 elections.
On the eve of the 1876 Presidential election, the nation still reeled from depression. The Grant
administration found itself no longer able to intervene in the South due to growing national
hostility to interference in southern affairs. Scandalous corruption in the Grant Administration
had sapped the national trust. By 1875, Democrats in Mississippi hatched the Mississippi Plan, a
wave of violence designed to suppress black voters. The state’s Republican governor urged
federal involvement, but national Republicans ignored the plea.
Meanwhile, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, won big
without mentioning Reconstruction, focusing instead on avoiding corruption, recovering the
economy, and discouraging alcohol use. His success entered him into the running as a potential
Presidential candidate. The stage was set for an election that would end Reconstruction as a
national issue.
Republicans chose Rutherford B. Hayes as their nominee while Democrats chose Samuel J.
Tilden, who ran on honest politics and home rule in the South. Allegations of voter fraud and
intimidation emerged in the three states where Reconstruction held strong. Florida, Louisiana,
and South Carolina would determine the president. Indeed, those elections were fraught with
violence and fraud because of the impunity with which white conservatives felt they could
operate in detering Republican voters. A special electoral commission voted along party lines—
eight Republicans for, seven Democrats against—in favor of Hayes.
Democrats threatened to boycott Hayes’ inauguration. Rival governments arose claiming to
recognize Tilden as the rightfully elected President. Republicans, fearing another sectional
crisis, reached out to Democrats. In the Compromise of 1877 Democrats conceded the
presidency to Hayes on the promise that all remaining troops would be removed from the
South. In March 1877, Hayes was inaugurated; in April, the remaining troops were ordered out
of the South. The Compromise allowed southern Democrats to return to power, no longer
fearing reprisal from federal troops or northern politicians for their flagrant violence and
intimidation of black voters.
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After 1877, Republicans no longer had the political capital to intervene in the South in cases of
violence and electoral fraud. In certain locations with large populations of African Americans
like South Carolina, freedpeople continued to hold some local offices for several years. Yet, with
its most revolutionary aims thwarted by 1868, and economic depression and political turmoil
taking even its most modest promises off the table by the early 1870s, most of the promises of
Reconstruction were unmet. (2)
Conclusion
The end of Reconstruction, and the federal government’s attempts to create a bi-racial
democracy in the former Confederate states, ushered in a new era of white supremacy. After
taking back control of state legislatures, conservative white Democrats created new state
Constitutions that disfranchised black voters through arbitrary literary tests and burdensome
poll taxes. Southern legislators also passed stringent new segregation or “Jim Crow” laws that
rigidly segregated black and white passengers on trains and street cars and prohibited or
limited African-American access to public places such as libraries, parks, hotels, and
restaurants.
The federal government’s failure to maintain the promises and ideals of Reconstruction meant
that African-Americans would continue to fight for civil rights and equality throughout the late
nineteenth and twentieth century. Only in the 1960s, during what some historians call the
Second Reconstruction, would federal legislation finally strike down voter and segregation laws
passed after the first Reconstruction that denied civil rights and equality under the law to
African-Americans. (1)
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READING MODULE 11: African Americans
and Jim Crow
Overview
In the end, the opportunities for African Americans, the South, and the country as a whole that
were lost because of the resistance to and abandonment of Reconstruction stand as one of the
great tragedies of American history. The subject naturally provokes a series of “what ifs.” What
if plans for land reform had been effectuated during that time? Doing so would have helped the
freedmen to become landowners, a status recognized since the country’s origins as a
foundation for personal independence. But Black independence was exactly what white
southerners didn’t want. They preferred to bring things back as close to slavery as possible,
ensnaring former enslaved people and their progeny in a system of share cropping and debt
peonage that stymied the growth of Black economic wealth for generations.
What if blacks’ voting rights had not been cut off through official shenanigans and outright
violence? What different political course might the South have taken? Support for public
education and public works would likely have been much stronger if Blacks had been active in
the electorate. This, in turn, might have brought more sustained economic development,
infrastructural improvements, and a higher standard of living to all in the region.
What if American historians during the aftermath of Reconstruction had not been white
supremacists? A different type of society, and a different type of education about that society,
would have given young Blacks and whites an opportunity to learn another narrative about
Black people’s place in America.
By Annette Grodon-Reed’s article in The Atlantic, “What if Reconstruction Hadn’t Failed?”
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
The student will be able to discuss the efforts of African Americans to rebuild their lives after
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•
•
Reconstruction's end.
The student will be able to describe the process and comparatively reflect on the different
examples of Jim Crow legislation.
The student will be able to analyze the impact of the white supremacy and racism in the United
States at the close of the century.
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical resources to analyze the late 19th century and the complexity it entails
for African Americans living in the United States during the time period and today.
11.1: Jim Crow and African American Life
After Reconstruction
The “nadir of American race relations” is a phrase that refers to the period in U.S. history from
the end of Reconstruction through the early twentieth century, when racism in the country is
deemed to have been worse than in any other period after the American Civil War. During this
period, African Americans lost many civil rights gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black
violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy
increased.
Conservative, white Democratic governments in the South passed Jim Crow legislation, creating
a system of legal racial segregation in public and private facilities. Blacks were separated in
schools and hospitals, and had to use separate sections in some restaurants and public
transportation systems. They often were barred from certain stores, or forbidden to use
lunchrooms, restrooms, and fitting rooms. Because they could not vote, they could not serve on
juries, which meant they had little if any legal recourse in the system.
Blacks who were economically successful faced reprisals or sanctions. Through violence and
legal restrictions, whites often prevented blacks from working as common laborers, much less
as skilled artisans or in the professions. Under such conditions, even the most ambitious and
talented black people found it extremely difficult to advance.
Jim Crow and African American Life
Just as reformers advocated for business regulations, anti-trust laws, environmental
protections, women’s rights, and urban health campaigns, so too did many push for racial
legislation in the American South. America’s tragic racial history was not erased by the
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Progressive Era. In fact, in all to many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther
from American public life.
In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and
race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of
“negro domination” and of black men violating white women. The region’s culture of racial
violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining
African American voters threatened to the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South,
southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of
progressive electoral and social reforms—disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as
reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would
“purify” the ballot box by restricting black voting and they would prevent racial strife by
legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the
South movement were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in
these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party
leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and
proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of a shared Anglo-Saxon, white supremacy.
As the nation took up the “white man’s burden” to uplift the world’s racially inferior peoples,
the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage non-white populations. The
South had become the nation’s racial vanguard.
The question was how to accomplish disfranchisement. The 15 th Amendment clearly prohibited
states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890 the state of
Mississippi took on this legal challenge. A state newspaper called on politicians to devise “some
legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies.”
The state’s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge
corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. Those hoping to vote in Mississippi
would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding
the state’s African American population from political power. The state first established a poll
tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped the suffrage
from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state’s African Americans. Next,
the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part
of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and
understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion,
the so called “understanding clause” allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain
the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically
abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and
deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the
ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly
color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud.
Between 1895 and 1908 the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions
including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause,
which bestowed the suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This
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ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded would still be eligible, at least
until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an
all-white primary, excluded blacks from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that
mattered across much of the South.
For all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later
Governor of Mississippi, boasted “there is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter.
Mississippi’s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the
nigger from politics; not the ignorant—but the nigger.” These technically colorblind tools did
their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were
registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only
5,320 voted in 1900. Blacks were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some
whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the
same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying in
order to prevent the fraud that had plagued the region’s elections.
At the same time that the South’s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise
the region’s black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial
segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a
modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white
and black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of
personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local
community’s racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence.
The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in
the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining
white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region’s
railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of
southern blacks. Southern cities were becoming a center of black middle class life that was an
implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a
way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water
fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the
deference of blacks into the very geography of public spaces.
As with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the constitution—in this
case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights
Cases (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states.
It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states
exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888. In a case
that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy challenged the
constitutionality of Louisiana’s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in
the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities
were legal provided they were equivalent. In practice this was rarely the case. The court’s
majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. “If
one race be inferior to the other socially,” the court explained, “the Constitution of the United
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States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter,
countered, “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among
citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law” Harlan went on to warn
that the court’s decision would “permit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the
sanction of law.” In their rush to fulfill Harlan’s prophecy, southern whites codified and
enforced the segregation of public spaces.
Segregation was built on a fiction—that there could be a white South socially and culturally
distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of “separate
but equal.” Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly
sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected black citizenship and
relegated black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided
lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world
apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region’s
growing black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between black and
white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that
completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.
And yet, many black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as activists such as Ida
Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois vied for
leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated
strategies for the uplifting of black Americans.
Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected
to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an
insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into
Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would
educate many black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute. Located in Alabama, Washington
envisioned Tuskegee’s contribution to black life to come through industrial education and
vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans too accomplish
economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment,
even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into
Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as
Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.
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Figure 11-1. The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their
desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, “WASHINGTON
BOOKER T,” between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress.
As a leading spokesperson for black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly
after Frederick Douglass’s exit from the historical stage in early 1895, Washington’s famous
“Atlanta Compromise” speech from that same year encouraged black Americans to “cast your
bucket down” to improve life’s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year
before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized segregation under the
“separate but equal” doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, “In all things that are
purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to
mutual progress.” Both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to
America’s unjust racial hierarchy, Washington’s public advocacy of a conciliatory posture
towards white supremacy concealed the efforts to which Washington went to assist African
Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee,
Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from
Slavery (1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in black journalism, working to fund
and support black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois’s growing
influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Speaking decades later, W.E.B. DuBois said Washington had, in his 1895 “Compromise” speech,
“implicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . I never thought Washington was a bad
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man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.” Du Bois would directly attack Washington
in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, but at the turn of the century he could never escape
the shadow of his longtime rival. “I admired much about him,” Du Bois admitted, “Washington .
. . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.”
Du Bois’s criticism reveals the politicized context of the black freedom struggle and exposes the
many positions available to black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W.
E. B. Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended.
Raised by a hardworking and independent mother, Du Bois’s New England childhood alerted
him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the
power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk
University. Du Bois’s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide
his life’s work to study what he called the “Negro problem,” the systemic racial and economic
discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the problem of the twentieth
century. After Fisk, Du Bois’s educational path trended back North, and he attended Harvard,
earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated
back to Harvard and in 1895—the same year as Washington’s famous Atlanta address—became
the first black American to receive a Ph.D. there.
Figure 11-2. “W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,” 1919. Library of Congress.
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Du Bois became one of America’s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by
producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois’s work as
an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in
American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political
conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not
only his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia, but also
in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and black life
in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) and Darkwater (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis
with engaging literary drama to validate black personhood and attack the inhumanity of white
supremacy, particularly in the lead up to and during World War I. In addition to publications
and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara
Movement and later with its offspring the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). Du Bois’s main work with the NAACP lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The
Crisis, one of America’s leading black publications. DuBois attacked Washington and urged black
Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under
the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal
challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity
for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.
“We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is
submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults… Any discrimination based simply
on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or
prejudice … discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth,
color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to
be thoroughly ashamed … Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.”
—W.E.B. DuBois
W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a
notable historical legacy. Reared in different settings, early life experiences and even personal
temperaments oriented both leader’s lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois’s
confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social
science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for
longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date.
Although Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T.
Washington” in Souls of Black Folk, four years later in 1907 they shared the same lectern at
Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American
South. As much as the philosophies of Du Bois and Washington diverged when their lives
overlapped, highlighting their respective quests for racial and economic justice demonstrates
the importance of understanding the multiple strategies used to demand that America live up
to its democratic creed.
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11.2: Jim Crow Laws
Enacted between 1876 and 1965, Jim Crow laws formalized racial segregation in the Southern
States, systematizing a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African
Americans.
The Jim Crow laws, enacted between 1876 and 1965, were a major factor in the AfricanAmerican Great Migration during the early part of the 2oth century. These laws mandated de
jure (i.e. legalized) racial segregation in all public facilities—public schools, public
transportation, and public places such as restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains—in
former Confederate states, with a supposedly “separate-but-equal” status for black Americans.
In reality, this separation led to inferior treatment, financial support, and accommodations than
those provided for white Americans, which systematized a number of economic, educational,
and social disadvantages.
Figure 11-3. “Colored” Drinking Fountain: An African-American man drinking at a “colored”
drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939. Library of
Congress.
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De jure segregation applied mainly in the Southern United States. Northern segregation was
generally de facto (i.e. occurring in practice, rather than being established by formal laws), with
patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job
discrimination—including discriminatory union practices—for decades.
State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the
United States in 1954 in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, while the remaining Jim Crow
laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Figure 11-4. Jim Crow Caricature: Cartoon from 1904 depicting racial segregation in the United
States as “White” and “Jim Crow” rail cars by John McCutcheon has no known copyright
restrictions.
Origins of the Laws
During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal law provided civil-rights protection in
the Southern United States for African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s,
white Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state—sometimes as a result
of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking black people or
preventing them from voting. These Democratic, conservative Redeemer governments
legislated Jim Crow laws, segregating black people from the white population.
Black people were still elected to local office in the 1880s, but the Democrats passed laws to
restrict voter registration and electoral rules, with the result that political participation by most
black people and many poor white people began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, 10 of
the 11 former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively
disfranchised most black people and tens of thousands of poor white people through a
combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping
requirements. Voter turnout throughout the South dropped drastically as a result. Those who
could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices; they
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effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence state legislatures, and
their interests were overlooked.
Jim Crow in the Early 1920s
The separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming more
formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), but it was also becoming increasingly
ingrained tradition. Even in cases where Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to
participate in sports or recreation, for instance, culture did.
As a result, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of African
Americans. Most black Americans still lived in the South, where they had been effectively
disenfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements
banned many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had
loopholes that exempted white Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for
instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before
1866 (a type of “grandfather clause”), was exempted from the literacy requirement—but the
only people who could vote before that year were white male Americans. That is to say, white
Americans were effectively excluded from literacy testing, whereas black Americans were
singled out by the law.
11.3 Exodusters
Introduction
In 1879, an African-American man from Louisiana wrote a letter to the governor of Kansas that
read in part: "I am very anxious to reach your state, not just because of the great race now
made for it but because of the sacredness of her soil washed by the blood of humanitarians for
the cause of black freedom."
This man was not alone. Thousands of African-Americans made their way to Kansas and other
Western states after Reconstruction. The Homestead Act and other liberal land laws offered
blacks (in theory) the opportunity to escape the racism and oppression of the post-war South
and become owners of their own tracts of private farmland. For people who had spent their
lives working the lands of white masters with no freedom or pay, the opportunities offered by
these land laws must have seemed the answer to prayer. Many individuals and families were
indeed willing to leave the only place they had known to move to a place few of them had ever
seen. The large-scale black migration from the South to Kansas came to be known as the "Great
Exodus," and those participating in it were called "exodusters."
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Conditions in the Post-War South
The post-Civil War era should have been a time of jubilation and progress for the AfricanAmericans of the South. Slavery was nothing more than a bad memory; the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Constitution had granted them citizenship; the Fifteenth Amendment
outlawed suffrage discrimination based on race, color, or previous slave status. However, many
Southern whites sought to keep blacks effectively disenfranchised and socially and
economically inferior.
One way whites in power attempted to prevent black equality was through denial of AfricanAmerican participation in the political process. Freed blacks were great supporters of the
Republican Party, which was the party of Lincoln and emancipation. Much of the white South,
however, remained loyal to the Democratic Party and professed hatred for all Republicans,
black or white. When blacks turned out in droves to cast their ballots for Republican
candidates, they were often met at the polls by whites employing creative means to keep the
African-Americans from ever seeing the inside of the voting booth. Many African-Americans
were prevented from casting their ballots and assuming their places as full members of the
society. In addition to maintaining some semblance of the post-war balance of power, these
methods also helped elect white Democrats.
Economic obstacles unique to their condition also prevented many freed blacks from moving
ahead. After having been slaves for most of their lives, they knew only how to be farmers. Even
for those that did possess or acquire alternative skills, the region's lack of alternatives to
farming as well as determined white supremacy blocked the freedmen's advance. As farmers,
they had no money to purchase land of their own, and many were actually forced to go back to
work for the very same whites who had held them in bondage for so many years. The only
difference was that the white landowners now paid them with a share of the crop which, after
deductions for food and other necessities, amounted to a ridiculously low wage for their work.
Though this did not technically constitute a master-slave relationship, it likely seemed hardly
better than one to the African-Americans that had to endure such humiliation and frustration.
Many of the freed blacks had few other skills, however, and often had families of their own to
support. It must have seemed a no-win situation.
The era of Reconstruction in the South lasted from 1865 to 1877. During these years, federal
troops occupied the states of the former Confederacy to ensure compliance with laws and
regulations governing Southern states' re-entry into the Union. Though the protection these
troops provided to African-Americans was often minimal, it had been better than nothing.
President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1877 and pulled the U.S. troops out of
the South. This gave the white ruling class of the South free reign to terrorize and oppress freed
blacks without interference from the U.S. Army or anyone else. Murders, lynchings and other
violent crimes against blacks increased dramatically. It was likely at this point that many
African-Americans began to feel that leaving the South forever was their only real chance to
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begin new lives. Movement to parts further west, such as Kansas, began almost immediately
after the end of Reconstruction.
Black Migration to Kansas Prior to the Great Exodus
What was it about Kansas that particularly attracted African-Americans to that state? At the
time that many blacks began to consider abandoning the South, there was certainly a good deal
of frontier land available elsewhere. Besides slick (and often misleading) promotion of town
sites, what drew freed men and women to Kansas?
First, purely logistical and geographic factors must be considered. Kansas, while certainly never
considered a part of the South (except by pro-slavery Missourians prior to the Civil War), is
much closer to the South than far-off spots like California and Oregon. Getting to Kansas was a
much simpler and less expensive task than getting to such faraway places. For those coming
from many parts of the South, a boat or train ride to St. Louis was the real beginning of their
journey to Kansas. While conditions on these boats and trains were never ideal, riding in any
form was certainly preferable to walking. Many arrived in St. Louis with little idea how they
would get across Missouri and into Kansas. They must have felt, however, that whatever
hardships they faced on that leg of the journey would be less significant than those left behind
in the South.
Another factor—a human one—also played a role in the selection of Kansas as the new
Promised Land. The exploits of anti-slavery activists like John Brown gave Kansas an almost holy
sacredness to many African-Americans. In Kansas, blood had been spilled to keep slavery out.
The memories of John Brown and other abolitionist warriors lived on in the hearts and minds of
freed men and women and made Kansas seem the ideal place to begin anew.
Many of the African-Americans that migrated to Kansas prior to the 1879 exodus came from
Tennessee. There a popular movement sprang seemingly from nowhere in 1874, leading to a
"colored people's convention" in Nashville in May 1875. Many town promoters, including the
notable Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, saw this convention as a way to convince people to migrate
to Kansas. The convention resulted in the designation of a board of commissioners to officially
promote migration to Kansas. This board would later stipulate that would-be migrants needed
at least $1,000 per family to relocate to Kansas; very few interested in doing so had such funds.
Nevertheless, many freed blacks determined to leave Tennessee anyway. Promoters like
Singleton became known as "conductors" and began leading African-American families to
Kansas.
Obviously, black migration to Kansas did not begin (or end) with the exodus of 1879. Thousands
of freed blacks made their ways to Kansas throughout the decade of the 1870s. Since their
migration was more gradual, however, few whites took notice. This was certainly not the case
when the well-publicized exodus took place in 1879.
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The Exodus of 1879
The great 1879 exodus of African-Americans was largely influenced by the outcome of 1878
elections in the state of Louisiana, in which the Democratic Party made major gains by winning
several congressional seats and the governorship. Freed blacks, largely Republican supporters,
were coerced, threatened, assaulted and even murdered to keep them away from the ballot
box. When the final tallies were in and the Democrats claimed almost total victory, many black
Louisianans knew that the time had come for them to abandon their state and join those
already in Kansas. Senator William Windom, a white Republican from Minnesota, introduced a
resolution on January 16, 1879, which actually encouraged black migration out of the South.
The Windom Resolution, together with southern white bigotry and the letters and newspaper
articles of those blacks already in Kansas, led many southern freed men and women to finally
decide to make their ways to Kansas. By early 1879, the "Kansas Fever Exodus" was taking
place.
The 1879 exodus removed approximately 6,000 African-Americans primarily from Louisiana,
Mississippi and Texas. Many had heard rumors of free transportation all the way to Kansas, but
they were sorely disappointed when they discovered that such a luxury did not exist. Very few,
however, were dissuaded by this inconvenience.
Many southern whites had a racist and patronizing attitude about blacks in general and the
exodus in particular. As much as whites hated dealing with freed blacks, they still wanted the
former slaves there as a cheap labor force. Many southern whites became so alarmed by the
exodus that they began to pressure their elected officials to put a stop to it. They eventually
succeeded, and a U.S. Senate committee met for three months in 1880 to investigate the cause
of the exodus. The committee disintegrated into partisan bickering and accomplished little.
Despite this, blacks continued to leave for Kansas. By early March, about 1,500 had already
passed through St. Louis en route to Kansas. Back in Mississippi and Louisiana, thousands more
crowded onto riverbanks to wait for passing steamers to give them passage to St. Louis. One
white man stated that the banks of the Mississippi River were "literally covered with colored
people and their little store of worldly goods [sic] every road leading to the river is filled with
wagons loaded with plunder and families who seem to think that anywhere is better than
here."
Once in St. Louis, many of the exodusters had little idea how to continue their flight with no
resources. Some were so destitute that they could not feed themselves or their families. In
response, St. Louis clergy and business leaders formed committees to assist the freed blacks so
that they could survive and makes their ways to Kansas. Food and funds were collected from
the local community as well as from sympathizers from Iowa to Ohio. Lack of shelter, however,
became the most serious problem, and many blacks were forced to sleep outside near the
waterfronts to which the steamships had delivered them. Care of the exodusters in St. Louis
became a political issue, especially after the Democratic-leaning Missouri Republican began
running anti-black stories and tales of mishandling of donated funds. By the time the last of the
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exodusters departed St. Louis by rail, wagon, boat or on foot, even the most sympathetic
citizens were likely happy to see them go.
Back in the South, more African-Americans continued to plan to depart for Kansas. Black social
leaders and ministers often sang the praises of the exodus, comparing it to Moses and the
Israelites' escape from Egypt. Of course, some black leaders spoke out against the exodus as
well, stating that those leaving for Kansas were jeopardizing the future of those who chose to
stay behind and that democracy should be given more time to work. Among the most notable
of those that tried to dissuade blacks from fleeing the South was Frederick Douglass.
Southern whites continued to oppose the exodus as well. Many went to extreme measures to
try to keep blacks from emigrating, including arrest and imprisonment on false charges and the
old standby of raw, brute force. African-Americans suffered beatings and other forms of
violence at the hands of whites desperate to keep them in the South. Though these typical
forms of intimidation did not really prevent many freed blacks from leaving, the eventual
refusal of steamship captains to pick them up did. One can only guess that at least some of
these sailors had been threatened or paid not to offer blacks passage to St. Louis.
End of the Exodus
The exodus began to subside by the early summer of 1879. Though some African-Americans did
continue to head for Kansas, the massive movement known as the exodus basically ended with
the decade of the 1870s. That ten-year period had witnessed great changes for blacks both in
the South and in Kansas. In 1870, Kansas had hosted a black population of approximately
16,250. Ten years later, in 1880, some 43,110 African-Americans called Kansas home. Between
the earlier gradual migrations and the 1879 exodus, Kansas had gained nearly 27,000 black
residents in ten years. Though a far greater number of blacks remained in the South, this
number still represents 27,000 individual dreams of a better life and 27,000 people that acted
on their desires and their rights to enjoy the freedoms to which they supposedly had been
entitled since the Emancipation Proclamation. Though few found Kansas to be the Promised
Land for which they hoped, they did find it a place that enabled them to live freely and with
much less racial interference than in the South.
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205
READING MODULE 12: Great Migration,
World War I, Great Depression
Overview
Great Migration, World War I, Great Depression
As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever–stronger hold in the South,
many African Americans saw self–improvement, especially through education, as the single
greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered. As America’s exploding urban
population faced shortages of employment and housing, violent hostility towards blacks had
increased around the country; lynching, though illegal, was a widespread practice. A new
permanent civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, was created with the goals of abolition of all forced segregation, the enforcement of
the 14th and 15th Amendments, equal education for blacks and whites, and complete
enfranchisement of both African American women and men.
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the efforts by African Americans to end discrimination and
segregation at the beginning of the 20th century.
The student will be able to describe the process and comparatively reflect on the different
approaches of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington.
The student will be able to analyze the impact of the Great Migration, World War I, and the
Great Depression on the African American community.
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
206
Use primary historical resources to analyze the early 20th century and the complexity it entails
for African Americans living in the United States during the time period and today.
12.1: Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance
New cities were populated with diverse waves of new arrivals, who came to the cities to seek
work in the businesses and factories there. While a small percentage of these newcomers were
white Americans seeking jobs, most were made up of two groups that had not previously been
factors in the urbanization movement: African Americans fleeing the racism of the farms and
former plantations in the South, and southern and eastern European immigrants. These new
immigrants supplanted the previous waves of northern and western European immigrants, who
had tended to move west to purchase land. Unlike their predecessors, the newer immigrants
lacked the funds to strike out to the western lands and instead remained in the urban centers
where they arrived, seeking any work that would keep them alive.
The African American “Great Migration”
Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression, nearly two million
African Americans fled the rural South to seek new opportunities elsewhere. While some
moved west, the vast majority of this Great Migration, as the large exodus of African Americans
leaving the South in the early twentieth century was called, traveled to the Northeast and
Upper Midwest. The following cities were the primary destinations for these African Americans:
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Indianapolis.
These eight cities accounted for over two-thirds of the total population of the African American
migration.
A combination of both “push” and “pull” factors played a role in this movement. Despite the
end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments
to the U.S. Constitution (ensuring freedom, the right to vote regardless of race, and equal
protection under the law, respectively), African Americans were still subjected to intense racial
hatred. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War led to increased
death threats, violence, and a wave of lynchings. Even after the formal dismantling of the Klan
in the late 1870s, racially motivated violence continued. According to researchers at the
Tuskegee Institute, there were thirty-five hundred racially motivated lynchings and other
murders committed in the South between 1865 and 1900. For African Americans fleeing this
culture of violence, northern and midwestern cities offered an opportunity to escape the
dangers of the South.
In addition to this “push” out of the South, African Americans were also “pulled” to the cities by
factors that attracted them, including job opportunities, where they could earn a wage rather
than be tied to a landlord, and the chance to vote (for men, at least), supposedly free from the
207
threat of violence. Although many lacked the funds to move themselves north, factory owners
and other businesses that sought cheap labor assisted the migration. Often, the men moved
first then sent for their families once they were ensconced in their new city life. Racism and a
lack of formal education relegated these African American workers to many of the lower-paying
unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. More than 80 percent of African American men worked
menial jobs in steel mills, mines, construction, and meat packing. In the railroad industry, they
were often employed as porters or servants. In other businesses, they worked as janitors,
waiters, or cooks. African American women, who faced discrimination due to both their race
and gender, found a few job opportunities in the garment industry or laundries, but were more
often employed as maids and domestic servants. Regardless of the status of their jobs,
however, African Americans earned higher wages in the North than they did for the same
occupations in the South, and typically found housing to be more available.
Figure 12-1. African American men who moved north as part of the Great Migration were often
consigned to menial employment, such as working in construction or as porters on the railways
(a), such as in the celebrated Pullman dining and sleeping cars (b). Library of Congress.
However, such economic gains were offset by the higher cost of living in the North, especially in
terms of rent, food costs, and other essentials. As a result, African Americans often found
themselves living in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions, much like the tenement slums in
which European immigrants lived in the cities. For newly arrived African Americans, even those
who sought out the cities for the opportunities they provided, life in these urban centers was
exceedingly difficult. They quickly learned that racial discrimination did not end at the Mason208
Dixon Line, but continued to flourish in the North as well as the South. European immigrants,
also seeking a better life in the cities of the United States, resented the arrival of the African
Americans, whom they feared would compete for the same jobs or offer to work at lower
wages. Landlords frequently discriminated against them; their rapid influx into the cities
created severe housing shortages and even more overcrowded tenements. Homeowners in
traditionally white neighborhoods later entered into covenants in which they agreed not to sell
to African American buyers; they also often fled neighborhoods into which African Americans
had gained successful entry. In addition, some bankers practiced mortgage discrimination, later
known as “redlining,” in order to deny home loans to qualified buyers. Such pervasive
discrimination led to a concentration of African Americans in some of the worst slum areas of
most major metropolitan cities, a problem that remained ongoing throughout most of the
twentieth century.
So why move to the North, given that the economic challenges they faced were similar to those
that African Americans encountered in the South? The answer lies in noneconomic gains.
Greater educational opportunities and more expansive personal freedoms mattered greatly to
the African Americans who made the trek northward during the Great Migration. State
legislatures and local school districts allocated more funds for the education of both blacks and
whites in the North, and also enforced compulsory school attendance laws more rigorously.
Similarly, unlike the South where a simple gesture (or lack of a deferential one) could result in
physical harm to the African American who committed it, life in larger, crowded northern urban
centers permitted a degree of anonymity—and with it, personal freedom—that enabled African
Americans to move, work, and speak without deferring to every white person with whom they
crossed paths. Psychologically, these gains more than offset the continued economic challenges
that black migrants faced.
The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s) was an African-American cultural movement known for
its proliferation in art, music, and literature.
Overview
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in the United States that spanned the 1920s
and 1930s. While the zenith of the movement occurred between 1924 and 1929, its ideas have
lived on much longer. At the time, it was known as the New Negro Movement, named after the
1925 anthology by Alain Locke.
This cultural and political renaissance produced novels, plays, murals, poems, music, dance, and
other artwork that represented the flowering of a distinctive African-American expression.
Along with the artists, political leaders such as Marcus Garvey founded potent philosophies of
self-determination and unity among black communities in the United States, the Caribbean, and
Africa.
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At the same time, activists like Hubert Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance,
arguing that the term was largely a white invention that overlooked the continuous stream of
creativity that had emerged from the African-American community since 1850.
Harlem’s Background
The district of Harlem had originally developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for
the white middle and upper classes. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the
late 19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by whites, who moved further
north.
Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s, during the Great
Migration in which many sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized
racism in the South. Others of African descent came from racially stratified communities in the
Caribbean, seeking a better life in the U.S. By 1930, 90,000 new arrivals joined the AfricanAmericans already living there, creating a community of nearly 200,000.
Despite the increasing popularity of black culture, virulent white racism continued to affect
African-American communities. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the
U.S. during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs, housing, and
social territories.
Characteristics and Themes
What characterized the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride and the developing idea
of a new black identity, that through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could
challenge the pervading racism and promote progressive politics.
There was no uniting form characterizing the art that emerged, however. It encompassed a
wide variety of styles, including Pan-African perspectives; high culture and low culture;
traditional music to blues and jazz; traditional and experimental forms in literature, such as
modernism; and the new form of jazz poetry.
Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of
slavery, black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas of performing and
writing for elite white audiences, and how to convey the experience of modern black life in the
urban North.
New authors attracted a great amount of national attention, and the Harlem Renaissance led to
more opportunities for blacks to be published by mainstream houses. Some authors who
became nationally known were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston,
James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Eric D. Walrond, and Langston Hughes.
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Figure 12-2. Langston Hughes: Langston Hughes was one of the most well-known writers to
emerge from the Harlem Renaissance. Library of Congress.
A new way of playing the piano called Harlem Stride was also created during the Renaissance,
and jazz musicians like Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Willie “The Lion”
Smith are considered to have laid the foundation for future musicians of their genre.
Visual artists of the time included Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Leslie Bolling, Aaron Douglas,
Jacob Lawrence, and Archibold Motley.
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Figure 12-3. Black Belt (original painting in color) by Archibald Motley is most famous for his
colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s and is
considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance. Wikimedia.
12.2: The Nadir of Race Relations
The nadir of race relations in the United States was an ideological era of nationwide hostility
directed from white Americans against African Americans. Racism was so pervasive and, in
many cases, so violent, that many African Americans realized they could not influence racists to
change their views. Many came to believe that only white people had the power to destroy
white supremacy and the racist economic, political, cultural, and social networks that
supported it.
Many white Americans around the nation and in the U.S. territories overseas supported legal
and customary rules of segregation known colloquially as “Jim Crow,” especially in the Midwest
and the South. Racism was so prevalent that even American presidents embraced
segregationist attitudes and polices in the government and the military, while black Americans
turned toward civil rights and Afrocentric movements led by W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus
Garvey.
The “Nadir of Race Relations”
Historians still debate the exact point in time at which the so-called nadir took place, but a
commonly cited period spans the late 1880s to just after World War I, when lynchings—extra212
judicial killings of black people—were common. During this period, the popular and academic
understandings of slavery in the United States, the Civil War, and Reconstruction supported a
Confederate, pro-slavery point of view. This perspective argued that African-American demands
for justice were ill-informed and illegitimate, since the competition between black people and
white people over resources and power was a zero-sum game.
The Great Migration and Social Tensions
Extending from around 1915 through the 1930s, many black people living in the South moved
to Northern cities, seeking better living conditions such as more work and an escape from the
common vigilante practice of lynching, the extra-judicial killing of black people, commonly by
hanging.
In what became known as the Great Migration, more than 1.5 million black people left the
South, and, while they faced difficulties, their chances overall were better in the North. They
had to adapt to significant cultural change, as most went from rural areas to major industrial
cities. In the South, white people worried about the loss of their labor force and so frequently
tried to block the black migration.
Even in the North, there was still segregation; black people had to compete for jobs and
housing in cities that also drew millions of Eastern- and Southern-European immigrants. African
Americans commonly experienced racism in the context of territorialism, often from ethnic Irish
people defending their power bases. Blackface performances—in which white people donned
costumes and extensive makeup to appear black and portrayed African Americans as ignorant
clowns—were still just as popular in the North as in the South.
213
Figure 12-4. Segregation in Ohio: A segregationist sign at a restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, in
1938. Jim Crow laws established “separate-but-equal” facilities is in the Public Domain.
In some regions, black people could not serve on juries. The Supreme Court reflected
conservative tendencies and did not overrule the Southern constitutional changes that
disfranchised African Americans. Despite being made up almost entirely of Northerners, in the
1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled that “separate-but-equal” facilities for black
people were in fact constitutional.
The years during and after World War I saw profound social tensions in the United States, not
only because of the effects of the Great Migration and European immigration but also due to
demobilization and the competition for jobs with returning veterans. Mass attacks on black
people, sparked by strikes and economic competition, occurred in Houston, Philadelphia, and in
East St. Louis in 1917. In 1919, there were riots in several major cities, resulting in the so-called
Red Summer. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 erupted into mob violence that lasted several
days, leaving 15 white people and 23 black people dead. The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Tulsa,
Oklahoma was even more deadly, with white mobs invading and burning the city’s Greenwood
district.
Figure 12-5. Chicago Race Riot: A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago
Race Riot of 1919. A lack of plans for demobilization after World War I exacerbated racial and
economic tensions in many cities across the U.S is in the Public Domain.
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12.3: Theodore Roosevelt and Race
Theodore Roosevelt’s treatment of the Brownsville Affair, in which 167 African American
soldiers were wrongfully discharged from the Army, caused the black community to turn away
from the Republic president they had once supported.
Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are criticized for their treatment of African
Americans during their terms as U.S. president. For Roosevelt, President from 1901–1909, the
Brownsville Affair in particular aroused criticism of his treatment of African Americans.
Figure 12-6. Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States
(1901–1909). Library of Congress.
Also known as the Brownsville Raid, the Brownsville Affair arose from tensions between black
soldiers and white citizens in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906. When a white bartender was killed
and a police officer wounded by gunshot, townspeople accused members of the 25th Infantry
Regiment, a segregated black unit stationed nearby. Although commanders said the soldiers
had been in the barracks all night, evidence was planted against them. As a result of an Army
Inspector General’s investigation, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of 167
soldiers, costing them their pensions and barring them from other civil-service jobs. The
administration withheld news of the discharge of the soldiers until after the 1906 Congressional
elections so the pro-Republican black vote would not be affected.
Black people and many white people across the United States were outraged at Roosevelt’s
actions. Prior to the Brownsville Affair, the black community had supported the Republican
president. They were loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln, and they also noted that Roosevelt
215
had invited civil rights leader Booker T. Washington to a White House dinner and had spoken
out publicly against lynching. Roosevelt had also appointed numerous African Americans to
federal office, such as Walter L. Cohen, whom he named register of the federal land office.
After the Brownsville Affair, however, black people began to turn against Roosevelt. Leaders of
major black organizations, such as the Constitution League, the National Association of Colored
Women, and the Niagara Movement, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the administration not to
discharge the soldiers. From 1907–1908, the U.S. Senate Military Affairs Committee
investigated the Brownsville Affair and in March 1908 reached the same conclusion as
Roosevelt. A minority report by four Republicans concluded that the evidence was too
inconclusive to support the discharges. In September 1908, civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois
urged black people to register to vote and remember their treatment by the Republican
administration when it was time to cast a ballot for President.
A renewed investigation in the early 1970s exonerated the discharged black troops. The
government pardoned them and restored their records to show honorable discharges but did
not provide retroactive compensation for the time they could have been working.
Woodrow Wilson and Race
Despite promises made to black voters during the election of 1912, Woodrow Wilson gave into
the demands of white Southern Democrats, fired a number of black Republican politicians, and
supported racial segregation.
Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (1901–1909).
Also known as the Brownsville Raid, the Brownsville Affair arose from tensions between black
soldiers and white citizens in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906. When a white bartender was killed
and a police officer wounded by gunshot, townspeople accused members of the 25th Infantry
Regiment, a segregated black unit stationed nearby. Although commanders said the soldiers
had been in the barracks all night, evidence was planted against them. As a result of an Army
Inspector General’s investigation, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of 167
soldiers, costing them their pensions and barring them from other civil-service jobs. The
administration withheld news of the discharge of the soldiers until after the 1906 Congressional
elections so the pro-Republican black vote would not be affected.
Black people and many white people across the United States were outraged at Roosevelt’s
actions. Prior to the Brownsville Affair, the black community had supported the Republican
president. They were loyal to the party of Abraham Lincoln, and they also noted that Roosevelt
had invited civil rights leader Booker T. Washington to a White House dinner and had spoken
out publicly against lynching. Roosevelt had also appointed numerous African Americans to
federal office, such as Walter L. Cohen, whom he named register of the federal land office.
216
After the Brownsville Affair, however, black people began to turn against Roosevelt. Leaders of
major black organizations, such as the Constitution League, the National Association of Colored
Women, and the Niagara Movement, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the administration not to
discharge the soldiers. From 1907–1908, the U.S. Senate Military Affairs Committee
investigated the Brownsville Affair and in March 1908 reached the same conclusion as
Roosevelt. A minority report by four Republicans concluded that the evidence was too
inconclusive to support the discharges. In September 1908, civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois
urged black people to register to vote and remember their treatment by the Republican
administration when it was time to cast a ballot for President.
A renewed investigation in the early 1970s exonerated the discharged black troops. The
government pardoned them and restored their records to show honorable discharges but did
not provide retroactive compensation for the time they could have been working.
Woodrow Wilson and Race
Despite promises made to black voters during the election of 1912, Woodrow Wilson gave into
the demands of white Southern Democrats, fired a number of black Republican politicians, and
supported racial segregation.
Figure 12-7. Wilson on Race: Quotation from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American
People as reproduced in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.
Numerous black people voted for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election based on his
promise to work for them. Yet as the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period,
Wilson did not interfere with the well-established system of Jim Crow and instead acquiesced
217
to the demands of Southern Democrats that their states be allowed to deal with issues of race,
such as voting, without interference from Washington.
Black leaders who supported Wilson were angered when segregationist white Southerners took
control of Congress and Wilson appointed many Southerners to his cabinet; Wilson and his
cabinet members fired a large number of black Republican office holders in political-appointee
positions, though they also appointed a few black Democrats to such posts.
Wilson’s Southern cabinet members pressed for segregated workplaces, even though federal
offices had been integrated since 1863. Wilson ignored complaints when his cabinet officials
established official segregation in many federal government departments, such as the post
office, because of his own firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interests of black
and white Americans alike. New facilities were designed to maintain this segregation, with U.S.
Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo defending the establishment of separate toilets in the
Treasury and Interior Department buildings by saying, “I am not going to argue the justification
of the separate toilets orders, beyond saying that it is difficult to disregard certain feelings and
sentiments of white people in a matter of this sort.”
Wilson and William Trotter
On November 12, 1914, Wilson met with a group led by prominent civil rights leader William
Monroe Trotter to discuss the continuing spread of segregation. In what became an
acrimonious exchange in the Oval Office, Trotter listed examples of federal workplace
segregation in several government buildings run by the Treasury Department, War Department,
Interior Department, and others. Noting the backing he and other black leaders had provided
Wilson in the 1912 election campaign, Trotter said, “Only two years ago you were heralded as
perhaps the second Lincoln, and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are
hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race.” Questioning Wilson’s promises to aid black
Americans with programs that included economic reforms, Trotter said, “Have you a ‘New
Freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens ? God
forbid!”
Wilson countered that he considered workplace segregation a benefit to black people and that
the aim was “not to put the Negro employees at a disadvantage [but] to make arrangements
which would prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro
employees.” Told by Trotter that black people considered workplace segregation to be a
humiliation, Wilson responded, “If you think that you gentlemen, as an organization, and all
other Negro citizens of this country, that you are being humiliated, you will believe it. If you
take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over
the country, why the consequence will be very serious.” Trotter continued with his claims that
Wilson’s position about Jim Crow aiding black people was disingenuous and ended by saying,
“We are sorely disappointed that you take the position that the separation itself is not wrong, is
not injurious, is not rightly offensive to you.” An angered Wilson countered that the civil
libertarian had insulted him, stating, “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came,”
218
before ending the meeting abruptly. In 1914, Wilson told The New York Times, “If the colored
people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.”
Figure 12-8. William Monroe Trotter, 1915: William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) was a
prominent African-American civil rights activist as well as founder and editor of the
independent African-American newspaper the Boston Guardian. Wikimedia. This media file is
in the public domain in the United States.
Despite Wilson’s clear support for separation of the races, hardline segregationists, such as
Georgia Congressman Thomas E. Watson, believed he did not go far enough in restricting black
employment in the federal government.
The segregation that the Wilson administration had introduced into the federal workplace was
maintained by succeeding presidents and not officially renounced until the Truman
administration in the late 1940s.
219
Military Segregation
Woodrow Wilson’s policy of military segregation led to conflict, rioting, and the brutal
sentencing of the all-black Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment.
President Woodrow Wilson also supported segregation of the military, even when the need for
troops during the First World War was so great that a national draft was reinstituted. African
Americans were drafted on the same basis as white people and made up 13% of draftees. By
the end of the war, more than 350,000 African Americans served in AEF units on the Western
Front, earning pay equal to that of white soldiers, although they were assigned to segregated
units commanded by white officers, under a policy approved by Wilson. This kept the great
majority of black people out of combat.
When a delegation of black soldiers protested the government’s discriminatory actions, Wilson
told them “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you
gentlemen.” W.E.B. Du Bois had supported Wilson in the 1916 presidential campaign and in
1918 was offered an Army commission in charge of dealing with race relations—Du Bois
accepted, but he failed his Army physical and did not serve.
Figure 12-9. Segregated Military: Members of the U.S. Army 369th Infantry Regiment, which
won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action in World War I, pictured in 1919. Nicknamed the
“Harlem Hellfighters,” it was the first all-black regiment By an unknown photographer, 1919.
Records of the War Department General and Special. Staffs. (165-WW-127-8).
220
A mutiny by soldiers at Camp Logan near Houston in 1917 was precipitated directly by
segregation. The all-black Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment was transferred from
Columbus, New Mexico, where segregation had not been enforced. In Houston, however, they
were met with segregated street cars and white workers at their camp who demanded
separate water fountains. This led to clashes with local authorities, including an incident in
which police beat a black soldier and set off a nighttime riot by 156 African-American troops
resulting in the shooting deaths of two soldiers, four police officers, and nine civilians. A police
officer and a soldier died later from wounds sustained in the riot, while another soldier died
from injuries he received during his capture the next day. Nineteen of the mutineers were
executed, and 41 received life sentences.
221
12.4: Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey, a prominent Jamaican, led a Back-to-Africa movement that promoted the
return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.
Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur,
and orator who was a staunch proponent of the black nationalism and Pan-Africanism
movements. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African
Communities League (UNIA-ACL), as well as the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa
movement that promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.
Prior to the 20th century, African-American leaders advocated the involvement of the African
diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy, known as
Garveyism, which focused on the complete and unending redemption of the continent of Africa
by people of African ancestry, both at home and abroad.
Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African redemption, Garveyism would eventually
inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement, which proclaims
Garvey a prophet. His intent was for those of African ancestry to “redeem” Africa and for the
European colonial powers to leave. Garvey summarized his essential ideas in the Negro World
editorial “African Fundamentalism,” in which he wrote, “Our union must know no clime,
boundary, or nationality…to let us hold together under all climes in every country….”
222
Figure 12-10. Marcus Garvey: Pan-African movement leader Marcus Garvey, pictured in August
1924. Library of Congress.
In 1910, Garvey left Jamaica and began traveling throughout the Central American region.
Garvey lived in London from 1912 to 1914, where he took classes in law and philosophy at
Birkbeck College, worked for newspapers, and sometimes spoke at Hyde Park’s Speakers’
Corner. Garvey’s philosophy, influenced by Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, and Henry
McNeal Turner, led him to organize the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in
Jamaica in 1914.
After corresponding with Booker T. Washington, Garvey arrived in the U.S. in 1916 to give a
lecture tour. He visited Tuskegee and afterward met a number of black leaders. In May 1916, he
undertook a 38-state speaking tour. In May 1917, Garvey and 13 others formed the first UNIA
223
division outside Jamaica and began advancing the idea of social, political, and economic
freedom for black people.
Garvey next set about developing a program to improve conditions for those of African
ancestry “at home and abroad” under UNIA auspices. August 1918 marked the first publication
of the widely distributed Negro World newspaper. By June 1919, UNIA’s membership had
grown to over 2 million. On June 27, 1919, the Black Star Line of Delaware was incorporated by
the members of UNIA, with Garvey as President. By September, the Black Star Line obtained its
first ship, rechristened as the S.S. Frederick Douglass in September 1919. By August 1920, the
UNIA claimed 4 million members, the International Convention of the UNIA was held, and
Garvey survived an attempt on his life.
Convinced that black people should have a permanent homeland in Africa, Garvey sought to
develop Liberia. The Liberia program, launched in 1920, was intended to establish colleges,
universities, industrial plants, and railroads; however, it was abandoned in the mid-1920s after
strong opposition from European powers with interests in the region.
A movement of black opposition to Garvey that came to be known as the “Garvey Must Go”
Campaign aimed to reveal Garvey as a fraud. Run by a group called the Friends of Negro
Freedom, the campaign pressed the federal government to investigate the Black Star Line. They
alleged violence by Garvey’s associates, including a related to the assassination of former
Garvey deputy J.W.H. Eason in New Orleans in January 1923. The “Garvey Must Go” movement
also revealed that Garvey had met secretly with Ku Klux Klan leader Edward Young Clarke in
June of 1922.
On January 15, 1923, U.S. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty received a petition for a
continued investigation into alleged mail fraud by Garvey that accused him of using the mail to
expand the influence of his movement. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, and
beginning in February 1925 he served nearly three years of a five-year sentence in the Atlanta
Federal Penitentiary. While there he wrote his “First Message to the Negroes of the World from
Atlanta Prison,” in which he proclaimed, “Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for
me all around you, for, with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of
black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you
in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.”
U.S. President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence in 1927, and he was deported to
Jamaica. After further political activism abroad, he died in London on June 10, 1940, at the age
of 52. Schools, highways, and numerous buildings in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the
United States have been named in his honor. There is a bust of Garvey in the Organization of
American States Hall of Heroes in Washington, D.C. Garvey’s admirers have included Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Earl and Louise Little, the parents of black militant activist Malcolm X, who
met each other at a UNIA convention in Montreal.
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12.5: The Depths of the Great Depression
Prior to the Great Depression, African Americans worked primarily in unskilled jobs. After the
stock market crash of 1929, those entry-level, low-paying jobs either disappeared or were filled
by whites in need of employment. According to the Library of Congress, the African-American
unemployment rate in 1932 climbed to approximately 50 percent.
Lasting from 1929 to 1939, the Great Depression was the worst economic downtown in the
industrialized world. While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great
Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. Said to be “last hired, first fired,”
African Americans were the first to see hours and jobs cut, and they experienced the highest
unemployment rate during the 1930s. Since they were already relegated to lower-paying
professions, African Americans had less of a financial cushion to fall back on when the economy
collapsed.
From industrial strongholds to the rural Great Plains, from factory workers to farmers, the
Great Depression affected millions. In cities, as industry slowed, then sometimes stopped
altogether, workers lost jobs and joined breadlines, or sought out other charitable efforts. With
limited government relief efforts, private charities tried to help, but they were unable to match
the pace of demand. In rural areas, farmers suffered still more. In some parts of the country,
prices for crops dropped so precipitously that farmers could not earn enough to pay their
mortgages, losing their farms to foreclosure. In the Great Plains, one of the worst droughts in
history left the land barren and unfit for growing even minimal food to live on.
The country’s most vulnerable populations, such as children, the elderly, and those subject to
discrimination, like African Americans, were the hardest hit. Most white Americans felt entitled
to what few jobs were available, leaving African Americans unable to find work, even in the jobs
once considered their domain. In all, the economic misery was unprecedented in the country’s
history.
Starving to Death
By the end of 1932, the Great Depression had affected some sixty million people, most of
whom wealthier Americans perceived as the “deserving poor.” Yet, at the time, federal efforts
to help those in need were extremely limited, and national charities had neither the capacity
nor the will to elicit the large-scale response required to address the problem. The American
Red Cross did exist, but Chairman John Barton Payne contended that unemployment was not
an “Act of God” but rather an “Act of Man,” and therefore refused to get involved in
widespread direct relief efforts. Clubs like the Elks tried to provide food, as did small groups of
individually organized college students. Religious organizations remained on the front lines,
offering food and shelter. In larger cities, breadlines and soup lines became a common sight. At
one count in 1932, there were as many as eighty-two breadlines in New York City.
225
Despite these efforts, however, people were destitute and ultimately starving. Families would
first run through any savings, if they were lucky enough to have any. Then, the few who had
insurance would cash out their policies. Cash surrender payments of individual insurance
policies tripled in the first three years of the Great Depression, with insurance companies
issuing total payments in excess of $1.2 billion in 1932 alone. When those funds were depleted,
people would borrow from family and friends, and when they could get no more, they would
simply stop paying rent or mortgage payments. When evicted, they would move in with
relatives, whose own situation was likely only a step or two behind. The added burden of
additional people would speed along that family’s demise, and the cycle would continue. This
situation spiraled downward, and did so quickly. Even as late as 1939, over 60 percent of rural
households, and 82 percent of farm families, were classified as “impoverished.” In larger urban
areas, unemployment levels exceeded the national average, with over half a million
unemployed workers in Chicago, and nearly a million in New York City. Breadlines and soup
kitchens were packed, serving as many as eighty-five thousand meals daily in New York City
alone. Over fifty thousand New York citizens were homeless by the end of 1932.
Children, in particular, felt the brunt of poverty. Many in coastal cities would roam the docks in
search of spoiled vegetables to bring home. Elsewhere, children begged at the doors of more
well-off neighbors, hoping for stale bread, table scraps, or raw potato peelings. Said one
childhood survivor of the Great Depression, “You get used to hunger. After the first few days it
doesn’t even hurt; you just get weak.” In 1931 alone, there were at least twenty documented
cases of starvation; in 1934, that number grew to 110. In rural areas where such documentation
was lacking, the number was likely far higher. And while the middle class did not suffer from
starvation, they experienced hunger as well.
By the time Hoover left office in 1933, the poor survived not on relief efforts, but because they
had learned to be poor. A family with little food would stay in bed to save fuel and avoid
burning calories. People began eating parts of animals that had normally been considered
waste. They scavenged for scrap wood to burn in the furnace, and when electricity was turned
off, it was not uncommon to try and tap into a neighbor’s wire. Family members swapped
clothes; sisters might take turns going to church in the one dress they owned. As one girl in a
mountain town told her teacher, who had said to go home and get food, “I can’t. It’s my sister’s
turn to eat.”
For his book on the Great Depression, Hard Times, author Studs Terkel interviewed hundreds
of Americans from across the country. He subsequently selected over seventy interviews to air
on a radio show that was based in Chicago. Visit Studs Terkel: Conversations with
America (Links to an external site.) to listen to those interviews, during which participants
reflect on their personal hardships as well as on national events during the Great Depression.
226
Black and Poor: African Americans and the Great Depression
Most African Americans did not participate in the land boom and stock market speculation that
preceded the crash, but that did not stop the effects of the Great Depression from hitting them
particularly hard. Subject to continuing racial discrimination, blacks nationwide fared even
worse than their hard-hit white counterparts. As the prices for cotton and other agricultural
products plummeted, farm owners paid workers less or simply laid them off. Landlords evicted
sharecroppers, and even those who owned their land outright had to abandon it when there
was no way to earn any income.
In cities, African Americans fared no better. Unemployment was rampant, and many whites felt
that any available jobs belonged to whites first. In some Northern cities, whites would conspire
to have African American workers fired to allow white workers access to their jobs. Even jobs
traditionally held by black workers, such as household servants or janitors, were now going to
whites. By 1932, approximately one-half of all black Americans were unemployed. Racial
violence also began to rise. In the South, lynching became more common again, with twentyeight documented lynchings in 1933, compared to eight in 1932. Since communities were
preoccupied with their own hardships, and organizing civil rights efforts was a long, difficult
process, many resigned themselves to, or even ignored, this culture of racism and violence.
Occasionally, however, an incident was notorious enough to gain national attention.
One such incident was the case of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1931, nine black boys, who had been
riding the rails, were arrested for vagrancy and disorderly conduct after an altercation with
some white travelers on the train. Two young white women, who had been dressed as boys and
traveling with a group of white boys, came forward and said that the black boys had raped
them. The case, which was tried in Scottsboro, Alabama, reignited decades of racial hatred and
illustrated the injustice of the court system. Despite significant evidence that the women had
not been raped at all, along with one of the women subsequently recanting her testimony, the
all-white jury quickly convicted the boys and sentenced all but one of them to death. The
verdict broke through the veil of indifference toward the plight of African Americans, and
protests erupted among newspaper editors, academics, and social reformers in the North. The
Communist Party of the United States offered to handle the case and sought retrial; the NAACP
later joined in this effort. In all, the case was tried three separate times. The series of trials and
retrials, appeals, and overturned convictions shone a spotlight on a system that provided poor
legal counsel and relied on all-white juries. In October 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed
with the Communist Party’s defense attorneys that the defendants had been denied adequate
legal representation at the original trial, and that due process as provided by the Fourteenth
Amendment had been denied as a result of the exclusion of any potential black jurors.
Eventually, most of the accused received lengthy prison terms and subsequent parole, but
avoided the death penalty. The Scottsboro case ultimately laid some of the early groundwork
for the modern American civil rights movement. Alabama granted posthumous pardons to all
defendants in 2013.
227
Figure 12-11. The Scottsboro Boys. The trial and conviction of nine African American boys in
Scottsboro, Alabama, illustrated the numerous injustices of the American court system. Despite
being falsely accused, the boys received lengthy prison terms and were not officially pardoned
by the State of Alabama until 2013.
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at: http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/us-history (Links to an external site.). License: CC BY:
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12.6: Great Depression and the Democratic Party
African Americans formed grassroots organizations, uniting for
economic and political progress
From the Great Depression’s earliest days, African Americans mobilized to protest for greater
economic, social and political rights. In 1929, Chicago Whip editor Joseph Bibb organized
boycotts of city department stores that refused to hire African Americans. The grassroots
protests against racially discriminatory hiring practices worked, resulting in the employment of
2,000 African Americans. The “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycotts and pickets soon
spread to other cities across the North.
228
The decade of the 1930s saw the growth of African American activism that presaged the Civil
Rights Movement. In 1935, Mary McLeod Bethune organized the National Council of Negro
Women, and the following year saw the first meeting of the National Negro Congress, an
umbrella movement of diverse African-American organizations that fought for anti-lynching
legislation, the elimination of the poll tax and the eligibility of agricultural and domestic
workers for Social Security. Young African Americans in 1937 formed the Southern Negro Youth
Congress that registered voters and organized boycotts.
Figure 12-12. File:(Mary McLeod Bethune), "Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and others at the opening
of Midway Hall, one of two residence halls built by the Public Buildings Administration of FWA
for Negro government girls..." This image is in the Public Domain. National Archives and
Records Administration.
The African-American vote help elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, for the
first time switching to the Democratic Party.
For decades prior to the Great Depression, African Americans had traditionally voted for the
Republican Party, which was still seen as the party of emancipation from the days of Abraham
Lincoln. The presidential election of 1932, however, saw a sea-change as African Americans
began to switch their political allegiance to the Democratic Party. “My friends, go turn Lincoln’s
picture to the wall,” Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert Vann implored African Americans in
1932. “The debt has been paid in full.”
229
In an oral interview, historian John Hope Franklin said African Americans were drawn to
Franklin D. Roosevelt after years of inactivity under Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert
Hoover. “He had a purpose, had a message, had a program. And it seemed that was better than
the inertia that preceded things,” he said.
Franklin also said African Americans could identify with Roosevelt’s personal struggles.
“Roosevelt inspired large numbers of blacks, I think in part because he was handicapped
himself. And although was not publicized as much as it might have been, blacks knew that he
was a victim of polio, that he couldn’t walk, and that he had overcome these handicaps.”
Since Roosevelt needed the support of Southern Democrats to pass his New Deal agenda, he
did not advocate for passage of a federal anti-lynching law or embrace efforts to ban the poll
tax that prevented many African Americans from voting. Yet, the economic support received by
African Americans under the New Deal solidified their newfound loyalty to the Democratic
Party. By 1936, more than 70 percent of African Americans voted for Roosevelt, according to
the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
What was the “Black Cabinet” during Roosevelt’s presidency?
Roosevelt appointed far more African Americans to positions within his administration than his
predecessors, and he was the first president to appoint an African American as a federal judge.
According to the Roosevelt Institute, FDR tripled the number of African Americans working in
the federal government.
New Deal officials appointed African Americans as special advisors. Although none actually
filled Cabinet-level positions, these public policy advisors were referred to as the “Black
Cabinet” and the “Black Brain Trust.” Perhaps the best-known member of the Black Cabinet was
its only woman, Bethune, a close friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and founder of BethuneCookman University.
New Deal programs, however, still discriminated against African
Americans.
Although New Deal programs provided African Americans with badly needed economic
assistance, they were administered at a state level where racial segregation was still widely,
and systemically, enforced. The New Deal did little to challenge existing racial discrimination
and Jim Crow laws prevalent during the 1930s.
The Civilian Conservation Corps established racially segregated camps, while the Federal
Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages in African-American neighborhoods. The
Agricultural Adjustment Association gave white landowners money for keeping their fields
fallow, but they were not required to pass any money to African-American sharecroppers and
tenant farmers who farmed the land and were not eligible for Social Security benefits.
230
Figure 12-13. Men and women working a field on the Bayou Bourbeaux Plantation, a Farm
Security Administration cooperative near Natchitoches, Louisiana. Library of Congress.
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231
READING MODULE 13: African Americans
and World War II
Overview
African Americans and World War II
African Americans served bravely and with distinction in every theater of World War II, while
simultaneously struggling for their own civil rights from “the world’s greatest democracy.”
Although the United States Armed Forces were officially segregated until 1948, WWII laid the
foundation for post-war integration of the
military. In 1941 fewer than 4,000 African Americans were serving in the military and only
twelve African Americans had become officers. By 1945, more than 1.2 million African
Americans would be serving in uniform on the Home Front, in Europe, and the Pacific (including
thousands of African American women in the
Women’s auxiliaries).
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the efforts of African American men and women during
World War II.
The student will be able to describe the Double V Campaign
The student will be able to analyze the impact of World War II and the Double V Campaign on
the African American community.
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical resources to analyze World War II and the complexity it entails for
African Americans living in the United States during the time period and today.
232
13.1: Race and World War II
World War II affected nearly every aspect of life in the United States, and America's racial
relationships were not immune. African Americans and many other racial and ethnic groups
were profoundly impacted.
In early 1941, months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, A. Philip Randolph, president
of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black trade union in the nation, made
headlines by threatening President Roosevelt with a march on Washington, D.C. In this “crisis of
democracy,” Randolph said, defense industries refused to hire African Americans and the
armed forces remained segregated. In exchange for Randolph calling off the march, Roosevelt
issued Executive Order 8802, banning racial and religious discrimination in defense industries
and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to monitor defense industry
hiring practices. While the armed forces would remain segregated throughout the war, and the
FEPC had limited influence, the order showed that the federal government could stand against
discrimination. The black workforce in defense industries rose from 3 percent in 1942 to 9
percent in 1945.
More than one million African Americans fought in the war. Most blacks served in segregated,
non-combat units led by white officers. Some gains were made, however. The number of black
officers increased from 5 in 1940 to over 7,000 in 1945. The all-black pilot squadrons, known as
the Tuskegee Airmen, completed more than 1,500 missions, escorted heavy bombers into
Germany, and earned several hundred merits and medals. Many bomber crews specifically
requested the “Red Tail Angels” as escorts. And near the end of the war, the army and navy
began integrating some of its platoons and facilities, before, in 1948, the U.S. government
finally ordered the full integration of its armed forces.
233
Figure 13-1. Tuskegee Airmen - Circa May 1942 to Aug 1943 Location unknown, likely Southern
Italy or North Africa. Wikimedia. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is
in the public domain in the United States.
While black Americans served in the armed forces (though they were segregated), on the home
front they became riveters and welders, rationed food and gasoline, and bought victory bonds.
But many black Americans saw the war as an opportunity not only to serve their country but to
improve it. The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper, spearheaded the “Double V”
campaign. It called on African Americans to fight two wars: the war against Nazism and Fascism
abroad and the war against racial inequality at home. To achieve victory, to achieve “real
democracy,” the Courier encouraged its readers to enlist in the armed forces, volunteer on the
home front, and fight against racial segregation and discrimination.
During the war, membership in the NAACP jumped tenfold, from 50,000 to 500,000. The
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was formed in 1942 and spearheaded the method of
nonviolent direct action to achieve desegregation. Between 1940 and 1950, some 1.5 million
southern blacks, the largest number than any other decade since the beginning of the Great
Migration, also indirectly demonstrated their opposition to racism and violence by migrating
out of the Jim Crow South to the North. But transitions were not easy. Racial tensions erupted
in 1943 in a series of riots in cities such as Mobile, Beaumont, and Harlem. The bloodiest race
riot occurred in Detroit and resulted in the death of 25 blacks and 9 whites. Still, the war ignited
in African Americans an urgency for equality that they would carry with them into the
subsequent years.
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13.2: African Americans in WWII
Despite racism and segregation in the U.S. military, more than two and a half million African
American men registered in the military draft, with more than 1 million serving in the armed
forces during World War II.
Racism in the Military
African Americans first started enlisting in the military on June 1, 1942. More than two and a
half million African American men registered in the military draft, and African American women
234
volunteered their services in the war. During the war, African-American enlistment was at an
all-time high, with more than 1 million serving in the armed forces. However, the U.S. military
was still heavily segregated. The air force and the marines had no African Americans enlisted in
their ranks, and the navy only accepted black Americans as cooks and waiters. The army had
only five African-American officers. In addition, no African-American would receive the Medal
of Honor during the war, and their tasks in the war were largely reserved to noncombat units.
Despite their high enlistment rate in the U.S. Army, most African-American soldiers still served
only as truck drivers and as stevedores (except for some separate tank battalions and army air
forces escort fighters). In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, a major
German offensive campaign launched on the western front (in the region of Wallonia in
Belgium, France, and Luxembourg), General Eisenhower was severely short of replacement
troops for existing military units that were totally white in composition. Consequently, he made
the decision to allow African-American soldiers to pick up weapons and join the white military
units to fight in combat for the first time. More than 2,000 black soldiers had volunteered to go
to the front.
At the start of the Battle of the Bulge, the 333rd Battalion, a combat unit composed entirely of
African-American soldiers led by white officers, was attached to the 106th Infantry Division.
Prior to the German offensive, the 106th division was tasked with holding a 26-mile (41.8
kilometers) long length of the front. The 333rd was badly affected, losing nearly 50 percent of
its soldiers, including its commanding officer. Eleven of its soldiers were cut off from the rest of
the unit and attempted to escape German capture, but were massacred on sight by the Waffen
SS. The remnants of the battalion retreated to Bastogne where they linked up the 101st. The
vestiges of the 333rd were attached to its sister unit the 969th Battalion. By December, the
Germans had surrounded Bastogne, which was defended by the 101st Airborne Division, the all
African-American 969th Artillery Battalion, and Combat Command B of the 10th Armored
Division. Despite low supplies of food and ammunition, and being limited to only 10 artillery
rounds per day, the 333rd fought tenaciously, successfully holding their sector of the front
despite repeated German assaults.
Tuskegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American military aviators in the U.S. Armed
Forces. Officially, they formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of
the U.S. Army Air Forces. The Tuskegee Airmen were subjected to discrimination, both within
and outside the army. All black military pilots who trained in the United States trained at Moton
Field, the Tuskegee Army Air Field, and were educated at Tuskegee University, located near
Tuskegee, Alabama. The name also applies to the navigators, bombardiers, mechanics,
instructors, crew chiefs, nurses, cooks, and other support personnel for the pilots.
Although the 477th Bombardment Group trained with North American B-25 Mitchell bombers,
they never served in combat. The 99th Pursuit Squadron (later, 99th Fighter Squadron) was the
first black flying squadron, and the first to deploy overseas (to North Africa in April 1943, and
235
later to Sicily and Italy). The 332nd Fighter Group was the first black flying group. The group
deployed to Italy in early 1944. In June 1944, the 332nd Fighter Group began flying heavy
bomber escort missions, and in July 1944, the 99th Fighter Squadron was assigned to the 332nd
Fighter Group, which then had four fighter squadrons.
Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., served as commander of the famed Tuskegee Airmen during the War. He
later went on to become the first African-American general in the U.S. Air Force. His father,
Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., had been the first African-American brigadier general in the army
(1940).
The Golden Thirteen
In June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order (8802) that prohibited
racial discrimination in the national defense industry. Responding to pressure from First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Adlai Stevenson, in January 1944, the
navy began an accelerated 2-month officer training course for 16 African-American enlisted
men at Camp Robert Smalls, Recruit Training Center Great Lakes (now known as Great Lakes
Naval Training Station), in Illinois. The class average at graduation was 3.89. Although all 16
members of the class passed the course, only 12 were commissioned in March 1944. Because
navy policy prevented them from being assigned to combatant ships, early black officers wound
up being detailed to run labor gangs ashore.
Port Chicago Disaster
The Port Chicago disaster was a deadly munitions explosion that occurred on July 17, 1944, at
the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California. Munitions detonated while being
loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific theater of operations, killing 320 sailors and
civilians and injuring 390 others. Most of the dead and injured were enlisted African-American
sailors.
A month later, unsafe conditions inspired hundreds of servicemen to refuse to load munitions,
an act known as the “Port Chicago Mutiny.” Fifty men—called the “Port Chicago 50″—were
convicted of mutiny and sentenced to long prison terms. Forty-seven of the fifty were released
in January 1946; the remaining three served additional months in prison.
During and after the trial, questions were raised about the fairness and legality of the courtmartial proceedings. Due to public pressure, the U.S. Navy reconvened the courts-martial board
in 1945; the court affirmed the guilt of the convicted men. Widespread publicity surrounding
the case turned it into a cause célèbre among certain Americans; it and other race-related
navy protests of 1944–1945 led the navy to change its practices and initiate the desegregation
of its forces beginning in February 1946.
236
Figure 13-2. Tuskegee Airmen: The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African-American pilots
in U.S. military history; they flew with distinction during World War II. Portrait of Tuskegee
airman Edward M. Thomas by photographer Toni Frissell, March 1945. Library of Congress.
237
Figure 13-3. African-American soldiers served with distinction in World War II,
despite racism and segregation: 12th AD soldier with German prisoners of war, April
1945. Wikimedia. This work is in the public domain in the United States.
Recognition
The desegregation of all U.S. Armed Forces did not take place until after World War II. In 1947,
A. Philip Randolph, prominent civil rights leader, along with colleague Grant Reynolds, renewed
efforts to end discrimination in the armed services, forming the Committee Against Jim Crow in
Military Service and Training, later renamed the “League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience
Against Military Segregation.” Consequently, Truman’s Order expanded on Executive Order
8802 by establishing equality of treatment and opportunity in the military for people of all
races, religions, or national origins. In July 1948, the Executive Order 9981 abolished racial
discrimination in the armed forces and eventually led to the end of segregation in the services.
It was not until the 1990s that black World War II military men were awarded the Medal of
Honor—the highest military decoration presented by the U.S. government to a member of its
armed forces. A 1993 study commissioned by the U.S. Army investigated racial discrimination in
the awarding of medals. At the time, no Medals of Honor had been awarded to black soldiers
who served in World War II. After an exhaustive review of files, the study recommended that
several black Distinguished Service Cross recipients be upgraded to the Medal of Honor. On
January 13, 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded the Medal to seven African-American World
War II veterans; of these, only Vernon Baker was still alive. The posthumous recipients were
Major Charles L. Thomas; First Lieutenant John R. Fox; Staff Sergeant Ruben Rivers; Staff
Sergeant Edward A. Carter, Jr.; Private First Class Willy F. James, Jr.; and Private George Watson.
238
Figure 13-4. Tuskegee Airmen: Tuskegee Airmen at Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945. Library of
Congress.
239
READING MODULE 14: African Americans
and the Civil Rights Movement
Overview
The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the
1950s and 1960s for blacks to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War
had officially abolished slavery, but it didn’t end discrimination against blacks—they continued
to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century,
African Americans had had more than enough of prejudice and violence against them. They,
along with many whites, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned
two decades.
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the efforts by African Americans to end discrimination and
segregation.
The student will be able to describe the process and comparatively reflect on the different
approaches in the Civil Rights Movement.
The student will be able to analyze the gains and limitations of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957,
1960, and 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical resources to analyze the Civil Rights Movements and the complexity it
entails for African Americans living in the United States during the time period and today.
240
14.1: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights
In the aftermath of World War II, African Americans began to mount organized resistance to
racially discriminatory policies in force throughout much of the United States. In the South, they
used a combination of legal challenges and grassroots activism to begin dismantling the racial
segregation that had stood for nearly a century following the end of Reconstruction.
Community activists and civil rights leaders targeted racially discriminatory housing practices,
segregated transportation, and legal requirements that African Americans and whites be
educated separately. While many of these challenges were successful, life did not necessarily
improve for African Americans. Hostile whites fought these changes in any way they could,
including by resorting to violence.
Early Victories
During World War II, many African Americans had supported the “Double-V Campaign,” which
called on them to defeat foreign enemies while simultaneously fighting against segregation and
discrimination at home. After World War II ended, many returned home to discover that,
despite their sacrifices, the United States was not willing to extend them any greater rights than
they had enjoyed before the war. Particularly rankling was the fact that although African
American veterans were legally entitled to draw benefits under the GI Bill, discriminatory
practices prevented them from doing so. For example, many banks would not give them
mortgages if they wished to buy homes in predominantly African American neighborhoods,
which banks often considered too risky an investment. However, African Americans who
attempted to purchase homes in white neighborhoods often found themselves unable to do so
because of real estate covenants that prevented owners from selling their property to blacks.
Indeed, when a black family purchased a Levittown house in 1957, they were subjected to
harassment and threats of violence.
The postwar era, however, saw African Americans make greater use of the courts to defend
their rights. In 1944, an African American woman, Irene Morgan, was arrested in Virginia for
refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus and sued to have her conviction overturned.
In Morgan v. the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the
conviction should be overturned because it violated the interstate commerce clause of the
Constitution. This victory emboldened some civil rights activists to launch the Journey of
Reconciliation, a bus trip taken by eight African American men and eight white men through the
states of the Upper South to test the South’s enforcement of the Morgan decision.
Other victories followed. In 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court held that
courts could not enforce real estate covenants that restricted the purchase or sale of property
based on race. In 1950, the NAACP brought a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that they
hoped would help to undermine the concept of “separate but equal” as espoused in the 1896
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave legal sanction to segregated school
systems. Sweatt v. Painter was a case brought by Herman Marion Sweatt, who sued the
241
University of Texas for denying him admission to its law school because state law prohibited
integrated education. Texas attempted to form a separate law school for African Americans
only, but in its decision on the case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this solution, holding that
the separate school provided neither equal facilities nor “intangibles,” such as the ability to
form relationships with other future lawyers, that a professional school should provide.
Not all efforts to enact desegregation required the use of the courts, however. On April 15,
1947, Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, playing first base. He was the first
African American to play baseball in the National League, breaking the color barrier. Although
African Americans had their own baseball teams in the Negro Leagues, Robinson opened the
gates for them to play in direct competition with white players in the major leagues. Other
African American athletes also began to challenge the segregation of American sports. At the
1948 Summer Olympics, Alice Coachman, an African American, was the only American woman
to take a gold medal in the games. These changes, while symbolically significant, were mere
cracks in the wall of segregation.
Figure 14-1. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson (a) was active in the civil rights movement. He
served on the NAACP’s board of directors and helped to found an African American-owned
bank. Alice Coachman (b), who competed in track and field at Tuskegee University, was the first
black woman to win an Olympic gold medal.
Desegregation and Integration
Until 1954, racial segregation in education was not only legal but was required in seventeen
states and permissible in several others. Utilizing evidence provided in sociological studies
242
conducted by Kenneth Clark and Gunnar Myrdal, however, Thurgood Marshall, then chief
counsel for the NAACP, successfully argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas before the U.S. Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Marshall
showed that the practice of segregation in public schools made African American students feel
inferior. Even if the facilities provided were equal in nature, the Court noted in its decision, the
very fact that some students were separated from others on the basis of their race made
segregation unconstitutional.
Figure 14-2. This map shows those states in which racial segregation in public education was
required by law before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, four years later,
fewer than 10 percent of southern African American students attended the same schools as
white students.
Thurgood Marshall on Fighting Racism
As a law student in 1933, Thurgood Marshall was recruited by his mentor Charles Hamilton
Houston to assist in gathering information for the defense of a black man in Virginia accused of
killing two white women. His continued close association with Houston led Marshall to
aggressively defend blacks in the court system and to use the courts as the weapon by which
equal rights might be extracted from the U.S. Constitution and a white racist system. Houston
also suggested that it would be important to establish legal precedents regarding the Plessy v.
Ferguson ruling of separate but equal.
243
By 1938, Marshall had become “Mr. Civil Rights” and formally organized the NAACP’s Legal
Defense and Education Fund in 1940 to garner the resources to take on cases to break the
racist justice system of America. A direct result of Marshall’s energies and commitment was his
1940 victory in a Supreme Court case, Chambers v. Florida, which held that confessions
obtained by violence and torture were inadmissible in a court of law. His most well-known case
was Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which held that state laws establishing separate
public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.
Later in life, Marshall reflected on his career fighting racism in a speech at Howard Law School
in 1978: "Be aware of that myth, that everything is going to be all right. Don’t give in. I add that,
because it seems to me, that what we need to do today is to refocus. Back in the 30s and 40s,
we could go no place but to court. We knew then, the court was not the final solution. Many of
us knew the final solution would have to be politics, if for no other reason, politics is cheaper
than lawsuits. So now we have both. We have our legal arm, and we have our political arm.
Let’s use them both. And don’t listen to this myth that it can be solved by either or that it has
already been solved. Take it from me, it has not been solved."
Figure 14-3. Holding a poster against racial bias in Mississippi in 1956, are four of the most
active leaders in the NAACP movement, from left: Henry L. Moon, director of public relations;
Roy Wilkins, executive secretary; Herbert Hill, labor secretary; Thurgood Marshall, special
counsel. Library of Congress.
In 1956, NAACP leaders (from left to right) Henry L. Moon, Roy Wilkins, Herbert Hill, and
Thurgood Marshall present a new poster in the campaign against southern white racism.
Marshall successfully argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) before the
U.S. Supreme Court and later became the court’s first African American justice.
244
When Marshall says that the problems of racism have not been solved, to what was he
referring?
Plessy v. Fergusson had been overturned. The challenge now was to integrate schools. A year
later, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered southern school systems to begin desegregation “with all
deliberate speed.” Some school districts voluntarily integrated their schools. For many other
districts, however, “deliberate speed” was very, very slow.
It soon became clear that enforcing Brown v. the Board of Education would require presidential
intervention. Eisenhower did not agree with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision and did not wish
to force southern states to integrate their schools. However, as president, he was responsible
for doing so. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was forced to accept its first
nine African American students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine. In response,
Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to prevent the students
from attending classes, removing the troops only after Eisenhower told him to do so. A
subsequent attempt by the nine students to attend school resulted in mob violence.
Eisenhower then placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent the U.S.
Army’s 101st airborne unit to escort the students to and from school as well as from class to
class. This was the first time since the end of Reconstruction that federal troops once more
protected the rights of African Americans in the South.
Figure 14-4. In 1957, U.S. soldiers from the 101st Airborne were called in to escort the Little
Rock Nine into and around formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Wikimedia. Copyright permissions unknown.
Throughout the course of the school year, the Little Rock Nine were insulted, harassed, and
physically assaulted; nevertheless, they returned to school each day. At the end of the school
year, the first African American student graduated from Central High. At the beginning of the
1958–1959 school year, Orval Faubus ordered all Little Rock’s public schools closed. In the
opinion of white segregationists, keeping all students out of school was preferable to having
245
them attend integrated schools. In 1959, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the school had to
be reopened and that the process of desegregation had to proceed.
White Responses
Efforts to desegregate public schools led to a backlash among most southern whites. Many
greeted the Brown decision with horror; some World War II veterans questioned how the
government they had fought for could betray them in such a fashion. Some white parents
promptly withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white private
academies, many newly created for the sole purpose of keeping white children from attending
integrated schools. Often, these “academies” held classes in neighbors’ basements or living
rooms.
Other white southerners turned to state legislatures or courts to solve the problem of school
integration. Orders to integrate school districts were routinely challenged in court. When the
lawsuits proved unsuccessful, many southern school districts responded by closing all public
schools, as Orval Faubus had done after Central High School was integrated. One county in
Virginia closed its public schools for five years rather than see them integrated. Besides suing
school districts, many southern segregationists filed lawsuits against the NAACP, trying to
bankrupt the organization. Many national politicians supported the segregationist efforts. In
1956, ninety-six members of Congress signed “The Southern Manifesto,” in which they accused
the U.S. Supreme Court of misusing its power and violating the principle of states’ rights, which
maintained that states had rights equal to those of the federal government.
Unfortunately, many white southern racists, frightened by challenges to the social order,
responded with violence. When Little Rock’s Central High School desegregated, an irate Ku Klux
Klansman from a neighboring community sent a letter to the members of the city’s school
board in which he denounced them as Communists and threatened to kill them. White rage
sometimes erupted into murder. In August 1955, both white and black Americans were shocked
by the brutality of the murder of Emmett Till. Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, had
been vacationing with relatives in Mississippi. While visiting a white-owned store, he had made
a remark to the white woman behind the counter. A few days later, the husband and brotherin-law of the woman came to the home of Till’s relatives in the middle of the night and
abducted the boy. Till’s beaten and mutilated body was found in a nearby river three days later.
Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral; she wished to use her son’s body to reveal the
brutality of southern racism. The murder of a child who had been guilty of no more than a
casual remark captured the nation’s attention, as did the acquittal of the two men who
admitted killing him.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
One of those inspired by Till’s death was Rosa Parks, an NAACP member from Montgomery,
Alabama, who became the face of the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. City ordinances in
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Montgomery segregated the city’s buses, forcing African American passengers to ride in the
back section. They had to enter through the rear of the bus, could not share seats with white
passengers, and, if the front of the bus was full and a white passenger requested an African
American’s seat, had to relinquish their place to the white rider. The bus company also refused
to hire African American drivers even though most of the people who rode the buses were
black.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man, and the Montgomery
police arrested her. After being bailed out of jail, she decided to fight the laws requiring
segregation in court. To support her, the Women’s Political Council, a group of African
American female activists, organized a boycott of Montgomery’s buses. News of the boycott
spread through newspaper notices and by word of mouth; ministers rallied their congregations
to support the Women’s Political Council. Their efforts were successful, and forty thousand
African American riders did not take the bus on December 5, the first day of the boycott.
Other African American leaders within the city embraced the boycott and maintained it beyond
December 5, Rosa Parks’ court date. Among them was a young minister named Martin Luther
King, Jr. For the next year, black Montgomery residents avoided the city’s buses. Some
organized carpools. Others paid for rides in African American-owned taxis, whose drivers
reduced their fees. Most walked to and from school, work, and church for 381 days, the
duration of the boycott. In June 1956, an Alabama federal court found the segregation
ordinance unconstitutional. The city appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.
The city’s buses were desegregated.
Summary
After World War II, African American efforts to secure greater civil rights increased across the
United States. African American lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall championed cases intended
to destroy the Jim Crow system of segregation that had dominated the American South since
Reconstruction. The landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education prohibited
segregation in public schools, but not all school districts integrated willingly, and President
Eisenhower had to use the military to desegregate Little Rock’s Central High School. The courts
and the federal government did not assist African Americans in asserting their rights in other
cases. In Montgomery, Alabama, it was the grassroots efforts of African American citizens who
boycotted the city’s bus system that brought about change. Throughout the region, many white
southerners made their opposition to these efforts known. Too often, this opposition
manifested itself in violence and tragedy, as in the murder of Emmett Till.
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14.2: The Role of Religion in the Civil Rights Movement
In the Civil Rights Movement, religious leaders, thousands of black churches, and anonymous
members, as well as religious rhetoric, played major roles.
Overview
Religion and religious institutions had a huge impact on the Civil Rights Movement. On the one
hand, major denominations financially and intellectually supported the movement, and its
many leaders were passionate ministers with superb oratory skills and who were critical to
conveying the inspiring message of the civil rights struggle. On the other hand, black churches
served as sites of organization, education, and community engagement for the movement’s
hundreds of thousands of anonymous supporters. Historians also note that churches were
places where many anonymous black women, so often excluded from the narratives of the Civil
Rights Movement, organized and supported the civil rights struggle.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African American civil rights
organization that was central to the Civil Rights Movement. The group was established in 1957
to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent
protest in pursuit of civil rights reform. During its early years, the SCLC struggled to gain
footholds in black churches and communities across the south. Social activism faced fierce
repression from police, the White Citizens ‘ Council, and theKu Klux Klan (KKK). Only a few
churches defied the white-dominated status quo by affiliating with the SCLC, and those that did
risked economic retaliation, arson, and bombings.
The SCLC’s advocacy of boycotts and other forms of nonviolent protest was controversial.
Traditionally, leadership in black communities came from the educated elite—such as ministers,
professionals, and teachers—who spoke for and on behalf of the laborers, maids, farmhands,
and working poor who made up the bulk of the black population. Many of these traditional
leaders were uneasy at involving ordinary African Americans in mass activities such as boycotts
and marches. The SCLC’s belief that churches should be involved in political activism against
social ills was also deeply controversial. Many ministers and religious leaders—both black and
white—thought the church’s role was to focus on the spiritual needs of the congregation and
perform charitable works to aid the needy. To some of them, the socio-political activity of
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Martin Luther King, Jr. (the SCLC’s first president) and the SCLC amounted to dangerous
radicalism that they strongly opposed.
Birmingham Campaign
The 1963 SCLC campaign was a movement to bring attention to the integration efforts of
African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Led by figures such as King, James Bevel, and Fred
Shuttlesworth, the campaign of nonviolent direct action culminated in widely publicized
confrontations between young black students and white civic authorities, and eventually led
the municipal government to change the city’s discrimination laws. Unlike the earlier efforts on
Albany, which focused on desegregation of the entire city, the campaign focused on more
narrowly defined goals: desegregation of Birmingham’s downtown stores, fair hiring practices
in stores and city employment, reopening of public parks, and creation of a biracial committee
to oversee the desegregation of Birmingham’s public schools. The brutal response of local
police, led by Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor, stood in stark contrast to the
nonviolent civil disobedience of the activists. After weeks of various forms of nonviolent
disobedience, the campaign produced the desired results. In June 1963, the Jim Crow signs
regulating segregated public places in Birmingham were taken down.
Three months later, on September 15, 1963, four KKK members planted at least 15 sticks of
dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the front steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
The church was one of the most important places of organization and protest during the
campaign. The explosion at the church killed four girls and injured 22 others. Although the FBI
had concluded in 1965 that the bombing had been committed by four known Ku Klux Klansmen
and segregationists, no prosecutions took place until 1977, with two men sentenced to life
imprisonment as late as 2001 and 2002, respectively, and one never being charged.
March on Washington
After the Birmingham campaign, the SCLC called for massive protests in Washington, D.C.,
aiming for new civil rights legislation that would outlaw segregation nationwide. Although the
march originated in earlier ideas and efforts of secular black leaders A. Philip Randolph and
Bayard Rustin, the overall presence of religious values that shaped the Civil Rights Movement
also marked the 1963 march. Its crowning moment was King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech
in which he articulated the hopes and aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement rooted in two
cherished gospels—the Old Testament and the unfulfilled promise of the American creed. It is
estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 participated in the march.
St. Augustine Protests
When civil rights activists protesting segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, were met with arrests
and KKK violence, the local SCLC affiliate appealed to King for assistance in the spring of 1964.
The SCLC sent staff to help organize and lead demonstrations, and mobilized support for St.
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Augustine in the north. Hundreds were arrested during sit-ins and marches opposing
segregation—so many that the jails were filled and the overflow prisoners had to be held in
outdoor stockades.
White mobs attacked nightly marches to the Old Slave Market, and when African Americans
attempted to integrate “white-only” beaches they were assaulted by police who beat them
with clubs. On June 11, King and other SCLC leaders were arrested for trying to have lunch at
the Monson Motel restaurant, and when an integrated group of young protesters tried to use
the motel swimming pool, the owner poured acid into the water. King sent his “Letter from the
St. Augustine Jail” to a northern supporter, Rabbi Israel Dresner of New Jersey, urging him to
recruit others to participate in the movement. This resulted, a week later, in the largest mass
arrest of rabbis in U.S. history—while conducting a pray-in at the Monson. Television and
newspaper stories about St. Augustine helped build public support for the Civil Rights Act of
1964 being debated in Congress.
Selma Voting Rights Campaign and March to Montgomery
When an illegal injunction blocked voter registration and civil rights activity in Selma, Alabama,
the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) asked the SCLC for assistance. King, the SCLC, and the
DCVL chose Selma as the site for a major campaign that would demand national voting rights
legislation in the same way that the Birmingham and St. Augustine campaigns won passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Nonviolent mass marches demanded the right to vote, and the jails filled up with arrested
protesters, many of them students. On February 1, King and Abernathy were arrested. Voter
registration efforts and protest marches spread to the surrounding Black Belt counties—Perry,
Wilcox, Marengo, Greene, and Hale.
On February 18, an Alabama state trooper shot and killed Jimmie Lee Jackson during a voting
rights protest in Marion, county seat of Perry County. In response, on March 7, close to 600
protesters attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery to present their grievances to
Governor George Wallace. Led by Reverend Hosea Williams of the SCLC and John Lewis of the
SNCC, the marchers were attacked by state troopers, deputy sheriffs, and mounted possemen
who used tear gas, clubs, and bullwhips to drive them back to Brown Chapel. King called on
clergy and people of conscience to support the black citizens of Selma. Thousands of religious
leaders and ordinary Americans came to demand voting rights for all.
After many more protests, arrests, and legal maneuvering, a federal judge ordered Alabama to
allow the march to Montgomery. It began on March 21st and arrived in Montgomery on the
24th. On the 25th, an estimated 25,000 protesters marched to the steps of the Alabama capitol,
where King spoke on the voting rights struggle. Within 5 months, Congress and President
Lyndon Johnson responded to the enormous public pressure generated by the Voting Rights
Campaign by enacting into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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Figure 14-5. Martin Luther King (1968) by Ben Shahn. National Portrait Gallery.
SCLC Fundraising Poster Depicting Martin Luther King, Jr.: Shortly after King’s death,
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference used this poster—issued in an edition of 100—
for a fundraising drive. The portrait was based on a drawing by Ben Shahn, commissioned
for Time magazine’s March 19, 1965 cover. Time’s publisher noted that Shahn, “as famed in his
own medium of protest as King is in his,” greatly admired the civil rights leader and felt that
King had “moved more people by his oratory” than anyone else. After the artist’s friend Stefan
Martin made a wood engraving based on the drawing, Shahn authorized its use in support of
various causes. This 1968 poster included two additions to the portrait: the orange seal or
artist’s “chop” that Shahn had made in Japan, incorporating the letters of the Hebrew alphabet
and an excerpt from King’s famous “mountaintop” speech in the artist’s own distinctive
lettering.
Ku Klux Klan’s Use of Religion
Similarly to the arguments used by earlier proponents of slavery, many segregationists used
Christianity to justify racism and racial violence. The KKK remains the most illustrative example
of this trend. A religious tone was present in the KKK’s activities from the beginning. Historian
Brian Farmer estimates that during the period of the Second Klan (1915–1944), two-thirds of
the national KKK lecturers were Protestant ministers. Religion was a major selling point for the
organization. Klansmen embraced Protestantism as an essential component of their white
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supremacist, anti-Catholic, and paternalistic formulation of U.S. democracy and national
culture. Their cross was a religious symbol, and their ritual honored Bibles and local ministers.
The 1950s–’60s KKK drew on those earlier symbols and ideologies.
Beginning in the 1950s, individual KKK groups in Birmingham, by bombing houses in transitional
neighborhoods, began to resist social change and blacks’ efforts to improve their lives. There
were so many bombings in Birmingham of blacks’ homes by KKK groups in the 1950s that the
city was sometimes referred to as “Bombingham.” During the tenure of Bull Connor as police
commissioner in the city, KKK groups were closely allied with the police and operated with
impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, Connor gave KKK members 15
minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack. When local and
state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government
established effective intervention.
In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, KKK members forged alliances with governors’
administrations. In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil
rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation, and assassination
directly against individuals. Continuing disfranchisement of African Americans across the south
meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all white.
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14.3: Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a U.S. clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African
American Civil Rights Movement.
Overview
Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 to April 4, 1968) was a U.S. clergyman, activist, and
prominent leader in the African American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his
practice of nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs. Later in his career, King’s
message highlighted more radical social justice questions, which alienated many of his liberal
allies.
Figure 14-5. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.; President Lyndon Johnson in background.
By Yoichi Okamoto, Washington, DC, March 18, 1966
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, National Archives and Records Administration.
Early Life
King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr.,
and Alberta Williams King. Growing up in Atlanta, he attended Booker T. Washington High
School. As a teenager, he was already known for his public speaking ability, joined the school’s
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debate team, and became the youngest assistant manager of a newspaper delivery station for
the Atlanta Journal at age 13. A precocious student, he skipped both the ninth and the twelfth
grades of high school. It was during King’s junior year that Morehouse College announced it
would accept any high school juniors who could pass its entrance exam. At that time, most of
the students had abandoned their studies to participate in World War II. Because of this, the
school became desperate to fill in classrooms. At age 15, King passed the exam and entered
Morehouse. The summer before his last year at Morehouse, in 1947, an eighteen-year-old King
made the choice to enter the ministry.
In 1948, King graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. in sociology, and enrolled in Crozer
Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a B.Div. in 1951.
In 1953, he married Coretta Scott on the lawn of her parents’ house in her hometown of
Heiberger, Alabama. They became the parents of four children. During their marriage, King
limited Coretta’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, expecting her to be a housewife and
mother. In 1954, he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,
Alabama, and a year later, received his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University.
However, an academic inquiry concluded in October 1991 that portions of his dissertation had
been plagiarized and he had acted improperly.
National Prominence
King’s first involvement in the Civil Rights Movement that attracted national attention was his
leadership over the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred
Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and
organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in pursuit of civil rights
reform. King led the SCLC until his death. In December 1961, King and the SCLC became
involved in the Albany Movement—a desegregation coalition formed in Albany, Georgia. The
movement mobilized thousands of citizens for a broad-front nonviolent attack on every aspect
of segregation within the city, and attracted nationwide attention.
After nearly a year of intense activism with few tangible results, the movement began to
deteriorate. King requested a halt to all demonstrations and a “Day of Penance” to promote
nonviolence and maintain the moral high ground. Divisions within the black community and the
canny, low-key response by local government defeated efforts. Though the Albany effort
proved a key lesson in tactics for Dr. King and the national civil rights movement, the national
media was highly critical of his role in the defeat, and the SCLC’s lack of results contributed to a
growing gap between the organization and the more radical SNCC. After Albany, King sought to
choose engagements for the SCLC in which he could control the circumstances, rather than
entering into pre-existing situations.
In April 1963, the SCLC initiated a campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice in
Birmingham, Alabama. The campaign used nonviolent but intentionally confrontational tactics,
developed in part by Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker. Black Americans in Birmingham, organizing with
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the SCLC, occupied public spaces with marches and sit-ins, openly violating unjust laws. King
was arrested and jailed early in the campaign—his 13th arrest of 29. From his cell, he composed
the now-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which responded to calls for him to discontinue
his nonviolent protests and instead rely on the court system to bring about social change.
King, representing the SCLC, was among the leaders of the “Big Six” civil rights organizations
instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took
place on August 28, 1963. Originally, the march was conceived as a very public opportunity to
dramatize the desperate condition of African Americans in the southern United States and
present organizers’ concerns and grievances directly to the seat of power in the nation’s capital.
At the time, it was the largest gathering of protesters in Washington, D.C.’s history. King’s “I
Have a Dream” speech there electrified the crowd.
On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality
through nonviolence. In the following years leading up to his death, he expanded his focus to
include poverty and the Vietnam War—alienating many of his liberal allies, particularly with a
1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam.” The speech reflected King’s evolving political advocacy in his
later years. He frequently spoke of the need for fundamental changes in the political and
economic life of the nation, and expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see
redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. He guarded his language in
public to avoid being linked to communism by his enemies, but in private he sometimes spoke
of his support for democratic socialism.
In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the “Poor People’s Campaign” to address issues of
economic justice. King traveled the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that
would march on Washington to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until
Congress created an “economic bill of rights” for poor Americans. King and the SCLC called on
the government to invest in rebuilding U.S. cities. The Poor People’s Campaign was
controversial even within the Civil Rights Movement.
Assassination and Legacy
On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee in support of black sanitary public works
employees, who had been on strike for 17 days, in an effort to attain higher wages and ensure
fairer treatment. While standing on the second floor balcony of a motel, King was shot by
escaped convict James Earl Ray. One hour later, King was pronounced dead at St Joseph’s
hospital.
King’s main legacy was securing progress on civil rights in the U.S. Just days after King’s
assassination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Title VIII of the Act, commonly
known as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited discrimination in housing and housing-related
transactions on the basis of race, religion, or national origin (later expanded to include sex,
familial status, and disability). This legislation was seen as a tribute to King’s struggle in his final
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years to combat residential discrimination in the United States. King’s legacy in the United
States, and internationally, continues to be that of a human rights icon.
Influences and Political Stances
As a Christian minister, King’s main influence was the Christian gospels, which he would almost
always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. Veteran
African American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was King’s first regular adviser on
nonviolence. King was also advised by white activists Harris Wofford and Glenn Smiley. Rustin
and Smiley came from the Christian pacifist tradition, and Wofford and Rustin both studied
Gandhi’s teachings. In 1959, King, inspired by Gandhi’s success with non-violent activism,
visited Gandhi’s birthplace in India. This trip profoundly affected King, deepening his
understanding of non-violent resistance and reinforcing his commitment to the U.S. struggle for
civil rights.
As the leader of the SCLC, King maintained a policy of not publicly endorsing a U.S. political
party or candidate. King did praise Senator Paul Douglas (D-Ill.) as being the “greatest of all
senators” because of his fierce advocacy for civil rights causes over the years, but critiqued both
parties’ performances on promoting racial equality. He supported the ideals of democratic
socialism, although he was reluctant to speak directly of this support because of the anticommunist sentiment arising throughout the U.S. at the time, and the association of socialism
with communism. King believed that capitalism could not adequately provide the basic
necessities of many Americans, particularly the African American community.
14.4: Women of the Civil Rights Movement
While their names all too often go unrecognized, many women were an integral part of the
advancements made during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Among many
others, key leaders of the movement included Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates,
Dorothy Height, and Viola Liuzzo.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting rights activist, civil rights leader, and philanthropist.
She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi’s Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1964, and later became the vice-chair of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National
Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
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On August 31 of 1962, Hamer traveled on a rented bus with other activists to Indianola,
Mississippi, to register to vote. In what would become a signature trait of Hamer’s activist
career, she began singing Christian hymns, such as “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “This Little
Light of Mine”, to the group in order to bolster their resolve. The hymns also reflected Hamer’s
belief that the civil rights struggle was a deeply spiritual one. That same day, upon Hamer’s
return to her plantation, she was fired by her boss, who had warned her against trying to
register to vote.
Mississippi Freedom Summer
On June 9, 1963, Hamer was arrested on false charges along with other activists and nearly
beaten to death by police in the cell. Though the incident had profound physical and
psychological effects, Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives,
including the “Freedom Ballot Campaign,” a mock election, in 1963, and the Freedom Summer
initiative in 1964. She was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer — most of whom were
young, white, and from northern states — as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights
effort should be multi-racial in nature. In addition to her Northern guests, Hamer played host to
Tuskegee University student activists Sammy Younge Jr. and Wendell Paris. Younge and Paris
grew to become profound activists and organizers under Hamer’s tutelage.
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or “Freedom Democrats” for
short, was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi’s all-white and anti-civil rights
delegation to the Democratic National Convention, which failed to represent all Mississippians.
Hamer was elected Vice-Chair. The Freedom Democrats’ efforts drew national attention to the
plight of blacks in Mississippi and represented a challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who
was seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for reelection. Their success would mean that
other Southern delegations, who were already leaning toward Republican challenger Barry
Goldwater, would publicly break from the convention’s decision to nominate Johnson —
meaning in turn that he would almost certainly lose those states’ electoral votes. Hamer,
singing her signature hymns, drew a great deal of attention from the media, enraging Johnson,
who referred to her in speaking to his advisors as “that illiterate woman.”
257
Figure 14-6. Fannie Lou Hamer, 1964: Fannie
Lou Hamer was instrumental in organizing
Mississippi’s Freedom Summer for the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in
1964, and later became the vice-chair of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Library of
Congress.
In 1964 and 1965 Hamer ran for Congress, but
failed to win. Hamer continued to work on other
projects, including grassroots-level Head Start
programs, the Freedom Farm Cooperative in
Sunflower County, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
Poor People’s Campaign. Hamer died of
complications from hypertension and breast cancer
on March 14, 1977, aged 59. Her tombstone is
engraved with one of her famous quotes: “I am sick
and tired of being sick and tired.”
Ella Baker
Grassroots civil rights activist Ella Baker was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career
spanned over five decades. She worked alongside some of the most famous civil rights leaders
and mentored many emerging activists of the time, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael,
Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses. She was a critic of professionalized, charismatic leadership and a
promoter of grassroots organizing and radical democracy. Baker instead pushed for a
“participatory democracy” that built on the grassroots campaigns of active citizens instead of
deferring to the leadership of educated elites and experts. As a result of her actions and direct
organizing of students on campus at Shaw University, in April of 1960, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed to carry the battle forward. During the summer of
1964, Baker worked together with Hamer and Robert Parris Moses to formally organize the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic
Party.
258
Figure 14-7. Ella Baker: Ella Baker was an integral activist in the Civil Rights movement,
championing the idea of participatory democracy. Image source unknown.
Daisy Bates
Daisy Bates was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a
leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957. In 1952, Daisy Bates was elected
president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches. She became President of the
Arkansas Conference of NAACP Branches in 1952 at the age of 38. She remained active and was
on the National Board of the NAACP until 1970. Due to her position in NAACP, Bates’ life was
threatened much of time.
In this role, Bates became deeply involved in the issue of desegregation in education. Bates and
her husband published a local black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, which publicized
violations of the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings. The plan for desegregating the schools
of Little Rock was to be implemented in three phases, starting first with the senior and junior
high schools; then, only after the successful integration of senior and junior schools, the
elementary schools would be integrated. After two years and still no progress, a suit was filed
against the Little Rock School District in 1956. The court ordered the School Board to integrate
the schools as of September 1957.
As the leader of NAACP branch in Arkansas, Bates guided and advised the nine black students,
known as the Little Rock Nine, who were to integrate the previously all-white Little Rock Central
High School in 1957. The students’ attempts to enroll provoked a confrontation with Governor
Orval Faubus, who called the National Guard to prevent their entry. The guard only let the
white students enter the gate; meanwhile, white mobs gathered to harass and threaten the
black students. Bates used her organizational skills to plan a way for the nine students to get
into Central High, speaking with parents and using ministers to escort the children.
Nevertheless, the chaos at Central High School caused superintendent Virgil Blossom to dismiss
school that first day of desegregation, and the crowds dispersed. U.S. President Dwight D.
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Eisenhower intervened by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and dispatching the 101st
Airborne Division to Little Rock to ensure that the court orders were enforced. The troops
maintained order, and desegregation proceeded. In the 1958-59 school year, however, public
schools in Little Rock were closed in another attempt to roll back desegregation. That period is
known as “The Lost Year” in Arkansas.
Dorothy Height
Dorothy Irene Height was an American administrator, educator, and civil rights and women’s
rights activist specifically focused on the issues of African-American women, including
unemployment, illiteracy, and voter awareness. She was the president of the National Council
of Negro Women from 1957-1997, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
1994 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.
During the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Height organized “Wednesdays in
Mississippi,” which brought together black and white women from the North and South to
create a dialogue of understanding. Height was also a founding member of the Council for
United Civil Rights Leadership. Height encouraged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to
desegregate schools and President Lyndon B. Johnson to appoint African-American women to
positions in government. In the mid-1960s, she wrote a column called “A Woman’s Word” for
the weekly African-American newspaper the New York Amsterdam News.
Height served on a number of committees, including as a consultant on African affairs to the
Secretary of State, the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped, and the
President’s Committee on the Status of Women. In 1974, she was named the National
Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research,
which published the Belmont Report, a response to the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and
an international ethical touchstone for researchers to this day. In 1990, Height, along with 15
other African Americans, formed the African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom.
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Figure 14-8. Dr. Dorothy Height: Height was the president of the National Council of Negro
Women from 1957-1997. Image source unknown.
Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo was a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan. In March of 1965,
Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of 5 with a history of local activism, heeded the call of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama in the wake of
the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated
as a white ally in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination
and logistics. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she
was shot dead by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She was 39 years old. In addition to other
honors, Liuzzo’s name is today inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama
created by Maya Lin.
14.5: Sit-In and Freedom Rides
Sit-ins and Freedom Rides were nonviolent civil rights actions used to challenge segregation and
racial discrimination.
Sit-Ins
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, students and other activists would “sit-in” at
whites-only locations. In the first sit-ins, students would sit at whites-only lunch counters and
refuse to leave until they had been served. Using this strategy of nonviolent resistance, the
movement spread across the South. Local authorities often used brutal force and violence to
physically remove and restrain the activists.
Greensboro Sit-Ins
The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests that led to the Woolworth’s
department store chain reversing its policy of racial segregation in the southern United States.
While these were not the first sit-ins, they were instrumental in increasing national awareness
at a crucial period in U.S. history. This series of sit-ins started at the Greensboro, North Carolina
Woolworth’s store.
On February 1, 1960, four students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North
Carolina—Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Franklin McCain—sat down at
the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth’s policy of excluding African Americans.
They had specifically chosen Woolworth’s because it was a national chain, and was therefore
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believed to be especially vulnerable to negative publicity. Following store policy, the lunch
counter staff refused to serve the African American men at the “whites only” counter, and the
store’s manager asked them to leave. On the second day of the sit-ins, more than twenty
African-American students who had been recruited from other campus groups came to the
store to join the sit-in. The lunch counter staff continued to refuse service. On the fourth day of
the sit-ins, more than 300 people took part. Hostile whites responded with threats and taunted
the students by pouring sugar and ketchup on their heads. Organizers agreed to spread the sitin protests to include the lunch counter at Greensboro’s Kress store.
As early as one week after the Greensboro sit-in had begun, students in other North Carolina
towns launched their own sit-ins. Demonstrations spread to towns near Greensboro, including
Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, and Charlotte. The sit-ins also spread to out-of-state towns
such as Lexington, Kentucky, and Richmond, Virginia.
Nashville’s Sit-Ins
The Nashville sit-ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were part of a nonviolent
direct action campaign to end racial segregation at lunch counters in downtown Nashville,
Tennessee. The first large-scale organized sit-in in Nashville occurred on Saturday, February 13.
At about 12:30 pm, 124 students, most of whom were black, walked into the downtown
Woolworths, S. H. Kress, and McClellan stores and asked to be served at the lunch counters.
After the staff refused to serve them, they sat in the stores for two hours and then left without
incident.
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Figure 14-9. Student sit-in leader Rodney Powell, standing, talks with two of his companions
after the lunch counter at a Nashville Walgreens was closed on March 25, 1960, when the sitins started. (Photo: Jimmy Ellis / The Tennessean)
Tensions mounted over the following week as sit-in demonstrations spread to other cities and
race riots broke out in nearby Chattanooga. On February 27, the Nashville student activists held
a fourth sit-in at the Woolworths, McClellan, and Walgreens stores. Crowds of white youths
again gathered in the stores to taunt and harass the demonstrators. However, this time, police
were not present. Eventually, several of the sit-in demonstrators were attacked by hecklers in
the McClellan and Woolworths stores. Some were pulled from their seats and beaten, and one
demonstrator was pushed down a flight of stairs. When police arrived, the white attackers fled
and none were arrested. Police then ordered the demonstrators at all three locations to leave
the stores. When the demonstrators refused to leave, they were arrested and loaded into
police vehicles as onlookers applauded. Eighty-one students were arrested and charged with
loitering and disorderly conduct.
The arrests brought a surge of media coverage to the sit-in campaign, including national
television news coverage, front page stories in both of Nashville’s daily newspapers, and an
Associated Press story. The students generally viewed any media coverage as helpful to their
cause, especially when it illustrated their commitment to nonviolence.
After weeks of secret negotiations between merchants and protest leaders, an agreement was
finally reached during the first week of May. According to the agreement, gradual
desegregation of the lunch counters would be implemented. Nashville thus became the first
major city in the South to begin desegregating its public facilities.
The Movement Spreads
The successful six-month-long Greensboro sit-in initiated the student phase of the African
American civil rights movement and, within two months, the sit-in movement had spread to 54
cities in nine states. Within a year, more than 100 cities had desegregated at least some public
accommodations in response to student-led demonstrations. The sit-ins inspired other forms of
nonviolent protest intended to desegregate public spaces. “Sleep-ins” occupied motel lobbies,
“read-ins” filled public libraries, and churches became the sites of “pray-ins.”
Freedom Rides
Students also took part in the 1961 “ freedom rides ” organized by the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The intent of the
African American and white volunteers who undertook these bus rides was to test enforcement
of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which prohibited segregation on
interstate transportation and to protest segregated waiting rooms in southern terminals.
During Freedom Rides, activists traveled through the Deep South to integrate seating patterns
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and desegregate bus terminals, including restrooms and water fountains, which proved to be a
dangerous mission.
From Washington to New Orleans
The first Freedom Ride of the 1960s left Washington D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to
arrive in New Orleans on May 17. Led by CORE Director James Farmer, 13 riders (seven black,
six white) left Washington, DC, on Greyhound and Trailways buses. Their plan was to ride
through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, ending in New Orleans,
Louisiana where a civil rights rally was planned. Most of the Riders were from CORE and two
were from SNCC; many were in their 40s and 50s.
The freedom riders encountered little difficulty until they reached Rock Hill, South Carolina,
where a mob severely beat John Lewis, a freedom rider who later became chairman of the
SNCC. The danger increased as the riders continued through Georgia into Alabama, where one
of the two buses was firebombed outside the town of Anniston. The second group continued to
Birmingham, where the riders were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan as they attempted to
disembark at the city bus station. The Birmingham, Alabama Police Commissioner Bull Connor
and Police Sergeant Tom Cook (an avid Ku Klux Klan supporter) organized violence against the
Freedom Riders with local Ku Klux Klan chapters. Freedom riders were stopped and beaten by
mobs in Montgomery, leading to the dispatch of the Alabama National Guard to stop the
violence.
In response to the national and international attention brought on by the Freedom Rides,
President Kennedy urged a “cooling off period” to avoid international embarrassment, which
was ignored by riders. The remaining activists continued to Mississippi, where they were
arrested when they attempted to desegregate the waiting rooms in the Jackson bus terminal.
Impact of the Freedom Rides
Despite being faced with severe violence, the freedom rides made an impact. In September of
1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) issued new policies that went into effect on
November 1. After the new ICC rule took effect, passengers were permitted to sit wherever
they pleased on interstate buses and trains; “white” and “colored” signs came down in the
terminals; racially segregated drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms were consolidated;
and the lunch counters began serving all customers, regardless of race.
Freedom Summer and Voter Registration
Jim Crow Barriers to Voting
Some of the greatest violence during this era was aimed at those who attempted to register
African Americans to vote. Though Freedom Summer failed to register many voters, it
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significantly affected the course of the Civil Rights Movement. It helped break down decades of
isolation and repression that were the foundation of the Jim Crow system. Before Freedom
Summer, the national news media had paid little attention to the persecution of black voters in
the Deep South and the dangers endured by black civil rights workers.
When Mississippi ratified its constitution in 1890, the constitution had placed barriers to black
voting with provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests. In the
spring of 1962, SNCC began organizing voter registration in the Mississippi Delta area. Their
efforts were met with fierce opposition from whites—arrests, beatings, shootings, arson, and
murder. In addition, white employers fired blacks who tried to register to vote, and white
landlords evicted them from their homes. Over the following years, the black voter registration
campaign spread across the state.
Selma
SNCC had undertaken an ambitious voter registration program in Selma, Alabama, in 1963, but
had made little headway. After local residents asked the SCLC for assistance, King came to
Selma to lead several marches. On March 7, 1965, Hosea Williams of the SCLC and John Lewis
of SNCC led a march of 600 people to walk from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Only
six blocks into the march, state troopers and local law enforcement, some mounted on
horseback, attacked the peaceful demonstrators. The national broadcast of the lawmen
attacking unresisting marchers provoked a national response.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
Eight days after the first march, President Johnson delivered a televised address to support the
voting rights bill he had sent to Congress. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which
suspended poll taxes, literacy tests, and other subjective voter tests that contributed to the
disenfranchisement of African Americans. The act authorized Federal supervision of voter
registration in states and individual voting districts where such tests were being used. Johnson
reportedly told associates of his concern that by signing the bill, he had lost the support of
white southern Democrats for the foreseeable future.
When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, only about 100 African Americans held elective
office, all in northern states of the United States. By 1989, there were more than 7,200 African
Americans in office, including more than 4,800 in the South.
14.6: Black Power
Black Power emphasized racial pride, the creation of political and social institutions against
oppression, and advancement of black collective interests.
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Overview
“Black Power” is a term used to refer to various ideologies associated with African Americans in
the United States, emphasizing racial pride and the creation of black political and cultural
institutions to nurture and promote black collective interests and advance black values. Black
Power expresses a range of political goals, from defense against racial oppression to the
establishment of social institutions and a self-sufficient economy.
Background
The episodes of violence that accompanied Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder were but the latest
in a string of urban protests since the mid-1960s. Between 1964 and 1968, there were 329
protests in 257 cities across the nation. In 1965, a traffic stop set in motion a chain of events
that culminated in violence in Watts, an African-American neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Thousands of businesses were destroyed and by the time the violence ended, 34 people were
dead, most of them African Americans killed by the Los Angeles police and the National Guard.
Frustration and anger lay at the heart of these protests. Despite the programs of the Great
Society, essentials such as good healthcare, job opportunities, and safe housing were abysmally
lacking in urban African-American neighborhoods in cities throughout the country, including in
the North and West, where discrimination was less overt but just as crippling. In the eyes of
many protesters, the federal government either could not or would not end their suffering, and
most existing civil rights groups and their leaders had been unable to achieve significant results
toward racial justice and equality. Disillusioned, many African Americans turned to those with
more radical ideas about how best to obtain equality and justice.
Stokely Carmichael
Within the chorus of voices calling for integration and legal equality were many that more
stridently demanded empowerment and thus supported Black Power. Black Power meant a
variety of things. One of the most famous users of the term was Stokely Carmichael, the
chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who later changed his
name to Kwame Ture. For Carmichael, Black Power was the power of African Americans to
unite as a political force and create their own institutions apart from white-dominated ones, an
idea first suggested in the 1920s by political leader and orator Marcus Garvey. Like Garvey,
Carmichael became an advocate of black separatism, arguing that African Americans should live
apart from whites and solve their problems for themselves. In keeping with this philosophy,
Carmichael expelled SNCC’s white members. In 1966, Carmichael began urging AfricanAmerican communities to confront the Ku Klux Klan armed and ready for battle; he felt it was
the only way to ever rid the communities of the terror caused by the Klan. He left SNCC in 1967
and later joined the Black Panthers.
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Malcolm X
Long before Carmichael began to call for separatism, the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930, had
advocated the same thing. In the 1960s, its most famous member was Malcolm X, born
Malcolm Little. The Nation of Islam advocated the separation of white Americans and African
Americans because of a belief that African Americans could not thrive in an atmosphere of
white racism. In a 1963 interview, Malcolm X, discussing the teachings of the head of the
Nation of Islam in America, Elijah Muhammad, referred to white people as “devils” more than a
dozen times. Rejecting the nonviolent strategy of other civil rights activists, he maintained that
violence in the face of violence was appropriate.
In 1964, after a trip to Africa, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam to found the Organization of
Afro-American Unity with the goal of achieving freedom, justice, and equality “by any means
necessary.” His views regarding black-white relations changed somewhat thereafter, but he
remained fiercely committed to the cause of African-American empowerment. On February 21,
1965, he was killed by members of the Nation of Islam. Stokely Carmichael later recalled that
Malcolm X had provided an intellectual basis for Black Nationalism and given legitimacy to the
use of violence in achieving the goals of Black Power.
Differing Approaches
This move toward Black Power and self-defense as a means of obtaining African-American civil
rights marked a change from previous nonviolent actions. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not
comfortable with the “Black Power” slogan, which sounded too much like black nationalism to
him. SNCC activists, in the meantime, began embracing the “right to self-defense” in response
to attacks from white authorities and disagreed with King for continuing to advocate
nonviolence.
When King was murdered in 1968, Stokely Carmichael stated that whites murdered the one
person who would prevent rampant rioting, and that blacks would burn every major city to the
ground. Racial riots broke out in the black community in cities from Boston to San Francisco
following King’s death. As a result, the white population fled from many areas in these cities
and city crews were often hesitant to enter affected areas, leaving blacks in dilapidated cities.
The Black Power movement was given a stage on live, international television on October of
1968. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, while being awarded the gold and bronze medals at the
1968 Summer Olympics, donned human rights badges and each raised a black-gloved Black
Power salute during their podium ceremony. Smith and Carlos were immediately ejected from
the games by the United States Olympic Committee, and the International Olympic Committee
would later issue a permanent lifetime ban for the two.
The self-empowerment philosophy of Black Power influenced mainstream civil rights groups
such as the National Economic Growth Reconstruction Organization (NEGRO), which sold bonds
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and operated a clothing factory and construction company in New York, and the Opportunities
Industrialization Center in Philadelphia, which provided job training and placement—by 1969, it
had branches in seventy cities.
Figure 14-10. Black Power salute. Image showing John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising
their black, gloved fists in protest after receiving their Olympic medals. Wikipedia.
The Black Power salute was a noted human rights protest and one of the most overtly political
statements in the 110-year history of the modern Olympic Games. African-American athletes
Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed their Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer
Olympics in Mexico City while receiving their medals and were subsequently ejected from the
games.
The Black Panther Party
Black Power was made most public by the Black Panther Party, which was founded by Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. This group followed the ideology of
Malcolm X using a “by-any-means necessary” approach to stopping inequality. Unlike
Carmichael and the Nation of Islam, most Black Power advocates did not believe African
Americans needed to separate themselves from white society. The Black Panther Party believed
African Americans were as much the victims of capitalism as of white racism. Accordingly, the
group espoused Marxist teachings and called for jobs, housing, and education, as well as
protection from police brutality and exemption from military service in their Ten Point Program.
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Their militant attitude and advocacy of armed self-defense attracted many young men but also
led to many encounters with the police, which sometimes included arrests and even shootouts,
such as those that took place in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Carbondale, Illinois.
The organization’s official newspaper, The Black Panther, was first circulated in 1967. That
same year, the Black Panther Party marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento in
protest of a selective ban on weapons. By 1968, the party had expanded into many cities
throughout the United States. Peak membership was near 10,000 by 1969, and their newspaper
had a circulation of 250,000.
Gaining national prominence, the Black Panther Party became an icon of the counterculture of
the 1960s. They instituted a variety of community social programs designed to alleviate
poverty, improve healthcare among inner city black communities, and soften the Party’s public
image. The Black Panther Party’s most widely known programs were its Free Breakfast for
Children program and its armed citizens ‘ patrols of the streets of African-American
neighborhoods to protect residents from police brutality. However, the group’s political goals
were often overshadowed by their confrontational, militant, and violent tactics against police.
Figure 14-11. Black Panther Party national chairman Bobby Seale (left) and defense minister
Huey Newton. AP. Retrieved from Encyclopedia Britannica.
Impact of the Black Power Movement on African-American
Identity
White fear and racialized backlash to groups such as the Black Panthers led to a great deal of
biased media coverage, and the Black Power movement gained a negative and militant
reputation. Many people felt that this movement of “insurrection” would soon serve to cause
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discord and disharmony through the entire country, even though discord and disharmony had
existed for African Americans since their early subjugation in the Americas.
Though Black Power at the most basic level refers to a political movement, Black Power was
also part of a much larger process of cultural change. The 1960s composed a decade not only of
Black Power but also of Black Pride. African- American abolitionist John S. Rock had coined the
phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in 1858, but in the 1960s, it became an important part of efforts
within the African- American community to raise self-esteem and encourage pride in African
ancestry. Black Pride urged African Americans to reclaim their African heritage and, to promote
group solidarity, to substitute African and African-inspired cultural practices, such as
handshakes, hairstyles, and dress, for white practices.
The movement uplifted the black community as a whole by cultivating feelings of racial
solidarity, often in opposition to the world of white Americans—a world that had oppressed
blacks for generations. Through the movement, blacks came to understand themselves and
their culture by exploring and debating the question “who are we?” in order to establish unified
and viable identities. The respect and attention accorded to African-American history and
culture in both formal and informal settings today is largely a product of the movement for
Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s.
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READING MODULE 15: African Americans
Post Civil Rights Movement
Module 15 Overview
At the end of Civil Rights, some have argued that America has moved into a Post-Racial time
period. However, from the experiences within the African American community, although there
have been some great success, there have be continuous struggles against inequity in
education, poverty, and mass incarceration. With the first Black president of the United States,
will our future make a shift and a change?
Learning Outcomes
This module addresses the following Course Learning Outcomes listed in the Syllabus for this
course:
•
•
To provide students with a general understanding of the history of African Americans within the
context of American History.
To motivate students to become interested and active in African American history by comparing
current events with historical information.(1)
Additional learning outcomes associated with this module are:
•
•
•
The student will be able to discuss the Post Civil Rights Era and African Americans in the
different economic stratus.
The student will be able to describe the impact of police brutality, mass incarceration, and the
murder of unarmed Black men.
The student will be able to analyze the gains and limitations of the Obama administration.
Module Objectives
Upon completion of this module, the student will be able to:
Use primary historical resources to analyze the Post Civil Rights time period and the complexity
it entails for African Americans living in the United States during the time period and today.
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15.1: Continuing Challenges
The civil rights movement for African Americans did not end with the passage of the Voting
Rights Act in 1965. For the last fifty years, the African American community has faced
challenges related to both past and current discrimination; progress on both fronts remains
slow, uneven, and often frustrating.
Legacies of the de jure segregation of the past remain in much of the United States. Many
African Americans still live in predominantly black neighborhoods where their ancestors were
forced by laws and housing covenants to live.
Even those who live in the suburbs, once largely white, tend to live in suburbs that are mostly
black.
Some two million African American young people attend schools whose student body is
composed almost entirely of students of color.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, efforts to tackle these problems were stymied by largescale public opposition, not just in the South but across the nation. Attempts to integrate public
schools through the use of busing—transporting students from one segregated neighborhood
to another to achieve more racially balanced schools—were particularly unpopular and helped
contribute to “white flight” from cities to the suburbs.
This white flight has created de facto segregation, a form of segregation that results from the
choices of individuals to live in segregated communities without government action or support.
Today, a lack of high-paying jobs in many urban areas, combined with persistent racism, has
trapped many African Americans in poor neighborhoods. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964
created opportunities for members of the black middle class to advance economically and
socially, and to live in the same neighborhoods as the white middle class did, their departure
left many black neighborhoods mired in poverty and without the strong community ties that
existed during the era of legal segregation. Many of these neighborhoods also suffered from
high rates of crime and violence.
Police also appear, consciously or subconsciously, to engage in racial profiling: singling out
blacks (and Latinos) for greater attention than members of other racial and ethnic groups, as
FBI director James B. Comey has admitted.
When incidents of real or perceived injustice arise, as recently occurred after a series of deaths
of young black men at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and
Baltimore, Maryland, many African Americans turn to the streets to protest because they
believe that politicians—white and black alike—fail to pay sufficient attention to these
problems.
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The most serious concerns of the black community today appear to revolve around poverty
resulting from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. While the public mood may have shifted
toward greater concern about economic inequality in the United States, substantial policy
changes to immediately improve the economic standing of African Americans in general have
not followed, that is, if government-based policies and solutions are the answer. The Obama
administration recently proposed new rules under the Fair Housing Act that may, in time, lead
to more integrated communities in the future.
Meanwhile, grassroots movements to improve neighborhoods and local schools have taken
root in many black communities across America, and perhaps in those movements is the hope
for greater future progress.
LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS
CC LICENSED CONTENT, SHARED PREVIOUSLY
•
American Government. Authored by: OpenStax. Provided by: OpenStax; Rice
University. Located at: https://cnx.org/contents/W8wOWXNF@12.1:Y1CfqFju@5/Preface (Links
to an external site.). License: CC BY: Attribution (Links to an external site.). License Terms:
Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/9e28f580-0d1b-4d72-8795-c48329947ac2@1.
15.2: The Obama Administration
Introduction
The Presidency of Barack Obama began on January 20, 2009, when he became the
44th President of the United States. Obama was a United States Senator from Illinois at the time
of his victory over Arizona Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. Barack
Obama is the first African-American president of the United States, as well as the first to be
born in Hawaii. He was elected to a second term on November 6, 2012.
Obama came to office during a global financial recession following the financial crisis of 2008.
His major policy initiatives have included changes in tax policies, legislation to reform the
United States health care industry, foreign policy initiatives, and the phasing out of the
detention of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. In October of 2009,
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen
international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
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Economic Policies
Upon entering office, Obama planned to center his attention on handling the global financial
crisis. Even before his inauguration, he lobbied Congress to pass an economic stimulus bill,
which became the top priority during his first month in office. On February 17, 2009, Obama
signed into law a $787 billion plan that included spending for health care, infrastructure, and
education, as well as various tax breaks, incentives, and direct assistance to individuals. The tax
provisions of the law reduced taxes for 98% of taxpayers, bringing tax rates to their lowest
levels in 60 years.
As part of the 2010 budget proposal, the Obama administration has proposed additional
measures to attempt to stabilize the economy, including a $2–3 trillion measure aimed at
stabilizing the financial system and freeing up credit. The program includes up to $1 trillion to
buy toxic bank assets, an additional $1 trillion to expand a federal consumer loan program, and
the $350 billion left in the Troubled Assets Relief Program. The plan also includes $50 billion
intended to slow the wave of mortgage foreclosures. The 2011 budget includes a three-year
freeze on discretionary spending, proposes several program cancellations, and raises taxes on
high income earners to bring down deficits during the economic recovery.
Health Care
Once the economic stimulus bill was enacted, health care reform became Obama’s top
domestic priority. On July 14, 2009, House Democratic leaders introduced a 1,000-page plan for
overhauling the U.S. health care system, which Obama wanted Congress to approve by the end
of the year. On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the bill into law. Immediately
following the bill’s passage, the House voted in favor of a reconciliation measure to make
significant changes and corrections to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which
was passed by both houses with two minor alterations on March 25, 2010, and signed into law
on March 30, 2010. The goals of this Act (which came to be know as Obamacare) were to
provide all Americans with access to affordable health insurance, to require that everyone in
the United States had some form of health insurance, and to lower the costs of healthcare.
LGBTQ Rights
On December 22, 2010, Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act. The “Don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy of 1993 had prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the
United States Armed Forces, and repealing this policy had been a key campaign promise Obama
had made during the 2008 presidential campaign.
During Barack Obama’s second term in office, courts began to counter efforts by conservatives
to outlaw same-sex marriage. A series of decisions declared nine states’ prohibitions against
same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to
overturn a federal court ruling to that effect in California in June 2013. Shortly thereafter, the
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Supreme Court also ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 was unconstitutional,
because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. These decisions
seem to allow legal challenges in all the states that persist in trying to block same-sex unions.
Foreign Policy
In his first week in office, Obama signed Executive Order 13492 suspending all the ongoing
proceedings of Guantanamo military commission and ordering the detention facility to be shut
down within the year. He also signed Executive Order 13491, which required the Army Field
Manual be used as a guide for interrogations of supposed terrorists and banned torture and
other coercive techniques, such as waterboarding.
Obama declared his plan for ending the Iraq War on February 27, 2009 in a speech at Camp
Lejeune, North Carolina before an audience of Marines stationed there. According to the
president, combat troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by August 2010, leaving a contingent
of up to 50,000 servicepeople to continue advisory, training, and counterterrorism operations
until as late as the end of 2011. In May of 2014, Obama announced that, for the most part, U.S.
combat operations in Afghanistan were over. Although a residual force of 9,800 soldiers will
remain to continue training the Afghan army, by 2016, all U.S. troops will have left the country,
except for a small number to defend U.S. diplomatic posts.
Starting with information received in July of 2010, intelligence developed by the CIA over the
next several months determined what they believed to be the location of Osama bin Laden, the
leader of al-Qaeda and the person behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, in a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On May 1, 2011, the U.S. initiated
Operation Neptune’s Spear, resulting in the death of bin Laden and the seizure of papers,
computer drives, and disks from the compound. Bin Laden’s body was identified through DNA
testing and buried at sea several hours later.
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Figure 15-1. U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team,
receive an update on Operation Neptune's Spear, a mission against Osama bin Laden, in one of the conference rooms of the
Situation Room
Figure 15-1. Obama and Biden await updates on bin Laden by Pete Souza
Assassination of Osama Bin Laden: U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe
Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on Operation
Neptune’s Spear, a mission against Osama bin Laden, in one of the conference rooms of the
Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011.
15.3: Racial Tensions and Black Lives Matter
Originating in 2013 in response to police violence, the Black Lives Matter movement has raised
awareness of institutionalized racism in the United States.
The Rise of Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an activist movement originating in the African-American
community that campaigns against violence and institutionalized racism toward black people in
the United States. BLM regularly organizes protests around the deaths of black people in killings
by law enforcement officers, as well as broader issues of racial profiling, police brutality, and
racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system.
The movement began in 2013 with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media in
response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen
Trayvon Martin. Black Lives Matter became nationally recognized for its street demonstrations
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following the 2014 police shooting deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric
Garner in New York City.
Events 2012-Present
Taryvon Martin and the Acquittal of George Zimmerman
Trayvon Benjamin Martin was an African American from Miami Gardens, Florida, who, at 17
years old, was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, in Sanford,
Florida. On the evening of February 26, 2012, Martin had gone to a convenience store and
purchased candy and a canned drink. As Martin returned from the store, he walked through a
neighborhood that had been victimized by robberies several times that year. Zimmerman, a
member of the community watch, spotted him and called the Sanford Police to report him for
suspicious behavior. Moments later, Martin was shot in the chest. Zimmerman was not charged
at the time of the shooting by the Sanford Police, who said that there was no evidence to refute
his claim of self-defense and that Florida’s stand your ground law prohibited law-enforcement
officials from arresting or charging him. After national media focused on the tragedy,
Zimmerman was eventually charged and tried in Martin’s death. A jury acquitted Zimmerman
of second-degree murder and of manslaughter in July 2013.
Michael Brown and Ferguson
Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was shot and killed on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson,
Missouri, by Darren Wilson, a 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer. The disputed
circumstances of the shooting of the unarmed man sparked existing tensions in the
predominantly black city, where protests and civil unrest erupted. The events received
considerable attention in the U.S. and elsewhere, attracted protesters from outside the region,
and sparked a vigorous debate in the United States about the relationship between law
enforcement officers and African Americans, the militarization of the police, and the Use of
Force Doctrine in Missouri and nationwide. Continued activism expanded the issues to include
modern-day debtors prisons, for-profit policing, and school segregation.
As the details of the original shooting emerged, police established curfews and deployed riot
squads to maintain order. Peaceful protests were met with police militarization, and some
areas of the city turned violent. The unrest continued on November 24, 2014, after a grand jury
did not indict Officer Wilson.
Eric Garner
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old African American man, was killed in Staten Island,
New York City, after a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer put him in what has
been described as a chokehold for about 15 to 19 seconds while arresting him for allegedly
selling cigarettes, which Garner had denied. The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office
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attributed Garner’s death to a combination of a chokehold, compression of his chest, and poor
health. NYPD policy prohibits the use of chokeholds, and video shows Garner repeatedly telling
the officer “I can’t breathe” before he lost consciousness. The medical examiner ruled Garner’s
death a homicide.
On December 3, 2014, the Richmond County grand jury decided not to indict Officer Pantaleo,
who had performed the chokehold. On that day, the United States Department of Justice
announced it would conduct an independent investigation. The event stirred public protests
and rallies, with charges of police brutality made by protesters. By December 28, 2014, at least
50 demonstrations had been held nationwide specifically for Garner, while hundreds of
demonstrations against general police brutality counted Garner as a focal point. On July 13,
2015, an out-of-court settlement was announced in which the City of New York would pay the
Garner family $5.9 million.
Freddie Gray and Baltimore Protests
On April 12, 2015, Baltimore Police Department officers arrested Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old
African American resident of Baltimore, Maryland, for possessing what the police alleged was
an illegal switchblade. Gray sustained heavy injuries to his neck and spine while in transport in a
police vehicle and fell into a coma. On April 18, 2015, the residents of Baltimore protested in
front of the Western district police station. Gray died the following day, April 19, 2015, a week
after the arrest. On April 21, 2015, pending an investigation of the incident, six Baltimore police
officers were suspended with pay.
Further protests were organized after Gray’s death became public knowledge, amid the police
department’s continuing inability to adequately or consistently explain the events following the
arrest and the injuries. Spontaneous protests started after the funeral service, and civil unrest
continued with at least 250 people arrested, at least 20 police officers injured, 285 to 350
businesses damaged, 60 structure fires, thousands of police and Maryland National Guard
troops deployed, and a state of emergency declared in the city limits of Baltimore. On May 1,
2015, Gray’s death was ruled to be a homicide, and legal charges were issued against the six
officers involved in the incident, including that of second-degree murder. The state of
emergency was lifted on May 6.
In September 2015, it was decided that there would be separate trials for the accused officers.
The first trial against Officer William Porter ended in mistrial in December 2015. Officer Edward
Nero subsequently opted for a bench trial and was found not guilty by Circuit Judge Barry
William in May 2016. In June, Officer Caesar Goodson, who faced the most severe charges, was
also acquitted by Williams by means of a bench trial.
Organizing Against Violence
The Black Lives Matter movement was co-founded by three black queer women who are active
community organizers: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. BLM claims inspiration
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from the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, the 1980s Black
feminist movement, Pan-Africanism, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Hip hop, LGBTQ social
movements, and Occupy Wall Street. Garza, Cullors and Tometi met through “Black Organizing
for Leadership & Dignity” (BOLD), a national organization that trains community organizers.
They began to question how they were going to respond to the devaluation of black lives after
Zimmerman’s acquittal. Garza wrote a Facebook post titled “A Love Note to Black People” in
which she wrote: “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.” Cullors replied: “#BlackLivesMatter.”
Tometi then added her support, and Black Lives Matter was born as an online campaign.
Figure 15-2. Alicia Garza: Alicia Garza, American activist and co-founder of Black Lives Matter
is licensed CC BY 3.0. The Movement Moment - panel at CitizenUCon16
In August of 2014, BLM members organized their first in-person national protest in the form of
a “Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride” to Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael
Brown. More than 500 members descended upon Ferguson to participate in non-violent
demonstrations. Of the many groups that descended on Ferguson, Black Lives Matter emerged
as one of the best organized and most visible groups, becoming nationally recognized as
symbolic of the emerging movement. The overall Black Lives Matter movement is a
decentralized network and has no formal hierarchy or structure.
Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the
deaths of numerous other African Americans by police actions or while in police custody,
including those of Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Jonathan Ferrell, Sandra Bland, Samuel
DuBose, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castille. In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter began
279
to publicly challenge politicians—including politicians in the 2016 United States presidential
election—to state their positions on BLM issues.
Common social media logo/profile/avatar for the formal Black Lives Matter organization: The
Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal
Tometi.
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ATTRIBUTIONS
Module Attributions
(1) Content by Florida State College at Jacksonville is licensed under a CC BY 4.0
(2) The American Yawp is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .
(3) Park Ethnography Program African American Heritage and Ethnography by the National Park
Service is in the Public Domain .
(4) The American Revolution by the National Park Service is in the Public Domain .
(5) U.S. History by The Independence Hall Association is licensed under CC-BY 4.0
(6) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African:
Written By Himself by Olaudah Equiano is in the Public Domain .
(7) A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London by Thomas Phillips is in the Public
Domain .
(8) Prayer by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no known copyright restrictions.
(9) Go Preach My Gospel by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no know copyright restrictions.
281
(10) Jesus, My God, I Know His Name by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no know
copyright restrictions.
(11) U.S. History by OpenStax is licensed under CC BY 4.0
(12) Boundless US History by Lumen Learning is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
(13) David Walker, Walker’s Appeal (Boston: David Walker, 1830) taken
from http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html/en-en/menu.html is in the Public
Domain .
(14) A Memorial of William Lloyd Garrison from the City of Boston by Boston (Mass.) City
Council is in the Public Domain .
(15) “Felix” (Unknown) Slave Petition for Freedom (January 6. 1773) in The Appendix: or Some
observations on the expediency of the petition of the Africans living in Boston… , by Lover of
constitutional liberty is in the Public Domain .
(16) Petition for freedom to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives,
January 1777 by Massachusetts Historical Societyis in the Public Domain .
(17) Slow Drag Work Song by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no known copyright restrictions.
(18) Long Hot Summer Day by John A. Lomax (Collector) has no known copyright restrictions.
282
(19) Sergeant A.M. Chandler of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, Co. F., and Silas
Chandler, family slave, with Bowie knives, revolvers, pepper-box, shotgun, and canteen by
Library of Congress is in the Public Domain .
(20) Letters from Spotswood Rice are in the Public Domain.
(21) Letter to President Lincoln by Hannah Johnson is in the Public Domain.
(22) My Life in the South by Jacob Stroyer is in the Public Domain.
(23) Letter to the Editor of the Christian Recorder (May 10. 1864) by George W. Hatton from the
archives of Mother Bethel Church is in the Public Domain.
(24) Black Residents of Nashville to the Union Convention by Unknown persons in Paying
Freedom’s Price: A History of African Americans in the Civil War by Paul David Escott (pp 144146) is in the Public Domain.
(25) “I Hope to Fall With My Face to the Foe” by Lewis Douglass is in the Public Domain .
(26) Selections from the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved African Americans on Slavery from
the Works Progress Administration is in the Public Domain.
(27) Maryland Slave to the President by Annie Davis is in the Public Domain.
(28) Selections from the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved African Americans on Being a Civil
War Soldier from the Works Progress Administration is in the Public Domain .
283
(29) Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom by Louis Hughes is in the Public Domain.
(30) Selections from the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved African Americans on
Emancipation by the Works Progress Administration is in the Public Domain .
284