Freedom from Below: Revisiting Emancipation and the Construction of Black Citizenship: Frank McShane

 

Although it has been over 150 years since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, the Civil War and chattel slavery continue to hold a powerful place in the American conscience. In everyday conversations and film representations, like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the demise of slavery in the United States is all too often portrayed as a “top-down” process, in which compassionate government officials destroyed the institution out of a sense of morality. This narrative is strongly felt in the popular phrase, “Lincoln freed the slaves,” which implies passivity among those in bondage, and a sense that enslaved people were either too disorganized, unaware, or content in their condition to seize freedom on their own. While it is true that the federal government played a necessary role in bringing about the destruction of slavery, historical scholarship makes clear that it was the daring, political actions of enslaved people themselves, which forced the State to adopt not only emancipation, but also the extension of citizenship to African-Americans over the course of the 1860s. By the start of the Civil War in 1861, these slaves had developed methods of acquiring political information, and had formed their own conception of the War’s meaning wholly independent of the question of reunion which captivated the white population. They saw, before anyone else, the possibility of gaining freedom for themselves and demolishing the larger institution of slavery.

Although federal officials at the outset of the War had no intention of interfering with slavery in the South, the actions of enslaved people forced the question of emancipation upon them. Slaves who fled to Union lines, offered their services in support of what they considered a powerful ally, and eventually died fighting for the Union, changed the meaning of the War and ensured the destruction of slavery was adopted as a Union war aim. As the end of the War approached, the wide-ranging services these men and women had provided pressed the additional question of black citizenship upon the government. The vision of citizenship and post-emancipation life which these (now) freedpeople demanded was highly influenced by the experiences of enslavement, the political visions which they had imagined in servitude, and the conditions under which they labored in Union contraband camps. With the end of the War, and passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, slavery was abolished, and African-Americans were granted citizenship, redefining citizenship for all Americans in the process.

The revolutionary actions taken by enslaved people during and after the Civil War would not have been possible had it not been for their development of antebellum information and communication networks which afforded at least basic knowledge of national political circumstances. From the earliest years of American slavery, enslaved people had developed means of acquiring political information against the wishes of their masters, who often sought to keep them uneducated and ill-informed. Many eavesdropped on their masters, who discussed current events in front of the very men and women they had hoped to keep in the dark. Historian Eugene Genovese notes some planters, believing their laborers “too stupid to reflect on what they had heard,” brought their slaves along to political meetings or events, allowing them to learn about abstract concepts like liberty, equality, and rights.[1] One enslaved woman demanded her freedom from her master explaining it was guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. When asked how she had heard of the Constitution, her response neatly summarized slaves’ political strategy; she responded, “By keeping still and mindin’ things.”[2] Literate slaves, of which there were “one or two in each neighborhood,” were even more politically attuned, as they were able to read newspapers, pamphlets, and posters which kept them informed of the brewing sectional crisis.[3]

The expansion of print media and powerful political parties in the 1820s and 30s only increased these opportunities for enslaved people to gather political information. As a result of the growth of the printing industry bondsmen and women, “could now become familiar with the language and issues of local and national politics…from the lips of politicians speaking at campaign stops, court days, and barbecues they attended, [and] from the mushrooming number of newspapers that political parties sponsored and slaves might get ahold of.”[4] This danger (from the point of view of planters) was especially prevalent during election years, when political information was at its most accessible and radical. As historian Eugene Genovese describes in From Rebellion to Revolution: “Every election campaign echoed the language of the American Revolution and threatened to generate slave unrest no matter how much care was taken to control the rhetoric.”[5] Slaves who encountered these speeches surely internalized their themes of liberty and equality, and would later put this information to use when making demands for emancipation and citizenship. Equally important to their growth as political actors, however, was the means they developed to disseminate this information.

The network of communication which slaves had developed in the antebellum era, referred to as the “grapevine telegraph,” served as a powerful force in the formation of a collective meaning of the Civil War and in the post-war construction of black citizenship. One of the most significant ways in which slaves were able to pass information to one another was through cross-plantation family ties. The buying and selling of slaves inevitably split families apart. These separated family members often would never see each other again. However, in cases of relatives sold to nearby plantations or in the case of cross-plantation marriages, masters were forced to “yield to demographic realities and pressure from their slaves, and to permit regular social interaction across farms or plantations.”[6] Slaves were, at times, permitted to leave the plantation for reasons other than family visits. Some performed extra labor on neighboring plantations in order to earn a (meager) wage, and large numbers met during community events including, “Fourth of July barbecues, corn shuckings, marriages, and funerals.”[7] It was at large, exciting, and often patriotic events, like Fourth of July barbecues, where masters took the most care in limiting slaves’ exposure to revolutionary zeal. One planter snidely advised his companions to avoid talk of the country’s revolutionary past during these events, and to focus on more mundane matters; he remarked, “instead of listening to the rehearsal of the victories over the British, let them rejoice in their well-earned triumph in their long, hard contest with ‘General Green’ that is with crab-grass.”[8] When put together, these usually small bits of information painted a broad picture of the country’s political situation. The grapevine telegraph and the knowledge slaves passed along were invaluable at the outset of the Civil War, as they allowed slaves not only to understand their political surroundings, but to form their own idea of the war’s purpose.

Enslaved people’s conception of the War centered around the possibility of their emancipation and future dreams of citizenship. It is remarkable that slaves saw the War as a means of achieving these ends considering the early hostility of most Northerners to the prospect of emancipation. As expressed by a group of Union volunteers, whose view was not uncommon among Northerners (Democrats especially), “to the flag we are pledged, all its foes we abhor, And we ain’t for the nigger, but we are for the War.”[9] Slaves looking to the federal government as an ally saw no more evidence of friendship; in fact, at the outset of the War, Lincoln had promised, “with the strong support of Congress” to, “respect the ‘established institutions’ when his armies marched South.”[10] Regardless, enslaved men and women continued to see the Union army as a powerful potential ally, even before the federal government had considered adopting emancipation as a War objective.[11] Almost a decade after the War, Alonzo Jackson, who was enslaved in South Carolina, explained his support for the Union telling an interviewer, “I sympathized with the Union cause ‘I knew what I needed most and looked that way certain!’ I wanted to be free—and wanted my race to be free…All the time during, and before the war, I felt as I do now that, the Union people were the best friends of the colored people.”[12]

Ironically, this vision of the Union Army as an emancipatory force was largely influenced by Southerners themselves who repeatedly charged Northerners with being “Black Republicans,” acting not only to destroy slavery, but also in pursuit of racial equality. Secession commissioners, who traveled throughout the South drumming up support for rebellion, were some of the loudest voices making such claims during the secession crisis. Judge William Harris, a commissioner speaking in Georgia, argued in favor of secession because, “they have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and negro races, under our Constitution; equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony.”[13] After repeatedly overhearing and commenting on private conversations, or speeches like the one given by Judge Harris, it’s not surprising that slaves saw the War as a means of achieving their liberation and gaining citizenship. As the first shots of the War were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861, enslaved people began to act on the collective vision they had formed, escaping toward Union lines and the freedom they believed was waiting for them.

As the War began small waves of slaves fled to Union lines seeking refuge, protection from their masters, and ultimately, their liberation. Thanks to the grapevine telegraph, slaves often knew the location of nearby Union camps and were able to direct their flight accordingly. The decision to flee toward Union lines was a deliberate one; they were not seeking a respite from work as slaves often had when truant. Rather, the decision to flee specifically to Union lines can be explained, “by the freedom slaves expected to find there: an assessment that clearly suggests some knowledge, understanding, or interpretation of the course of political events that slaves surely shared with one another.”[14] Although slaves had fled from bondage for over a century, the War provided circumstances that made running away a powerful, political action which could provide a means to emancipation and strike a blow against the larger institution of slavery. As more men and women escaped and sought refuge behind Union lines, they began to force a powerful question upon the government; the terms of debate over slavery’s role in the war had begun to change dramatically. Historian James Oakes describes a situation in which, “the choice was no longer emancipation or not, but re-enslavement or not.”[15]

Many government officials, even if they felt uneasy about emancipation, could not support a policy of re-enslavement; furthermore some (including Lincoln) felt that re-enslavement was impractical in any event, as the newly liberated slaves would surely resist their return to bondage with ferocity.[16] Union policy caught up to the changing attitudes of government officials, when Gen. Benjamin Butler allowed escaped slaves to remain behind his lines at Fortress Monroe, which he explained in a May 27, 1861, letter as, “a measure of necessity to deprive their masters of their services.”[17] Butler’s decision to accept able-bodied men and women, then, was based primarily on military necessity. The admission of their families, on the other hand, he considered a matter of morality. In the same letter, Butler questioned General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, “As a political question and as a question of humanity, can I receive the services of a Father and a Mother and not take the children? Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt. Of the political one I have no right to judge.”[18]

After being approved by Scott and Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Butler’s decision marked the first government act that lent credence to the slaves’ vision of a war for emancipation, and it began the slow transformation of the Union Army into an army of liberation as well as one of reunion.  In the coming years, Butler’s order would be followed by the passage of the First and Second Confiscation Acts, which “declared that all slaves owned by Confederate masters would be free once they crossed into Union lines”[19] On January 1, 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, completing the transformation of the army’s role which Butler had begun almost two years prior. However, because the Emancipation Proclamation did not practically free any slave, as they would only be freed upon escaping to Union lines, its most consequential provision was surely the enrollment of black Union soldiers. Although slaves welcomed behind Union lines had previously been allowed only to labor, the growing need for manpower in a prolonged War had essentially forced the government to approve a policy of black enlistment. Prior to the Proclamation’s issuance one Union officer, in response to a government questionnaire sent to black contraband camps, described the need for such a measure, writing, “Yes, arm him! It will do him worlds of good. He will know then he has rights, and are to maintain them—a grand step towards manhood. Arm him! For our country needs soldiers. Arm him!—for the rebels need enemies, & heaven knows the blacks have reason to be that.”[20] The enrollment of black soldiers offered both free black northerners and escaped slaves an entirely new opportunity in the War. The willingness they showed to fight and die for the Union cause created the possibility of a radical change in the relationship between African-Americans and the federal government. By issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union had firmly committed itself to the complete destruction of slavery as a war aim; a fate that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years prior.

W.E.B. DuBois, in Black Reconstruction in America, described slaves’ military service as the key factor which solidified emancipation as a Union war aim, remarking, “Later his services as a soldier were not only permitted but were demanded to replace the tired and rebellious white men of the North. But as a soldier, the Negro must be free.[21] If it was this military service which cemented slaves’ emancipation, it was the entirety of their labor, both military and otherwise, which opened a space for slaves to bargain for citizenship as the War drew to a close. From the moment slaves arrived at Union Army camps they had assisted officials by providing vital intelligence. Abner Doubleday, a Union general stationed in D.C. described the importance of the information they provided in a letter to a New York regiment’s commander, saying, “they bring much valuable information which cannot be obtained from any other source. They are acquainted with all the roads, paths, fords, and other natural features of the country and…they also know and frequently have exposed the haunts of secession spies and traitors and the existence of rebel organization.”[22] Escaped slaves, and the information they brought with them, were invaluable assets to the Union cause, as northern troops were unfamiliar in their Southern surroundings. By accepting slaves behind their lines, Union officers were able to tap into the grapevine telegraph, which continued to operate throughout the War, providing them access to a unique network of intelligence spread across the region.

Liberated slaves, male and female alike, also provided various forms of labor to the Union cause, often under highly exploitative conditions. The labor of “able-bodied men” often took on a military function, including the construction of fortifications, roads, and levees; others, including both men and women, could be put to work in Union contraband camps or on plantations under federal control. Slaves who escaped to these camps relied entirely upon the Union army for personal protection and an enduring freedom.[23] Due to their lack of bargaining power, escapees were often forced into highly coercive and abusive forms of labor which afforded them little to no payment for their work. In response to a federal questionnaire, the superintendent of a camp in Corinth, Mississippi noted, “All men, except for the infirm, & few for camp, employed. All women, save those having large families or small children;—generally reported industrious and faithful, when half [decently?] treated. Many have worked from 2 to 12 months, and never received a cent or a rag yet as reward.”[24] It was not uncommon for Union laborers to remain unpaid through the duration of their service, all the while working in conditions one antislavery pastor in a Virginia contraband camp, described as, “government slavery.”[25] Although they often remained unpaid, freed men and women continued to labor for the Union in jobs including, “digging, ditching, weeding, hoeing, hauling, distributing, nursing, [and] scouting.”[26]

The labor former slaves performed in Union Army camps would also prove a powerful force in shaping their visions of post-emancipation life. Freed men and women, while working for the Union, began to form a distinct vision of life after the War, and the rights and opportunities they believed themselves entitled to as a result of their wartime service and previous enslavement. The first, and most consequential, of these demands was citizenship, and as the War came to a close, freedpeople forced the federal government to address this additional, monumental decision.

As it had in the government’s adoption of emancipation as a war aim, the military service of black soldiers played a central role in freedpeople’s demands for citizenship. African-Americans had argued that their willingness to fight and die for the Union entitled them to citizenship as early as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. In a speech that same year, Frederick Douglass explained to his crowd, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S…and…there is no power on earth…which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”[27] The pressure faced by the government was only compounded when considering the labor freedpeople had provided in contraband camps, on occupied plantations, and behind Union lines. While working in these spaces, freedpeople became very politically active and began to shape a collective vision of their post-war futures. In fact, black Union laborers, “did not just use the language of citizenship as a meaningless trope, nor did they talk about ‘rights’ vaguely; to the contrary, they generated a consistent list of the exact rights they believed their wartime service obligated the federal government to protect.”[28] It was the totality of this service and political activity, and the mounting pressure which it placed on the government that led to a previously unthinkable change in policy in the years shortly after the War.

With the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the federal government enshrined black citizenship into law, agreeing that freedmen had earned the rights it afforded in return for their service, labor, and sacrifice. Although it was not until three years after the War’s end that the Amendment was ratified (Congress had passed it in 1866), a favorable sentiment to the proposition of black citizenship had already emerged among Union officials much earlier. So prevalent was that support, “by the midpoint of the war, even Gen. Nathaniel Banks, a former democrat widely criticized by soldiers…for being more sympathetic to southern whites than former slaves, insisted that by virtue of their labor, former slaves deserved the ‘privileges of citizenship’ not as ‘a boon conferred, but a right conquered.’”[29] The services former slaves provided to the Union cause, both military and otherwise, were clearly central to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the extension of citizenship to African-Americans. Along with this newfound citizenship, however, freedpeople expected the right to vote.

In making demands for suffrage, freedpeople sought to protect the gains they had made over the course of the War and to cement their budding alliance with the federal government. In the eyes of many, voting was a means of continuing the fight against rebellious Southerners after the War. This point was repeatedly articulated in post-war Colored Conventions held throughout the country, in which groups of black men gathered to discuss their collective futures and make demands of the federal government. A group of 59 men in an 1865 Colored Convention in Nashville, Tennessee expressed their demands, arguing, “what higher order of the citizen is there than the soldier?…If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot box? The latter is as necessary to save the Government as the former.”[30] In addition to the moral and political pillars upon which freedpeople rested their claims for suffrage, they included a historical component, as well. Supporters of black suffrage repeatedly emphasized the fact that African-Americans had voted in many elections in the late 18th and early 19th centuries including, in Tennessee, a “period of thirty-nine years [in which] free colored men voted at all her elections without question.”[31] Through the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 (which enfranchised only black men), freedmen were given the right to vote, marking the end of their long journey from slaves to enfranchised citizens. Unfortunately, the hopeful visions for the future which many freedpeople had in the decade after the War would soon be dashed. They had certainly succeeded in gaining citizenship and freedom, but their desire for safety, economic change and independence, and the vote was soon torn from their hands. 

Again, while enslaved, black men and women were aware of and internalized patriotic political rhetoric about liberty, equality, and the Bill of Rights. When making demands, then, they drew upon these supposedly American values, and sought not simply to be legally recognized as equal with whites, but also to have the same degrees of freedom and self-sufficiency. Their ability to form and make such demands was facilitated by their conditions working in Union contraband camps. As the War raged on, camps began to swell with escapees and soon became spaces of fervent political activity in which former slaves constructed their vision of “black prospects in a post-emancipation world.”[32] In their attempt to improve their prospects after emancipation, freedpeople first sought to address the worst of the abuses they suffered in bondage. It is understandable, then, that one of their most important demands was safety and protection both for themselves and their families. After over a century of being forcibly separated from loved ones and forced into violent, coercive labor practices, freedpeople sought official recognition for their marriages, in order to ensure their families could not be separated again, and assurances from the government that they could not be returned into servitude once freed. Freedpeople’s desire for safety was a crucial first step to achieving the lasting freedom they so desired, but if they were to be truly self-sufficient, it would require radical changes to the coercive labor processes of the plantations South.

In their pursuit of independence, freedpeople pressed the issue of fair pay for their work and greater control over the labor process. Their demand was, of course, shaped largely by their former masters’ complete appropriation of their labor, but also by the limited systems of independent production and exchange which they had developed while enslaved. Often permitted by their masters to farm small plots of land, enslaved people grew all sorts of agricultural goods which they ate to supplement their often meager rations and exchanged with one another. Historian Steven Hahn argues these small-scale markets, however meager they were, “permitted the slaves to enact various rituals of reciprocity that implicitly rejected the condition of enslavement and envisioned, if not insisted on, alternative possibilities.”[33] The limited exposure slaves had to independent and reciprocal market interactions provided them with a template for the types of economic relations they expected as future, presumably equal citizens. Moreover, just as the oppressive labor conditions of slavery had impacted their vision of post-emancipation life, so did the exploitation they encountered laboring in Union contraband camps.

Although the time freedmen spent laboring in Union camps was short, it proved very influential in shaping their demands for improved economic and labor practices. The unequal, and often entirely absent, wages black laborers were subjected to only increased their desire for fair pay and reciprocity as citizens, as did the seizure of property which usually awaited them upon successfully reaching Union lines. The small amount of property fleeing slaves brought with them, including goods they had produced or bartered for, was often seized by officers and soldiers who accused them of stealing from their masters.[34] Escaped slaves who arrived in Union camps with optimistic visions of free labor had their hopes dashed at the outset. The forced labor, inadequate pay, and seizure of property which they experienced, both in camp and in bondage, shaped their desire for reciprocity in exchange and a greater degree of control over their labor. Unsatisfied with these coercive labor practices, freedpeople, “expected more from freedom than wage-labor under close supervision.”[35] They had come to expect nothing less than economic independence; however, they knew it would be impossible to accomplish such a goal without access to a single, crucial resource: land.

Because freedpeople saw land as essential to accomplishing their goals of self-sufficiency and the institution of reciprocal labor practices, they pressed the government to adopt land reform policies as a part of its ‘post-war Reconstruction’ plans. They saw ownership of land as a means of escaping the extreme exploitation they experienced in slavery and in their short time as wage-earners in Union camps.[36] Arguing their service to the Union made them greater post-war allies than traitorous white Southerners, freedpeople sought to take ownership of the occupied and largely abandoned plantations of rebel planters. They first insisted that land ownership was their best means of achieving self-sufficiency. In an interview between Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Gen. William T. Sherman, one black minister (speaking on behalf of a group), explained, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.”[37] Furthermore, they insisted on their willingness to work upon and pay for the land, if only the government would allow them to purchase it on loan beforehand. In a letter to President Lincoln, a group of 20 black ministers expressed the sense of urgency and necessity which freedpeople attached to land reform, writing, “We are all ready and willing of truth anxious to buy all our Masters’ Land and everything upon them…Let us farm it giving one half of all that is raised to the Government.”[38] Although there were some proposals made by radicals in Congress and military officers, including Gen. Sherman’s Field Orders #15 which set aside “40 acres of tillable ground” each for freed slaves’ families to settle upon, meaningful land reform was never enacted during post-war Reconstruction.[39] Resulting in large part from President Andrew Johnson’s personal racism and desire to reconcile with Southern whites, land reform became one of the most significant failures in the movement to shape and improve black post-war life.[40] The arguments freedpeople put forth in support of land reform proved remarkably prescient; as a result of their inability to purchase land, former slaves were, as they had feared, forced back into new forms of coercive labor under the sharecropping system. In this system, freedpeople once again were subjected to unequal payment for their work, a lack of control over the labor process, and widespread violence often at the hands of the same masters they had served in bondage.

At the close of the War, freedpeople were optimistic about their future prospects. They had toiled over the past four years in service of the Union cause and expected to be rewarded with rights and protections from the federal government, namely emancipation and citizenship. Among the rights that they believed citizenship entitled them to, were the protection of their persons and families from violence and the extension of suffrage. Additionally, they also expected to be repaid with certain political changes, namely personal protection, land reform, and the vote, which would allow them to escape the power of their former masters and achieve a degree of economic independence and self-sufficiency. Although the War did bring about the destruction of slavery and the extension of citizenship to African-Americans, freedpeople’s demands for suffrage and independence were largely dashed. As the Northern occupation of the South came to an end through the Compromise of 1877, white Southerners acted quickly to reassert their social dominance over freedpeople. The rise of the Jim Crow System led to the destruction of many of the gains Southern blacks had made since 1865, perhaps most importantly in terms of black suffrage. Black southerners’ recently won right to vote was slowly eroded by the institution of poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and other policies which made it near-impossible for them to cast their ballots. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups only worsened this problem by threatening, beating, and often killing southern blacks who were seen as too political. Furthermore, in the absence of meaningful land reform, recently freed slaves found themselves, once again, dependent on white planters for employment. The system of sharecropping which arose soon after the war’s end ensnared black men and women in a new form of coercive labor, denying them the self-sufficiency they had hoped for. Thus, by the 1880s, the grand dreams of freedpeople were largely in tatters. They found themselves trapped in yet another system of brutal, exploitative labor overseen by white planters; they (and their families) were, again, made victims of widespread white-on-black violence, and the right to vote which they had fought so hard to achieve was torn from their hands by white politicians and violent white supremacist groups, like the KKK.

That being said, it would be a mistake to describe the movement which formerly enslaved people built as a failure. It is certainly true that their post-emancipation hopes for the vote and economic independence were dashed, and it is equally true that a better future for freedpeople was possible after 1865. However, to call their movement a failure would be to deny the monumental changes and successes which they achieved during the Civil War, and the 1860s more generally. Again, at the outset of the War, the federal government was actively hostile to the prospect of emancipation, let alone black citizenship. Lincoln believed he had no right to interfere with slavery in the South, and Northern officers even returned escaped slaves to their masters in the early months of the War. When Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, it marked a seismic shift in Union policy and attitudes toward slavery. In just two short years, federal officials had firmly committed themselves to the destruction of slavery as a war objective and had become open to the prospect of black citizenship which they previously would have considered laughable. Enslaved people’s vision of the War as a conflict of liberation and change was realized at the War’s end; the push for emancipation which had begun with their individual flights to Union lines was undoubtedly successful. Furthermore, although post-emancipation prospects for black southerners fell far short of what they had envisioned, freedpeople were still successful in winning citizenship for themselves. It is impossible to ignore the fact that freedpeople were plunged into new forms of coercive labor and social control after the end of Reconstruction; however, in gaining citizenship, they had earned crucial rights and protections, fundamentally altered the relationship between African-Americans and the federal government and redefined the nature of citizenship for all Americans in the process. Enslaved people had fought in pursuit of their liberation for over a century, but it was only with the outbreak of the Civil War that their actions acquired a powerful, political significance. With this newfound political power, former slaves were able to seize their own freedom from their former masters and become officially recognized as American citizens. Even considering the denial of suffrage, the dashed hopes for self-sufficiency, and the regime of white supremacist terror which would follow the end of Reconstruction, the gains which freedpeople won through their own daring, political actions should be considered nothing short of revolutionary. 

***

[1] Eugene D. Genovese. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006.), 127.

[2] Genovese, 128.

[3] James Oakes. “Political Significance of Slave Resistance.” History Workshop Journal 22.1. (01 Oct. 1986.), 99.

[4] Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.), 55.

[5] Genovese, 128.

[6] Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 35.

[7] Ibid., 41.

[8] Genovese, 127.

[9] W.E. Burghardt DuBois. Black Reconstruction in America. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & co, 1935.), 56.

[10] Steven Hahn. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.), 59.

[11] Manisha Sinha. “Allies for Emancipation?: Lincoln and Black Abolitionists” Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2008.), 168.

[12] Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, et al.“Testimony of Alonzo Jackson” Free at Last, (New York: The New Press, 1992.), 160.

[13] Charles B Dew. Apostles of Disunion. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 26.

[14] Hahn, Political Worlds, 73.

[15] Oakes, 101.

[16] Ibid. 102.

[17] Berlin, Fields, et al. “Letter from Gen. Benjamin F. Butler to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott,” in Free at Last, 10.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Hahn, Political Worlds, 64.

[20] Berlin, Fields, et al. “Federal Questionnaire to Contraband Camp Superintendents,” Free At Last, 199.

[21] DuBois, 66.

[22] Berlin, Fields, et. al. “Letter from Gen. Abner Doubleday to NY Commander.” in Free at last, 36.

[23] Berlin, Fields, et al.196-70.

[24]  Berlin, Fields, et al. “Federal Questionnaire,” in Free at Last, 191.

[25]  Berlin, Fields, et al. “Letter from Lewis C. Lockwood to Sen. Henry Wilson,” in Free at Last, 170.

[26]  Chandra Manning, “Working for Citizenship in Civil War Contraband Camps,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, (2014.), 181.

[27]  Frederick Douglass, “Address for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” (Philadelphia, July 6, 1863), quoted in Manning, 174.

[28] Ibid, 188.

[29] Manning, 182.

[30] Berlin, Fields, et al. “Letter to the Union Convention of Tennessee from 59 Colored Citizens of Nashville,” in Free at Last, 499.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 75.

[33] Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 30.

[34] Berlin, Fields, et al. “Federal Questionnaire” in Free at Last, 121.

[35] Berlin, Fields, et al, 254.

[36] Ibid, 290.

[37] Berlin, Fields, et al. “Interview between Colored Church Ministers in Savannah, GA and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton & General William T. Sherman,” in Free at Last, 314.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Berlin, Fields, et al, 318.

[40] Annette Gordon-Reed,“The President Obstructs,” in, Andrew Johnson, (New York, NY: Times Books, 2011.)