Civil War Humanitarian Crisis

From the UK Guardian, "How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans: In the brutal chaos that followed the civil war, life after emancipation was harsh and often short, new book argues," by Paul Harris New York, on 16 June 2012

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right.

"In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own," Downs told the Observer.

Downs's book is full of terrible vignettes about the individual experiences of slave families who embraced their freedom from the brutal plantations on which they had been born or sold to. Many ended up in encampments called "contraband camps" that were often near union army bases. However, conditions were unsanitary and food supplies limited. Shockingly, some contraband camps were actually former slave pens, meaning newly freed people ended up being kept virtual prisoners back in the same cells that had previously held them. In many such camps disease and hunger led to countless deaths. Often the only way to leave the camp was to agree to go back to work on the very same plantations from which the slaves had recently escaped.

Treatment by union soldiers could also be brutal. Downs reconstructed the experiences of one freed slave, Joseph Miller, who had come with his wife and four children to a makeshift freed slave refugee camp within the union stronghold of Camp Nelson in Kentucky. In return for food and shelter for his family Miller joined the army. Yet union soldiers in 1864 still cleared the ex-slaves out of Camp Nelson, effectively abandoning them to scavenge in a war-ravaged and disease-ridden landscape. One of Miller's young sons quickly sickened and died. Three weeks later, his wife and another son died. Ten days after that, his daughter perished too. Finally, his last surviving child also fell terminally ill. By early 1865 Miller himself was dead. For Downs such tales are heartbreaking. "So many of these people are dying of starvation and that is such a slow death," he said.

Downs has collected numerous shocking accounts of the lives of freed slaves. He came across accounts of deplorable conditions in hospitals and refugee camps, where doctors often had racist theories about how black Americans reacted to disease. Things were so bad that one military official in Tennessee in 1865 wrote that former slaves were: "dying by scores – that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagonloads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench".

So bad were the health problems suffered by freed slaves, and so high the death rates, that some observers of the time even wondered if they would all die out. One white religious leader in 1863 expected black Americans to vanish. "Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us," the man wrote.

Such racial attitudes among northerners seem shocking, but Downs says they were common. Yet Downs believes that his book takes nothing away from the moral value of the emancipation.

Instead, he believes that acknowledging the terrible social cost born by the newly emancipated accentuates their heroism.

"This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost," Downs said. (source: UK The Guardian)

Civil War Contraband Camps of North Carolina

In the illustration above, Union troops distribute clothes to a contraband camp in New Bern, NC. [Image: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, NC.]

Contraband Camps

Before the end of the Civil War, as Union troops occupied more and more of North Carolina during the Civil War, more and more slaves fled to Union lines to live in what were then called contraband camps. Contrabands were escaped slaves from the Confederate territory into Union territory. By late 1861, Union generals in North Carolina refused to return contrabands to their owners, so that the Confederacy might be deprived of its slave labor. Contraband camps were located on the outskirts of Union encampments and provided a haven for escaped slaves.

'The effects of the proclamaition – freed Negroes coming into our lines at Newbern, North Carolina.' Harper's Weekly, Feb. 21, 1863.

In the camps, contrabands worked for wages; however, they were not always paid in cash. The deduction of food and clothing lowered their wages. Despite the loss in wages, contrabands received formal education previously denied in the past. Northern missionaries from the American Missionary Association and the New York branch of the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, for example, started schools for escaped slaves. Contrabands also started and maintained their own schools and churches. As noted by historian Patricia Click, once Union forces gained control over several areas in coastal North Carolina, escaped slaves fled into the occupied territory. By the midsummer of 1862, over 10,000 contrabands were living in Union-occupied areas.

In April 1863, Major General John G. Foster appointed Horace James, an evangelical Congregationalist minister and abolitionist from Worcester, Massachusetts, as the superintendent of Negro Affairs. James supervised contraband camps at Beaufort, New Bern, Plymouth, Roanoke Island, and Washington. The number nearly doubled by January 1864, with 17,419 contrabands living within Union lines. In North Carolina, contraband camps varied in size. Out of the six camps, New Bern became the largest with 8,591 contrabands. The rest contained a total of 8,801: 2,426, in Beaufort, 89 in Hatteras, 860 in Plymouth, 2,712 in Roanoke Island, and 2,714 in Washington.

Three of the six camps were destroyed by Confederate attack. Only Beaufort, New Bern, and Roanoke Island survived. (source: North Carolina History)

Philip Morgan: Early American Slave Culture

T.H. Breen reviews Philip Morgan's book "Slave Counterpoint" on 19 July 1998, in the New York Times -- In 1754 an American tobacco planter residing in England decided to send his slave Aron back to Virginia. Joseph Ball expressed great concern for Aron's welfare, instructing white overseers in the colony to provide the slave with a ''framed House,'' a sturdy bed and a selection of ''Household Goods.'' Ball even promised Aron ''the Liberty of a Horse to Ride to Church.'' But no sooner had Aron landed in Virginia than his ''Loving Master'' announced in a letter that if the slave ever seemed ''unruly,'' he ''must be tyd up and Slasht Severly, and pickled'' (to be pickled was to have salt and vinegar rubbed into one's wounds).

In ''Slave Counterpoint'' Philip D. Morgan builds curious fragments of experience, like Aron's tale, into a massive reconstruction of life in the 18th-century American South. He touches on an impressive range of topics: the material culture of plantations, patterns of work, contacts between whites and blacks in commerce, recreation, worship and sex. Most important, he helps us understand how African-Americans caught up in a web of interdependencies made sense of their lives, not as slaves but as human beings.

This was a world of irreconcilable contradictions. In encounters with whites, black people who were defined as chattel insisted on recognition of their humanity. In this society, no one escaped from slavery's pervasive grip. The plantations in the Chesapeake Bay counties of Virginia and the Lowcountry areas of South Carolina lying nearest to the oceanfront were scenes of constant negotiation, perpetual struggles between body and soul, as masters and slaves, blacks and whites, men and women tried to comprehend an all-embracing labor system that was ''no curious abnormality, no aberration, no marginal feature of early America.'' The originality of this study derives from Morgan's utterly persuasive -- and deeply disturbing -- contention that slavery was ''a fundamental, acceptable, thoroughly American institution.''

As the character of colonial slavery evolved, so did patterns of race relations. Morgan distinguishes three stages of development. Encounters that occurred in the 17th century, for example, were strikingly different from those of the Revolutionary era. White settlers in early Virginia adopted slavery with muted enthusiasm. European indentured servants made up a much larger percentage of the labor force than did Africans. Personal contacts between the two groups tended to be more open, more fluid. Black slaves and indentured whites frequently ran away together and on several occasions resisted Virginia authorities with force of arms.

But during the early decades of the 18th century the demography of the American slave societies suddenly shifted. In both Chesapeake Virginia and Lowcountry South Carolina an insatiable appetite for field workers triggered a flood of new slaves, most of whom came from Angola, the Bight of Biafra and Senegambia. These Africans -- overwhelmingly young males -- whose cultures and languages the whites could not understand, frightened the planter class, and the colonial gentry moved decisively not only to discipline an exploding slave population but also to discourage informal relations between the races.

During the third phase of slave development, the two regions took sharply divergent paths. By the mid-1700's Virginia planters no longer relied on a supply of laborers imported directly from Africa. The reasons for this shift were complex. An improvement in life expectancy coupled with a more balanced sex ratio allowed slaves more easily to find mates and to produce a large mixed population. Chesapeake blacks paid a cultural price for the opportunity to form families, however, for with each passing year African-Americans found it harder to sustain the Old World customs and languages of their parents. The Lowcountry followed a different course. Throughout the century rice plantations continued to absorb thousands of new slaves, many of whom died within a year of arrival. On the eve of the American Revolution, 35 percent of the slaves of South Carolina were Africans, while in Virginia only 9 percent of the blacks had experienced the infamous Middle Passage.

From "Slave Counterpoint": "An Overseer Doing His Duty Sketched From Life Near Fredericsburg," by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1798.

The quality of material life depended a lot on where the slave lived. Morgan recognizes that comparisons of this sort raise hard interpretive problems. After all, enslavement is objectionable in any form. But he brings subtlety and common sense to sensitive issues. An African-American working in the Chesapeake colonies was most likely better fed, clothed and housed than a slave in the Lowcountry. The explanation for different treatment has almost nothing to do with generosity of spirit. Masters in both regions wanted to maximize returns on capital investment. It was just that in rice-producing areas potential profits were much larger than in the tobacco colonies. The great planters of South Carolina thought nothing of sending gangs of Africans to labor in extremely unhealthy conditions. Some slaves survived, many died; all could be replaced. But in the Chesapeake, amortizing an initial expenditure took much longer, and it made good financial sense to attend to the slaves' diet and health. The irony was that the continuing influx of new slaves into the Lowcountry, combined with the large concentrations of field hands on rice plantations, meant that African culture, if not individual Africans, survived much longer in South Carolina than in Virginia. The conditions of work may have been horrendous, but as Morgan explains, ''Rice cultivation provided Lowcountry slaves with greater autonomy, more residential stability and a chance to incorporate more African practices into their work routines than tobacco cultivation did for Chesapeake slaves.''

During the early decades of the 18th century, masters of large Southern plantations expressed not the slightest defensiveness about denying freedom to thousands of slaves. White colonists often adopted the language of the Old Testament, depicting themselves as ''the Patriarchs of old.'' The great planters assumed absolute power over their slaves, and when one of these self-styled fathers concluded that a black laborer had challenged his authority -- by running away, for example -- patriarchal concern for the worker's well-being could turn vengeful. Robert (King) Carter, Virginia's wealthiest tobacco planter, cut off the toes of slaves who repeatedly attempted to escape. And no white contemporary in that region criticized such drastic punishment. No wonder that when George Ogilvie established a plantation on the Santee River in 1774, he imagined himself ''like the Tyrant of some Asiatick Isle the only free Man in an Island of Slaves.''

By the end of the century, however, declarations of naked power embarrassed even hardened slaveholders. Perhaps as a result of the spread of evangelical Protestantism throughout the South, masters felt obliged to proclaim their sincere attachment to the slaves. African-American workers, they claimed, were members of extended plantation communities -- in the words of one master, objects of ''domestic affection.'' When slaves resisted, masters whined that the blacks ''don't love me.'' In fact, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, some white paternalists accused rebellious slaves of ingratitude. In 1803 Benjamin Smith, a South Carolinian, pleaded his case against Bristol, a slave who had run away. ''He has now left my service without the slightest provocation,'' Smith cried, ''without having ever been whipped in it, without undergoing the most laborious and disagreeable part of duty.'' With great reluctance he offered a $50 reward literally for Bristol's head.

However the masters justified their actions, the slaves took advantage of whatever opportunities for personal independence came their way, accommodating themselves to the incessant demands of the dominant culture while preserving memories of an African past. They enjoyed partial victories. Against extraordinary odds black people in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry managed to create families, and in their courageous insistence on reaching out to loved ones, they forced masters to recognize their humanity. Morgan, a professor of history at the College of William and Mary, set out to provide ''a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and of the ability of slaves to shape their lives.'' He has succeeded splendidly, and in the process reminded modern readers that the world of the 18th century is not so distant as they sometimes imagine. (source: New York Times)

Philip Morgan: Early American Slave Culture

Philip Morgan: Early American Slave Culture from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

Ira Berlin: Slavery in America

Q - How does"Generations" differ from other histories about slavery?

A - Most of the studies of slavery have concentrated on the relationship between the master and the slave. What I'm interested in, in Generations of Captivity, is how that relationship changes over time and how the lives of black people change over time, and how, by being a slave, you're not one thing but you're many different things.

Q - Is"Generations" an attempt to challenge our views about slavery?

A - Most of our understanding about slavery comes directly before the Civil War, directly before emancipation. When you ask most people about what they think about slavery, when I ask my students what they think about slavery, they'll tell you cotton, they'll talk about the"Deep South," they might even talk about the African Christian Church and Afro-Christianity. We know for most of the history of slavery, most people did not grow cotton, they didn't live in the black belt, they didn't live in the Deep South and probably they were not Christians. Those things happened very, very late in a very small part of the 300-year history of slavery in mainland North America. Looking at the entire history gives us a sense of development, gives us a sense of change, and helps us understand how things became what they did become.

Q - How important is slavery to American history?

A - Slavery is at the center of the history of the United States. We can't understand the history of the United States without slavery. Slaves were central to the economy of the United States. The American colonies, the republic that was formed out of the colonies, the tobacco, the rice, indigo, sugar, eventually the cotton they grow brings capital into the United States. That capital becomes central to the creation of the economy that we enjoy today. The people who controlled that economy were able to translate their economic power into political power. If we look at the history of the country from the history of the republic to the Civil War, most of our presidents are slaveholders and very substantial slaveholders. Our Supreme Court was controlled by slaveholders. The Congress, for a good part of this period, is controlled by slaveholders. I think that the fact that these people could control our politics made them very central in shaping our values. And I think it's no accident that slaveholders make freedom a central value in American society. They understood what it might mean to be a slave. So they were extremely conscious about freedom.

Q - Can we, as a people, ever make peace with what happened? Can we deal with slavery and its impact on America and move on?

A - Well, we're going to have to deal with it. It's not a very happy or pleasant subject. It's not something that one gets over. One does not get over history, one just has to come to terms with it. I think that's one of the things that's happening in our own present society. We're wrestling with the subject; we're trying to come to terms with it. And I think the debates about slavery, about apologies, about affirmative action, about reparations all reflect on the institution of slavery...are attempts to come to terms with it. It's not going to go away because we come to understand it, it's just that we will have a better understanding of it and be able, as a people, to deal with it.... (source: History News Network)

Ira Berlin: Slavery in America from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Slave Insurrections as Insurgencies

Stono's Rebellion -- September 9, 1739

Stono's rebellion was only one among the 250 rebellions documented in the Colonies and later in the southern United States. In 1822, a conspiracy to incite 9,000 slaves became known as Vesey's Rebellion. After Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, where nearly 60 white people were killed, Turner was executed.

When the slave owners caught up with the rebels from the Stono River in 1739, they engaged the 60 to 100 slaves in a battle. More than 20 white Carolinians, and nearly twice as many black Carolinians, were killed. As a result, South Carolina's lawmakers enacted a harsher slave code. This new code severely limited the privileges of slaves. They were no longer allowed to grow their own food, assemble in groups, earn their own money or learn to read. Some of these restrictions were already in place, but they had not been strictly enforced.

Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited African-American educator Booker T. Washington, who had become close to the president, to dine with his family at the White House. Several other presidents had invited African-Americans to meetings at the White House, but never to a meal. And in 1901, segregation was law.

News of the dinner between a former slave and the president of the United States became a national sensation. The subject of inflammatory articles and cartoons, it shifted the national conversation around race at the time.

NPR's Neal Conan talks with Deborah Davis, author of Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation about the dinner that she believes changed history.

Interview Highlights

On why inviting a black man to dinner crossed a social boundary

"African-Americans were invited to meet in offices. They built the White House. They worked for the various presidents. But they were never, ever invited to sit down at the president's table. And when that happened, the outrage was just unbelievable. ...

" 'Dining,' and I put it in quotation marks, was really a code word for social equality. And the feeling was, certainly in the South, that if you invited a man to sit at your table, you were actually inviting him to woo your daughter. He should feel perfectly comfortable asking your daughter to marry him. And so that's really the primary reason why people were so offended. It just shouldn't happen in 1901 that a black man would be able to ... have that entree into your family."

On why Roosevelt extended the invitation, and Washington accepted

"Theodore Roosevelt was known for being a very, very impulsive man. But this was a good impulse. He had an appointment with Booker T. Washington. At the last minute, he thought, 'Let's make it dinner.' He started to send out the invitation, and he hesitated for a second, thinking, 'Is this a bad idea because of this man's color?' And he was so ashamed that he hesitated, that he hastened to send the invitation out before he could change his mind.

"Now, Booker T. Washington faced the same thing when he had to decide whether or not to accept the invitation. He thought, 'This is going to be a real problem for me, but I have no right to refuse. It's a landmark moment, and I have to accept this on behalf of my whole race.' ...

"[But] he understood what the aftermath would be and the backlash."

On the furor following the dinner

"There was hell to pay, first weeks, then months, then years, then decades. This story did not go away. And, you know, an assassin was hired to go to Tuskegee to kill Booker T. Washington. He was pursued wherever he went. Theodore Roosevelt was criticized in ways that presidents were not criticized. There were vulgar cartoons of Mrs. Roosevelt that had never been done before. This was all new territory.

"There were some interesting spinning sessions that went on among Republicans. One was to turn the dinner into lunch, because it seems that lunch would be a less objectionable meal, and so the story went that, no, you know, Booker T. Washington didn't go to the dining room at the White House. He was sitting in the office, and they got hungry and they ordered a tray. And by the time they were finished, there was barely a sandwich on it. And that seemed to make the meal a little more palatable in the South. ...

"And this persisted for decades, actually, until finally in the '30s, a journalist asked Mrs. Roosevelt, was it lunch or was it dinner? And she checked her calendar, and she said it was most definitely dinner." (source: NPR)

BBC -- Abraham Lincoln Saint or Sinner

The Union War

From the Washington Post, "Review: Gary W. Gallagher’s “The Union War,” by Jonathan Yardley, Published: April 15, 2011

This exceptionally fine book is in effect a companion piece to its author’s “The Confederate War,” published in 1997. In that volume Gary W. Gallagher argued that despite the obvious advantages enjoyed by the Union in manpower, materiel and industrial production, the Confederacy was not doomed from the start to lose the war, as so many of his fellow historians insist. To the contrary, he overturned the conventional wisdom by documenting the passion with which the Rebel armed forces embraced their cause and the extraordinary determination and valor with which they fought for it.

Now, in “The Union War,” Gallagher is back to take issue with what has become the new conventional wisdom, that the North fought the war in order to achieve the emancipation of the slaves. While welcoming the post-civil-rights-era emphasis on “slavery, emancipation, and the actions of black people, unfairly marginalized for decades in writings about the conflict,” Gallagher makes a very strong case — in my view a virtually irrefutable one — that the overriding motive in the North was preservation of the Union. “Students and adults interested in the Civil War,” he writes, “are reluctant to believe that anyone would risk life or fortune for something as abstract as ‘the Union.’ A war to end slavery seems more compelling.” Indeed it does, but it embroiders historical truth in order to suit the cultural and ideological mood of the moment.

Part of the problem lies in the understandable difficulty that many people have in distinguishing causes from motives. There was “a very widely held belief among Union soldiers that slavery had caused the war,” and indeed as Gallagher correctly notes, “it is beyond dispute that controversies relating to slavery precipitated secession and by extension the outbreak of fighting in 1861.” But it is one thing for rank-and-file soldiers to understand why the war started and quite another for us to attribute motives to them that in fact only a minuscule percentage actually felt. Gallagher writes:

“Much recent Civil War scholarship obscures the importance of Union for the wartime generation. Two interpretive threads run through such literature. The first and more prominent suggests the Union of 1860-61 scarcely deserved to be defended at the cost of any bloodshed. The second argues that a major shift in war aims occurred when northerners realized that only emancipation made their level of sacrifice worthwhile. In both instances, modern sensibilities distort our view of how participants of a distant era understood the war.”

Thus one historian, Orville Vernon Burton, advances the currently fashionable notion that “the republic threatened by southern secession in 1860-61 was ‘grounded in ruthless ideas of inequality of race, class, and gender,’ ” while another, Walter A. McDougall, insists that “if preserving the Union was the war’s deepest meaning, then it merely restored the status quo ante bellum.” In other words, since the Union was an imperfect place before the war and remained one in “a postwar era dominated by rampant racism, nationalism, and imperialism,” if the war was fought to restore the Union, in the words of Barbara J. Fields, a star of Ken Burn’s TV series about the war, it was “a goal too shallow to be worth the sacrifice of a single life.”

All this politically correct twaddle plays fast and loose with the facts. Gallagher makes a polite bow to those who spout it — “it is important to know how northern society dealt with race and gender and how it conceived of freedom, liberty, and opportunity” — but then closes the case: “simply describing the many ways in which wartime northerners fell short of later standards of acceptable thought and behavior yields little understanding.” Drawing on “letters, diaries, newspapers, books, broadsides, illustrative materials, and other evidence produced at the time,” he “seeks not to decide whether we like or dislike the Civil War generation but to understand them and their actions.”

What he finds, over and over again, is that in the North “the mass of loyal citizens equated “the Union” with “the Nation” and believed beyond question that it had to be defended and preserved:

“It represented the cherished legacy of the founding generation, a democratic republic with a constitution that guaranteed political liberty and afforded individuals a chance to better themselves economically. From the perspective of loyal Americans, their republic stood as the only hope for democracy in a western world that had fallen more deeply into the stifling embrace of oligarchy since the failed European revolutions of the 1840s. Slaveholding aristocrats who established the Confederacy, believed untold unionists, posed a direct threat not only to the long-term success of the American republic but also to the broader future of democracy. Should armies of citizen-soldiers fail to restore the Union, forces of privilege on both sides of the Atlantic could pronounce ordinary people incapable of self-government and render irrelevant the military sacrifices and political genius of the Revolutionary fathers.”

The words of Daniel Webster, spoken on the Senate floor in January 1830, became fighting words for the North: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” As Gallagher says, “Recapturing how the concept of Union resonated and reverberated throughout the loyal states in the Civil War era is critical to grasping northern motivation. No single word in our contemporary vocabulary shoulders so much historical, political, and ideological meaning; none can stir deep emotional currents so easily. Devotion to the Union functioned as a bonding agent among Americans who believed, as a citizenry and a nation under the Constitution, they were destined for greatness on the world stage.”

To virtually all except “abolitionists and some Radical Republicans,” the “liberation of enslaved people took a back seat to saving the Union.” Still, this “does not drain all value from a war for constitutional law and a democratic republic on the northern model.” The North may have been imperfect in 1861: “Women, free and enslaved black people, and others did not partake fully of what most northerners would have defined as liberties and freedoms at the center of their popular republic.” One need only contemplate what would have happened to the slaves and their descendants had the South won, however, to understand how absolutely essential a northern victory was, whatever the motives of those who fought it.

“Troops commanded by officers who cared nothing about black people — William Tecumseh Sherman comes immediately to mind — proved as destructive to slavery as those led by ardent advocates of emancipation,” Gallagher writes. “No matter how prejudiced their own attitudes, Union soldiers functioned as cogs in a grand military mechanism that inexorably ground down slavery.” He quotes from a letter written by an infantryman from Iowa whose regiment was welcomed ecstatically by an old black woman in Alabama:

“It was no new thing to us to be hailed by these bondsmen as their deliverers; yet if we some times stopped to think of it, there would come a strange question, how much we really deserved their gratitude? But thinking is the very least of a soldier’s business; and so the incident and its impressions passed out of mind altogether, as the important trivialities of the march succeeded.”

Gallagher, who holds a distinguished professorship in history at the University of Virginia, is far more interested in pursuing historical truth than in massaging whatever praiseworthy sentiments he may harbor on race, gender, class or anything else. He knows that for the historian the central obligation is to understand and interpret the past, not to judge it. This is what he has done, to exemplary effect, in “The Union War.” I suspect that one of his motives in writing it may have been to remind us of what a precious thing our Union is, a Union that we have come to take for granted. Fighting for its preservation was a noble thing, in and of itself. (source: The Washington Post)

Emancipation Proclamation (Full Text)

Emancipation Proclamation

Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

"That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States."

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left

precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known 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.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

Copy of Emancipation Proclamation Sells for Nearly $2.1 Million

From the New York Times, "Copy of Emancipation Proclamation Sells for Nearly $2.1 Million," A rare copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document signed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War that freed tens of thousands of slaves and laid the foundation for the end of slavery, sold for $2.085 million at auction in New York City on Tuesday.

The sell, which included a “buyer’s premium” or commission of $235,000, is the second-highest price ever paid for a Lincoln-signed proclamation. Another copy of the document, once owned by Robert Kennedy, sold for $3.8 million two years ago. The copy sold on Tuesday was auctioned at the Robert Siegel Auction Galleries and went to David Rubenstein, managing director of The Carlyle Group investment firm. The American seller remained anonymous.

Lincoln issued the proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves in states then in rebellion. The proclamation also provided a legal framework for the emancipation of millions of other slaves as the Union armies advanced. Forty-eight copies were subsequently printed, with Lincoln signing all of them in 1864. The copies were sold throughout the country to support Union troops.

“They have appreciated in value because it’s so powerful as a document,” said Seth Kaller, a dealer and expert in American historic documents who worked with the seller in Tuesday’s auction. “If you have an original document like this on exhibit people get a sense of the excitement,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. ‘This document changed the course of history.”

Mr. Kaller said he can locate 26 copies of the proclamation, 18 of which are in museums and libraries. Some of the privately owned copies are on loan to museums, he said. The first document signed by Lincoln is in the National Archives. His website, www.SethKaller.com, lists the location of the 26 copies.

The copy acquired by Mr. Rubinstein is his second, he said. The other is currently on loan to the White House and went there during the presidency of Barack Obama. The document Mr. Rubenstein bought on Tuesday will eventually go on public exhibit, Mr. Kaller said.

“It was really down to a couple of bidders who are major collectors of historical documents,” Scott Trepel, president of the gallery said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s the only one I’ve sold.”

A total of nine proclamation copies have been sold publicly in the past 40 years, Mr. Kaller said. In 2010, Robert Kennedy’s family auctioned his copy for $3.8 million at Sotheby’s New York. Mr. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968, had purchased it for $9,500 in 1964, when he was U.S. attorney general and enforcing civil rights laws. “Kennedy was a document collector,” Mr. Kaller said. “He bought this as he was working on the unfinished business of the Civil War.” (source: The New York Times)

Lesson 16: The Slave South

Lesson 16: The Slave South

David Brion Davis: In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery

David Brion Davis: In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery

David Brion Davis: In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) Lyndon Baines Johnson

Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965)

by Lyndon Baines Johnson

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of Congress, members of the Cabinet, distinguished guests, my fellow Americans:

Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield. Yet to seize the meaning of this day, we must recall darker times.

Three and a half centuries ago the first Negroes arrived at Jamestown. They did not arrive in brave ships in search of a home for freedom. They did not mingle fear and joy, in expectation that in this New World anything would be possible to a man strong enough to reach for it.

They came in darkness and they came in chains.

And today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds. Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend.

And let us remember that it was not always so. The stories of our Nation and of the American Negro are like two great rivers. Welling up from that tiny Jamestown spring they flow through the centuries along divided channels.

When pioneers subdued a continent to the need of man, they did not tame it for the Negro. When the Liberty Bell rang out in Philadelphia, it did not toll for the Negro. When Andrew Jackson threw open the doors of democracy, they did not open for the Negro.

It was only at Appomattox, a century ago, that an American victory was also a Negro victory. And the two rivers—one shining with promise, the other dark-stained with oppression—began to move toward one another.

Yet, for almost a century the promise of that day was not fulfilled. Today is a towering and certain mark that, in this generation, that promise will be kept. In our time the two currents will finally mingle and rush as one great stream across the uncertain and the marvelous years of the America that is yet to come.

This act flows from a clear and simple wrong. Its only purpose is to right that wrong. Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong is one which no American, in his heart, can justify. The right is one which no American, true to our principles, can deny.

In 1957, as the leader of the majority in the United States Senate, speaking in support of legislation to guarantee the right of all men to vote, I said, "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."

Last year I said, "Until every qualified person regardless of . . . the color of his skin has the right, unquestioned and unrestrained, to go in and cast his ballot in every precinct in this great land of ours, I am not going to be satisfied."

Immediately after the election I directed the Attorney General to explore, as rapidly as possible, the ways to ensure the right to vote.

And then last March, with the outrage of Selma still fresh, I came down to this Capitol one evening and asked the Congress and the people for swift and for sweeping action to guarantee to every man and woman the right to vote. In less than 48 hours I sent the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the Congress. In little more than 4 months the Congress, with overwhelming majorities, enacted one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.

The Members of the Congress, and the many private citizens, who worked to shape and pass this bill will share a place of honor in our history for this one act alone.

There were those who said this is an old injustice, and there is no need to hurry. But 95 years have passed since the 15th amendment gave all Negroes the right to vote.

And the time for waiting is gone.

There were those who said smaller and more gradual measures should be tried. But they had been tried. For years and years they had been tried, and tried, and tried, and they had failed, and failed, and failed.

And the time for failure is gone.

There were those who said that this is a many-sided and very complex problem. But however viewed, the denial of the right to vote is still a deadly wrong.

And the time for injustice has gone.

This law covers many pages. But the heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, states and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down. If it is clear that State officials still intend to discriminate, then Federal examiners will be sent in to register all eligible voters. When the prospect of discrimination is gone, the examiners will be immediately withdrawn.

And, under this act, if any county anywhere in this Nation does not want Federal intervention it need only open its polling places to all of its people.

This good Congress, the 89th Congress, acted swiftly in passing this act. I intend to act with equal dispatch in enforcing this act.

And tomorrow at 1 p.m., the Attorney General has been directed to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the poll tax in the State of Mississippi. This will begin the legal process which, I confidently believe, will very soon prohibit any State from requiring the payment of money in order to exercise the fight to vote.

And also by tomorrow the Justice Department, through publication in the Federal Register, will have officially certified the States where discrimination exists.

I have, in addition, requested the Department of Justice to work all through this weekend so that on Monday morning next, they can designate many counties where past experience clearly shows that Federal action is necessary and required. And by Tuesday morning, trained Federal examiners will be at work registering eligible men and women in 10 to 15 counties.

And on that same day, next Tuesday, additional poll tax suits will be filed in the States of Texas, Alabama, and Virginia.

And I pledge you that we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.

So, through this act, and its enforcement, an important instrument of freedom passes into the hands of millions of our citizens. But that instrument must be used. Presidents and Congresses, laws and lawsuits can open the doors to the polling places and open the doors to the wondrous rewards which await the wise use of the ballot.

But only the individual Negro, and all others who have been denied the right to vote, can really walk through those doors, and can use that right, and can transform the vote into an instrument of justice and fulfillment.

So, let me now say to every Negro in this country: You must register. You must vote. You must learn, so your choice advances your interest and the interest of our beloved Nation. Your future, and your children's future, depend upon it, and I don't believe that you are going to let them down.

This act is not only a victory for Negro leadership. This act is a great challenge to that leadership. It is a challenge which cannot be met simply by protests and demonstrations. It means that dedicated leaders must work around the clock to teach people their rights and their responsibilities and to lead them to exercise those rights and to fulfill those responsibilities and those duties to their country.

If you do this, then you will find, as others have found before you, that the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

Today what is perhaps the last of the legal barriers is tumbling. There will be many actions and many difficulties before the rights woven into law are also woven into the fabric of our Nation. But the struggle for equality must now move toward a different battlefield.

It is nothing less than granting every American Negro his freedom to enter the mainstream of American life: not the conformity that blurs enriching differences of culture and tradition, but rather the opportunity that gives each a chance to choose.

For centuries of oppression and hatred have already taken their painful toll. It can be seen throughout our land in men without skills, in children without fathers, in families that are imprisoned in slums and in poverty.

For it is not enough just to give men rights. They must be able to use those rights in their personal pursuit of happiness. The wounds and the weaknesses, the outward walls and the inward scars which diminish achievement are the work of American society. We must all now help to end them—help to end them through expanding programs already devised and through new ones to search out and forever end the special handicaps of those who are black in a Nation that happens to be mostly white.

So, it is for this purpose—to fulfill the rights that we now secure—that I have already called a White House conference to meet here in the Nation's Capital this fall.

So, we will move step by step—often painfully but, I think, with clear vision—along the path toward American freedom.

It is difficult to fight for freedom. But I also know how difficult it can be to bend long years of habit and custom to grant it. There is no room for injustice anywhere in the American mansion. But there is always room for understanding toward those who see the old ways crumbling. And to them today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it has, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too.

It is not just a question of guilt, although there is that. It is that men cannot live with a lie and not be stained by it.

The central fact of American civilization—one so hard for others to understand—is that freedom and justice and the dignity of man are not just words to us. We believe in them. Under all the growth and the tumult and abundance, we believe. And so, as long as some among us are oppressed—and we are part of that oppression—it must blunt our faith and sap the strength of our high purpose.

Thus, this is a victory for the freedom of the American Negro. But it is also a victory for the freedom of the American Nation. And every family across this great, entire, searching land will live stronger in liberty, will live more splendid in expectation, and will be prouder to be American because of the act that you have passed that I will sign today.

Thank you. (source: Mills Center, Presidential Speeches)