The Civil War
The Civil War
Included in this section are the following entries with the primary source documents listed below in italics.
The Final Century of Slavery in the United States
Adapted from essays by Rob Forbes, Gilder Lehrman Center
Sojourner Truth's Address Before the Convention on Women's Rights
Nat Turner's Revolt and the Subsequent "Bill Concerning Slaves, Free Negroes and Mulattoes"
Excerpt from The Fugitive Blacksmith by James Pennington
"Reception and Treatment of Kidnappers"
African Americans and the Civil War
Adapted from essays by Laura Mitchell, University of California, and Barbara Savage, University of Pennsylvania
Letter from Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman
H. C. Chambers's Address Regarding the Use of Slaves in War
Excerpt from Behind the Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley
On the eve of the Civil War, the American legacy of slavery and African American disenfranchisement, or as the novelist Ralph Ellison referred to it, the American reality made up of "the word and the contradiction of the word," was already well in place. The New World had been a place of promise and freedom for religiously oppressed and even ethnically oppressed Europeans, and yet for African Americans the opening of the New World marked the beginning of a long history of poverty and second-class citizenship that few Africans could have ever imagined in their native villages. When it came time to draft the young nation's Constitution, a powerful document was created, one that drew on the best of various threads of European intellectual and social thought. Indeed, in that Constitution lay the "word," a curiously idealistic treatise on the "inalienable" rights of mankind. The U.S. Constitution was an optimistic and visionary document more akin to poetry or a philosopher's theorem than to the documents created to inaugurate the beginnings of new nations. In the document's reality, however, lay the convenient and calculated omission of a definition of the "mankind" to whom those rights should apply. As a result, the social reality for Africans in the United States was from the country's inception one of disenfranchisement. The United States was a nation that aspired to the highest ideals, while enforcing a series of feudal and markedly undemocratic laws designed to keep certain persons locked out of the nation's promise. This is precisely what Ellison referred to when he spoke of the "word and the contradiction of the word", the "word" being the Constitution and the "contradiction" being the daily reality of Africans brought to the New World.
When the Revolutionary War broke out, African Americans fought to free the young nation, but at the same time they were indentured and enslaved, and they faced the potential danger of being capriciously murdered at the hands of their owners as a part of legally legitimate "punishment. "When it came time for the Civil War, African Americans, rather than being able to participate as soldiers or citizens, were treated more as pawns in the political process and the backroom cigar and whiskey machinations of landholders and presidents. In most ways African Americans were not even afforded the protections given to servants, who might expect the basic level of protection accorded to an employee or to a piece of property having some significant financial value. To the contrary, American slavery, often called the "peculiar institution," was more a nightmare experiment in degradation—a set of perverse psychologies that reflected the most base desires and fears of the slaveholders—and it transferred that contorted relationship onto the lives and psyches of those who suffered within the system of slavery.
Historians today recognize that Abraham Lincoln's freeing of the slaves, despite the heartfelt wish to see justice done and the stunning oratory of his second inaugural address, was more a game of political chess. It is true that the racial atmosphere had changed within the nation. The abolitionist cause had been pursued for many decades and had given birth to various persuasive apologists. In a twist as classically American as any in our history, however, it was the overwhelming success of slave narratives and, more importantly, those fascinating tales of escape printed up in the papers—the best-selling murder mysteries or Hollywood action films of their age—that had brought the plight and astounding conditions of the black person's life to the attention of the nation. As the Southern states seceded in an effort to protect the way of life they had built over a century, President Lincoln understood that by forcing the issue and declaring the slaves who joined the Union's cause to be free, he would drive a political wedge between the powerful men in the South and the very manpower they had used to build up their plantations and homes, their armies, and their sense of self. The Republican president co-opted for himself and his cause the moral high ground and with it the willingness of the people he served to suffer the casualties and economic hardships that go with any war. Nevertheless, while it is true that without the figure of Lincoln the institution of slavery most likely would not have been dismantled at the time that it was, it is important that one look a little below the surface and see the truer nature of the times and the motivations of the principal characters on that stage.
The Civil War was a bloody, vicious, lengthy war. It was a war between America the ideal and America the reality, and a war between the word and its contradiction, with African Americans once again the invisible force both at the frontlines (Lincoln's realization that he would lose the war without the help of African American soldiers is an even darker truth behind the Emancipation Proclamation) and hovering somewhere between the lines of the nation's collective psyche. In the end, neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the war that was ostensibly fought around it would change the social and economic realities for African Americans. With the Civil War and the golden age of Reconstruction that followed it, the United States logged another chapter in the continuing drama of the dream and its deferral—a particularly bloody chapter, and one that, despite its promise or name, in many ways marked the beginnings of racism and discriminatory hate going underground in the United States, where they would be able to continue largely unchecked and seldom spoken about for many decades to come.ﾀﾀ