Did African Americans experience the ‘Antebellum Puzzle’? Evidence from the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Haines ◽  
Lee A. Craig ◽  
Thomas Weiss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Colored Troops

A White Man’s War?

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Founding Principle ◽  
Proper Response

This chapter looks at the first two years of the Civil War, when black men were barred from serving in the US Army. It follows the debate that black Northerners conducted about the proper response to the call to serve in the US military, which they were sure would come at some point. Immediate enlistment advocates sparred with those who counseled withholding enlistment until African Americans’ demands had been met. Black Northerners began to articulate the terms under which they would serve the Union, among which citizenship emerged as central, as well as the changes necessary to bring lived reality in the United States in line with the founding principle of equality.

If We Are Not Citizens, Then What Are We?

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of

This chapter reviews the history of black military service in previous American wars, an analysis of which black Northerners relied on when they thought that about how to respond to the opportunity to serve in the Civil War. This chapter coves black activists’ antebellum rhetorical use of black service, black Northerners’ goal of bringing lived reality in the United States in line with the founding US ideal of equality, the history of black citizenship prior to the Civil War, and antebellum African Americans’ ideas about what, if any, duty black men possessed to fight for the United States in the event of war. This chapter also covers the expansion of slavery, the growth of the Northern black community, and the coming of the Civil War.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
The United States

This introduction explains the importance of visual culture to the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. People believed images to have persuasive powers and activists used them to convince viewers to join various social movements that included antislavery and black emigration. Black activists produced images before, during, and after the Civil War that included daguerreotypes, lithographs, moving panoramas, and cartes de visite. They quickly seized these technologies and mobilized the popularity, desirability, and unique capabilities of each. Studying the works of these black cultural producers expands our understanding of the arsenal of strategies African Americans drew upon in the service of increasing black rights.

Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Freedmen's Bureau ◽  
Shenandoah Valley ◽  
United States Colored Troops ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
No Man's Land

In Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, Jonathan Noyalas examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the black experience in the region until now. Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently—where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man’s land another. He shows that the region’s enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and contemporary newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war’s emancipationist legacy would survive.

Defining Loyalty in an Age of Emancipation

2018 ◽  
pp. 87-117
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
State Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The Republic ◽  
American State

Beginning at the start of the war, the growth of the American state worked in tandem with concerns about the threats to that state’s survival from disloyal persons, all of which generated a rapid expansion of state power. By the middle of the Civil War, ideas about loyalty had coalesced around a new plan for the occupied South, a plan in which white southerners, shorn of their citizenship, would become colonial subjects of the American state. At the same time, the doctrine of emancipation created opportunities and challenges for African Americans, who grabbed the idea of loyalty as a key to their inclusion in the republic. Looking at how freedpeople both encouraged and challenged U.S. policy as soldiers and laborers, the chapter examines how officials came to realize that any future for the United States in the Confederate South lay in providing some measure of protection for loyal African Americans, in contrast to white southerners, whose loyalty was suspect.

scholarly journals Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents: A Historical Reflection On Two Cultures

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Ibrahim K Sundiata
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Historical Reflection

In 2020 Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, published Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents. An African American, she used the age-old hierarchy of India to hold up a light to the hierarchical ‘racial’ orders in the United States (Nazi Germany was included as a third case). Ever since the 1940s debate has raged over whether such a comparison is apt. In the United States, more than almost any other group, African Americans are in-marrying, residentially segregated, poor, linked to past forced labor, and stigmatized because of it. One argument put forward against comparison was that the Indian Dalits (the former ‘untouchables’) were inured to a system that was millennia old. However, slaves on Southern plantations were often described as being as humble and compliant as any Dalit. White slaveholders often thought of the India caste model. However, the very brevity of the full-fledged Cotton Kingdom (1820–1860) militated against the coalescence of a fully formed national caste consensus. The United States, unlike most places on the globe, had a constitutional armature in which, following the Civil War, former bonds people could go from being property to voters de jure. In both societies the carapace of caste is now being cracked open, but this leaves open the question of whether we should reform caste or abolish it.

Questions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Gibson ◽  
Michael J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The U.S

We have investigated the differences in support for the U.S. Supreme Court among black, Hispanic, and white Americans, catalogued the variation in African Americans’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities, and examined how those latter two factors shape individuals’ support for the U.S. Supreme Court, that Court’s decisions, and for their local legal system. We take this opportunity to weave our findings together, taking stock of what we have learned from our analyses and what seem like fruitful paths for future research. In the process, we revisit Positivity Theory. We present a modified version of the theory that we hope will guide future inquiry on public support for courts, both in the United States and abroad.

Dissent in the Atlantic World, 1787–1830

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Carté Engel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Church And State ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Population ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
General Role

The very term ‘Dissenter’ became problematic in the United States, following the passing of the First Amendment. The formal separation of Church and state embodied in the First Amendment was followed by the ending of state-level tax support for churches. None of the states established after 1792 had formal religious establishments. Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists accounted for the majority of the American population both at the beginning and end of this period, but this simple fact masks an important compositional shift. While the denominations of Old Dissent declined relatively, Methodism grew quickly, representing a third of the population by 1850. Dissenters thus faced several different challenges. Primary among these were how to understand the idea of ‘denomination’ and also the more general role of institutional religion in a post-establishment society. Concerns about missions, and the positions of women and African Americans are best understood within this context.

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