3. 1862

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-63
Author(s):  
Louis P. Masur
Keyword(s):  
Army Of Northern Virginia ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

“1862” covers the conscription of Confederate soldiers and the emergence of Robert E. Lee, who assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee won many significant battles against larger Union armies. Both sides experienced heavy losses, in part due to new, deadlier weapons. Soldiers fought for a variety of reasons, and photographs of the battlefield destroyed the public’s romantic notions about the war. While the war was not going well for the Union, a Republican Congress passed legislation that would have been impossible previously. Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation after the battle of Antietam and, by the end of the year, was poised to deliver it.

scholarly journals “The Negro's Peculiar Work”: Jim Crow and Black Discourses on US Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1877–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEANNETTE EILEEN JONES
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
Take Back ◽  
The Us ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
Keynote Speech

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper theNew York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,The whites found gold, diamonds, and other riches in Africa. Why should not the Negro? Africa is their country. They should claim it: they should go to Africa, civilize those Negroes, raise them morally, and by education show them how to obtain wealth which is in their own country, and take the grand continent as their own.Price's “Black Man's Burden” projected American blacks as agents of capitalism, civilization, and Christianity in Africa. Moreover, Price suggested that African American suffering under slavery, failed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow placed them in a unique position to combat imperialism. He was not alone in seeing parallels between the conditions of “Negroes” on both sides of the Atlantic. Many African Americans, Afro-Canadians, and West Indians saw imperialism in Africa as operating according to Jim Crow logic: white Europeans would subordinate and segregate Africans, while economically exploiting their labor to bring wealth to Europe.

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox

2021 ◽  
pp. 601-618
Author(s):  
Elizabeth R. Varon
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Army Of Northern Virginia ◽  
The Moment

Americans experienced the last months of the Civil War as uncertain and full of dramatic events that together finally spelled the Confederacy’s doom. The Union capitalized on its advantages in manpower and materiel, on the command harmony of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his team, and on the political momentum of President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation policy to seize the prizes of Richmond and Petersburg and send the Confederate government and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into flight. Confederates, confronting shortages of manpower and materiel, debated how to prolong the fight and clung to the hope that Lee’s army would win victories that breathed new life into the Confederate project. President Lincoln framed this last season of war as a moral reckoning with slavery and the moment to advance the work of reunion. The final campaigns were a watershed in the process of emancipation, as Lee’s surrender brought many slaves their de facto freedom.

The Political Culture of Emancipation: Morality, Politics, and the State in Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1854–1863

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Mark Voss-Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
National Government ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.

The Gettysburg Campaign

2021 ◽  
pp. 390-404
Author(s):  
Carol Reardon
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Central Region ◽  
The South ◽  
South Central ◽  
Army Of Northern Virginia ◽  
Significant Area ◽  
General Order

When Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched into Pennsylvania in June 1863, five counties in the south-central region of the Keystone State became the first significant area of free soil to experience the destruction that accompanied the passage of rival armies. Despite Lee’s General Order No. 72 that prohibited unauthorized confiscation of civilian property, residents of the Chambersburg area experienced nearly a week of depredations and saw local freeborn African Americans rounded up and sent south into slavery. The major battle around Gettysburg on July 1–3 inflicted massive destruction on the landscape and residents’ livelihoods, in some cases forcing the sale of damaged properties that became the foundation of today’s National Military Park.

The Battle of Fredericksburg

2021 ◽  
pp. 316-330
Author(s):  
Barton A. Myers
Keyword(s):  
Capital City ◽  
Union Army ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Army Of Northern Virginia ◽  
Army Of The Potomac ◽  
Combat Casualties ◽  
Military Campaign ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

The December 13, 1862, Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, marked the defeat of Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, an important setback for the Union cause and military effort to seize the Confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia. The battle and military campaign preceding it, which occurred primarily along the Rappahannock River at the city of Fredericksburg and in adjacent Stafford and Spotsylvania counties, was the most lopsided victory the Army of Northern Virginia achieved during the American Civil War, with the Union Army sustaining combat casualties equivalent to more than double those suffered by Confederates. The campaign also saw the use of urban combat, military occupation, and the direct role of civilians at the center of the November and December military maneuvers around the city, which was positioned approximately equidistant between Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Principal battle locations included the Confederate position of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s corps on Marye’s Heights behind the city, the Union artillery position on Stafford Heights, the position of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Confederate corps at Prospect Hill south of the city of Fredericksburg, and the Rappahannock River itself, which was crossed only after Union engineers built a pontoon bridge under fire. The campaign is noted for Union Army shelling of the city itself as a military position, the failed, multiwave Union infantry assaults against fortified positions, and the destruction of property on December 12 as the town itself was sacked.

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