Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality

2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-205
Author(s):  
Scott Hancock
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Fault Line

The Banneker Age

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britt Rusert
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
Early National ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Emancipatory Politics

This chapter identifies Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787) as a “founding text” for a vibrant genealogy of black scientific discourse in the early national and antebellum periods, from Benjamin Banneker’s 1791 correspondence with Jefferson to David Walker’s 1829 Appeal, James Pennington’s 1844 ethnology, and James McCune Smith’s essays on Notes, written in 1859, on the cusp of the Civil War. It also examines the widespread memorialization of Benjamin Banneker by African Americans in the antebellum period, an act that, among other things, used Banneker to imagine the beginning of a new scientific age, marked by anti-racism and emancipatory politics.

The Land of Misfit Relics

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-120
Author(s):  
Chad Seales
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Dead

This chapter addresses the fascinations of Protestants with certain “relics” of racial, political, and communal violence. In contrast to Catholicism, blatant Protestant relics are rare. While the ones they have are significant, there are not enough of them to comprise a Protestant tradition of devotional use of relics. However, there are southern Protestants who have had two major sources of relics as understood as the sacred remains of the dead: those produced by death in the Civil War and those made through the lynching deaths of African Americans. There are three possible options for the presence and persistence of religious relics in popular culture. The first is the importance of religious relics to subcultural memory. The second is the significance of religious relics to the cultural production and ritual construction of racial difference. The third is the power of those relics to resurface and strain against historical amnesia.

Race and the Visions of John Lafayette Girardeau

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Otis W. Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Coping With Death

This chapter focuses on John Lafayette Girardeau, a Presbyterian leader who, after the Civil War, simultaneously worked to shape churchly reform and Lost Cause religiosity. Girardeau's postbellum ecclesiastical reform in ordaining African Americans and pushing for their ecclesiastical equality places him among emancipationists. However, his work on the battlefield as a Confederate chaplain, his aid to the public in coping with death and destruction after the Civil War, and his service as pastor of an integrated church places him in the reconciliationist camp. Meanwhile, his work as a defender of the Lost Cause, which helped justify the racial violence perpetuated by Lost Cause adherents, places him within the emerging norms of a white supremacist vision. Ultimately, Girardeau's life and world presents a much more complex picture than his missionary activity, representative Calvinism, efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, or Lost Cause ideology reveal.

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.

Samson and the Making of American Martyrs

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
Social Advancement ◽  
John Brown

By the 1850s, some abolitionists had begun to use the term “Samson” to refer to those involved in insurrections by enslaved persons. By the dawn of the Civil War, they extended that term to describe real-life persons who fought to end slavery. In the last half of the nineteenth century, poets, clergy, scholars, and other intellectuals began to identify biblical Samson with historical individuals who challenged racial oppression in America. The biblical hero had already become a potent symbol of African Americans’ collective strength in the fight against slavery and other barriers to social advancement. Eventually, he became associated with those who took up this struggle through passionate rhetoric, violence, and, at times, political compromise. In the process, persons like John Brown, Fredrick Douglass, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Booker T. Washington became memorialized as larger-than-life Samson figures.

Strayed Cattle

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-103
Author(s):  
Kenneth M. Price
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
York City ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Pastoral Tradition ◽  
Vantage Points

Whitman’s war writings have been criticized on the grounds that he turns to pastoralism to justify the violence of the Civil War. Whitman was in fact intrigued by the pastoral tradition stretching from Virgil forward. Rather than being in thrall to arcadian fantasies, Whitman instead “sees through” (in both senses) pastoralism. His writings avoid romantic claptrap that serves to justify wartime violence. He experienced the war from the vantage points of New York City and Washington, DC, and he shows no yearning for an idyllic rural retreat, nor does he indulge in nostalgia for a lost way of life. Pastoralism often involves the care of cattle, and this chapter probes the ties between African Americans, cattle, and an anti-pastoral tradition.

The Civil War

1998 ◽  
pp. 173-187
Author(s):  
Sefton D. Temkin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Fugitive Slave Law ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter examines Isaac Mayer Wise during the secession crisis and the Civil War. When the possible dissolution of the Union first entered men’s minds, Wise was once again hoping to realize his plan of establishing a college, but the issues which led to secession must have forced themselves on his attention. Cincinnati stood on the border between free and slave states; its environs were the first stage on the ‘Underground Railroad’ by which slaves were taken to Canada for liberation; it was near the scene of attempts, sometimes the cause of riots, to arrest and return slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law. Yet the belief that the fires would cool was widespread, and Wise was by no means alone when he remarked that ‘the two extreme factions will be cooled down before the year ends’. The crisis did not abate, however.

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