Searching for Black Confederates

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Levin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Confederate Army ◽  
Enslaved African Americans

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans’ gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Shenandoah Valley ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Better Than

The book’s introduction stresses that while a handful of historians have examined various aspects of the African American experience in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War era, the topic has been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed. The introduction’s cornerstone is a historiographical discussion of how authors such as Joseph Waddell, John Walter Wayland, and Julia Davis—who minimized slavery’s role in the Valley, promulgated the myth that slavery was not important to the Valley’s agrarian economy, and wrote that enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley were treated better than in other parts of the slaveholding South—influenced various authors. Finally, the introduction highlights the various primary source material, including freedom narratives, never before utilized by historians who investigated any aspect of the Shenandoah Valley’s African American story.

Black Confederates on the Front Lines of the Civil War Sesquicentennial

2019 ◽  
pp. 152-176
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Levin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Black Men ◽  
National Parks ◽  
Hate Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sustained Effort

African Americans have long played a role in legitimizing the loyal slave and black Confederate myth. For instance, H. K. Edgerton, is a well known and outspoken neo-confederate who downplays the role of slavery in the south before, during, and after the Civil War. Some African Americans have embraced the Confederacy as a means to celebrate their ancestors who they believe fought in the war and have been forgotten or ignored. Small numbers of Black men have been recruited as Confederate soldiers in Civil War re-enactments to perpetuate the myth of positive race relations in the confederacy. Overall, support for the Confederacy is waning with the Black Lives Matter movement, the adoption of the battle flag by hate groups, and a sustained effort by various groups to accurately educate the public about the role of slavery in the Civil War. For example, the National Parks Service titled the sesquicentennial “Civil War to Civil Rights” which placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War discussion.

“Undistinguished Destruction”: The Effects of Smallpox on British Emancipation Policy in the Revolutionary War

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-885 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARY SELLICK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Source Material ◽  
American Continent ◽  
British Military ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Impact

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any African American who fought for the British cause against the colonial rebels in his province. Dunmore's plan to reconquer Virginia with his “Ethiopian Regiment” ended in failure, not due to a lack of willing volunteers but because of a familiar eighteenth-century killer: smallpox. Five years later, similar proclamations were issued in South Carolina. Yet smallpox again hindered British designs, devastating the eager African Americans who flooded to their lines. This paper uses primary source material and research on smallpox to analyze the experiences of African Americans who actively sought freedom with the British during the Revolutionary War. Focussing on the differing regions of Virginia and South Carolina this paper will assess the impact of smallpox on British military designs for runaway slaves while also evaluating the reasons why the disease had such a devastating effect on African Americans during the period. Overall, this paper will show how smallpox, so common in eighteenth-century Europe, put a fatal end to the first widespread push for emancipation on the American continent and helped derail one of Britain's best hopes for turning the tide in the Revolutionary War.

The Northern Homefront

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Etcheson ◽  
Cortney Cantrell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Total War ◽  
The North ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
Work Family ◽  
The Impact

During the Civil War, the entire North constituted the homefront, an area largely removed from the din and horror of combat. With a few exceptions of raids and battles such as Gettysburg, civilians in the North experienced the war indirectly. The people on the homefront mobilized for war, sent their menfolk off to fight, supplied the soldiers and the army, coped without their breadwinners, and suffered the loss or maiming of men they loved. All the while, however, the homefront was crucially important to the course of the war. The mobilization of northern resources—not just men, but the manufacture of the arms and supplies needed to fight a war—enabled the North to conduct what some have called a total war, one on which the Union expended money and manpower at unprecedented levels. Confederate strategists hoped to break the will of the northern homefront to secure southern independence. Despite the hardships endured in the North, this strategy failed. On the homefront, women struggled to provide for their families as well as to serve soldiers and the army by sending care packages and doing war work. Family letters reveal the impact of the war on children who lost their fathers either temporarily or permanently. Communities rallied to aid soldiers’ families but were riven by dissension over issues such as conscription and emancipation. Immigrants and African Americans sought a new place in U.S. society by exploiting the opportunities the war offered to prove their worth. Service in the Union army certainly advanced the status of some groups, but was not the only means to that end. Nuns who nursed the wounded improved the reputation of the Catholic Church and northern African Americans used the increasingly emancipationist war goals to improve their legal status in the North. The Civil War altered race relations most radically, but change came to everyone on the northern homefront.

scholarly journals Prosocial legal thought in the age of revolution and civil war in Russia (1917—1918)

Lex Russica ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 159-171
Author(s):  
D. R. Zaynutdinov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Third ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The Right

The paper deals with the formation and development of right-socialist legal thought during the revolutionary period of 1917 and the Civil war of 1918. During the analysis, special attention is given to the legal views and ideas of the largest theorists of the right-socialist school, such as G.V. Plekhanov, V.M. Chernov, P.B. Akselrod, M.V. Vishnyak. The paper is divided into four interrelated parts. The first part reveals the fact of the lack prosocial groups of projects of legal development of the Russian state to establish a social democratic regime that caused their appeal to the legal concepts of the cadets. Also the reasons of registration by right-socialist groups of the concept of “the third way” and its realization in anti-Bolshevist statehood of the period of 1918 are revealed. In the second part of the work the understanding of the essence of law in socialism is studied, the comparison of the ideological approach to “law” on the part of the lawyers of the left-socialist and right-socialist camp is made. Special attention is given to the place of law in the teachings of socialism and the relationship of law with the economy. In the third part of the work the image of A.I. Gukovskiy as a jurist of the right socialist camp is investigated. His characteristic given to him by the right Socialists Revolutionarists (SRs) is generalized. The image of A.I. Gukovskiy reveals common features inherent in all legal scholars of the right socialist camp. The fourth part of the paper draws attention to the idea of human and civil rights and freedoms in the teachings of social democracy. For the jurists of social democracy, the development of the idea of human and civil rights and freedoms is nothing more than the materialization of the spirit of the revolution, and therefore the problems of the legal status of the individual in the works of right socialist thinkers received a special place. In conclusion, the author draws conclusions about the contribution of Russian lawyers of the right socialist group to the world fund of legal science.

scholarly journals “It Will Come at Last”: Acts of Emancipation in the Art, Culture and Politics of the Black Diaspora

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-239
Author(s):  
FIONNGHUALA SWEENEY
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Many ◽  
Enslaved African Americans

For enslaved African Americans in the antebellum period, emancipation was writ large as the most pressing of political imperatives stemming from the most fundamental obligations of justice and humanity. That it could be achieved individually was clear from the activities of countless runaways, fugitives and cultural and political activists, Douglass and Jacobs included, who escaped territories of enslavement to become self-emancipated subjects on free soil. That it could be achieved collectively was evidenced by the success of the Haitian Revolution, with its army of enslaved and free black persons. This piece explores the ways in which emancipation is understood 150 years after US Emancipation at the end of the Civil War, and provides an introduction to the new scholarship on the many acts of emancipation, memorialization and practices of freedom discussed in this special issue.

The Legal Status of Cryptocurrencies in the Russian Federation

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. L. Sidorenko
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Virtual Currency ◽  
Content Analysis Method ◽  
Crypto Currency ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Historical Comparative ◽  
Definition Of

The paper focuses on the definition of the legal status of the cryptocurrency in the framework of the current Russian legislation. The subject of the research is the principal scientific and practical approaches to determining the object of civil rights and the object of acquisitive crimes in terms of their adaptability to cryptocurrencies. The purposes of the work were the search for a universal algorithm for resolving civil disputes related to the turnover of the crypto currency, and the qualification of the virtual currency theft (fraud). By using historical, comparative legal and dialectical methods as well as the content analysis method parallels between cryptocurrencies and individual objects of civil rights (a thing, property rights, other property) were drawn, and a number of options for qualifying the actions related to the non-repayable withdrawal of the cryptocurrency were proposed. Finally, the paper analyzes the draft laws prepared by the RF Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and presents the author’s vision of the prospects for legalizing the cryptocurrency as an object of civil rights.

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