Making Black Service Matter

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Reconstruction Period ◽  
Post War

This chapter deals with black activists’ post-war campaign to convince federal officials to encode black citizenship and political rights in law. Black military service during the Civil War served as a linchpin in African Americans’ post-war arguments for black rights and citizenship. This chapter explains the dynamics of the Reconstruction period that led Congressional Republicans to pass the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter also covers the downfall of Reconstruction and the process by which, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, white Americans undermined the rights and citizenship that African Americans possessed in theory.

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.

Beyond the Iconoclastic Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Compulsory Military Service

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.

scholarly journals Survey Essay 1. Periodizing and Historicizing German Afro-Americanophilia: From Antebellum to Postwar (1850-1965)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Ege ◽  
Andrew Wright Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Black Germans ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

In this first essay, we delve into significant moments in the history (and pre-history) of twentieth century Afro-Americanophilia in Germany. We establish a periodisation stretching from the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s (from which point our second essay will continue), and take in the pre-colonial, the colonial, the Weimar, the Nazi; and the post-war eras.  We draw out some of the particularly significant moments, ruptures, and continuities within that time frame. We also identify some of the salient ways scholars have interpreted ‘Afro-Americanophilia’ during the period.  Focusing on a variety of practices of appropriation, communicative media, actors and forms of agency, power differentials, and sociocultural contexts, we discuss positive images of and affirmative approaches to black people in German culture and in its imaginaries. We attend to who was active in Afro-Americanophilia, in what ways, and what the effects of that agency were. Our main focus is on white German Afro-Americanophiles, but—without attempting to write a history of African Americans, black people in Germany, or Black Germans— we also inquire into the ways that the latter reacted to, suffered under the expectations levied upon them, or were able to engage with the demand for ‘black cultural traffic.’  

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.

Fighting for Citizenship

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Civil War Era

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans’ enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners’ key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war’s most important results.

Oil Paintings

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-151
Author(s):  
Amanda Brickell Bellows
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Oil Paintings ◽  
American Artists ◽  
Winslow Homer

After the abolition of serfdom and slavery, Russian and American artists created oil paintings of peasants and African Americans that revealed to viewers the complexity of their post-emancipation experiences. Russian painters from the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions and American artists including Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Edouard Scott, and Winslow Homer created thematically similar works that depicted bondage, emancipation, military service, public schooling, and the urban environment. Their compositions shaped nineteenth-century viewers’ conceptions of freedpeople and peasants and molded Russians’ and Americans’ sense of national identity as the two countries reconstructed their societies during an era of substantial political and social reform.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Military Service ◽  
White Racism ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter evaluates the gains won by black military service in the Civil War. Black soldiers won formal citizenship that was undermined by pervasive white racism, which impacted the ways in which laws related to citizenship and black rights were administered and interpreted. It looks at the relationship that black service created between black veterans and the US government, as well as between African Americans who came under direct federal purview and the federal government. It explains why African Americans considering serving the US in subsequent conflicts have faced the same dilemma that black men faced during the Civil War – why fight for a country that mistreats members of your community?

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