Our Country

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant R. Brodrecht
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Union ◽  
Christian Nation

Our Country explores northern evangelical thought and sentiment in relation to the concept of Union during the Civil War era. The book complements our understanding of northern motivation during the Civil War and contributes to a fuller understanding of the eventual “failure” of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African Americans’ equal inclusion in American society. In short, the book contends that mainstream northern evangelicals consistently subordinated concern for racial justice to an overarching understanding of the Union as a specifically Christian nation that existed in a covenantal relationship to God under their proprietary care. The book joins recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, while it challenges interpretations that understand northern evangelicals primarily in terms of abolitionist millennialism. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather, they entered Reconstruction expecting to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogeneous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause. That restored Union was to be one in which evangelical religious and political assumptions would be even more culturally dominant than they had been during the antebellum years. Focused on much else besides racial justice, northern evangelicals acted as a brake on the abolitionist vision for a racially equitable and inclusive American Union throughout the entire Civil War era.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Finseth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Complex ◽  
Moral Conflicts ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Dead ◽  
War Dead ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Society

Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.

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.

The Forgotten Legacy of Shirley Chisholm

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tera W. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Woman ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Key Events

This chapter sets up the basic dilemma of the Democratic primary contest: how would the competition between an African American man and a white woman affect the liberal coalition of African Americans, white liberals, feminists, and organized labor in place since the 1970s? It decries the deterioration of the Democratic race into a debate over which group, African Americans or women, was more aggrieved and reminds us of the historical consequences of division. Recounting key events from the Civil War era, the chapter argues that the Democratic Party would do better to recall instead the legacy of Shirley Chisholm, who in 1972 ran a principled campaign for president on a platform of antiracist, antisexist, pro-labor, and pro-peace policies.

First Martyr of Liberty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Racial Background ◽  
Black Abolitionists

By 1850 Crispus Attucks began playing a significant role in African Americans’ affirmation of their essential Americanness. Black abolitionists muted his mixed racial background in favor of a fully African American one, and his possible reasons for being part of the Boston mob were left unscrutinized. Attucks emerged as a black patriot and Founder. During and immediately after the Civil War, for African Americans, Attucks remained a symbol of black patriotism and military valor. But some whites began to emphasize his Native American background and to question his status as a hero. And as the nation slowly distanced itself from the Civil War, it became clear that the national interest did not include racial justice for black Americans.

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