“The Effect Was Immediate”

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-44
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Shenandoah Valley ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Black Man

This chapter focuses on how the Shenandoah Valley’s African Americans reacted to John Brown’s raid and how enslavers in the region responded. Although throngs of enslaved people and free blacks from the Shenandoah Valley did not join Brown’s army of liberation in large numbers as Brown had hoped, this chapter illustrates that once the Valley’s enslaved learned of Brown’s attempt to strike a blow against slavery they employed various methods of resistance including arson and killing livestock to show their support for Brown’s actions, unnerving enslavers. This chapter examines the efforts of not only whites in the Valley to prevent Brown’s attack from sparking a broader insurrection through an increase in slave patrols but also enslavers’ attempts to downplay the events of Brown’s raid, advancing the notion that enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley did not support Brown and remained loyal to their enslavers. At the epicenter of this particular discussion is the story of Heyward Shepherd, a free black man who became the raid’s first casualty.

William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Welch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The Law ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Case Basis

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

Memory Making on Parade

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-72
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Union Soldiers

This chapter clarifies that black communities experienced emancipation traditions in different ways. Given the large proportion of blacks in Natchez, and the region’s well-established free black community, it seemed probable that Natchez would experience a robust emancipation tradition. That was not the case. The grand 1867 Fourth of July parade in Natchez organized by the Union League drew a large crowd of African Americans, suggesting the beginnings of a bold emancipation tradition. Instead, public emancipation celebrations dwindled. By the time of the 1871 Decoration Day observance, leaders stressed reconciliation and a tribute to Confederate as well as Union soldiers, a far different message heard only four years earlier. The erosion of a black emancipation tradition resulted from the unusually close ties that existed between Natchez free blacks and white elites, and the fear among free blacks that it was in their best political interests to suppress such traditions.

Republicans of Color

2019 ◽  
pp. 122-165
Author(s):  
Paul J. Polgar
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Reform Project ◽  
American Experiment ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology

The genesis of the first movement abolitionist reform project stemmed from a central dilemma bequeathed to abolitionists by the American Revolution. The same natural rights Revolutionary ideology that aided the first abolition movement also presented slaves as the very antithesis of the independent, virtuous citizenry necessary to uphold representative government and maintain the American experiment in republicanism, making emancipation a problematic process. Out of their quest to solve this paradox, abolition society members and their free black collaborators constructed a reform agenda of societal environmentalism. Based on free black socioeconomic uplift and the application of the early republic's educational mores to free blacks, societal environmentalism aimed to inculcate republican virtue in former slaves. Black education and citizenship would help to defeat white prejudice and convince the public that African Americans were worthy of emancipation. Through these reformist initiatives, first movement abolitionists sought to prove black capacity for freedom by integrating African Americans into the American republic and making them virtuous and independent citizens, fully capable of productively exercising their liberty within greater white society.

“Freedom to Slaves!”

2021 ◽  
pp. 88-113
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Shenandoah Valley ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

This chapter’s central focus is how the Valley’s African Americans responded to the Emancipation Proclamation and Union general Robert H. Milroy’s enforcement of it in the northern Shenandoah Valley during the first six months of 1863. Additionally, this chapter focuses on the important roles filled by African Americans, such as Lee Jenkins, in General Milroy’s espionage operations. Furthermore, the chapter examines the fate of African Americans following General Milroy’s defeat at the Second Battle of Winchester. While untold numbers of African Americans escaped north into Pennsylvania, some of whom were seized by Confederates as they moved into the Keystone State, several hundred African Americans were captured by Confederate general Richard Ewell’s command near Stephenson’s Depot, north of Winchester, among them Lee Jenkins, who ultimately committed suicide to avoid enslavement. Through Jenkins’ story this chapter also explores the difficult decisions free blacks such as Jenkins confronted when seized by Confederates and impressed.

“The Servants … Could Not Be Conveniently Stored Away”

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-88
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Union Soldiers

This chapter focuses on 1862, with a particular emphasis on how Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign impacted enslaved people and free blacks. Throughout the spring of 1862, enslaved people, estimated in the thousands, sought refuge with Union forces. However, as this chapter illustrates, taking sanctuary with Union troops did not mean that the Valley’s African Americans were passive participants. This chapter highlights the various ways freedom seekers supported Union operations in the Valley throughout 1862. Simultaneously, the chapter also illustrates that the desire for survival at times trumped the desire for freedom and prompted some freedom seekers to return to enslavers. Although incidents such as these have been used by advocates of the Lost Cause to perpetuate the “happy slave” myth, this chapter discusses the complexities of life for African Americans and how what some interpreted as loyalty to enslavers was in fact an enslaved person’s loyalty to themselves. Finally, this chapter examines how some Union soldiers, due to interactions with enslaved people in 1862, became more open to transforming the war to preserve the Union into one that also eradicated slavery.

Peculiar Planning

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-85
Author(s):  
Bjørn F. Stillion Southard
Keyword(s):  
Black Identity ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Black Man

Louis Sheridan was a wealthy merchant and free black man. This chapter examines his negotiations with the American Colonization Society and other groups for passage to Liberia. Despite his willingness and resources, the negotiations were fraught. The analysis of the correspondence illuminates deeper concerns of black identity related to notions of Afro-Pessimism and black optimism.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
Black Churches ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Parallel Connections

This book explores the free Black communities in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and their associations with the Underground Railroad. Focusing on the Black settlements in Rocky Fork and Miller Grove in Illinois, Lick Creek in Indiana, and Poke Patch in Ohio, it considers how the Underground Railroad movement secretly operated in conjunction with free Blacks and their historic Black churches. The book uses vital elements of what it calls the “geography of resistance” to examine the mechanisms of escape from slavery from an alternative perspective. By drawing on geography in combination with archaeology, community and church histories, and traditional Underground Railroad stories, the book makes visible unrecognized parallel connections between free Black communities and larger better-known abolitionist centers.

“Desiring Total Tranquility” and Not Getting It: Conflict Involving Free Black Women in Spanish New Orleans

1998 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly S. Hanger
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Black Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Women Soldiers ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Free Black ◽  
The Status ◽  
Judicial Procedures ◽  
Assault And Battery

Colonial New Orleans was a community, like so many others in Latin America, in which the upper sectors desired to maintain order and “toda tranquilidad,” preferably by way of legislation and judicial compromise but through force and authoritarian measures if necessary. Challenges to this tranquility came from those groups considered marginal and thus often subordinated, oppressed, and made generally unhappy with the status quo, among them workers, women, soldiers, slaves, and free blacks (libres). Free black women— the focus of this paper—drew upon multiple experiences as members of several of these subjugated groups: as women, as nonwhites, sometimes as former slaves, and usually as workers, forced by poverty to support their families with earnings devalued because they were gained doing “women's work.” But they did not suffer silently. Condemning the patriarchal order, racist, sexist, authoritarian society in which they operated, libre women vigorously attacked it both verbally and physically, employing such elite-defined legal and illegal methods as petitions, judicial procedures, slander, insults, arson, and assault and battery.

Organization Despite Adversity

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theda Skocpol ◽  
Jennifer Lynn Oser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voluntary Organization ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Per Capita

A prominent form of voluntary organization in the United States from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, fraternal associations are self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provide mutual aid to members, enact group rituals, and engage in community service. Synthesizing primary and secondary evidence, this article documents that African Americans historically organized large numbers of translocal fraternal voluntary federations. Some black fraternal associations paralleled white groups, while others were distinctive to African Americans. In regions where blacks lived in significant numbers, African Americans often created more fraternal lodges per capita than whites; and women played a much more prominent role in African American fraternalism than they did in white fraternalism. Rivaling churches as community institutions, many black fraternal federations became active in struggles for equal civil rights.

Minstrelization and Nationhood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Waldstreicher
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Free Black ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
Black Sailors

This essay argues that the long-acknowledged first example of U.S. blackface minstrelsy, a song entitled “Backside Albany” or “The Siege of Plattsburgh,” was crucially shaped by its war of 1812 origins. By extension, the essay also argues that blackface minstrelsy can then be understood as one of the effects of the War of 1812. The song, “sung in the character of a black sailor” in Albany and New York in 1814 and 1815, responds to the importance of black sailors and African Americans more generally in the war and in contemporary politics. It tries to contain black assertiveness, but in doing so affirms the centrality of African Americans and their struggles in that moment. I argue that the racializing and demeaning work of blackface minstrelsy must thus be seen as a response to free black politics and to antislavery, and earlier than scholars have contended

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