“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 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.

scholarly journals “The Negro's Peculiar Work”: Jim Crow and Black Discourses on US Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1877–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEANNETTE EILEEN JONES
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
Take Back ◽  
The Us ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
Keynote Speech

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper theNew York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,The whites found gold, diamonds, and other riches in Africa. Why should not the Negro? Africa is their country. They should claim it: they should go to Africa, civilize those Negroes, raise them morally, and by education show them how to obtain wealth which is in their own country, and take the grand continent as their own.Price's “Black Man's Burden” projected American blacks as agents of capitalism, civilization, and Christianity in Africa. Moreover, Price suggested that African American suffering under slavery, failed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow placed them in a unique position to combat imperialism. He was not alone in seeing parallels between the conditions of “Negroes” on both sides of the Atlantic. Many African Americans, Afro-Canadians, and West Indians saw imperialism in Africa as operating according to Jim Crow logic: white Europeans would subordinate and segregate Africans, while economically exploiting their labor to bring wealth to Europe.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

The Legacy of the Obama Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Executive Order ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt

This chapter argues that African Americans, despite being critical to Obama's election, will not get specific attention to issues of discrimination and equity unless they unite in a social movement that compels the president and Congress to take up these issues. Whether Obama is avoiding “race” issues from a desire not to alienate white voters or he is motivated by commitment to a “colorblind” approach to policy, African Americans will get the president's attention only to the extent that there is an independent social movement that can bring political pressure to bear. The chapter goes on to discuss three occasions in U.S. history that stand out as historical moments when African Americans, independently organized and mobilized and with militant, progressive leadership, made successful interventions with U.S. presidents that resulted in major civil rights gains, and sometimes economic and political gains: Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation; Franklin Roosevelt and Executive Order 8802; and the Kennedy–Johnson administration and civil rights legislation.

A Family Long Free

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McKee
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Level ◽  
Free African Americans ◽  
The City ◽  
And Training

This chapter argues that no family embodies the anomalous history of New Orleans better than the Dede family. Of all the towns and cities in North America with populations of free African Americans, the chapter goes on to argue, New Orleans was the city most likely to have produced a black man like Edmond Dede—possessed of enough talent, ambition, and training to launch himself up to a high level of accomplishment. Only in New Orleans could African American families trace their family's history back beyond 1864, the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Contrary to later reports that Edmond Dede was the son of West Indian refugees, he in fact belonged instead to a long-established family with roots in North America.

A Grand Opportunity

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-27
Author(s):  
James G. Mendez
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Union Army ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Black Race ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, and provided a long awaited opportunity for northern African Americans to prove their loyalty and their worthiness for full citizenship. And for all African Americans, this was a chance to end slavery and the mark of inferiority it branded on the black race. However, the initial euphoria of these African Americans quickly evaporated when they were told this was not a war in which blacks were welcomed to participate. Their help was not requested and was outright rejected. Northern blacks (men and women) looked for and found other ways to contribute to the Union war effort. With the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln had decided to free all the slaves in rebel territory. The Union army now also became an army of liberation. The potential for Union forces to obtain desperately needed manpower, black troops, was another important factor for the decision.

Lick Creek, Indiana

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Orange County ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Northwest Ordinance ◽  
Northwest Territory ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship of Quakers and free Blacks in Lick Creek to the Underground Railroad. The Lick Creek settlement once existed in the southeast corner of Paoli Township, Orange County, in southern Indiana. In 1817, freeborn African Americans came to the area and purchased land in what later became the Lick Creek settlement. Blacks also came accompanying Quakers fleeing persecution in North Carolina. With the opening of frontier lands for settlement, free Blacks, encouraged by the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, joined the country's westward passage to the Northwest Territory. This chapter first provides a background on Quakers and free Blacks at Lick Creek before focusing on William Paul Quinn's arrival in Indiana, where he built AME churches that became an important focal point of the Lick Creek community. It then considers the antislavery efforts of free Blacks, Quakers, and citizens of conscience working on the Underground Railroad on behalf of escaped slaves. It also discusses the participation of Indiana's Blacks in the Civil War.

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