Repost: Black History Month: The Civil War

The Dred Scott Case

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford--a victory to supporters of slavery; it also fueled the fires of northern abolitionists.

During the 1830s, the owner of a slave named Dred Scott had taken him from Missouri—a slave state--to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois, where slavery was against the law, according to the Missouri Compromise. Once returned to Missouri, Scot sued for his freedom on the idea that since he’d been taken to a free state he was now free.

The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was a slave and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.
The verdict, in effect, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

The South rejoiced; antislavery northerners were furious.

____________________

John Brown’s Raid

John Brown was a restless man; he struggled throughout life trying to support his family, moving from place to place in an effort to do so. He had assisted the Underground Railroad in Missouri, and fought in battles between pro– and anti–slavery forces in Kansas in the 1850s. Still, he was anxious to strike a more extreme blow for the cause.

During the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led less than 50 men in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown wanted to obtain enough ammunition to lead a larger operation against Virginia’s slaveholders. Brown’s men, including several blacks, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was tried for his crimes;; his trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859

__________________

Civil War and Emancipation

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts between the North and South erupted into civil war; eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

President Abraham Lincoln, although vocally anti-slavery, whose mere election as America’s first Republican President was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the south to secede, did not want the Civil War to be seen as a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln simply wanted to preserve the Union; and he knew that few people even in the North would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

In the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer.

After the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and then, on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure. He did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists. But, by freeing 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Some 186,000 black soldiers--nearly all of them former, or runaway, slaves--would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

_________________

The Post–Slavery South

Though the Civil War gave over 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, but the status of freed slaves in the south was in flux. White southerners eventually reestablished civil authority, and enacted a series of laws known as the “black codes,” designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force.

Impatient with the leniency shown former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination, so–called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This essentially put the South under martial law, and the following year the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves.

Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

The growing influence of former slaves angered many white southerners, who felt control slipping away. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise blacks by using voter fraud, intimidation and, finally, violence .

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks were left with little improvement in their economic and social status; the political gains they had made oftentimes eradicated by white supremacist forces.

Repost: Black History Month: Frederick Douglass

As an infant, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was separated from his slave mother—he never knew his white father—and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read and when her husband discovered this he ordered his wife to stop, declaring that learning would make him unfit for slavery. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

In 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a laborer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass decided to write his autobiography in 1845; it was revised several times over the years and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Yet he was still considered a runaway slave and to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglass left America for a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union’s victory Douglass dedicated himself to securing his community’s rights to this new freedom. He strongly supported the 14^th Amendment, which granted Black people citizenship, but he realized that this new citizenship status needed to be protected by suffrage. He was a longtime supporter of women’s rights, but realizing a universal suffrage amendment would fail under Reconstruction politics, Douglass then supported Black male suffrage with the idea that Black men could help women secure the right to vote later.

Frederick Douglass held numerous government appointments; he was the first Black U.S. marshal in 1877 when he was appointed to that post for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford B. Hayes; in 1881 President Garfield appointed him to the high-paying position of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia; President Harrison named Douglass  the U.S. minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti in 1882.

During the later years of his life, Douglass remained committed to social justice and the African American community. Douglass was the most photographed American man in the 19th century and used those pictures as deliberate contradictions to the visual stereotypes of Black men and women at that time, which often exaggerated their facial features, skin color, and physical bodies and demeaned their intelligence. He served on Howard University’s board of trustees from 1871 to 1895.

Frederick Douglass died in his Cedar Hill home on February 20, 1895; a remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president to icon.

The Civil War

The Dred Scott Case
On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford--a victory to supporters of slavery; it also fueled the fires of northern abolitionists.

During the 1830s, the owner of a slave named Dred Scott had taken him from Missouri—a slave state--to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois, where slavery was against the law, according to the Missouri Compromise. Once returned to Missouri, Scot sued for his freedom on the idea that since he’d been taken to a free state he was now free.

The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was a slave and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.
The verdict, in effect, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

The South rejoiced; antislavery northerners were furious.

____________________

John Brown’s Raid
John Brown was a restless man; he struggled throughout life trying to support his family, moving from place to place in an effort to do so. He had assisted the Underground Railroad in Missouri, and fought in battles between pro– and anti–slavery forces in Kansas in the 1850s. Still, he was anxious to strike a more extreme blow for the cause.

During the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led less than 50 men in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown wanted to obtain enough ammunition to lead a larger operation against Virginia’s slaveholders. Brown’s men, including several blacks, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was tried for his crimes;; his trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859

__________________

Civil War and Emancipation

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts between the North and South erupted into civil war; eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

President Abraham Lincoln, although vocally anti-slavery, whose mere election as America’s first Republican President was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the south to secede, did not want the Civil War to be seen as a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln simply wanted to preserve the Union; and he knew that few people even in the North would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

In the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer.

After the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and then, on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure. He did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists. But, by freeing 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Some 186,000 black soldiers--nearly all of them former, or runaway, slaves--would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

_________________

The Post–Slavery South
Though the Civil War gave over 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, but the status of freed slaves in the south was in flux. White southerners eventually reestablished civil authority, and enacted a series of laws known as the “black codes,” designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force.

Impatient with the leniency shown former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination, so–called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This essentially put the South under martial law, and the following year the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves.

Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

The growing influence of former slaves angered many white southerners, who felt control slipping away. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise blacks by using voter fraud, intimidation and, finally, violence .

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks were left with little improvement in their economic and social status; the political gains they had made oftentimes eradicated by white supremacist forces.

Frederick Douglass

He was separated as an infant from his slave mother--he never knew his white father--and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read.

Auld, however, declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Mrs. Auld was ordered to stop the instruction. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

At 16, upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand.

Later, in 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away.

Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass felt impelled to write his autobiography in 1845, revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. It became a classic in American literature as well as a primary source about slavery from the bondsman's viewpoint.

Still considered a runaway slave, Douglass, to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, left on a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

After 1851 Douglass allied himself with the faction of the abolitionist movement led by James G. Birney. He did not countenance violence, however, and specifically counseled against the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. Throughout Reconstruction, he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and vigorously supported the women's rights movement.

After Reconstruction, Douglass served as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, and in the District of Columbia he was marshal and recorder of deeds; finally, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti.

A remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president.