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Migration of enslaved Africans

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 Migration of enslaved Africans

The Africans boarding the ship had no idea what lay ahead. For weeks, months, sometimes as long as a year, they waited in the dungeons of the human trafficking factories scattered along Africa's western coast. They had already made the long, difficult journey from Africa's interior -- but just barely. Out of the roughly 20 million who were taken from their homes and sold into slavery, half didn't complete the journey to the African coast, most of those dying along the way. And the worst was yet to come.

 

Condition of enslaved Africans during migration

The slaves were branded with hot irons and restrained with shackles. Their "living quarters" was often a deck within the ship that had less than five feet of headroom -- and throughout a large portion of the deck, sleeping shelves cut this limited amount of headroom in half. Lack of standing headroom was the least of the slaves' problems, though. About 400 people packed in a tiny area with literally worse condition than it would be for livestock in today’s standard -- an area with little ventilation and, in some cases, not even enough space to place buckets for human waste -- disease was prevalent. According to Olaudah Equiano (Photo citation), "The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died."

 

Arrival of enslaved African slaves in America

At their arrival in America, arranged like horses at a fair, they are branded like cattle, and then driven to toil, to starve, and to languish for a few years on the different plantations.

Slave labor involved cultivation of cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar in the plantation, others included carpenters, bricklayers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, tanners, tailors, butchers, masons, coopers, cabinet makers, metal workers, and silversmiths and a large numbers also worked as boatmen, waiters, cooks, drivers, housemaids, spinners, and weavers. Many slaves were engaged in construction of roads and railroads. Slave masters extracted labor from virtually the entire slave community, young, old, healthy, and physically impaired. Children as young as three or four were put to work, usually in special "trash gangs" weeding fields, carrying drinking water, picking up trash, and helping in the kitchen. Young children also fed chickens and livestock, gathered wood chips for fuel, and drove cows to pasture. Between the ages of seven and twelve, boys and girls were put to work in intensive field work. Older or physically handicapped slaves were put to work in cloth houses, spinning cotton, weaving cloth, and making clothes.

 

Treatment of enslaved Africans

Because slaves had no direct single incentive that can impel the will, or excite their efforts of nothing but terrors and punishments are presented to them; death is denounced if they run away; horrid delaceration if they speak with their native freedom; perpetually awed by the terrible cracks of whips, or by the fear of capital punishments, while even those punishments often fail of their purpose. Others confined recalcitrant slaves to private jails. Chains and shackles were widely used to control runaways. Whipping was a key part of plantation discipline.

 

Enslaved Africans’ marriages and family ties were not recognized by American law. If permitted to become fathers, this fatal indulgence only tends to increase their misery: the poor companions of their scanty pleasures are likewise the companions of their labors; and when at some critical seasons they could wish to see them relieved, with tears in their eyes they behold them perhaps doubly oppressed, obliged to bear the burden of nature--a fatal present--as well as that of unabated tasks.

 Any owner was free to sell husbands from wives, parents from children, and brothers from sisters. Many large slaveholders had numerous plantations and frequently shifted slaves, splitting families in the process. The most conservative estimates indicate that at least 10 to 20 percent of slave marriages were destroyed by sale. The sale of children from parents was even more common. As a result of the sale or death of a father or mother, over a third of all slave children grew up in households from which one or both parents were absent.

On large plantations, one slave father in three had a different owner than his wife, and could visit his family only at his master's discretion. On smaller holdings, divided ownership and mother-headed households occurred even more frequently. Many slaves had to share their single room cabins with relatives or other unrelated slaves. Even on model plantations, children between the ages of 7 and 10 were taken from their parents and sent to live in separate cabins.

Despite the frequent breakup of families by sale, African-Americans managed to forge strong and durable family and kin ties within the institution of slavery. Most slaves married and lived with the same spouse until death, and most slave children grew up in two parent households. To sustain a sense of family identity, slaves often named their children after parents, grandparents, recently deceased relatives, and other kin. Slaves passed down family names to their children, usually the name of an ancestor's owner rather than their current owner's. The strength of slave families is nowhere more evident than in the advertisements slave-owners posted for runaway slaves. Over a third of the advertisements indicate that fugitives left an owner to visit a spouse, a child, or other relatives.

 

Ties to an immediate family stretched outward to an involved network of extended kin. Family destruction and dispersal created extended kinship networks stretching across whole counties. Whenever children were sold to neighboring plantations, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins often took on the functions of parents. When blood relatives were not present, strangers cared for and protected children.

 Enslaved African Americans resisted slavery in a variety of active and passive ways. "Day-to-day resistance" was the most common form of opposition to slavery. Breaking tools, feigning illness, staging slowdowns, and committing acts of arson and sabotage--all were forms of resistance and expression of slaves' alienation from their masters.

 

Running away was another form of resistance. Most slaves ran away relatively short distances and were not trying to permanently escape from slavery. Instead, they were temporarily withholding their labor as a form of economic bargaining and negotiation. Slavery involved a constant process of negotiation as slaves bargained over the pace of work, the amount of free time they would enjoy, monetary rewards, access to garden plots, and the freedom to practice burials, marriages, and religious ceremonies free from white oversight.

 

Some fugitives did try to permanently escape slavery. While the idea of escaping slavery quickly brings to mind the Underground Railroad to the free states, in fact more than half of these runaways headed southward or to cities or to natural refuges like swamps. Often, runaways were relatively privileged slaves who had served as river boatmen or coachmen and were familiar with the outside world.

 

Especially in the colonial period, fugitive slaves tried to form runaway communities known as "maroon colonies." Located in swamps, mountains, or frontier regions, some of these communities resisted capture for several decades.

 During the early 18th century there were slave uprisings in Long Island in 1708 and in New York City in 1712. Rumor has it that a character named Willie Lynch was invited to the colony of Virginia in 1712 to teach his methods to slave owners at the bank of the James River in the colony of Virginia in 1712. Lynch was a British slave owner in the West Indies. He allegedly made the following statements: “I HAVE A FULL PROOF METHOD FOR CONTROLLING YOUR BLACK SLAVES. I guarantee every one of you that, if installed correctly, IT WILL CONTROL THE SLAVES FOR AT LEAST 300 HUNDREDS YEARS. My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it. I HAVE OUTLINED A NUMBER OF DIFFERENCES AMONG THE SLAVES; AND I TAKE THESE DIFFERENCES AND MAKE THEM BIGGER. I USE FEAR, DISTRUST AND ENVY FOR CONTROL PURPOSES.”The term “lynching” is derived from his last name.

 

 

Nonetheless, African resistance to slavery persisted and oppression continued to grow. Slaves in South Carolina staged several insurrections, culminating in the Stono Rebellion in 1739, when they seized arms, killed whites, and burned houses.

 

In 1740 and 1741, conspiracies were uncovered in Charleston and New York. During the late 18th century, slave revolts erupted in Guadeloupe, Grenada, Jamaica, Surinam, San Domingue (Haiti), Venezuela, and the Windward Island and many fugitive slaves, known as maroons, fled to remote regions and carried on guerrilla warfare (during the 1820s, a fugitive slave named Bob Ferebee led a band in fugitive slaves in guerrilla warfare in Virginia). During the early 19th century, major conspiracies or revolts against slavery took place in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800; in Louisiana in 1811; in Barbados in 1816; in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822; in Demerara in 1823; and in Jamaica and in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.

 

Slave revolts were most likely when slaves outnumbered whites, when masters were absent, during periods of economic distress, and when there was a split within the ruling elite. They were also most common when large numbers of native-born Africans had been brought into an area at one time.

 

The main result of slave insurrections was the mass executions of blacks. After a slave conspiracy was uncovered in New York City in 1740, 18 slaves were hanged and 13 were burned alive. After Denmark Vesey's conspiracy was uncovered, the authorities in Charleston hanged 37 blacks. Following Nat Turner's insurrection, the local militia killed about 100 blacks and 20 more slaves, including Turner, were later executed. In the South, the preconditions for successful rebellion did not exist, and tended to bring increased suffering and repression to the slave community.

 Violent rebellion was rarer and smaller in scale in the American South than in Brazil or the Caribbean, reflecting the relatively small proportion of blacks in the southern population, the low proportion of recent migrants from Africa, and the relatively small size of southern plantations. Compared to the Caribbean, prospects for successful sustained rebellions in the American South were bleak. In Jamaica, slaves outnumbered whites by ten or eleven to one; in the South, a much larger white population was committed to suppressing rebellion. In general, Africans were more likely than slaves born in the New World to participate in outright revolts. Not only did many Africans have combat experience prior to enslavement, but they also had fewer family and community ties that might inhibit violent insurrection.

Typical punishment for disobedient enslaved Africans

The following scene will I hope account for these melancholy reflections, and apologize for the gloomy thoughts with which I have filled this letter: my mind is, and always has been, oppressed since I became a witness to it. I was not long since invited to dine with a planter who lived three miles from ---, where he then resided. In order to avoid the heat of the sun, I resolved to go on foot, sheltered in a small path, leading through a pleasant wood. I was leisurely travelling along, attentively examining some peculiar plants which I had collected, when all at once I felt the air strongly agitated; though the day was perfectly calm and sultry. I immediately cast my eyes toward the cleared ground, from which I was but at a small distance, in order to see whether it was not occasioned by a sudden shower; when at that instant a sound resembling a deep rough voice, uttered, as I thought, a few inarticulate monosyllables. Alarmed and surprised, I precipitately looked all round, when I perceived at about six rods distance something resembling a cage, suspended to the limbs of a tree; all the branches of which appeared covered with large birds of prey, fluttering about, and anxiously endeavoring to perch on the cage. Actuated by an involuntary motion of my hands, more than by any design of my mind, I fired at them; they all flew to a short distance, with a most hideous noise: when, horrid to think and painful to repeat, I perceived a negro, suspended in the cage, and left there to expire!

 

I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes, his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped, and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood. I found myself suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves were convulsed; I trembled, I stood motionless, involuntarily contemplating the fate of this Negro, in all its dismal latitude. The living spectre, though deprived of his eyes, could still distinctly hear, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to give him some water to allay his thirst. Humanity herself would have recoiled back with horror; she would have balanced whether to lessen such reliefless distress, or mercifully with one blow to end this dreadful scene of agonizing torture ! Had I had a ball in my gun, I certainly should have dispatched him ; but finding myself unable to perform so kind an office, I sought, though trembling, to relieve him as well as I could. A shell ready fixed to a pole, which had been used by some negroes, presented itself to me; filled it with water, and with trembling hands I guided it to the quivering lips of the wretched sufferer. Urged by the irresistible power of thirst, he endeavored to meet it, as he instinctively guessed its approach by the noise it made in passing through the bars of the cage. "Tanke, you white man, tanke you, pute some poy'son and give me." "How long have you been hanging there?" I asked him. "Two days, and me no die; the birds, the birds; aaah me!"

 

Oppressed with the reflections which this shocking spectacle afforded me, I mustered strength enough to walk away, and soon reached the house at which I intended to dine. There I heard that the reason for this slave being thus punished, was on account of his having killed the overseer of the plantation. They told me that the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary; and supported the doctrine of slavery with the arguments generally made use of to justify the practice; with the repetition of which I shall not trouble you at present. Letter from an American farmer. De Crevecor.

 

Conditions for slavery were ripe for rebellion. Enslaved Africans and some Europeans who were against slavery or cruelty to humankinds made several attempt to rebel against the slavery system. All known attempts were crushed according to the historical records, and no violent attempt ever succeeded in America. In most occasions, the culprits were apprehended and had faced very harsh punishments such as deaths by hanging, or maiming, or burned to death and being executed on a breaking wheel. The severity of punishment was in proportion to fears of insurrection. After which laws governing the lives of blacks were often made more restrictive. African Americans were not permitted to gather in groups of more than three, they were not permitted to carry firearms, and gambling was outlawed. Other crimes, such as property damage, rape, and conspiracy to kill, were made punishable by death. Free blacks were no longer allowed to own land. Slave owners who decided to free their slaves were required to pay a tax of £200, a price much higher than the price of a slave. Slave sympathizers could not even afford to set their slaves free if they wanted. Slavery was essentially abetted by the US government.

 

War of independence

Leaders of the patriot cause repeatedly argued that British policies would make the colonists slaves of the British and these were the basic ideas upon which American independence was built. Thomas Paine (1737–1805) was one of the great fiery voices of the American Revolution and the author of Common Sense, a popular pamphlet that argued for complete American independence from Britain. He was also one of the advocates against slavery in America. During the American Revolution, both the British and the colonists believed that slaves could serve an important role in their causes. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, promised freedom to all slaves belonging to rebels who would join the British Troops and several hundreds of slaves joined British forces. Colonists persuaded in turn recruited slaves in the thousands to stop a British invasion. Although, there were no slave troops approved by congress. As a result of the Revolution, a surprising number of slaves were manumitted, while thousands of others freed themselves by running away. Georgia lost about a third of its slaves and South Carolina lost 25,000. Yet despite these losses, slavery quickly recovered in the South. By 1810, South Carolina and Georgia had three times as many slaves as in 1770.

 

Effect of American independence on African enslavement

The Revolution had contradictory consequences for slavery. In the South, slavery became more entrenched. In the North, every state freed slaves as a result of court decisions or the enactment of gradual emancipation schemes. Vermont was the first territory (not a state at the time) in North America to abolish slavery outright in 1777. The first state to abolish slavery outright was Pennsylvania in 1780. All of the other states north of Maryland began to gradually abolish slavery between 1781 and 1804. Yet even in the North, there was strong resistance to emancipation and freeing of slaves was accompanied by the emergence of a virulent form of racial prejudice.

 

A new boom in the south as the price of enslaved Africans rise

During the early 19th century, slavery underwent a new boom, rapidly expanding in new territories southwest of the Appalachian mountains in the United States: into Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. This was essentially due to a new demand of manpower created by Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin. By 1794 the price of slaves had tripled, going from $500 apiece from previous years to $1,500 in 1794. As the price of slaves grew, so, too, did their numbers. During the first decade of the 19th century, the number of slaves in the United States rose by 33 percent; during the following decade, the slave population grew another 29 percent. But, slaves suffered extremely high mortality rate.

 

The struggle to free enslaved Africans begins

The struggle to free slaves in the colonies led to the emergence of the abolitionists. The first article published in what later became the United States advocating the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery may have been written by Thomas Paine. Titled "African Slavery in America", it appeared on 8 March 1775 in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, more popularly known as The Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Museum. Thomas Paine's writing greatly influenced his contemporaries and, especially, the American revolutionaries. His books inspired philosophic and working-class radicals in the U.K., and U.S. liberals, libertarians, feminists, democratic socialists, social democrats, anarchists, freethinkers, and progressives often claim him as an intellectual ancestor. Many of his works have also been an inspiration for rapidly expanding secular humanism.

 

Organizing the Abolitionists movements

The slave system faced little opposition until the 18th century, when some thinkers criticized it for violating the rights of man, and Quaker and other evangelical religious groups condemned it as un-Christian. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was the first American abolition society, formed 14 April 1775, in Philadelphia, primarily by Quakers who had strong religious objections to slavery. Rhode Island Quakers, associated with Moses Brown, co-founder of Brown University, and who also settled at Uxbridge, Massachusetts prior to 1770, were among the first in America to free slaves. The society ceased to operate during the Revolution and the British occupation of Philadelphia. After the Revolution, it was reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president.

 

By 1783, Anti-slavery movement has stated to take shape and quickly became widely spread but had had little immediate effect on the centers of slavery themselves — the West Indies, South America, and the southern United States. The importation of African slaves was banned in the British colonies in 1807, and in the United States in 1808. In the British West Indies, slavery was abolished in 1827 and in the French possessions 15 years later.

 

The abolition campaigns

 

The Abolitionist Movement set in motion actions in every state to abolish slavery. By 1804, abolitionists succeeded in passing legislation that would eventually emancipate the slaves in every state north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. John Woolman gave up most of his business in 1756 to devote himself to campaigning against slavery along with other Quakers. By 1810 people had started to free their slaves. The most notable of individuals was Robert Carter III of Virginia, who freed more than 450 people by "Deed of Gift", filed in 1791. This number was more slaves than any single American had freed or would ever free. However, emancipation in the Free states was so gradual that there were still a dozen "permanent apprentices" in the 1860 census. Often slaveholders came to their decisions by their own struggles in the Revolution; their wills and deeds frequently cited language about the equality of men supporting their manumissions.

 

John Newton was a good example of persons of that era with a dramatic change of view on slavery. After being a slave driver and a slave ship captain for several years and forced to resign his commission on the advice of his doctors; he became a minister. He wrote "I think I should have quitted the slave trade] sooner had I considered it as I now do to be unlawful and wrong. But I never had a scruple upon this head at the time; nor was such a thought ever suggested to me by any friend." In 1770, Newton wrote the famous hymn:

 

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see

 

Banning importation of enslaved Africans

The importation of slaves into the United States was officially banned on 1 January 1808. The main impetus behind antislavery came from religion. New religious and humanitarian values contributed to a view of slavery as "the sum of all villainies," a satanic institution that gave rise to every imaginable sin: violence, despotism, racial prejudice, and sexual corruption. As the struggle for emancipation of slaves continued, the abolitionist groups fragmented into several groups of ideological divisions.

 

Ideologies and figures behind the growth of abolitionist movements

 

The Genius of Universal Emancipation was one of the major abolitionist newspapers, and it founded in 1821 in Mount Pleasant, Ohio by Benjamin Lundy. The Genius ran from 1821 to 1839 under Lundy's editorship. Lundy's contributions reflected his Quaker views, condemning slavery on moral and religious grounds but advocating gradual emancipation and the removal of Negroes from the United States. Lundy moved the paper to Jonesboro, Tennessee in 1823, and then established himself in Baltimore, Maryland in 1824, where most of the paper's run would be published.

 

In 1829, Lundy recruited the young William Lloyd Garrison to join him in Baltimore, Maryland and help him edit the paper. Garrison's experience as a printer and newspaper editor allowed him to revamp the layout of the paper and free Lundy to spend more time traveling as an antislavery speaker. Garrison, who had been converted to abolitionism by one of Lundy's northern speaking tours, initially shared Lundy's gradualist views, but, while working for the Genius, he became convinced of the need to demand immediate and complete emancipation. Lundy and Garrison continued to work together on the paper in spite of their differing views, agreeing simply to sign their editorials to indicate who had written it.

 

One of the regular features that Garrison introduced during his time at the Genius was "the Black List," a column devoted to printing short reports of "the barbarities of slavery -- kidnappings, whippings, murders." One of Garrison's "Black List" columns reported that a shipper from Garrison's home town of Newburyport, Massachusetts -- one Francis Todd -- was involved in the slave trade, and that he had recently had slaves shipped from Baltimore to New Orleans on his ship Francis. Todd filed a suit for libel against both Garrison and Lundy, filing in Maryland in order to secure the favor of pro-slavery courts. The state of Maryland also brought criminal charges against Garrison, quickly finding him guilty and ordering him to pay a fine of $50 and court costs. (Charges against Lundy were dropped on the grounds that he had been traveling and not in control of the newspaper when the story was printed.) Garrison was unable to pay the fine and was sentenced to a jail term of six months. He was released after seven weeks when the antislavery philanthropist Arthur Tappan donated the money for the fine, but Garrison had decided to leave Baltimore, while he and Lundy amicably agreed to part ways. Garrison returned to New England, and soon began his own abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. After Garrison's departure, Lundy mounted a failed attempt to relocate the newspaper to Washington, DC, and eventually ceased publication in 1835 in order to move to Philadelphia and begin a new newspaper. In 1839, Lundy revived the Genius and printed one more issue before he died of a fever on August 22, 1839.

Abolitionist groups were divided by approach and interest. Some were motivated by culture (free soils), or by religion, by political interest, academic or philosophical, social, humanitarian, and economic interest. Historian James M. McPherson describes three types of abolitionists prior to the Civil War: Civil Right antislavery which demanded unconditional emancipation and usually envisaged civil equality for the free slaves, Conservatives Antislavery group demanded immediate abolition and separation, and Free Soil which desired only the containment of slavery and was ambivalent on the question of equality. This included those who joined the American Anti-Slavery Society or its auxiliary groups in the 1830s and 1840s as the movement fragmented. The fragmented anti-slavery movement included groups such as the Liberty Party; the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; the American Missionary Association; and the Church Anti-Slavery Society.

 

African-American activists and their writings were rarely heard outside their community; however, they were tremendously influential to some sympathetic European American people, most prominently the first activist to reach prominence, William Lloyd Garrison was its most effective propagandist. Garrison's efforts to recruit eloquent spokesmen led to the discovery of ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who eventually became a prominent activist in his own right. Eventually, Douglass would publish his own, widely distributed abolitionist newspaper, the North Star.

 

In the face of vicious attacks, the antislavery movement divided over questions of strategy and tactics. In 1829, William Lloyd Garrison demanded "immediate emancipation" of slaves without compensation to their owners and began to attack all forms of inequality and violence in American society, withdrew from churches that condoned slavery, demanded equal rights for women, and called for voluntary dissolution of the Union through his publication, the Liberator. Other abolitionists turned to politics as the most promising way to end slavery, helping to form the Liberty Party in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in 1854.  Within six years, 200 antislavery societies had sprouted up in the North, and had mounted a massive propaganda campaign against slavery. Most Northerners favored a policy of gradual and compensated emancipation. After 1849 abolitionists rejected this and demanded it end immediately and everywhere. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison repeatedly condemned slavery for contradicting the principles of freedom and equality on which the country was founded. In 1854, Garrison wrote:

 

I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of American Independence in which it is set forth, as among self-evident truths, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Hence, I am an abolitionist. Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form – and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing – with indignation and abhorrence. Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to principle. They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defense, ask me to give the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my soul. I will not be a liar, a poltroon, or a hypocrite, to accommodate any party, to gratify any sect, to escape any odium or peril, to save any interest, to preserve any institution, or to promote any object. Convince me that one man may rightfully make another man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of Independence. Convince me that liberty is not the inalienable birthright of every human being, of whatever complexion or clime, and I will give that instrument to the consuming fire. I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together.

 

 

David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World – among the most powerful anti-slavery works ever written. Walker denounced the American institution of slavery as the most oppressive in world history and called on people of African descent to resist slavery and racism by any means. The book terrified southern slave owners, who immediately labeled it seditious. A price was placed on Walker's head: $10,000 if he were brought in alive, $1,000 if dead.

 

David Walker was the Boston agent for the distribution of the Freedom's Journal, a New York based weekly abolitionist newspaper. Walker provided an appeal to secular theological basis for insurrection. His works was banned in several states and were instrumental in initiating slave escapes and insurrections.

 

In the Appeal, Walker argued that African Americans suffered more than any other people in the history of the world, and identified four causes for their "wretchedness:" slavery, a submissive and cringing attitude towards whites (even amongst free blacks), indifference by Christian ministers, and false help by groups such as the American Colonization Society, which promised freedom from slavery only on the condition that freed blacks would be forced to leave America for colonies in West Africa (Mayer 83). The pamphlet called for immediate, universal, and unconditional emancipation — an uncommon position, even amongst antislavery activists, in the 1820s — and in particular condemned colonization plans, arguing:

 

Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites — we have enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears: — and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood?

 

Walker went even further, openly praising slaves who used violence in self-defense against their masters and overseers, and suggested that slaves kill their masters in order to gain freedom:

 

The whites have had us under them for more than three centuries, murdering, and treating us like brutes; and, as Mr. Jefferson wisely said, they have never found us out — they do not know, indeed, that there is an unconquerable disposition in the breasts of the blacks, which, when it is fully awakened and put in motion, will be subdued, only with the destruction of the animal existence. Get the blacks started, and if you do not have a gang of tigers and lions to deal with, I am a deceiver of the blacks and of the whites. ... If you commence, make sure work — do not trifle, for they will not trifle with you — they want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us in order to subject us to that wretched condition — therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed. Now, I ask you, had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife, and dear little children? Look upon your mother, wife and children, and answer God Almighty; and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty; ....

 

– David Walker, Walker's Appeal, pp. 29-30

 

On June 18, 1830, Walker died just months after completing the third edition of the Appeal. Walker’s sudden and mysterious death caused speculation that he was poisoned.

 

 

Uprising and Mob vengeance

John Brown was not the only abolitionist known to have actually planned a violent insurrection. In 1831, a bloody slave rebellion took place in Southampton County, Virginia. A slave named Nat Turner, who was able to read and write and had "visions," started what became known as Nat Turner's Rebellion or the Southampton Insurrection. With the goal of freeing himself and others, Turner and his followers killed approximately fifty people, but they were eventually subdued by the militia.

 

Nat Turner and his followers were hanged, and Turner's body was flayed. The militia also killed more than a hundred slaves who had not been involved in the rebellion. Across the South, harsh new laws were enacted in the aftermath of the 1831 Turner Rebellion to curtail the already limited rights of African Americans. Typical was the following Virginia law against educating slaves, free blacks and children of whites and blacks:

 

. . . Every assemblage of Negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any Negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such Negro to be punished with stripes.

 

If a white person assemble with negroes for the purpose of instructing them to read or write, or if he associate with them in an unlawful assembly, he shall be confined in jail not exceeding six months and fined not exceeding one hundred dollars; and any justice may require him to enter into a recognizance, with sufficient security, to appear before the circuit, county or corporation court, of the county or corporation where the offence was committed, at its next term, to answer therefore, and in the mean time to keep the peace and be of good behavior.

 

 John Brown’s attempt in 1859 to start a slave uprising provoked another harsh public reaction. Mobs led by "gentlemen of property and standing" attacked the homes and businesses of abolitionist merchants, destroyed abolitionist printing presses, attacked black neighborhoods, and murdered the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. Northerners suspected of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists. The abolitionist movement was strengthened by the activities of free African-Americans, especially in the black church, who argued that the old Biblical justifications for slavery contradicted the New Testament.

 

 

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, (born circa 1818  – February 20, 1895) was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. Called "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia", Douglass is one of the most prominent figures in African American and United States history. He was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. "He coined the term “Self-Made Men" in a famous lecture first delivered in 1859. He gave his own definition of the self-made man and explains what he thinks are the means to become such a man. Self-made men he claimed are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results.

 

In addition, Douglass does not believe in what he calls the "good luck theory" (p552), which attributes success to chance and friendly circumstances. He believes that "opportunity is important but exertion is indispensable" (p553). It is not luck that makes a man a self-made man, but considerable physical and mental effort. Similar to Franklin’s virtue of industry, Douglass underlines the importance of hard work as a necessary means to achieve success. He remarks that "there is nothing good, great or desirable […], that does not come by some kind of labor” (p555). Douglass is convinced that success can be explained by only one word, namely "WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!" (p556)

 

He further argues that there is a natural hierarchy of men. An ambitious man will naturally, through hard work, climb the social ladder, whereas the unmotivated man will not improve his position: "the man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down" (p557). Applying this theory to the situation of the African-Americans, Douglass remarks: "Give the Negro fair play and let him alone. If he lives, well. If he dies, equally well. If he cannot stand up, let him fall down." (p557)

 

Yet, Douglass admits that industry is not the only explanation of the phenomenon of the self-made man. In his opinion, necessity is what urges a man to achieve more. Moreover, favorable circumstances are counterproductive to one’s resolution to get ahead. Ease and luxury rather lead to helplessness and inactivity and an inactive man can never become a self-made man. "As a general rule, where circumstances do most for men there man will do least for himself; and where man does least, he himself is least. His doing makes or unmakes him."(p558) However, though acknowledging that there are other factors for success such as "order, the first law of heaven" (562), Douglass insists that hard work is the most important of them all, without which all others would fail:

 

My theory of self-made men is, then, simply this; that they are men of work. Whether or not such men have acquired material, moral or intellectual excellence, honest labor faithfully, steadily and persistently pursued, is the best, if not the only, explanation of their success. (p560)

 

Thus, like Franklin, Douglass arrives at his moral principles. According to him, "the principles of honor, integrity and affection" (p561) are the essential prerequisites for enduring success:

 

All human experience proves over and over again, that any success which comes through meanness, trickery, fraud and dishonor, is but emptiness and will only be a torment to its possessor. (p561)

 

The concept of the self-made man is deeply rooted in the American Dream. It is as old as the United States. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, is also sometimes said to have co-founded that very concept. In his Autobiography, he describes his way from a poor, unknown son of a candle-maker to a very successful business man and highly acknowledged member of the American society. Franklin creates the archetype of someone coming from low origins, who, against all odds, breaks out of his inherited social position, climbs up the social ladder and creates a new identity for himself. Key factors in this rise from rags to riches are hard work and a solid moral foundation. Franklin also stresses the significance of education for self-improvement. Examples of self-made men, such as Andrew Carnegie and Douglass, are often used to justify Social Darwinism and to oppose labor movements.

 

In the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations were established advocating the movement of black people from the United States to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization, while others advocated emigration. During the 1820s and 1830s the American Colonization Society (A.C.S.) was the primary vehicle for proposals to return black Americans to freedom in Africa.

The famous, "fiery" Abolitionist, Abby Kelley Foster, from Massachusetts, was considered an "ultra" abolitionist who believed in full civil rights for all black people. She held to the views that the freed slaves would colonize Liberia. Parts of the anti-slavery movement became known as "Abby Kellyism". She recruited Susan B Anthony to the movement.

 

The American Colonization Society (ACS)

 

The ACS was formed following the American Revolutionary War as a solution to the "problem" of free “blacks. The events which motivated some supporters of emigration included an abortive slave rebellion headed by Gabriel Prosser in 1800, and a rapid increase in the number of free African-Americans in the United States which was perceived by some to be alarming. Although the ratio of whites to blacks was 8:2 from 1790 to 1800, it was the massive increase in the number of free African-Americans that disturbed proponents of colonization. From 1790 to 1800, the number of free African-Americans increased from 59,467 (1½ % of total U.S. population, 7½ % of U.S. black population) to 108,398 (2 % of U.S. population), a percentage increase of 82 percent; and from 1800 to 1810, the number increased from 108,398 to 186,446 (2½ % of U.S. pop.), an increase of 72 percent.

 

This steady increase did not go unnoticed by an anxious white community that was ever more aware of and anxious about the free blacks in their midst. The arguments propounded against free blacks, especially in Free states, may be divided into four main categories. One argument pointed toward the perceived moral laxity of blacks. Blacks, it was claimed, were licentious beings who would draw whites into their savage, unrestrained ways. These fears of an intermingling of the races were strong and underlay much of the outcry for removal. Along these same lines, blacks were accused of a tendency toward criminality. Still others claimed that the supposed mental inferiority of African-Americans made them unfit for the duties of citizenship and incapable of real improvement. Economic considerations were also put forth. Free blacks, it was thought, would only take jobs away from whites. This feeling was especially strong among the working class in the North.

 

Southerners had their special reservations about free blacks. It was feared that freedmen located in slave areas would act as an enticing reminder of what freedom might mean and encourage runaways and slave revolts. While the colonialists in the South were, in some cases, motivated by racism and fear of slave uprising, the white colonialists in the North did not accept the notion of white-black co-existence. The proposed solution was to have this class of people deported from United States and colonize parts of Africa.

 

Precursors to the ACS

As early as the Revolutionary period, Thomas Jefferson proposed relocating African Americans beyond the boundaries of the new nation. Colonization, as this idea became known, rested upon the contention that blacks and whites—due to innate racial differences, polarized societal statuses, and pervasive racism—could not live together in social harmony and political equality within the U.S. To many of its advocates, colonization was an ideological middle ground between the immediate, nationwide abolition of slavery, which seemed an ever remote possibility, and perpetual black bondage, a proposition that even some southern slaveholders found discomforting.

  

Origins and formation

The ACS had its origins in 1816, when Charles Fenton Mercer, a Federalist member of the Virginia state assembly, discovered accounts of earlier legislative debates on black colonization held in the wake of Gabriel Prosser's conspiracy. Mercer pushed the state of Virginia to support the idea, and one of his political contacts in Washington City, John Caldwell, in turn contacted his brother-in-law, a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Robert Finley, who endorsed the scheme. The American Colonization Society was established in Washington at the Davis Hotel on December 21, 1816.

 

Ex-president Thomas Jefferson publicly supported the organization's goals, and President James Madison arranged public funding for the Society. Other notable supporters included Francis Scott Key, Bushrod Washington, and the architect of the United State Capitol, William Thornton. At this inaugural meeting, Finley proposed a colony be established in Africa to take free people of color, most of whom had been born free, away from the United States. Finley meant to colonize "(with their consent) the free people of color residing in our country, in Africa, or such other place as Congress may deem most expedient."

 

These "moderates" thought slavery was unsustainable and should eventually end but did not consider integrating slaves into society a viable option. So, the ACS encouraged slaveholders to offer freedom on the condition that those accepting it would move to Liberia at the society's expense. A small number of slave owners chose to follow this course of action.

 

The presidents of the ACS tended to be southerners. The first president of the ACS was the nephew of former U.S. President George Washington, Bushrod Washington, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Supporters of the ACS may have been divided into three main groups. The first consisted of those who genuinely felt that it was the best solution to a difficult problem and might lead to a gradual emancipation. Another smaller group was a pro-slavery group who saw removal as the answer to problems associated with "dangerous" free blacks. Perhaps the largest group of supporters was made up of those who opposed slavery, but did not believe in anything remotely resembling equality of the races.

 

The colonization effort resulted from a mixture of motives. Free blacks, freedmen and their descendants, encountered widespread discrimination in the United States of the early 19th century. They were generally perceived as a burden on society, and a threat to white workers because they undercut wages. Some abolitionists believed that blacks could not achieve equality in the United States and would be better off in Africa. Many slaveholders were worried that the presence of free blacks would encourage slaves to rebel. Other supporters of removal to Africa wanted to prevent racial mixing, to promote the spread of Christianity in Africa, or to develop trade with Africa.

 

The ACS encouraged slaveholders to offer freedom on the condition that those accepting it would move to Liberia at the society's expense.

 

The reasons that the movement never became very successful can be credited to objections raised by blacks and abolitionists, the enormous scale of the task of moving so many people (there were 4 million free blacks in the USA after the Civil War), and the difficulty in finding locations willing to accept large numbers of newcomers. On the other side, Africans in America stood divided on the issue of emigration. A few black church leaders signaled their support for the ACS. In January 1817, free blacks in Richmond, Virginia, made a public pronouncement favoring emigration. Among those Africans that supported colonization was Paul Cuffe. Paul Cuffe (1759–1817) was a successful Quaker ship owner of African-American and Native American ancestry. He advocated for settling freed American slaves in Africa and gained support from the British government, free black leaders in the United States, and members of Congress for a plan to take emigrants to the British colony of Sierra Leone. Cuffe intended to make one voyage per year, taking settlers and bringing back valuable cargoes. In 1816, Captain Cuffe took thirty-eight American blacks at his own expense to Freetown, Sierra Leone and planned subsequent voyages but these were precluded by his death in 1817. However, Cuffe had reached a large audience with his pro-colonization arguments and thus laid the groundwork for the American Colonization Society.

 

Many slave owners also thought that colonization might be the best option available and were willing to pay for their favored slaves’ passage to Africa. And, some of those slaveholders who fathered children with enslaved women supported colonization as a means of providing for and removing their mulatto offspring from public view. Still other colonizers who were opposed to slavery altogether on moral grounds or for political reasons supported colonization as the first step toward ending slavery. This group included many free African Americans in northern states. Eventually, most free African American and white abolitionists moved away from colonization, seeing it as a means of sending the most talented blacks out of the country while retaining the rest in slavery. This break did not happen fully, however, until the 1830s. One account of Africans sent back was Thomas Foster agreed to sell Ibrahima Abd ar-Rahman Jallo (Photo citation) for the low sum of $200 with the condition that his esteemed slave be sent immediately back to Africa. Unwilling to leave his wife behind, ar-Rahman, with Marschalk, persuaded local whites, some who were members of the Mississippi Colonization Society, to buy and emancipate ar-Rahman’s wife, Isabella, in 1828.

 

However, most free blacks in northern communities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston united against emigration, seeing it as a ploy to expel free blacks from the United States. Many denounced the membership of the society as racist whose aim was not to help black people, but rather to strengthen slavery by ridding society of a free black population. They felt that it would be better to stay in America and fight against slavery and for full rights as United States citizens. Lemuel Haynes, a free black Presbyterian minister at the time of the Society's formation, argued passionately that God's providential plan would eventually defeat slavery and lead to the harmonious integration of the races as equals. Nearly 150 years after his death, a manuscript written by Haynes around 1776 was discovered, in which he boldly stated "That an African... has an undeniable right to his Liberty." The treatise went on to condemn slavery as sin, and pointed out the irony of slave-owners fighting for their own liberty while denying it to others. There was, however, considerable opposition among African Americans, many of whom denounced colonization as an effort to cleanse the United States of its black population and did not see colonization as a viable or acceptable solution to their daunting problems in the United States. "In 1817, another strong proponent against repatriation, James Forten and Bishop Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church organized over 3,000 Africans to gather in Philadelphia in a protest against the ACS plans for colonization. James Forten was well known for having  written a pamphlet, Letters from a Man of Color, denouncing a racist bill then being considered in the Pennsylvania legislature.

 

At the same time, many slave owners in the South vigorously denounced the plan as an assault on their slave economy. For many years the ACS tried to persuade the United States Congress to appropriate funds to send colonists to Liberia. The Society's members relentlessly pressured Congress and the President for support. They got an ally when James Monroe took office in 1817. Monroe had endorsed the removal of free blacks to Africa since the turn of the century when he had been Governor of Virginia, and was now willing to use his authority to help the new society. He was able to convince Congress to appropriate $100,000 for the cause in 1819, and also helped the society to secure federal help in acquiring territory. In fact, Monroe's efforts to help the American Colonization Society were seen as so monumental, the capital of Liberia was named Monrovia in his honor.

 

After a series of attempts to plant small settlements on the coast of West Africa, the A.C.S. established the colony of Liberia in 1821–22. Over the next four decades, it assisted thousands of former slaves and free black people to move there from the United States. The disease environment they encountered was extreme, and most of the migrants died fairly quickly. Enough survived to declare independence in 1847. American support for colonization waned gradually through the 1840s and 1850s, largely because of the efforts of abolitionists to promote emancipation of slaves and granting of American citizenship. Americo-Liberians ruled Liberia continuously until the military coup of 1980.

  

Antebellum

 

In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe's published her first novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Critical and popular views of both the character and the novel have shifted over time,  leading to the shift in the term's use. Today, Uncle Tom is a pejorative term for a person of African ancestry who is perceived by others as behaving in a subservient manner to person of European ancestry authority figures, or as seeking ingratiation with them by way of unnecessary accommodation. In the novel the Uncle Tom character is a Christian martyr, morally superior to his white owners in an antebellum fiction whose subtext was an argument that the institution of slavery was immoral. Numerous adaptations altered the depiction substantially, often rendering him feeble, servile, or a race traitor. These adaptations, along with critical distaste for the original character's passivity, contributed to the strongly negative connotations of the name in modern popular use.

 

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for white audiences by portraying Tom as a Christ like figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two fugitive female slaves. Uncle Tom demonstrates great moral strength and his characterization constitutes a compelling rebuttal to then-current Southern arguments that defended slavery on the grounds that slavery enforces Christianity upon slaves: Uncle Tom and actual men like him are better Christians than the white slave-owners depicted.

 

Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War. Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery”. Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the moral ideal of Uncle Tom.

 

The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the United States, so much in the latter case that the novel intensified the sectional conflict leading to the American Civil War.

 Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States alone. The book's impact was so great that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln is often quoted as having declared, "So this is the little lady who made this big war."

 

By the late 1850s, a growing number of northerners were convinced that slavery posed an intolerable threat to free labor and civil liberties. Many believed that an aggressive Slave Power had seized control of the federal government, incited revolution in Texas and war with Mexico, and was engaged in a systematic plan to extend slavery into the western territories. John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859 produced shock waves throughout the South, producing fears of slave revolt and race war. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, many white southerners were convinced that this represented the triumph of abolitionism in the North and thought they had no choice but to secede from the Union. The new president, however, was passionately committed to the preservation of the union, and peaceful secession proved to be impossible.

 

In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion, following the Dred Scott appeal, stating that: Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the Declaration of Independence.

The Ordinance of 1787 could not confer freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory to non-white people. The provisions of the Act of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, were voided as a legislative act because the act exceeded the powers of Congress, insofar as it attempted to exclude slavery and impart freedom and citizenship to Black people in the northern part of the Louisiana cession. In effect, the Court ruled that slaves had no claim to freedom. They were property and not citizens, and could not bring suit in federal court. Because slaves were private property, the federal government could not revoke a white slave owner's right to own a slave based on where he lived, thus nullifying the essence of the Missouri Compromise. Taney, speaking for the majority, also ruled that since Scott was considered private property, he was subject to the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution which prohibits taking property from its owner "without due process".

 

Dred Scott was a 46 or 47-year old slave who sued for his freedom after the death of his owner on the grounds that he had lived in a territory where slavery was forbidden (the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, from which slavery was excluded under the terms of the Missouri Compromise). Scott filed suit for freedom in 1846 and went through two state trials, the first denying and the second granting freedom. Eleven years later the Supreme Court denied Scott his freedom in a sweeping decision that set the United States on course for Civil War. The court ruled that Dred Scott was not a citizen who had a right to sue in the Federal courts, and that Congress had no constitutional power to pass the Missouri Compromise.

 

The decision enraged abolitionists and encouraged slave owners, helping to push the country towards civil war. The divisions became fully exposed with the 1860 presidential election. The electorate split four ways. The Southern Democrats endorsed slavery, while the Republicans denounced it. The Northern Democrats said democracy required the people to decide on slavery locally. The Constitutional Union Party said the survival of the Union was at stake and everything else should be compromised.

 

Lincoln, the Republican, won with a plurality of popular votes and a majority of electoral votes. Lincoln, however, did not appear on the ballots of ten southern states: thus his election necessarily split the nation along sectional lines. Many slave owners in the South feared that the real intent of the Republicans was the abolition of slavery in states where it already existed, and that the sudden emancipation of four million slaves would be problematic for the slave owners and for the economy that drew its greatest profits from the labor of people who were not paid.

 

They also argued that banning slavery in new states would upset what they saw as a delicate balance of Free states and slave states. They feared that ending this balance could lead to the domination of the industrial North with its preference for high tariffs on imported goods. The combination of these factors led the South to secede from the Union, and thus began the American Civil War. Northern leaders had viewed the slavery interests as a threat politically, and with secession, they viewed the prospect of a new southern nation, the Confederate States of America, with control over the Mississippi River and the West, as politically and militarily unacceptable.

 

Civil War

The consequent American Civil War, beginning in 1861, led to the end of chattel slavery in America. Not long after the war broke out, through a legal maneuver credited to Union General Benjamin F. Butler, a lawyer by profession, slaves who came into Union "possession" were considered "contraband of war". General Butler ruled that they were not subject to return to Confederate owners as they had been before the war. Soon word spread, and many slaves sought refuge in Union territory, desiring to be declared "contraband." Many of the "contrabands" joined the Union Army as workers or troops, forming entire regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. Others went to refugee camps such as the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe or fled to northern cities. General Butler's interpretation was reinforced when Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces.

 

The issues of emancipation and military service were intertwined from the onset of the Civil War. News from Fort Sumter set off a rush by free black men to enlist in U.S. military units. They were turned away, however, because a Federal law dating from 1792 barred Negroes from bearing arms for the U.S. army (although they had served in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812). In Boston disappointed would-be volunteers met and passed a resolution requesting that the Government modify its laws to permit their enlistment.

 

The Lincoln administration wrestled with the idea of authorizing the recruitment of black troops, concerned that such a move would prompt the Border States to secede. When Gen. John C. Frémont (photo citation: 111-B-3756) in Missouri and Gen. David Hunter (photo citation: 111-B-3580) in South Carolina issued proclamations that emancipated slaves in their military regions and permitted them to enlist, their superiors sternly revoked their orders. By mid-1862, however, the escalating number of former slaves (contrabands), the declining number of white volunteers, and the increasingly pressing personnel needs of the Union Army pushed the Government into reconsidering the ban.

 

As a result, on July 17, 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act, freeing slaves who had masters in the Confederate Army. Two days later, slavery was abolished in the territories of the United States, and on July 22 President Lincoln (photo citation: 111-B-2323) presented the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet. After the Union Army turned back Lee's first invasion of the North at Antietam, MD, and the Emancipation Proclamation was subsequently announced, black recruitment was pursued in earnest. Volunteers from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Massachusetts filled the first authorized black regiments. Recruitment was slow until black leaders such as Frederick Douglass (photo citation: 200-FL-22) encouraged black men to become soldiers to ensure eventual full citizenship. (Two of Douglass's own sons contributed to the war effort.) Volunteers began to respond, and in May 1863 the Government established the Bureau of Colored Troops to manage the burgeoning numbers of black soldiers.

 By the end of the Civil War, roughly 10% of the Union Army was of African descent. Nearly 40,000 African American  soldiers died over the course of the war—30,000 of infection or disease. Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause. There were nearly 80 black commissioned officers. Black women, who could not formally join the Army, nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman (photo citation), who scouted for the 2d South Carolina Volunteers.

 

Because of prejudice against them, black units were not used in combat as extensively as they might have been. Nevertheless, the soldiers served with distinction in a number of battles. Black infantrymen fought gallantly at Milliken's Bend, LA; Port Hudson, LA; Petersburg, VA; and Nashville, TN. The July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, SC, in which the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers lost two-thirds of their officers and half of their troops, was memorably dramatized in the film Glory. By war's end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their valor.

 

In addition to the perils of war faced by all Civil War soldiers, black soldiers faced additional problems stemming from racial prejudice. Racial discrimination was prevalent even in the North, and discriminatory practices permeated the U.S. military. Segregated units were formed with black enlisted men and typically commanded by white officers and black noncommissioned officers. The 54th Massachusetts was commanded by Robert Shaw and the 1st South Carolina by Thomas Wentworth Higginson—both white. Black soldiers were initially paid $10 per month from which $3 was automatically deducted for clothing, resulting in a net pay of $7. In contrast, white soldiers received $13 per month from which no clothing allowance was drawn. In June 1864 Congress granted equal pay to the U.S. Colored Troops and made the action retroactive. Black soldiers received the same rations and supplies. In addition, they received comparable medical care.

 

The black troops, however, faced greater peril than white troops when captured by the Confederate Army. In 1863 the Confederate Congress threatened to punish severely officers of black troops and to enslave black soldiers. As a result, President Lincoln issued General Order 233, threatening reprisal on Confederate prisoners of war (POWs) for any mistreatment of black troops. Although the threat generally restrained the Confederates, black captives were typically treated more harshly than white captives. In perhaps the most heinous known example of abuse, Confederate soldiers shot to death black Union soldiers captured at the Fort Pillow, TN, engagement of 1864. Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest witnessed the massacre and did nothing to stop it.

 

The document featured with this article is a recruiting poster directed at black men during the Civil War. It refers to efforts by the Lincoln administration to provide equal pay for black soldiers and equal protection for black POWs. The original poster is located in the Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780's–1917, Record Group 94.

Article Citation Freeman, Elsie, Wynell Burroughs Schamel, and Jean West. "The Fight for Equal Rights: A Recruiting Poster for Black Soldiers in the Civil War." Social Education 56, 2 (February 1992): 118-120. [Revised and updated in 1999 by Budge Weidman.]

 

The war lasted four years. The human cost of the war far exceeded what anyone had imagined in 1861. The North placed roughly 2.2 million men in uniform (approximately 200,000 of them were of African ancestry), of whom about 640,000 were killed, wounded in battle, or died of disease. Of the 360,000 Northern soldiers who died, two-thirds perished from illnesses such as dysentery, diarrhea, measles, malaria, and typhoid. Casualties in Confederate forces are more difficult to estimate, but they probably approached 450,000 out of approximately 750,000 to 850,000 Confederate soldiers. Of these, it is estimated that more than 250,000 died. The proportion of battlefield deaths to deaths by disease was probably the same as in the Northern armies. Total deaths thus exceeded 600,000, and the dead and wounded combined totaled about 1.1 million. More Americans were killed in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined from the colonial period through the war in Afghanistan in 2001.

 

Human suffering also extended beyond the military sphere and continued long after fighting ceased. During the conflict, thousands of black and white Southerners became refugees, losing many of their possessions and facing an uncertain future in strange surroundings. Far fewer Northern civilians experienced the war so directly, although the citizens of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, saw their town burned by Confederate cavalry in 1864. An unknown number of civilians perished at the hands of guerrillas, deserters, and, less frequently, regular soldiers in both armies. After the war, many thousands of veterans struggled to cope with lost limbs and other wounds. Thousands of families faced difficult financial circumstances due to the death of husbands and fathers. The United States government made available small pensions for disabled veterans and widows of soldiers, and southern states did the same for former Confederate soldiers and their widows. In neither instance, however, were the funds sufficient to provide for all the needs of a family.

 

 

Reconstruction was the military occupation of the south after the Civil War.  Its purpose was to control rebel territories and flex northern military might over a conquered people while they rebuilt their local infrastructure.  The KKK was created to oppose this military occupation and to enforce customary norms (such as the oppression of black people) that the northern armies would not enforce.

 

Reconstruction was the military occupation of the south after the Civil War.  Its purpose was to control rebel territories and flex northern military might over a conquered people while they rebuilt their local infrastructure.  The KKK was created to oppose this military occupation and to enforce customary norms (such as the oppression of black people) that the northern armies would not enforce.

 

In conclusion, it must be remarked that the Civil War did not raise blacks to a position of equality with whites. Nor did the war bring about that emotional reunion that Lincoln hoped for when he spoke in his first inaugural address of “the bonds of affection” that had formerly held the two sections together.

 

After the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, abolitionists continued to pursue the freedom of slaves in the remaining slave states, and to better the conditions of black Americans generally. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 officially ended slavery in the United States. However, many conservative Northerners were uneasy at the prospect of the sudden addition to the labor pool of a huge number of freed laborers who were used to working for very little, and thus seen as being willing to undercut prevailing wages.

 

Postbellum

 

Britain had already emancipated 780,000 slaves in 1833,, paying 20 million pounds sterling compensation to their owners. In 1848, Denmark and France freed slaves in their colonial empires. Slavery survived in Surinam and other Dutch New World colonies until 1863 and in the United States in 1865. The last New World slaves were emancipated in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888.

 

1865, near the end of the war, abolitionists were concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation would be construed solely as a war act and no longer apply once fighting ended. They were also increasingly anxious to secure the freedom of all slaves, not just those freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus pressed, Lincoln staked a large part of his 1864 presidential campaign on a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery uniformly throughout the United States. Lincoln's campaign was bolstered by separate votes in both Maryland and Missouri to abolish slavery in those states. Maryland's new constitution abolishing slavery took effect in November 1864. Slavery in Missouri was ended by executive proclamation of its governor, Thomas C. Fletcher, on January 11, 1865.

 

President Abraham Lincoln and others were concerned that the Emancipation Proclamation would be seen as a temporary war measure, and so, besides freeing slaves in those states where slavery was still legal, they supported the Amendment as a means to guarantee the permanent abolition of slavery.

  

Winning re-election, Lincoln pressed the lame duck 38th Congress to pass the proposed amendment immediately rather than wait for the incoming 39th Congress to convene. In January 1865, Congress sent to the state legislatures for ratification what became the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery in all U.S. states and territories. The amendment was ratified by the legislatures of enough states by December 6, 1865 and proclaimed 12 days later. There were about 40,000 slaves in Kentucky and 1,000 in Delaware who were liberated then.

 

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially was adopted on December 6, 1865, and was then declared in a proclamation of Secretary of State William H. Seward on December 18.

 

 The Thirteenth Amendment is the first of the Reconstruction Amendments.

 

The Emancipation Proclamation consists of two executive orders issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. The first one, issued September 22, 1862, declared the freedom of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. The second order, issued January 1, 1863, named ten specific states where it would apply. Lincoln issued the Executive Order by his authority as "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution.

 

The Emancipation Proclamation was criticized at the time for freeing only the slaves over which the Union had no power. Although most slaves were not freed immediately, the Proclamation brought freedom to thousands of slaves the day it went into effect in parts of nine of the ten states to which it applied (Texas being the exception).

 

Additionally, the Proclamation provided the legal framework for the emancipation of nearly all four million slaves as the Union armies advanced, and committed the Union to ending slavery, which was a controversial decision even in the North. The proclamation did not name the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware, which had never declared secession, and so it did not free any slaves there. The state of Tennessee had already mostly returned to Union control, so it also was not named and was exempted. Virginia was named, but exemptions were specified for the 48 counties that were in the process of forming West Virginia, as well as seven other named counties and two cities. Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and thirteen named parishes of Louisiana, all of which were also already mostly under Federal control at the time of the Proclamation.

 

However, in other Union-occupied areas of Confederate states besides Tennessee, the Proclamation went into immediate effect and at least 20,000 slaves were freed at once on January 1, 1863. Hearing of the Proclamation, more slaves quickly escaped to Union lines as the Army units moved south. As the Union armies conquered the Confederacy, thousands of slaves were freed each day until nearly all (approximately 4 million, according to the 1860 census were freed by July 1865.

 

Near the end of the war, abolitionists were concerned that while the Proclamation had freed most slaves as a war measure, it had not made slavery illegal. Several former slave states had already passed legislation prohibiting slavery; however, in a few states, slavery continued to be legal, and to exist, until the institution was ended by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 18, 1865.

 

After the Civil War, the biggest problem across the South was labor. To the African-Americans who had been held in bondage their entire lives, freedom meant many things. It meant freedom from white control, autonomy both as individuals and as a community, freedom from the innumerable regulations of slavery, freedom to hold mass meetings and to worship, freedom to own property, and most importantly, freedom to "have land, and turn it and till it by [their] own labor." In other words, black people wanted to work for themselves, not for their former masters.

 

 

Not everyone was able to acquire his own land, however. Some stayed to work on their old plantations. The Freedmen's Bureau helped establish a system of wage labor. One advantage of this system was that it gave blacks the power to break their contracts and move to a new plantation if they wanted to. Nevertheless, many blacks chose to leave the South altogether. An Englishman traveling through the state immediately after the war reported: "Thirty-seven thousand negroes, according to newspaper estimates, have left South Carolina already, traveling west."

 

The lives of everyone in the South changed dramatically. White yeoman farmers (who cultivated their own small plots of land) suffered devastating losses. Before the Civil War, many yeomen had concentrated on raising food crops and instead of cash crops like cotton. After the war these farmers found themselves deep in debt, often with buildings destroyed and lands untended. Their plight was magnified by a series of crop failures in early Reconstruction years. Needing to borrow money to resume planting, many fell deeper into debt – debt that only increased with each successive cotton crop failure.

 

At the same time, many wealthy plantation owners abandoned their property and emigrated to Europe or reestablished themselves as planters in Brazil, where slavery was still legal. Those who stayed developed a romanticized notion of the Confederate experience, celebrating the failed struggled as a "noble Lost Cause." Although this myth of the Lost Cause didn't reach its heyday until the late 1880s and early 1890s, it was born during Reconstruction. As historians Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney explain, "In the strange logic of a plantation society, African-Americans who sought to become self-sufficient farmers seemed not examples of industriousness, but demoralized freedmen unwilling to work – work, that is, under white supervision on a plantation."

 

By the 1860s, cotton was no longer ôkingö in the South, and many Southerners were calling for a more diversified economy. There was an increasing move from a farm economy to an industrial one, and the industrialization of the South with increased capital investment in the Southern economy was endorsed by many. At the same time, Anglo-Americans were now settling millions of acres and overcoming resistance from Native Americans in the Indian Wars. The Civil War was about much more than slavery, and the issue of slavery was much more complex than many realize. Slavery was responsible for the rise of modernity, the growth of instrumental nationality, perceptions of racial identity, the spread of market relations, wage-labor development, growing commerce and communication, the birth of consumer societies, and individualist sensibility.

 

The likes of Henry Carey believed strongly in protectionism, believing that the object of protection is that of securing a demand for labor, and its tendency is to produce equality of condition...the abolition of protection invariably tended to the production of inequality (Document A). He pointed out that wealthy capitalists do not fear change because they usually come out of it for the better, while small businessmen are often ruined by change. The wealthy can borrow at low rates of interest to get back on t

 

North tried to convince the South to adopt the Republican form of government, with free labor and equal rights, but they held strongly to their Democratic principles. The Reconstruction Act was passed in 1867 over President Johnson's veto, and included the 14th Amendment, which protected the rights of Southern Blacks and restricted the power of former Confederates. It also added to the Constitution the definition of a U.S. citizen, which barred states from abridging other privileges or immunities of citizens’ or depriving any person of life, liberty or property without due process of the law. The 15th Amendment, passed in 1869, gave Blacks the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 barred discrimination by hotels, theaters, and railroads. Blacks, now free, became politically active in the South, and many held public office, most of them as members of the Republican Party. The Republican government was responsible for establishing a public school system in the South, though it was racially segregated. However, it was unsuccessful in achieving two of its primary goals: redistribution of plantation lands to former slaves and poor Whites, and a prolonged federal supervision of the former Confederate states.

 

 

Reconstruction in the Southern states

 

On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was to function for only one year, but on July 16, 1866, Congress extended the life of the bureau over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. The Goals of the Freedmen’s Bureau the bureau was organized under the War Department with Major General Oliver O. Howard as the commissioner. The bureau’s chief focus was to provide food, medical care, help with resettlement, administer justice, manage abandoned and confiscated property, regulate labor, and establish schools. Over 1,000 schools were built, teacher-training institutions were created, and several black colleges were founded and financed with the help of the bureau.

 

The Bureau’s Failings

 

Despite the bureau’s success in education, it was unable to alleviate many problems, especially in regard to land management. When the Bureau gave 850,000 acres of abandoned and confiscated land to freedmen, President Andrew Johnson returned the land to Confederate owners. Without the resettlement of land, the bureau instead focused on helping freedmen gain work. They encouraged them to work on plantations, but this eventually led to oppressive sharecropping and tenancy arrangements. The progressive goals of the bureau, however, were not enough to make up for the inadequate funds that plagued its existence. In 1869, Congress terminated all of the bureau’s work except for its efforts in education. In 1870, that too was ended.

 

Six middle-class Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War. They made up the name by combining the Greek kyklos with clan. The Ku Klux Klan was one among a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, including the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865), and the Knights of the White Camellia (1867) in Louisiana.

 

Historians generally see the KKK as part of the postwar violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means in order to restore white supremacy. In 1866, Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan used public violence against blacks as intimidation. They burned houses, and attacked and killed blacks, leaving their bodies on the roads.

 

More recently, historian Bob Brewer has suggested that the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) were a precursor to the KKK. Most recruits to the KGC were in the Southwest, in Texas and New Mexico, where they formed private militias to carry out raids in actions that people hoped would extend slave territory after the Mexican War. While some sympathizers and recruits to the KGC were found during the Civil War in the states bordering the Ohio River, the organization was considered dissolved before the end of the war.

 

A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic Party as continuations of the Confederacy. In an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting up to a national headquarters. They elected Brian A. Scates to be the Leader and President of this organization. Since most of the Klan's members were veterans, they were used to the hierarchical structure of the organization, but in fact the Klan never operated under this structure. Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon developed the Prescript, or Klan dogma. The Prescript suggested elements of white supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of "a white man's government", "the re-enfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights." The latter is a reference to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union, although in practice only a minority of whites were disenfranchised.

 

Gordon supposedly told former slave trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, about the Klan. Forrest allegedly responded, "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place." A few weeks later, Forrest was selected as Grand Wizard, the Klan's national leader, although he always denied his leadership.

 

Nathan Bedford Forrest

In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan's primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republican state governments, people like Tennessee governor Brownlow and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues. One Alabama newspaper editor declared "The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan."

 

Despite Gordon's and Forrest's work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously. There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore white dominance in the disrupted postwar society. Historian Elaine Frantz Parsons commented on the makeup of the membership:

 

Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of "anti-black" vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.

 

Historian Eric Foner observed:

In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican Party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life. Wiki source has original text related to this article:

 

Interview with Nathan Bedford Forrest

To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks. The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions."

 

Activities

Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks. Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other's faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers. "The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night." With this method both the high and the low could be attacked. The Ku Klux Klan night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."

 

The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because people had many roles. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks. "Armed guerilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites." Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. Generally, it Canby reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault.

 

Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. As the following examples indicate, over 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.

 

In the April 1868 Georgia gubernatorial election, Columbia County cast 1, 222 votes for Republican Rufus Bullock. By the November presidential election, however, Klan intimidation led to suppression of the Republican vote and only one person voted for Ulysses S. Grant.

 

Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties. Freedmen's Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies by Klansmen.

 

Milder encounters also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry

 

One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited ... between one and two o'clock in the morning on March 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front. The lieutenant had a pistol in his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full. They treated her "gentlemanly and quietly" but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice. She heeded the warning and left the county.

 

 

Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family. Wiki source has original text related to this article:

 

Why the Ku Klux

By 1868, two years after the Klan's creation, its activity was beginning to decrease. Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for free-lance violence. Many influential southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it. There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating "that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain."

 

Resistance

Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized 'the anti-Ku Klux.' They put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina and patrolled the streets to protect their homes.

 

National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed or believed that it was just a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors. Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.

 

In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a Congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. They accumulated 12 volumes of horrifying testimony. In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Ku Klux Klan Act. This added to the enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him. While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage. The Governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state. A riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse were reported, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.

 

 

Benjamin Franklin Butler wrote the 1871 Klan Act. Wiki source has original text related to this article:

 

Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871

In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler's legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act was used by the Federal government together with the 1870 Force Act to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution. Under the Klan Act, Federal troops were used for enforcement, and Klansmen were prosecuted in Federal court. More African Americans served on juries in Federal court than were selected for local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process. In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned. In South Carolina, habeas corpus was suspended in nine counties.

 

The Klan declines and is superseded by other hate groups. Although Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that he could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days' notice, as a secret or "invisible" group, it had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers. It was difficult for observers to judge its actual membership. It had created a sensation by the dramatic nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.

 

One Klan official complained that his, "so-called 'Chief'-ship was purely nominal, I having not the least authority over the reckless young country boys who were most active in 'night-riding,' whipping, etc., all of which was outside of the intent and constitution of the Klan..."

 

In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization". It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina. Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan's costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace". Historian Stanley Horn writes "generally speaking, the Klan's end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment". A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870, "A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux".

 

 

Gov. William Holden of North Carolina.

 

While people used the Klan as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against them. African Americans were kept off juries. In lynching cases, all-white juries almost never indicted Ku Klux Klan members. When there was a rare indictment, juries were unlikely to vote for a conviction. In part, jury members feared reprisals from local Klansmen.

 

Others may have agreed with lynching as a way of keeping dominance over black men. In many states, officials were reluctant to use black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised. When Republican Governor of North Carolina William Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, it added to his unpopularity. Combined with violence and fraud at the polls, the Republicans lost their majority in the state legislature. Disaffection with Holden's actions led to white Democratic legislators' impeaching Holden and removing him from office, but their reasons were numerous.

 

The Klan was destroyed in South Carolina and decimated throughout the rest of the South, where it had already been in decline. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions. In some areas, other local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs continued to intimidate and murder black voters.

 

In 1874, organized white paramilitary groups formed in the Deep South to replace the faltering Klan: the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in Mississippi, North and South Carolina. They campaigned openly to turn Republicans out of office, intimidated and killed black voters, tried to disrupt organizing and suppress black voting. They were out in force during the campaigns and elections of 1874 and 1876, contributing to the conservative Democrats regaining power in 1876, against a background of electoral violence.

 

Shortly after, in United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Supreme Court ruled that the Force Act of 1870 did not give the Federal government power to regulate private actions, but only those by state governments. The result was that as the century went on, African Americans were at the mercy of hostile state governments that refused to intervene against private violence and paramilitary groups.

 

Whereas the number of indictments across the South was large, the number of cases leading to prosecution and sentencing was relatively small. The overloaded federal courts were not able to meet the demands of trying such a tremendous number of cases, a situation that led to selective pardoning. By late 1873 and 1874, most of the charges against Klansmen were dropped although new cases continued to be prosecuted for several more years. Most of those sentenced had either served their terms or been pardoned by 1875. The Supreme Court of the United States eviscerated the Ku Klux Act in 1876 by ruling that the federal government could no longer prosecute individuals although states would be forced to comply with federal civil rights provisions. Republicans passed a second civil rights act (the Civil Rights Act of 1875) to grant equal access to public facilities and other housing accommodations regardless of race. Ironically, the Klan during this period served to further Northern reconstruction efforts, as Ku Klux violence provided the political climate needed to pass civil rights protections for blacks. Although the Ku Klux Act of 1871 dismantled the first Klan, Southern whites formed other, similar groups that kept blacks away from the polls through intimidation and physical violence. Reconstruction ended with the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who suspended the federal military occupation of the South; yet blacks still found themselves without the basic civil liberties that Congressional Republicans had sought to secure.

 

In 1882, long after the Klan was destroyed, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Harris that the Klan Act was partially unconstitutional. It ruled that Congress's power under the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend to the right to regulate against private conspiracies.

 

Klan costumes, also called "regalia", disappeared by the early 1870s (Wade 1987, p. 109). The fact that the Klan did not exist for decades was shown when Simmons's 1915 recreation of the Klan attracted only two aging "former Reconstruction Klansmen." All other members were new. By 1872, the Klan was broken as an organization. Nonetheless, the goals that the Klan had failed to achieve itself, such as suppressing suffrage for Southern blacks and driving a wedge between poor whites and blacks, were largely accomplished by the 1890s by militant Southern whites. Lynching of African Americans, far from being ended by the Klan's disintegration, instead peaked in 1892 with 161 deaths.

 

The second Klan: 1915–1944

 

Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation has been widely noted for reviving the Ku Klux Klan. An illustration from The Clansman: "Take dat f'um yo equal—"Three closely linked events occurred in 1915:

 

The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.

Leo Frank, a Jewish man whose controversial death sentence for the rape and murder of a young white girl named Mary Phagan had been commuted, was lynched near Atlanta against a backdrop of media frenzy.

 

The second Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, supplementing its original anti-black ideology with a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Prohibitionist and anti-Semitic agenda. The bulk of the founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan that had organized around Leo Frank's trial. The new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.

 

The Birth of a Nation

 

Director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard's Spots, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr.. Dixon said his purpose was "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!" The film created a nationwide Klan craze. At the official premier in Atlanta, members of the Klan rode up and down the street in front of the theater.

 

Much of the modern Klan's iconography, including the standardized white costume and the lighted cross, are derived from the film. Its imagery was based on Dixon's romanticized concept of old Scotland, as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott. The film's influence and popularity were enhanced by a widely reported endorsement by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

 

The Birth of a Nation included extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People, as if to give it a stronger basis. After seeing the film in a special White House screening, Wilson allegedly said, "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Given Wilson's views on race and the Klan, his statement was taken as supportive of the film. In later correspondence with Griffith, Wilson confirmed his enthusiasm. Wilson's remarks immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial.

 

Historian Arthur Link quotes Wilson's aide, Joseph Tumulty: "the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it."

 

Leo Frank

Another event that influenced the Klan was sensational coverage of the trial, conviction and lynching of a Jewish factory manager from Atlanta named Leo Frank. In lurid newspaper accounts, Frank was accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a girl employed at his factory.

 

 

The lynching of Leo Frank

 

After a trial in Georgia in which a mob daily surrounded the courtroom, Frank was convicted. Because of the presence of the armed mob, the judge asked Frank and his counsel to stay away when the verdict was announced. Frank's appeals failed. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented from other justices and condemned the mob's intimidation of the jury as the court's failing to provide due process to the defendant. After the governor commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment, a mob calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him.

 

The Frank trial was used skillfully by Georgia politician and publisher Thomas E. Watson, the editor for The Jeffersonian magazine. He was a leader in recreating the Klan and was later elected to the U.S. Senate. The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. A few aging members of the original Klan attended, along with members of the self-named Knights of Mary Phagan.

 

Simmons stated that he had been inspired by the original Klan's Prescripts, written in 1867 by Confederate veteran George Gordon in an attempt to create a national organization. These were never adopted by the Klan, however. The Prescript stated the Klan's purposes in idealistic terms, hiding the fact that its members committed acts of vigilante violence and murder from behind masks.

 

Social factors

The second Klan arose during the nadir of American race relations, in response to urbanization and industrialization. Massive immigration from the largely Catholic countries of eastern and southern Europe led to friction with America's longer-established Protestant worshipers. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked racism by whites in Northern industrial cities; thus the second Klan would achieve its greatest political power not in any Southern state, but in Indiana. The migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern cities further increased tensions. The Klan grew most rapidly in cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Stanley Horn, a Southern historian sympathetic to the first Klan, was careful in an oral interview to distinguish it from the later "spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute — and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days".

 

 

William Joseph Simmons founded the second Ku Klux Klan in 1915.In an era without Social Security or widely available life insurance, it was common for men to join fraternal organizations such as the Elks or the Woodmen of the World in order to provide for their families in case they died or were unable to work. The founder of the new Klan, William J. Simmons, was a member of twelve different fraternal organizations. He recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, and consciously modeled the Klan after those organizations.

 

Klan organizers signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He then left town with the money. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.

 

The Klan's growth was also affected by mobilization for World War I and postwar tensions, especially in the cities where strangers came up against each other more often. Southern whites resented the arming of black soldiers. Black veterans did not want to go back to second class status, and some were lynched, still in uniform, on returning from overseas.

 

Activities

 

In reaction to social changes, the Klan adopted anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant slants. Klan groups lynched and murdered Black soldiers returning from World War I while they were still in military uniforms. The Klan warned Blacks that they must respect the rights of the white race "in whose country they are permitted to reside". The number of lynching escalated, and from 1918 to 1927, 416 African Americans were killed, mostly in the South.

 

When two black men attempted to vote in November 1920 in Ocoee, Florida, the Klan attacked the black community. In the ensuing violence, six black residents and two whites were killed, and twenty five black homes, two churches, and a fraternal lodge were destroyed. Branford Clarke illustration in The Ku Klux Klan In Prophecy by Bishop Alma White published by the Pillar of Fire Church in 1925 at Zarephath, NJ. Although Klan members were concentrated in the South, Midwest and west, there were some members in New England, too. Klan members torched an African American school in Scituate, Rhode Island. In the 1920s and 1930s, a violent and zealous faction of the Klan called the Black Legion was active in the Midwestern U.S. under Virgil Effinger.

 

Temperance

 

Lender et al. state that the Klan's resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the temperance movement. In Arkansas and elsewhere, the Klan opposed bootleggers, and in 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County. The national Klan office was finally established in Dallas, Texas, but Little Rock, Arkansas was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this auxiliary was a former president of the Arkansas WCTU. Verification needed] One historian contends that the KKK’s "support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation". Membership in the Klan and other prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated activities. For example, Edward Young Clarke, a top leader of the Klan, raised funds for both the Klan and the Anti-Saloon League. Clarke was indicted in 1923 for violations of the Mann Act.

 

 

Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan in 1915.

 

"The End" Referring to the end of Catholic influence in the US. Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty 1926 Blaine Amendments. In 1921, the Klan arrived in Oregon from central California and established the state's first klavern in Medford. In a state with one of the country's highest percentages of white residents, the Klan attracted up to 14,000 members and established 58 klaverns by the end of 1922. Given the small population of non-white minorities outside Portland, the Oregon Klan directed attention almost exclusively against Catholics, who numbered about 8% of the population. In 1922, the Masonic Grand Lodge of Oregon sponsored a bill to require all school-age children to attend public schools. With support of the Klan and Democratic Governor Walter M. Pierce, endorsed by the Klan, the Compulsory Education Law was passed with a majority of votes. Its primary purpose was to shut down Catholic schools in Oregon, but it also affected other private and military schools. A number of states passed Blaine Amendments, which forbid direct government aid to religious schools.

 

Labor and anti-unionism

 

The social unrest of the postwar period included labor strikes in response to low wages and poor working conditions in many industrial cities, often led by immigrants, who also organized unions. Klan members worried about labor organizers and the socialist leanings of some of the immigrants, which added to the tensions. They also resented upwardly mobile ethnic Catholics. At the same time, in cities Klan members were themselves working in industrial environments and often struggled with working conditions.

 

In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs but opposed unions. During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations(CIO), which advocated industrial unions and was open to African-American members. With access to dynamite and skills from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham began using bombings to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods. "By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill." Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and were deeply engaged in violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Urbanization

 

A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in both the North and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state's membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who were trying to protect their jobs and housing from the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic and Jewish in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants; and black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the U.S. Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.

 

For some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indiana showed the rural stereotype was false for that state:

 

Indiana's Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.

 

The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long. Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group they wanted. Millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation's eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan's decline.

 

The burning cross

 

Cross burning is said to have been introduced by William J. Simmons, the founder of the second Klan in 1915. The second Klan adopted a burning cross as its symbol, using it as a rallying point and a means of intimidation against their targets. No such crosses had been used by the first Klan.

The practice of cross burning had been loosely based on ancient Scottish clans' practice of burning a St. Andrew's cross (an X-shaped cross) as a beacon to muster their forces for war. In The Clansman (see above), Dixon had falsely claimed that the first Klan had used fiery crosses when rallying its men to fight against Reconstruction. Griffith brought this image to the screen in The Birth of a Nation, adding to the confusion by mistakenly portraying the burning cross as an upright Latin cross rather than the St. Andrew's cross that the Highland clans had actually used. Simmons adopted the burning Latin cross wholesale from the movie, prominently displaying it at the 1915 Stone Mountain meeting, and the incendiary symbol has been indelibly associated with the Ku Klux Klan ever since.

 

Political influence

 

Sheet music to "We Are All Loyal Klansmen", 1923

The Good Citizen July 1926 Published by Pillar of Fire Church

Branford Clarke illustration in Heroes of the Fiery Cross 1928The Klan had major political influence in several states and was influential mostly in the center of the country. The Klan spread from the South into the Midwest and Northern states, and into Canada where there was a large movement against Catholic immigrants. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.[citation needed] Most of the Klan's membership resided in Midwestern states.

 

In another well-known example from the same year, the Klan decided to turn Anaheim, California, into a model Klan city. It secretly took over the City Council, but the city conducted a special recall election and Klan members were voted out.

 

Klan delegates played a significant role at the path-setting 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, often called the "Klanbake Convention". The convention initially pitted Klan-backed candidate William Gibbs McAdoo against Catholic New York Governor Al Smith. After days of stalemates and rioting, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Klan delegates defeated a Democratic Party platform plank that would have condemned their organization.

 

In some states, such as Alabama, the KKK worked for political and social reform. The state's Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other "progressive" political measures. In many ways these reforms benefited lower class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders like J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership against the power of Black Belt planters who had long dominated the state.

 

Black was elected senator in 1926 and later became a Supreme Court Justice. In 1926, with Klan support, a former Klan chapter head named Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor's office. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, however, even the Klan was unable to break the planters' and rural areas' hold on power.

 

Unlike its predecessor, which had been an exclusively partisan Democratic organization, the second Klan was courted by both Republicans and Democrats in the Midwest, and endorsed candidates from either party that supported its goals; Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and the Republicans to make common cause in the North. In the South, however, the Republican Party was powerless; thus, the southern Klan remained Democratic, closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government.

 

Resistance and decline

 

Nazi propaganda poster from 1944, showing a Ku Klux Klan hood and a lynching noose. Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan. In response to blunt attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan's campaign to illegalize private schools, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed after the lynching of Leo Frank. When one civic group began to publish Klan membership lists, the number of members quickly declined. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People carried on public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied against Klan abuses in Congress. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership began to decline rapidly in most areas of the Midwest.

 

In Alabama, KKK vigilantes, thinking that they had governmental protection, launched a wave of physical terror in 1927, targeting both blacks and whites who had violated racial norms and for perceived moral lapses the state's conservative elite counterattacked. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began publishing a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan for its "racial and religious intolerance". Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for his crusade. Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and "un-American". Sheriffs cracked down. In the 1928 presidential election, the state voted for the Democratic candidate Al Smith, although he was Catholic. Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than six thousand by 1930. Small independent units continued to be active in Birmingham, where in the late 1940s, members launched a reign of terror by bombing the homes of upwardly mobile African Americans. KKK activism increased as a reaction against the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

 

D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. His conviction for murdering a young white schoolteacher in 1925 devastated the Indiana Klan.D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states, was convicted in 1925 for second degree murder resulting from his part in the rape and subsequent death] of Madge Oberholtzer. After Stephenson's conviction in a sensational trial, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana. Historian Leonard Moore concluded that a failure in leadership caused the Klan's collapse:

 

Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana's Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan's stated goals. They were disinterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan's behalf.:

 

Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician, but they were unable to staunch the exodus of members. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944.

 

 

Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1928.Thanks, in part to the Klan terror directed at them five million blacks left the South for northern, Midwestern and western cities from1940-1970 though they found that some of the most politically powerful Klan chapters were in Indiana. The Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Indiana politics and society after World War I. It was made up of native-born, white Protestants of many income and social levels. Nationally, in the 1920s, Indiana was said to have the most powerful Ku Klux Klan. Though it counted a high number of members statewide, its importance peaked with the 1924 election of Edward Jackson for governor. A short time later, the scandal surrounding the murder trial of Indiana Klan official D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the Ku Klux Klan as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Ku Klux Klan was "crippled and discredited."

After World War II, folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan and provided information to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy's intention to strip away the Klan's mystique and trivialize the Klan's rituals and code words may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership. In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.

Like other slave societies, the South did not produce urban centers on a scale equal with those in the North. Virginia's largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year, Wilmington, North Carolina's largest city, had just 7,264 inhabitants. Southern cities were small because they failed to develop diversified economies. Unlike the cities of the North, southern cities rarely became centers of commerce, finance, or processing and manufacturing and southern ports rarely engaged in international trade.

 

By northern standards, the South's transportation network was primitive. Traveling the 1,460 miles from Baltimore to New Orleans in 1850 meant riding five different railroads, two stage coaches, and two steamboats. Its educational system also lagged far behind the North's. In 1850, 20 percent of adult white southerners could not read or write, compared to a national figure of 8 percent.

 The free black families began to thrive, together with African Americans free before the Revolution, mostly descendants of unions between working class white women and African men. By 1860, in Delaware 91.7 percent of the blacks were free, and 49.7 percent of those in Maryland. These first free families often formed the core of artisans, professionals, preachers and teachers in future generations.

 

The Shame and Silence

As late as 1750, no church condemned slave ownership or slave trading. Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Portugal, and Spain all openly participated in the slave trade. Beginning with the Quakers in the late 1750s, however, organized opposition to slavery quickly grew. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from the territories north of the Ohio River; by 1804, the nine states north of Delaware had freed slaves or adopted gradual emancipation plans. In Haiti in 1791, nearly a half million slaves emancipated themselves by insurrection and revolutionary struggle. In 1807, Britain and the United States outlawed the African slave trade.

 

The wars of national liberation in Spanish America ended slavery in Spain's mainland New World Empire. In 1821, the region that now includes Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela adopted a gradual emancipation plan. Two years later, Chile agreed to emancipate its slaves. In 1829, Mexico abolished slavery.

 

Slavery has shaped the American experiences on both sides of the aisles: the enslaved and the slave masters. Slavery is attributed to race exploitation, which has existed in America since its beginning and was largely responsible for systemic annihilation of indigenous values and African cultures in America. Although nordicism was perceived in sense among generation of settlers and immigrants, it was the eugenicist Madison Grant  who emerged as its primary spokesman in the 1900s. His book, “The Passing of the Great Race” (1916), or “The Racial Basis of European History about Nordicism” was highly influential among racial thinking and government policy making.

Grant used the theory as justification for immigration policies of the 1920s, arguing immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe represented a lesser type of European and their numbers in the United States should not be increased. Grant argued the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and admixture was "race suicide" and unless eugenic policies were enacted, the Nordic race would be supplanted by inferior races. Grant and others urged this as well as the complete restriction of non-Europeans. The Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. This was designed to reduce the number of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, exclude Asian immigrants, and favor immigration from Northern and Western European countries such as Britain, Ireland and Germany. President Coolidge agreed, stating "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.”

Grant recommended segregating "unfavorable" races in ghettos by installing civil organizations through the public health system to establish quasi-dictatorships in their particular fields. In 1906, although as Secretary of the New York Zoological Society, he lobbied to put Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy, on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo.

The history of African-Americans in the United States is one of both immeasurable suffering, continues to be very challenging, and that of  soaring hope. African American people have managed to reinvent themselves in spirit, soul, and culture. Although, they are still grappling with issues of identity, truth, empty promises, fair representation and due recognition. Nevertheless, the story of the African American people is that of great triumph in human spirit and resilience.

 

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