"Finally puts to rest the notion that the Confederacy was an intellectual wasteland and that Confederates had nothing to say aside from their rebel yell." --Journal of American History
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We welcome a guest post today from Stanley Harrold, author of Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, which is now available in a new paperback edition. During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle—the underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob actions, and sectional politics—are well known as parts of other stories. In Border War, Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the dramatic incidents that it comprised, and its role in the complex dynamics leading to the Civil War.
In the following guest post, Harrold reveals similarities in the struggles over legal status of enslaved people seeking freedom in the mid-1800s and some immigrants to the U.S. today.
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Slave escapes from the South to the North and Canada happened frequently during the decades prior to the Civil War. Such escapes had a major role in causing the war. From the 1830s through the 1850s, people (North and South, black and white) called the escapees fugitive slaves or runaway slaves. Of the two terms, I prefer the former. Runaway seems demeaning. It suggests triviality or that the slaves deserted masters who deserved loyalty. Some who study the slave escape networks known collectively as the underground railroad go further. They object to using the term slaves and prefer enslaved people. They call slaves who left their masters to head north freedom seekers.
During the pre-Civil War decades, people did not use the term freedom seekers. The closest that I have found in antebellum sources is freedom-hunters. Radical antislavery journalist Joshua Leavitt of Boston used this term in 1841, as he contrasted the escapees with slave-hunters who sought to capture and re-enslave them. What is important for both freedom seekers and freedom-hunters is their emphasis on slave action in gaining freedom. By escaping north, they forced the slavery issue on the nation.
Illegal immigrant, like freedom seeker, is a term that did not exist in the Civil War era. Yet, better than freedom seeker, when applied to fugitive slaves, illegal immigrant facilitates understanding of the relationship between the pre–Civil War black struggle for freedom and the current struggle over the status of many Hispanic immigrants to this country.
Fugitive slaves were the illegal immigrants of their time, despite the fact that the U.S. did not restrict foreign immigration until 1875. keep reading →
In his nonfiction novel Two Captains from Carolina: Moses Grandy, John Newland Maffitt, and the Coming of the Civil War, Bland Simpson twines together the lives of two accomplished nineteenth-century mariners from North Carolina—one African American, one Irish American. Though Moses Grandy (ca. 1791-ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819-1886) never met, their stories bring to vivid life the saga of race and maritime culture in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. With his lyrical prose and inimitable voice, Bland Simpson offers readers a grand tale of the striving human spirit and the great divide that nearly sundered the nation.
In the following excerpt from Two Captains from Carolina (pp. 10-12), we get a glimpse of Moses Grandy’s early career as a boatman—the freedom he felt on the water and the opportunities that lay ahead.
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The Wharf on the Pasquotank River Elizabeth City, North Carolina
CIRCA 1813, WINTERTIME
Boatman dance, boatman sing
Boatman do most anything
When the boatman gets on shore
Spends his money and works for more.
Moses Grandy was used to going to bed cold and hungry in a cabin in Camden and then waking up no less cold, no less hungry, a hoecake scarcely enough to stave it off , turning out at first light, the ground frozen, he underclad and unshod, and the only way to warm his feet was to rouse a hog and stand in the absolute mud where the hog had lain all night and let that rare warm earth wake his flesh and move his own blood. Now he was Charles Grice’s boatman, and Mister Grice saw to it that the man he had to trust with no small part of his commercial life the fifty miles up to Norfolk and then back again did not go to work on the water hungry or cold or barefoot. The young man got a griddle cake, a salted herring, an old blanket refashioned into a coat with a rope belt to hold it closed, an old pair of boots, and a big cypress boat.
Grice put Grandy in command of a rude sailing barge, two huge dug-out cypress logs with a long plank keel joining them, here in North Carolina called a periauger, most of forty feet long overall and low with room aplenty for barrels of flour, barrels of fish, and decking enough that a hog or a goat or small cow could be happy just long enough to reach the market up the way. His was a heavy craft, with a pair of sails and a small cabin forward, yet without a name, and it could be pulled, poled, rowed, scull-oared, sailed, whatever motive force was necessary and available. Sometimes there might be a second such boat, sometimes two more. However many there were, Moses Grandy commanded them all.
Wintertime, wartime, he cared not—in a life and in a world of captivity he was at last master of something important: his own movements for many days at a time. keep reading →
We welcome a guest post today from Rod Andrew Jr., author of Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer, which is now available in a new paperback edition. One of the South’s most illustrious military leaders, Wade Hampton III was for a time the commander of all Lee’s cavalry and at the end of the Civil War was the highest-ranking Confederate cavalry officer. Andrew’s critical biography sheds light on Hampton’s central role during Reconstruction as a conservative white leader, governor, U.S. senator, and Redeemer; his heroic image in the minds of white southerners; and his positions and apparent contradictions on race and the role of African Americans in the New South.
In the following guest post, Andrew explores Hampton’s history as an unlikely Confederate stalwart.
Nearly everybody has an opinion on what caused the Civil War—and on what Americans on both sides thought they were fighting for (which, by the way, could be a quite different question). In the case of individual Confederates, however, we have other questions—why and how did they decide to stop fighting? And, if they had formerly been very committed to the Confederate cause, how did they justify for themselves the act of surrendering?
Lieutenant General Wade Hampton III of South Carolina did not formally submit to federal authorities until May 15, 1865, a full 19 days after his superior, General Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered the Army of Tennessee to General William T. Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina. Like all Confederates who finally decided to quit fighting, Hampton’s decision was a highly personal one, and yet it was profoundly influenced by cultural traditions of his time and place.
Before the war began, few would have foreseen Hampton emerging as a die-hard Confederate. He did not oppose slavery, and in fact benefited from it, but saw no point in allowing the political disputes between North and South to destroy the Union and possibly provoke a war. He was one of the most reluctant secessionists in the most secession-eager state. Indeed, some fire-eaters began to subtly question the loyalty and state patriotism of Hampton and the handful of other moderates in their midst.
After President Abraham Lincoln called for troops to suppress the Southern rebellion, however, Hampton no longer hesitated. keep reading →
In this video, Rubin discusses her new role as president of the Society of Civil War Historians, her goals for the next two years, and how Civil War studies can make use of digital history. (running time: 16:22)
The History News Network is on the ground at the American Historical Association annual meeting, underway now in New Orleans. They shared the following video of Kate Masur’s presentation of a paper entitled “Fugitive Slaves, Military Intelligence, and Civil Rights before the Emancipation Proclamation” at a panel session called The Emancipation Proclamation at 150: Dynamics, Contexts, and Legacies, held January 3, 2013.
[This article is crossposted at uncpressblog.com.]
