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Relates the story of the first Black regiments in the Civil War and their pivotal mission to establish a Union base in Jacksonville, Florida, in an attempt to create a haven for fugitive slaves.
A nearly forgotten Civil War episode is restored to history in this masterful account. In March 1863, nine hundred black Union soldiers, led by white officers, invaded Florida and seized the town of Jacksonville. They were among the first African American troops in the Northern army, and their expedition into enemy territory was like no other in the Civil War. It was intended as an assault on slavery by which thousands would be freed. At the center of the story is prominent abolitionist Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who led one of the regiments. After waging battle for three weeks, Higginson and his men were mysteriously ordered to withdraw, their mission a seeming failure. Yet their successes in resisting the Confederates and collaborating with white Union forces persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to begin full-scale recruitment of black troops, a momentous decision that helped turned the tide of the war. Using long-neglected primary sources, historian Stephen V. Ash’s stirring narrative re-creates this event with insight, vivid characterizations, and a keen sense of drama.
A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality—in the face of murderous violence—in the years after the Civil War.
A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil War Features contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarship Covers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory
"This book is about the relationship between the Civil War generation and the founding generation," Timothy S. Huebner states at the outset of this ambitious and elegant overview of the Civil War era. The book integrates political, military, and social developments into an epic narrative interwoven with the thread of constitutionalism—to show how all Americans engaged the nation's heritage of liberty and constitutional government. Whether political leaders or plain folk, northerners or southerners, Republicans or Democrats, black or white, most free Americans in the mid-nineteenth century believed in the foundational values articulated in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787—and this belief consistently animated the nation's political debates. Liberty and Union shows, however, that different interpretations of these founding documents ultimately drove a deep wedge between North and South, leading to the conflict that tested all constitutional faiths. Huebner argues that the resolution of the Civil War was profoundly revolutionary and also inextricably tied to the issues of both slavery and sovereignty, the two great unanswered questions of the Founding era. Drawing on a vast body of scholarship as well as such sources as congressional statutes, political speeches, military records, state supreme court decisions, the proceedings of black conventions, and contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, Liberty and Union takes the long view of the Civil War era. It merges Civil War history, US constitutional history, and African American history and stretches from the antebellum era through the period of reconstruction, devoting equal attention to the Union and Confederate sides of the conflict. And its in-depth exploration of African American participation in a broader culture of constitutionalism redefines our understanding of black activism in the nineteenth century. Altogether, this is a masterly, far-reaching work that reveals as never before the importance and meaning of the Constitution, and the law, for nineteenth-century Americans.
The first book of its kind to appear in a generation, this comprehensive study details the experiences of the black men, women, and children who lived in the South during the traumatic time of secession and civil war. The Black Experience in the Civil War South is the first comprehensive study of the Southern black wartime experience to appear in a generation. Incorporating the most recent scholarship, this thematically organized book does justice to the richness of its subject, looking at the lives of blacks in the Confederate states and the nonseceding Southern states; at blacks on farms and plantations and in towns and cities; at blacks employed in industry and the military; and at black men, women, and children. Drawing on memoirs, autobiographies, and other original source materials, the author details the experiences of blacks who took up residence in Union "contraband camps" and on free-labor plantations and those who enlisted in the Union army. He introduces individuals who escaped from slavery, as well as the small minority of Southern blacks who were free when the war began. Most significantly, this revealing study deals not only with those who gained freedom during the war, but those whose freedom came only after the conflict's end.
The Civil War changed the United States in many ways—economic, political, and social. Of these changes, none was more important than Emancipation. Besides freeing nearly four million slaves, it brought agricultural wage labor to a reluctant South and gave a vote to black adult males in the former slave states. It also offered former slaves new opportunities in education, property ownership—and military service. From late 1862 to the spring of 1865, as the Civil War raged on, the federal government accepted more than 180,000 black men as soldiers, something it had never done before on such a scale. Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains, and still others took part in major operations like the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments took up posts in the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy. Freedom by the Sword tells the story of these soldiers' recruitment, organization, and service. Thanks to its broad focus on every theater of the war and its concentration on what black soldiers actually contributed to Union victory, this volume stands alone among histories of the U.S. Colored Troops.
The story of an enormous step forward in both the struggle for black freedom and the defeat of the Confederacy: turning former enslaved men into Union soldiers. After President Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, Confederate slaves who could reach Union lines often made that perilous journey. A great many of the young and middle-aged among them, along with other black men in the free and border slave states, joined the Union army. These U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), as the War Department designated most black units, materially helped to win the Civil War—performing a variety of duties, fighting in some significant engagements, and proving to the Confederates that Northern manpower had practically no limits. Soldiering for Freedom explains how Lincoln’s administration came to recognize the advantages of arming free blacks and former slaves and how doing so changed the purpose of the war. Bob Luke and John David Smith narrate and analyze how former slaves and free blacks found their way to recruiting centers and made the decision to muster in. As Union military forces recruited, trained, and equipped ex-slave and free black soldiers in the last two years of the Civil War, white civilian and military authorities often regarded the African American soldiers with contempt. They relegated the men of the USCT to second-class treatment compared to white volunteers. The authors show how the white commanders deployed the black troops, and how the courage of the African American soldiers gave hope for their full citizenship after the war. Including twelve evocative historical engravings and photographs, this engaging and meticulously researched book provides a fresh perspective on a fascinating topic. Appropriate for history students, scholars of African American history, or military history buffs, this compelling and informative account will provide answers to many intriguing questions about the U.S. Colored Troops, Union military strategy, and race relations during and after the tumultuous Civil War.
Alabamians in Blue offers an in-depth scholarly examination of Alabama’s black and white Union soldiers and their contributions to the eventual success of the Union army in the western theater. Christopher M. Rein contends that the state’s anti-Confederate residents tendered an important service to the North, primarily by collecting intelligence and protecting logistical infrastructure. He highlights an underappreciated period of biracial cooperation, underwritten by massive support from the federal government. Providing a broad synthesis, Rein’s study demonstrates that southern dissenters were not passive victims but rather active participants in their own liberation. Ecological factors, including agricultural collapse under levies from both armies, may have provided the initial impetus for Union enlistment. Federal pillaging inflicted further heavy destruction on plantation agriculture. The breakdown in basic subsistence that ensued pushed Alabama’s freedmen and Unionists into federal camps in garrison cities in search of relief and the opportunity for revenge. Once in uniform, Alabama’s Union soldiers served alongside northern regiments and frustrated Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s attempts to interrupt the Union supply efforts in the 1864 Atlanta campaign, which led to the collapse of Confederate arms in the western theater and the eventual Union victory. Rein describes a “hybrid warfare” of simultaneous conventional and guerilla battles, where each significantly influenced the other. He concludes that the conventional conflict both prompted and eventually ended the internecine warfare that largely marked the state’s experience of the war. A comprehensive analysis of military, social, and environmental history, Alabamians in Blue uncovers a past of biracial cooperation in the American South, and in Alabama in particular, that postwar adherents to the “Myth of the Lost Cause” have successfully suppressed until now.
This book explores the remarkable partnership of Joseph and Harriet Hawley, a married couple from Connecticut whose lives were transformed by overlapping experiences in the American Civil War era. When Joseph became the colonel of the 7th Connecticut Infantry Regiment in 1862, Harriet ignored family advice and social convention, and travelled to Union military headquarters at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where Joseph’s regiment was stationed. From that bold beginning, she spent the next three years as a visitor at field hospitals, a teacher at freedman’s schools, a wartime journalist, a ward nurse, and her husband’s informal advisor and publicist. Moving in and around the scenes of military action, she lived and worked in spaces usually reserved for men and took on responsibilities that implicitly challenged conventional understandings of women’s physical and emotional dependency. While Joseph struggled for recognition and promotion in the brutally competitive environment of Union military politics, Harriet shrewdly used her own personal contacts with power brokers in Hartford and Washington to protect his interests and those of his men. And as the terrible realities of the Civil War pushed them both to the brink of physical and emotional collapse, Harriet and Joseph remained committed to the cause and found ways to sustain their devotion to both Union and emancipation in the very worst moments of the conflict.