HIS 227
Notes
Reconstruction—How African Americans sought to give new meaning to freedom
Slavery and the making of America
Robert Smalls
The challenge of freedom –1862 Smalls escaped on the Charleston harbor
Urban life- buy their freedom work for others
James McPherson- Who Freed the Slaves * The slaves freed themselves?- escaping /bringing emancipation to the Lincoln administration / creating a situation in which southern masters would have to return them to slavery or acknowledge their freedom “contrabands” * GIFT to slaves? * Black soldiers weighed in the scale of the civil war – union victory * Vincent Harding (1981)- Lincoln hesistated and the self-liberated fugitives into the union lines took freedom into their own hands- blacks had already claimed to be living proclamations the emancipation proclamation confirmed and gave ambiguous legal standing to their freedom * Two corollaries of the self-emancipation thesis- 1) Lincoln hindered more than he helped the cause 2) image of him as the great emancipator is a myth crreted by whites to deprive them of credit ----placed the preservation of the white union above the death of black slavery MASSAGE PROPOGANDA! * Lincoln had exempt one- third of the south from emancipation * By coming into Union lines, by withdrawing their labor from Confederate owners, by working for the Union army and fighting as soldiers in it, slaves did play an active part in achieving their own freedom WERE NOT passive victims or pawns * Would not have came about if there wasn’t a Civil War * On the eve of the Civil War- plantation agriculture was more profitable, slavery entrenched – U.S government however did not recognize its legitimacy * Abraham Lincoln moves to center stage. Seven states seceded and formed the Confederacy because he won the presidency on an anti- slavery platform; four more seceded after shooting broke out when he refused to evacuate Fort Sumter; the shooting escalated to full-scale war because he called out troops to suppress rebellion. The common denominator in all the steps that opened the door to freedom was the active agency of Lincoln as antislavery political leader, president-elect, president, and commander in chief. * Lincoln’s entire career based on opposition to the expansion of slavery * 1860 election Southerners felt they had los the control of the national government * The Crittenden Compromise did indeed place preservation of the Union above the death of slavery. So did Seward; so did most white Americans during the secession crisis. But that assertion does not describe Lincoln. He refused to yield the core of his antislavery philosophy to stay the breakup of the Onion. Concession over succession * Lincoln's chief concern of 1861 was to maintain a united coalition of War Democrats and border-state Unionists as well as Republicans in support of the war effort. To