Abstract
In early November 1863, Union Army officials gathered at Goodrich’s Landing, in northern Louisiana, to speak to an audience of soldiers and freedpeople. Since the war began, the small outpost on the Mississippi River had become a crucial base of operations for the Union, and a magnet for African Americans from all over the Mississippi Valley. The purpose of the event was, in many ways, to rectify the growing problem that freedpeople posed to Union operations. Officials sought to reaffirm the Lincoln government’s position regarding emancipation, while at the same time outlining the limits of what African Americans could expect from this. Before a colorfully dressed and overwhelmingly black audience—which included children from a local school, who were marched in front of the crowd, reciting sections of their grammar primer from memory—Union officials spoke with one voice about what the war would bring, and what emancipation demanded of African Americans. Bearing a message that would become all too familiar by the end of the Civil War, Lorenzo Thomas, Adjutant-General of the United States, asserted that emancipation had extended freedom to black slaves but nothing more: “You have none now on whom you can lay the burden of your cares. Your welfare depends solely on your own efforts. You have none who possess or assume the right to crush or oppress you. Your sorrows and trials will be the result of your own folly or incapacity.” After Thomas had finished speaking, a black preacher seemingly echoed his words on the challenges of freedom but gave them different meaning. The message he delivered was that emancipation had only replaced one authority with another because devotion to the rule of law was still necessary. “Everything must have a head,” he called out to the crowd, “the plantation, the house, the steamboat, the army, and to obey that head was to obey the law.” 1
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Notes
The more recent work on the study of African Americans during the Civil War stands on the shoulders of earlier studies, which argued that black sacrifice during the war had only been briefly acknowledged, and had largely been brushed aside by the turn of the twentieth century. See, for instance, Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States in the Wars of 1775–1812, 1861–1865 (1890; New York: Arno Press, 1968)
Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1953)
Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956; Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987). More recent studies that make a powerful case for African American involvement in the war as crucial to the conflict’s outcome include:
James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (1965; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982)
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), 3–220
Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Series II: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
John David Smith, ed., Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Keith P. Wilson, Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers During the Civil War (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002)
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 62–115
Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005)
Barbara Tomblin, Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009)
Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
The most recent work on Reconstruction has broken new ground by paying close attention to black political culture and, increasingly, emphasizing the fissures within African American communities. Some of the best scholarship has focused attention on the question of citizenship for freedpeople—both its promise and its limits—and is largely written by gender historians. For some of the more pivotal studies in this vein, see: Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition From Slavery to Freedom,” in The Black Public Sphere Collective, eds., The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 111–150
Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)
Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). For two monographs that have taken black wartime politics in completely new directions, see: Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet
Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 30–60.
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 218–309.
For more on the connections of between citizenship and military service in the history of slavery, see Philip D. Morgan and Christopher Leslie Brown, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Berlin et al., Black Military Experience , 12 (Table 1). For a fascinating, comparative study of African American ideas about property, see Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) . Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to Brigadier General S. C. Hawkins, Vicksburg MS, October 11, 1863, Box 2, Series 159: Generals Papers and Books: Gen. Lorenzo Thomas. RG 94, National Archives.
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© 2013 Iwan W. Morgan and Philip John Davies
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Mathisen, E. (2013). Freedpeople, Politics, and the State in Civil War America. In: Morgan, I.W., Davies, P.J. (eds) Reconfiguring the Union. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336484_4
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