slavery before the civil war essay

Table of contents

Slavery and its legacies before and after the civil war.

During the antebellum era, well after the end of slavery in Massachusetts, and even after the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution conferred emancipation nationwide in 1865, vestiges—or legacies—of the system lingered. Legacies of slavery such as exclusion, segregation, and discrimination against Blacks in employment, voting, housing, healthcare, public accommodations, criminal punishment, and education, among other areas, persisted in the South as well as the North.⁠ Go to footnote 38 detail Notwithstanding the Commonwealth’s Revolutionary War heritage as birthplace of the colonists’ struggle for liberty, its celebrated antislavery activists, and its many brave Union veterans of the Civil War,⁠ Go to footnote 39 detail racial inequality flourished in Massachusetts—and at Harvard—as Blacks struggled for equal opportunity and full citizenship.⁠ Go to footnote 40 detail

Slavery and Antislavery before the Civil War

In the years before the Civil War, the color line held at Harvard despite a false start toward Black access. In 1850, Harvard’s medical school admitted three Black students but, after a group of white students and alumni objected, the School’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them.⁠ Go to footnote 41 detail The episode crystallized opposition to Black students on campus, which outweighed the views of a vocal contingent of white classmates who supported the admission of the three African American students.⁠ Go to footnote 42 detail Over 100 years would pass before these more welcoming attitudes toward Blacks would prevail and open the door to significant Black enrollment.

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, requiring the return of enslaved people to their owners, even if slaves had escaped to free states, turned more white Northerners against slavery and its cruelties.⁠ Go to footnote 43 detail Yet support for antislavery efforts remained anemic at Harvard, even amid the rise of abolitionist sentiment in the Commonwealth. In some cases, University leadership even attempted to suppress abolitionist sentiment.

Within the context of increasing political rancor and social division on and off campus, a small but vocal group of Harvard affiliates pressed the abolitionist cause. In addition to Charles Sumner, outspoken abolitionist voices included Wendell Phillips (AB 1831; LLB 1834), founder of the New England Antislavery Society; John Gorham Palfrey (AB 1815; dean and faculty member, 1830–1839; overseer, 1828–1831, 1852–1855), the first dean of the Divinity School; and several other faculty members, among them cofounders of the Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society.⁠ Go to footnote 44 detail Richard Henry Dana Jr. (AB 1837; LLB 1839; lecturer 1866–1868; overseer, 1865–1877) cofounded the antislavery Free Soil party and represented Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave who had been arrested in Boston. In a turn of events decried by many Northerners, a Massachusetts judge, himself a Harvard alumnus and lecturer, ordered Burns returned to slavery in Virginia.⁠ Go to footnote 45 detail Because of such controversies, the Fugitive Slave Act became a catalyst of the Civil War, and by the time war began in 1861, the University officially supported the Union. Many Harvard men fought and died for the Union, and their sacrifices are commemorated on campus in Memorial Hall; some also fought and died for the Confederacy.⁠ Go to footnote 46 detail

Intellectual Leadership

Harvard’s ties to the legacies of slavery also include, prominently, its intellectual production—its scholarly leadership and the influential output of some members of its faculty. In the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, that would, in the hands of the University’s prominent scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of so-called race science at Harvard and other American institutions.⁠ Go to footnote 47 detail Charles William Eliot—Harvard’s longest-serving president—and several prominent faculty members promoted eugenics, the concept of selective reproduction premised on innate differences in moral character, health, and intelligence among races.⁠ Go to footnote 48 detail These were ideas of the sort that had long been deployed to justify racial segregation and which would in the 19th and 20th centuries cement profound racial inequities in the United States and underpin Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations.⁠ Go to footnote 49 detail In addition to research in the University’s extensive collections of human remains, Eliot authorized anthropometric measurements of Harvard’s own student-athletes.⁠ Go to footnote 50 detail Many of the records and artifacts of this era remain in the University’s collections today.⁠ Go to footnote 51 detail

Vestiges of Slavery after the Civil War

The decades after the Civil War, during the period of Reconstruction when debates raged about whether and how to support the Black American quest for equality, are especially germane to understanding legacies of slavery in American institutions of higher education. The US Constitution changed, reflecting the nation’s formal break with slavery and commitment to equal citizenship rights regardless of race. The 14th Amendment, conferring equal protection and due process of law, and the 15th Amendment, prohibiting discrimination against males in voting, were enacted and ratified.⁠ Go to footnote 52 detail Within this context, reformers conceived policies and social supports to lift the formerly enslaved and their descendants. But it fell to the nation’s institutions, its leadership, and its people to safeguard—or not—citizens’ rights and implement these policies.⁠ Go to footnote 53 detail

Around the same time, Harvard itself aspired to transform: it sought to enlarge its infrastructure, expand its student body, and recruit new faculty. Samuel Eliot Morison, a noted historian of the University, explained that during the period from 1869 into the 20th century, the University resolved “to expand with the country.”⁠ Go to footnote 54 detail Harvard’s leaders, particularly Presidents Charles William Eliot and Abbott Lawrence Lowell, argued that Harvard should become a “true” national university that would serve as a “unifying influence.”⁠ Go to footnote 55 detail They viewed the recruitment of students from “varied” backgrounds and a “large area” of the country as a linchpin of these ambitions.⁠ Go to footnote 56 detail

Hence, two developments critical to understanding this moment of promise and peril occurred at once: The fate of African Americans hung in the balance. And Harvard, already well-known, sought to grow, evolve, and build a yet greater national reputation.

The University, as a prominent institution of higher education, held influence in a sphere deemed particularly critical to racial uplift. Because so many considered education “a liberating force,” legislative and philanthropic efforts to create opportunity for African Americans often emphasized schooling.⁠ Go to footnote 57 detail Massachusetts was already a leader in this area; in addition to its many universities, the state had led the movement to establish taxpayer-supported “common schools” at the elementary and secondary levels.⁠ Go to footnote 58 detail

Nevertheless, in Massachusetts and in every corner of the nation, African Americans encountered roadblocks to achieving social mobility through education. White opposition to racially “mixed” schools, born of racist attitudes about Black ability and character promoted by slaveholders as well as intellectuals at Harvard and elsewhere, blocked equal access to education.⁠ Go to footnote 59 detail Segregated, under-resourced, and often inferior elementary and secondary schools became the norm for African Americans. In this, too, Massachusetts led the way.

Harvard alumni played prominent roles on both sides of the struggle over school segregation. One critically important chapter in that struggle, which would have dire nationwide consequences for Blacks into the 20th century, had occurred in Boston before the Civil War. In Roberts v. City of Boston , an 1850 decision, the Commonwealth helped normalize segregated schools. In that case—filed by Charles Sumner on behalf of a five-year-old Black girl—the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that racial segregation in the city’s schools did not offend the law.⁠ Go to footnote 60 detail Judge Lemuel Shaw (AB 1800; overseer, 1831–1853; fellow, 1834–1861) authored the opinion for the court.⁠ Go to footnote 319 detail “[T]he good of both classes of school will be best promoted, by maintaining the separate primary schools for colored and for white children,” he wrote.⁠ Go to footnote 745 detail Advocacy by the local Black community with important support from Sumner led the Commonwealth to ban segregated schools in 1855, the first such law in the United States.⁠ Go to footnote 734 detail Nevertheless, decades later, in 1896, the US Supreme Court cited Roberts as authority when it held in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially “separate but equal” facilities did not violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.⁠ Go to footnote 61 detail

In higher education, Blacks also found themselves in separate and unequal schools. It was left to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), supported by the federal government beginning in 1865 and often founded by Black self-help organizations and religious societies, to provide a measure of opportunity.⁠ Go to footnote 62 detail But from the start, HBCUs were sorely underfunded, a reality that hobbled school leaders as they sought to fulfill the HBCUs’ mission of racial uplift through postsecondary school access.⁠ Go to footnote 63 detail

Predominantly white universities did not fill the breach. In keeping with prevailing racial attitudes and the relegation of African Americans to poorly resourced HBCUs of uneven quality, Harvard—like all but a few white universities—did relatively little to support the African American quest for advancement.⁠ Go to footnote 64 detail

In the decades following the Civil War, at Harvard and other white universities, Blacks still faced discrimination, or plain indifference. Notwithstanding Harvard’s rhetorical commitment in the war’s wake to recruit a nationally representative student body that would model political collegiality, the University’s sights remained set on a white “upper crust.” Harvard prized the admission of academically able Anglo-Saxon students from elite backgrounds—including wealthy white sons of the South—and it restricted the enrollment of so-called “outsiders.”⁠ Go to footnote 65 detail Despite access to civic organizations in major cities that could identify a pool of able Black students, the college enrolled meager numbers of African Americans.⁠ Go to footnote 66 detail During the five decades between 1890 and 1940, approximately 160 Blacks attended Harvard College, or an average of about 3 per year, 30 per decade.⁠ Go to footnote 67 detail The pattern of low enrollment of Blacks also held true at Radcliffe College,⁠ Go to footnote 70 detail founded in 1879 as the “women’s annex” to all-male Harvard.⁠ Go to footnote 71 detail Radcliffe did consistently enroll more Black women than its Seven Sisters peers.⁠ Go to footnote 72 detail Yet the women educated at Radcliffe overwhelmingly were white, and Black women were denied campus housing.⁠ Go to footnote 73 detail

Those Blacks who did manage to enter Harvard’s gates during the 19th and early-to-mid 20th century excelled academically, earning equal or better academic records than most white students,⁠ Go to footnote 74 detail but encountered slavery’s legacies on campus. Two examples illustrate the segregation and marginalization that the few Black Harvard students faced:⁠ Go to footnote 75 detail First, Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell’s signature innovation—a residential college experience for first years that was meant to build community—excluded the handful of Black Harvard students.⁠ Go to footnote 76 detail Lowell’s exclusionary policy was eventually overturned by the University’s governing boards following press attention and pressure from students, alumni, and activists.⁠ Go to footnote 77 detail Second, Black Harvard athletes, whose talents sometimes earned them respect and recognition from other students on campus, encountered discrimination and exclusion in intercollegiate play, and Harvard administrators sometimes bowed to it.⁠ Go to footnote 78 detail Yet Black students generally could and did participate in campus clubs and activities—illustrating a “half-opened door,” as one author termed the Ivy League experience of African Americans and, for a time, Jewish and other students from disfavored white ethnic backgrounds.⁠ Go to footnote 79 detail

The University’s history is complex, and its record of exclusion—not only along lines of race but also ethnicity, gender, and other categories—is clear and damaging. Yet this report does not explore the entirety of that difficult history; nor does it discuss at length the significance of Indigenous history to Harvard’s evolution, beyond colonial era dispossession and enslavement. This report focuses specifically on Harvard’s involvement with slavery and its legacies, from the colonial period into the 20th century, which is distinct in both degree and kind: Harvard’s very existence depended upon the expropriation of land and labor—land acquired through dispossession of Native territories and labor extracted from enslaved people, including Native Americans and Africans brought to the Americas by force. And, long after the official end of slavery, intellectual clout of influential Harvard leaders and distinguished faculty would be a powerful force justifying the continued subjugation of Black Americans.

Hence, the truth— Veritas —is that for hundreds of years, both before and after the Civil War, racial subjugation, exclusion, and discrimination were ordinary elements of life off and on the Harvard campus, in New England as well as in the American South. Abolitionist affiliates of the University did take a stand against human bondage, and others fought for racial reform after slavery. The willingness of these Harvard affiliates to speak out and act against racial oppression is rightly noted and celebrated.⁠ Go to footnote 80 detail But these exceptional individuals do not reflect the full scope of the University’s history. The nation’s oldest institution of higher education—“America’s de facto national university,” as a noted historian described it—helped to perpetuate the era’s racial oppression and exploitation.⁠ Go to footnote 81 detail

See Section IV of this report, and Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard, xix, 3, 22; Ronald Takaki, “Aesculapius Was a White Man: Antebellum Racism and Male Chauvinism at Harvard Medical School,” Phylon 32, no. 2 (1978): 128 – 134; Doris Y. Wilkinson, “The 1850 Harvard Medical School dispute and the admission of African American students,” Harvard Library Bulletin 3, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 13 – 27; see also Nora N. Nercessian, Against All Odds: The Legacy of Students of African Descent at Harvard Medical School before Affirmative Action, 1850–1968 (Hollis, NH: Puritan Press, 2004).

Wilkinson, “1850 Harvard Medical School,” 14, 16.

See Carla Bosco, “Harvard University and the Fugitive Slave Act,” New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 79, no. 2 (2006): 227–247.

Bosco, “Fugitive Slave Act,” 229–230, 239. See Section IV of this report.

Bosco, “Fugitive Slave Act,” 242–243.

The names of Harvard men who died in service to the Union are displayed in Memorial Hall. See Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard , 302–303.

See Section IV of this report.

Adam S. Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era,” Features, Harvard Magazine , March-April 2016, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/03/harvards-eugenics-era . 

Charles Patton Blacker, Eugenics: Galton and After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). On eugenics and Nazi Germany’s extermination campaigns, see Morton A. Aldrich et al., Eugenics: Twelve University Lectures (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914).

See Section V of this report.

Because of universities’ unique role as sites of research and education, the idea of intellectual leadership as a category of entanglement and a form of culpability with slavery is particularly important. Yet it is also a complicated matter: Many universities rightly prize intellectual freedom, and therefore strive not to proscribe or circumscribe the intellectual output of their faculty. Harvard is no exception in this regard, and the discussion of past wrongs is not a departure from this core institutional value. It affirms academic freedom: As this report documents, rather than upholding the principle of academic freedom and the pursuit of Veritas , the University, on several occasions, sought to moderate or suppress anti-slavery views within the community.

Moreover, the committee does not propose a retrospective evaluation of all the ideas that have emerged from Harvard and may have caused harm. Rather, this report describes specific actions and ideas advanced by Harvard faculty and leaders with the University’s institutional backing—actions and ideas that caused enduring harm, and which we, as a University community, must no longer honor.

See U.S. Const. amends. XIII, XIV, XV; see also Eric Foner, “What is Freedom? The Thirteenth Amendment,” chap. 1, “Toward Equality: The Fourteenth Amendment,” chap. 2, and “The Right to Vote: The Fifteenth Amendment,” chap. 3 in The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).

On the white vigilante violence that followed formerly enslaved Blacks when they tried to exercise their newly found freedom, see Foner, Reconstruction 119–123, 425–430. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860 – 1880 (New York, NY: Russell & Russell, 1935), 221–230, describes, for example, the insufficient resources given to the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency design to aid the formerly enslaved in the South, as the result of political pushback from Southern whites.

Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard , 323.

This language is drawn from an address by Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869–1909, quoted in Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard , 322.

Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard , 322. On the Overseers’ aspirations for Harvard during this period, see also Morison,   324–331.

Bobby L. Lovett, America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Narrative History, 1837 – 2009 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011), 5.

Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Wagoner, Jr., American Education: A History (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 116–127. On higher education in the Commonwealth, see George Gary Bush, History of Higher Education in Massachusetts (Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1891).

See Lovett, Black Colleges and Universities , 4–5; Urban and Wagoner, Jr., American Education , 167–168.

Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198, 5 Cush. 198 (1849). See David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009), 151. Sumner asserted: “The separation of the schools, so far from being for the benefit of both races, is an injury to both.” See also Roberts , 59 Mass. at 204.

“Lemuel Shaw,” Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accessed February 17, 2022, https://www.mass.gov/person/lemuel-shaw-0 ; Roberts , 59 Mass. at 209 (1850).

Roberts , 59 Mass. at 209.

See Carleton Mabee, “A Negro Boycott to Integrate Boston Schools,” New England Quarterly 41, no. 3 (September 1968): 341–361.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 544 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting) coined the oft-quoted phrase “separate but equal”; see also Plessy, 544–545 (discussing Roberts ); Douglas J. Ficker, “From Roberts to Plessy : Education Segregation and the ‘Separate But Equal’ Doctrine,” The Journal of African American History 84, no. 4 (1999): 301–314. Even philanthropists who aided schools supported the practice of racial segregation and systematically provided less funding to southern Black schools. See Urban and Wagoner Jr., American Education , 166–171.

For a discussion on racial segregation in elementary and secondary education, see Urban and Wagoner, Jr., American Education , 165–168; for HBCUs, see generally Lovett, Black Colleges and Universities .

See Lovett, Black Colleges and Universities , xii–xiii; James D. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 – 1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 239, 248–249; Walter R. Allen et al., “Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Honoring the Past, Engaging the Present, Touching the Future,” The Journal of Negro Education 76, no. 3 (2007): 263, 267.

There was little support for mixed schools anywhere in the North. See Urban and Wagoner, Jr., American Education , 165; Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard , 1–4; West, “Harvard and the Black Man.”

On the exclusion of “outsiders,” see Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 38; on preference for the “upper crust,” see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), 188, 199, 206, 255. Karabel discusses those excluded in greater detail at 39–41, 49–52, and chap. 3, “Harvard and the Battle Over Restriction.”

Synnott, The Half-Opened Door , 38, 40, 47, 207-208, 220; Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard , 2-3.

Synnott, The Half-Opened Door , 47.

See Muriel Spence, “Minority Women at Radcliffe: Talent, Character, and Endurance,” Radcliffe Quarterly 72, no. 3 (September 1986): 20–22, https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.ARCH:4609952?n=130 .

Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard , 391–392.

Linda M. Perkins, “The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960,” Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 4 (December 1997): 726–729. Like the history of women at Harvard generally, the history of women of color at Harvard and Radcliffe has seldom been a subject of description or analysis. See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ed., Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2004), and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Harvard’s Womanless History: Completing the University’s Self-Portrait,” Features, Harvard Magazine , December 18, 2018, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/12/harvards-womanless-history .

See Perkins, “African American Female Elite,” 729; Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard , 392. The pattern of limited Black enrollment at Harvard and Radcliffe persisted into the mid-1960s. See Section V of this report.

Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard , xxi-xxiii; Perkins, “African American Female Elite,” 728–729.

See Nell I. Painter, “Jim Crow at Harvard: 1923,” The New England Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1971): 627–634; Sollors et al., eds., Blacks at Harvard , xxi–xxiii; Synnott, The Half-Opened Door , 49–50. For more on this controversy during the Lowell presidency, see Section V of this report.

Raymond Wolters, “The New Negro on Campus,” in Blacks at Harvard , 195–202. See also “Attacks Harvard On Negro Question: J. Weldon Johnson Denounces the Exclusion of Negroes From Its Dormitories,” New York Times , January 13, 1923, https://nyti.ms/3nJaq96 .

Synnott, The Half-Opened Door , 48–49.

Synnott, The Half-Opened Door , 47; on his exclusion from the glee club and social marginalization, see W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Negro Student at Harvard at the End of the 19th Century,” Massachusetts Review 1, no. 5 (May 1960): 439–458.

Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 13.

For scholarship discussing the many laws, policies, practices, norms, and attitudes that remained as relics of slavery despite its legal prohibition, see generally Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, NY: Knopf, 1979); Tera W. Hunter , To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, DC (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 214–256; Eric Foner,  Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York, NY: Knopf, 2005), 189–213; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: after the Civil War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Ariela J. Gross,  What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4–5, 9–11, 70–110.

See generally Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolitionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 41–42, 67–72, 454. These anti-slavery activists, however, encountered significant resistance. See Josh S. Cutler, The Boston Gentleman’s Mob: Maria Chapman and the Antislavery Riot of 1835 (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2021). This history is sometimes forgotten. On the complex association between historical memory in discussions of slavery and antislavery see Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Ana Lucia Araujo, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

Joseph Marr Cronin, Reforming Boston’s Schools, 1930 to the Present: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),   5, 25–26; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 – 1877 (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1988), 26; Kazuteru Omori, “Race-Neutral Individualism and Resurgence of the Color Line: Massachusetts Civil Rights Legislation, 1855–1895,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22, no. 1 (2002): 32–58; Janette Thomas Greenwood, “A Community within a Community,” in  First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862 – 1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 131–173; Tony Hill, “Ethnicity and Education,” Boston Review, July 23, 2014,  https://bostonreview.net/us/tony-hill-ethnicity-and-education .

A Legacy of African American Resistance

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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Published: April 25, 2024

Millions of enslaved Africans contributed to the establishment of colonies in the Americas and continued laboring in various regions of the Americas after their independence, including the United States. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Existing estimates establish that Europeans and American slave traders transported nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas. Of this number approximately 10.7 million disembarked alive in the Americas. During the 18th century alone, approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons were transported to the Americas. This forced migration deprived the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves.

Before the rise of the American Revolution , the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Black and white abolitionists contributed to the enactment of new legislation gradually abolishing slavery in some northern states such as Vermont and Pennsylvania. However, these laws emancipated only the newly born children of enslaved women.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the end of the American Revolutionary War , slavery was maintained in the new states. The new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a U.S.-born  schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery was never widespread in the North as it was in the South, but many northern businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Although gradual abolition emancipated newborns since the late 18th century, slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827, and in Connecticut in 1848.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Enslaved people organized r ebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America.  Other rebellions followed, including the one led by  Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. These uprisings were brutally repressed.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered as many 50 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Like with previous rebellions, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner’s Rebellion, slave owners feared similar insurrections and southern states further passed legislation prohibiting the movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century,  a growing abolitionist movement emerged in the North.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people  such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Black abolitionists  and antislavery northerners led meetings and created newspapers. They also had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although no one knows for sure how many men, women, and children escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, it was in the thousands ( estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000).  

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed —in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

Ana Lucia Araujo , a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, edited and contributed to this article. Dr. Araujo is currently Professor of History at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Projects. Her three more recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History , The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism , and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery .

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Chapter 7 Introductory Essay: 1844-1860

Written by: allen guelzo, princeton university, by the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain the context in which sectional conflict emerged from 1844 to 1877

Introduction

The antebellum period before the Civil War witnessed rapid population and economic growth and several reform movements aimed at improving lives and fulfilling the principles of the American republic. The United States also experienced contention and deep divisions as slavery and the expansion of territory challenged the political balance of power in the nation. The national debate over slavery and its expansion was at the root of the sectional tensions that, despite the efforts of many, led to the Civil War.

Texas, the Mexican War, and Slavery’s Expansion

In the two decades after it was adopted in 1820, the Missouri Compromise promised that virtually all the republic’s future expansion westward would be secured from slavery. In fact, however, the compromise only deflected the energies of westward expansion south-westward to the old Spanish domains, where Mexican revolutionaries (following the American example) had overthrown their colonial overlords and created a Mexican Republic in 1823. Achieving political stability proved more difficult for Mexico than for the United States, and in a bid to promote development, the new Mexican government encouraged American immigrants to settle in the northernmost province of Texas in the 1820s. Mexico soon regretted the decision. American settlers arrived in alarming numbers—some 20,000 by the end of the decade—and showed no inclination to either assimilate themselves to Mexican culture or obey Mexican laws banning slavery. In 1835, these  nordamericanos  rose in revolt, and after a gallant but bloody defeat at the Alamo in March 1836, they won a resounding victory over Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836.

Theodore Gentilz created (a) The Fall of the Alamo in 1844 eight years after the battle in which General Santa Anna gave no quarter. “Remember the Alamo!” became a rallying cry for Texans in their ensuing war for independence. (b) Today what remains of the Alamo is designated as a World Heritage site by the United Nations. (credit b: modification of work by Mary Patterson/Flickr CC BY 4.0)

Texas proclaimed itself an independent republic, which Mexico refused to recognize diplomatically. But Texans’ hopes were on annexation by the United States. President Martin Van Buren ought to have been a friend of annexation: he was the handpicked successor of Andrew Jackson, and Jackson’s Democrats had always been eager to promote westward expansion, especially if it served the interests of southern slaveholders, who filled their ranks. But opposition to westward land grabs and the growth of slavery had already contributed to the creation of the Whig Party, headed by Henry Clay. Besides, Texas had run up substantial debt in its war with Mexico, and the United States, then in the throes of a deep economic recession, was not eager to add to the nation’s bills.

However, in 1844, another Jackson protégé, James Knox Polk of Tennessee, narrowly defeated Henry Clay for the presidency. Polk was dedicated to the ideal of Manifest Destiny and put fresh wind in the sails of expansion. (See the  To What Extent Were Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion Justified?  Point-Counterpoint and the  Art Analysis:  American Progress  by John Gast, 1872  Primary Source.) Not only was Texas annexed but Polk agitated for the acquisition of still more Mexican territory in the southwest—New Mexico, California—and demanded border readjustments to the north, along the line dividing Oregon from British Canada. As Democratic journalist John L. O’Sullivan wrote in 1845, it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” (See the  John O’Sullivan, “Annexation,” 1845  Primary Source.) Polk took this idea to heart, starting with congressional annexation of Texas in 1845. After Mexico protested that it would never recognize the annexation, Polk stationed federal troops at Texas’s southern border. Ten months later, there was a border skirmish, and Polk used it as the pretext for war with Mexico. (See the  Debating the Mexican-American War, May 1846  Primary Source and the  To Go to War with Mexico?  Decision Point.)

U.S. naval and land forces occupied New Mexico and California over only modest opposition. An invasion of northern Mexico by U.S. forces under General Zachary Taylor produced a major victory over a Mexican army commanded by Santa Anna at Buena Vista, and a daring thrust into central Mexico by General Winfield Scott, following the old route of the Spanish conquistadors, succeeded in capturing the capital, Mexico City, on September 13, 1847. The dejected Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo the following February, conceding the annexation of Texas and surrendering New Mexico and California (including the modern states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada) to the United States. (See  The American Southwest: Tucson in Transition  Narrative.) Given that most of this Mexican Cession lay below the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′, the real winners of the war seemed to be southern slaveholders, who now saw a new empire for slavery’s expansion opening at their feet. As one American officer, Ulysses Grant, later wrote in disgust, the war was really nothing but “a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.”

The U.S. annexation of Texas and the ceding of land by Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo added territory south of the Missouri Compromise line. The debate over the future of slavery in the western territories then intensified widening the growing division between North and South.

The Compromise of 1850 and the “Popular Sovereignty” Doctrine

But the destiny of the Mexican Cession was by no means so manifest in Congress. The war with Mexico had hardly begun in the summer of 1846 before a Pennsylvania Representative, David Wilmot, proposed an amendment to an appropriations bill that would require “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico” that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime.” The Wilmot Proviso was angrily countered by South Carolina’s pro-slavery senator John C. Calhoun. Calhoun argued that any territory won from Mexico was the “common property” of all the states, and therefore open for slaveholders to migrate to—with their slaves. Yet another proposal came from a northern Democratic senator, Lewis Cass, who urged that the slavery question be “left to the people…in their respective local governments” who would actually settle in the Cession and should have the final say by “popular sovereignty.” President Polk favored a simple extension of the Missouri Compromise line, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But Polk failed, both in mustering support for such an extension and in reconciling any of the other factions, and he left office in 1848 to be followed by a Whig president, the Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 resulted in Maine’s being admitted to the Union as a free state and Missouri’s being admitted as a slave state. Slavery was forbidden in the Louisiana Purchase territory above latitude 36°30’ (with the obvious exception of Missouri). Polk’s suggestion to extend the line across the United States’ new territory after the Mexican-American War failed and tensions over slavery’s expansion continued to escalate. (attribution: Copyright Rice University OpenStax under CC BY 4.0 license)

Although Taylor was a southerner and a slaveholder himself, he was convinced that Congress should never “permit a state made from [the Mexican Cession] to enter our Union with the features of slavery connected with it.” The discovery of significant deposits of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California had triggered a massive gold rush and the influx of enough emigrants to justify the direct admission of California without an intervening territorial phase. (See  The 49ers  Narrative, the  Dame Shirley (Mrs. Clappe), Letters from a Western Pioneer, 1851–1852  Primary Source, and the  Frank Lecouvreur,  From East Prussia to the Golden Gate , 1851–1871  Primary Source.) Taylor used this to push California’s admission as a free state in 1850. Defusing the confrontation in Congress now fell to the master compromiser, Senator Henry Clay, who constructed yet another great national compromise, this time limiting future admissions of states from the Mexican Cession to Senator Cass’s popular sovereignty rule. Clay sweetened the deal for southerners by adding a tough new Fugitive Slave Act, giving federal assistance for the recapture of runaway slaves. (See  The Compromise of 1850  Decision Point.)

The real star of the effort behind Clay’s Compromise of 1850 was the Democratic junior senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, who had engineered the passage of the compromise’s components one by one. As early as 1852, Douglas was already being talked about as a possible Democratic presidential candidate. Although the nomination in that year went instead to the Mexican War veteran Franklin Pierce (who easily defeated the Whig candidate from the Mexican War, Winfield Scott), Douglas was emerging as the most powerful man in the Senate. Moreover, his success in passing the Compromise of 1850 convinced him that popular sovereignty was the key to solving the whole slavery conundrum. Douglas was irritated that slaveholders dissatisfied with the compromise and popular sovereignty were successfully blocking legislation for the organization of the old Louisiana Purchase territories of Kansas and Nebraska, both still governed by the no-slavery agreement of the Missouri Compromise. Brimming with confidence in the idea of popular sovereignty, he introduced legislation in January 1854 that repealed the Missouri Compromise and instead proposed to organize Kansas and Nebraska on the basis of popular sovereignty.

In the words of Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act left many Americans “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion.” Northerners in the free states had assumed, a little too readily, that not even popular sovereignty would be enough to promote the use of slaves in the arid wastes of New Mexico, while the protections of the Missouri Compromise would secure the old Louisiana Purchase territories for free labor forever. That assurance was now cruelly ripped away. “But we rose, each fighting,” Lincoln recounted, “grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver”—anything with which to oppose Kansas-Nebraska and the popular sovereignty doctrine. Free Soilers, led by Salmon Chase of Ohio and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, accused Douglas of advancing a shadowy conspiracy they called “the Slave Power,” which aimed at nothing less than legalizing slavery everywhere in the United States. (See  The Free Soil Party  Narrative.) The Kansas-Nebraska bill passed anyway, with Democratic president Franklin Pierce supporting it, but the outrage of some Democratic members of Congress remained.

In fact, that anger was stoked by another of Douglas’s creations, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This statute put new strength into federal enforcement of the capture and extradition of runaway slaves in the North. In the process, however, it also created sensational showdowns between fugitive slaves and their trackers, sometimes resulting in deadly shootouts, and at other times in disgraceful recaptures of formerly enslaved individuals who had blended peacefully into northern society for years. (See the  Fugitive Slave Act, 1850  Primary Source and the  Thomas Sims and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850  Narrative.)

This April 24 1851 poster warned blacks about authorities who acted as slave catchers. The Fugitive Slave Act began to turn many northerners into abolitionists.

On May 24, 1854, Anthony Burns who had escaped from slavery to Boston, was apprehended by slave catchers at the store where he worked and had to be marched to a waiting boat in chains, guarded by files of U.S. Marines to prevent his liberation by crowds of angered Bostonians. Amos Lawrence, a pro-Compromise Whig, remembered that after the Burns affair, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned conservative Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad abolitionists.” (See the Henry David Thoreau “Slavery in Massachusetts” 1854 Primary Source.)

Abolitionists and Republicans

Abolitionist was a word few northerners had used to describe themselves before the 1850s; it applied only to a small band of uncompromising opponents of slavery who demanded the immediate and unconditional liberation of all slaves. Their rhetoric was radical. For example, William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist leader and editor of the most prominent abolitionist journal,  The Liberator , accused the Constitution of complicity with slavery and publicly burned a copy of it with the declaration that it was “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” (See the  William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass on Abolition, 1845–1852  Primary Source.)

The Fugitive Slave Act began to change northerners’ hesitation about abolition, and it changed them still more after June 1851, when the antislavery newspaper  National Era  began serializing a new novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe entitled  Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly . (See the  Harriett Beecher Stowe and  Uncle Tom’s Cabin  Narrative.) Stowe, who came from a religious and reform-oriented family, not only depicted the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act in the most lurid colors but also dramatized how easily southern blacks could be sold, beaten, raped, and even killed by their masters, with no particular legal consequences. When  Uncle Tom’s Cabin  was released in book form in 1852, about 3,000 copies were sold on its first day. Together, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and  Uncle Tom’s Cabin  made the political gap between the free states of the North and the slave states of the South almost unbridgeable.

(a) The caption below the drawing from Uncle Tom’s Cabin reads “Eliza comes to tell Uncle Tom that he is sold and that she is running away to save her child.” The cruelty of the novel’s white slaveholders and the brutality of the slave dealer Simon Legree shocked readers. (b) Author Harriet Beecher Stowe shown here in 1852 believed she had a moral obligation to mold the nation’s conscience.

The first casualty of this polarization was the Whig Party, which collapsed into quarrelling northern and southern factions, with most of the southern Whigs merging into the Democratic Party. Some northern Whigs blamed their party’s troubles on rising tides of Catholic immigrants from Europe, who seemed willing to trade votes for the “Slave Power” for political favors, and they attached themselves to a short-lived anti-immigrant American Party (or “Know-Nothings,” so called from the party members’ pledge to respond to investigators with “I know nothing”). (See the  Nativist Riots and the Know-Nothing Party  Narrative.) But the majority of northern Whigs (among them Abraham Lincoln) merged instead with disenchanted antislavery Democrats and abolitionists in a new northern antislavery party, the Republicans. In earlier years, the national constituencies of Whigs and Democrats had helped damp down sectional animosities. Now, the parties were becoming the mouthpieces of the country’s two sections, with each section increasingly behaving as though it saw no alternative but to go its own way.

Other casualties were human. If popular sovereignty was now to determine the future of Kansas and Nebraska as free or slave states, then it was up to antislavery and proslavery emigrants to move there and capture that sovereignty by numbers. As they did so, they inevitably clashed, and the clashes turned bloody. On May 24, 1856, a radical abolitionist named John Brown, with four of his sons and two of his neighbors, hacked five unarmed proslavery Kansans to death along Pottawatomie Creek before going underground to escape the law. (See the  Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas  Narrative.)

Other events in the mid-1850s contributed to growing sectional tensions. In the fall of 1854, three of President Pierce’s diplomats—James Buchanan, Pierre Soule, and James Mason—formulated the Ostend Manifesto, describing how the United States could extend its expansionist arms into the Caribbean and annex Cuba as a new slave state. At almost the same time, John Brown launched his raid at Pottawatomie Creek, a southern member of Congress, Preston Brooks, accosted Republican leader and abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate and beat him senseless with a cane. (See the  Charles Sumner and Preston Brooks  Narrative.) On March 6, 1857, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger Brooke Taney, a southerner backed by a southern majority of justices, issued a decision in the case of  Dred Scott v. Sandford . Dred Scott was an enslaved person living in Missouri who was suing for his freedom because he had lived on free soil for a time. Taney’s decision declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional because Congress could not regulate slavery in the territories. It struck down even the requirement that there must be some expression of popular sovereignty before a territory could decide about slavery. Now, in effect, no territory could ban slavery. The Court’s decision also asserted that African Americans were not and could not become citizens of the United States. Taney believed the decision would calm sectional divisions over slavery, but, in fact, it inflamed them. (See the  Dred Scott v. Sandford  DBQ  Lesson.)

Watch this BRI Homework Help video: Dred Scott v. Sandford for more information on the pivotal Dred Scott decision.

Each of these steps only convinced northerners that ever-stronger antislavery steps needed to be taken, if not to abolish slavery (as the abolitionists wanted) then at least to contain its spread. Northerners did not lack for means. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen A. Douglas for his seat in the U.S. Senate, and although Douglas enjoyed the advantage of public recognition, Lincoln quickly closed that gap by pressing relentlessly on the flaws in Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine.

For instance, when was a territory to schedule the vote on legalizing slavery by which its residents’ popular sovereignty would be recorded? Halfway through the process of statehood? What would keep slaveholders from stuffing the territory—and the ballot-boxes—with proslavery votes? If the vote went against legalization, how could the slaveholders in that territory be legally evicted? Above all, how could a mere vote take away from an enslaved human being the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that the Declaration of Independence had declared were inalienable? “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” Lincoln wrote on August 1, 1858, in a note for the debates. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” Although Lincoln lost the election because of the state’s system of voting apportionment, the seven open-air debates he held with Douglas deeply damaged Douglas’s career as a national political leader and brought Lincoln national attention. (See the  Lincoln-Douglass Debates, 1858  Primary Source.)

In 1858 (a) Abraham Lincoln debated (b) Stephen Douglas seven times in the Illinois race for the U.S. Senate. Although Douglas won the seat the debates propelled Lincoln into the national political spotlight.

Other northerners were growing more impatient. In October 1859, John Brown and a small band of abolitionist recruits stormed the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to seize the weapons stored there and spark a slave uprising in the western Virginia mountains. The raid was badly bungled, and Brown and his supporters were either killed or hanged for treason. But across the North, a man who in earlier years would have been scorned as a madman was now hailed as a martyr. “He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed,” said the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in a tribute to Brown, “the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own.” (See the  John Brown: Hero or Villain? DBQ  Lesson and the  John Brown and Harpers Ferry  Narrative.)

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was a radical abolitionist’s attempt to start a revolt that would ultimately end slavery. This 1859 illustration is captioned “Harper’s Ferry insurrection—Interior of the Engine House just before the gate is broken down by the storming party—Col. Washington and his associates as captives held by Brown as hostages.” It is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine. Do you think it represents a southern or northern version of the raid?

The most telling changes were also the most subtle ones. The South might possess the most valuable export commodity in the world, in the form of cotton, but in every other respect, its economic organization was feeble. Despite a major economic downturn in 1857 and 1858, which hurt the North far more than the South, the free states had 1,125 banks in operation, whereas the slave South had only 297; the North had built 18,123 miles of railroads, whereas the South had only 6,630. The public budgets of the slave states amounted to only a quarter of those of the free states. Above all, the population of the northern states had been gradually outpacing the South’s for decades. In 1840, the population of the free states stood at 9.6 million, and the slave states’ free population at 4.8 million. By 1850, however, the North experienced a dramatic increase of population, fueled largely by immigration from Ireland and Germany, which were experiencing severe famine and political unrest. (See the  Irish and German Immigration DBQ  Lesson.) The free-state population had grown to 13.4 million, while in the slave states, the free population had increased only to 6.4 million. If antislavery northerners could unite behind a reasonable antislavery candidate for the presidency, they would be able to elect such a candidate purely on the strength of the northern states’ electoral votes, and thus they could finally check the path of southern belligerence.

The North found such a candidate in Abraham Lincoln, who won the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860. (See  The Election of 1860  Narrative.) Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He believed the states had the responsibility for ending slavery and promised the South that as president he would have no authority over slavery. He favored emancipation, but only on a gradual timetable and with some form of national legislation and compensation for slaveholders, and he always insisted that he wanted to curtail slavery’s expansion into the territories more than anything else.

All that southerners heard, however, was that Lincoln opposed slavery, and then they handicapped themselves by refusing to endorse the Democratic Party’s favorite, Stephen Douglas. No longer content with Douglas’s popular sovereignty, southern Democrats wanted national slavery legislation and the acquisition of new foreign territory for expanding slavery’s domain, and they split the Democratic Party by nominating a southern proslavery candidate, John C. Breckinridge. Former southern Whigs who wanted to avoid the slavery issue and avert secession organized the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell from Tennessee. With Democrats thus divided between Douglas and Breckinridge and southerners divided between Democrats and the Constitutional Union Party, Lincoln coasted to an easy victory on November 6, 1860. Although he actually won only 39.8 percent of the popular vote (1,865,000 votes), he garnered almost all those votes in northern states with large populations and, therefore, won a lopsided Electoral College majority of 180 of 303 votes.

Southerners understood that this election signaled they had lost control of the political process. On November 12, the South Carolina state legislature called for a state convention to authorize secession from the United States, which it did on December 20. (See the  South Carolina Secession Debate, 1860  Lesson.) By February 1, 1861, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas had quickly followed. Last-minute compromise efforts were made in Congress, first by Kentucky’s senior senator, John J. Crittenden, whom many saw as the heir of Henry Clay in working out compromises, and then by a Peace Convention that met in Washington in February. But the secessionists, who had organized themselves into a new Confederate States of America, were interested not in compromise but in taking possession of federal property within their boundaries, including the military installations at Ft. Pickens in Florida and Ft. Sumter in South Carolina. President-elect Lincoln refused to sanction the compromises in any case. The nation was about to tip over into the abyss of civil war. (See  The Election of Lincoln and the Secession of Southern States DBQ  Lesson.)

The antebellum period gave rise to reform movements meant to improve lives and fulfill the principles of the American republic. Despite several attempts to compromise sectional tensions led the nation to the brink of civil war in 1860.

Additional Chapter Resources

• Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad Narrative
• Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan Narrative
• Migration West Decision Point
• The Oregon Question: 54-40 or Fight? Decision Point
• Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 1845 Primary Source
• Negro Spirituals Primary Source
• Daniel Webster “7th of March ” 1850 Primary Source
• Sojourner Truth “Ain’t I a Woman?” 1851 Primary Source
• Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass 1855 Primary Source
• Art Analysis: Hudson River School Landscape Paintings 1836-1868 Primary Source

Review Questions

1. The phrase “manifest destiny” was used by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845 to justify what policy?

• The Louisiana Purchase
• The annexation of territory belonging to Mexico
• The acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands
• War with Great Britain

2. Stephen A. Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty allowed

• slaves to be brought into the free states
• federal marshals to act as deputies in arresting fugitive slaves
• California to be admitted as a free state
• settlers in the territories to decide on the legalization of slavery for themselves

3. Abraham Lincoln’s criticism of popular sovereignty was based on

• his unwillingness to believe a single vote could deprive anyone of the natural right to liberty
• his reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• his personal experience of owning slaves years before
• his participation in the attempt to rescue Anthony Burns

4. Which factor contributed to Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860?

• Lincoln’s popular support came from northern states with many Electoral College votes.
• The Democratic Party had lost support in the South after the Dred Scott case.
• Northern Democrats threw their support behind Lincoln and considered him a moderate.
• A third party the Constitutional Union Party pulled away key Democratic votes.

5. In 1836 many Texans favored annexation by the United States because of

• Mexican military victories at the Alamo and San Jacinto
• President Jackson’s proslavery support
• discontent with Mexico’s policy governing its northern territory
• Whig interest in southern and western territorial expansion

6. A result of the Texas Revolution of 1836 was

• the establishment of an independent Republic of Texas
• the creation of multiple slave states Mexico’s northern territory
• Texas’ ultimate return to the control of the Mexican government
• the immediate annexation of Texas by the United States

7. James K. Polk’s defeat of Henry Clay in the 1844 presidential election led to

• loss of U.S. territorial interests in Oregon
• decreasing public support for westward expansion
• a period of comparative calm in U.S. foreign policy
• a greater likelihood that Texas would be annexed

8. The group with the most to gain from the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was

• New England Whigs
• proslavery southerners
• moderate Republicans
• northern manufacturers

9. Opposition to the Wilmot Proviso came mainly from

• moderate Democrats
• the Whig Party
• the Republican Party

10. Which event hastened statehood for a portion of the Mexican Cession?

• The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency
• The passage of the Wilmot Proviso
• The California gold rush
• The U.S. military victory at San Jacinto

11. Provisions of the Compromise of 1850 included

• a tough new fugitive slave act
• continuation of the Missouri Compromise regarding fugitive slaves
• modification of the federal fugitive slave laws to allow extradition of slaves who had escaped to Canada
• abolition of slavery in Washington DC

12. Allowing popular sovereignty in the lands ceded by Mexico in 1848 would have most severely threatened the political balance in the

• House of Representatives
• Supreme Court
• presidential Cabinet

13. In the 1840s and 1850s the existence of the Missouri Compromise line at 36°30′ led to

• strong Northeastern support for the Mexican-American War
• reluctance of southerners in Congress to organize territories north of the line
• relaxation of slave laws in the cotton-rich South
• expansion of cotton cultivation north of the Mason-Dixon line

14. As the 1860 presidential election approached the Southern slave states held an advantage over the North in

• total free population
• number of banking institutions
• value of export commodity
• miles of railroad track

15. Which was a result of passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act?

• Diminished national support for the abolitionist movement
• Legal challenges that led the Act to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
• Reduction of the threat Southern slaveholders perceived from northern interests
• Partisan realignment in the North and the creation of the Republican Party

16. In the 1860 election southern Democrats rejected the presidential candidacy of Stephen Douglas because

• they felt popular sovereignty insufficiently protected their interests
• Abraham Lincoln had considered making Stephen Douglas his vice president
• they knew the slave states held a majority of electoral votes
• South Carolina had already seceded from the Union

17. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 marked

• a continuation of Supreme Court’s challenges to the institution of slavery in the 1850s
• an attempt by the Supreme Court to resolve the issue of slavery that Congress had sought to reconcile through compromise
• a reversal of decades of judicial activism by the Supreme Court
• the catalyst that led to the creation of the Republican Party

Free Response Questions

• Describe the solutions proposed for dealing with slavery and its future in the Mexican Cession.
• Explain why the Kansas-Nebraska Act aroused such furious opposition.
• Explain why white southerners in the 1850s considered themselves increasingly isolated politically.

AP Practice Questions

A map published in the Newark Daily Advertiser in 1845.

1. The provided map was created in response to debates surrounding the

• annexation of Texas
• end of the Mexican-American War
• passage of the Fugitive Slave Act
• repeal of the Missouri Compromise

2. Which group would most likely support the argument raised in the provided map?

• Northern Whigs
• Cotton-growing southerners
• Supporters of the Dred Scott decision

3. The sentiments expressed in the provided map most directly reflected a growing belief that

• sectional compromise was both possible and probable
• the New England states represented a formidable opponent in the Senate
• southern slave power was gaining in political strength
• immigrants from Germany and Ireland would sway the vote

Population of the United States 1830-1860

Immigration to the United States 1820-1859

4. Which population trend for the period 1830-1860 is seen in the two provided tables?

• Population more than doubled over this period.
• The highest rate of increase occurred in the 1830s.
• Immigration primarily accounted for increase in population.
• Each new state brought in two million additional people.

5. A direct result of the immigration trend demonstrated in the provided tables was

• a decline in urban population along the East Coast
• an end to the importation of slaves
• increasing resentment toward immigrants
• an increase in the number of two-income households

6. Which of the following caused the demographic trends from Ireland and Germany (refer to the provided table)?

• War with Mexico
• Sectionalism and the rise of a third party
• Famine and political upheaval

Primary Sources

The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1859 . Boston: Crosby Nichols & Co. 1859.

Cass Lewis. “Cass Lewis to A.P.O. Nicholson (December 24, 1847).” The American Debate Over Slavery 1760-1865: An Anthology of Sources . Edited by H.L. Lubert K.R. Hardwick S.J. Hammond 200-204. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. 2016.

Cong. Globe 29th Cong. 1st Sess. 1214 (August 8, 1846).

Cong. Globe 29th Cong. 1st Sess. 77 (August 12, 1846). https://memory.loc.gov/ll/llcg/016/1200/12651217.tif

Emerson Ralph Waldo. “Speech at Boston November 18, 1859.” Essays First and Second Series English Traits Representative Men Addresses . Edited by Arthur Brisbane. New York: Hearst’s International Library 1914. http://www.bartleby.com/90/1110.html

“The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.” 31st Congress (1850). A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/33rd-congress/session-1/c33s1ch59.pdf

Garrison William Lloyd. “Resistance to Tyranny.” Documents of Upheaval: Selections from William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator 1831-1865 . Edited by Truman Nelson. New York: Hill & Wang 1866.

Grant Ulysses S. “Personal Memoirs.” Memoirs and Selected Letters . Edited by M.D. McFeely and W.S. McFeely. New York: Library of America 1990.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. 33rd Congress (1854). A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation . Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/33rd-congress/session-1/c33s1ch59.pdf

Lincoln Abraham. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln . Edited by R.P. Basler. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press 1953.

Lincoln Abraham. Peoria Speech October 16, 1854. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

Lincoln Abraham. Seventh Debate Alton Illinois. October 15, 1858.- National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate7.htm

Lincoln Abraham. Cooper Union Address. February 27, 1860. https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/cooperunionaddress.htm

O’Sullivan John L. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review . July-August 1845;17:5. http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=usde;cc=usde;rgn=full%20text;idno=usde0017-1;didno=usde0017-1;view=image;seq=0013;node=usde0017-1%3A3

“Senate. Proceedings.” [On the admission of Maine and Missouri.] A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation . Library of Congress. https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&fileName=035/llac035.db&recNum=211

The Senate Select Committee Report on the Harpers Ferry Invasion — http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/masonreport.html

Stowe Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin . 1852.

Taney Roger C. John H. Van Evrie and Samuel A. Cartwright. Dred Scott v. Sanford . 1857. “The Dred Scott decision: opinion of Chief Justice Taney.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/17001543/

Suggested Resources

Abbott Richard H. Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform 1854-1868 . Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press 1991.

Bauer K. Jack. Zachary Taylor: Soldier Planter Statesman of the Old Southwest . Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press 1985.

Bordewich Fergus M. America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay Stephen A. Douglas and the Compromise That Preserved the Union . New York: Simon & Schuster 2012.

Carton Evan. Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America . New York: Free Press 2006.

Donald David Herbert. Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War . New York: Knopf 1960.

Etcheson Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era . Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas 2004.

Fehrenbacher Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics . New York: Oxford University Press 1978.

Foner Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad . New York: W.W. Norton 2015.

Freehling William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 . Oxford UK: Oxford University Press 2007.

Freeman Joanne B. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War . New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux 2018.

Guelzo Allen C. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America . New York: Simon & Schuster 2008.

Hamilton Holman. Zachary Taylor: Soldier in the White House . Indianapolis IN: Bobbs Merrill 1951.

Holt Michael F. The Election of 1860: A Campaign Fraught with Consequences . Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas 2017.

Horwitz Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War . New York: Henry Holt 2011.

Johannsen Robert Walter. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination . New York: Oxford University Press 1985.

Koester Nancy. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life . Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2014.

Maltz Earl M. Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage . Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas 2010.

Mayer Henry. All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery . New York: St. Martin’s Press 1998.

Nevins Allan. The Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny 1847-1852 and A House Dividing 1852-1857 . New York: Charles Scribner 1947.

Oakes James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States 1861-1865 . New York: W.W. Norton 2012.

Oakes James. The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War . New York: W.W. Norton 2014.

Potter David Morris. The Impending Crisis 1848-1861 . New York: Harper & Row 1976.

Remini Robert Vincent. Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union . New York: W.W. Norton 1991.

Reynolds David S. John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights . New York: Knopf 2005.

Starobin Paul. Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston 1860 and the Mania for War . New York: Public Affairs 2017.

Related Content

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

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Lesson Plan Slavery in the United States: Primary Sources and the Historical Record

This lesson introduces students to primary sources — what they are, their great variety, and how they can be analyzed. The lesson begins with an activity that helps students understand the historical record. Students then learn techniques for analyzing primary sources. Finally, students apply these techniques to analyze documents about slavery in the United States.

Students will be able to:

• assess the credibility of primary sources; and
• use a variety of primary sources to clarify, elaborate, and understand a historical period.

Lesson Preparation

• Primary Source Analysis tool
• Teacher's guide  Analyzing Primary Sources
• Primary source gallery Slavery in the United States, 1790-1865

Lesson Procedure

Leaving evidence of our lives.

How can the historical record be both huge and limited? To consider the strengths and limitations of the historical record, do the following activity:

• Assign students to work individually or in small groups. Alert students that they will share their activity responses with the class.
• Ask students to think about all the activities they were involved in during the past 24 hours, and list as many of these activities as they can remember.
• Have students write down what evidence, if any, each activity might have left behind.
• Which of the daily activities were most likely to leave trace evidence behind?
• What, if any, of that evidence might be preserved for the future? Why?
• What might be left out of a historical record of these activities? Why?
• What would a future historian be able to tell about your life and your society based on evidence of your daily activities that might be preserved for the future?
• What kinds of evidence might this event leave behind?
• Who records information about this event?
• For what purpose are different records of this event made?
• Based on this activity, students will write one sentence that describes how the historical record can be huge and limited at the same time. As time allows, discuss as the strengths and limitations of the historical record.

In this section, students analyze primary source documents.

• Assign two primary sources from the primary source gallery  Slavery in the United States, 1790-1865  to individuals or groups. Students should be assigned to look at two different kinds of primary sources to allow for comparison.
• Allow 30 to 50 minutes for students to analyze the documents. Students analyze the documents, recording their thoughts on the  Primary Source Analysis Tool . Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher’s guide  Analyzing Primary Sources  to focus the group work, and select additional questions to focus and prompt a whole class discussion of their analysis.

In this section, students discuss their primary source analysis with the entire class and compare and contrast analysis results.

• Have student groups summarize their analysis of a primary source document for the class. Ask students to comment on the credibility of the source. If several groups have analyzed the same document, encourage supporting or refuting statements from other groups.
• What was slavery like for African-Americans in the period before the Civil War?
• Was any document completely believable? Completely unbelievable? Why or why not?
• Did some types of primary sources seem less believable than other kinds of sources? Why do you think this is true?
• What information about slavery did each document provide? How did looking at several documents expand your understanding of slavery?
• If you found contradictory information in the sources, which sources did you tend to believe? Why?
• What generalizations about primary historical sources can you make based on this document set?
• What additional sources (and types of sources) would you like to see to give you greater confidence in your understanding of slavery?

Each student might be asked to find one additional primary source on slavery. Individuals or groups might be challenged to research and gather a set of primary sources on a topic other than slavery.

Additional activity suggestions for different types of primary sources:

• Hypothesize about the uses of an unknown object pictured in an old photograph. Conduct research to support or refute the hypothesis. Make a presentation to the class to "show and tell" the object, hypothesis, search methods, and results.
• Study old photographs to trace the development of an invention over time (examples: automobiles, tractors, trains, airplanes, weapons). What do the photographs tell you about the technology, tools, and materials available through time?
• Use a historic photograph or film of a street scene. Describe the sights, sounds, and smells that might surround the scene. Closely examine the image to find clues that will help you. (weather, time of day, clothing of people, vehicles and other technology, architecture, etc.)
• Select a historical photograph or film frame. Predict what will happen one minute or one hour after the photograph or film was taken. Explain the reasoning behind your predictions
• Research your family history by interviewing relatives. Make note of differing recollections about the same event.
• Listen to audio recordings from old radio broadcasts. Compare the language, style of speaking, and content to radio and television programs today. How do they differ? What do they tell you about the beliefs and attitudes of the time?
• Study historical maps of a city, state, or region to find evidence of changes in population, industry, and settlement over time.
• Choose a famous, historical, public building in your area. Research blueprints or architectural drawings of the building. Compare the plans to the building as it exists today. What changes do you see? Why do you think the changes occurred?
• Select a cookbook from another era. Look at the ingredients lists from a large number of recipes. What do the ingredients lists tell you about the types of foods available and the lifestyle of the time?
• Select a time period or era. Research and read personal letters that comment on events of the time. Analyze the point of view of the letter writer. Compose a return letter that tells the author how those historical events have affected modern society.
• Make a record of family treasures (books, tools, musical instruments, tickets, letters, photographs) using photographs, photocopies, drawings, recordings, or videotapes. What was happening in the world when ancestors were using these family treasures? How did those events affect your family?
• Prepare a community time capsule. What primary sources will you include to describe your present day community for future generations? When should your time capsule be opened?

Lesson Evaluation

As an assessment activity, ask students to select a document from the primary source gallery  Slavery in the United States, 1790-1865  that they have not yet analyzed. Have students write an analysis of the document using the rules and questions provided in the Analysis section of the lesson.

The Social Science Education Consortium University of Colorado, Boulder

Slavery in the United States, 1790-1865

What specific information about slaves and slavery can you see in (or infer from) these photographs and text documents?

View photo gallery

Excerpt from "Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen" (1864)

Report of the Board of education for freedmen, Department of the Gulf, for the year 1864.

Read the full transcription of this document

REPORT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION FOR FREEDMEN, DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF, FOR THE YEAR 1864. NEW ORLEANS: PRINTED AT THE OFFICE OF THE TRUE DELTA. 1865.

{Begin page}

REPORT. Office of the Board of Education for Freedmen, ) Department of the Gulf, .......... February 28, 1865. .......... Major General S. A. Hurlbut, Commanding Department of the Gulf:

General--In complaince with your order, we have the honor to submit the following Report of the Board of Education for Freedmen, Department of the Gulf.

The Report relates the operations of the Board from the date of its organization, March 22d, 1864, to December 31st, same year--a period of nine months.

COLORED SCHOOLS IN NEW ORLEANS.

When, in April, 1862, the guns of Farragut transferred the city of New Orleans from rebel to national rule, no such thing as a "Public School" for colored children, was found in the schedule of the conquest.

No such thing had ever existed in the Crescent City. Even that portion of the colored population, who, for generations, had been wealthy and free, were allowed no public school, although taxed to support the school-system of the city and State. Occasionally a small donation was made from the public fund to a school for orphans, attached to the Colored Orphans' Asylum.

The children of the free colored people who were in good circumstances, known as "Creoles," generally of French or Spanish extraction, when not educated abroad, or at the North, or from fairness of complexion, by occasional admission to the white schools, were quietly instructed at home, or in a very few private schools, of their class.

Even these, although not contrary to law, were really the ban of opinion, but were tolerated, because of the freedom, wealth, respectability and light color of the parents, many of whom were nearly white, and by blood, sympathy, association, slaveholding, and other interests, were allied to the white rather than to the black.

For the poor, of the free colored people, there was no school.

To teach a slave the dangerous arts of reading and writing, was a heinous offence, having, in the language of the statute, "a tendency to excite insubordination among the servile class, and punishable by imprisonment at hard labor for not more than twenty-one years, or by death, at the discretion of the Court."

In the face of all obstacles, a few of the free colored people, of the poorer class, learned to read and write. Cases of like proficiency were found among the slaves, where some restless bondsman, yearning for the knowledge, that somehow he coupled with liberty, hid himself from public notice, to con over, in secret and laboriously, the magic letters.

In other cases, limited teaching of a slave was connived at, by a master, who might find it convenient for his servant to read.

Occasionally, the slave was instructed by some devout and sympathizing woman or generous man, who secretly violated law and resisted opinion, for the sake of justice and humanity.

A single attempt had been made to afford instruction, through a school, to the poor of the colored people, by Mrs. Mary D.Brice, of Ohio, a student of Antioch College, who, with her husband, both poor in money, came to New Orleans in December, 1858, under a sense of duty, to teach colored people.

So many and great were the obstacles, that Mrs. Brice was unable to begin her school until September, 1860. At that time she opened a "school for colored children and adults," at the corner of Franklin and Perdido streets.

The popular outcry obliged her to close the school in June, 1861.

Subsequently receiving, as she believed, a divine intimation that she would be sustained, Mrs. Brice again opened her school in November following, near the same place; afterwards removing to Magnolia street, on account of room.

Under Confederate rule, she was repeatedly "warned" to desist teaching.

The gate-posts in front of her house were covered at night by placards, threatening "death to nigger teachers."

When forced to suspend her school, Mrs. Brice stole round at night, especially on dark and rainy nights, the more easily to elude observation, to the houses or resorts of her pupils, and there taught the eager learners, under every disability of mutual poverty, often of sore need, in face of imprisonment, banishment, or possible death.

Upon the occupation of the city by our forces, her school was preserved from further molestation, rather by the moral sentiment of the army than by any direct action; for so timid or prejudiced were many of our commanders, that long after that time General Emory sent for the Rev. Thomas Conway, to admonish him not to advocate,

publicly, the opening of schools for colored children, as it would be very dangerous!

The school of Mrs. Brice continued to thrive, and subsequently passed under the Board of Education, in whose employ she is now an efficient and honored Principal.

The advent of the Federal army weakened slavery, and suspended the pains and penalties of its bloody code, and a few private teachers began to appear, in response to the strong desire of the colored people for instruction.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR COLORED PEOPLE.

No public schools were established until October, 1863. The great work was fairly begun by the "Commission of Enrollment," created by order of Major General Banks, commanding Department of the Gulf.

In February, 1864, was published General Order No. 23, of Gen. Banks, known as the "Labor Order." That order bridged the chasm between the old and the new. By it the laborer, although a slave, was permitted to choose his employer. The governing power was shifted from the planter to the Provost Marshal.

In addition to food, clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance and wages, instruction for his children was promised the colored man by the Government. ....

DIFFICULTIES ATTENDING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF COUNTRY SCHOOLS.

It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the difficulty of establishing these schools in the country parishes.

Considering the expense and the probability of change in the school districts, the Board decided not to build school-houses at present, but to avail themselves of such accommodations as could be found.

The parish Provost Marshals were directed to seize and turn over to the Board all buildings designated by our agents as essential to the schools, taking care not to incommode or irritate any one, beyond the necessities of the case.

Any hesitancy to act, or indifference on the part of the Marshals, was met forthwith by the Provost Marshal General in the shape of a peremptory order, or by the prompt removal of the refractory subordinate. By this means the first obstacles were overcome. Had the Board received from the same office a continuance of the active interest in these schools manifested by General Bowen during his incumbency, we should have had, at this time, at least three thousand additional pupils.

Cabins, sheds, unused houses, were appropriated, roughly repaired, fitted with a cheap stove for the winter, a window or two for light and air a teacher sent to the locality, the neighboring children gathered in, and the school started.

In some of the parishes, so great was the difficulty of obtaining boarding places for our teachers--notwithstanding the efforts of agents and Provost Marshals--that a special order or circular letter was published, (see Appendix D,) by which many of the teachers were provided with temporary homes. But it frequently occurs, that in a desirable locality for a school, it is impossible to obtain boarding for the teachers. In such cases, a weather-proof shelter of some kind--very poor at best--is obtained, some simple furniture provided, and a teacher sent who is willing to undergo the privations--often hardships-of boarding herself, in addition to the fatigues of her school,

Compelled to live on the coarsest diet of corn bread and bacon; often no tea, coffee, butter, eggs, or flour; separated by miles of bad

roads from the nearest provision store; refused credit because she is a negro teacher, unable to pay cash because the Government is unavoidably in arrears; subjected to the jeers and hatred of her neighbors; cut off from society, with unfrequent and irregular mails; swamped in mud--the school shed a drip, and her quarters little better; raided occasionally by rebels, her school broken up and herself insulted, banished, or run off to rebeldom; under all this, it is really surprising how some of these brave women manage to live, much more how they are able to render the service they do as teachers.

Despite all the efforts of our agents, the assistance of the Provost Marshals, and the devotion of the teachers, many of these schools would have to be abandoned but for the freedmen themselves. These, fully alive to all that is being done for them, gratefully aid the teachers from their small store, and mount guard against the enemy of the schools, whether he be a rebel, a guerilla, or a pro-slavery professed unionist skulking behind the oath.

Excerpt from "What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation?" (1859)

What became of the slaves on a Georgia plantation?: Great auction sale of slaves, at Savannah, Georgia, March 2d & 3d, 1859. A sequel to Mrs. Kemble's Journal.

{Begin handwritten} Life in the Southern States {End handwritten} WHAT BECAME OF THE SLAVES ON A GEORGIA PLANTATION? GREAT ACTION SALE OF SLAVES

{Begin handwritten} by Price M. Butler {End handwritten} AT  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA MARCH 2d 3d, 1859. A SEQUEL TO MRS. KEMBLE'S JOURNAL. {Begin handwritten} Savannah, Ga. {End handwritten} 1863.

SALE OF SLAVES

The largest sale of human chattels that has been made in Star-Spangled America for several years, took place on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, at the Race-course near the City of Savannah, Georgia. The lot consisted of four hundred and thirty-six men, women, children and infants, being that half of the negro stock remaining on the old Major Butler plantations which fell to one of the two heirs to that estate. Major Butler, dying, left a property valued at more than a million of dollars, the major part of which was invested in rice and cotton plantations, and the slaves thereon, all of which immense fortune descended to two heirs, his sons, Mr. John A. Butler, sometime deceased, and Mr. Pierce M. Butler, still living, and resident in the City of Philadelphia, in the free State of Pennsylvania.

Losses in the great crash of 1857-8, and other exigencies of business, have compelled the latter gentleman to realize on his Southern investments, that he may satisfy his pressing creditors. This necessity led to a partition of the negro stock on the Georgia plantations, between himself and the representative of the other heir, the widow of the late John A. Butler, and the negroes that were brought to the hammer last week were the property of Mr. Pierce M. Butler, of Philadelphia, and were in fact sold to pay Mr. Pierce M. Butler's debts. The creditors were represented by Gen. Cadwalader, while Mr. Butler was present in person, attended by his business agent, to attend to his own interests.

The sale had been advertised largely for many weeks, though the name of Mr. Butler was not mentioned; and as the negroes were known to be a choice lot and very desirable property, the attendance of buyers was large. The breaking up of an old family estate is so uncommon an occurrence that the affair was regarded with unusual interest throughout the South. For several days before the sale every hotel in Savannah was crowded with negro speculators from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, who had been attracted hither by the prospects of making good bargains.

Nothing was heard for days, in the bar-rooms and public rooms, but talk of the great sale; criticisms of the business affairs of Mr. Butler, and speculations as to the probable prices the stock would bring. The office of Joseph Bryan, the Negro Broker, who had the management of the sale, was thronged every day by eager inquirers in search of information, and by some who were anxious to buy, but were uncertain as to whether their securities would prove acceptable. Little parties were made up from the various hotels every day to visit the Race-course, distant

some three miles from the city, to look over the chattels, discuss their points, and make memoranda for guidance on the day of sale. The buyers were generally of a rough breed, slangy, profane and bearish, being for the most part from the back river and swamp plantations, where the elegancies of polite life are not, perhaps, developed to their fullest extent. In fact, the humanities are sadly neglected by the petty tyrants of the rice-fields that border the great Dismal Swamp, their knowledge of the luxuries of our best society comprehending only revolvers and kindred delicacies. ...

WHERE THE NEGROES CAME FROM.

The negroes came from two plantations, the one a rice plantation near Darien, in the State of Georgia, not far from the great Okefonokee Swamp, and the other a cotton plantation on the extreme northern point of St. Simon's Island, a little bit of an island in the Atlantic, cut off from Georgia mainland by a slender arm of the sea. Though the most of the steek had been accustomed only to rice and cotton planting, there were among them a number of very passable mechanics, who had been taught to do all the rougher sorts of mechanical work on the plantations. There were coopers, carpenters, shoemakers and blacksmiths, each one equal, in his various craft, to the ordinary requirements of a plantation; thus, the coopers could make rice-tierces, and possibly, on a pinch, rude tubs and buckets; the carpenter could do the rough carpentry about the negro-quarters; the shoemaker could make shoes of the fashion required for the slaves, and the blacksmith was adequate to the

manufacture of hoes and similar simple tools, and to such trifling repairs in the blacksmithing way as did not require too refined a skill. Though probably no one of all these would be called a superior, or even an average workman, among the masters of the craft, their knowledge of these various trades sold in some cases for nearly as much as the man--that is, a man without a trade, who would be valued at $900, would readily bring $1,600 or $1,700 if he was a passable blacksmith or cooper. ...

... None of the Butler slaves have ever been sold before, but have been on these two plantations since they were born. Here have they lived their humble lives, and loved their simple loves; here were they born, and here have many of them had children born unto them; here had their parents lived before them, and are now resting in quiet graves on the old plantations that these unhappy ones are to see no more forever; here they left not only the well-known scenes dear to them from very baby-hood by a thousand fond memories, and homes as much loved by them, perhaps, as brighter homes by men of brighter faces; but all the clinging ties that bound them to living hearts were torn asunder, for but one-half of each of these two happy little communities was sent to the shambles, to be scattered to the four winds, and the other half was left behind. And who can tell how closely intertwined are the affections of a little band of four hundred persons, living isolated from all the world beside, from birth to middle age? Do they not naturally become one great family, each man a brother unto each?

It is true they were sold "in families," but let us see: a man and his wife were called a "family," their parents and kindred were not taken into account; the man and wife might be sold to the pine woods of North Carolina, their brothers and sisters be scattered through the cotton fields of Alabama and rice swamps of Louisiana, while the parents might be left on the old plantation to wear out their weary lives in grief, and lay their heads in far-off graves, over which their children might never weep. And

no account could be taken of loves that were as yet unconsummated by marriage; and how many aching hearts have been divorced by this summary proceeding no man can ever know. And the separation is as utter, and is infinitely more hopeless, than that made by the Angel of Death, for then the loved ones are committed to the care of a merciful Deity; but in the other instance, to the tender mercies of a slave-trade. These dark-skinned unfortunates are perfectly unlettered, and could not communicate by writing even if they should know where to send their missives. And so to each other, and to the old familiar places of their youth, clung all their sympathies and affections, not less strong, perhaps, because they are so few. The blades of grass on all the Butler estates are outnumbered by the tears that are poured out in agony at the wreck that has been wrought in happy homes, and the crushing grief that has been laid on loving hearts.

But, then, what business have "niggers" with tears? Besides, didn't Pierce Butler give them a silver dollar a-piece? which will appear in the sequel. And, sad as it is, it was all necessary, because a gentleman was not able to live on the beggarly pittance of half a million, and so must needs enter into speculations which turned out adversely.

HOW THEY WERE TREATED IN SAVANNAH.

The negroes were brought to Savannah in small lots, as many at a time as could be conveniently taken care of, the last of them reaching the city the Friday before the sale. They were consigned to the care of Mr. J. Bryan, Auctioneer and Negro Broker, who was to feed and keep them in condition until disposed of. Immediately on their arrival they were taken to the Race-course, and there quartered in the sheds erected for the accommodation of the horses and carriages of gentlemen attending the races. Into these sheds they were huddled pell-mell, without any more attention to their comfort than was necessary to prevent their becoming ill and unsaleable. Each "family" had one or more boxes or bundles, in which were stowed such scanty articles of their clothing as were not brought into immediate requisition, and their tin dishes and gourds for their food and drink.

...In these sheds were the chattels huddled together on the floor,

there being no sign of bench or table. They eat and slept on the bare boards, their food being rice and beans, with occasionally a bit of bacon and corn bread. Their huge bundles were scattered over the floor, and thereon the slaves sat or reclined, when not restlessly moving about, or gathered into sorrowful groups, discussing the chances of their future fate. On the faces of all was an expression of heavy grief; some appeared to be resigned to the hard stroke of Fortune that had torn them from their homes, and were sadly trying to make the best of it; some sat brooding moodily over their sorrows, their chins resting on their hands, their eyes staring vacantly, and their bodies rocking to and fro, with a restless motion that was never stilled; few wept, the place was too public and the drivers too near, though some occasionally turned aside to give way to a few quiet tears. They were dressed in every possible variety of uncouth and fantastic garb, in every style and of every imaginable color; the texture of the garments was in all cases coarse, most of the men being clothed in the rough cloth that is made expressly for the slaves. The dresses assumed by the negro minstrels, when they give imitations of plantation character, are by no means exaggerated; they are, instead, weak and unable to come up to the original.

There was every variety of hats, with every imaginable slouch; and there was every cut and style of coat and pantaloons, made with every conceivable ingenuity of misfit, and tossed on with a general appearance of perfect looseness that is perfectly indescribable, except to say that a Southern negro always looks as if he could shake his clothes off without taking his hands out of his pockets. The women, true to the feminine instinct, had made, in almost every case, some attempt at finery. All wore gorgeous turbans, generally manufactured in an instant out of a gay-colored handkerchief by a sudden and graceful twist of the fingers; though there was occasionally a more elaborate turban, a turban complex and mysterious, got up with care, and ornamented with a few beads or bright bits of ribbon. Their dresses were mostly coarse stuff, though there were some gaudy calicoes; a few had ear-rings, and one possessed the treasure of a string of yellow and blue beads. The little children were always better and more carefully dressed than the older ones, the parental pride coming out in the shape of a yellow cap pointed like a mitre, or a jacket with a strip of red broadcloth round the bottom. The children were of all sizes, the youngest being fifteen days old. The babies were generally good-natured; though when one would set up a yell, the complaint soon attacked the others, and a full chorus would be the result.

The slaves remained at the Race-course, some of them for more than a week, and all of them for four days before the sale. They were brought in thus early that buyers who desired to inspect them might enjoy that privilege, although none of them were sold at private sale. For these preliminary days their shed was constantly

visited by speculators. The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound; and in addition to all this treatment, asking them scores of questions relative to their qualifications and accomplishments. All these humiliations were submitted to without a murmur, and in some instances with good-natured cheerfulness--where the slave liked the appearance of the proposed buyer, and fancied that he might prove a kind "Mas'r." ...

... The negroes looked more uncomfortable than ever; the close confinement in-doors for a number of days, and the drizzly, unpleasant weather, began to tell on their condition. They moved about more listlessly, and were fast losing the activity and springiness they had at first shown. This morning they were all gathered into the long room of the building erected as the "Grand Stand" of the Race-course, that they might be immediately under the eye of the buyers. The room was about a hundred feet long by twenty wide, and herein were crowded the poor creatures, with much of their baggage, awaiting their respective calls to step upon the block and be sold to the highest bidder. This morning Mr. Pierce Butler appeared among his people, speaking to each one, and being recognized with seeming pleasure by all. The men obsequiously pulled off their hats and made that indescribable sliding hitch with the foot which passes with a negro for a bow; and the women each dropped the quick curtsy, which they seldom vouchsafe to any other than their legitimate master and mistress. Occasionally, to a very old or favorite servant, Mr. Butler would extend his gloved hand, which mark of condescension was instantly hailed with grins of delight from all the sable witnesses.

... Mr. Walsh mounted the stand and announced the terms of the sale, "one-third cash, the remainder payable in two equal annual instalments, bearing interest from the day of sale, to be secured by approved mortgage and personal security, or approved acceptances in Savannah, Ga., or Charleston, S. C. Purchasers to pay for papers." The buyers, who were present to the number of about two hundred, clustered around the platform; while the negroes, who were not likely to be immediately wanted, gathered into sad groups in the back-ground, to watch the progress of the selling in which they were so sorrowfully interested. The wind howled outside, and through the open side of the building the driving rain came pouring in; the bar down stairs ceased for a short time its brisk trade; the buyers lit fresh cigars, got ready their catalogues and pencils, and the first lot of human chattels was led upon the stand, not by a white man, but by a sleek mulatto, himself a slave, and who seems to regard the selling of his brethren, in which he so glibly assists, as a capital joke. It had been announced that the negroes would be sold in "families," that is to say, a man would not be parted from his wife, or a mother from a very young child. There is perhaps as much policy as humanity in this arrangement, for thereby many aged and unserviceable people are disposed of, who otherwise would not find a ready sale. ...

... It seems as if every shade of character capable of being implicated in the sale of human flesh and blood was represented among the buyers. There was the Georgia fast young man, with his pantaloons tucked into his boots, his velvet cap jauntily dragged over to one side, his cheek full of tobacco, which he bites from a huge plug, that resembles more than anything else an old bit of a rusty wagon tire, and who is altogether an animal of quite a different breed from your New York fast man. His ready revolver, or his convenient knife, is ready for instant use in case of heated argument. White-neck-clothed, gold-spectacled, and silver-haired old men were there, resembling in appearance that noxious breed of sanctimonious deacons we have at the North, who are perpetually leaving documents at your door that you never read, and the business of whose mendicant life it is to eternally solicit subscriptions for charitable associations, of which they are treasurers. These gentry, with quiet step and subdued voice, moved carefully about among the live stock, ignoring, as a general rule, the men, but tormenting the women with questions which, when accidentally overheard by the disinterested spectator, bred in that spectator's mind an almost irresistible desire to knock somebody down.

And then, all imaginable varieties of rough, backwoods rowdies, who began the day in a spirited manner, but who, as its hours progressed, and their practice at the bar became more prolific in results, waxed louder and talkier and more violent, were present, and added a characteristic feature to the assemblage. Those of your readers who have read "Uncle Tom,"--and who has not?--will remember, with peculiar feelings, Legree, the slave-driver and woman-whipper. That that character is not been overdrawn, or too highly colored, there is abundant testimony. Witness the subjoined dialogue: A party of men were conversing on the fruitful subject of managing refractory "niggers;" some were for severe whipping, some recommending branding, one or two advocated other modes of torture, but one huge brute of a man, who had not taken an active part in the discussion, save to assent, with approving nod, to any unusually barbarous proposition, at last broke his silence by saying, in an oracular way, "You may say what you like about managing niggers; I'm a driver myself, and I've had some experience, and I ought to know. You can manage ordinary niggers by lickin' 'em, and givin' 'em a taste of the hot iron once in awhile when they're extra ugly; but if a nigger really sets himself up against me, I can't never have any patience with him. I just get my pistol and shoot him right down; and that's the best way." ...

...The expression on the faces of all who stepped on the block was always the same, and told of more anguish than it is in the power of words to express. Blighted homes, crushed hopes and broken hearts, was the sad story to be read in all the anxious faces. Some of them regarded the sale with perfect indifference, never making a motion, save to turn from one side to the other at the word of the dapper Mr. Bryan, that all the crowd might have a fair view of their proportions, and then, when the sale was accomplished, stepped down from the block without caring to cast even a look at the buyer, who now held all their happiness in his hands. Others, again, strained their eyes with eager glances from one buyer to another as the bidding went on, trying with earnest attention to follow the rapid voice of the auctioneer. Sometimes, two persons only would be bidding for the same chattel, all the others having resigned the contest, and then the poor creature on the block, conceiving an instantaneous preference for one of the buyers over the other, would regard the rivalry with the intensest interest, the expression of his face changing with every bid, settling into a half smile of joy if the favorite buyer persevered unto the end and secured the property, and settling down into a look of hopeless despair if the other won the victory. ...

... Many other babies, of all ages of baby-hood, were sold, but there was nothing particularly interesting about them. There were some thirty babies in the lot; they are esteemed worth to the master a

hundred dollars the day they are born, and to increase in value at the rate of a hundred dollars a year till they are sixteen or seventeen years old, at which age they bring the best prices. ...

... The highest price paid for a single man was $1,750, which was given for William, a "fair carpenter and caulker."

The highest price paid for a woman was $1,250, which was given for Jane, "cotton hand and house servant."

The lowest price paid was for Anson and Violet, a gray-haired couple, each having numbered more than fifty years; they brought but $250 a piece. ...

...And now come the scenes of the last partings--of the final separations of those who were akin, or who had been such dear friends from youth that no ties of kindred could bind them closer--of those who were all in all to each other, and for whose bleeding hearts there shall be no earthly comfort--the parting of parents and children, of brother from brother, and the rending of sister from a sister's bosom; and O! hardest, cruellest of all, the tearing asunder of loving hearts, wedded in all save the one ceremony of the Church-these scenes pass all description; it is not meet for pen to meddle with tears so holy.

As the last family stepped down the block, the rain ceased, for the first time in four days the clouds broke away, and the soft sunlight fell on the scene. The unhappy slaves had many of them been already removed, and others were now departing with their new masters. ...

Excerpt from "My Ups and Downs," an interview with Kert Shorrow" (1939)

[My Ups and Downs]

The  complete interview  is available.

MY UP'S AND DOWN'S

Written By: Mrs. Ina B. Hawkes

Research Field Worker, Georgia Writers' Project, Athens -

Edited By: Mrs. Maggie B. Freeman

Editor, Georgia Writers' Project, Athens - WPA Area -6

October 9, 1939

September 14, 1939

[Kert Shorrow?] (Negro)

Route # 1, Athens, Georgia

Mrs. Ina B. Hawkes

It was just a small Negro shanty, just off the highway. I went up to the front door. I noticed it was open, but I found the screen door shut and latched.

I came back down off the porch and walked around the house. I saw an old Negro woman coming down a little grassy lane. I walked up to meet her. She looked a little tired. She had a white cotton sack on her back where she had been picking cotton and a big sun hat on. She looked up and appeared very much surprised to see me.

"Good morning, Aunty. Do you live here?" She said, "Good morning, Miss. Yes, man, I lives here. I aint been here so long though. Is der something I can do for yo?"

I told her that I wanted to talk to her a little while if she had time. She said, "Yes'um, but you see I don't want to be [empolite?] cause I won't raised dat way. But if you will come in I will talk to you while

I fix a little dinner. I works in the field all I can."

About that time I saw a small boy coming around the house with his cotton sack.

"My name is [Sadie?]," she said, "and dis is my great grandson here. I'se got seventeen chillun, Honey."

"How did you manage with so many children, Aunty?" I asked. "By the help of the Lawd. We didn't have much, but you know what the old frog said when he went to the pond and found jus a little water, don't you? Well, he said, "A little is better than none.' Dat's de way I all'ers felt about things.

"I was born and raised in Walton County. But dey is done changed things back over der so much. I was over der to see my daughter while back and, Lawdy mussy, chile, dey is done built a new bridge ah didn't know nothing about.

"Here, Sammy, make mama a fire in de stove while I gits a few things ready to cook."

The little boy had a kerosine lamp over the blaze and, before I could stop myself, I had yelled at him to get it away from that blaze. Aunt Sadie said, "Dat's right, Miss. Correct him. Chillun des days don't see no danger in nothing.

"Back in my day as far back as I can remember

my mother and father was [Marse?] Holt and Mistess Holt's slaves. 'Case we chilluns wus too, but slavery times wus over fo I wus big nuf to know very much 'bout hit.

"But I do know about [Marse?] Holt and Mistess Holt. Lawd, child, dey wus de best people in de world I do think. Ole Mistess use to make us go to bed early. She would feed us out under a walnut tree. She wouldn't let us eat lak chilluns do now. We would have milk and bread, and dey would always save pot liquor left over from the vegetables. They put corn bread in it. We little Niggers sho' injoyed hit though. Sometimes we would get syrup and bread and now and then a biscuit.

"[Marse?] and Mistess died, but Ma and Pa and we chillun just stayed on and waked hard. Pa and Ma both wus good farmers. But, Honey, talk 'bout slavery times, hit's mor lak slavery times now with chillun dan it wus den. 'Cause us didn't have to go to de fields til we wus good size chillun. Now de poor things has to go time dey is big nuf to walk and tote a cotton sack.

"Miss Ruth is [Marse?] and Mistess Holt's daughter. I wus fortunate to know Miss Ruth. She larnt me to say my A B C's. If I didn't know them or say them fast nuf she would slap me and make me do hit right". She got up and went over to an old washstand and got an old blue

back speller. "Here," she said, "look at dis and you will see whut she taught me wid. You can see why I loves dat book. I don't let nobody bother wid dat.

"I sits and looks at my little book lots of times and think of dem good old days. I went to regular school two months in my life.

"I thought I wus grown when I hopped up and married."

..."My life, Honey, is jus been  ups  and  downs . Me and

pa and the chilluns always jus had to stay home and work 'cept on Saddays. We would always go to town and church on Sundays. We would fix a big box of oats and get up soon Sadday morning, and Tom and the boys would hitch up old Buck to the cart. Yes, dat old ox wus jus as fast as anybody's mule. He would take us to town and bring us back safe.

"I never will forget one Sadday we wus in town. It wus a treat to jus go to town for us, the lights wus so pretty, but coming home dat day a man stopped us. Me and Tom had most of the chilluns with us. He said he wanted to take our pictures, so he could save it and show it ot his grandchilluns.

"We jus sold old Buck in 1934. He wus gitting old and couldn't plow and git 'bout lak he used too. And we needed a mule too.

"Lawdy, dere's Tom now. He come in the back door, a little man not much older looking than I is."....

Excerpt from "Mrs. Lulu Bowers II," an interview with Mrs. Lulu Bowers (1938)

[Mrs. Lula Bowers, II]

{Begin handwritten} Beliefs Customs - Customs {End handwritten}

Accession no. - 10160

Date received - 10/10/40

Consignment no.

Shipped from Wash. Off.

Amount - 4p.

WPA L. C. PROJECT Writers' UNIT

Folklore Collection (or Type)

Title Social Customs. Mrs. Lula Bowers II

Place of origin Hampton Co., S. Car. Date 6-28-38

Project worker Phoebe Faucette

Project editor

{Begin deleted text} 8882 {End deleted text}

Project #-1655

Phoebe Faucette

Hampton County {Begin handwritten} [?] {End handwritten} {Begin deleted text} 390552 {End deleted text}

Records of the Past

SOCIAL CUSTOMS

Mrs. Lula Bowers {Begin handwritten}, II {End handwritten}

...."There is a great change in the men and women, too, from what it used to be. It used to be that the men tended to all the business. Now most all the business is tended to by the women!

I remember the first woman free dealer. She was Mr. Ned Morrison's grandmother. She was the first free-dealer I ever heard of. Her husband was an excellent man but no business man. He had a large farm to manage after the war, with free labor. He'd get so mad with the negroes that he'd just let them go, and give up. So she had to take charge. She went to the courthouse and got an appointment. She was the only woman I know that got an appointment to run her own farm. Now women run their farms if they want to.

"The churches and schools wasn't much. They got free-schools for three months then. Now they get it for nine.

"The roads weren't good either like they are now. And it was so hard to get anybody to work on the roads. Each farmer had to send a certain amount of hands to work the roads, and someone had to oversee the work. My father was generally the one.

"In slavery time we had three slave quarters - ten houses in each quarter. The houses were kept nice, kept clean. And there was one special house where they kept the children and a nurse. The houses were log-houses, and they didn't have any windows more than ten or twelve inches square. And they had shutters, not sash. The hinges for the shutters were made in the blacksmith shop. They wouldn't have but two rooms. Very often they wouldn't have lumber enough to put in the partition, and would have to hang up sheets between the rooms.

They'd ceil them with clapboards from the woods. Their furniture was just anything that they could get - little stools, and little benches, and just anything. They'd use the back of their old dresses for quilts.

"The clothes of the slaves were spun at home and made by their mistresses. The'd weave them white, then dye the cloth. They'd go in the woods and get bark and dye them.

"The slaves had bread and hominy, and what little meat they could get hold of now and then. There were a lot of cattle in this country. And they raised a lot of geese, and guineas, and such like. Most of the slaves were doctored by their owners. Dr. Nathan A. Johnston was the first doctor I knew anything about. They'd rake soot off the back of the chimney and make a tea out of it for the colic. Called it soot-tea. I've seen my grandmother do it a many a time! The slaves didn't have any education in that day. They'd have Sunday Schools for the white people and for the slaves. The old people would write down what the children had to say. They had no books then, and paper was so scarce they sometimes had to use paste-board. When the slaves wanted to go off on a visit they were given tickets, and allowed to go for just so many hours.

"After the war, military rule was oppressive for a while; but they got so they dropped that. There was much lawlessness. There was no law at all, and they couldn't manage the negroes at all. There was a man that came from Beaufort named Wright, and he controlled them. He was a northerner but he was a

good man. He and his wife came. They stayed in three different homes when they were here. Only three homes would take those people in! One of them was a relative of mine. She said one night Mrs. Wright said she would make a pudding for them all - what she called Hasty Pudding. So my aunt got out the sugar, and eggs and seasonings for her; but the 'Pudding' proved to be just Fried Hominy - cold hominy sliced and rolled in egg and flour and fried. They had a son and a daughter. After a while they came, too,"

Source: Mrs. Lula Bowers, 79, Luray, S. C.

(Second interview.)

Excerpt from "E.W. Evans, Brick Layer & Plasterer," an interview with E.W. Evans (undated)

[E. W. Evans, Brick Layer & Plasterer]

E. W. Evans (Negro)

610 Parsons Street, S.W.

Brick Layer Plasterer

by Geneva Tonsill

"My parents were slaves on the plantation of John H. Hill, a slave owner in Madison, Georgia. I wuz born on May 21, 1855. I wuz owned and kept by J. H. Hill until just befo' surrender. I wuz a small boy when Sherman left here at the fall of Atlanta. He come through Madison on his march to the sea and we chillun hung out on the front fence from early morning 'til late in the evening, watching the soldiers go by. It took most of the day.

"My master wuz a Senator from Georgia, 'lected on the Whig ticket. He served two terms in Washington as Senator. His wife, our mistress, had charge of the slaves and plantation. She never seemed to like the idea of having slaves. Of course, I never heard her say she didn't want them but she wuz the one to free the slaves on the place befo' surrender. Since that I've felt she didn't want them in the first place....

The next week after Sherman passed through Madison, Miss Emily called the five ... wimmen ... women ... that wuz on the place and tole them to stay 'round the house and attend to things as they had always done until their husbands come back. She said they were free and could go wherever they wanted to. See ... she decided this befo surrender and tole them they could keep up just as befo' until their husbands could look after a place for them to stay. She meant that they could rent from her if they wanted to. In that number of ... wimmen ... women ... wuz my mother, Ellen, who worked as a seamstress for Mrs. Hill. The other ... wimmen ... women ... wuz aunt Lizzie and aunt Dinah, the washer- ...wimmen ... women ... , aunt Liza ... a seamstress to help my mother, and aunt Caroline ... the nurse for Miss Emily's chilluns.

"I never worked as a slave because I wuzn't ole 'nough. In 1864, when I wuz about nine years ole they sent me on a trial visit to the plantation to give me an idea of what I had to do some day.

{Begin page no. 2}

The place I'm talkin' about, when I wuz sent for the tryout, wuz on the outskirts of town. It wuz a house where they sent chilluns out ole 'nough to work for a sort of trainin'. I guess you'd call it the trainin' period. When the chilluns wuz near ten years ole they had this week's trial to get them used to the work they'd have to do when they reached ten years. At the age of ten years they wuz then sent to the field to work. They'd chop, hoe, pick cotton ... and pull fodder, corn, or anything else to be done on the plantation. I stayed at the place a whole week and wuz brought home on Saturday. That week's work showed me what I wuz to do when I wuz ten years ole. Well, this wuz just befo Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea and I never got a chance to go to the plantation to work agin, for Miss Emily freed all on her place and soon after that we wuz emancipated.

"The soldiers I mentioned while ago that passed with Sherman carried provisions, hams, shoulders, meal, flour ... and other food. They had their cooks and other servants. I 'member seeing a woman in that crowd of servants. She had a baby in her arms. She hollered at us Chillun and said, 'You chilluns git off dat fence and go learn yore ABC's.' I thought she wuz crazy telling us that ... for we had never been 'lowed to learn nothing at all like reading a writing. I learned but it wuz after surrender and I wuz over tens years ole.

"It wuz soon after the soldiers passed with Sherman that Miss Emily called in all the ... wimmen ... women ... servants and told them they could take their chillun ... to the cabin and stay there until after the war. My father, George, had gone with Josh Hill, a son of Miss Emily's to wait on him. She told my mother to take us to that cabin until a place could be made for us.

{Begin page no. 3}

"I said I wuz born a slave but I wuz too young to know much about slavery. I wuz the property of the Hill family from 1855 to 1865, when freedom wuz declared and they said we wuz free....

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The extension of slavery to new territories had been a subject of national political controversy since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the area now known as the Midwest . The Missouri Compromise of 1820 began a policy of admitting an equal number of slave and free states into the Union. But the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (both grounded in the doctrine of popular sovereignty ), along with the U.S. Supreme Court ’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, opened all the territories to slavery.

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By the end of the 1850s, the North feared complete control of the country by slaveholding interests, and whites in the South believed that the North was determined to destroy its way of life. White Southerners had been embittered by Northern defiance of the 1850 federal fugitive slave act and had been alarmed in 1859 by the raid at Harpers Ferry , Virginia (now in West Virginia), led by the white abolitionist John Brown . After Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the antislavery platform of the new Republican Party , the Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America .

The Civil War , which ultimately liberated the country’s slaves, began in 1861. But preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, was the initial objective of President Lincoln. He initially believed in gradual emancipation, with the federal government compensating the slaveholders for the loss of their “property.” But in September 1862 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation , declaring that all enslaved people residing in states in rebellion against the United States as of January 1, 1863, were to be free. Thus the Civil War became, in effect, a war to end slavery.

African American leaders such as author William Wells Brown , physician and author Martin R. Delany , and Douglass vigorously recruited Black men into the Union armed forces . Douglass declared in the North Star , “Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” By the end of the Civil War more than 186,000 African Americans were in the Union army. They performed heroically despite discrimination in pay, rations, equipment, and assignments as well as the unrelenting hostility of the Confederate troops. Enslaved people served as a labor force for the Confederacy, but thousands of them dropped their tools and escaped to the Union lines.

As a result of the Union victory in the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865), nearly four million slaves were freed. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted African Americans citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed their right to vote . Yet the Reconstruction period (1865–77) was one of disappointment and frustration for African Americans, for these new provisions of the Constitution were often ignored, particularly in the South.

After the Civil War, the freedmen were thrown largely on their own meager resources. Landless and uprooted, they moved about in search of work. They generally lacked adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The Southern states enacted Black codes , laws resembling the slave codes that restricted the movement of the formerly enslaved people in an effort to force them to work as plantation laborers—often for their former masters—at absurdly low wages.

The federal Freedmen’s Bureau , established by Congress in 1865, assisted the formerly enslaved people by giving them food and finding jobs and homes for them. The bureau established hospitals and schools, including such institutions of higher learning as Fisk University and Hampton Institute . Northern philanthropic agencies, such as the American Missionary Association , also aided the freedmen.

During Reconstruction, African Americans wielded political power in the South for the first time. Their leaders were largely clergymen, lawyers, and teachers who had been educated in the North and abroad. Among the ablest were Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina and John R. Lynch of Mississippi. Both were speakers of their state House of Representatives and were members of the U.S. Congress. Pinckney B.S. Pinchback was elected lieutenant governor of Louisiana and served briefly as the state’s acting governor. Jonathan Gibbs served as Florida’s secretary of state and superintendent of education. Between 1869 and 1901, 20 African American representatives and 2 African American senators— Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi—sat in the U.S. Congress .

But Black political power was short-lived. Northern politicians grew increasingly conciliatory to the white South, so that by 1872 virtually all leaders of the Confederacy had been pardoned and were again able to vote and hold office. By means of economic pressure and the terrorist activities of violent anti-Black groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan , most African Americans were kept away from the polls. By 1877, when Pres . Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from the South, Southern whites were again in full control. African Americans were disfranchised by the provisions of new state constitutions such as those adopted by Mississippi in 1890 and by South Carolina and Louisiana in 1895. Only a few Southern Black elected officials lingered on. No African American was to serve in the U.S. Congress for three decades after the departure of George H. White of North Carolina in 1901.

The rebirth of white supremacy in the South was accompanied by the growth of enforced “racial” separation. Starting with Tennessee in 1870, all the Southern states reenacted laws prohibiting interracial marriage. They also passed Jim Crow laws segregating almost all public places. By 1885 most Southern states had officially segregated their public schools. Moreover, in 1896, in upholding a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

In the post-Reconstruction years, African Americans received only a small share of the increasing number of industrial jobs in Southern cities. And relatively few rural African Americans in the South owned their own farms, most remaining poor sharecroppers heavily in debt to white landlords. The largely urban Northern African American population fared little better. The jobs they sought were given to European immigrants. In search of improvement, many African Americans migrated westward.

During and after the Reconstruction period, African Americans in cities organized historical, literary, and musical societies. The literary achievements of African Americans included the historical writings of T. Thomas Fortune and George Washington Williams . The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) became a classic of autobiography. Black artists also began to make a major impact on American mass culture through the popularity of such groups as the Fisk Jubilee Singers .

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Slavery, the Constitution, and the Origins of the Civil War by Paul Finkelman

Paul Finkelman’s essay on “Slavery, the Constitution, and the Origins of the Civil War” describes the slow-developing constitutional collision over slavery that began in 1787 and finally erupted into war by 1861. This excerpt, however, focuses on Lincoln’s emancipation policy and argues that the “irony” of southern secession was how it “allowed Lincoln to do what he had always wanted.” Finkelman, a law professor at the University of Albany, considers Lincoln deeply opposed to slavery and yet also committed to upholding the Constitution and political compromises over slavery during the years before war broke out. You can read Finkelman’s full essay inside the print edition of Volume 25 of the OAH Magazine of History (April 2011) or online via Oxford Journals .

1. According to Paul Finkelman, what are some of the key wartime anti-slavery policies that predated the Emancipation Proclamation? What can you find out about them using the House Divided research engine?

2. Read the full-text of Lincoln’s letters to Horace Greeley (August 22, 1862) and to Albert G. Hodges, (April 4, 1864). What did they say? How did they differ? How does Finkelman uses short quotations from these letters to build his argument about Lincoln’s anti-slavery beliefs? What does he leave out?

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The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces Essay

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The most prominent elements of the philosophical debates between pro-and anti-slavery forces before the civil war were systems of ethical and political social thought based on the idea of conscience. According to Öztürk (2021), each conscience and the public opinion developed from each individual’s moral consciousness and conscience will sound. In this ethical theory, human beings are endowed with free will and reason and have a sense of justice that allows them to know what is right or wrong (Öztürk, 2021). It is believed that slave owners abused their authority by denying the slaves their humanity and freedom.

Most anti-slavery thinkers argued that all human beings are equal in terms of rights and, therefore, slavery is immoral. At its root, slavery violated the fundamental ethical and religious norms on which these colonists had been raised since childhood. For example, slaves were denied their freedom and treated as property rather than human beings (Öztürk, 2021). They were denied the right to have children and be married (although they could be sold away from their families). They also proved that human beings could grow intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually through self-reliance and gain skills by being productive ( Öztürk, 2021). Thus, they believed that slavery was an inefficient economic practice because it kept the whole society unproductive.

Consequently, Öztürk (2021) argued that the most prominent elements of the philosophical debates between pro-and anti-slavery forces before the civil war were whether slavery was sinful or not, whether it was right or wrong and whether it was evil. The pro-slavery forces argued that it was a right, while the anti-slavery forces argued it was wrong (Gutacker, 2020). The pro-slavery forces argued that slavery was the right thing to do, promoting abolitionists and the anti-slavery forces as terrible villains because they wanted to abolish slavery. The pro-slavery forces also insisted on respect and law, while the anti-slavery forces countered that only God was above respecting life, including human rights (Gutacker, 2020). Regarding slavery, slavery is not sinful as long as it practices how it is supposed to be practiced. Those against slavery and who favored abolition were terrorists because they wanted the government to protect life and did not want slaves’ rights revoked.

Gutacker (2020) asserted that the South was right in slavery, where they were fighting for their rights to give them freedom and not be persecuted by being invaded. However, the North was wrong because they wanted slavery eliminated but did not want to fight for slaves’ rights since it was a sin, making the South more apt to win over them. Slavery is not a right, but it is a wrong that promotes injustice. Consequently, many people claim that the anti-slavery forces are terrorists who do not know what they are doing because slavery existed for years, even before the government.

The civil war did not change differences in the philosophical debates between pro-and anti-slavery forces because most of the original philosophical differences remained intact. Whereby the divided beliefs did not change to accommodate the opposing side. According to Richardson (2020), the philosophical differences were not racial but ideological contests. It was race that was the crucial component of the debate. The evolution of political parties shows this in the years following the war. The party that defended slavery and rights for black people switched to a purely anti-slavery party (Richardson, 2020). Thus, the philosophical debates did not need to change to accommodate opposing ideas because they were separate from those opinions.

In addition to the above, the issue between pro-and anti-slavery forces was mainly a question of economics and constitutional interpretation rather than morality. On the other hand, slavery became more entrenched after the war ended, which had more to do with imperialistic ambitions in Africa and South America than one’s views on race. The federal government took over the land in this period and confiscated the property of the states that had been involved in the rebellion (Richardson, 2020). The state governments lost control of their property and land, which was then divided among citizens of whatever race was thought superior. The Civil War was referred to as “the war for slavery” (Richardson, 2020). As a result, the philosophical debates between pro-and anti-slavery forces began after the war where it left off before the war because most philosophers believed that natural rights did not justify slavery.

In addition, the issue between pro-and anti-slavery forces was mainly a question of economics and constitutional interpretation rather than morality. It made the philosophical arguments on slavery incapable of changing even after the civil war. Both the war and its aftermath served to harden attitudes toward slavery, but not all of these attitudes were racial (Richardson, 2020). Instead, much more was at stake in terms of political power than with slavery. The economic aspects were what caused the split between pro-and anti-slavery forces. The arguments were based on human nature and attempted to define it. In other words, the differences between pro-and anti-slavery forces were ideologically driven, not racial, and not connected to the issue of morality (Richardson, 2020). Nonetheless, the issue of slavery seemed to be directly related to one’s views on race for some people because slavery was based mainly upon a racial hierarchy within society. Thus, in many cases opposing views on race are closely linked with opposing views on slavery.

Gutacker, P. (2020). Seventeen centuries of sin: The Christian past in Antebellum slavery debates. Church History , 89 (2).

Öztürk, B. E. (2021). Treachery of silence: Usage of pro-and anti-slavery rhetoric as political propaganda in 18th-and 19th-century revolutions [Unpublished master’s thesis]. İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University.

Richardson, H. C. (2020). How the South won the civil war: oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America . Oxford University Press, USA.

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IvyPanda. (2023, August 26). The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-war-pro-anti-slavery-forces/

"The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces." IvyPanda , 26 Aug. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-war-pro-anti-slavery-forces/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces'. 26 August.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces." August 26, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-war-pro-anti-slavery-forces/.

1. IvyPanda . "The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces." August 26, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-war-pro-anti-slavery-forces/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The American Civil War: Pro- & Anti-Slavery Forces." August 26, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-war-pro-anti-slavery-forces/.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Civil War — Causes of the Civil War

Causes of The Civil War

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Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 572 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Economic factors, political factors, social factors, the role of leadership.

• McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.
• Goldfield, D. R. (2005). America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. Bloomsbury Press.

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The Mammy Monument: 100 Years Ago, There Were Plans to Memorialize Slavery in D.C.

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Fifty years after the Civil War, the people of the defeated Confederacy raced around the country in a monument building frenzy. Their goal: memorialize the rebellion as a “Lost Cause” – a noble but doomed effort by the heroes of the South. Statues of Confederate leaders and memorials to veterans began cropping up all over the country in a bid to rewrite history. Slavery, as both an essential mechanism of the antebellum South and the main point of contention in the war, also needed to be cleaned up. According to those who embraced Lost Cause ideology, the Confederacy’s valiant young men would never have taken up arms to preserve an institution built on injustice and evil. However, they would sacrifice for a system which was for the good of all Southerners, black and white, and created “the strong bonds between the races” rooted in benevolence and fidelity. 1

To make slavery palatable and refute “the assertion that the master was cruel to his slave,” the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) added the “faithful slave” to their list of people to memorialize in the early part of the 20 th century. 2  The UDC was (and still is) an organization “dedicated to the purpose of honoring the memory of its Confederate ancestors; collecting and preserving the material for a truthful history of the War Between the States; [and] recording the participation of Southern women in their patient endurance of hardship and patriotic devotion during and after the War Between the States.” 3

What better representation of the faithful slave than the mammy, “she who, by her extraordinary devotion, her steadfast loyalty, helped to make the bitter aftermath of the war in the South endurable”? 4  The UDC needed a monument to the mammies.

The Black Mammy is a caricature that any Southerner – or any American, really – will instantly recognize. She lives in children’s cartoons, where she waves a broom around at misbehaving animals. She shows up in romantic novels, where she looks after sweet young women until they get married. She even graces our breakfast tables in the form of a syrup bottle. She has a “large dark body and…round smiling face.” We know “her deeply sonorous and effortlessly soothing voice, her infinite patience, her raucous laugh, her self-deprecating wit.” 5  Newspapers from a century ago, when the mammy character was first manufactured, call her a surrogate mother to her charges, a “’black foster-parent,’ who lived only for ‘dem white chillun’” who “never ceased loving. Her devotion grew with her own age and her charge.” 6

The post-Civil War descriptions of this made-up woman don’t stop there and they become increasingly unflattering. One white writer from Houston, Texas described the ubiquitous mammy as “wholly unlearned, without even the rudiments of education, holding with unshakable belief to all manner of superstition, filled with terror and direful foreboding if the ‘squeech’ owl was heard even once at twilight…with hell fire and brimstone as essential ingredients of her religious belief…Her faith in God was the simple, trusting faith of childhood.” 7

Many a Southerner in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries looked back on their own “Mammy” with fondness and nostalgia. “His mind goes back to the tender embraces, the watchful eyes, the crooning melodies which lulled him to rest, the sweet old black face.” 8  But those memories were, at best, viewed through rose-colored glasses and, at worst, pure fabrication.

The campaign to memorialize the “Faithful Colored Mammies of the South” began in 1910 in Galveston, Texas, where an organization of wealthy businessmen proposed to erect a monument to “Old Black Mammy.” Soon, they were flooded by “appeals from prominent men all over the country to make the movement…a national affair.” 9  The idea transformed into building a “million dollar monument” – supporters would collect $1 donations from around the U.S., allowing as many people as possible to “mak[e] amends for a long-neglected duty in rearing a monument to our faithful slaves.” 10

For one reason or another, the fervor over a mammy monument died out until 1923, when the Jefferson Davis Chapter of the UDC revived the proposal, now seeking approval to erect it in Washington, D.C., where it would help shape the national narrative around slavery. This time, they made it to Congress. Mississippi Senator John Sharp Williams brought the bill to the Senate in January 1923. In March, it passed and was sent over to the House.

Though the UDC seemed to be on the verge of getting their statue, the African American press was not going to let that happen without a fight. While some papers printed the news along with proposed designs, personal stories of readers’ mammies, and amateur poetry about the good old days in the South, others gave voice to the outrage and insult felt by the descendants of those misremembered women. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, the founder of a boarding school for African Americans and an active advocate for civil rights, suggested another method for remembering the “Mammy”: “If the fine spirited women, Daughters of the Confederacy, are desirous of perpetuating their gratitude, we implore them to make their memorial in the form of a foundation for the education and advancement of the Negro children descendants of those faithful souls they seem anxious to honor.” 11

The Washington Eagle was a little more forceful in its disapproval: “A single bomb can remove a monument more rapidly than sculptors and builders can erect it.” 12

Dozens of letters to the editor expressed the shared reactions of insult and anger that such a proposal would even be considered. Thomas H. R. Clarke wrote to the Afro-American , voicing his concerns. “The proposed monument is brought forward simply to remind intelligent and progressive colored men and women of the degradation of their mothers, an insidious insult to the race delivered under the guise of gratitude for the Negro blood the white South drew into its veins from the bosoms of helpless black women.” 13

It was especially shocking in the wake of a failed anti-lynching bill which had been tossed out just before the Mammy monument was approved. “The Daughters of the Confederacy would do better if they made an effort to see to it that the sons and daughters of the so-called ‘mammies’ were not lynched and burned in the South and that their rights as citizens were respected.” 14

Activist and founder of the National Association of Colored Women Mary Church Terrell led a charge against the statue as well. “Colored women all over the United States stand aghast at the idea of erecting a Black Mammy monument in the Capital of the United States. The condition of the slave woman was so pitiably, hopelessly helpless” – not cozy and familial as the UDC would have the monument imply.

The Black Mammy had no home life. In the very nature of the case she could have none. Legal marriage was impossible for her. If she went through a farce ceremony with a slave man, he could be sold away from her at any time, or she might be sold from him and be taken as a concubine by her master, his son, the overseer or any other white man on the place…The Black Mammy was often faithful in the service of her mistress’s children while her own heart bled over her own little babies who were deprived of their mother’s ministrations and tender care which the white children received. 15

While she did not go so far as to suggest a bomb, Terrell also hoped that any statue which might be built would end up as rubble:

If the Black Mammy statue is ever erected, which the dear Lord forbid, there are thousands of colored men and women who will fervently pray that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground so that the descendants of Black Mammie [ sic ] will not forever be reminded of the anguish of heart and the physical suffering which their mothers and grandmothers of the race endured for nearly three hundred years. 16

More letters of protest poured into senators’ offices and the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA even appealed to Vice President Calvin Coolidge and Speaker of the House Frederick H. Gillett to block the bill.

Meanwhile, white sculptors were squabbling over designs. Artist Ulric S. J. Dunbar was in a rage over what he claimed was a stolen concept. Sixteen years prior, he said, Tennessee Senator Robert Love Taylor had asked him to create a preliminary design for a similar monument which was never built. Now, George Julian Zolnay, the sculptor commissioned by the UDC for this and many other Confederate monuments, was presenting a similar idea, though his incorporated a fountain (a concept which Dunbar found ludicrous). 17  Dunbar claimed that Zolnay had just “got to the newspapers” first. He found it strange “that Mr. Zolnay’s model should embody much of the symbolism which served as the inspiration for his model.” 18  Never mind that they were working from the same concepts and narrative promoting Lost Cause ideology. Zolnay, though, refused to have this fight with Dunbar.

So what was this monument supposed to look like? Both designs showed a “mammy” holding a white child, smiling down at it, while her own children reached for the attention she withheld in favor of her master’s offspring. Dunbar’s was a statue and Zolnay’s a bas relief over a fountain. (“Bah,” said Dunbar. “He has a fountain in it. How could any one make a fountain symbolic of the black mammy?” 19 )

According to The Chicago Defender , the editor of that paper helped put the last nail in the coffin of the mammy monument bill. Congressman Morton D. Hull, a member of the Library Committee of Congress which had “charge of all matters relating to public monuments in the District of Columbia,” wrote to Editor Robert S. Abbott to ask his opinion on the matter. Abbott wrote back, “To us the Black Mammy is no heroine. She was an ignorant untaught servant, whose natural affections were traded upon, and who has been held up for generations to young ambitious and aspiring Colored men and women as an ideal for which they ought to strive.” He echoed other suggestions for a better monument to “Mammy”: “What Colored Americans want first is their rights and privileges and protection under the Constitution – the abolition of Jim Crow laws and lynching.” 20

Hull evidently took his advice, replying that “In view of your statement it was the conclusion of the committee that it would be unwise to permit the erection of the statue to the Colored Mammy of the South.” 21

In an ahistorical turn of events, African American protesters had won the day and Washington was saved the hatred and heartache of another racist monument.

“Old Mammy Will Have Statue,” The Baltimore Sun , April 1, 1923.

Angelina Ray Johnston and Robinson Wise, “Commemorating Faithful Slaves, Mammies, and Black Confederates,” Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina, March 19, 2010.

“United Daughters of the Confederacy,” accessed June 26, 2024.

“Old Mammy Will Have Statue.”

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy : A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2008), 2. 

“Dear Old Mammy,” New York Times , December 20, 1902, sec. Saturday Review of Books and Art.

“Deserves a Monument,” New York Times , May 15, 1910.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, “Mammy”: An Appeal to the Heart of the South (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1919), 1.

“Tribute to ‘Black Mammy,’” The Washington Post , April 28, 1910.

Hollis W. Field, “To Build a Monument to ‘Ol’ Black Mammy,’” The Chicago Tribune , May 29, 1910; C. Gilliland Aston, “A Monument to the Faithful Old Slaves,” in Confederate Veteran , vol. 12 (Nashville, TN: S.A. Cunningham, 1904), 443.

Olivia Haynie, “‘Fear the Greeks, Though Bearing Gifts’: Efforts to Build a National ‘Mammy’ Monument in D.C.,” False Image of History, accessed June 18, 2024.

“D.C. Newspaper Suggests Bomb For Proposed Monument To ‘Black Mammies,’” Afro-American , March 9, 1923.

Thomas Clarke, “Another View of the ‘Black Mammy’ Question,” Afro-American , May 14, 1910.

“‘Mammy’ Statue Not Race Issue Says Dixieites,” The Chicago Defender , February 24, 1923.

Mary Church Terrell, “The Black Mammy Monument” (online text, 1923).

“Award Of 'Mammy' Statue Causes War Between Artists,” The Baltimore Sun , July 8, 1923.

“Rival’s ‘Mammy’ Statue Arouses Artist’s Wrath,” The Washington Post , June 28, 1923.

“Rival’s ‘Mammy’ Statue Arouses Artist’s Wrath.”

“Mammy Statue Topples After Defender Attack,” The Chicago Defender , April 26, 1924.

“Mammy Statue Topples After Defender Attack.”

About the Author

Kira Quintin grew up going to Colonial Williamsburg dressed in the period costumes her grandmother made her and sporting a stylish straw hat with a pink ribbon. Years later, she found herself back in costume as an intern and employee of that same living history museum, this time in a hat with a white ribbon. After graduating with a degree in history from William & Mary, Kira began exploring other ways of helping people find the stories that are important to them, starting by writing for Boundary Stones. She plans to continue that exploration while earning a Master’s in Local, Regional and Public History from James Madison University.

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Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

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By Jonathan Swan Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

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