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23 - African American Political Activism

from Part IV - Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

By
Stephen Kantrowitz
Edited by
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

The Civil War, Frederick Douglass knew, began “in the interests of slavery on both sides. The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North fighting to keep it in the Union; the South fighting to get it beyond the limits of the United States Constitution, and the North fighting for the old guarantees;– both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” Nearly all African American political activists of the Civil War era would have agreed with Douglass, not only for his analysis of the terms on which the war began, but also for the way his words captured these activists’ twin and inseparable struggles: the battle to abolish slavery, and the struggle to overcome white hostility and transform the United States into a nonracial republic.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 480 - 500
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Berlin, Ira, Reidy, Joseph P., and Rowland, Leslie S. (eds.).Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Blight, David. Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Cecelski, David S. The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Davis, Hugh. “We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Diemer, Andrew. The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Faulkner, Carol. Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedman’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Kantrowitz, Stephen. More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012).Google Scholar
McPherson, James M. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (1965; reprinted New York: Ballantine, 1991).Google Scholar
Masur, Kate L. An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War (1953; reprinted New York: Da Capo, 1989).Google Scholar
Ripley, C. Peter (ed.).The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. v, The United States, 1859–1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964; reprinted New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
Samito, Christian. Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

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