Organizing Freedom: Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest
Autor Jennifer R Harbouren Limba Engleză Paperback – 27 apr 2020
Despite banning slavery, Illinois and Indiana share an antebellum history of severely restricting rights for free black people while protecting the rights of slaveholders. Nevertheless, as Harbour shows, black Americans settled there, and in a liminal space between legal slavery and true freedom, they focused on their main goals: creating institutions like churches, schools, and police watches; establishing citizenship rights; arguing against oppressive laws in public and in print; and, later, supporting their communities throughout the Civil War.
Harbour’s sophisticated gendered analysis features black women as being central to the seeking of emancipated freedom. Her distinct focus on what military service meant for the families of black Civil War soldiers elucidates how black women navigated life at home without a male breadwinner at the same time they began a new, public practice of emancipation activism. During the tumult of war, Midwestern black women negotiated relationships with local, state, and federal entities through the practices of philanthropy, mutual aid, religiosity, and refugee and soldier relief.
This story of free black people shows how the ideal of equality often competed against reality in an imperfect nation. As they worked through the sluggish, incremental process to achieve abolition and emancipation, Midwestern black activists created a unique regional identity.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809337699
ISBN-10: 080933769X
Pagini: 208
Ilustrații: 5
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 16 mm
Greutate: 0.05 kg
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN-10: 080933769X
Pagini: 208
Ilustrații: 5
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 16 mm
Greutate: 0.05 kg
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Notă biografică
Jennifer R. Harbour is an associate professor of Black Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
Extras
Introduction
In October 1851, Sarah Ann Lucas stood before justice of the peace Jared C. Jocelyn to attest to her “proof of freedom.” Born free in Ohio, Sarah had immigrated to Indiana some twenty years earlier. Her white male witnesses, Benjamin Connor and Andrew Israel, further authenticated her state citizenship by swearing that they had known her to be “a free person of colour” for ten years. A year later, in August 1852, Sarah returned to the same Floyd County Courthouse to register as a black resident, which Indiana law required of all African Americans. In late 1853, Sarah helped another black woman, an enslaved runaway called “Amanda,” to cross the Ohio River into New Albany, Indiana. Ostensibly, Sarah provided Amanda with legal advice, because Amanda presented herself as a free person in the Floyd County Courthouse in early December 1853, albeit with a fake name. On January 7, 1854, in Louisville, Kentucky, police arrested Sarah for “enticing [the] slave” Amanda, known property of Benjamin J. Adams, a resident of Kentucky. Judge Joyes threw out the felony charges and gave Sarah bail, set at six hundred dollars, as long as she demonstrated “good behavior” for a year.
Sarah and Amanda’s story illustrates the complicated and dynamic nature of freedom in the antebellum and wartime Midwest, where African Americans resolutely claimed free states as locations for emancipated communities. This book analyzes black community activism in antebellum and wartime Illinois and Indiana, places that would become tremendously important sites of contest. These states shared similar circumstances: they were geographically close to slave and border states, they had a history of similarly functioning black codes and other repressive laws, they protected the rights of slaveowners whenever enslaved people were brought in, and they were home to some of the most virulent proslavery racists in the region, especially in their southern sections. An analysis of the black activism in these states reveals an obscene truth in African American history—freedom was not granted by any one law or slaveowner or politician or state constitution or even a civil war; it had to be made into something tangible by blacks themselves. Indiana earned statehood in 1816, and Illinois followed suit in 1818. Both state constitutions, representing the supposed demands of the white constituency, disallowed slavery. Those same voters, however, would do everything in their power to stop blacks from coming into their states. Scholars have engaged in the crucial task of posing what seems to be an elementary question: How did slaves transition from cradle-to-grave, race-based, labor-intense servitude into a condition of personhood called freedom? Somehow we have managed to teach schoolchildren that crossing a river like the Ohio—with slavery on one side and freedom on the other—might have been arduous, but touching a foot or hand to “free” soil equaled the end of a thousand brutalities wrought by slavery. America, we are told, is a place where one can judge how much terrorism, dehumanization, and degradation was meted out just by knowing whether a place was a “slave state” or not.
Mid-nineteenth-century Indiana and Illinois amplify the neglected history of the black experience by highlighting the inadequacy of this argument. In America, there was no “good” place to have black or brown skin, and to be a woman with black or brown skin was even worse. By studying the Midwest, we can see emancipation for what it really was: sluggish, protracted, and filled with its own barbarities. But we can also see the raw humanity in the people who sought it: aggressive, tenacious, and anxious to engage with the most powerful institutions in America. In common parlance, slavery and freedom are used to describe seemingly opposite states of birth and of being. In fact, American slavery was sui generis, incomparable in world history for its self-propagation. The Northwest Ordinance forbade slavery in Indiana and Illinois, but the rights of slaveowners to transfer, detain, hunt, and secure their property was stunningly well protected both de jure and de facto. Race-based slavery also meant that nonwhite people could be caught, bought, and sold at any time, regardless of their free status. As a result, the institution of slavery—and sweeping national respect for it—created a closed society in which black people were neither slaves nor masters, nor entirely free. As such, the precarity of midwestern African Americans defies the usual historical categorization, and the only way to truly understand their approach to emancipation is to retrace their steps leading up to it.
Free blacks’ vision of emancipation included ideals of self-determinism, citizenship rights, and the ability to control their own families and domiciles. In the 1840s and 1850s, long before anyone could have predicted the Civil War, activists sought jobs and began to build schools and churches in their free black neighborhoods. Indiana and Illinois legislators discouraged and blocked black settlement with fines, bounties, and rigorous legal requirements, such as those encountered by Sarah Ann Lucas. Still, blacks entreated the local white power structure to extend some degree of formalized state citizenship to them, despite the threat of violent backlash. In the 1860s, this activism was mature enough for blacks to demand equal treatment as Union soldiers and families. Black people insisted that the destruction of slavery was crucial to their emancipation everywhere, including the Midwest. Men and women alike sought to define and secure their freedoms by becoming activists within local and state settings. Emancipation activism sought the acquisition of rights and responsibilities for blacks as groups and as individual citizens.
This book makes a pointed delineation between the study of Reconstruction and emancipation. While the study of presidential and radical Reconstruction, especially the Reconstruction amendments, has been useful to historians when analyzing a wide range of wartime topics, emancipation as part of the black experience has yet to be fully explored. Thus, my choice to focus on emancipation rather than Reconstruction is a deliberate one. Although Foner’s impressive and legendary Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877indicted the Dunning School for its description of blacks as childlike and simpleminded, scholarship in general was slow to revise its one-dimensional portrait of blacks as a victimized, blighted population with nearly no agency. Studies of Reconstruction have generally approached it as a period of Union occupation of the South, which ended in 1877. In these traditional histories, African Americans played mostly minor roles. More recently, historians have demonstrated the relationships among black suffrage, labor, and politics as they pertain to the end of the war and the rebuilding of the South. Civil War historiography may be an overcrowded field but not for the cause of black women as historical agents—this literature is pitifully small when compared with the prodigious volumes describing the lives of soldiers, presidents, and military leaders, not to mention the details of regional and local histories, battles and skirmishes, medical practices, legislative and legal occurrences, and even historical memorialization.
This book offers a narrative of emancipation as a gradual, incremental process. It also emphasizes the contributions of black women as central to that narrative, rather than just peripheral. In this endeavor, I hope to repair some of the astoundingly reductionist historiography of gender, race, and slavery. Emancipation was an activist enterprise designed, managed, modified, and implemented by blacks themselves. Emancipation was not conferred, granted, or even gifted. Yes, an enslaved human being could be bought, sold, emancipated, manumitted, willed, stolen, kidnapped, deeded, mortgaged, jailed, seized as an asset, transferred, or simply let go, but that is the language of the oppressor and the purview of the white gaze. Emancipation in its purest form was self-empowerment, either for groups or individuals, and it was the stated goal of black communities everywhere.
Many Americans still believe that emancipation was something bestowed on blacks—whether through antislavery or abolitionist efforts—by benevolent whites, beginning with Lincoln himself. Because this interpretation has done little to suffuse the history of African Americans with tangible evidence of agency and self-determination, the first goal of this book is to enlarge the definition of the term emancipation. This word is used by many historians to mean “the destruction of slavery,” but this book reveals the hidden dimensions of black activists who sought emancipation from outside the South—in this case, in two free midwestern states. African Americans often found themselves (and their families) stuck in a liminal space between legal slavery and freedom but squarely in the capitalistic marketplace. Enslaved men and women were often “hired out” by their owners to earn money for the planter’s coffers or occasionally allowed to keep the money themselves. The contractual vagaries of slavery meant that enslaved persons could legally be owned by infants and children, people who lived abroad, and even the long dead. In the nineteenth century, to be black meant that freedom was never a given, no matter where one lived. In short, emancipation for all—which included the destruction of slavery—required the commitment of the larger black community.
The second goal of this book, then, is to direct the historian’s gaze north and west, and toward women and gender roles. Historical treatments of emancipation have heretofore focused almost exclusively on the Northeast and the South, and mostly concern men. This book also offers a fresh approach to the study of the Civil War, emancipation, and African American life by expanding the focus to include free black women, their spouses and families, and their communities. In American historiography, black women’s raced, gendered, and sexualized lives have only recently attracted sophisticated analyses. Even when black women do appear in secondary sources, the analysis of their lives is overly focused on their oppression, their roles as mothers and wives, or their position at the very bottom of the racial caste system. By capitalizing on local activist opportunities, black women promoted the construction of educational, civic, and occupational opportunities for women in American society. By centering themselves squarely in community activity, they also created opportunities for protest discourse, racial self-expression, and freedoms defined by their own conceptions of gender.
[end of excerpt]
Cuprins
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Free Black Communities and Black Codes
2. Legal, Educational, and Religious Foundations
3. Antebellum and Wartime Emancipation Activism
4. Black Soldiering and Emancipation Activism
5. Black Women’s Wartime Political Culture
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Free Black Communities and Black Codes
2. Legal, Educational, and Religious Foundations
3. Antebellum and Wartime Emancipation Activism
4. Black Soldiering and Emancipation Activism
5. Black Women’s Wartime Political Culture
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
"Jennifer R. Harbour's Organizing Freedom provides a riveting account of the complex nature of Black emancipation activism in antebellum and wartime Illinois and Indiana. Harbour deals impressively with subjects few historians have examined in depth: early Black migration to the Midwest, Black organizational and community development beyond the Northeast, and Black women's activist and emancipation strategies within those regions."—Jazma Sutton, Middle West Review
"Jennifer R. Harbour provides us with a finely tuned multilayered exploration of black women's activism in the antebellum and Civil War eras."—Gayle T. Tate, Civil War Book Review
"Harbour moves away from the traditional focus on white abolitionists and black men, telling this story through black newspapers, church records, letters to black publications and white political leaders, and to a lesser extent white-created documents. . . . Her emphasis on institutions and women--not simply as a supplement but by reconceptualizing black activity as fundamentally about families and communities overall--goes beyond the individualized 'great man' perspective that often dominates historical understandings, especially of war and politics." —David Brodnax Sr., The Annals of Iowa
“Jennifer R. Harbour deftly teases out everyday acts of bravery in the black communities of Illinois and Indiana in their pursuit of emancipation as a conscious, concerted, collective, and ongoing action. With vivid examples she reveals men, women, and children not only surviving in a threatening environment but also defining the terms of freedom as something greater than the absence of slavery. This is an important contribution to Underground Railroad, abolitionist, and Civil War studies.”—Leigh Fought, author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass
“Harbour skillfully presents the struggle for emancipation in a new light, one that illuminates the activism of black men and women and their extraordinary effort to carve out communities and civic organizations in the midst of white supremacy.”—Stephen I. Rockenbach, author of War upon Our Border: Two Ohio Valley Communities Navigate the Civil War
“This pathbreaking study achieves several important goals by broadening our definition of ‘emancipation,’ redirecting our gaze westward, forcing us to consider the important role of women, and describing in detail the crucial role of black organizational activity in the antebellum Midwest.”—Beverly C. Tomek, author of Pennsylvania Hall: A “Legal Lynching” in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell
"Jennifer R. Harbour provides us with a finely tuned multilayered exploration of black women's activism in the antebellum and Civil War eras."—Gayle T. Tate, Civil War Book Review
"Harbour moves away from the traditional focus on white abolitionists and black men, telling this story through black newspapers, church records, letters to black publications and white political leaders, and to a lesser extent white-created documents. . . . Her emphasis on institutions and women--not simply as a supplement but by reconceptualizing black activity as fundamentally about families and communities overall--goes beyond the individualized 'great man' perspective that often dominates historical understandings, especially of war and politics." —David Brodnax Sr., The Annals of Iowa
“Jennifer R. Harbour deftly teases out everyday acts of bravery in the black communities of Illinois and Indiana in their pursuit of emancipation as a conscious, concerted, collective, and ongoing action. With vivid examples she reveals men, women, and children not only surviving in a threatening environment but also defining the terms of freedom as something greater than the absence of slavery. This is an important contribution to Underground Railroad, abolitionist, and Civil War studies.”—Leigh Fought, author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass
“Harbour skillfully presents the struggle for emancipation in a new light, one that illuminates the activism of black men and women and their extraordinary effort to carve out communities and civic organizations in the midst of white supremacy.”—Stephen I. Rockenbach, author of War upon Our Border: Two Ohio Valley Communities Navigate the Civil War
“This pathbreaking study achieves several important goals by broadening our definition of ‘emancipation,’ redirecting our gaze westward, forcing us to consider the important role of women, and describing in detail the crucial role of black organizational activity in the antebellum Midwest.”—Beverly C. Tomek, author of Pennsylvania Hall: A “Legal Lynching” in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell
Descriere
A riveting and significant social history of black emancipation activism in Indiana and Illinois during the Civil War era. By enlarging the definition of emancipation to include black activism, author Jennifer R. Harbour details the aggressive, tenacious defiance through which Midwestern African Americans—particularly black women—made freedom tangible for themselves.