Download or read book Slaves Sailors Citizens written by Steven J. Ramold and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As many as one in six Union navy sailors was African American, many of them former slaves. This richly detailed history shows that the free blacks and "contraband" slaves who joined the U.S. Navy during the Civil War were essential to Northern victories at sea. Through their role in preserving the Union, they helped to win recognition for African Americans as full citizens. African Americans joined the U.S. Navy from the first days of the war and soon demonstrated to a skeptical Northern population that they would fight for their freedom. Faced with the hazards of battle, African American sailors performed with great heroism, and several earned the nation's highest military tribute, the Medal of Honor. Their service in the navy paved the way for their wider employment in the U.S. Army. Despite the lack of official records on the subject, Ramold has combed through mountains of memoirs, court documents, pension reports, and other sources to discover the true magnitude of African Americans' contribution to the naval effort. The book presents a vivid description of the lives of these sailors from enlistment to discharge, telling the story as much as possible in the words of the sailors themselves. A dozen rare photographs illustrate the range of African American service. Ramold demonstrates that the navy, from necessity and from tradition, treated African Americans in its ranks far more equitably than did the army or any other public institution in antebellum America. Decades later, black sailors would be consigned to work in the mess hall, but in the Civil War era they fought side by side with white sailors, were treated equally in courts-martial, and received the same pay and benefits. Slaves, Sailors, Citizens allows us to rediscover these largely forgotten heroes, whose story can now take its rightful place in the history of the war and in the struggle of slaves and free blacks to become citizens.
Download or read book Moral Contagion written by Michael A. Schoeppner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Antebellum era, thousands of free black sailors were arrested for violating the Negro Seamen Acts. In retelling the harrowing experiences of free black sailors, Moral Contagion highlights the central roles that race and international diplomacy played in the development of American citizenship.
Download or read book Bluejackets and Contrabands written by Barbara Brooks Tomblin and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2009-10-09 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the lesser-known stories of the Civil War is the role played by escaped slaves in the Union blockade along the Atlantic coast. From the beginning of the war, many African American refugees sought avenues of escape to the North. Due to their sheer numbers, those who reached Union forces presented a problem for the military. Fortunately, the First Confiscation Act of 1861 permitted the seizure of property used in support of the South's war effort, including slaves. Eventually regarded as contraband of war, the runaways became known as contrabands. In Bluejackets and Contrabands, Barbara Brooks Tomblin examines the relationship between the Union Navy and the contrabands. The navy established colonies for the former slaves, and, in return, some contrabands served as crewmen on navy ships and gunboats and as river pilots, spies, and guides. Tomblin presents a rare picture of the contrabands and casts light on the vital contributions of African Americans to the Union Navy and the Union cause.
Download or read book Black Jacks written by W. Jeffrey Bolster and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the roles of African-Americans, both free men and slaves, in maritime history during the years 1740 to 1865. Also discusses their relationships with white sailors.
Download or read book Black Slaves Indian Masters written by Barbara Krauthamer and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South
Download or read book Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes 1730 1807 written by Emma Christopher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-03 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Diary of a Contraband written by William Benjamin Gould and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart of this book is the remarkable Civil War diary of the author’s great-grandfather, William Benjamin Gould, an escaped slave who served in the United States Navy from 1862 until the end of the war. The diary vividly records Gould’s activity as part of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia; his visits to New York and Boston; the pursuit to Nova Scotia of a hijacked Confederate cruiser; and service in European waters pursuing Confederate ships constructed in Great Britain and France. Gould’s diary is one of only three known diaries of African American sailors in the Civil War. It is distinguished not only by its details and eloquent tone (often deliberately understated and sardonic), but also by its reflections on war, on race, on race relations in the Navy, and on what African Americans might expect after the war. The book includes introductory chapters that establish the context of the diary narrative, an annotated version of the diary, a brief account of Gould’s life in Massachusetts after the war, and William B. Gould IV’s thoughts about the legacy of his great-grandfather and his own journey of discovery in learning about this remarkable man.
Download or read book Baring the Iron Hand written by Steven J. Ramold and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During antebellum wars the Regular Army preserved the peace, suppressed the Indians, and bore the brunt of the fighting. The Civil War, however, brought an influx of volunteers who overwhelmed the number of army Regulars, forcing a clash between traditional military discipline and the expectations of citizens. Baring the Iron Hand provides an extraordinarily in-depth examination of this internal conflict and the issue of discipline in the Union Army. Ramold tells the story of the volunteers, who, unaccustomed to such military necessities as obeying officers, accepting punishment, and suppressing individuality, rebelled at the traditional discipline expected by the standing army. Unwilling to fully surrender their perceived rights as American citizens, soldiers both openly and covertly defied the rules. They challenged the right of their officers to lead them and established their own policies on military offenses, proper conduct, and battlefield behavior. Citizen soldiers also denied the army the right to punish them for offenses like desertion, insubordination, and mutiny that had no counterpart in civilian life. Ramold demonstrates that the clash between Regulars and volunteers caused a reinterpretation of the traditional expectations of discipline. The officers of the Regular Army had to contend with independent-minded soldiers who resisted the spit-and-polish discipline that made the army so efficient, but also alienated the volunteers' sense of individuality and manhood. Unable to prosecute the vast number of soldiers who committed offenses, professional officers reached a form of populist accommodation with their volunteer soldiers. Unable to eradicate or prevent certain offenses, the army tried simply to manage them or to just ignore them. Instead of applying traditionally harsh punishments for specific crimes as they had done in the antebellum period, the army instead mollified its men by extending amnesty, modifying sentences, and granting liberal leniency to many soldiers who otherwise deserved the harshest of penalties. Ramold's fascinating look into the lives of these misbehaving soldiers will interest both Civil War historians and enthusiasts.
Download or read book The Many Headed Hydra written by Peter Linebaugh and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the International Labor History Award Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many Headed-Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world. When an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy, a vast, diverse, and landless workforce was born. These workers crossed national, ethnic, and racial boundaries, as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados, and from the Americas back to Europe. Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a 'hydra' and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others, hidden from history and recovered here, have much to teach us about our common humanity.
Download or read book Across the Divide written by Steven J. Ramold and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ramold disputes the old argument that citizen-soldiers in the Union Army differed little from civilians. He shows how a chasm of mutual distrust grew between soldiers and civilians during four years of fighting that led many Democratic soldiers to…build the groundwork for the postwar Republican Party. Filled with gripping anecdotes, this book makes for fascinating reading." —Scott Reynolds Nelson, College of William & Mary Union soldiers left home in 1861 with expectations that the conflict would be short, the purpose of the war was clear, and public support back home was universal. As the war continued, however, Union soldiers noticed growing disparities between their own expectations and those of their families at home with growing concern and alarm. Instead of support for the war, an extensive and oft-violent anti-war movement emerged. In this first study of the gulf between Union soldiers and northern civilians, Steven J. Ramold reveals the wide array of factors that prevented the Union Army and the civilians on whose behalf they were fighting from becoming a united front during the Civil War. In Across the Divide, Ramold illustrates how the divided spheres of Civil War experience created social and political conflict far removed from the better-known battlefields of the war. Steven J. Ramold, Associate Professor of American History at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of two previous books, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy and Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army. He and his wife reside in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Download or read book Birthright Citizens written by Martha S. Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.
Download or read book The Empire of Necessity written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.
Download or read book The Internal Enemy Slavery and War in Virginia 1772 1832 written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "Impressively researched and beautifully crafted…a brilliant account of slavery in Virginia during and after the Revolution." —Mark M. Smith, Wall Street Journal Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation’s course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
Download or read book Africa Squadron written by Donald L. Canney and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald L. CanneyOCOs study is the first book-length history of the U.S. NavyOCOs Africa Squadron. Established in 1842 to enforce the ban on importing slaves to the United States, in twenty yearsOCO time the squadron proved ineffective. To officers and enlisted men alike, duty in the squadron was unpopular. The equatorial climate, departmental neglect, and judicial indifference, which allowed slavers back at sea, all contributed to the sailorsOCO frustration. Later, the most damaging allegation was that the squadron had failed at its mission. Canney investigates how this unit earned a poor reputation and whether it is deserved. Though U.S. warships seized slave vessels as early as 1800, four decades passed before the Navy established a permanent squadron off the western coast of Africa to interdict U.S.-flag vessels participating in this trade. Canney traces the NavyOCOs role in interdicting the slave trade, Great BritainOCOs pressure on the U.S. government to curb slave traffic, the creation of the squadron, and how individual politicians, department secretaries, captains, and squadron commanders interpreted the laws and orders from higher authorities, changing squadron operations. While famous ships and captains served on this station, none won distinction in the Africa Squadron. In the final analysis, the squadron was unsuccessful, even though it was the NavyOCOs only permanent squadron with a specific, congressionally mandated mission: to maintain a quasi-blockade on a foreign shore. While Canney exonerates southern-born naval captains, who approached their work as diligently as their counterparts from the north, he demonstrates how the secretaries of the NavyOCopro-slavery southern politiciansOConeglected the squadron."
Download or read book The Slaves Gamble written by Gene Allen Smith and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping and original look at American slavery in the early nineteenth century that reveals the gamble slaves had to take to survive Images of American slavery conjure up cotton plantations and African American slaves locked in bondage until the Civil War. Yet early on in the nineteenth century the state of slavery was very different, and the political vicissitudes of the young nation offered diverse possibilities to slaves. In the century's first two decades, the nation waged war against Britain, Spain, and various Indian tribes. Slaves played a role in the military operations, and the different sides viewed them as a potential source of manpower. While surprising numbers did assist the Americans, the wars created opportunities for slaves to find freedom among the Redcoats, the Spaniards, or the Indians. Author Gene Allen Smith draws on a decade of original research and his curatorial work at the Fort Worth Museum in this fascinating and original narrative history. The way the young nation responded sealed the fate of slaves for the next half century until the Civil War. This drama sheds light on an extraordinary yet little known chapter in the dark saga of American history.
Download or read book South to Freedom written by Alice L Baumgartner and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico. The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historianAlice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.
Download or read book Obstinate Heroism written by Steven J. Ramold and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite popular belief, the Civil War did not end when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, in April 1865. The Confederacy still had tens of thousands of soldiers under arms, in three main field armies and countless smaller commands scattered throughout the South. Although pressed by Union forces at varying degrees, all of the remaining Confederate armies were capable of continuing the war if they chose to do so. But they did not, even when their political leaders ordered them to continue the fight. Convinced that most civilians no longer wanted to continue the war, the senior Confederate military leadership, over the course of several weeks, surrendered their armies under different circumstances. Gen. Joseph Johnston surrendered his army in North Carolina only after contentious negotiations with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Gen. Richard Taylor ended the fighting in Alabama in the face of two massive Union incursions into the state rather than try to consolidate with other Confederate armies. Personal rivalry also played a part in his practical considerations to surrender. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had the decision to surrender taken out of his hands—disastrous economic conditions in his Trans-Mississippi Department had eroded morale to such an extent that his soldiers demobilized themselves, leaving Kirby Smith a general without an army. The end of the Confederacy was a messy and complicated affair, a far cry from the tidy closure associated with the events at Appomattox.
