Download or read book The Freedman s Story written by William Parker and published by LM Publishers. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The manuscript of the following pages has been handed to me with the request that I would revise it for publication, or weave its facts into a story which should show the fitness of the Southern black for the exercise of the right of suffrage. The narrative is a plain and unpretending account of the life of a man whose own right arm—to use his own expression—won his rights as a freeman. It is written with the utmost simplicity, and has about it the verisimilitude which belongs to truth, and to truth only when told by one who has been a doer of the deeds and an actor in the scenes which he describes. It has the further rare merit of being written by one of the "despised race"; for none but a negro can fully and correctly depict negro life and character. General Thomas—a Southern man, and a friend of the Southern negro—was once in conversation with a gentleman who has attained some reputation as a delineator of the black man, when a long, lean, "poor white man," then a scout in the Union army, approached the latter, and, giving his shoulder a familiar slap, accosted him with,— "How are you, ole feller?" The gentleman turned about, and forgetting, in his joy at meeting an old friend, the presence of this most dignified of our military men, responded to the salutation of the scout in an equally familiar and boisterous manner. General Thomas "smiled wickedly," and quietly remarked,— "You seem to know each other." "Know him!" exclaimed the scout. "Why, Gin'ral, I ha'n't seed him fur fourteen year; but I sh'u'd know him, ef his face war as black as it war one night when we went ter a nigger shindy tergether!" The gentleman colored up to the roots of his hair, and stammered out,— "That was in my boy days, General, when I was sowing my wild oats." "Don't apologize, Sir," answered the General, "don't apologize; for I see that to your youthful habit of going to negro shindies we owe your truthful pictures of negro life." And the General was right. Every man and woman who has essayed to depict the slave character has miserably failed, unless inoculated with the genuine spirit of the negro; and even those who have succeeded best have done only moderately well, because they have not had the negro nature. It is reserved to some black Shakspeare or Dickens to lay open the wonderful humor, pathos, poetry, and power which slumber in the negro's soul, and which now and then flash out like the fire from a thunder-cloud. I do not mean to say that this black prophet has come in this narrative...

Download or read book Bloody Dawn written by Thomas P. Slaughter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When four young men, slaves on Edward Gorsuch's Maryland farm, escaped to rural Pennsylvania in 1849, the owner swore he'd bring them back. Two years later, Gorsuch lay dead outside the farmhouse in Christiana where he'd tracked them down, as his federal posse retreated pell-mell before the armed might of local blacks--and the impact of the most notorious act of resistance against the federal Fugitive Slave Law was about to be felt across a divided nation. Bloody Dawn vividly tells this dramatic story of escape, manhunt, riot, and the ensuing trial, detailing its importance in heightening the tensions that led to the Civil War. Thomas Slaughter's engaging narrative captures the full complexity of events and personalities: The four men fled after they were detected stealing grain for resale off the farm; Gorsuch, far from a brutal taskmaster, had pledged to release all his slaves when they reached the age of twenty-eight, but he relentlessly pursued the escapees out of a sense of wounded honor; and the African-American community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania that provided them refuge was already effectively organized for self-defense by a commanding former slave named William Parker. Slaughter paints a rich portrait of the ongoing struggles between local blacks and white kidnapping gangs, the climactic riot as neighbors responded to trumpet calls from the besieged runaway slaves, the escape to Canada of the central figures (aided by Frederick Douglass), and the government's urgent response (including the largest mass indictment for treason in our history)--leading to the trial for his life of a local white bystander accused of leading the rioting blacks. Slaughter not only draws out the great importance given to the riot in both the North and the South, but he uses legal records reaching back over half a century to uncover the thoughts of average people on race, slavery, and violence. The Whiskey Rebellion, Slaughter's previous work of history, received widespread acclaim as "a vivid account" (The New York Times) and "an unusual combination of meticulous scholarship and engaging narrative" (The Philadelphia Inquirer). It was a selection of the History Book Club, and won both the National Historical Society Book Prize and the American Revolution Round Table Award. In Bloody Dawn, he once again weaves together the incisive insights of a professional historian with a gripping account of a dramatic moment in American history.

Download or read book The Christiana Riot and the Treason Trials of 1851 written by William Uhler Hensel and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America written by Robert H. Churchill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

Download or read book The Christiana Riot and the Treason Trials of 1851 written by William Uhler Hensel and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Captive s Quest for Freedom written by R. J. M. Blackett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the impact fugitive slaves had on the Fugitive Slave Law and the coming of the American Civil War.

Download or read book Emilie Davis s Civil War written by Judith Giesberg and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community. Her diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in “real time” and are a counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period. Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of wartime Philadelphia. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war’s major events, Davis’s diaries give us a rare look at how the war was experienced as a part of everyday life—how its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected a northern city with a vibrant black community.

Download or read book The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom written by James A. Delle and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-06-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating what life was like for African Americans north of the Mason-Dixon Line during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, James Delle presents the first overview of archaeological research on the topic in this book, debunking the notion that the “free” states of the Northeast truly offered freedom and safety for African Americans. Excavations at cities including New York and Philadelphia reveal that slavery was a crucial part of the expansion of urban life as late as the 1840s. Slaves cleared forests, loaded and unloaded ships, and manufactured charcoal to fuel iron furnaces. The case studies in this book also show that enslaved African-descended people frequently staffed suburban manor houses and agricultural plantations. Moreover, for free blacks, racist laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 limited the experience of freedom in the region. Delle explains how members of the African diaspora created rural communities of their own and worked in active resistance against the institution of slavery, assisting slaves seeking refuge and at times engaging in violent conflicts. The book concludes with a discussion on the importance of commemorating these archaeological sites, as they reveal an important yet overlooked chapter in African American history. Delle shows that archaeology can challenge dominant historical narratives by recovering material artifacts that express the agency of their makers and users, many of whom were written out of the documentary record. Emphasizing that race-based slavery began in the Northeast and persisted there for nearly two centuries, this book corrects histories that have been whitewashed and forgotten. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney

Download or read book Resistance at Christiana written by Jonathan Katz and published by New York : T. Y. Crowell Company. This book was released on 1974 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Frederick Douglass written by Philip S. Foner and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during his life—from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to black nationalism. Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass's hundreds of speeches, letters, articles, and editorials into an impressive five-volume set, now long out of print. Abridged and condensed into one volume, and supplemented with several important texts that Foner did not include, this compendium presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass's massive oeuvre.

Download or read book Scenes of Subjection Terror Slavery and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America written by Saidiya Hartman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated. Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.

Download or read book History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania written by Robert Clemens Smedley and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Force and Freedom written by Kellie Carter Jackson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-08-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war. In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.

Download or read book Right Or Wrong God Judge Me written by John Wilkes Booth and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of the known writings of John Wilkes Booth are included in this collection. Of this wealth of material, the most important item is a previously unpublished twenty-page manuscript discovered at the Players Club in Manhattan. Written by Booth in 1860 in a form similar to Mark Antony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar, it makes clear that his hatred for Lincoln was formed early and was deeply rooted in his pro-slavery and pro-Southern ideology. Also included in the nearly seventy documents are six love letters to a seventeen-year-old Boston girl, Isabel Sumner, written during the summer of 1864, when Booth was conspiring against Lincoln; several explicit statements of Booth's political convictions; and the diary he kept during his futile twelve-day flight after the assassination. The documents show that Booth, although opinionated and impulsive, was not an isolated madman. Rather, he was a highly successful actor and ladies' man who also was a Confederate agent. Along with many others, he believed that Lincoln was a tyrant whose policies threatened civil liberties. --From publisher's description.

Download or read book Independence Hall in American Memory written by Charlene Mires and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Independence Hall is a place Americans think they know well. Within its walls the Continental Congress declared independence in 1776, and in 1787 the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution there. Painstakingly restored to evoke these momentous events, the building appears to have passed through time unscathed, from the heady days of the American Revolution to today. But Independence Hall is more than a symbol of the young nation. Beyond this, according to Charlene Mires, it has a long and varied history of changing uses in an urban environment, almost all of which have been forgotten. In Independence Hall, Mires rediscovers and chronicles the lost history of Independence Hall, in the process exploring the shifting perceptions of this most important building in America's popular imagination. According to Mires, the significance of Independence Hall cannot be fully appreciated without assessing the full range of political, cultural, and social history that has swirled about it for nearly three centuries. During its existence, it has functioned as a civic and cultural center, a political arena and courtroom, and a magnet for public celebrations and demonstrations. Artists such as Thomas Sully frequented Independence Square when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital during the 1790s, and portraitist Charles Willson Peale merged the arts, sciences, and public interest when he transformed a portion of the hall into a center for natural science in 1802. In the 1850s, hearings for accused fugitive slaves who faced the loss of freedom were held, ironically, in this famous birthplace of American independence. Over the years Philadelphians have used the old state house and its public square in a multitude of ways that have transformed it into an arena of conflict: labor grievances have echoed regularly in Independence Square since the 1830s, while civil rights protesters exercised their right to free speech in the turbulent 1960s. As much as the Founding Fathers, these people and events illuminate the building's significance as a cultural symbol.

Download or read book The Fugitive Slave Law and It s Victims Illustrated written by American Anti-Slavery Society and published by BookRix. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fugitive Slave Law was enacted by Congress in September, 1850, received the signature of HOWELL COBB, [of Georgia,] as Speaker of the House of Representatives, of WILLIAM R. KING, [of Alabama,] as President of the Senate, and was "approved," September 18th, of that year, by MILLARD FILLMORE, Acting President of the United States. The authorship of the Bill is generally ascribed to James M. Mason, Senator from Virginia. Before proceeding to the principal object of this tract, it is proper to give a synopsis of the Act itself, which was well called, by the New York Evening Post, "An Act for the Encouragement of Kidnapping." It is in ten sections.

Download or read book Prominent Families of New York written by Lyman Horace Weeks and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: