By 1860, African Americans understood that the Republican Party's “opposition” to slavery was not a declaration of freedom for blacks based on moral grounds; rather, it was a confirmation of the continued abuse of the so-called Negro under the guise of the Constitution.11 In other words, with regard to black empowerment, the Republican Party was no better than the Southern Democratic Party: both wanted to maintain dominance over the black race and continue the abuse initiated by the founding fathers. Black intellectuals such as Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond, and Alfred M. Green understood the limitations of supporting the Republican Party, but they knew which side of the equation African Americans would have to be on if they hoped to change the fortunes and futures of 4 million people.
On December 20, 1860, after deliberations on the future of the United States and the possibility of forming a separate nation, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. It was followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana in January 1861; Texas in February; and Virginia in April.12 A month earlier, Ohio representative Thomas Corwin's proposed constitutional amendment allowing the slave states to continue to regulate and control the institution of slavery within their borders passed the House and was endorsed by Congress. However, because of tensions and political posturing on both sides of the conflict, the Southern states refused to acknowledge the efforts being made to prevent war. On April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia attacked the Federal position at Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of an inevitable war that would shape the nation's future. Most important, the war would determine the fate of people of African descent born in the United States and denied the rights, privileges, and protections of the U.S. Constitution.13
The war's beginning was marked by excited commentary among black leaders who recognized its significance to the liberation of African Americans. On April 20, 1861, an editorial in the Weekly Anglo African conveyed African Americans' hopes regarding the outcome of the war:
This is but another step in American Progress. We say Progress, for we know that no matter what may be the desires of the men of Expediency who rule, or seem to, the affairs of the North,—the tendencies are for Liberty.
God speed to conflict. May the cup be drained to its dregs, for only thus can this nation of sluggards know the disease and its remedy.
The strife will be deadly, but the end is certain. It matter not whether the Government is successful, whether the Union is preserved, the ideals underlying the struggle will triumph. Forms are but the dead cerements,—the rattling husks and dry shells which buried shall rot away, while the vital principle within, germinates into newer and more glorious manifestations of Life and Beauty.14
The same day the editorial was published, Alfred Green, a Philadelphia schoolteacher, spoke to black Philadelphians recalling the unfairness with which previous generations had been treated after their military service, but he resisted the notion of giving up the perpetual quest to be recognized as human beings and citizens based on what he called “past grievances.” Instead, Green made a passionate plea to Philadelphia's affluent black community: “Let us, then, take up the sword, trusting in God, who will defend the right, remembering that these are other days than those of yore; that the world today is on the side of freedom and universal political equity.”15 Furthermore, Green argued that free men marching and fighting as soldiers against the Confederate army would inspire a sense of confidence in those held as human chattel, elevating their sense of purpose and prompting them to fight for their own freedom.
More than anything, men such as Green understood that black men had to be willing to seize their freedom and claim both their manhood and their citizenship. African American leaders believed that once black men proved their worth on the battlefield, there would be no denying them full citizenship rights and privileges in the country of their birth. Black leadership stood firm and refused to be dissuaded by the cool rebuke of native white Americans and Irish immigrants, who knew what was at stake if free blacks were allowed to assert their will and challenge the validity of slavery and their status as second-class citizens. Affirming the legacies of their grandfathers and fathers who had fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, respectively, African Americans knew that military service provided access to a breadth of possibilities for self-improvement and a greater sense of belonging, along with the opportunity to expunge the negative claims against them.
Through a series of tracts, public speeches, and newspaper articles, black leaders instructed the black community how to use the war's mission of keeping the Union together as a vehicle to abolish slavery and remove the social, political, and legal barriers to their full citizenship status. One of the foremost abolitionists was black orator Charles Lenox Remond, who prior to the Civil War had argued most eloquently, “In spite of slavery and negrophobia, in spite of the American Constitution,—I believe we have rights against the world in argument, and in believing this, I hold it to be our right and duty to defy the men and bodies who shall, in this late hour, undertake still to crush us in the dust.”16 Remond's words resonated loud and clear with free urban blacks, whose lives were in constant turmoil due to their precarious position in a country that did not value blackness or fully recognize their freedom. Enslaved blacks in the South, who suffered under a brutal system that made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence and confirmed the U.S. Constitution's support of white supremacy, were no better off than their Northern urban cousins.
By the fall of 1862, much of America was embroiled in the Civil War in one way or another. From the coast of Maine to the goldfields of California, Americans took sides on the issues at the center of the fighting: the expansion of slavery, states' rights, and the Federal government's ability to wage war against its own people.17 Initially, President Lincoln was not in favor of freeing the 3.9 million slaves inhabiting the American South. Like a majority of “black Republicans,” he believed the institution of slavery was best suited to its current location and would eventually die out if it were prevented from expanding into the Federal territories. Lincoln believed that slavery was “an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”18 Essentially, the Republican Party's only guarantee to the wretched souls of the South was that they would continue to toil under the same system their forebears had endured for generations, with no respite but death. Free blacks would have few protections under the law primarily because the party's position was to safeguard the interests of nonslaveholding white men: antislavery in this context meant anti–black labor and competition in support of pro-white labor and prosperity.
Understandably, African American participation in the Civil War was neither embraced nor recognized as necessary by politicians and nativists. As one politician put it, the conflict between North and South was “a white man's war” to be settled by white men alone.19 Meanwhile, Irish immigrants, who sought to keep blacks at the bottom of society as leverage for their own rise, desperately clung to the possibility of being recognized as white so they could demonstrate their patriotism.20 Black men steadfastly believed that they too would be liberated from the grips of tyranny and oppression when their patriotic contributions were tallied.
Earlier in the century, black physician and intellectual Martin Delany discussed the nature of “True Patriotism” in an essay published in the abolitionist paper the North Star:
Patriotism consists not in a mere professed love of country, the place of one's birth—an endearment to the scenery, however delightful and interesting, of such country; not simply the laws and political policy by which such country is governed; but a pure and unsophisticated interest felt and manifested for man—an impartial love and desire for the promotion and elevation of every member of the body politic, their eligibility to all the rights and privileges of society. This, and other than this, fails to establish the claims of tru
e patriotism.21
Clearly, Delany's observations challenge the idea that patriotism is blind and entails bending one's will to the desires of the nation. A true patriot, in Delany's words, is one who works for the “promotion and elevation of every member of the body politic” and who protects and respects each individual's right to live free from tyranny and oppression. The American Civil War gave black men the opportunity to display their courage and loyalty to the nation, recognizing that their lives and futures hung in the balance.
In the spring of 1862 President Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in an attempt to stop the war and begin the healing process. Knowing that the time was right, thousands of African American men began liberating themselves, running away to join the Union effort. In the state of Kentucky, officials of the U.S. military and a large portion of the general public rejected African American men—both freeborn and enslaved—who volunteered to help crush the Southern rebellion. Many of those opposed to African American participation claimed the conflict had nothing to do with slavery but was a Federal effort to keep the nation unified.22 Regardless, President Lincoln made it clear that the course of American history was set, and citizens of the nation could not escape the fact that “in giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose, the last best hope of [the] earth.”23
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that “all persons held as slaves” in the states seceded from the Union were free and that “such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States.” In support of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and other black leaders challenged all black men to seize their freedom with both hands. By the spring, tremendous battles had been fought and thousands of American lives lost in the process, but as a result of Lincoln's mandate, the U.S. military had been authorized to enroll black men for armed military service. Thus began the push to allow black men to serve the Federal government as soldiers in an effort to demonstrate and claim their manhood and citizenship, while seizing freedom and liberty for all African Americans.
Kentucky
Before the 1860 election, Kentuckians did not support Lincoln. Many were agitated by his position against the expansion of slavery, which they thought would shape the Federal government's attitude toward the South in general. Fresh in the minds of most Southerners was Lincoln's 1858 address at the State Republican Convention in Springfield, Illinois, where he had delivered his “House Divided” speech. In that address, Lincoln clearly stated that the future of the United States pivoted on the slavery question, and the country could not survive as half slave and half free. After Lincoln won the presidency, states across the South held conventions to discuss withdrawing from the Union. Southern politicians believed that states had a constitutional right to leave the Union because the Federal government, an agent of the states, threatened their sovereignty.
Between April 1861 and July 1862, Lincoln's policy toward states that had seceded created a breach in trust for those that had once been loyal to the United States. Kentucky's most prominent citizens, many of whom were slaveholders themselves or benefited directly from the institution, signed up to fight the Federal government, based on the belief that President Lincoln and the Republican Party had gone too far by violating their right to hold slaves. As a result of this clear rupture between sectional powers, many Kentuckians, who were heavily dependent on slave labor for their wealth, rebelled against the Federal government and its power to dictate the lives of free men.
One of these men was John Hunt Morgan. Born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1825, Morgan moved with his family to Lexington when he was a small boy. His mother, Henrietta Hunt Morgan, was the daughter of the distinguished Kentucky merchant, horse breeder, and slaveholder John Wesley Hunt, who is widely recognized as one of the first millionaires to settle west of the Allegheny Mountains. Hunt was a powerful force in business, politics, and agriculture. In the early part of the nineteenth century he was responsible for importing racehorses to Lexington, with the goal of improving the quality of the region's horseflesh.24 Hunt's cord and rope manufacturing business in Lexington turned the hemp grown on his farm (using slave labor) into the packaging and shipping materials required to support the South's cotton industry (another crop cultivated and harvested by slaves).25 John Hunt Morgan and his brother C. C. Morgan followed in their grandfather's footsteps as manufacturers, slaveholders, and businessmen in Kentucky.
In 1862 Kentucky voted to side with the Federal government in the conflict. Morgan, however, believed Kentucky should maintain its neutrality and was unwilling to accept the Union's position on slavery and the dissolution of states' rights. He thus began a campaign to disrupt the Federal government's presence in Kentucky, using his familiarity with the land and his proven ability as a military leader to cut across the state with his cavalry company, destroying lines of communication and wreaking havoc wherever he could. With the generous support of Kentuckians sympathetic to the rebel cause, Morgan challenged the Union troops at every turn. From April to December 1862 Captain Morgan was responsible for raids that relieved farmers and Union supporters of their horses, cattle, and weapons; burned railroad tunnels to disrupt the flow of supplies to Federal troops throughout Kentucky; and captured more than 2,000 Federal soldiers.26
The violence surrounding David Tanner's Clark County farm, where America and Isaac Murphy lived, must have been both exciting and daunting. Five days prior to Isaac's second birthday, on January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, abolishing slavery in the states that had seceded from the Union. Those sweet words of freedom no doubt lifted the hearts and souls of those who hoped one day to see the promised land their forebears had assured them was just beyond the horizon. Lincoln's words rang clear, affirming that the day of deliverance had arrived for those held in bondage: “That on the First Day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand, eighteen hundred and sixty three, all persons held as slaves within any State or any designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, henceforward, and forever free.” Lincoln's strategy was simple: create instability within the Confederacy by freeing those at the center of the conflict, thereby delivering the death blow to the heart of the institution.
As the effects of the radical document unfolded across the country, black abolitionists' vision for “colored people” varied. Individuals such as Sarah Parker Remond, the sister of Charles Lenox Remond, spoke loudly and widely in defense of the freedom of enslaved and free African Americans and their right to develop as whole human beings. In her address to the International Congress of Charities, Correction, and Philanthropy in London, Remond argued that the “real capacities of the Negro race have never been thoroughly tested; and until they are placed in a position to be influenced by the civilizing influences which surround freemen, it is really unjust to apply to them the same test, or to expect them to attain the same standard of excellence, as if a fair opportunity had been given to develop their faculties.”27 In other words, Remond was anticipating a transition period from slavery to freedom, and she was asking for patience and compassion on the part of society. Newly freed blacks would need time to shed the influences of their previous condition (one that was not of their choosing) and develop the necessary skills to succeed as full citizens of the United States and the world. Remond's observations were important to the full-fledged emancipation of blacks, and this understanding was central to the forward movement advocated by black abolitionists, who recognized the window of opportunity provided by the war and the need to take full advantage of it to achieve their freedom.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, the area around the Tanner farm became active with the sights and sounds of war, as individuals sought to claim the state for their own side of the conflict. Also active were the area's black s
laves, many of whom stole away as soon as they got the chance, even though, by law, they were not considered free because Kentucky had not seceded. In defiance of their masters, African Americans fled to claim what was theirs under the banner of the Federal government: freedom. Federal campsites throughout the state became swollen with masses of old and young blacks seeking refuge and sanctuary. With so few blacks left on the farms, there was no one to harvest the corn, barley, hemp, and wheat; no one to tend the animals; and no one to wait hand and foot on their masters.
Up to this time, enslaved blacks' existence had consisted of satisfying a multitude of demands and desires that were not their own, providing living proof of the fiction of white supremacy, and living in fear of displeasing their masters and mistresses. How would they respond to their new status as free in this time of war and uncertainty? What did liberty mean to men and women shaped by a brutal system designed to extract as much from them as possible while giving little, if anything, in return? How would they deal with the burden of being liberated from the fetters of servitude? Where would they turn for advice? President Lincoln may have signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but in the hearts and minds of African Americans, God was the great architect who had willed their freedom, and in God they found strength.
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