Short Essay No. 7 Responses to H.K. Edgerton Torin Steele The numerous historical and personal factors that might drive an African American man to spend his golden years becoming a political champion for the modern Lost Cause mythology is unclear and difficult to ascertain based on the rarity of this seemingly self-defeating attitude. Nonetheless, one H.K. Edgerton seems to have taken up this mantle: fighting a culture war against what he deems to be a long history of northern propaganda which has dishonestly portrayed the Confederate States of America as not being particularly kind in its treatment of those of African descent. Perish the thought of the. According to Edgerton’s history, not only did the Confederacy respect the Black man as …show more content…
In this writing, I will justify my incredulity with Edgerton’s fiction and attempt to posit the true role the African American played in the Confederate war effort. Part 1: The Myth. The moment the Confederacy fell and the ego of the white supremacist portions of the South received the blow that was a Union victory and the following full emancipation, there was a massive scramble to find a way to compensate for the decades of virulent race science and justifications for the subjugation of the African American. In the early postbellum years, the claim of slavery’s benevolence persisted as the dominant justification. Yet as Reconstruction saw its rise and subsequent crash, and Jim Crow found its foothold in the ashes, this worldview needed to evolve. The subtext of racial inferiority never left, but it needed to be veiled to avoid the optical damage that came with the territory of what the Lost Cause truly believed. The Lost Cause needed evidence of African American loyalty to the Confederacy to hold up the fantasy that the war was not fought over the subjugation of a race, but rather economic …show more content…
This order functionally permitted Confederate troops who captured Black Union Soldiers to never give quarter to their prisoners. As the war came to an end, and the Confederacy army ran so low on manpower, the proposal of emancipating slaves to bolster their ranks began to be genuinely considered by the Rebel higher-ups. On January 22nd, 1864, the Confederate Congress issued a reminder to the people of the nation concerning Slavery’s importance in their way of life; “Subjugation involves everything that the torturing malice and devilish ingenuity of our foes can suggest – the destruction of our nationality, the equalization of whites and blacks, the obliteration of State lines, degradation to colonial vassalage, and the reduction of many of our citizens to dreary, hopeless, remediless bondage.” (2) It was the official position of the Confederate government that to enact an emancipation order in any way, shape, or form might as well be surrendering to the
C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most Southern historian and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, for Mary Chestnut's Civil War. He’s also a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. In honor of his long and adventurous career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. The book actually helped shape that historical curve of black liberation; it’s not slowed movement; it’s more like a rollercoaster.
In his work “Escape and Revolt in Black and White,” James M. McPherson discusses the lives of now famous black and white defenders of the black population and how society’s views of these individuals changed over time. The majority of his essay focused on the stories of Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and John Brown, each of whom impacted their own immediate surroundings, even if only on a small scale, in an attempt to improve the condition of blacks. He investigates whether these now famous individuals became famous due to their own merits or as another piece of propaganda to support either side of the fight over civil rights. However, this overall point was very unclear and jumbled as he focused too heavily on just his narrative of these
In, “Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War,” Charles B. Dew analyzes the public letters and speeches of white, southern commissioners in order to successfully prove that the Civil War was fought over slavery. By analyzing the public letters and speeches, Dew offers a compelling argument proving that slavery along with the ideology of white supremacy were primary causes of the Civil War. Dew is not only the Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College, but he is also a successful author who has received various awards including the Elloit Rudwick Prize and the Fletcher Pratt Award. In fact, two of Dew’s books, Tredegar Iron Works and Apostles of Disunion and Ironmaker to
The American Civil war is considered to be one of the most defining moments in American history. It is the war that shaped the social, political and economic structure with a broader prospect of unifying the states and hence leading to this ideal nation of unified states as it is today. In the book “Confederates in the Attic”, the author Tony Horwitz gives an account of his year long exploration through the places where the U.S. Civil War was fought. He took his childhood interest in the Civil War to a new level by traveling around the South in search of Civil War relics, battle fields, and most importantly stories. The title “Confederates in the Attic”: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War carries two meanings in Tony Horwitz’s thoughtful and entertaining exploration of the role of the American Civil War in the modern world of the South. The first meaning alludes to Horwitz’s personal interest in the war. As the grandson of a Russian Jew, Horwitz was raised in the North but early in his childhood developed a fascination with the South’s myth and history. He tells readers that as a child he wrote about the war and even constructed a mural of significant battles in the attic of his own home. The second meaning refers to regional memory, the importance or lack thereof yet attached to this momentous national event. As Horwitz visits the sites throughout the South, he encounters unreconstructed rebels who still hold to outdated beliefs. He also meets groups of “re-enactors,” devotees who attempt to relive the experience of the soldier’s life and death. One of his most disheartening and yet unsurprising realizations is that attitudes towards the war divide along racial lines. Too many whites wrap the memory in nostalgia, refusing...
Gilmore argues that African American male political participation between 1890 and 1898 represented a movement toward greater inclusion. She claims that African American males in politics strove for the balance of power between political parties in North Carolina, and that the Populist-Republican victory in 1896 kept African American votes in contention and maintained some African American men in political office for a short period of time. There was an agreement between African Americans and whites that the “Best Men,” middle class African Americans, were to be the only African Americans to hold office. This was because by being dubbed the “Best Men,” they had met certain standards and were suitable for office according to the white politicians. The “Best Men” clashed with the South’s “New White Man,” who sought to re-monopolize voting rights and political power, as well as to completely dominate African Americans. Gilmore attributes the “New White Man’s” goals to these men’s bitterness towards their fathers who were blamed for the defeat in the Civil War, southern underdevelopment, and black progress. Nonetheless, African American men rapidly increased power in politics when many positions became publicly elected.
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
People attending schools before 1960’s were learning about certain “unscrupulous carpetbaggers”, “traitorous scalawags”, and the “Radical Republicans”(223). According to the historians before the event of 1960’s revision, these people are the reason that the “white community of South banded together to overthrow these “black” governments and restore home rule”(223). While this might have been true if it was not for the fact that the “carpetbaggers were former Union soldiers”, “Scalawags… emerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionists”(227). Eric Foner wrote the lines in his thesis “The New View of Reconstruction” to show us how completely of target the historians before the 1960’s revision were in their beliefs.
Walker addresses biases established by Jefferson decades before his time that still significantly shape the way many think about blacks. In doing so, Walker is able to draw attention the problematic logic behind said arguments. Ultimately, in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, David Walker addresses the arguments, presented in Thomas Jefferson’ Notes on the State of Virginia, of race superiority, slavery, citizenship, and Jefferson’s own default validation by means of his authority, to further and strengthen his own abolitionist
Henry Steele Commager’s essay “The Defeat of the Confederacy: An Overview” is more summary than argument. Commager is more concerned with highlighting the complex causality of the war’s end rather than attempting to give a definitive answer. Commager briefly muses over both the South’s strengths
A veteran’s letter proved the surprising fact that the “Lost Cause” did not honor all ex-Confederates equally, and the differing treatment of veterans based on social status and titles proved that a major limit of the “Lost Cause” was that even the movement, which sought to glorify the South, was biased in favor of the upper class. This fact leads one to the conclusion that the “Lost Cause” was probably led by the upper class and was intended to restore the family honor of relatives of prominent officers. Andrews’ textbook proved that white supremacy was an important element of the “Lost Cause’s” ideology. The fact that the UDC approved the textbook also demonstrated how influential the UDC was on education, and the fact that this textbook was written from the perspective of a white man also proved that the “Lost Cause” wanted to teach children racist ideas in order to continue the belief in white supremacy. This makes one question whether or not the “Lost Cause” was worried that abolition and Reconstruction would teach children that white supremacy was wrong, and thereby end the “Southern way of life”. Taylor’s writing proved that racial violence was an important issue in the South that white Southerners were not concerned with
When even the highly-supported secession documents clearly outline how important slavery was to the southern states, it is hard to deny its fault in the war. The argument that the Confederacy was fighting for states’ rights is the most-often suggested alternative, however all one needs to do is dig deeper and calculate what these
Preisser, Thomas M. “The Virginia Decision to Use Negro Soldiers in the Civil War, 1864-1865.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83, no. 1 (January 1975): 98-113. Accessed April 14, 2014. http://jstor.org/stable/4247927.
The article, “The Negro’s Civil War in Tennessee, 1861-1865” by Bobby L. Lovett, can be found in "The Journal of Negro History. Lovett's article relates the importance of the contributions the black soldiers of Tennessee made during the Civil War. He portraits to the reader the determination of these black Tennesseans fight to gain their freedom under some extremely violent and racial conditions.
The quote above is from the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore who proclaimed freedom for African American slaves who fought for the British, after George Washington announced there would be no additional recruitment of Blacks in the Continental army in 1776. For numerous free blacks and enslaved blacks, the Revolutionary War was considered to be an essential period in black manifestation. Many public officials (like Dunmore), who initially had not expressed their views on slavery, saw the importance of African Americans and considered them an imperative tool in winning the war. Looking back, it almost seems like an inherent paradox in white America’s desire of emancipation from England while there still enslaving blacks. This concept has different grounds in white’s idea of liberation in comparison to that of the African-Americans. To white Americans, this war was for liberation in a political/economical tone rather than in the sense of the privatized oppression that blacks suffered from. But what started this war and what would this mean for blacks? How did these African Americans contribute to the war effort? What were there some of their duties? How did the white communities perceive them? How did it all end for these blacks? The main topic of this paper is to show how the use African Americans helped the control the outcome of the war while monitoring their contributions.
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-consciousness, manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message f...