Repost: Black History Month: The Civil War

The Dred Scott Case

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford--a victory to supporters of slavery; it also fueled the fires of northern abolitionists.

During the 1830s, the owner of a slave named Dred Scott had taken him from Missouri—a slave state--to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois, where slavery was against the law, according to the Missouri Compromise. Once returned to Missouri, Scot sued for his freedom on the idea that since he’d been taken to a free state he was now free.

The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was a slave and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.
The verdict, in effect, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

The South rejoiced; antislavery northerners were furious.

____________________

John Brown’s Raid

John Brown was a restless man; he struggled throughout life trying to support his family, moving from place to place in an effort to do so. He had assisted the Underground Railroad in Missouri, and fought in battles between pro– and anti–slavery forces in Kansas in the 1850s. Still, he was anxious to strike a more extreme blow for the cause.

During the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led less than 50 men in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown wanted to obtain enough ammunition to lead a larger operation against Virginia’s slaveholders. Brown’s men, including several blacks, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was tried for his crimes;; his trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859

__________________

Civil War and Emancipation

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts between the North and South erupted into civil war; eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

President Abraham Lincoln, although vocally anti-slavery, whose mere election as America’s first Republican President was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the south to secede, did not want the Civil War to be seen as a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln simply wanted to preserve the Union; and he knew that few people even in the North would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

In the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer.

After the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and then, on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure. He did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists. But, by freeing 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Some 186,000 black soldiers--nearly all of them former, or runaway, slaves--would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

_________________

The Post–Slavery South

Though the Civil War gave over 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, but the status of freed slaves in the south was in flux. White southerners eventually reestablished civil authority, and enacted a series of laws known as the “black codes,” designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force.

Impatient with the leniency shown former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination, so–called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This essentially put the South under martial law, and the following year the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves.

Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

The growing influence of former slaves angered many white southerners, who felt control slipping away. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise blacks by using voter fraud, intimidation and, finally, violence .

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks were left with little improvement in their economic and social status; the political gains they had made oftentimes eradicated by white supremacist forces.

Repost: Black History Month: Frederick Douglass

As an infant, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was separated from his slave mother—he never knew his white father—and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read and when her husband discovered this he ordered his wife to stop, declaring that learning would make him unfit for slavery. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

In 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a laborer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass decided to write his autobiography in 1845; it was revised several times over the years and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Yet he was still considered a runaway slave and to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglass left America for a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union’s victory Douglass dedicated himself to securing his community’s rights to this new freedom. He strongly supported the 14^th Amendment, which granted Black people citizenship, but he realized that this new citizenship status needed to be protected by suffrage. He was a longtime supporter of women’s rights, but realizing a universal suffrage amendment would fail under Reconstruction politics, Douglass then supported Black male suffrage with the idea that Black men could help women secure the right to vote later.

Frederick Douglass held numerous government appointments; he was the first Black U.S. marshal in 1877 when he was appointed to that post for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford B. Hayes; in 1881 President Garfield appointed him to the high-paying position of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia; President Harrison named Douglass  the U.S. minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti in 1882.

During the later years of his life, Douglass remained committed to social justice and the African American community. Douglass was the most photographed American man in the 19th century and used those pictures as deliberate contradictions to the visual stereotypes of Black men and women at that time, which often exaggerated their facial features, skin color, and physical bodies and demeaned their intelligence. He served on Howard University’s board of trustees from 1871 to 1895.

Frederick Douglass died in his Cedar Hill home on February 20, 1895; a remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president to icon.

The Funny Papers

JD Crowe, Steve Sack, Deb Milbrath, Darrin Bell, Drew Sheneman, Nick Anderson, Matt Wuerker, Mike Luckovich, RJ Matson, Michael de Adder, Ed Hall, Jack Ohman, Clay Bennett,

The Funny Papers

Matt Wuerker, Michael de Adder, Kevin Siers, Adam Zyglis, Nick Anderson, Christopher Weyant, Bill Day, Clay Bennett, RJ Matson, Jack Ohman, Dave Whamond, Ted Littleford, Ed Hall, Marc Murphy, Darrin Bell

Tuesday Thought #2

Tuesday Thought #4

A Letter From Jordan Anderson To The Man Who Once 'Owned' Him

You may not have heard of Jordan Anderson — I know I hadn’t — but his story is an interesting one.

Jordan — sometimes spelled Jourdan — was born in 1825 in Tennessee and around the time he was seven or eight he was ‘sold’ to General Paulding Anderson to work on his plantation.

General Anderson had a son, Patrick Henry Anderson, and it is believed that Jordan was “given” to Patrick as a playmate and personal servant … slave … when they were both children. The two men grew up together and Jordan, as property of now Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson, worked on his plantation; Jordan married a fellow slave, Amanda, and they had eleven children … all owned by the colonel.

In 1864 the Union army came into Tennessee and camped on Anderson’s land; Jordan and Amanda, and their children, were set free by the provost marshal general of the Department of Nashville.

He then may have worked at the Cumberland Military Hospital in Nashville before he and Amanda took their family to Dayton, Ohio where he lived for the next forty years, working as a servant, janitor, coachman, or hostler, until 1894, when he became a sexton—a person who looks after a church and churchyard—at the Wesleyan Methodist Church until he passed away in 1907, a free man.

So why does anyone know Jordan Anderson?

Well, in July 1865, a few months after the end of the Civil War, Colonel Patrick Anderson wrote a letter to Jordan asking him to come back and work on the Tennessee plantation which was in a shambles after the war; Colonel Anderson also owed a great debt that he’s hoped to ease by getting Jordan back to “work” for him.

On August 7th Jordan Anderson dictated his response to the colonel though his employer, Valentine Winters; Winters sent the letter to Colonel Anderson and also sent it to the Cincinnati Commercial, who published it. And from there it went around the world, in newspapers and in classrooms; it was reprinted in the New York Daily Tribune and Lydia Child’s The Freedman’s Book; it became the subject of lectures in history classes everywhere.

In the letter, which has been compared to the satiric writings of Mark Twain, Jordan describes his new, better, life in Ohio; he has a job, he gets paid, his children are allowed to go to school. And so he asks the Colonel if, in good faith, he would prove his goodwill by paying the back wages Jordan and Amanda were entitled to during their years of working on Anderson’s plantation; he calculated the back pay at roughly $11,000. But then he turned serious, asking if his daughters, his own children, would be safe on a plantation that, during his time there, had been the home to horrific violence to female slaves.

Jordan tells the Colonel he would rather die "than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters... how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine."

He ends the letter with … well, here, you read it ...

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jordon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can.

I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this.

I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson — and the children — Milly, Jane, and Grundy — go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher.

They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee.

The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master.

Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville.

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future.

We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.

Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve — and die, if it come to that — than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters.

You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jordon Anderson

The people Jordan talks of in the letter are real; George Carter was a carpenter; “Miss Mary" and "Miss Martha" are Colonel Anderson's wife, Mary, and daughter, Martha. The "Henry" who vowed to shoot Jordan if he ever got the chance was probably Colonel Anderson’s son. Jordan’s two daughters mentioned in the letter — “poor Matilda and Catherine" — did not leave Tennessee with Jordan and Amanda; their fate is unknown. They may have been killed or sold to other plantations before Jordan was freed.

Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson never responded to Jordan’s letter and later sold his land for a pittance to erase a debt; he died two years later. In 2006, historian Raymond Winbush tracked down the colonel’s remaining relatives who were said to still be “angry at Jordan for not coming back" to help the Colonel save his home.

Yes, seriously; in 2006 they were furious that a former slave did not wish to return to his master — even as a free man.

Jordan Anderson; I cannot imagine what was done to him, his wife, and his children, during their time on Colonel Anderson’s plantation though I imagine it was horrific.

And Colonel Anderson; I cannot imagine the gall of someone who owned people, owned people, as playthings and personal servants, who would then ask them to give up their new, free lives to come back and help him save his land.

But I love Jordan’s letter; I love the humor, the sarcasm, even at what must have been a horrendous life, in responding to the Colonel. His request for “back pay” was priceless.

He could have, as many of us might, having been put in that situation, written back to the Colonel in a decidedly different tone; I’m imagining the vile things I might have spewed in the same situation. But Jordan took the high road, the satiric road, the common sense road, in responding to a man who had more than likely treated him as property, and treated him badly, and apparently sold off two of his children before Jordan and Many were freed.

I’m thinking we could all learn a lesson from Jordan Anderson … even after 150 years.

Daily Mail

South Carolina Legislators Say The Flag Could Come Down As Early As Next Week

You know, before the shooting in Charleston, I wasn’t holding my breath on this whole #TakeDownThatFlag movement. Since we moved to South Carolina, there have been petitions and request and newspaper articles about removing the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds, but that was it; the requests came, and then nothing happened.

Now, however, I am cautiously optimistic. And our state lawmakers are saying they are actually confident that a bill to remove that flag could be on Governor Nikki Haley’s desk by the end of next week. My fingers are crossed.

Vincent Sheheen, a Democratic state Senator who represents the part of South Carolina where we live — you just know I couldn’t live in a ‘Red’ county — sponsored the bill, which is expected to pass the Senate by next Tuesday, and then go to Haley by Thursday.

But … and ain’t there always a but? … House Speaker Jay Lucas, and he’s a Republican of course, says he will refer flag bills to the House Judiciary Committee “where they will go through the appropriate process” that might take weeks. Jay Lucas has not shared his opinion on removing the flag, so yeah. Hmmmmm.

And holding off any kind of vote, much less a resolution, could be dangerous. This past Monday night, after pro-flag and anti-flag protestors clashed at the capitol, one man was arrested after shots were fired. And someone threw a red-paint filled balloon at the statue of Ben Tillman, a white supremacist who was a governor and U.S. senator.

“It’s July and hot, and the world is watching. “It will only get worse. If we don’t act, we are encouraging problems.” — House Minority Leader, and Democrat, Todd Rutherford

And we still have some loon, and bigots, and out-and-out anti-LGBT asshats in the legislature, most notably state Senator, and Republican, of course, Lee Bright, who has started an online petition to keep the flag on the State House grounds because, he says:

“I hate how these creeps have misused these emblems.”

Creeps. South Carolinians who want a divisive symbol of racism and hate removed from state property are “creeps.” And if that doesn’t tell the people who voted for Bright — and there’s a misnomer if I ever heard one — that it’s time to vote him out, I don’t know what does.

Still, the 123-member House voted 103-10 and the 45-member Senate voted 42-3 to debate the flag, and those numbers indicate there is the two-thirds support required in the House and Senate to take down the flag.

But, it’s quite clear, by the number of South Carolinians who support removal, by the number of our legislators who support removal, by our Republican governor, who supports removal that the time has come to take down that flag.

Put it in a museum, where artifacts and relics from the past belong. It does not deserve a place on honor on state grounds.

Plus, and this would just be delicious, the Ku Klux Klan has scheduled a pro-flag rally for July 18. Wouldn’t it be rich to have the flag down before they ever showed up?

The State

The Civil War

The Dred Scott Case
On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Scott v. Sanford--a victory to supporters of slavery; it also fueled the fires of northern abolitionists.

During the 1830s, the owner of a slave named Dred Scott had taken him from Missouri—a slave state--to the Wisconsin territory and Illinois, where slavery was against the law, according to the Missouri Compromise. Once returned to Missouri, Scot sued for his freedom on the idea that since he’d been taken to a free state he was now free.

The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was a slave and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.
The verdict, in effect, declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

The South rejoiced; antislavery northerners were furious.

____________________

John Brown’s Raid
John Brown was a restless man; he struggled throughout life trying to support his family, moving from place to place in an effort to do so. He had assisted the Underground Railroad in Missouri, and fought in battles between pro– and anti–slavery forces in Kansas in the 1850s. Still, he was anxious to strike a more extreme blow for the cause.

During the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led less than 50 men in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown wanted to obtain enough ammunition to lead a larger operation against Virginia’s slaveholders. Brown’s men, including several blacks, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was tried for his crimes;; his trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859

__________________

Civil War and Emancipation

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts between the North and South erupted into civil war; eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America.

President Abraham Lincoln, although vocally anti-slavery, whose mere election as America’s first Republican President was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the south to secede, did not want the Civil War to be seen as a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln simply wanted to preserve the Union; and he knew that few people even in the North would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

In the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer.

After the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and then, on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure. He did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists. But, by freeing 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Some 186,000 black soldiers--nearly all of them former, or runaway, slaves--would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

_________________

The Post–Slavery South
Though the Civil War gave over 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in 1865, but the status of freed slaves in the south was in flux. White southerners eventually reestablished civil authority, and enacted a series of laws known as the “black codes,” designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and ensure their availability as a labor force.

Impatient with the leniency shown former Confederate states by Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination, so–called Radical Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This essentially put the South under martial law, and the following year the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting “equal protection” of the Constitution to former slaves.

Congress required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union, and the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

The growing influence of former slaves angered many white southerners, who felt control slipping away. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise blacks by using voter fraud, intimidation and, finally, violence .

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks were left with little improvement in their economic and social status; the political gains they had made oftentimes eradicated by white supremacist forces.

Frederick Douglass

He was separated as an infant from his slave mother--he never knew his white father--and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read.

Auld, however, declared that learning would make him unfit for slavery, and Mrs. Auld was ordered to stop the instruction. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

At 16, upon the death of his master, he was returned to the plantation as a field hand.

Later, in 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away.

Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a labourer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass felt impelled to write his autobiography in 1845, revised and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. It became a classic in American literature as well as a primary source about slavery from the bondsman's viewpoint.

Still considered a runaway slave, Douglass, to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, left on a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

After 1851 Douglass allied himself with the faction of the abolitionist movement led by James G. Birney. He did not countenance violence, however, and specifically counseled against the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. Throughout Reconstruction, he fought for full civil rights for freedmen and vigorously supported the women's rights movement.

After Reconstruction, Douglass served as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, and in the District of Columbia he was marshal and recorder of deeds; finally, he was appointed U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti.

A remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president.