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The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner (2011)

Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial examines Abraham Lincoln’s views on American slavery, southern secession and the convergence of events that produced the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although Foner’s narrative relies on speeches, correspondence and newspaper materials many scholars have previously engaged, the author seeks a new “Lincoln in motion” by “tracking the development of his ideas and beliefs.” Rather than framing emancipation as an inevitable outcome, Foner approaches it as a confluence of both ideological and contingent forces: Lincoln’s personal desire to curtail slavery, the military necessity of destroying its economic value and, above all, the President’s determination to preserve the Union.

Beginning with Lincoln’s childhood years in Kentucky, Foner’s sees in the future President a moderate temperament and perpetual anxiety over division—a judicious disposition that helped shape his views on slavery. As a state legislator, Lincoln spoke out against the institution’s divisive nature, anticipating its potential to threaten America’s social and political stability. However, the author is careful not to cast Lincoln as an arbiter of total race equality, revealing instances in which he was all too willing to engage, and manipulate, contemporary racial ideologies. One notable example is the presidential campaign of 1858, during which Lincoln accused the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce, of encouraging racial “amalgamation” by opposing the Fugitive Slave Act. Foner depicts these attitudes as fairly ordinary within the Republican Party of antebellum America, at that moment between “radical abolitionism” and the Democratic Party’s virulent racism.

Foner argues that Lincoln’s instinctive moderation continued to inform his presidency throughout the Civil War. Calming sectarian tensions and reestablishing legal authority across the Union persisted as his chief objectives. During the early years of the war, abolition was not an inherent objective for Lincoln, but rather a bargaining chip to encourage reunification. While he sought to avoid the slavery question on a national level, the President was simultaneously courting border states with offers of compensated emancipation, leading one contemporary writer to note that to “soothe southern wrath…the negro is thrown in as the offering.”

At The Fiery Trial’s conclusion, Foner directly challenges the dominant view of the Emancipation Proclamation, namely that it represented a uniquely progressive decision impelled solely by the moral evil of slavery. Stressing the document’s political and military objectives, Foner depicts the pronouncement as one final effort to entice slaveholders back into the union. Although its language eschewed the gradualism of Lincoln’s earlier views on abolition, the Proclamation’s emancipatory edict was borne out of wartime necessity. In addition to providing fresh soldiers for the Union cause, it effectively gutted the Confederacy’s labor pool and, by extension, larger economic system.

Foner ultimately portrays the Emancipation Proclamation as a pragmatic means of achieving both political and military objectives; and very much in keeping with Lincoln’s inclination to be “propelled” by provisional events rather than moral imperative. Lincoln himself even acknowledged as much: “I claim not to have controlled events…but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” By forgoing the inevitability of emancipation, Foner removes Abraham Lincoln from the idealism of history and recasts the 16th President as a practical administrator, intent on restoring political control over the United States. Emancipation, despite its broader significance in American history, was a means of attaining that outcome.

You may also like:

Our blog post debating the origins of the American Civil War.

George Forgie’s offers a list of his favorite history books about the Civil War.

Kristie Flannery reviews a book about the very visible legacy of the American Civil War.

Professor Jacqueline Jones talks about her latest book Saving Savannah.

Photo credits:

Alexander Hay Ritchie (engraver), F.B. Carpenter (artist), “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet,” 1866. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Making History: Jessica Wolcott Luther

Interview by Zach Doleshal

In the second installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Jessica Wolcott Luther about her experience as a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Jessica shares stories about researching in seventeenth century archives (she’s been to eleven so far!), studying history using anthropological documents, and overcoming the frustration of knowing that she may never get the chance to find a direct source from a former enslaved person.

Jessica Wolcott Luther is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Texas. Her dissertation focuses on Barbados from 1640 to 1700. It analyzes the impact that the growing English empire, the rapid move toward slavery as the main form of labor, and a new-found desire to document nature through the lens of empirical science had on the way that the English thought about the human body.

The dissertation is mainly a local study using the personal documents (letters, journals, merchant ledgers, etc.) created by people in Barbados, the laws enacted to control certain bodies, and official government documents used to track populations (census, wills, baptisms). It analyzes how the English made sense of the many new bodies and their own bodies’ reactions to the space of the Caribbean as the century progressed and the enslaved population on the island became the majority by large numbers. My project also attempts to trace the ways that those changing ideas about the body affected the lives of everyone in Barbados: Englishmen and women, including servants; enslaved Africans; and native Carib peoples (most of them enslaved). It is also an Atlantic study, as it documents how the expansion to the Caribbean and the novelty of the institution of slavery led to an increasing interest in black bodies in both the Caribbean and England, not limited to but especially within scientific circles.

More broadly, this project intervenes in one of the central debates in early modern historiography — how did the modern concept of race emerge? — and its corollary — when did race become so intertwined with science? My project argues that it was in Barbados in the seventeenth century when Englishmen began to work out, in confusing, contradictory, and experimental ways, some of the kernels of belief that would eventually become central to English notions about race.

Existing at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, this dissertation is about the process through which a society made sense of itself as it underwent radical, dramatic shifts in fundamental arenas of thought and practice when issues of human difference came quickly to the fore.

Learn more about Jessica Wolcott Luther and her work by visiting her website and following her on Twitter.

You may also like:

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Jessica Luther’s blog piece on seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepy’s hypothetical tweeting history, along with her review of David Eggers’ 2009 book “Zeitoun.”

Sankofa (1993)

By Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

In this 1993 film by Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima, a modern-day, fashion model is transported to the past to experience the traumas of American chattel slavery. It is only through her return to the past that she can move forward, hence the name of the film, Sankofa, an Akan word meaning “go back and take” or “go back to move forward.” The film opens with a photo shoot on the coast of Ghana on the grounds of a fortification (read castle/dungeon) used to house African captives prior to being forcibly transported to new world plantations. Zola, the main character, is forced back in time to an isolated sugar plantation. There she learns the power of family, community, and even rebellion as she and other members of the enslaved community seek their freedom through solidarity and decisive action. This is the closest film rendition of slavery since the 1977 television mini-series Roots. Gerima, a Howard University professor, did much to ensure that his portrayal of the institution of slavery and the presentation of African cultural traditions were as close to reality as possible.

Teza, another film directed by Haile Gerima

The bookstore, gallery and cafe, Sankofa, established by Gerima

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002)

By Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

This film tells the story of Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia slave revolt. For years, historians have grappled with the details of the affair and debated about the ways Nat Turner should be remembered. For some, he was a revolutionary hero; for others, Turner was nothing more than a deranged, blood-hungry killer. After all, it was Turner’s rebellion that sent the South into a frenzy forcing southern legislatures and planters to harden their stances (and laws) on slavery. This PBS movie blends documentary narrative, historical re-enactment, and scholarly reflection to examine the various renditions of the revolt and to uncover the many faces of Nat Turner and slave resistance in general. Directed by Charles Burnett, this is a film worth watching for those interested in slavery, public history, and the history memory. As part of the Independent Lens series, the PBS website provides a wealth of historical material on Nat Turner, slave rebellion, and historical treatments.

Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work and Sexuality

American slavery was a dynamic institution. And though slavery was mainly a system of labor, those who toiled in the fields and catered to the most private needs and desires of slaveholders were more than just workers. Although utterly obvious, it must be reiterated that the enslaved were indeed people. In fact, the nature and diversity of the institution of slavery ensured that bondpeople would experience enslavement quite differently. Aiming to highlight the variety of conditions that affected a bondperson’s life as a laborer, Swing the Sickle examines the workaday and interior lives of the enslaved in two plantation communities in Georgia—Glynn County in the lowcountry and Wilkes in the piedmont east of Athens.

My study of antebellum Georgia forces us to reconsider notions of “skilled” and “unskilled labor,” to see the impact of domestic violence on slave families, the trauma of separations and sales, episodes of “forced breeding” and the significance of religion and an informal economy amongst the enslaved. Swing the Sickle provides an incisive look into the plantation lives of enslaved women and men.

Historians have often seen the enslaved workforce as divided into two separate camps: the skilled laborers and the unskilled. This view segregates domestics and craftsmen from field hands.. “Skilled laborer” became loose shorthand for bondmen and “unskilled labor” was nothing more than a proxy for female, or “woman’s work.” But skilled labor was often women’s work, especially if we look at skilled labor as nothing more than one’s ability to do something well. Field labor, and especially intricate rice cultivation, was a form of skilled labor that crossed gendered lines. Women swung the sickle, mastered the hoe and plow, and operated the mechanical cotton gin, all tasks that required practice and dedication over time not restricted to a particular biological sex. Some readers are surprised to learn that bondwomen performed many of these backbreaking field tasks at rates that numerically exceeded their male counterparts. Women also engaged in crafts like sewing, cooking, and even nursing. These types of non-agricultural labor were essential to plantation operations and demanded a great deal of skill and time from bondwomen. Thus, as skilled and hence valued laborers, some enslaved women also enjoyed many of the privileges and prerogatives afforded to some male skilled workers. Molly, for example, though not a field hand, was a valued servant to the King family and therefore, gained the same geographic mobility through her frequent travels as other trusted, skilled bondmen on the same plantation. If we expand our definition of skilled laborer to include the various skilled tasks that women performed, many bondwomen fall into that category.

Berry3 — *Julia Williams Wadsworth, former slave*

Aside from their lives as laborers, bondpeople in Wilkes and Glynn counties successfully attempted to forge fuller and more meaningful existences outside and around the dehumanizing institution of slavery. They built families and churches, and reveled in each other’s company during holiday feasts, corn shuckings, and during late night “working socials” and quilting parties. These social activities gave both bondmen and women an unexpected degree of automony.

Other experiences that fall outside the realm of work were intended to rob the enslaved of all autonomy and agency. Men and women were both subject to unwanted, coerced sexual activity. Sexual exploitation affected both bondmen and bondwomen. While it is well-known that enslaved women suffered immeasurable cruelties and gross sexual violations at the hands of slaveholders and other male agents of power within plantation communities, little thought has been given to enslaved men’s experiences with forced breeding. Bondmen were raped too. They were sometimes coerced into sexual relations with partners other than their wives or the women they courted, all for the slaveholder’s eventual increase in slave labor. That these men were denied a fundamental right to not only choose mates but to dictate the terms of their intimate relations with those mates was yet another debasing act of slavery.

Further reading:

The website produced by the National Humanities Center on daily life of slaves in the US.

Toyin Falola on Africa and the United States

By Toyin Falola

Often wrongly considered to be on the periphery of the history of the United States, Africa has played an important role politically, economically, and culturally from before American independence until the present day. The importance of slavery to early U.S. history was paramount, with lasting effects into the twentieth century and the contributions of African-Americans to life in the United States has often been celebrated, but Africa’s relevancy for the United States has been most appreciated and discussed in terms of the African roots of a broad spectrum of American culture. Following decolonization in Africa, the newly independent nations took on a new relevancy and significance for the United States, one that should be re-examined for the twenty-first century.

The entire history of the United States is deeply intertwined with the history of Africa. Slavery was practiced in America even prior to independence from Great Britain and was an integral part of its economy, particularly in the South. Agriculture depended on the labor of slaves sent from the West African coast, and was one of the key reasons the Southern states fought in the Civil War. When the fight against slavery as a moral issue gained momentum, slave owners in the South feared it would be outlawed on the national level. And it was outlawed at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, despite the Thirteenth Amendment, and the citizenship and voting rights that came with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, racial discrimination was still a critical issue in American social life. Jim Crow laws in the South kept both public and private life in the southern United States segregated until the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement was fostered in part by international developments. Following the Second World War, the Cold War and its numerous manifestations were the primary concern of the United States government. With the Civil Rights Movement, however, foreign and domestic policy concerns were directly connected. Contemporaneous with the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union was the decolonization of much of Africa and Asia. As nations became independent from their former colonial powers, most often Great Britain and France, they faced a bipolar political situation in which they had to decide whether they wanted democratic or communist governance. The United States, in an attempt to ensure democracy for these sometimes geopolitically strategic nations, offered itself up as an ally to African nations. In such a situation, treatment of African Americans was an especially ugly scar on the face of the U.S., and America’s support for newly independent African nations proved to be an important impetus in accelerating Civil Rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Decolonization in Africa affected both United States domestic policy towards Civil Rights legislation, as well as foreign policy toward Africa. Previously, American foreign policy toward Africa did not exist, and any concerns over Africa were instead directed towards its European colonizers. The combination of the Cold War and decolonization quickly made the African continent relevant to the U.S. in a new way. The overextension of the United States’ foreign policy during this period, including the rebuilding of post-War Europe, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, meant that many African leaders of newly independent nations felt they were not given the audience that they deserved from the United States government. Yet it is clear that the U.S. involved itself where it felt Cold War concerns were most relevant, as when it supported Mobutu Sese Seko, the brutal dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire.

The United States’ foreign policy changed dramatically after the end of the Cold War and its policy towards Africa in the 1990s did as well. For the last decade of the twentieth century the main agenda for the United States seemed to be to ignore African nations, even in the face of severe crisis, such as the Rwandan genocide. Yet with the end of the twentieth century also came the beginning of a huge international public health battle against HIV/AIDS. Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, has been at the forefront of this struggle, one that quickly linked U.S. interests in Africa with both positive and negative effects. Many countries, such as Uganda, have seen AIDS deaths drop significantly because of American help, particularly during the administration of President George W. Bush. However, issues surrounding aid dependency, the cultural relevancy of some aid programs, and the often times controversial role of American pharmaceutical companies in Africa have complicated this relationship.

On September 11, 2001, Africa’s relevancy to the United States changed once again with the bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists. While originally the focus of the U.S. was on the Islamic countries of the Middle East, political instability in Africa and a high percentage of Muslims in many African nations, has brought the American War on Terror to countries such as Somalia and against extremists in countries like Nigeria. It has become clear to policymakers that the political and economic stability of Africa is in fact relevant to the United States. However, the increasingly global nature of every aspect of life ensures that policies will have to broaden beyond a focus on public health and terrorism. Stability in Africa would not only help to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans, but also open opportunities for American companies to invest and create new networks in the global economy. Africa’s relevancy for the United States has changed significantly over the past 300 years; however, the relationship between the U.S. and Africa is crucial to understanding American history, and will continue to be an important element in the twenty-first century.

The United States and West Africa, edited by Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola

Jacqueline Jones on Civil War Savannah

By Jacqueline Jones

On March 21, 1861, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, delivered an extemporaneous speech to an enthusiastic crowd in Savannah, Georgia. Stephens declared that new nation had been created in order to refute the idea enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.” According to Stephens, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.” Four years later the Confederacy lay in ruins, and nearly 700,000 Americans lay dead. Three and a half million black Southerners were celebrating their release from bondage. Intending to preserve the institution of slavery, secessionists had started a war that destroyed the very way of life they had set out to defend.

Saving Savannah chronicles the wholly unanticipated consequences of the Civil War for Confederate slaveholders and the dramatic efforts of the city’s black people to live life on their own terms. In 1860 Savannah was a lively river port of 22,000 (people of color made up 40 percent of the population), processing and shipping rice, cotton, and lumber to the North and to Europe. Visitors enjoyed the balmy winters and marveled at the city’s charming, leafy squares and its elegant brick and pink-stucco mansions. Frequent, elaborate parades and processions displayed a social order based on the power of whites over blacks, rich over poor, men over women, native-born over immigrant. City fathers tried to enforce white/black, free/slave divisions, but often failed. A small number of wealthy merchants, lawyers, and bankers managed to convince a large number of white dockworkers (many of them Irish immigrants) that the Democratic Party represented the interests of all white men regardless of class or ethnic background. At the same time, the city’s commercial economy also depended on the labor of black men, enslaved and freed, who hauled staples from the railroad depot to the processing mill and then to the wharves. The fact of the matter was that black and poor-white workers shared lowly material conditions. Together, black and white men and women of the laboring classes ate, slept, drank, danced, and fought with each other in the “disorderly” parts of town and together they ran an underground economy fueled by resourceful men and women who trafficked in goods stolen from their social betters.

The black community was remarkably well-organized. Black education was illegal; but each morning some enslaved children hurried through the streets, their primers wrapped in paper and tucked away in lunch pails, on their way to schools operated secretly by black teachers. Men and women belonged to mutual-aid and burial associations, secret societies in the West African tradition. Moreover, the community openly supported their own churches where ministers preached a subversive message to their congregants each Sunday. Invoking a creed of universal Christian brotherhood, the Reverend Andrew Marshall, pastor of First African Baptist Church, demanded to know, “How many of those to whom we are subject in the flesh have recognized our common Master in Heaven, and they are our masters no longer?” Savannah whites were convinced that their systems of social control would keep all blacks, enslaved and free, in their “place”; but they were wrong.

Dock workers in Savannah, Georgia stand on tall mounds of packaged goods.

The onset of military hostilities in April 1861 caused an immediate disruption to Savannah’s prosperity and its pretenses of a well-ordered hierarchy. Trade came to an abrupt halt, and many white workers lost their jobs. Irish immigrants who had come south from New York for the busy season (November to May) packed up and went home. An influx of Confederate soldiers—up to 9,000 at one point—overtaxed the city’s natural and law-enforcement resources. Soldiers of modest backgrounds deployed up and down the Georgia coast endured sweltering summers, tormented by mosquitoes and sandflies. They resented the officers who brought their personal cooks and valets to camp and returned to Savannah periodically to take a hot bath or attend a party. Laboring men were less than enthusiastic conscripts into the Confederate army. By early 1863 the local papers were running advertisements for army deserters—listing their age, height, and distinguishing physical characteristics– where ads for fugitive slaves had been posted before the war. The antebellum class consensus among the city’s elites faltered, as even well-off Jews became the targets of anti-Semitic attacks. Even the wealthiest Savannahians were not immune to wartime dislocations: the Chicago-born Nelly Kinzie Gordon, married to a scion of one of Savannah’s most distinguished families, endured the scorn of her neighbors when they learned that several of her kinsmen, including her uncle General David Hunter, were serving in the Union army and stationed in coastal waters not far from the city. In the spring of 1864, poor white women staged a downtown bread riot; their anger and frustration highlighted the sufferings of many in the city scrounging for work—and for food.

Meanwhile, black people emerged as a subversive force within the heart of the Confederacy. Some men served as pilots, scouts and spies for Union forces, helping gunboats to navigate through the intricate lattice-work of coastal waterways. Other men, beginning in 1862, joined the Union army and navy. Some Savannah blacks fled to Federal lines, while others remained behind and made money supplying Confederate army camps. One butcher, Jackson Sheftall, profited handsomely, and in 1862 paid $2600 to free his wife Elizabeth. Labor-hungry Confederate officials charged with constructing fortifications soon found that they needed to pay cash wages to men and women of color regardless of whether they were slaves or free. Cooks and domestics worked slowly and grudgingly, if at all. Church members defied city authorities and sang praise-hymns to freedom. The institution of slavery was crumbling at lightning speed and black people themselves were hastening its demise.

Although the Confederacy died in April, 1865, the Confederate project premised on white supremacy did not. In late 1864 Union General William Tecumseh Sherman spared the city from destruction, and in an effort to restore public “order,” he even allowed the mayor and members of the city council to remain in office. Over the next few years, Union military officials, federal Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and representatives of northern missionary associations would join with white politicians, police, and employers to stall black people’s struggles for autonomy and self-determination. Most whites, whether northern or southern, believed that black people were not really working unless they worked under the supervision of a white person, in the fields or in a kitchen. These whites frowned upon freed men and women who attempted to run their own schools and farm their own land, separate from their former masters and mistresses.

Shipworkers in Savannah, Georgia. On the left, one Black woman and two Black men look toward the photographer with a white man behind them. On the right, a young Black man stands beside a white man.

After the war, black leaders emerged to offer diverse—and at times conflicting—strategies for political empowerment. Particularly outspoken individuals included James Simms, carpenter, preacher, labor organizer, and principled integrationist determined to win for blacks full citizenship rights; and Aaron A. Bradley, a militant lawyer and professional provocateur bent on championing the interests of black laborers in the cotton and rice fields. Tunis G. Campbell and Ulysses L. Houston favored self-sufficient black colonies as the way toward collective autonomy. The Reverend Garrison Frazier stressed the significance of landownership, but he also counseled accommodation to the white powers-that-be. Richard W. White, a Union army veteran inclined toward poetry, confounded whites because he looked white; he was the subject of an 1869 court case where his “race” was in dispute. City officials were trying to prevent all black men from running for office; in order to reestablish the antebellum order, they needed first to identify who was “white” and who was “black.” Yet ironically these “racial” distinctions did not always depend on the color of a person’s skin. With the exception of Frazier, all of these men occupied public office briefly, until local whites celebrated the departure of Union occupation forces by suppressing and eventually eliminating the black vote via a poll tax and election-day violence. By the early 1870s, in Savannah and along the Georgia coast, few freedmen were allowed to vote and none served on juries, the city council, or the police force. The outlines of the Confederate project would survive for the next hundred years.

Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War

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