"The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places." From the Ken Buns' Civil War documentary.
I appreciate this thought very much, because 1) is can be surprising to find some of the places the war occurred; and 2) it's about every place not named Gettysburg.
Here are two quotes, one by and one about a Virginian who remained loyal to the U.S.Army, Philip St. George Cooke (1809–1895). From the Encyclopedia of Virginia:
“When the Civil War began, Cooke was one of the Regular Army’s top cavalrymen and he chose to stay with the Union, writing, ‘I owe Virginia little; my country much.’ It was a decision that caused a long estrangement from his son, John Rogers Cooke (1833–1891), and a rift with his son-in-law, the future Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart.”
“Secession divided Cooke’s family. One son-in-law commanded a New York regiment in the Union army, but the other two served the Confederacy. Cooke’s son, John Rogers Cooke, resigned his commission in the United States Army and late in 1862 became a Confederate brigadier general. Of Cooke’s loyalty to the Union J. E. B. Stuart wrote, with mortification, ‘He will regret it but once & that will be continually.’”
My favorite is from General Grant during the Wilderness fighting…”Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what are we going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."
Well, then, Tubman was right on that point, too. Its in the details, and she seems to have been aware. Based on passes she received in July, signed by Montgomery and Gillmore, I'd say she was indeed with the regiments on Morris Island on the 18th. And, therefore, if she said she served Strong and Shaw their last meal, then she did.
I certainly don't mean to be difficult. I've come across a number of postwar accounts from people who claim to have been associated in some way with RGS only to learn that they are fabricated. I am certainly not suggesting that Tubman fabricated anything. You are the expert and I take what you say seriously. Once again, thanks for the help.
I am not as well versed in the timeline of July 18. If Shaw did not eat on the 18th, then perhaps she served the meal on the 17th. I do not know. But if she said that she served him his last meal, then that is what she assumed was his last meal before the battle. And what about Strong? Did Shaw meet with Strong in the hours before the battle?
Shaw did indeed meet with Gen. Strong before the assault, though I don't know for how long. I suspect if it did occur, it happened then as opposed to the days leading up to the 18th given the position and condition of the regiment.
I am not sure what kind of evidence you require that would have noted Tubman's presence. Given that she was an illiterate Black woman (who relied on others to tell her story), in what way would Shaw or other men have noted her presence during those particular days? She told Swift that she served a meal to General George Strong then, too. Why would she make up stuff like that? We know she served with Col. James Montgomery and the 2nd South Carolina who were also at Morris Island on the 18th. She had been sent to South Carolina by Governor John Andrew in the spring of 1862, who recommended her service as a spy and scout. Letters in Andrew's papers at Mass. Historical and other collections reveal the attention accorded to her and her interactions with Union officers.
I am just struggling to understand where, along the timeline of July 18, Shaw would have had time for a meal. I certainly don't doubt that Tubman was on Morris Island on the 18th. I appreciate your help with this.
On Lincoln’s face as he waited to get his picture taken.
“He had that serious, faraway look that with prophetic intuition saw the awful panorama of war and heard the cries of suffering and oppression.” - John Hay
Duty is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more. You should never wish to do less. - Robert E. Lee
That's a good one, so I clicked Like. But I also know a story that, for me, centrally involves that quotation, and it's a story no one should like. If interested, please have a look at this web page:
What you see is an aerial shot of Point Comfort, the 1619 starting place of British North American slavery. Decades before the Civil War, it became Fort Monroe, thanks in important part to then-Lt. Robert E. Lee leading slave laborers building the majestic moated stone citadel that the now-retired Army post contains.
Weeks after Fort Sumter in 1861, Fort Monroe became the place where slavery began to crumble. Adam Goodheart, author of "1861: The Civil War Awakening," explained in the New York Times Magazine article "How Slavery Really Ended in America." Here's the gift link:
When the Army in 2005 announced that Fort Monroe would be retired in 2011, it quickly became clear that the Commonwealth of Virginia didn't know or care what the historical treasure is that it was now going to be stewarding.
A long political fight began. Many of us wanted a sensibly established national park on Point Comfort--accommodating non-park uses but also respecting the spirit of place.
We did our duty, as the Lee quotation prescribes, and we lost. Overdevelopment-obsessed politicians marginalized us deftly by establishing a token, split, fake national monument. It's the undeveloped area upper right in the aerial photo plus the moated stone fortress--except that Virginia, not the National Park Service, actually controls the fortress.
It's a Potemkin national monument.
Scroll down the page from the aerial. Note that the page never so much as mentions the national monument or the National Park Service. At the bottom, have a look at the vision statement in white lettering. Does that sound like a fitting vision for the place that saw both the start and the end of the quarter-millennium long arc of slavery that bent toward emancipation?
Here's the point about the Lee duty quotation.
On the aerial photo, see the bridge on the right leading across the moat and into a tunnel beneath the elevated, grass-topped rampart? As you enter the fortress from that bridge and tunnel, you see a large house across the street. It's where President Lincoln stayed.
Inside that house was the office of the leader of Virginia's effort to do the wrong thing with what it was to be stewarding. And on his office wall was the quotation that I like in the abstract but that, for me, conjures a bad memory of post-Army Fort Monroe's evolution.
Though it's still evolving. And if Americans start paying attention to how slavery really ended, maybe we could still have a sensible, sense-of-place-respecting Freedom's Fortress National Park to help tell ourselves and the world the country's highly imperfect but nevertheless beautiful freedom story.
Tubman witnessed the carnage inflicted upon the 54th Massachusetts on July 19th at Fort Wagner. She later told an interviewer that she served Col. Robert Gould Shaw his last meal. She had probably become quite familiar with Shaw and his regiment since they had arrived in Beaufort six weeks earlier. Frederick Douglass’s two sons, Lewis and Charles, were members of the 54th, and Tubman knew both young men.
Tubman’s description of that fateful day is stunning and haunting:
“And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead that we reaped.”
The wounded were transported to Beaufort, where Tubman tended to them. Charles A. Smith, a member of the 54th Massachusetts, recalled meeting Tubman when she was assigned by Montgomery to provide nursing and comfort to the wounded and dying soldiers felled during the Wagner assault. Tubman later recounted the dreadful conditions and the difficult environment in which they had to care for the wounded and ill soldiers:
“I'd go to the hospital, I would, early every morning. I'd get a big chunk of ice, I would, and put it in a basin, and fill it with water; then I'd take a sponge and begin. First man I'd come to, I'd thrash away the flies, and they’d rise, they would, like bees round a hive. Then I'd begin to bathe their wounds, and by the time I'd bathed off three or four, the fire and heat would have melted the ice and made the water warm, and it would be as red as clear blood. Then I'd go and get more ice, I would, and by the time I got to the next ones, the flies would be round de first ones, black and thick as ever.”
It's such a wonderful quote. Thanks for sharing. I am not sure what to make of Tubman's claim that she served Shaw his last meal. The regiment didn't arrive on Morris Island until the afternoon of July 18 and they were constantly on the move. Does anyone else confirm her claim? Thanks.
Hildegard Hoyt Swift, who knew Tubman from Auburn, NY, claimed that Tubman told her this in correspondence with author and Tubman biographer Earl Conrad in the fall of 1939. Hoyt was born in 1890 and Tubman died in Auburn in 1913. Hoyt wrote a young adult book about Tubman (The Railroad to Freedom) in 1932, and in it she claims that Tubman served Shaw his "supper." From what I understand, Tubman had attached herself to the 54th days or even weeks before the battle. In an interview with Florida Ruffin Ridley in 1897, Tubman told the same story, though Ridley recorded "breakfast." Tubman also mentioned that during muster that morning, several women disguised as soldiers were discovered in the ranks, including one who had just given birth to twins. According to Ridley, this was a story that Tubman told to "many" other people. Tubman was not one to exaggerate (she did not need to), so either these stories are true or the reporters misreported what she actually said.
Thanks for the follow-up. Very helpful. I wish I could confirm that Tubman was with the 54th during this time, but I don't see any evidence for it, especially in the days leading up to Wagner.
"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855
I debated whether to post this, but then I remembered that the phrase "Civil War Memory"--like the life and work of its author--means what it telegraphs: We remember the Civil War because it matters.
Here's my own view of how hugely it matters: The Civil War was the Biblical-scale struggle to re-found--this time honestly and beautifully--the planet's first nation to declare itself founded on the principle of freedom and individual human dignity.
So here's my point for "What is your favorite Civil War Era quote?"
If Congresswoman Cheney were here, she would very likely cite her 2024 use of the phrase "Great Task" as she explains at https://greattask.com/ :
"Speaking at Gettysburg, Lincoln described our Great Task, 'that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.' Today, that remains our greatest and most important task."
Earlier, she used the phrase to end a two-minute 2022 video:
I hesitated at first to interpret Kevin's challenge as I've tried to do here, since it could be unsettling to some. But then I remembered why all of this matters in the first place.
I first came across this quote from Frederick Douglass in the Ken Burns' Civil War series and thought it provided a great insight into the African American experience in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War: “In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”
This is supposed to be a marching song of the 1st Colored Kansas Infantry.
"We was slave and now we're free, marching in the infantry. Lift your head and lift it high, the First Colored Kansas is marching by."
Saw this several years ago during the Civil War sesquicentennial in a document put out by the KS Historical Society. It does sound suspiciously like a modern marching song. But the Army is one of those organizations where the more things change the more they stay the same.
When I think of favorite civil war era quotes, I tend to look at the language that captures not only a description of what caused the war, but also, what describes the essence of the fundamental problems left unresolved by the formal end of the war, as well as language that portends how future events (including the decades of Jim Crow era raced-based laws and government policies) will unfold in American history.
With that in mind, I will offer a somewhat extended quote from Carl Schurz’s Report on the Condition of the South, which he wrote after his journey through a number of former Confederate states in the summer of 1865. At one point in the report, Schurz “insert(s) some remarks on the general treatment of the blacks as a class, from the whites as a class.” What follows, in my opinion, is some rather searing and brutally direct language that foretells the reasons for the violent resistance to, and the eventual demise of, Reconstruction, as well as the decades of history that followed:
“It is not on the plantations and at the hands of planters themselves that the negroes have to suffer the greatest hardships. Not only the slaveholders, but the non-slaveholding whites, who, even previous to the war, seemed to be more ardent in their pro-slavery views, are possessed by a singularly bitter and vindictive feeling against the colored race since the negro has ceased to be property. The pecuniary value which the individual negro formerly represented having disappeared, the maiming and killing of colored men seems to be looked upon by many as one of those venial offenses which must be forgiven to the outraged feelings of a wronged and robbed people. Besides, the services rendered by the negro to the national cause during the war, which makes him an object of special interest to the loyal people, make him an object of particular vindictiveness to those whose hearts were set upon the success of the rebellion.”
Several pages later, Schurz returns again to offer remarks on the general attitudes of the whites in the south as a class to the blacks as a class:
“I regret to say that… aside from the assumption that the negro will not work without physical compulsion,there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the south, which stands as no less serious an obstacle in the way of a successful solution to the problem. It is that the negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice, and sugar *for the whites* (emphasis in original), and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way. Although it is admitted that he has ceased to be the property of the master, it is not admitted that he has a right to be his own master. As Colonel Thomas, assistant commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau in Mississippi, in a letter addressed to me, very pungently expresses it: “The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and, however much they may admit that the relations of master and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, they still have an engrained feeling that blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves, they treat the colored people as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate.” An engrained feeling like this is apt to bring forth that sort of class legislation which produces laws to govern one class with no other view than to benefit another.”
It is certainly a disturbing report on the immediate postwar South that had a great deal of influence on the Radical Republicans and their commitment to standing up against President Johnson. Thanks for sharing, Peter.
I'll never stop talking about this, from Richmond's Sarah Valentine, in 1859:
"God hath in a mysterious union forever united the master and slave. Man may not, man cannot put them asunder. We shall not tremble at the thought that we enslaved our brother, but if we have neglected to observe the meaning of that providence that led us thus to act, then shall we find ourselves indeed 'unprofitable servants' to the best of Masters."
"The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places." From the Ken Buns' Civil War documentary.
I appreciate this thought very much, because 1) is can be surprising to find some of the places the war occurred; and 2) it's about every place not named Gettysburg.
Great point, Bryan.
Here are two quotes, one by and one about a Virginian who remained loyal to the U.S.Army, Philip St. George Cooke (1809–1895). From the Encyclopedia of Virginia:
“When the Civil War began, Cooke was one of the Regular Army’s top cavalrymen and he chose to stay with the Union, writing, ‘I owe Virginia little; my country much.’ It was a decision that caused a long estrangement from his son, John Rogers Cooke (1833–1891), and a rift with his son-in-law, the future Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart.”
“Secession divided Cooke’s family. One son-in-law commanded a New York regiment in the Union army, but the other two served the Confederacy. Cooke’s son, John Rogers Cooke, resigned his commission in the United States Army and late in 1862 became a Confederate brigadier general. Of Cooke’s loyalty to the Union J. E. B. Stuart wrote, with mortification, ‘He will regret it but once & that will be continually.’”
To my mind, Cooke may have sorrowed over his rebel son and son-in-law, but I do not believe he ever regretted his choice to remain loyal to the United States. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/cooke-philip-st-george-1809-1895/
My favorite is from General Grant during the Wilderness fighting…”Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what are we going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."
You can't go wrong with Grant. Thanks, Ken.
Well, then, Tubman was right on that point, too. Its in the details, and she seems to have been aware. Based on passes she received in July, signed by Montgomery and Gillmore, I'd say she was indeed with the regiments on Morris Island on the 18th. And, therefore, if she said she served Strong and Shaw their last meal, then she did.
I certainly don't mean to be difficult. I've come across a number of postwar accounts from people who claim to have been associated in some way with RGS only to learn that they are fabricated. I am certainly not suggesting that Tubman fabricated anything. You are the expert and I take what you say seriously. Once again, thanks for the help.
I am not as well versed in the timeline of July 18. If Shaw did not eat on the 18th, then perhaps she served the meal on the 17th. I do not know. But if she said that she served him his last meal, then that is what she assumed was his last meal before the battle. And what about Strong? Did Shaw meet with Strong in the hours before the battle?
Shaw did indeed meet with Gen. Strong before the assault, though I don't know for how long. I suspect if it did occur, it happened then as opposed to the days leading up to the 18th given the position and condition of the regiment.
I am not sure what kind of evidence you require that would have noted Tubman's presence. Given that she was an illiterate Black woman (who relied on others to tell her story), in what way would Shaw or other men have noted her presence during those particular days? She told Swift that she served a meal to General George Strong then, too. Why would she make up stuff like that? We know she served with Col. James Montgomery and the 2nd South Carolina who were also at Morris Island on the 18th. She had been sent to South Carolina by Governor John Andrew in the spring of 1862, who recommended her service as a spy and scout. Letters in Andrew's papers at Mass. Historical and other collections reveal the attention accorded to her and her interactions with Union officers.
I am just struggling to understand where, along the timeline of July 18, Shaw would have had time for a meal. I certainly don't doubt that Tubman was on Morris Island on the 18th. I appreciate your help with this.
On Lincoln’s face as he waited to get his picture taken.
“He had that serious, faraway look that with prophetic intuition saw the awful panorama of war and heard the cries of suffering and oppression.” - John Hay
Duty is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. You can never do more. You should never wish to do less. - Robert E. Lee
That's a good one, so I clicked Like. But I also know a story that, for me, centrally involves that quotation, and it's a story no one should like. If interested, please have a look at this web page:
https://reimagine.fortmonroe.org
What you see is an aerial shot of Point Comfort, the 1619 starting place of British North American slavery. Decades before the Civil War, it became Fort Monroe, thanks in important part to then-Lt. Robert E. Lee leading slave laborers building the majestic moated stone citadel that the now-retired Army post contains.
Weeks after Fort Sumter in 1861, Fort Monroe became the place where slavery began to crumble. Adam Goodheart, author of "1861: The Civil War Awakening," explained in the New York Times Magazine article "How Slavery Really Ended in America." Here's the gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html?ugrp=c&unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.42Wj.2ZE1w2D0zuyQ&smid=url-share
When the Army in 2005 announced that Fort Monroe would be retired in 2011, it quickly became clear that the Commonwealth of Virginia didn't know or care what the historical treasure is that it was now going to be stewarding.
A long political fight began. Many of us wanted a sensibly established national park on Point Comfort--accommodating non-park uses but also respecting the spirit of place.
We did our duty, as the Lee quotation prescribes, and we lost. Overdevelopment-obsessed politicians marginalized us deftly by establishing a token, split, fake national monument. It's the undeveloped area upper right in the aerial photo plus the moated stone fortress--except that Virginia, not the National Park Service, actually controls the fortress.
It's a Potemkin national monument.
Scroll down the page from the aerial. Note that the page never so much as mentions the national monument or the National Park Service. At the bottom, have a look at the vision statement in white lettering. Does that sound like a fitting vision for the place that saw both the start and the end of the quarter-millennium long arc of slavery that bent toward emancipation?
Here's the point about the Lee duty quotation.
On the aerial photo, see the bridge on the right leading across the moat and into a tunnel beneath the elevated, grass-topped rampart? As you enter the fortress from that bridge and tunnel, you see a large house across the street. It's where President Lincoln stayed.
Inside that house was the office of the leader of Virginia's effort to do the wrong thing with what it was to be stewarding. And on his office wall was the quotation that I like in the abstract but that, for me, conjures a bad memory of post-Army Fort Monroe's evolution.
Though it's still evolving. And if Americans start paying attention to how slavery really ended, maybe we could still have a sensible, sense-of-place-respecting Freedom's Fortress National Park to help tell ourselves and the world the country's highly imperfect but nevertheless beautiful freedom story.
Tubman witnessed the carnage inflicted upon the 54th Massachusetts on July 19th at Fort Wagner. She later told an interviewer that she served Col. Robert Gould Shaw his last meal. She had probably become quite familiar with Shaw and his regiment since they had arrived in Beaufort six weeks earlier. Frederick Douglass’s two sons, Lewis and Charles, were members of the 54th, and Tubman knew both young men.
Tubman’s description of that fateful day is stunning and haunting:
“And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead that we reaped.”
The wounded were transported to Beaufort, where Tubman tended to them. Charles A. Smith, a member of the 54th Massachusetts, recalled meeting Tubman when she was assigned by Montgomery to provide nursing and comfort to the wounded and dying soldiers felled during the Wagner assault. Tubman later recounted the dreadful conditions and the difficult environment in which they had to care for the wounded and ill soldiers:
“I'd go to the hospital, I would, early every morning. I'd get a big chunk of ice, I would, and put it in a basin, and fill it with water; then I'd take a sponge and begin. First man I'd come to, I'd thrash away the flies, and they’d rise, they would, like bees round a hive. Then I'd begin to bathe their wounds, and by the time I'd bathed off three or four, the fire and heat would have melted the ice and made the water warm, and it would be as red as clear blood. Then I'd go and get more ice, I would, and by the time I got to the next ones, the flies would be round de first ones, black and thick as ever.”
Hi Kate,
It's such a wonderful quote. Thanks for sharing. I am not sure what to make of Tubman's claim that she served Shaw his last meal. The regiment didn't arrive on Morris Island until the afternoon of July 18 and they were constantly on the move. Does anyone else confirm her claim? Thanks.
Hildegard Hoyt Swift, who knew Tubman from Auburn, NY, claimed that Tubman told her this in correspondence with author and Tubman biographer Earl Conrad in the fall of 1939. Hoyt was born in 1890 and Tubman died in Auburn in 1913. Hoyt wrote a young adult book about Tubman (The Railroad to Freedom) in 1932, and in it she claims that Tubman served Shaw his "supper." From what I understand, Tubman had attached herself to the 54th days or even weeks before the battle. In an interview with Florida Ruffin Ridley in 1897, Tubman told the same story, though Ridley recorded "breakfast." Tubman also mentioned that during muster that morning, several women disguised as soldiers were discovered in the ranks, including one who had just given birth to twins. According to Ridley, this was a story that Tubman told to "many" other people. Tubman was not one to exaggerate (she did not need to), so either these stories are true or the reporters misreported what she actually said.
Thanks for the follow-up. Very helpful. I wish I could confirm that Tubman was with the 54th during this time, but I don't see any evidence for it, especially in the days leading up to Wagner.
"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855
One of my favorites from Lincoln. Thanks for sharing, Michael.
I debated whether to post this, but then I remembered that the phrase "Civil War Memory"--like the life and work of its author--means what it telegraphs: We remember the Civil War because it matters.
Here's my own view of how hugely it matters: The Civil War was the Biblical-scale struggle to re-found--this time honestly and beautifully--the planet's first nation to declare itself founded on the principle of freedom and individual human dignity.
So here's my point for "What is your favorite Civil War Era quote?"
If Congresswoman Cheney were here, she would very likely cite her 2024 use of the phrase "Great Task" as she explains at https://greattask.com/ :
"Speaking at Gettysburg, Lincoln described our Great Task, 'that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.' Today, that remains our greatest and most important task."
Earlier, she used the phrase to end a two-minute 2022 video:
https://youtu.be/FiHEi0SsqNQ
I hesitated at first to interpret Kevin's challenge as I've tried to do here, since it could be unsettling to some. But then I remembered why all of this matters in the first place.
Hi Steven. I love how you interpreted this open thread. Thanks for sharing.
I first came across this quote from Frederick Douglass in the Ken Burns' Civil War series and thought it provided a great insight into the African American experience in the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War: “In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”
Can't go wrong with Douglass. Thanks, Robert.
I don't know if this really qualifies but. . .
This is supposed to be a marching song of the 1st Colored Kansas Infantry.
"We was slave and now we're free, marching in the infantry. Lift your head and lift it high, the First Colored Kansas is marching by."
Saw this several years ago during the Civil War sesquicentennial in a document put out by the KS Historical Society. It does sound suspiciously like a modern marching song. But the Army is one of those organizations where the more things change the more they stay the same.
I didn't know about this one. Thanks for sharing, Michael.
When I think of favorite civil war era quotes, I tend to look at the language that captures not only a description of what caused the war, but also, what describes the essence of the fundamental problems left unresolved by the formal end of the war, as well as language that portends how future events (including the decades of Jim Crow era raced-based laws and government policies) will unfold in American history.
With that in mind, I will offer a somewhat extended quote from Carl Schurz’s Report on the Condition of the South, which he wrote after his journey through a number of former Confederate states in the summer of 1865. At one point in the report, Schurz “insert(s) some remarks on the general treatment of the blacks as a class, from the whites as a class.” What follows, in my opinion, is some rather searing and brutally direct language that foretells the reasons for the violent resistance to, and the eventual demise of, Reconstruction, as well as the decades of history that followed:
“It is not on the plantations and at the hands of planters themselves that the negroes have to suffer the greatest hardships. Not only the slaveholders, but the non-slaveholding whites, who, even previous to the war, seemed to be more ardent in their pro-slavery views, are possessed by a singularly bitter and vindictive feeling against the colored race since the negro has ceased to be property. The pecuniary value which the individual negro formerly represented having disappeared, the maiming and killing of colored men seems to be looked upon by many as one of those venial offenses which must be forgiven to the outraged feelings of a wronged and robbed people. Besides, the services rendered by the negro to the national cause during the war, which makes him an object of special interest to the loyal people, make him an object of particular vindictiveness to those whose hearts were set upon the success of the rebellion.”
Several pages later, Schurz returns again to offer remarks on the general attitudes of the whites in the south as a class to the blacks as a class:
“I regret to say that… aside from the assumption that the negro will not work without physical compulsion,there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the south, which stands as no less serious an obstacle in the way of a successful solution to the problem. It is that the negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice, and sugar *for the whites* (emphasis in original), and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way. Although it is admitted that he has ceased to be the property of the master, it is not admitted that he has a right to be his own master. As Colonel Thomas, assistant commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau in Mississippi, in a letter addressed to me, very pungently expresses it: “The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and, however much they may admit that the relations of master and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, they still have an engrained feeling that blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves, they treat the colored people as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate.” An engrained feeling like this is apt to bring forth that sort of class legislation which produces laws to govern one class with no other view than to benefit another.”
It is certainly a disturbing report on the immediate postwar South that had a great deal of influence on the Radical Republicans and their commitment to standing up against President Johnson. Thanks for sharing, Peter.
I'll never stop talking about this, from Richmond's Sarah Valentine, in 1859:
"God hath in a mysterious union forever united the master and slave. Man may not, man cannot put them asunder. We shall not tremble at the thought that we enslaved our brother, but if we have neglected to observe the meaning of that providence that led us thus to act, then shall we find ourselves indeed 'unprofitable servants' to the best of Masters."
What a horrifying observation on so many levels. Thanks for sharing, Chris.
"They have seen our backs.... let's show them our faces."
Sorry, Dad, but Errol Flynn doesn't count. :-)