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Civil War I: Slaves
In his 1899 memoir, The End of an Era, former slaveowner John Sergeant Wise expressed the astonishment shared, perhaps, by many Confederates about their slaves' loyalty:
Were not the negroes perfectly content and happy? Had I not often talked to them on the subject? Had not every one of them told me repeatedly that they loved "old Marster" better than anybody in the world, and would not have freedom if he offered it to them? Of course they had,—many and many a time. And that settled it.
Yet those slaves abandoned the owners by the thousands from the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, heading north or wherever "behind Union lines" took them.1 Many others could not leave or would not leave without their families. As we know from the WPA narratives of the 1930s excerpted here, many enslaved people did not know a war was going on or had been convinced by their masters that the Yankees were their enemies as well as the masters'. Yet by the time "the Yankees came through," most slaves knew whose side they were on.
Here we read the war memories of former slaves—a selection from the WPA narratives and then two chapters from the 1897 narrative, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, by Louis Hughes, who escaped behind Union lines late in the war as the Yankees arrived in Mississippi. We recommend that you view the photographs of enslaved African Americans, most taken by Federal photographers accompanying Union troops, before you read the text selections. (xx pages, including the photographs.)
Discussion questions
- In what ways did the Civil War affect the lives of enslaved people in the South?
- How did they cope with the privations and anxieties of the war?
- How did they deal with their masters' privations and anxieties?
- For those slaves whose masters left the plantation to join the Confederate army, how did they deal with the change in power structure on the plantation?
- What common experiences and attitudes do they relate about the final months of the war in their regions?
- In the WPA narratives, consider whether each narrator lives in the same or a different state than the one he/she lived in as a slave (indicated in the excerpts). How does this factor influence their accounts of their war experiences?
- What do you learn from the photographs? When are the enslaved people aware of the camera? How do they convey this awareness?
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Framing Questions
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How did enslaved African Americans construct communities over time? What were their principal characteristics? |
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What obstacles did slaves confront in constructing communities? |
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How did white Americans respond to the collective behavior of African Americans? |
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How was autonomy exercised through community by antebellum African Americans? |
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Printing
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Supplemental Sites
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| *PDF file - You will need software on your computer that allows you to read and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have this software, you may download it FREE from Adobe's Web site. |
Images:
- Photograph labelled "Cumberland Landing, Va. Group of 'contrabands' at Foller's house," photograph by James F. Gibson. 14 May 1862 (detail).
- Photograph labelled "Port Royal Island, S.C. African Americans preparing cotton for the gin on Smith's plantation," photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1862 (detail).
- Photograph labelled "Rappahannock River, Va. Fugitive African Americans fording the Rappahannock," photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, August 1862 (detail). [LOC note: Photograph from the main eastern theater of the war, Second Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, July-August 1862].
All photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Civil War Glass Negative Collection.
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1 Colin A. Palmer, Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, Vol. I: 1619-1863 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group, 2002), p. 294.
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