Newark Tah Day 3

Newark TAH Day 3 Morning Historian Discussions by Professor James Oakes: 1. Nowhere to Run: The Emancipation of Louis Hughes 2. Nowhere to Run: The Emancipation of Louis Hughes Afternoon Education Workshop with Kelly Woestman 1. 2. 3. 4.

Connections to Day 2 Activities Excerpt from Autobiography of Louis Hughes The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social History a. 13th Amendment b. 14th Amendment c. 15th Amendment 5. African American Family Photograph 6. Additional Resources a. Read and ponder the Fugitive Slave Law! b. Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting i. Connections back to Frederick Douglass and Lincoln: History in a Box

Note: All PowerPoints will be posted to Slideshare.net and be publicly available after the seminar. I will share the online addresses for those. If you have questions or would like to share how you used this material in your teaching of American history, don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected]. Just put “Newark” in the subject line. 

Excerpt from Autobiography of Louis Hughes [Available from: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/hughes/hughes.html] As before stated, we arrived in Memphis on the Fourth of July, 1865. My first effort as a freeman was to get something to do to sustain myself and wife and a babe of a few months, that was born at the salt works. I succeeded in getting a room for us, and went to work the second day driving a public carriage. I made enough to keep us and pay our room rent. By our economy we managed to get on very well. I worked on, hoping to go further north, feeling somehow that it would be better for us there; when, one day I ran across a man who knew my wife's mother. He said to me: "Why, your wife's mother went back up the river to Cincinnati. I knew her well and the people to whom she belonged." This information made us eager to take steps to find her. My wife was naturally anxious to follow the clue thus obtained, in hopes of finding her mother, whom she had not seen since the separation at Memphis Page 192 years before. We, therefore, concluded to go as far as Cincinnati, at any rate, and endeavor to get some further information of mother. My wife seemed to gather new strength in learning this news of her mother, meager though it was. After a stay in Memphis of six weeks we went on to Cincinnati, hopeful of meeting some, at least, of the family that, though free, in defiance of justice, had been consigned to cruel and hopeless bondage - bondage in violation of civil as well as moral law. We felt it was almost impossible that we should see any one that we ever knew; but the man had spoken so earnestly and positively regarding my mother-in-law that we were not without hope. On arriving at Cincinnati, our first inquiry was about her, my wife giving her name and description; and, fortunately, we came upon a colored man who said he knew of a woman answering to the name and description which my wife gave of her mother, and he directed us to the house where she was stopping. When we reached the place to which we had been directed, my wife not only found her mother but one of her sisters. The meeting was a joyful one to us all. No mortal who has not experienced it can imagine the feeling of those who meet again after Page 193 long years of enforced separation and hardship and utter ignorance of one another's condition and place of habitation. …..

Full Source Information: Thirty Years a Slave. From Bondage to Freedom. The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter:

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOUIS HUGHES MILWAUKEE: SOUTH SIDE PRINTING COMPANY 1897 COPYRIGHT, 1896. Electronic Edition. Funding from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition supported the electronic publication of this title. Text scanned (OCR) by Claire LaForce Text encoded by Teresa Church and Natalia Smith First edition, 1997. ca. 400K Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997. © This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

Here’s more information on this project: Documenting the American South [Available from: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html] "North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920. * Introduction * Browse this Collection Alphabetically * Browse Images by Subject * Scholarly Bibliography of Slave and Ex-Slave Narratives compiled by William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English * Guide to Religious Content in Slave Narratives * About this Collection

The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source

[Available from: http://historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html] By David W. Blight Class of 1954 Professor of American History, Yale University, and Director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in America or England between 1760 and 1860 were windows into the nature of slavery itself; they were first-person witnesses to the will to be known and the will to write among a people so often set apart and defined out of the human family of letters. American slaves wrote their personal stories first because they were under such pressure to demonstrate their own humanity in a sea of racial prejudice. They also wrote to prove that they could be reliable truth-tellers of their own experience. And they wrote I-narratives in order to declare their own literary, psychological, and spiritual independence. The stories that slaves wrote were not only about how they became free, but were also precious acts, as the critic William Andrews has put it, of “freestorytelling.” For former slaves, some of whom were still legally fugitives when they wrote, the pen became an instrument of liberation when neither law nor society offered the same. “Why does the slave ever love?” wrote Harriet Jacobs unforgettably in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). “Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of violence?” In language at once so honest and compelling, Jacobs named one of the deepest dilemmas American slaves faced, especially women: how indeed to trust, to love children or a partner with all one’s heart when the world of endearment and family might be torn apart at almost any time by sale, brutality, or flight. With the remarkable insight of an ex-slave woman who suffered sexual abuse, separation, and a long struggle to find safety, much less love, Jacobs declared that, “when separations come by the hand of death, the pious soul can bow in resignation… But when the ruthless hand of man strikes the blow… it is hard to be submissive. I did not reason thus when I was a young girl. Youth will be youth. I loved, and I indulged the hope that the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright lining. I forgot that in the land of my birth the shadows are too dense for light to penetrate.” Jacobs tried to free herself from her past in the act of writing her autobiography. So did Frederick Douglass in the most eloquent and widely read of all the slave narratives. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), the twenty-seven-year-old, who had escaped at age twenty, left many unforgettable expressions of the meaning of slavery and freedom. In a theme found in many slave narratives, Douglass described his achievement of literacy as life-giving, as “the light [that] broke in upon me by degrees,” and that with time, “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul.” At the same time, however, Douglass admitted with stunning honesty that “the more I read the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,” considering them “a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery.” Like Jacobs, Douglass did not sugar-coat his experience;

his was not merely another success story for American readers eager for tales of triumph over adversity. He warned his reader that his literacy had liberated him to knowledge and a semblance of power, but it also worked to “torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish.” The ability to grasp and use language, Douglass lamented, “had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder on which to get out.” In their powerful metaphors of darkness and lightness and of a pit with no ladder, Jacobs and Douglass converted yearnings for love and literacy, the one a universal human craving and the other among the modern world’s most important sources of power and human self-worth, into ways of understanding slavery and freedom. Both wrote about anguish, but Jacobs, despite her pain, could no more stop loving than she could stop breathing, and no one in the nineteenth century wielded the music of words better than Douglass in describing America’s hypocrisy and its promise. To understand this paradox, to probe the slaves’ own experience in bondage and their quest for freedom, dignity, and human rights, there is no better place to begin than the slave narratives. Jacobs’s and Douglass’s autobiographies have become merely the two most famous in a genre that has received tremendous scholarly and pedagogical attention in recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century, slave narratives were not considered proper sources for the study of slavery. Ulrich B. Phillips, the first major historian of slavery to make extensive use of plantation records, deemed them inauthentic and biased. Phillips did not acknowledge that ex-slaves left any genuine testimony on what their lives were really like. His American Negro Slavery (1918), the most authoritative work on the subject as late as the 1950s, pictured slavery as a benign institution in which masters and slaves acted out natural roles as parentlike caretakers and chattel laborers who benefited from contact with a superior civilization. This white supremacist “Plantation Legend” died hard in American historiography and popular culture. But the revolution in African American history, which coincided with the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, brought a renewed attention to and use of the slave narratives. Historians began to make careful use of the narratives as sources of historical information, and most importantly, as guides to the slaves’ perspective on their own felt experience. With this rediscovered tool of research, historians and literary critics have been able to open the world the slaves themselves made and interpreted – their folk life, religious expression, modes of resistance, mores and values, and their ultimate psychological survival. What indeed was it like to be a slave? What were the slaves’ daily feelings, yearnings, crises, and hardships? Why did some special few escape bondage while most could not? Was slavery a closed world of total oppression, or a world of reciprocal giveand-take between slaves and their masters for control of production, time, and selfworth? The best of the slave narratives offer complex answers to these questions. Autobiography is self-indulgent by definition; as the reconstruction of a personal story it often masks as much as it reveals. The best autobiographies are not merely factual summaries of a person’s life; they are artistic creations, plotted narratives that serve the ends of the author and impose a story on the reader. The slave narratives were no exception to this trend. But this makes these tales no less authentic as literary works, or as sources for understanding history. The slave

narratives are both an original genre of American literature and a source for reconstructing historical experience. Ex-slaves were constantly under suspicion about the veracity of their stories and the authenticity of their writing. Some of the more famous narratives, such as Sojourner Truth’s (1837), were narrated through an amanuensis, since the author was illiterate. Many slave narratives were published with letters serving as endorsements from important white abolitionists, attesting to the authenticity of the author’s work – Lydia Maria Child for Harriet Jacobs, and William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips for Frederick Douglass. And many narratives include the phrase in their titles, “Written by Himself” or “Herself.” This necessity of endorsement and verification was more a measure of the prejudices of the white reading public than of the literary abilities of former slaves. Whatever those prejudices, however, slave narratives garnered huge audiences in antebellum America, and most slave narrators wrote their own books. Many became bestsellers, Douglass’s Narrative selling 30,000 copies within the first five years of its publication. The narratives by Charles Ball (1837); William Wells Brown (1847); Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, and James Pennington (all in 1849); Solomon Northup (1853); and Ellen and William Craft (1860) also were widely read. Many Northern whites were extremely eager to understand slavery from the slaves’ own viewpoints; they loved stories of escape, ascension tales of overcoming great obstacles to achieve hope and triumph. As America’s great political crisis over the expansion of slavery began to sever the political culture and eventually the Union itself in the 1850s, slave narratives only grew in popularity. Indeed, some scholars conclude that it was the slave narratives that forged the large reading audience that Harriet Beecher Stowe then captured in unprecedented numbers with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. One of the best ways to teach about American slavery is first, to help students understand the overall history of the African slave trade (especially valuable is Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, 1789), the emergence of slavery in colonial America (African-born Venture Smith’s story from Connecticut, 1798), its growth as both a Northern and especially a Southern institution rooted in money-crop agriculture, and eventually as the dominant economic and political force in the “slave society” that the South became by the antebellum period. With that accomplished, teachers can then assign slave narratives that give students access to the slaves’ daily lives, their psychological worlds, their treatment and experiences in the master-slave relationship, and their quest for freedom. It is in the slaves’ own voices that we might come to understand that most ubiquitous of American concepts – “freedom,” a word and an idea we best comprehend by seeing and feeling its denials. My Notes:

The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social History [Available from: http://historynow.org/12_2004/historian.html] by Eric Foner DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University

Photographic montage of lawmakers who voted aye for the Thirteenth Amendment Photographic montage of lawmakers who voted aye for the Thirteenth Amendment Lawmakers Who Voted Aye for the Thirteenth Amendment [Photographic montage] (GLC07033.03) On June 13, 1866, Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican floor leader in the House of Representatives and the nation’s most prominent Radical Republican, rose to address his Congressional colleagues on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Born during George Washington’s administration, Stevens had enjoyed a career that embodied, as much as any other person’s, the struggle against slavery and for equal rights for black Americans. In 1837, as a delegate to Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention, he had refused to sign the state’s new frame of government because it abrogated African Americans’ right to vote. During the Civil War, he was among the first to advocate the emancipation of the slaves and the enrollment of black soldiers. The most radical of the Radical Republicans, he even proposed confiscating the land of Confederate planters and distributing small farms to the former slaves. Like other Radical Republicans, Stevens believed that Reconstruction was a golden opportunity to purge the nation of the legacy of slavery and create a “perfect republic,” whose citizens enjoyed equal civil and political rights, secured by a powerful and beneficent national government. In his speech on June 13 he offered an eloquent statement of his political dream -- “that the intelligent, pure and just men of this Republic . . . would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich. . . . .” Stevens continued that the proposed amendment did not fully live up to this vision. But he offered his support. Why? “I answer, because I live among men and not among angels.” A few moments later, the Fourteenth Amendment was approved by the House. It became part of the Constitution in 1868.

The Fourteenth Amendment did not fully satisfy the Radical Republicans. It did not abolish existing state governments in the South and made no mention of the right to vote for blacks. Indeed it allowed a state to deprive black men of the suffrage, so long as it suffered the penalty of a loss of representation in Congress proportionate to the black percentage of its population. (No similar penalty applied, however, when women were denied the right to vote, a provision that led many advocates of women’s rights to oppose ratification of this amendment.) Nonetheless, the Fourteenth Amendment was the most important constitutional change in the nation’s history since the Bill of Rights. Its heart was the first section, which declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States (except Indians) to be both national and state citizens, and which prohibited the states from abridging their “privileges and immunities,” depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying them “equal protection of the laws.” In clothing with constitutional authority the principle of equality before the law regardless of race, enforced by the national government, this amendment permanently transformed the definition of American citizenship as well as relations between the federal government and the states, and between individual Americans and the nation. We live today in a legal and constitutional system shaped by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three changes that altered the Constitution during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the United States. The Fifteenth, which became part of the Constitution in 1870, prohibited the states from depriving any person of the right to vote because of race (although leaving open other forms of disenfranchisement, including sex, property ownership, literacy, and payment of a poll tax). In between came the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which gave the vote to black men in the South and launched the short-lived period of Radical Reconstruction, during which, for the first time in American history, a genuine interracial democracy flourished. “Nothing in all history,” wrote the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this . . . transformation of four million human beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot-box.” These laws and amendments reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil War era – a newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry enjoying equality before the law. These legal changes also arose from the militant demands for equal rights from the former slaves themselves. As soon as the Civil War ended, and in some places even before, blacks gathered in mass meetings, held conventions, and drafted petitions to the federal government, demanding the same civil and political rights as white Americans. Their mobilization (given moral authority by the service of 200,000 black men in the Union army and navy in the last two years of the war) helped to place the question of black citizenship on the national agenda. The Reconstruction Amendments, and especially the Fourteenth, transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct

by all levels of government. The rewriting of the Constitution promoted a sense of the document’s malleability, and suggested that the rights of individual citizens were intimately connected to federal power. The Bill of Rights had linked civil liberties and the autonomy of the states. Its language -- "Congress shall make no law" -- reflected the belief that concentrated power was a threat to freedom. Now, rather than a threat to liberty, the federal government, declared Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, had become “the custodian of freedom.” The Reconstruction Amendments assumed that rights required political power to enforce them. They not only authorized the federal government to override state actions that deprived citizens of equality, but each ended with a clause empowering Congress to "enforce" them with "appropriate legislation." Limiting the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been intrinsic to the practice of American democracy. Only in an unparalleled crisis could these limits have been superseded, even temporarily, by the vision of an egalitarian republic embracing black Americans as well as white and presided over by the federal government. Constitutional amendments are often seen as dry documents, of interest only to specialists in legal history. In fact, as the amendments of the Civil War era reveal, they can open a window onto broad issues of political and social history. The passage of these amendments reflected the immense changes American society experienced during its greatest crisis. The amendments reveal the intersection of political debates at the top of society and the struggles of African Americans to breathe substantive life into the freedom they acquired as a result of the Civil War. Their failings -- especially the fact that they failed to extend to women the same rights of citizenship afforded black men -- suggest the limits of change even at a time of revolutionary transformation. Moreover, the history of these amendments underscores that rights, even when embedded in the Constitution, are not self-enforcing, and cannot be taken for granted. Reconstruction proved fragile and short-lived. Traditional ideas of racism and localism reasserted themselves, Ku Klux Klan violence disrupted the Southern Republican party, and the North retreated from the ideal of equality. Increasingly, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to eviscerate its promise of equal citizenship. By the turn of the century, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had become dead letters throughout the South. A new racial system had been put in place, resting on the disenfranchisement of black voters, segregation in every area of life, unequal education and job opportunities, and the threat of violent retribution against those who challenged the new order. The blatant violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments occurred with the acquiescence of the entire nation. Not until the 1950s and 1960s did a mass movement of black Southerners and white supporters, coupled with a newly activist Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Reconstruction Amendments as pillars of racial justice. Today, in continuing controversies over abortion rights, affirmative action, the rights of homosexuals, and many other issues, the interpretation of these amendments, especially the Fourteenth, remains a focus of judicial decision-making and political debate. We have not yet created the "perfect republic" of which Stevens dreamed. But more Americans enjoy more rights and freedoms than ever before in our history.

My Notes:

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) [Available from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=40]

Transcript of 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) AMENDMENT XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865. Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment. Annotation from National Archives (www.archives.gov): The 13th amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States, passed the Senate on April 8, 1864, and the House on January 31, 1865. On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The necessary number of states ratified it by December 6, 1865. The 13th amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." In 1863 President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation. Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would have to be followed by a constitutional amendment in order to guarantee the abolishment of slavery. The 13th amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War before the Southern states had been restored to the Union and should have easily passed the Congress. Although the Senate passed it in April 1864, the House did not. At that point, Lincoln took an active role to ensure passage through congress. He insisted that passage of the 13th amendment be added to the Republican Party platform for the upcoming Presidential elections. His efforts met with success when the House passed the bill in January 1865 with a vote of 119–56.

With the adoption of the 13th amendment, the United States found a final constitutional solution to the issue of slavery. The 13th amendment, along with the 14th and 15th, is one of the trio of Civil War amendments that greatly expanded the civil rights of Americans.

14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868) [Available from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=43] AMENDMENT XIV Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. Section 5. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Annotation from National Archives (www.archives.gov): 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868) Following the Civil War, Congress submitted to the states three amendments as part of its Reconstruction program to guarantee equal civil and legal rights to black citizens. The major provision of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to former slaves. Another equally important provision was the statement that “nor shall any state deprive any person of live, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The right to due process of law and equal protection of the law now applied to both the Federal and state governments. On June 16, 1866, the House Joint Resolution proposing the 14th amendment to the Constitution was submitted to the states. On July 28, 1868, the 14th amendment was declared, in a certificate of the Secretary of State, ratified by the necessary 28 of the 37 States, and became part of the supreme law of the land. Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio, the primary author of the first section of the 14th amendment, intended that the amendment also nationalize the Federal Bill of Rights by making it binding upon the states. Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, introducing the amendment, specifically stated that the privileges and immunities clause would extend to the states “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments.” Historians disagree on how widely Bingham's and Howard's views were shared at the time in the Congress, or across the country in general. No one in Congress explicitly contradicted their view of the Amendment, but only a few members said anything at all about its meaning on this issue. For many years, the Supreme Court ruled that the Amendment did not extend the Bill of Rights to the states. Not only did the 14th amendment fail to extend the Bill of Rights to the states; it also failed to protect the rights of black citizens. One legacy of Reconstruction was the determined struggle of black and white citizens to make the promise of the 14th amendment a reality. Citizens petitioned and initiated court cases, Congress enacted legislation, and the executive branch attempted to enforce measures that would guard all citizens’ rights. While these citizens did not succeed in empowering the 14th amendment during the Reconstruction, they effectively articulated arguments and offered dissenting opinions that would be the basis for change in the 20th century.

15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870) [Available from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=44] Fortieth Congress of the United States of America; At the third Session, Begun and held at the city of Washington, on Monday, the seventh day of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight. A Resolution Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Resolved by the Senate and House of Respresentatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, (two-thirds of both Houses concurring) that the following article be proposed to the legislature of the several States as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States which, when ratified by threefourths of said legislatures shall be valid as part of the Constitution, namely: Article XV. Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude— Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Annotation from National Archives (www.archives.gov): 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870) To former abolitionists and to the Radical Republicans in Congress who fashioned Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th amendment, enacted in 1870, appeared to signify the fulfillment of all promises to African Americans. Set free by the 13th amendment, with citizenship guaranteed by the 14th amendment, black males were given the vote by the 15th amendment. From that point on, the freedmen were generally expected to fend for themselves. In retrospect, it can be seen that the 15th amendment was in reality only the beginning of a struggle for equality that would continue for more than a century before African Americans could begin to participate fully in American public and civic life. African Americans exercised the franchise and held office in many Southern states through the 1880s, but in the early 1890s, steps were taken to ensure subsequent “white supremacy.” Literacy tests for the vote, “grandfather clauses” excluding from the franchise all whose ancestors had not voted in the 1860s, and other devices to disenfranchise African Americans were written into the constitutions of former Confederate states. Social and economic segregation were added to black America’s loss of political power. In 1896 the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson legalized “separate but equal” facilities for the races. For more than 50 years, the overwhelming majority of African American citizens were reduced to second-class citizenship under the “Jim Crow” segregation system. During that time, African Americans sought to secure their rights and improve their position through organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League and through the individual efforts of reformers like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and A. Philip Randolph. The most direct attack on the problem of African American disfranchisement came in 1965. Prompted by reports of continuing discriminatory voting practices in many Southern states, President Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a southerner, urged Congress on March 15, 1965, to pass legislation “which will make it impossible to thwart the 15th amendment.” He reminded Congress that “we cannot have government for all the people until we first make certain it is government of and by all the people.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965, extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, abolished all remaining deterrents to exercising the franchise and authorized Federal supervision of voter registration where necessary. (Information excerpted from Milestone Documents [Washington, DC: The National Archives and Records Administration, 1995] pp. 61-63.)

African American Family

What are some of your initial thoughts about this photograph from the Gilder Lehrman Collection?

What additional information would be helpful in further analyzing this picture?

What background information would you give your students before you asked them to analyze this picture?

Here’s more information about the photograph on the previous page: Portrait of an African-American family in Calhoun, Alabama, cyanotype by Richard Riley, late nineteenth century. The Gilder Lehrman Collection. [http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/online/wilberforce/slide12.html] This photograph depicts a free black family living in the post-Civil War American South. The dignity and pride in their bearing suggest how consciously they were throwing off the legacy of slavery for themselves and their children.

Note that the following sources connect us back to Frederick Douglass and Day 1.

Additional Resources: Note that the following sources connect us back to Frederick Douglass and Day 1.

Read and ponder the Fugitive Slave Law! [1850] [Available from: http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/display_results.php?id=GLC01862]

Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC01862 Title: Read and ponder the Fugitive Slave Law! Author: unknown Year: 1850 Place: Boston, Massachusetts Type of document: Broadside

Quotation: "Read and Ponder the Fugitive Slave Law!" Description: A large anti-Whig broadside, attacking Samuel A. Elliott of Boston, and re-printing the Fugitive Slave law. Emphasis added with capital letters in some sections. Declares that the law is against the Constitution, habeas corpus and Christianity. States of the law, "...which tramples on the Constitution, by its denial of the sacred rights of Trial by Jury, Habeas Corpus, and Appeal..." Appeals to the public, "Freemen of Massachusetts, Remember, that Samuel A. Elliott of Boston, voted for this law, that Millard Fillmore, our Whig President approved it..." Three columns, large banner headline, text framed in black rules. Backed on linen. Printed at the Spy Office, with black borders. Full Text: Read and Ponder the Fugitive Slave Law! Which disregards all the ordinary securities of PERSONAL LIBERTY, which tramples on the Constitution, by its denial of the sacred rights of Trial by Jury, Habeas Corpus, and Appeal, and which enacts, that the Cardinal Virtues of Christianity shall be considered, in the eye of the law, as CRIMES, punishable with the severest penalties,--Fines and Imprisonment.... Sec. 5 And be it further enacted, that it shall be the duty of all marshals and deputy marshals to obey and execute all warrants and precepts issued under the provisions of this act, when to them directed; and should any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to receive such warrant...he shall...be fined in the sum of $1,000... and ALL GOOD CITIZENS are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law whenever their services may be required Sec. 6. And be it further enacted. That when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United States has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory...the person or persons to whom such service or labor may be due...may pursue and reclaim such fugitive person, either by procuring a warrant from some one of the courts, judges or commissioners...or by seizing and arresting such fugitive, where the same can be done without process, and by taking...such person...before such court, judge or commissioner, whose duty it shall be to hear and determine the case of such claimant in a SUMMARY MANNER; and upon satisfactory proof being made, by disposition or affidavit, in writing, to be taken and certified by such court...[A] certificate of such magistracy...shall be SUFFICIENT TO ESTABLISH THE COMPETENCY OF THE PROOF, AND WITH PROOF, ALSO BY AFFIDAVIT, of the identity of the person whose service or labor is claimed to be due.... IN NO TRIAL OR HEARING UNDER THIS ACT SHALL THE TESTIMONY OF SUCH ALLEGED FUGITIVE BE ADMITTED IN EVIDENCE.... Sec. 7. And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder or prevent such claimant, his agent, or attorney, or any person or persons lawfully assisting him...or shall aid, abet, or assist such a person so owing service or labor...directly or indirectly to escape...or SHALL HARBOR or CONCEAL such fugitive...shall, for either of said offences be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months. Annotation:

The most divisive element in the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Law, which permitted any African American to be seized and sent south solely on the affidavit of anyone claiming to be his or her owner. As a result, free blacks were in danger of being placed in slavery. The law also stripped runaway slaves of the right to a jury trial and the right to testify in their own defense. The law further stipulated that accused runaways stand trial in front of special commissioners, not a judge or a jury, and that the commissioners be paid $10 if a fugitive was returned to slavery but only $5 if the fugitive was freed--a provision that many Northerners regarded as a bribe to ensure that any black accused of being a runaway would be found guilty (the provision was justified by the supposed costs involved). And finally, the law required all U.S. citizens to assist in the capture of escapees.

Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting [1851] Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC04717.16 Title: Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting. At a large meeting of persons from various parts of the State of New York, held in the City of Syracuse... Author: Smith, Gerrit (1797-1874) Year: 1851/01/09 Place: Syracuse, New York Type of document: Printed document Quotation: "We pour out upon the Fugitive Slave Law the fullest measure of our contempt and hate" Description: Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting. At a large meeting of persons from various parts of the State of New York, held in the City of Syracuse,January 9th 1851, and of which Frederick Douglass was President, the following resolutions and address were unanimously adopted. The address is the same, and, with an inconsiderable exception, the Resolutions are the same, as those, which were reported by Gerrit Smith to the State Convention held in said City, January 7th, 8th, 9th, 1851. Full Text: 1st. Resolved, that we pour out upon the Fugitive Slave Law the fullest measure of our contempt and hate and execration; and pledge ourselves to resist it actively, as well as passively, and by all such means, as shall, in our esteem, promise the most effectual resistance. 2d. Resolved, that they who consent to be the agents of Southern oppressors for executing this law, whether as Commissioners or Marshals, or in any other capacity, are to be regarded as kidnappers and land-pirates. 3d. Resolved, that it is our duty to peril life, liberty, and property, in behalf of the fugitive slave, to as great an extent as we would peril them in behalf of ourselves. 4th. Resolved, that obviously and grossly Unconstitutional as is this Law, nevertheless this is not the chief reason why we condemn and defy it:--for equally, whether they are Constitutional or Unconstitutional, we do condemn and defy all laws, which insult Him, who is above all Constitutions, and which, aiming not to protect, but to destroy, rights, are, therefore to be regarded as no laws. 5th. Resolved, that horrible as is this law, we must bear in mind, that it is but a perfectly natural and not at all to be wondered at exaction of slavery; and that, hence our first and great work is to get rid, not of the law, but of slavery--as it would be our first and great work to pursue and kill the mad-dog, instead of pausing, until we had effected the cure of one of his bites.

6th. Resolved, that between corrupt politics on the one hand and corrupt churches on the other--between the politicians and parties, who enacted this Law, and the priests who are preaching its enforcement--there is no hope for this Nation, unless it shall very speedily be brought to prefer honesty to knavery, both in its religious teachers and civil rulers. 7th. Resolved, that, were the current religion of this country to be exchanged for rank infidelity, the abolition of slavery would be comparatively easy. 8th. Resolved, that when the immortal writer of the Declaration of Independence said: "If we do not liberate the enslaved by that generous energy of our own minds, they must, they will, be liberated by the awful process" of St. Domingo Emancipation, he uttered words, which there is but too much reason to believe are rapidly approaching their fulfillment. 9th. Resolved, that inasmuch as sound principles and sound teachers are as indispensable in our Institutions of Learning, as in our pulpits, we rejoice to know, that, under the progress of antislavery sentiment, there are already several Colleges in our country, which are opened to colored students; and that there are two of these in which colored students find themselves emphatically at home. There are Oberlin College in Ohio, and Central College in New York--in the latter of which there is a colored Professor. 10th. Resolved, that, inasmuch as every National party in this Nation must, because it is a National party, spare, if not indeed, positively favor, slavery, it follows, that whoever belongs to the Whig or Democratic party, or to any ecclesiastical National party, does, however unwillingly or unwittingly, give his influence and support to slavery. 11th. Resolved, that the time has come, and had long ago come, for gathering a Northern political party, which shall be both determined and able to carry out the principles of the Federal Constitution and the principles of humanity and religion, in overthrowing the base and bloody system of American slavery, and in establishing a righteous Civil Government.... Annotation: Smith, a politician from New York, served as a U.S. Representative from 1853-1854. He was a noted philanthropist and social reformer active in anti-slavery campaigns and women's rights.