Abolition

How Did the Speeches of Daniel Webster Inspire the North to Fight To Preserve the Union?
Civil War and Reconstruction

How Did the Speeches of Daniel Webster Inspire the North to Fight To Preserve the Union?

Bruce Strom 0

Webster knew that “the question of paramount importance in our affairs is likely to be, for some time to come, the Preservation of the Union, or its Dissolution; and now power can decide this question, but that of the People themselves.”
South Carolina not only set bad precedent, but she had also enacted a state law that stated that state militia could resist federal forces sent in to enforce the laws passed by Congress under the Constitution. Thus, you could argue that the Civil War did not start in 1864, that it really started in the 1830’s. […]

Eliza Harris and Her Infant Escapes Slavery Over the Ice
Civil War Memories

Underground Railroad: Eliza and Her Infant Escape Slavery Over the Ice Before the Civil War

Bruce Strom 0

The slave catchers were searching for her. “In the evening, she discovered pursuers nearing the house, and with desperate courage, she determined to cross the river, or perish in the attempt. Clasping her child in her arms, she darted out the back door and ran toward the river, followed by her pursuers, who had just dismounted from their horses when they caught sight of her.”
“No fear or thought of personal danger entered Eliza’s mind, for she felt that she had rather be drowned than to be captured and separated from her child. Clasping her babe to her bosom with her left arm, she sprang on to the first cake of ice, then from that to another and another. Sometimes the cake she was on would sink beneath her weight, then she would slide her child onto the next cake, pull herself on with her hands, and so continue her hazardous journey. She became wet to the waist with ice water and her hands were numbed with cold, but as she made her way from one cake to ice to another, she felt that surely the Lord was preserving and upholding her, and that nothing could harm her.” […]

Underground Railroad: Harriet Jacobs, the Slave Girl Who Escapes Slavery Before the Civil War
Civil War Memories

Underground Railroad: Harriet Jacobs, the Slave Girl Who Escapes Slavery Before the Civil War

Bruce Strom 1

In her 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs recounts her experiences, spreading the awful truth about slavery. “I can testify,” she writes, “from my own experiences and observations, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.” […]

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South
Civil Rights

Benefits and Detriments of Slavery in the Deep South

Bruce Strom 0

There was one very real benefit of slavery to the enslaved in the Deep South. Before the Civil War, slaves were far less likely to be lynched or killed than were freed slaves after the war. The reason for this was simple: it is illegal to damage someone’s property, and slaves were extremely valuable. Slaves were the most valuable asset class in America before the Civil War. Before the Civil War, a slave was worth as much as an economy car is worth today. […]

Summary Three Generations Black Leaders
Civil Rights

Three Generations of Leading Black Leaders: Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB Du Bois

Bruce Strom 4

Who do we consider to be the leaders of the first three generations of black leaders? Frederick Douglass, first generation black leader, abolitionist writer and orator, who was born a slave and escaped to freedom; Booker T Washington, educator, second generation black leader, who was born a slave, was freed when the Civil War ended; and WEB Du Bois, third generation black leader, civil rights activist, author and scholar, who was born free in Massachusetts after the Civil War, chose to attend college in the Deep South, and was co-founder of the NAACP. […]

Civil Rights

WEB Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, and Sharecropping

Bruce Strom 0

How does WEB Dubois start his essay on the life of Alexander Crummell? By how he confronted the temptations and doubts that faced all talented black men in a time when whites could not comprehend that a black man could actually be a true intellectual, that he could think independently of his white overlords. WEB starts his essay, “This is the history of a human heart, the tale of a black boy who” “struggled with life that he might know the world and know himself,” fulfilling the instructions written on the Temple of Delphi so many millennia ago. […]

Civil Rights

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, After Slavery as an Abolitionist

Bruce Strom 5

Frederick Douglass remembers, “In the South I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property,” as chattel, like talking livestock. “In the Northern states, a fugitive slave was hunted like a felon, to be hurled into the terrible jaws of slavery, doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color,” “shut out from cabins on steamboats, refused admission to respectable hotels, caricatured, scorned, scoffed, mocked and maltreated by anyone with a white skin.” […]

Civil Rights

Frederick Douglass Tells Us About His Life as a Slave in his Autobiography

Bruce Strom 9

Frederick Douglas was born a slave in Maryland in the late 1820’s, he can only guess how old he is, like most slaves he did not know when he was born. He escaped slavery on his second attempt to run away to the Northern states, and not only did he teach himself how to read, he became a spell-binding orator and abolitionist, agitating for the end of slavery, and becoming a best-selling author, publishing three autobiographies, other books and a newspaper. Some bigots claimed it was impossible for an ex-slave to be able to write that well, though they could not argue that it was not him making his speeches. […]

Civil Rights

American Slavery and the Abolitionists: Yale Lecture Notes

Bruce Strom 13

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he remarked, So you are the little lady whose little book started the Civil War.  This book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was the best-selling book by far in 1852, eventually selling over a million copies, galvanizing Northern opinion about the horrors of slavery.  This romantic novel from the point of view of ordinary slaves, and it really promoted that the lives of even slaves should have dignity, they were not just mere property like cows or horses, that slaves could the heroes and heroines of a tragic novel allowing the reader to imagine the horrors of a life lived bound in chains, of souls bound in cruel inequities, of human beings bound in a life of unending cruelties.[2]

The antithesis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs Sanford in 1857.  Dred Scott was a slave who sued his master for his freedom as his master moved him and his family between slave states and free states that banned slavery under the Missouri Compromise law.  The Southern Chief Justice Roger Taney held that no negro had ever enjoyed the rights of a citizen under the Constitution.  Negroes were denied the dignity of personhood, negroes were always property and would also remain property, negroes were declared by the Supreme Court decision to be “so far inferior that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”  This decision, which denied that the Constitution gave Congress the right to bar slavery in the territories, enraged public opinion in the North, bolstering the popularity of Lincoln and the Republican Party […]