Category: Uncategorized (page 8 of 10)

July 21, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–Virginia

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer.

This week we feature Virginia. Next we will cover New England, and then the West.

Here are my top five places or sites this summer for an encounter with history that really means something (with a brief explanation why)–Jamestown, the Moton civil rights museum, Monticello, Chancellorsville battlefield, and the Tredegar Civil War Center and Museum:

1. Jamestown

American colonial history really begins at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, settled in 1607 (much earlier than Plymouth). Here, on the James River in the great Chesapeake Bay, English, Indian (Algonquian), and African societies encountered one another at the edge of what some are now calling “the Atlantic World.” The place is undeniably important and you can stand right in the ruins.

Go to the Island first, the original site of the fort: what is called Jamestown Rediscovery. Begin there not the Jamestown Settlement reproduction and museum nearby. The island is owned jointly by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). The history-making archaeological dig underway at the island, led by William Kelso, has discovered the original Jamestown fort, and this work is transforming the way historians think about the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. You can tour the dig as well as the new, beautifully displayed artifacts at the “Archaearium” (that’s right). The Archaearium display is a powerful look at the work of archaeologists and features the process of what happened in the dig at Jamestown Fort. Although the exhibit at the Archaearium downplays English-Indian conflict too much, and generally does not explain the Algonquian experience, children will be fascinated with the artifacts that Kelso and his team uncovered. The well, into which Jamestown’s first colonists seemed to have thrown everything, is a marvel.

The experience of standing in the original footprint of the fort along the James River is powerful. You can look right down the river and see where the signal posts were to guard the tiny colony from any approaching Spanish fleet. Because Spain’s military governor in Havana had sailed right into the Chesapeake in 1571 to search for a missing Jesuit mission and because Roman Catholic Spain was Protestant England’s enemy on the seas, the idea of a Spanish attack was not fanciful. The line of sight down the James River today from the fort is still remarkably unbroken by modern structures, so the effect of this view is well worth the trip.

The Jamestown Yorktown Foundation’s site (The Settlement) and its museum and reproduction of the fort is near Jamestown Island, and its exhibits are also worth visiting. Although many visitors think this is the original site, you should bear in mind that the entire creation is a reproduction, and if you have visited the original site first you will not be confused about this. The Settlement exhibit includes a carefully reproduced Algonquian village. Living historical actors dress in Indian clothing and use Indian implements to cook, grow corn, and treat deer hides. Although children may find the site fascinating for this reason and although the huts and equipment are reproduced faithfully (largely based on the drawings by John White from 1585 and the writings of John Smith that describe Indian towns and structures in some detail), the site is placed so close to the fort that it appears as if Indians lived next door to and in feudal vassalage to the English fort’s colonists. They did not, of course. The best part of the Settlement is the reproduction ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery.

Before any tour of Jamestown you might look online at the biggest archive of Jamestown materials, The Virtual Jamestown Project. Here you can read John Smith’s accounts, letters from the period, and important original documents.

2. The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County

This site is a historic place in the Civil Rights Movement, and the little museum is a gem. In 1951 students at the segregated, black Robert Russa Moton High School staged a strike to demand that the school board build a new black high school. The leader of the student strike, Barbara Johns, organized the student body to walk out of school down to the county building and make their demands known. The students did not go back to school for several weeks as they sat out “on strike.” The event prompted civil rights attorney Oliver Hill to visit the community, and he and the NAACP eventually took on the case. The case became one of the five included in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In reaction to the landmark Brown decision striking down segregated schools, local white leaders in Prince Edward County shut off all funding for public schools and closed the schools rather than integrate them. The schools remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964. These circumstances make the site especially important and dramatic. You can stand in the small, cramped auditorium where Barbara Johns rallied the students for the strike and see the “tar paper shacks” that the school erected because it had no funds. The effects of segregated schools become instantly clear and the improbable effects of the student strike of 1951 intensely felt.

You should contact the Moton Museum before going to make sure of its hours. You can walk from the museum on the same roads that the students took when they walked en masse in May 1951 down to the county office building. This one mile walk past the historic black church where NAACP meetings were held gives you an important view of the early beginnings of the civil rights movement. I encountered this story through the work on original films from local television stations–you can see these films too and look at the Prince Edward situation at: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv.

3. Monticello

There are few places like this in the United States. Any summer history tour should visit the historic home of Thomas Jefferson. His epigraph says it all, or at least all he wanted to say about himself: “author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Founder of the University of Virginia.” President for two terms, Secretary of State, Envoy to France, Governor of Virginia, and political party founder, Jefferson could claim much more on his tombstone. He valued liberty, religious freedom, and learning above all. Of course, he designed his home at Monticello in the middle of all of this, and it is an exquisite statement of his values and aspirations for the nation.

Monticello has firmly placed slavery in the story of Jefferson and his life. The site includes tours of the slave living and working sites, and the team of archaeologists and historians are continually uncovering new evidence about this experience. Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings is clearly explained and affirmed in the tours. Slavery, freedom, and the political basis of the American republic were at the heart of Jefferson’s life and experiences. Jefferson’s wrestling with all three are on display in the design of Monticello and the material objects found there. Jefferson had great faith in us, the generations to come after him in the American republic. And it is humbling to be reminded just how much faith he had and how much trust he placed in our democracy.

4. Chancellorsville Battlefield

No summer history tour is complete without a Civil War battlefield experience. There are, sadly, many to choose from. The war tore through the heart of America and killed hundreds of thousands. It is far too easy to forget the consequences of war and to glorify set-piece battles as if they were played like a game. But when you visit a battlefield and see the ground on which armies fought, the war and its destruction take on a new meaning.

The great battlefields include Gettysburg, Petersburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Manassas, and of course Chancellorsville. All are run by the National Park Service and have extensive, high quality historical interpretation. You will find expert park rangers and historians at all of them.

I chose Chancellorsville for several reasons. First, the battlefield landscape is rapidly changing, as housing developments, golf courses, and commercial strip malls have taken the place of farms, fields, and barns. It is increasingly difficult to see the battlefield, so go now.

Second, the battle was huge, extending over dozens of square miles and had tremendous importance in the flow of the war, giving the Confederacy vitality and energy at a key turning point. The best tour is to begin at Zoar Baptist Church where Stonewall Jackson’s troops first encountered Hooker’s Federal forces and in the first hours of the engagement changed the dynamic of the battle with an aggressive attack. Then, you can follow Jackson’s long march route around the Federal right flank and his surprise attack on the 11th Corps. You can do this in a car, but on bike is also fun. And if you take a car, stop along the way and get out to walk the route because the Wilderness effect is still there. Another good walk to do is the short distance from the Hazel Grove to the Chancellor House ruins. The high ground of the Hazel Grove and the open sight lines to the House give you a sense of the desperate stakes in the artillery battle there.

5. The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar

Tredegar Iron Works cast iron before the Civil War for railroads and during the war supplied the Confederacy with much of its cannon and other armaments and ammunition. The works were extensive and have been preserved in downtown Richmond. Few sites give a feel for the work of nineteenth-century industry and how it operated. Tredegar holds added importance because so many slaves were employed in heavy industry here. The Civil War center has been dedicated to explain the experiences of Confederate, Union, and African-American soldiers and civilians in the Civil War. Few museums attempt such an interwoven set of exhibits. And few treat the experience of the U.S. Colored Troops with any degree of completeness, but Tredegar has made that effort its main mission. Although the exhibits are useful, informative, and interesting, the grounds, buildings, and equipment at Tredegar offer visitors a window into the nineteenth century and into the machinery that was at the heart of the Civil War and its destructiveness. You will not be disappointed.

So, enjoy these great sites. Next, we take a tour of New England and then the West for the best summer sites to visit.

July 18, 2008

The Rise and Fall of Segregation

In the final months of the Democratic primary, presidential candidate Barack Obama faced an unexpected dilemma. His minister at Trinity Church in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, became the subject of intense criticism and attention, so much so that Obama felt compelled to distance himself from his remarks. Wright had preached incendiary sermons, holding America accountable for generations of racial injustice, sermons that condemned, sermons like none that many white churchgoing Americans had heard before. They were downloaded off the Internet, and the most controversial clips were played again and again on television and the radio. Wright’s sermons sparked frenzied commentary, as many Democrats were left flat footed and many Republicans pounced on the Obama candidacy as insufficiently patriotic and deeply out of touch with American values.

Historian and author Garry Wills has likened Obama’s speech in answer to these charges to the one that Abraham Lincoln made as a Republican candidate for president at the Cooper Union in which he distanced himself from John Brown and presented his moderate positions against slavery’s extension clearly, firmly, and forthrightly. In The New York Review of Books, Wills points out that Obama emphasized both the painful realities of our racial past and the positive progress the nation has made. Obama, more than any other presidential candidate in history, presents the future as open to change, able to be shaped, and this optimism resonates among many younger voters who believe that an era of racial division and discord has passed.

If slavery dominated the first 250 years of the nation’s racial history, then the rise and fall of segregation certainly characterized the next 150 years. From about 1880 to 1965 legal segregation in one form or anther prevailed in large parts of the United States, and the legacies of that system continued to have far reaching effects in American society into the 1990s. In the long context of racial division, Rev. Wright’s remarks, however challenging, cannot be surprising. We ought to ask, now more than ever, what sustained racial segregation for so long and what caused it to fall when it did.

C. Vann Woodward, the eminent Southern historian, pointed out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) that segregation emerged in Northern cities before the Civil War and that for a long period after the war in the South formal, legal segregation did not take root. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and of Harriet Jacobs described their encounters with segregated rail cars in the North. And there is considerable evidence that southern racial boundaries were shifting, unclear, and in flux in the 1870s and 1880s. No one knew then, Woodward indicated in his still landmark analysis, that segregation would become so pervasive and resistant to change. Woodward held out the hope that the South had not always been so racially divided. He provided a history for how we became who we are in a way that allowed Americans, especially Southerners, black and white, to recover an experience of racial integration.

The rise of segregation in the South came as it did in the North with the development of the most advanced technologies of the day–the railroad. Once segregation began, it was difficult to stop. Segregated cars, then depots, water fountains, bathrooms, beaches, pools, lunch counters, and voting booths. Like a cancer it metastasized, moving silently into unexpected places. By the 1950s segregation had become deeply entrenched in the South, a pattern of thinking and behavior, a wall of racial categories and divisions, a series of daily practices enacted with such consistency that few could comprehend how to challenge them. Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi gives us one of the most moving accounts of how disabling and and pervasive racial separation became in the rural South.

Historians have begun to reconsider the fall of segregation. First, historians have pointed out that resistance to segregation began much earlier than we commonly think, long before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In the thirties, indeed in the teens and twenties, black Americans protested and opposed political disenfranchisement and segregation laws. So, the movement to oppose segregation did not spring out of white Americans’ recognition after World War II of racial injustice, nor did it arrive in 1954 in the form of a Supreme Court decision as if out of the clouds. Black Americans actively and consistently opposed segregation much earlier, and the growing movement in the 1950s and 60s extended from and connected to these earlier efforts.

Second, scholars are beginning to look again at what made the broad social movement to end segregation possible, what made it take off, when so many social reform movements in American history have failed. The pillars holding up segregation were significant, based in political power, legal precedent, and social custom. The Supreme Court in its Brown decision in 1954 and again in 1955 rendered segregation in schools unconstitutional. And states in the South responded with what Virginia’s U.S. Senator Harry F. Bryd called “massive resistance.” Virginia in fact passed a series of “massive resistance laws” in a special legislative session in August 1956 designed to prevent desegregation by closing affected schools if necessary. In 1957 in Virginia J. Lindsay Almond won the governorship in a bitter campaign against Ted Dalton that hinged on the politics of who would defend segregation better. Then in 1958, Virginia plunged into “massive resistance” full force. The state closed schools in four places rather than allow them to integrate under federal court order, and in that same year, in rural Caroline County, sheriffs served a grand jury indictment against Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

But often in these years, when whites were asked questions and prompted to defend segregation, they could not precisely say why segregation should prevail. They fell back on tradition, conservative values, and twisted constitutional logic and legalisms. A good example of this befuddlement occurred when WDBJ intervew with Norview High School Students students at Norview High School were asked directly about desegregation in February 1959. When asked why he did not want black students at Norview, this student could only say “I don’t know why, I just don’t.” Yet, other students could easily see a time, probably in their lifetime, when interracial marriage would be accepted.

The forces holding up segregation were many and well-defended, and we should not underestimate them. Dozens were killed for challenging segregation and hundreds brutally beaten. Blind allegiance to a past way of doing things was powerful and provided the strongest elements of resistance to change. Despite the bluster of Virginia’s “massive resistance” and the stuffy and esoteric doctrine of “interposition” cobbled together by Richmond News Leader editor, James J. Kilpatrick, many whites, like the young man from Norview High, defended segregation for reasons that they could not fully articulate.

One of the most interesting recent perspectives on the struggle for civil rights in the South is David L. Chappell’s, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) which stresses black prophetic religion as the decisive force in what was, in effect, a cultural battle. He points out that black southern leaders were driven by a deep sense of realism, indeed a form of conservativism. They had little faith that economic progress would bring social justice. After all, segregation spread across the South at the very time of the region’s modern development and it came hand-in-hand with that era’s most modern devices.

There was no reason to believe, in other words, that time would solve the problem of racial injustice. Most of all, Chappell argues, black southerners seemed to have little of what white liberals so valued–optimism. Instead, a profound pessimism rested at the core of black prophetic views. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope, Chappell explains, was carved from a mountain of despair. The black ministers and leaders were, it turns out, not idealistic at all. They read Neibhur. They drew on a deep reservoir of the Hebrew Prophets–they could not count on the world to improve itself, nor could they simply stand by while injustice persisted.

The white liberals, from Chappell’s viewpoint, were especially ineffective, if sincere and well meaning. Liberals at the moment of their greatest cultural authority, the 1930s, seemed to have failed to achieve anything substantial for black rights. They read Gunnar Myrdal, not the Hebrew Prophets, and believed that reason somehow would eventually wear down prejudice. But it did not and it probably would not.

Black southerners had no such illusions about their odds, nor about what they were up against. And Chappell asks an interesting and surprising question: why were the forces of resistance to change so culturally weak? Neither liberals (think of Kennedy) who wanted to slow down change and contain and control it (let time run its course of progress without intervention), nor segregationists who wanted to resist greater black freedom, were able to use religion to inspire self-dedication and solidarity to their cause. Chappell considers white religion the weak link in the segregationist armor. The failure of segregationists–for all of their political and legalistic authority–to get their churches to give them active support stripped the massive resistance campaign of cultural force, of conviction, of deep social power. Search as they might, white Bible readers could find little of the sanction for segregation that their grandfathers found for slavery.

The rise of segregation was not a by-product or inevitable extension of slavery. C. Vann Woodward told us that. Instead, segregation took shape around the modern spaces and technologies in the 1880s, gained strength from the progressive reform movement as a means to “clean” up politics, and gathered cultural weight with the rise of scientific racism or eugenics. Segregation, more than anything else, became a means of economic control and oppression.

The fall of segregation was equally complex and contingent. The new medium of televised news affected the way Americans saw racial injustice. The federal government’s battle with Cold War adversaries prompted wholesale changes, such as the desegregation of the military. And the black prophetic ministers preached sermons of great power, determination, and conviction.

Black prophetic criticism of American racial segregation sparked intense reaction in the 1950s and 60s. White politicians and government leaders cast suspicion on them as un-American and Communist-influenced. They were criticized for their pessimism, for protesting during the Cold War conflict, for calling attention to America’s blemishes and flaws. The prophetic voice of protest, whether black or white, has often been marginalized in the United States, where progress and optimism have held sway in the public square. Without that voice, however, Americans may never have heard the call, much less maintained the conviction, to end segregation.

The South has changed, and so has the nation. Jim Crow segregation has been brought down, though racism obviously persists. In the March 3, 2007 special issue of The Economist which focused on the American South, there is ample evidence of a progressive South, of a true “new South,” a South to which African Americans are moving at rate that exceeds those leaving, a South where there are more black elected officials than any other region in the nation, a South where polls show widespread acceptance of interracial dating.

Some aspects of the South, however, have not changed. There is still a place for the voices of change. Most significantly from The Economist special report came the disturbing news that the South’s schools still lag far behind the rest of the nation’s in nearly every category of measurement. It is safe to say that the region’s persistent undercapitalization of education over such a long time–one of the deepest legacies of segregation that has extended through the 20th century into the 21st–has crippled the South much more severely than all destruction by Sherman’s army in the Civil War.

July 10, 2008

Race and Violence: A Conversation Comparing the Post-Civil War West and South

This podcast with Will Thomas and Andy Graybill explores a little-known episode in the Indian Wars–the Marias Massacre–and the wider issues surrounding race and violence in the West and South during Reconstruction. The U.S. Army attacked a camp of Blackfeet Indians on the Marias River in Montana in January 1870, killing over 173, including nearly 90 women and 50 children. The New York Times reacted with disgust, as did much of the Eastern press, and called the event a “slaughter.” Yet, many white Americans in the Western territories greeted the news enthusiastically. The murder of a prominent Montana trader, Malcolm Clark, in August, 1869, set these events in motion, and led to calls for the Army the hunt down Indian “marauders.” The Army, it turned out, attacked the wrong camp of Blackfeet, one afflicted with small pox and unconnected to Clark’s murder. We discuss what led to this event and explore its significance for Indian policy, the Army, and the West, and we compare the event with racial violence in the South.

Andy Graybill is the author of Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (University of Nebraska and University of Calgary Press, 2007) and is currently researching and writing a study of the Marias Massacre.

July 2, 2008

Did U.S. Railroads Own Slaves–How Many?

The short answer to this important question is that Southern railroad companies owned many slaves and built most of their lines with enslaved labor. The question, however, has not been fully researched and for years we have known little about this experience or the scale of the railroads’ involvement in slavery. We know that southern slaveholders were the principal stockholders and directors of many railroad companies and that the South moved quickly in the 1830s to build railroads. Southerners built some of the earliest and longest railroads in the nation. By the 1850s southern railroad construction was in full swing, with crews grading thousands of miles of track.

Although historians, such as Allen Trelease, Robert Starobin, and Walter Licht, have acknowledged the presence of slave labor on Southern railroads, we have little sense of its overall dimensions or its relationship to southern expansionism of the 1850s. One historian, Theodore Kornweibel, has recently begun to research in detail the southern railroads’ use of slave labor. Kornweibel found documented evidence for slave labor on over 75 % of southern railroads. He has also estimated that over 10,000 slaves a year were working on the railroads in the South between 1857 and 1865. These figures seem entirely plausible and accurate.

A careful examination of railroad annual reports from the South begins to reveal the scale and diversity of the experience. Most of the slave labor on southern railroads was hired or rented from local slaveholders to grade the tracks. Enslaved women and children were also forced to work on the railroads, running wheelbarrows, moving dirt, cooking, picking up stones, and shoveling. Some skilled slaves, especially blacksmiths, were hired as well on these construction crews.

But railroads began buying slaves outright in the mid-1850s. Only after the Civil War did these railroads have to reconcile their assets and liabilities to account for the loss of slavery. The Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad President, for example, reported after the Civil War on the railroad’s investment in slaves. “We find from the books,” he explained to the stockholders, “that there has been invested in negroes, in Georgia, the sum of $154,348 and negroes sold amounting to $32,805.25 leaving negro investment $121,542.71.” The investment, he noted, “is now, manifestly, a total loss.”

Railroads, it seems, bought slaves both in large groups and one at a time. The Richmond and Petersburg listed 114 “slaves” on its payroll of 191 employees in 1864. The railroad purchased its first slave in 1856 for $1,070, listing the expense in its annual report as “a negro man purchased.” By 1860 some railroads were buying slaves by the dozens. The Mississippi Central bought 21 slaves in one purchase and 31 in another in 1860. Its 1864/65 annual report from the company treasurer listed in the balance sheet on the liabilities side “Account and Bonds of C. S. and cost of Negroes now free $585,237.” In an action that clearly indicated the intentions of the slaveholding railroads, the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston directors authorized a large purchase of slaves in 1841. The chairman of the board, Alexander Mazyck, proposed a resolution that the Board “be authorized as soon as the means and credit of the Company will permit, to purchase for the service of the Rail-road, from fifty to sixty male Slaves between the ages of sixteen and thirty.” It was adopted without argument or amendment.

Railroads in the South owned and hired slaves on a scale we have generally forgotten. By the 1860s the Southern railroads were among the largest slaveholding and slave employing entities in the region, as a group they eclipsed the largest individual planters. Recent historical research has begun to uncover just how far the practice extended. The implications of this form of slavery, however, need further examination. We need to know more about the use of slaves by railroads, the jobs they performed, and their experiences.

June 24, 2008

How Slavery Ended in the Civil War

In the Library of Congress’ Cornelius Chase papers there are boxes of carefully collected records of the activities of slave traders out of Richmond, Virginia. Chase was a Quaker and an abolitionist, and he pulled together evidence and materials wherever he could find them of the inhumanity of slavery. There are two remarkable aspects to this collection. The first is just how quickly the slave trade modernized around telegraphs and railroads (a subject for another post).

The second is that slave traders were busy in the South right up through the end of the Civil War. Who would purchase slaves in, say, late 1864, and for what purpose? Surely, with slavery collapsing all around them, white southerners must have thought twice about holding slaves, much less buying slaves. Were they concerned about the war, about the price of slaves? What explains the actions of whites, any one of whom might have been the last person to purchase a slave in the Confederacy?

Historians from Armistead Robinson to Ira Berlin and Barbara Fields have argued that slavery broke down in the war and in many areas black self-liberation meant that slavery was collapsing from within. The focus of this argument has rightly been on the slaves themselves. So many thousands appeared at Fortress Monroe that Union General Benjamin Butler took them in as “contraband” of war in 1861, beginning a process of self-emancipation and enlistment in the Union cause that led to the formation of the U.S. Colored Troops units with over 180,000 black men in uniform by the end of the war. Despite the widespread movement of African Americans in the areas around the Union Army to free themselves, many slaves remained on plantations well out of reach of any Union forces. In Stephen Ash’s brilliant 1865: A Year in the South the Agnew plantation operated largely intact with over fifty slaves on it until early 1865. Union soldiers had yet to appear in the county. This experience was common and explains in part why Union General William Tecumseh Sherman wanted to reach the “interior” (as he called it) of the South with his March to the Sea. Similarly, even in Rockbridge County, Virginia, as late as July 1864, Confederate civilians had never seen a Union soldier. There were vast reaches of the interior South where the war was a distant, if very important, event.

And so the slave trade went on. Browning & Moore, E. H. Stokes, Betts and Gregory, Dickenson and Hill, and other slave trading partnerships carried on their business in the war. The war clearly had an effect on slaves even before the Emancipation Proclamation. In January 1862 one man wrote a Richmond, Virginia, slave trader that he wanted to sell “a very intelligent negro” about 32 years old who had been “a very useful servant.” He put the slave on the market because “I think he has ideas very prevelant [sic] in this part of the country since the war began which render it a disagreeable task to [unclear] him.”

In the same year E. H. Stokes, a busy slave trader in Richmond, defended himself to the Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, claiming he had hired a substitute and was exempt from the draft. Besides, he claimed, he ran a 2,000 acre plantation in Lunenburg County that produced surpluses for the Army and, as important, kept slaves under control in the wartime environment: “I have no overseer nor other white persons than myself to manage them [60 slaves]. With my supervision they can be made to support themselves, and raise a considerable surplus for the Army. Left to themselves, they would make nothing of consequence for themselves, nor for any body else. On the contrary they would speedily destroy all my supplies on hand.”

Even if slaves clearly understood what the war meant and that they might have the opportunity to take matters into their own hands, Confederate whites like Stokes saw little prospect for an end to slavery anytime soon. The records of these traders indicate a high volume of buyers and sellers even into 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern whites, it seems, assumed there would be some sort of compensation for any eventual plan of emancipation to work, whether war imposed or not. Such views could not have been unreasonable after years of discussion of colonization and debates over many decades about gradual emancipation. The idea of an end to slavery seemed to Southern whites an unthinkable one, except perhaps on terms they might control and determine.

Their own government, the Confederate States of America, built itself around the idea of slaves as property and it was no accident that the U.S. Congress used its Confiscation Acts to provide the opening for emancipation. In July 1864 a frantic telegram, typical of many such wartime queries, came over the wires from Augusta, Georgia, to Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate Quartermaster wanted a ruling from his superiors: if he hired “negro teamsters for the Army of Tennessee would the government be responsible to the owners if they are captured or killed.” The Inspector General rendered a brief reply: “The Govt. will be responsible.”

Slavery ended in and with the Civil War both because slaves sought their own freedom and because the Union Army demonstrated that the Confederate government could not make good on its promise to protect the property rights whites held in slavery. The formal abolition of slavery laws was carried out in the terms of reconstruction for Southern states. But slavery as an idea vested in property rights persisted among many whites and proved durable, a burning ember stamped upon but still glowing during the long Reconstruction years. The Confederate government was ultimately responsible for those rights and lost them in the war, but the expectations of many Southern whites in the war was that these rights were in a sense inalienable–that they might be taken by force but conceptually they were not lost. That slave traders continued their business unabated, that Confederates demanded compensation from their government for the loss of slaves impressed in the war, and that many of these activities persisted through 1864 and into 1865, indicate that many southern whites could not fully contemplate the end of slavey in the war.