Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860
Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860

Author: Tommy Bogger

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780813916903

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Very few studies of free blacks have attempted to interpret the actions and events affecting them from their own perspectives. At the same time. the search for understanding the antebellum black experience in the South usually has centered on slaves. In Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860, Tommy L. Bogger portrays lives somewhere between slavery and freedom. A free black community of skilled artisans and semi-skilled laborers emerged in Norfolk around 1800. Some free blacks earned the respect of leading white businessmen, and many enjoyed easy access to credit and steady employment. They showed no hesitation in suing recalcitrant debtors -- black or white -- and until 1805 they could count on the cooperation of court officials in helping them to collect. But from then on. free blacks experienced a steady decline in status that continued throughout the antebellum period. Legal restraints were placed on them at the same time that Norfolk's economy stagnated. and white immigrants arriving in the 1830s entered fields once monopolized by blacks. By the 1850s the free black community was sunk in hopelessness and despair. Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860 discusses the active roles that blacks played in creating their community, contradicting prevalent images of free blacks at the mercy of whites. While previous studies of Virginia's free blacks have focused on Richmond or Petersburg, developments in Norfolk's free black community also merit analysis. Norfolk also offers the advantage of a population large enough to provide a reliable data base yet small enough to preserve the stories of individual lives. Those interested in African-American history, Virginia history, orthe South in general will find this book a valuable new resource.

Free Blacks of Lynchburg, Virginia, 1805-1865
Free Blacks of Lynchburg, Virginia, 1805-1865

Author: Ted Delaney

Publisher: Old City Cemetery

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781890306274

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The defining feature of this work is the collection of official registrations, records of emancipations, orders of apprenticeship, tax lists and other local court records of free people of color residing in Lynchburg from 1805 through the Civil War. A remarkable primary source for genealogical and historical research. -- Publisher.

Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South
Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South

Author: Diane Miller Sommerville

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0807876259

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Challenging notions of race and sexuality presumed to have originated and flourished in the slave South, Diane Miller Sommerville traces the evolution of white southerners' fears of black rape by examining actual cases of black-on-white rape throughout the nineteenth century. Sommerville demonstrates that despite draconian statutes, accused black rapists frequently avoided execution or castration, largely due to intervention by members of the white community. This leniency belies claims that antebellum white southerners were overcome with anxiety about black rape. In fact, Sommerville argues, there was great fluidity across racial and sexual lines as well as a greater tolerance among whites for intimacy between black males and white females. According to Sommerville, pervasive misogyny fused with class prejudices to shape white responses to accusations of black rape even during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, a testament to the staying power of ideas about poor women's innate depravity. Based predominantly on court records and supporting legal documentation, Sommerville's examination forces a reassessment of long-held assumptions about the South and race relations as she remaps the social and racial terrain on which southerners--black and white, rich and poor--related to one another over the long nineteenth century.

The American South
The American South

Author: William J. Cooper Jr.

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2008-10-23

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0742563995

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In The American South: A History, Fourth Edition, William J. Cooper, Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill demonstrate their belief that it is impossible to divorce the history of the South from the history of the United States. The authors' analysis underscores the complex interaction between the South as a distinct region and the South as an inescapable part of America. Cooper and Terrill show how the resulting tension has often propelled section and nation toward collision. In supporting their thesis, the authors draw on the tremendous amount of profoundly new scholarship in Southern history. Each volume includes a substantial biographical essay—completely updated for this edition—which provides the reader with a guide to literature on the history of the South. Coverage now includes the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, up-to-date analysis of the persistent racial divisions in the region, and the South's unanticipated role in the 2008 presidential primaries.

The Age of Lincoln
The Age of Lincoln

Author: Orville Vernon Burton

Publisher: Hill and Wang

Published: 2008-07-08

Total Pages: 661

ISBN-13: 1429939559

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Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations. America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president's authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country. Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.

Appealing for Liberty
Appealing for Liberty

Author: Loren Schweninger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-03

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0190664304

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Dred Scott and his landmark Supreme Court case are ingrained in the national memory, but he was just one of multitudes who appealed for their freedom in courtrooms across the country. Appealing for Liberty is the most comprehensive study to give voice to these African Americans, drawing from more than 2,000 suits and from the testimony of more than 4,000 plaintiffs from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War. Through the petitions, evidence, and testimony introduced in these court proceedings, the lives of the enslaved come sharply and poignantly into focus, as do many other aspects of southern society such as the efforts to preserve and re-unite black families. This book depicts in graphic terms, the pain, suffering, fears, and trepidations of the plaintiffs while discussing the legal system—lawyers, judges, juries, and testimony—that made judgments on their "causes," as the suits were often called. Arguments for freedom were diverse: slaves brought suits claiming they had been freed in wills and deeds, were born of free mothers, were descendants of free white women or Indian women; they charged that they were illegally imported to some states or were residents of the free states and territories. Those who testified on their behalf, usually against leaders of their communities, were generally white. So too were the lawyers who took these cases, many of them men of prominence, such as Francis Scott Key. More often than not, these men were slave owners themselves-- complicating our understanding of race relations in the antebellum period. A majority of the cases examined here were not appealed, nor did they create important judicial precedent. Indeed, most of the cases ended at the county, circuit, or district court level of various southern states. Yet the narratives of both those who gained their freedom and those who failed to do so, and the issues their suits raised, shed a bold and timely light on the history of race and liberty in the "land of the free."

Confronting Black Jacobins
Confronting Black Jacobins

Author: Gerald Horne

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1583675620

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The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers—France, Great Britain, and Spain—suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti’s mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne’s path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola. Giving particular attention to the responses of African Americans, Horne surveys the reaction in the United States to the revolutionary process in the nation that became Haiti, the splitting of the island in 1844, which led to the formation of the Dominican Republic, and the failed attempt by the United States to annex both in the 1870s. Drawing upon a rich collection of archival and other primary source materials, Horne deftly weaves together a disparate array of voices—world leaders and diplomats, slaveholders, white abolitionists, and the freedom fighters he terms Black Jacobins. Horne at once illuminates the tangled conflicts of the colonial powers, the commercial interests and imperial ambitions of U.S. elites, and the brutality and tenacity of the American slaveholding class, while never losing sight of the freedom struggles of Africans both on the island and on the mainland, which sought the fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of 18th century republicanism.

Portsmouth Virginia
Portsmouth Virginia

Author: Cassandra Newby-Alexander

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738515816

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African Americans in Portsmouth built a strong, insulated community because they were cognizant of the need to look inward. Whether assisting the pre-Civil War escapes through the Underground Railroad, forming banks, publishing a newspaper, or providing recreational facilities, Portsmouth's African Americans created one of the most stable middle-class black communities in America. Early 20th-century leaders such as Dr. William Reid, Nancy T. Wheeler, and the Reverend Harvey N. Johnson Sr. were civic models and guiding forces for a community emerging from the ravages of slavery, and enduring the hardships of segregation. Black America: Portsmouth, Virginia captures the world of an ever-changing community and a people who persevered, no matter the odds.

Israel on the Appomattox
Israel on the Appomattox

Author: Melvin Patrick Ely

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 658

ISBN-13: 0307773426

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WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZEA New York Times Book Review and Atlantic Monthly Editors' ChoiceThomas Jefferson denied that whites and freed blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife. Slavery cast its grim shadow, even over the lives of the free, yet on Israel Hill we discover a moving story of hardship and hope that defies our expectations of the Old South.