Black History: History in an Hour. Rupert Colley

that may have been retired were made to work longer.

      In 1822, an organization called the American Colonization Society founded a new colony, Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. Colonized by freed American slaves and declared independent in 1847, Liberia means liberty, and the country’s motto is ‘The love of liberty brought us here’. The flag is a one-star variation on the stars and stripes and the capital, Monrovia, was named after James Monroe, president of the United States between 1817 and 1825. Liberia, it was felt, offered a safer option for the freed slave than remaining in America. But for many born in the US, they preferred to run the gauntlet of discrimination and remain in the nation of their birth.

      North and South:

       ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong’

      Only one in four Southern families owned a slave, but the whole economy and society was based on slavery and the fear of insurrection was constant. There are on record over 250 known incidences of revolt. Denmark Vesey, a freed slave, spent years planning a huge insurrection and had attracted almost 5,000 African-Americans to his cause. But in 1822, Vesey was found out, captured and executed, along with his ringleaders.

      In 1831 in Virginia, Nat Turner, a slave who had learnt to read and write and who had turned to Christianity, believed that God had ordered him to slay his enemies. A solar eclipse in mid-August 1831 convinced Turner of the necessity and timing and on 21 August he killed his master and his master’s family. Leading a gang of trusted slaves, Turner led an orgy of killing that lasted twenty-four hours before troops took control. In retaliation, local whites killed over 100 slaves at random. Turner, having eluded capture until 30 October, was tried, convicted and executed. Laws were subsequently passed to restrict the education of slaves.

      Harriet Tubman (far left) with rescued slaves, c.1885

      Many escaped slaves fled to the North and sometimes on to Canada via an escape route known as the Underground Railroad. The railroad consisted of a series of safe houses, transport facilities and guides to help the runaways escape. Between 1830 and 1860 the railroad helped over 3,000 slaves to freedom and safety. Its most famous organizer, Harriet Tubman (pictured above with some rescued slaves), went on to become a Union spy during the civil war.

      The population of the US was growing at an incredible rate: from 7.2 million in 1810 to almost 10 million a decade later. By 1860 this had increased threefold to over 30 million, and New York had become the third largest city in the world (behind London and Paris). The increasing birth rate contributed, but it was mainly immigration, particularly from Ireland and Germany, people attracted by the vast tracts of land available in the west, that caused the dramatic rise. Conflicts arose with the Native Indians, but the expansion westwards was inevitable.

      As the white population expanded, newly settled areas, or territories, asked to be admitted into the Union. To maintain the balance between slave states and free states, territories were admitted two at a time. By 1819, the United States was comprised of twenty-two states, eleven free states from the North, and eleven slave states from the South.

      This informal arrangement became policy following the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1820, Missouri petitioned to be admitted into the Union as a slave state, despite its proximity to free states. Senator Henry Clay suggested allowing Missouri in as a slave state but to maintain the 50/50 ratio, to admit Maine as a free state. More significantly, the Compromise stated that, with the exception of Missouri, no new state containing slavery would be allowed above the line of 36 degrees 30 minutes.

      Whilst the Southern states tried to paint a paternalistic and benevolent picture of the relationship between master and slave, the anti-slavery movement of the North, inspired by Britain’s lead in 1834, continued to press for total abolition. In 1847 Frederick Douglass, a slave who had escaped and won his freedom, began the weekly abolitionist newspaper, the North Star. In May 1851, Sojourner Truth, a freed slave, delivered her influential ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in which she compared herself to white women, who were accorded respect, and asked why the same was not the case for black women. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published the influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin which portrayed, in dramatic fashion, the life of the slave in the American South.

      But in 1857, the abolitionist cause was dealt a severe blow following the verdict of the Dred Scott case. Scott, a slave from Missouri, tried to sue his owner on the grounds that he had lived with him in Illinois, a state where slavery had been outlawed. The US Supreme Court ruled that blacks were not eligible as US citizens therefore had no recourse to the US legal system. Furthermore, a slave did not become free merely by entering a free state. A Negro, in short, had no more legal rights than an ass.

      In 1860, Abraham Lincoln (pictured below) was elected the sixteenth US president, representing the newly formed Republican Party, a party established by the anti-slavery lobby. Lincoln took up his post saying, ‘I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.’ Lincoln described himself as ‘naturally anti-slavery.’ ‘If slavery is not wrong,’ he wrote in a letter in April 1864, ‘nothing is wrong.’

      Abraham Lincoln, 1865 Photograph by Henry F. Warren

      Lincoln’s electoral success convinced the South that the days of slavery were numbered. On 20 December 1860, South Carolina formally withdrew, or seceded, from the Union of the United States. Within seven weeks, six more states had seceded and together they formed the Confederate States of America, also known as the Confederacy, with Jefferson Davis as its president. Once the civil war had started, on 12 April 1861, another four states followed suit.

      War and Emancipation:

       ‘Previous condition of servitude’

      Slavery may have been the cause of the civil war but Lincoln did not go to war specifically for the benefit of the slave. Instead, his ‘paramount’ objective was to save the Union: ‘If I could save the Union,’ he wrote in 1862, ‘without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.’

      Many slaves fled from their masters, emigrated north and joined the Union army, but Lincoln, mindful not to upset the border states between North and South, was initially reluctant to enlist blacks. In late 1862, however, he relented and through the Militia Act permitted African-Americans into the Union army.

      In September 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which stated that as from 1 January 1863, all slaves in the Confederate States (but not the border states) would be free. Southern slave owners ignored the proclamation, but nonetheless, at the turn of the New Year, thousands of slaves fled to the Union, and cities like New York were suddenly overwhelmed with African-Americans. Much of the white population in the North resented having to fight for the benefit of blacks who then engulfed their cities, threatening their livelihoods by offering cheaper labour. As New York and other Northern cities descended into race riots, Lincoln prepared to end slavery throughout the country.

      In his Gettysburg Address in November 1863, Lincoln talked of the need to preserve a ‘nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’.

      In April 1865, after four years of civil war, the Union emerged victorious. At the end of the war, there were 185,000 blacks in the Union army, and around twenty black soldiers had received the Congressional Medal of Honour. But Lincoln was still concerned that emancipation did not cover the whole nation and that the former Confederate States might see it as merely a temporary measure of war. Therefore, on 6 December 1865, ten months after its proposal and following the Union’s victory, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified: ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.’ Slavery, this peculiar institution, had finally been abolished.

      Lincoln put together a plan