Taylor and Francis Group is part of the Academic Publishing Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 3099067.

Informa

Section 3: African American Experience

Click on the tabs below to view the content for each section.

Images

Discussion Questions

  1. What do Rebecca Harding Davis’s “John Lamar” and Louisa May Alcott’s “My Contraband” have in common? What do the stories seem to have difficulty imagining, and what does that difficulty suggest?
  2. How do you think either Frederick Douglass or W. E. B. Du Bois would respond to “John Lamar” or “My Contraband”?
  3. What does the ending of Alcott’s “My Contraband” accomplish? Is it a satisfying resolution to the story? What, if anything, does it leave open?
  4. In his essay “Emancipation Proclamation,” how does Ralph Waldo Emerson define, frame, or reimagine the act of emancipation?
  5. Discuss the final line of Mark Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” What makes the line so powerful? What is Aunt Rachel’s larger point?
  6. What does Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s “Camp Diary” suggest about the ways in which race informed liberal thought during this period? How significant a problem is Higginson’s paternalism in the context of his radical antislavery politics?
  7. How would you describe the attitude expressed in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Use of Liberty”?
  8. Both Susie King Taylor and Thomas Wentworth Higginson describe close association between whites and blacks during the Port Royal experiment. Which features of this association do they emphasize, and which do they downplay? Do they seem to have different attitudes toward it?
  9. Compare and contrast the representation of the postwar South in James L. Smith’s Autobiography with that in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Deserted Plantation.”

Selected Bibliography

Adair, Lyle, and Glenn Robins. They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2011.

Ash, Stephen V. Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Bailey, Anne J. Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Blight, David W. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom: Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.

Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Boritt, Gabor S. and Scott Hancock, eds. Slavery, Resistance, Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Brewer, James H. The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861–1865. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

Cornish, Dudley T. The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865. New York: Norton, 1966.

Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Durden, Robert F. The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972, 2000.

Franklin, John Hope. The Emancipation Proclamation. New York: Anchor, 1965.

Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1990.

Greenwood, Janette T. First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Hollandsworth, James G., Jr. The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Holzer, Harold, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams. The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Humphreys, Margaret. Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Hunter, Tera W. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Inscoe, John C. Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

James, Jennifer C. A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Lause, Mark A. Race and Radicalism in the Union Army. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Levine, Bruce C. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

McPherson, James. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union. 1965. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991.

Miller, Edward A., Jr. The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Colored Infantry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

Ochs, Stephen J. A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

O’Donovan, Susan E. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Redkey, Edwin S. A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army 1861–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Regosin, Elizabeth A., and Donald R. Shaffer. Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction Through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Reid, Richard M. Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.

Samito, Christian G. Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship During the Civil War Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Shaffer, Donald R. After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004.

Smith, John David, ed. Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Tomblin, Barbara. Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009.

Trudeau, Noah Andre. Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998.

Urwin, Gregory J. W., ed. Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Ward, Andrew. The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Westwood, Howard C. Black Troops, White Commanders, and Freedmen During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Wilder, Burt G., and Richard M. Reid. Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

Wise, Stephen R. Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Zinn, Howard. The Other Civil War: Slavery and Struggle in Civil War America. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011.