By Dr. Frank Smith Jr. (TriceEdneyWire.com)
Editor’s Note: The Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which promotes, preserves and researches the history and culture of African Americans, set the annual 2011 Black History Month theme as “African Americans and the Civil War.” This is the first in a four-part series on the theme.
For White America — both North and South — the firing on Fort Sumter April 12, 1861, was a cause for tribulation and anxiety. But, for free and enslaved Black Americans, the onset of the Civil War was a cause for celebration and a time for jubilee.
The Northern press fretted over whether the union could be saved. The Southern press railed on about the threat to the demise of the South’s “Peculiar Institutions” – slavery – while the Black Press rejoiced in headlines such as, “The Coming Hour,” and declared for “Emancipation or Extermination.” Yes, there were Black newspapers during slavery — since March 16, 1827.
The Weekly Anglo-African, on April 13, 1861, heralded: “Better be a DEAD MAN, than a live slave! Better to die fighting, than to live to breed children for the shambles! Death slays only the body; the spirit, [disenthralled], will pass on, working out its immortal destiny. Rather say we, ‘Ten Reigns of Terror’ than one year of bondage! Better a thousand guillotines, than one fugitive returned. ‘Let the Union go to pieces, if the slaves go free.'”
Black leaders faced the reality and inevitability of the consequence of the coming sectional conflict with resolution, while White leaders were in denial of the union’s transformation and the certain demise in the preservation of slavery. Frederick Douglass editorialized in his Douglass Monthly in May, 1861, just one month after the start of the war: “God be praised! That it has come at last. We should have been glad if the North, of its own proper virtue, had given this quietis to doubt and vacillation.
“She [the Union], did not do it, and perhaps it is best that she [the Union], did not. What her negative wisdom withheld, has now come to us through the vengeance and rashness of slaveholders. Another instance of the wrath of man working out the purposes in praise of eternal goodness!”
Free and enslaved Blacks transformed a Civil War for reunion into a war for liberation. It would take five years of fratricidal conflict for White America to arrive at the meaning of the war that was clear to Black America at its beginning — the reaffirmation of the founding universal human principle of America that all men are created equal. “This [the Civil War] is but another step
in the drama of American progress. We say progress, for we know that no matter what may be the desires of the men of Expediency who rule, or seem to, the affairs of the North, the tendencies are for Liberty. God speed the conflict. The strife will be deadly, but the end is certain. It matters not whether the government is successful, whether the union is preserved, the ideas underlying the struggle will triumph.” — Weekly Anglo-African, April 20, 1861.
April 12, 2011, will mark the 150th anniversary of the firing on Ft. Sumter and the start of the American Civil War. The African American Civil War Memorial Foundation will commemorate the beginning Civil War with celebrities reading from Civil War period newspapers, speeches and other documents announcing the coming of the war and its profound effect on the ending of slavery in America. Celebrities also will read from selected press responses to the election of President Lincoln and the anti-slavery platform of the Republican Party of 1860.
The African American Civil War Memorial lists the names of 209,145 Black union soldiers who joined President Lincoln to save the Union and keep it united under one flag.
The monument, located at the corner of 10th and U streets N.W., Washington, D.C., was built by a private foundation that operates a museum. On July 18, 2011, the museum will host a Grand Opening for its newly renovated 5,000-square-foot-space with new exhibits, artifacts and state-of-the- art educational programs adjacent to the monument.
“Little Known Stories of Blacks and the Civil War” is a four-part Black History Month series, sponsored by The African American Civil War Museum and Monument and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). For more information, visit www.afroamcivilwar.org/our-story.html, call (202) 667-2667 or email: info@amcivilwar.org. Also, www.asalh.org/, (202) 238-5910 or info@asalh.net.
Dr. Frank Smith Jr. is executive director of the African American Civil War Museum and Monument.
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