African-Americans in the Civil War

The foundation for black participation in the Civil War began more than a hundred years before the outbreak of the war. Blacks in America had been in bondage since early colonial times. In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankind 's inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the institution of slavery had become firmly established in America. Blacks worked in the tobacco fields of Virginia, in the rice fields of South Carolina, and toiled in small farms and shops in the North. Foner and Mahoney report in A House Divided, America in the Age of Lincoln that, "In 1776, slaves composed forty percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia, but well below ten percent in the colonies to the North." The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 provided a demand for cotton thus increasing the demand for slaves. By the 1800 's slavery was an institution throughout the South, an institution in which slaves had few rights, and could be sold or leased by their owners. They lacked any voice in the government and lived a life of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the slave population never abandoned the desire for freedom or the determination to resist control by the slave owners. The slave 's reaction to this desire and determination resulted in outright rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place the strongest reaction in the enlisting of blacks in the war itself. Batty in The Divided Union: The Story of the Great American War, 1861-65, concur with Foner and Mahoney about the importance of outright rebellion in their analysis of the Nat Turner Rebellion, which took place in 1831. This revolt demonstrated that not all slaves were willing to accept this "institution of slavery" passively. Foner and Mahoney note that the significance of this uprising is found in its aftermath because of the numerous reports of "insubordinate" behavior by slaves. 8 Individual

Bibliography: Batty, Peter The Divided Union, Tempus Publishing Limited, September 1999. Catton, Bruce The Civil War, Houghton Mifflin Company, April 1985 Foner, Eric and Mahoney, Olivia A House Divided, Norton, Ww, Louisania University Press, May 1991 McPherson, James M. The Negro 's Civil War: How Americans Felt and Acted During the War for the Union., Ballantine Books, Inc., February 1989 Stokesbury, James C. A Short History of the Civil War Morrow, William & Company, March, 1997 Wilson, Joseph T. The Black Phalanx: African-American Soldiers in the War of Independence and the Civil War Plenum Publishing Corp., April 1994