Yale Lecture Notes on the American Civil War: History of How Blacks Helped the North Persevere in this Struggle

Today we will learn and reflect on the history of the Civil War, and how
runaway black slaves helped the Union persevere and triumph, with ex-
slaves serving as soldiers, spies, and laborers. Our main sources are the
Yale lectures on Black History and the Civil War. Yale University has
published the undergraduate class lectures for Professors Holloway and
Blight, over four dozen lectures in total. We took the best stories from
the lectures to encourage you to listen to the full set of lectures, they are
spell-binding.
These were such violent times, and blacks were treated so cruelly, that
these videos have a disclaimer for those who have difficulty handling this
violence.

At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used
for this video, please feel free to follow along with our
PowerPoint scripts we uploaded to SlideShare. Please,
we welcome interesting questions in the comments. Let
us learn and reflect together!

https://amzn.to/3KRgTc1
https://amzn.to/3orcpz7
https://amzn.to/3jvz9L9
https://amzn.to/3rZHpH0
https://amzn.to/3je7rmW
© Copyright 2021
Become a patron:
https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom
YouTube Channel, Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqDkfFbWhXOnzdjp__YZtg
https://amzn.to/3kfEXbT
Yale Lecture Notes: Civil War
https://youtu.be/89ulb20cy8Q

When the war began Lincoln insisted that the war needed to be
fought to preserve the Union. Lincoln said that if he could
abolish slavery and save the Union, he would do that; if he could
preserve slavery and save the Union, he would do that.
Why would Union soldiers volunteer to fight to preserve the
Union? According to Professor Gallagher, the sentiment was
Lincoln won the Presidency fair and square, and that you just
cannot secede because your side lost the election. The US was a
democratic beacon shining over the monarchial regimes in
Europe, Americans took great pride in their fledgling democracy,
and were serious about preserving the Union.

In this 1850 political cartoon, the artist attacks abolitionist, Free Soil
and other sectionalist interests of 1850 as dangers to the Union
The Free-Soil Party 1854 Presidential Candidate was the ex-President Martin Van Buren, Frederick Douglass was
active in the movement, afterwards many Free-Soil members joined the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln.

But preserving the Union was really all about slavery.
Northerners were against admitting new states in the western
territories as slave states, the various compromises negotiated
were either overturned by events or by the Supreme Court. The
Free-Soil movement sought to keep the Territories free because
slave plantations with free labor were unfair competition for the
yeoman farmer. Even if Lincoln had sought a peace treaty with
the Confederacy, what would happen to those Western
territories? Many informed observers at the time felt that civil
war was inevitable because of the competition between free and
slave states for the new territories.

Sources of Tension Before Civil War:
• Constant abolitionist rhetoric
• Enforcement of fugitive slave laws
• John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry
• Publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Lincoln was forced into the war because the Confederacy
would not permit Northern ships to resupply Fort
Sumter. Lincoln wanted to resupply the fort not with
munitions but with food and water. Southern cannons
fired on the fort in the bay of Charleston, South Carolina,
the first state to secede from the Union.

Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Currier & Ives, 1861

At the beginning of the war both sides anticipated, maybe hoped
is a better word, that the war would only last a few more
months. But then month after month, battle after battle, armies
advance then retreat, and the casualties mount with no end in
sight. But the soldiers from the North were far easier to replace,
the South would lose in a war of attrition, especially since most
of the battles were fought on Southern soil. The North had more
manufacturing, more railroads, more railroads of the same
gauge, and a far larger population.
In the beginning the South had the better leading generals,
General Robert E Lee was always a brilliant tactician.

Civil War Battle Scene, by William T Trego, 1887

Although the Northern General McClellan would
incessantly drill the raw recruits in the Northern
Army, he was a cautious general, letting victory slip
through his grasp many times after a hard-fought
bloody battle. McClellan was not an abolitionist; he
was a peace Democrat who ran against Lincoln in the
next Presidential election.

President Abraham
Lincoln visits General
George B. McClellan
and his staff near
Sharpsburg,
Maryland on
October 3, 1862 a
few weeks after the
Battle of Antietam.
Soon afterwards,
Lincoln would fire
McClellan.

But General Grant would win a major victory at Vicksburg,
giving the Union control over the mighty Mississippi River.
After that, Lincoln put Grant in charge of the Union armies,
he would continually flank Lee until he was cornered and
surrendered at Appomattox, while General Sherman
burned Atlanta and marched to the sea.

Admiral Porter's Fleet
Running the Rebel
Blockade of the
Mississippi at
Vicksburg, April 1863,
Currier and Ives

The Southern army was never well provisioned. David
Blight says this of Lee’s army when they invaded
Maryland for the Battle of Antietam:
“Lee’s army wasn’t very well fed, and they weren’t
very well clad. Here’s one description of a young
Marylander who saw the Confederate Army. He said it
was nothing but “a set of ragamuffins. It seemed as if
every cornfield in Maryland had been robbed of its
scarecrows. None had any underclothing. My costume
consisted of a ragged pair of trousers,”–this guy
apparently joined–“a stained dirty jacket, an old
slouch hat, the brim pinned up with a thorn, a
begrimed blanket over my shoulder, a grease-
smeared cotton haversack full of apples and corn, a
cartridge box full and a musket. I was barefooted. I
had a stone bruise on each foot. There was no one
there who would not have been run in by the police
had he appeared on the streets of a normal city.”

And there’s plenty of testimony in the record, though a lot of young Maryland
men came out to see this now famous army of Robert E. Lee, took one look or
one smell, as one put it, and went back to their farms. Lee will get almost no real
recruits out of Maryland. What they will do in Maryland, however, is capture
several hundred slaves and return them, or take them, to Virginia. They’re going
to do the same thing in 1863 in the Gettysburg campaign on an even larger scale.
Kidnapping ex-slaves, and any blacks they found, was also part of the Confederate
army’s job.
From the beginning of the war, every time the Union forces advanced into the
South escaped slaves would cross the Union lines. Some were returned to their
masters in the beginning of the war, but most were confiscated as contraband of
war. Most of them were put to work doing menial labor for the Union Army, but
some of them served as scouts and spies and soldiers for the Union forces.

Battle of
Antietam, Kurz
and Allison,
copyright 1888

Battle of
Antietam, the
charge of Iron
Brigade near the
Dunker Church,
1862, by Thure
de Thulstrup,
painted 1887

Battle of Antietam, burying the dead
https://www.nps.gov/anti/learn/photosmultimedia/gardnerphotos.htm
Alexander Gardner took 70 photographs of the battlefield
starting just two days after the battle. This was the first
time an American battlefield had ever been photographed
before the dead had been buried.

Many southerners thought that if they treated their house slaves
or urban slaves well that they would readily accept slavery as
their lot in life. David Blight tells this story of one such slave who
escapes to Union lines:
“Back in Virginia there was a young slave, twenty-two years old.
His name was John Washington, he had grown up in
Fredericksburg, Virginia. He had a white father whom he had
never known, and a slave mother named Sarah, who taught him
how to read and write. He grew up as an urban slave with lots of
skills, highly valued, probably a brilliant young man. He was hired
out many times as an independent artisan before the war. He
married his sweetheart in January 1862 in the African Baptist
Church in Fredericksburg. He chose his moment of escape at the
first appearance of Union forces along the Rappahannock River in
Fredericksburg on the 18th of April, 1862.”
This recruitment poster was issued under a
July 1863 presidential order with the
promise of freedom, protection and pay.

John, then 22 years old, tells the story of all the white people
evacuating Fredericksburg and how his mistress, Mrs. Tolliver,
is literally packing her china and her silver, and she says to
John, “Now John, you’ll be with us tomorrow, you’ll be with us
tomorrow.” She’s assuming his loyalty. And he says, “Yes
Misses, yes Misses, I’ll be with you tomorrow.”
Then he goes to the hotel where he’s been hired out as a
steward,” “he took the twelve black workers up on the roof of
the hotel where they could see across the river “the gleam of
the Yankees’ bayonets.” And then he brought them all back
down into the kitchen and he poured a round of drinks, and
he held a toast, and the toast was “To the Yankees.” And then
he instructed his fellow workers, he said, to get out of there.
“But don’t get too far from the Yankees.” John Washington
spent the rest of that summer as a camp hand and a guide for
the Union Army, all the way through Second Manassas.
Henry Louis Stephens, 1863, Headline:
Presidential Proclamation on Slavery

If you have not seen the movie Harriet, released in 2019, about
Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave and underground railroad
conductor who repeatedly risked her life rescuing hundreds of
slaves in the Deep South, you must see the movie. As with all
movies, there were a few exaggerations, at the end of the movie
they concoct a scene enabling her to give a Thucydides speech to
her aggrieved former master, but her incredible bravery and
determination could never be exaggerated.

For an excellent review of this movie and more about the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/true-story-harriet-tubman-movie-180973413/

Harriet Tubman also assisted the Union Army in their invasions of the
South. Harriet was the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War.
From Wikipedia: When Union troops were planning attacks on South Carolina
plantations, Tubman served as a key adviser and accompanied the raid. On the
morning of June 2, 1863, Tubman guided three steamboats around Confederate
mines in the waters leading to the shore. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to
the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of
food and supplies. When the steamboats sounded their whistles, slaves throughout
the area understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as slaves
stampeded toward the boats. “I never saw such a sight”, she said later, describing a
scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in
bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents’ necks.
Although their owners, armed with handguns and whips, tried to stop the mass
escape, their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced
to the scene, steamboats steamed north, packed full of ex-slaves.

The Harriet Tubman Organization's president, Donald Pinder, stands before
a vibrant, folk art mural depicting Tubman's life, museum in Maryland.

Raid of Combahee
River, Harper's
Weekly,1863 July 4.
Union steamships free
many rice plantation
slaves, this raid was led
by Harriet Tubman.

David Blight tells us a story about an escaped slave named George Hatton
who had advanced to sergeant in the Colored Troops when his regiment
was encamped near Jamestown, Virginia.
Into the Union lines came several black freed women who all declared
they had recently been severely whipped by a master. Members of
Hatton’s company managed to capture that slave owner, a Mr. Clayton,
the man who had allegedly administered the beatings on these women.
The white Virginian was stripped to the waist. He was tied to a tree and
he was given 20 lashes by one of his own former slaves, a man named
William Harris, who was now a member of the Union Army.

In turn, each of the women that Clayton had beaten
were given the whip and their chance to lay the lash on
this slaveholder’s back. “The women were given leave,”
said Sergeant Hatton, “to remind him that they were not
longer his but safely housed in Abraham’s bosom and
under the protection of the Star-Spangled Banner and
guarded by their own patriotic, though once
downtrodden race.” In Hatton’s letter he once again felt
a loss for words to describe the transformation he was
witnessing. “Oh, that I had the tongue to express my
feelings,” he wrote, “while standing on the banks of the
James River on the soil of Old Virginia, the mother-state
of slavery, as a witness of such a sudden reverse. The
day is clear, the fields of grain are beautiful, and the
birds are singing sweet melodious songs while poor Mr.
Clayton is crying to his servants for mercy.”
Whipping Old Barney, illustration:
Frederick Douglass Autobiography

As the number of these escaped slaves increased and the need
for additional Union soldiers likewise increased, Lincoln and the
generals began to ask themselves, Why not induct these former
slaves into the Army? They would be eager to bear arms against
the masters who had so often whipped and humiliated them.
To win the war, Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation,
shared it with his Cabinet, and then pocketed the document until
the fortunes of war improved for the North. After the victory at
the Battle of Antietam and Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, Lincoln
released the Emancipation Proclamation as an executive order
issued under his war powers as Commander-In-Chief in
September 1862.

.”
Emancipation Proclamation, AA Lamb, painted 1864

What the Emancipation Proclamation did not do was emancipate
any slaves immediately, nor did it emancipate the slaves in the
border states loyal to the Union cause. Lincoln proclaimed that if
the Confederacy surrendered by January 1, 1863, she could keep
her slaves, but if the rebellion persisted after that date all slaves
in the rebelling states would be free.
This Harper’s Weekly illustration shows what the free blacks saw
in Emancipation, no longer would they be whipped, no longer
would they be abused, they could now vote, they and their
children could attend school, learn how to read, and have a
house, and have a family, and have family in their house, and
have a real life of their own.

Emancipation
from
Freedmen's
viewpoint,
illustration
from Harper's
Weekly 1865

(REPEAT) Professor Blight: “There were at least four immediate and visible effects of the
Emancipation Proclamation.
• First, every forward movement the Union armies now would, whether some of those officers
liked it or not, liberate more slaves.
• Second, news of this Proclamation, whatever the details and the fine print, would spread like
wildfire across the South, and it would attract towards Union lines more freed people. We have
testimony of Confederate soldiers and white Southerners saying they first heard about the
Emancipation Proclamation from their slaves.
• Third, it committed the United States Government in the eyes of the world to
Emancipation. That’s terribly important when we remember that Great Britain was on the
verge of recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation.
• Fourth, Lincoln formally authorizes once and for all, although it’s already begun to happen, the
recruitment of black men into the Union Armies and Navy, and it authorizes a formal process
now to recruit black men to the Union uniform. And before the war will end about ten percent
of all Union forces will be African American– approximately 180,000–eighty percent of whom
were former slaves, from the slave states.”

Professor Blight: There were four immediate
effects of the Emancipation Proclamation.
• First, every forward movement the Union
armies now would liberate more slaves.
• Second, news of this Proclamation would
spread like wildfire across the South, and it
would attract towards Union lines more
freed people.
• Third, it committed the United States
Government to Great Britain and the world
to Emancipation.
• Fourth, Lincoln formally authorizes the
formal recruitment of black men into the
Union Armies and Navy. Before the war will
end about ten percent of all Union forces
will be African American.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, two years into the war
under Lincoln, Congress passed the Conscription Act,
America’s first national draft act. The draft was controversial
everywhere in the North, especially in New York City. Of all
northern cities, New York City had the closest economic ties to
the South, New York was a center of the cotton trade with
Europe. Many New Yorkers were sympathetic to the Southern
cause.

New York City Draft Riots 1863
Above: Harper’s Weekly:
How to escape the draft
Left: There were multiple
lynchings in the NYC Draft Riots

Professor Holloway says this:
“In response to the Union draft,
several days of rioting begin in
New York City. The military
command–commandant of the
region, anything embodying
military, or suggesting police
control, is targeted. They’re
targeted by largely ethnic Irish
gangs. These gangs also targeted
blacks. The commandant calls for
more troops. When the dust has
settled, as many as a thousand
people are dead during these
riots.”
Depiction of the Draft Riots in 1863, The Illustrated London news

Professor Holloway continues:
“These were bloody riots. We’re not talking
about gangs throwing rocks and beating each
other up. We are talking about lynchings. In
total, eleven people are lynched during the
several days of riots. A few examples: Joseph
Reed, separated from his mother and
grandmother, he’s beaten to death. He’s
seven years old. William Williams, a sailor,
assaulted by the longshoremen, the dock
workers, when he asked for directions, not
knowing this riot is happening. Someone
picks up a cobblestone, hurls the stone at
him. Someone else stabs him. The crowd
cheers, and they start chanting, “Don’t hire
niggers! Don’t hire niggers!”
Rioters attacking a building on Lexington Ave

Professor Holloway continues:
“The Colored Orphanage, a very large building
there to take care of abandoned children, the
crowd sees this place as a site of threat–
something the blacks have that the Irish don’t.
They set the orphanage on fire. Thankfully, the
staff and children were able to escape out the
back as the building is torched. On the third day
of riots, Abraham Franklin, a disabled black
coachman, and his sister Henrietta, were pulled
out of their boarding room and lynched. Now
there’s one thing I forgot to mention that’s
important. Blacks and Irish were at each others’
throats through this process, but they’re living in
the same areas. They’re interacting all the time,
and that’s what makes this story that much
more horrific.”

After the riots Lincoln decides to leave New York
City alone and quietly discontinues the
compulsory draft in the city. He reasons that as
long as the rest of the country thinks New York City
is pulling its weight in the war, that is all that
matters.

David Blight relates another incredible story about
the young slave Wallace Turnage, whose spirit was
never broken even as he was savagely beaten and
mistreated following four failed attempts to escape
to freedom:
“Wallace Turnage was sold to a Richmond, Virginia
slave-trader named Hector Davis. He spent about six
months in 1860 working in the three-story slave
jail/auction house in Richmond. His job every day
was preparing the slaves in what was called the
dressing room, to take them out to the auction floor.
And one day he’s simply told, ‘Boy, you’re in the
auction.’ And he was sold to an Alabama cotton
planter named James Chalmers.
The narrative he left us is the story of his five
attempts to escape in the midst of the bloody Civil
War, the story of a half-crazy teenage slave who just
couldn’t be controlled.”
Slaves for sale, New Orleans, 1861
Slave
trader's
business
Atlanta,
Georgia,
1864

“Wallace ran away four times into Mississippi,
always trying to get up to northern Mississippi
to get to the Union armies. One time he was
at large for four and a half months, hiding in
other slave cabins and hiding in woods and
forests and gullies wherever he could
hide. He almost reached the big contraband
camp in Corinth on his fourth try. He was
captured by slave patrols. His master would
always come after him because he was so
valuable. Chalmers now got fed up of
constantly trying to retrieve this kid, so he
took him down to Mobile, Alabama, selling
him in 1863 for $2,000. That’s about the price
today of a good Mercedes-Benz.”
At Harper’s Ferry

“Wallace’s fifth and final escape attempt came after a vicious
beating. He had been beaten many more times than he could count,
he had been put in neck braces and leg chains and ankle chains and
wrist chains, he had experienced about every kind of brutality
slavery could bring on a teenage kid. One day, he crashed his
master’s carriage and the master got so angry that he took him to
the slave jail, hired the jailer to give him thirty lashes with the
ugliest whip they had, a whip that would make you bleed on every
lash. At the end of it he’s standing there naked, bleeding, and his
master says, ‘Go home.’ And instead of going home he put his
clothes back on and he walked right through the Confederate Army,
a garrison of 10,000 troops, where he was no doubt simply mistaken
for yet another black camp hand. At dusk he just crossed through
the Confederate camp, and he walked out of Mobile. And his final
escape is a three-week trek, which he narrates in remarkable ways,
a three-week trek down the western shore of Mobile Bay for
twenty-five miles through a snake and alligator invested swamp,
now known as the Fowl River Estuary.”
Harriet Tubman, 1870

“Wallace describes one day praying especially hard
when he got out to the tip of Mobile Bay, and the tide
brought in an old rickety rowboat, and he tipped over
the rowboat, took a plank of wood and he just started
rowing out into the ocean. And in quite dramatic form
he describes how a wave is about to swamp his little
boat, and he hears oars, and the oars were a Union
gunboat with eight sailors. They said, “Jump in.” He
jumped in. And he said as he sat down in their boat,
he said the Yankee sailors were struck with silence as
they looked at him, wondering who he was and how
he got there. They took him to a Sand Island fort and
clothed him and fed him, the first kind acts by a white
person that seventeen-year-old Turnage had ever
experienced.”

“The next day they took him to Fort Gaines on
Dauphin Island, which is the big, beautiful sandbar
island out at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and he was
brought before the Union commander of all forces in
the area, Gordon Granger, who interrogated him for
intelligence about Mobile, and Granger gave him two
choices. He could either join a black regiment that
they were forming at that very time in the Gulf
region, or he could become a servant to a white
officer. Wallace chose the latter, he didn’t tell us why,
but probably he had had suffered enough. He had
seen enough of his own war with the Confederates.
And he served out the war for another year as the
mess cook for a captain from a Maryland regiment
whose name was Junius Turner. And Wallace was
with that regiment in Baltimore, Maryland in August
of 1865 when it was mustered out.”
Contrabands—fugitive slaves—cooks, laundresses,
laborers, teamsters, railroad repair crews—were
freed in 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation.
Union Colored Troops in the Civil War

Wallace lived three years in Baltimore and then moved to
New York City where he lived the rest of his life, until
1916. He was lucky to find his mother and his four
siblings, and they were all living in a tenement house,
surviving, as part of the first generation of a black
working class, former slaves, in a northern city. He lived
till 1916 and is buried in Cyprus Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn,
New York. The point of this story is that these slaves
escaping were real people, with real names, real family,
real hopes and desires.

SOURCES:
Jonathon Holloway was a Yale professor whose
chosen academic field is black history, a topic he
chose as a teenager. These are his undergraduate
lectures on African-American history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp6mjKumW2g&list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyqnC6Gj5VCZERhhy9CC1S6
Jonathon Holloway was a
Yale professor whose
chosen academic field is
black history, a topic he
chose as a teenager. These
are his undergraduate
lectures on African-
American history.
Classroom notes and suggested reading:
https://oyc.yale.edu/NODE/46

Professor David Blight’s lectures on The Civil War and Reconstruction Era 1845-
1877 have a different perspective. He gives us background on Southern culture
for the first few lectures, the following history lectures quickly pick up the
pace. He covers many topics on the Civil War in detail, including the economics
both North and South, life at the home front, North and South, turning points in
the war, a deep dive into the effect of Emancipation, and wartime
Reconstruction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXXp1bHd6gI&list=PL5DD220D6A1282057
Professor
David Blight’s
lectures on The
Civil War and
Reconstruction
Era from 1845
through 1877.
Classroom notes and suggested reading:
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119

We were not planning on a blow by blow, bloody battle by bloody battle account
of the Civil War, but then we realized, WOW, there are all these incredible Civil
War paintings and full-color lithographs of these battles! Photography had just
been invented, but everyone had to stay perfectly still for minutes for a photo,
which meant that Matthew Brady took many after-battle pictures of the Civil
War fallen. Perhaps the American painters realized, our days are numbered, we
need to paint as many paintings as we can now, and so they did.
So, we changed our mind, and our main source, the Teaching Company lectures
by Professor Gallagher, also cover many of the moral aspects of the war against
SLAVERY, so this video will be coming out a month or so after this video in 2022.

These are the two paintings used for our thumbnail, we have the Lost Cause of
the bucolic depiction of happy slaves at work, overwhelmed by the
righteousness indignation and rebellion by the fiery John Brown, who helped
spark the Civil War with his unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s
Ferry.
In our Amazon list we have many key books we use for this and other videos on
this time in our history as well, as well as Professor Gallagher’s forty-eight lecture
series on the Civil War.

A cotton plantation on the Mississippi, 1884

Tragic Prelude,
John Brown, by
John Stuart Curry,
painted 1938

https://www.patreon.com/seekingvirtueandwisdom

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
© Copyright 2021
Blog and YouTube Description
include links for Amazon books
and lectures mentioned, please
support our channel with these
affiliate commissions.
Link to blog: https://wp.me/pachSU-pP

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqDkfFbWhXOnzdjp__YZtg/

Yale Lecture Notes on the American Civil War: History of How Blacks Helped the North Persevere in this Struggle

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

More from Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History

More from Reflections on Morality, Philosophy, and History (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Yale Lecture Notes on the American Civil War: History of How Blacks Helped the North Persevere in this Struggle