|
Frederick Douglass
(1948) /
The Negro in the Civil War
(1953) /
The Negro in the American
Revolution, (1961)
Lincoln and the Negro
(1962) /
The Negro in the Making of
America (1964) /
Black Abolitionists
(1969)
Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown
(1974) /
Black Mosaic: Essays in
Afro-American History and Historiography (1988)
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The Negro in the American
Revolution
By Benjamin Quarles
Reviews
The Negro's
important role in the Revolutionary War stemmed from the
inescapable fact that both sides needed black manpower. And both
sides offered the Negro his freedom as a reward. this valuable
book gives us an extraordinary sense of reality of the
Revolutionary times and affords us glimpses of all the levels of
America's society.
--Publisher
The Negro in
the American Revolution underscores the fact that Professor
Quarles is one of the most able historians currently writing
about the Negro in the American past.
--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography
Exhaustive and
painstaking research went into the making of this monograph. . .
. [Professor Quarles'] synthesis is characterized throughout by
restrained judgment and a high degree of objectivity.
--The Annals
One of the major
virtues of Quarles' book is that it does not confine itself
merely to [its] principal theme of Negroes as revolutionaries,
but deals also with the Negroes who served with the British
(mostly as laborers and a few as spies) and with those who were
"carried off" at the end of the war. . . .
--New England Quarterly
In
the Revolutionary war the American Negro was a participant and a
symbol. He was active on the battlefronts and behind the lines;
in his expectations and in the gains he registered during the
war, he personified the goal of that freedom in whose name the
struggle was waged. the Negro's role in the Revolution can best
be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a
place nor to a people, but to a principle. Insofar as he had
freedom of choice, he was likely to join the side that made him
the quickest and best offer in terms of those "unalienable
rights" of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken. Whoever invoked
the image of liberty, be he American or British, could count on
a ready response from the blacks.
--Preface, The Negro in the American
Revolution
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Other Books by Benjamin A. Quarles
Frederick Douglass (1948)
The Negro in the Civil War (1953)
Lincoln and the Negro
(1962)
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass (edited, 1962)
The Negro in the Making of
America (1964)
Lift
Every Voice: The Lives of Booker T.Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary
Terrell, and James Weldon Johnson (with Dorothy
Sterling, 1965)
Frederick Douglass (Compiled and
edited, Great Lives Observed Series, 1968)
The Black Abolitionists
(1969)
Blacks
on John Brown (compiled and edited,
1972)
Allies for Freedom and Blacks on John Brown
(1974)
The Black American: A Documentary History
(edited with Leslie H. Fishel, Jr., 1975)
Black History's Antebellum Origins (1979)
Black Mosaic: Essays in
Afro-American History and Historiography (1988)
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More Reviews
Benjamin
Quarles was a great man and a great historian. His work has the
extraordinary quality of being both pioneering and definitive.
from his biography of Frederick Douglass to his studies of the
black people in the American Revolution and the antislavery
movement, the scholarship of Benjamin Quarles is classic. But
then its author too was a classic: a gentleman whose modesty was
exceeded only by his ability. We will not soon see his like. . .
. He has left a splendid legacy in print and by his example.
Although I never took a course with him, I consider myself one
of his students. I have tried to emulate his scholarship, with
the understanding that his achievements are far beyond my grasp.
I feel extraordinary luck to have known him.
--Ira Berlin, Ph.D. University of Maryland,
College Park
It
is clear that all of us in the field are greatly in his debt.
Like [John Hope] Franklin, he has served as a model to a whole
generation of scholars in Afro-American history, white and black
alike. His synthesis of [the] Civil war and abolition, his
authoritative book and articles on the Revolution, his sensitive
analysis of Lincoln and the blacks are all works that remain
unequaled or unsurpassed. Even his pioneering Frederick Douglass
remains a highly respected monograph. The present and next
generation of historians are, and will be, writing from a later
perspective and addressing themselves to different questions,
but Quarles' works not only plowed new ground, they will live as
standard treatments of topics for years to come.
--August Meier, Emeritus Professor of
History, Kent State University
Ben Quarles and I, for many
years, conducted a game of trying to "outcompliment"
each other. I would say, "Ben, your The Negro in the
Civil War breaks new ground. You have every reason to be
proud of your achievement," to which he would offer a
rejoinder that would leave me speechless. "John Hope,"
he would begin, "there is nothing like your Reconstruction
After the Civil War. When I read it, I ask myself if I can
ever match it." This friendly banter was both light and
serious. We really did enjoy matching wits about what we had
done; but behind it was a profound respect for each other's
diligence and commitment to scholarship.
Now that we no longer joke
with each other regarding our respective
"achievements," I can say categorically and without
fear of contradiction that Benjamin Quarles was one of the
finest, most original historians of his generation. When I first
read his biography of Frederick Douglass, my admiration and,
yes, envy extended to wishing that it had been written over my
signature! He had a way with words, especially in the manner in
which he encapsulated the essence of a chapter in its title:
"The Users of Adversity" in Black Abolitionists;
"Behind the Man Behind the Gun," in The Negro in
the American Revolution; and "Among Us,--Yet Not of
Us" in Lincoln and the Negro. then, in every
line under those chapter headings he elaborated in graphic and
revealing ways the ideas that he wished precisely to convey.
I suppose that I am most
honored by the manner in which our careers and our work have
been associated together in the minds and writings of others.
Both in his introduction to Benjamin Quarles' delightful
collection of essays, Black Mosaic, and in his Black
History and the Historical Profession, August Meier placed
us not only in the same generation--"the last two black
scholars of distinction to emerge [after the Carter G. Woodson
era] until the early 1970s--but also as two scholars having a
common approach tot he study of African-American and American
history. he said that Quarles, "even more explicitly than
Franklin . . . placed blacks on the center stage of major events
and movements in American history." Under the circumstances
I was immensely proud to be in the company with Quarles.
Over the years, whenever our
paths crossed, it was a happy time for both of us. We were
colleagues in the broadest sense, but I always wanted to be a
colleague in the narrowest sense. i wanted to be in the same
department at the same university with him. I wanted to share
with him the joys, excitement, and the frustrations of pursuing
American history. I wanted to learn from the great fountain of
knowledge and the wondrous sense of history that he possessed.
That never happened, and I am the poorer for this void in my
life. (Even so) I can rejoice, as others can rejoice, that
Benjamin Quarles, by his magnificent scholarship and his
generous sharing of himself with others, has given us a
blessings for which we all can be deeply grateful.
--John Hope Franklin, Ph.D., Historian
Benjamin Quarles.
The Negro in the American
Revolution,. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1961
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A progressive historian, Benjamin Arthur Quarles
(1904-1996), was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a
subway porter. He himself worked as a bellhop on Boston-based
steamboats and Florida hotels. He alter enrolled in Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina and then obtained his
graduate education at the University of Wisconsin. His
dissertation topic was the life of abolitionist Frederick
Douglass. This dissertation undoubtedly was the basis for his
first published historical work Frederick Douglass
(1948).
His doctorate awarded in 1940, Quarles was employed by
Dillard University from 1939 to 1953. From about 1948, Dr.
Quarles was the dean of the Dillard faculty. |
| Quarles taught at Morgan State from 1953 until
his retirement in 1974, and headed the history department there
in 1953-67. One of his many highly-regarded books of history and
biography, the 1964 work The Negro in the Making of America, was
reprinted as recently as 1995.
Quarles married twice: first to Vera Bullock Quarles, who
died in 1951; and then to Ruth Brett, 1952. Ruth Brett
Quarles outlived her husband. They had two daughters.
There were few sympathizers at Wisconsin for Quarles's
desires to write black history. "There was a feeling that a
black person studying black history would turn it into
propaganda," he later recalled. Nevertheless, Quarles stuck
to his plan, and eventually found a professor who consented to
guide his thesis research.
Much of Quarles writing style was learned from Professor
William Hesseltine of the University of Wisconsin with whom he
worked while completing his doctorate. It was a smooth
narrative mask of objectivity. Yet as Wilson Jeremiah Moses,
points out in History Teacher (1998), "his
persistent efforts to demonstrate the centrality of blacks in
building. American civilization, and his criticism of those who
did not share his belief in the mission of the United States in
the world, show he was a conceptual historian with a clear
agenda."
Quarles' second book, The Negro in the Civil War,
appeared in 1953, the year he moved to Morgan State College in
Baltimore, Maryland, to chair the department of history. In this
work he set out to show the deep flaw in the traditional picture
of slaves as passive pawns in the fight against slavery. On the
contrary, he asserted, 3.5 million African Americans had been
major participants in the struggle for democracy, 180,000 of
them working as soldiers, and the rest as orderlies, spies, and
laborers.
“Milliken’s Bend,” said Quarles, “was . . . [near
Vicksburg, Mississippi] one of the hardest fought encounters in
the annals of American military history." Its lesson was
not lost on the Union high brass: “The bravery of the Blacks
at Milliken’s Bend,” observed Assistant Secretary of War
Charles A. Dana, “completely revolutionized the sentiment of
the army with regard to the employment of Negro troops.”
In his next major work, The Negro in the American
Revolution, Quarles enlarged upon the theme of black
Americans as major players in their own search for freedom. He
was the the first to cast any light at all on the topic of the
African American contribution to the revolution itself.
"Unlettered, they put very little down on paper. If they
are to be understood, it must be primarily by what they did.
Hence, especially in the pages of this work dealing with the
Negro acting of his own volition, my approach has been to state
the facts about his activities, indicate the documentary
sources, and as far as possible avoid conjecture as to his
unrecorded thought," he continued.
His next book Lincoln and the Negro, Quarles attempted
to show Lincoln the president as a true friend of the enslaved.
For Lincoln opposed slavery opposed slaver because of the
philosophy expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Yet
Lincoln also believed that blacks were mentally inferior to
whites, that intermarriage was unworthy, and was
non-supportive of voting rights for black Americans. Quarles
still concluded: "In the story they would relate to their
children, Negroes would lay stress on the enduring Lincoln, in
whom death was swallowed up in victory."
All his previous works were a prelude to his 1969
publication, Black Abolitionists. In this work Quarles
challenged the accepted view that abolitionists had been
primarily white reformers. There were blacks carrying the
anti-slavery banners as early as the1830s. These black
abolitionists spiritedly opposed efforts to colonize all black
Americans in Africa, and resented the paternalization of
missionary whites determined to uplift them willy-nilly. Quarles
also reminded the historical community that new Negro newspapers
had emphasized the non-white viewpoint, insisting on voting,
civil, and human rights for an audience of both black and white
readers.
For the journal Daedalus, Quarles
wrote one of his last thought-provoking essays. He concluded,
"The role of blacks in America--what they have done and
what has been done to them--illuminates the past and informs the
present. Unless we fully comprehend the role of racism in this
society, we can never truly know America."
Publications
Frederick Douglass, Associated
Publishers, 1948.
The Negro in the Civil War, Little
Brown, 1953.
The Negro in the American
Revolution, University of North Carolina Press, 1961.
Lincoln and the Negro, Oxford,
1962.
The Negro in the Making of
America, Collier, 1964.
Black Abolitionists, Oxford, 1969.
Allies for Freedom
and Blacks on John Brown, Oxford, 1974. Black Mosaic: Essays in
Afro-American History and Historiography (1988) |
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updated 18 October 2007 |
