| 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) |
