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Up From Slavery
A Documentary History of Negro
Education
Compiled By
Rudolph Lewis
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The Emancipation Proclamation,
1863
By the President of the United States of America:
A Proclamation.
Whereas on the 22d day of September, A.D.
1862, a proclamation was issued by the
President of the United States, containing, among other things,
the following, to wit:
"That on the 1st day of January A.D.
1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated
part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion
against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and
forever free; and the executive government of the United States,
including the military and naval authority thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do
no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any
efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
"That the executive will on the 1st day
of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and
parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof,
respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United
States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall
on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the
United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a
majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have
participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing
testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the
people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United
States."
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President
of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in
time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and
government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war
measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of
January, A.D. 1863,
and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaim
for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above
mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States
wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in
rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the
parishes of St. Bernard, Plaque-mines, Jefferson, St. John, St.
Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche,
St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New
Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South
Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight
Counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of
Berkeley, Accomac, Northhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess
Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and
Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left
precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.
And by virtue of the power and for the purpose
aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as
slaves within said designated States and parts of States are,
and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive
Government of the United States, including the military and
naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the
freedom of said persons.
And I do hereby enjoin upon the people so
declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in
necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all
cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.
And I further declare and make known that such
persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed
service of the United States to garrison forts, positions,
stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in
said service.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an
act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military
necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the
gracious favor of Almighty God.
U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, pp.
1268-69.
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Sources:
Chapter VI. "The Instruction of Negroes." In Edgar W.
Knight..
A Documentary History of Education in the South before 1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 1953
Chapter 10 "Up From Slavery: Educational and
other Rights of Negroes." In Edgar W. Knight and Clifton L. Hall. Readings
in American Educational History. New York Appleton-Century-Crofts,
Inc., 1951. Many states had laws prohibiting
the education of blacks; here black youngsters are turned away at the
school door |
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Abraham Lincoln
(February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th
President of the United States, serving from
March 1861 until
his assassination in 1865. He led the country
through a great constitutional, military and moral
crisis—the
American Civil War—preserving the Union while
ending slavery and promoting economic and financial
modernization. Reared in a poor family on the
western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated.
He became a country lawyer, an Illinois state
legislator, and a one-term member of the
United States House of Representatives, but
failed in two attempts at a seat in the
United States Senate. He was an affectionate,
though often absent, husband and father of four
children.
After deftly
opposing the expansion of
slavery in the United States in his campaign
debates and speeches, Lincoln secured the Republican
nomination and was
elected president in 1860. Following
declarations of
secession by southern slave states, war began in
April 1861, and he concentrated on both the military
and political dimensions of the war effort, seeking
to reunify the nation. He vigorously exercised
unprecedented war powers, including the arrest and
detention without trial of thousands of suspected
secessionists. He prevented British recognition of
the
Confederacy by skillfully handling the
Trent affair late in 1861. He issued his
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoted
the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the United States
Constitution, abolishing slavery.
Lincoln closely
supervised the war effort, especially the selection
of top generals, including the commanding general
Ulysses S. Grant. He brought leaders of various
factions of his party into his cabinet and pressured
them to cooperate. Under his leadership, the
Union took control of the
border slave states at the start of the war and
tried repeatedly to capture the Confederate capital
at Richmond. Each time a general failed, Lincoln
substituted another until finally Grant succeeded in
1865. An exceptionally astute politician deeply
involved with power issues in each state, he reached
out to
War Democrats and managed his own re-election in
the
1864 presidential election.
As the leader
of the moderate faction of the Republican party,
Lincoln came under attack from all sides.
Radical Republicans wanted harsher treatment of
the South, War Democrats desired more compromise,
and
Copperheads despised him—not to mention
irreconcilable secessionists in reconquered areas.
Politically, Lincoln fought back with patronage, by
pitting his opponents against each other, and by
appealing to the American people with his powers of
oratory. His
Gettysburg Address of 1863 became the most
quoted speech in American history. It was an iconic
statement of America's dedication to the principles
of nationalism, equal rights, liberty, and
democracy. At the close of the war, Lincoln held a
moderate view of
Reconstruction, seeking to speedily reunite the
nation through a policy of generous reconciliation
in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness.
However, just six days after the surrender of
Confederate commanding general
Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was shot and killed by
Confederate sympathizer
John Wilkes Booth at
Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. His death
marked the first assassination of a U.S. president.
Lincoln has been consistently
ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S.
presidents.— Wikipedia
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The Fiery Trial
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
A
mixture of visionary progressivism and
repugnant racism, Abraham Lincoln's
attitude toward slavery is the most
troubling aspect of his public life, one
that gets a probing assessment in this
study. Columbia historian and Bancroft
Prize winner Foner (Free Soil, Free
Labor, Free Men) traces the
complexities of Lincoln's evolving ideas
about slavery and African-Americans:
while he detested slavery, he also
publicly rejected political and social
equality for blacks, dragged his feet
(critics charged) on emancipating slaves
and accepting black recruits into the
Union army, and floated schemes for
colonizing freedmen overseas almost to
war's end. Foner situates this record
within a lucid, nuanced discussion of
the era's turbulent racial politics; in
his account Lincoln is a canny operator,
cautiously navigating the racist
attitudes of Northern whites,
prodded--and sometimes willing to be
prodded--by abolitionists and racial
egalitarians pressing faster reforms.
But as Foner tells it, Lincoln also
embodies a society-wide transformation
in consciousness, as the war's upheavals
and the dynamic new roles played by
African-Americans made previously
unthinkable claims of freedom and
equality seem inevitable. Lincoln is no
paragon in Foner's searching portrait,
but something more essential--a
politician with an open mind and a
restless conscience. 16 pages of illus.,
3 maps.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 22 July 2008
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