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Slavery
Sociologists continue to be vexed by the pathology of urban violence: Why is it so random, so fierce, so easily triggered? One answer may be found in this nation's Southern past.
In August of 1863, Frederick Douglass called upon the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to explain why the recruiting of black troops for the Union had been slower than some had expected. Black men wanted equal pay, he explained, and a chance for promotion.
While the American Revolution was still being fought, Mum Bett declared that the new nation’s principle of liberty must extend to her, too. It took 80 years and a far-more-terrible war to confirm the rights that she had demanded.
Mum Bett, aka Elizabeth
More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861.
"Americans just can’t get enough of the Civil War.” So says a man who should know, Terry Winschel, historian of the Vicksburg National Military Park. Millions of visitors come to Vicksburg and to more than a dozen other Civil War national battlefield and millitary parks every year.
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to look through a collection of photographs of New York in the 1920s with the amiable old man who had made them then for a news agency.
Thousands of them sided with Great Britain, only to become the wandering children of the American Revolution
IN THE EARLY summer of 1775 the rebeb of Virginia evicted their royalist governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, from his capital at Williamsburg and drove him to refuge aboard a British warship.
How the mistress of the plantation became a slave
“WE’RE USED to living around ‘em. You Northerners aren’t. You don’t know anything about ‘em.” This is or was the all-purpose utterance of white Southerners about blacks.
PRESIDENT LINCOLN MOVES AT LAST
Influence of “Advanced Republicans” Seen as Crucial to the Outcome
THE UNION UNITED STILL
THE PRESIDENT’S TACT & COURAGE
HE WAITED ON THE PROPER HOUR
JUBILATION AMONG THE BLACKS
They Stand Ready to Defend With Arms the Rights Thus Gained
NEW LIGHT SHED ON THE PARTICULARS OF THE GREAT DRAMA
When the cold, fastidious Mississippian rose to speak, a hush fell over the crowded Senate chamber. It was January 21, 1861, and Jefferson Davis and four other senators from the Deep South were here this day to announce their resignations.
THE BLACK SLAVE DRIVER
Wise planters of the ante-bellum South never relaxed their search for talent among their slaves. The ambitious, intelligent, and proficient were winnowed out and recruited for positions of trust and responsibility.
While some American captives languished, others conducted a flourishing market—and a huge black sailor organized everything
Stark, mist-enshrouded Dartmoor prison has long held a fascination for those interested in British crime.
Was there really a conspiracy to burn the town?
In January, 1708, a Mr. William Hallett, Jr., of Newton, Long Island, was murdered in his sleep with his pregnant wife and his five children. Two of Hallett’s slaves, an Indian man and a Negro woman, were tried for the crime and found guilty.
Sure that he was divinely appointed, Nat Turner led fellow slaves in a bloody attempt to overthrow their masters
Until August, 1831, most Americans had never heard of Virginia’s Southampton County, an isolated, impoverished neighborhood located along the border in the southeastern part of the state.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, an extraordinary member of an extraordinary family, always claimed that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin
She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.
The black laborers on John Williams’ plantation never seemed to leave or complain. It took some digging to find out why
For some men the only solution to the dilemma of blacks and whites together was for the blacks to go back where they came from
Packed like animals in the holds of slave ships, Negroes bound for America were prey to disease, brutal masters, and their own suicidal melancholy.
Packed like animals in the holds of slave ships, Negroes bound for America were prey to disease, brutal masters, and their own suicidal melancholy.
Without doubt they were Washington, who walked carefully within the Constitution, and Lincoln, who stretched it as far as he dared
A southern woman’s memoir of a by-gone era
There are many ways of looking at the now-vanished plantation society of the pre-Civil War South. One of them is the way of legend—white-pillared plantation, a leisured and courtly life centering in it, charming women and gallant men consciously living up to a tradition which has lingered on as a memory long after the reality has gone.
A small bit of that legend—faithful to the magnolia-and-roses tradition, but embodying an authentic fragment of real human experience—is presented here, in a memoir written years ago by Cornelia Barrett Ligon, who spent her girlhood on Newstead Plantation, near Jackson, Mississippi, and who in 1932, as very aged woman, set down her reminiscences of the old days. From notes she wrote and dictated, her daughter Lucile Ligon Cope of Port Arthur, Texas, has put together the following account of what life on legendary Old South plantation was like, and how the war finally came to the plantation and ended an era.
AMERICAN HERITAGE presents this memoir as an interesting fragment of the legend and the tradition of fabulous Dixie.
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