Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery

Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery

Leon F. Litwack

Language: English

Pages: 672

ISBN: 0394743989

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
Based on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution."

Contents
1. "The Faithful Slave"
2. Black Liberators
3. Kingdom Comin'
4. Slaves No More
5. How Free is Free?
6. The Feel of Freedom: Moving About
7. Back to Work: The Old Compulsions
8. Back to Work: The New Dependency
9. The Gospel and the Primer
10. Becoming a People

Gods and Generals: A Novel of the Civil War

Devil's Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest

The Killing Ground Wilderness to Cold Harbor

1861: The Civil War Awakening

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Department of Archives and History; and the Valentine Museum and State Library in Richmond, Virginia. I should also like to express my appreciation to the Board of Trustees of the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia for their kind permission to use and microfilm The Christian Recorder, a rare and major source of black testimony from the wartime and postwar South that proved indispensable to my work. The opportunity to draw on the knowledge and insights of many

development of the Northern colored men and women” into the South. Negro gentlemen and ladies must become teachers among them by example as well as by precept, teach them that though they be black, they are as good as any other class whose skin is whiter than theirs; teach them that complexions may differ but man is a man for all that. Finally, colored men in the North have got to come to this doctrine, that black men must think for themselves—act for themselves …86 9 BEFORE THE

the Civil War, 152. 76. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 86–97. For accounts of slave prices during the war, see also Ruffin, Diary, II, 353, 466; Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States, 62; Bettersworth, Confederate Mississippi, 167–69; and Bryan, Confederate Georgia, 130–31. 77. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, V: Texas Narr. (Part 4), 195; XVI: Va. Narr., 6; Perdue et al. (eds.), Weevils in the Wheat, 39; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, 497. 78. Montgomery Advertiser, quoted in Douglass’ Monthly,

meetings by ex-slaves, see Rawick (ed.), American Slave, III: S.C. Narr. (Part 3), 178; VIII: Ark. Narr. (Part 1), 37–38; XIII: Ga. Narr. (Part 4), 34. 39. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, IV and V: Texas Narr. (Part 2), 45–46, (Part 3), 70; Ravenel, Private Journal, 213–14. 40. Rawick (ed.), American Slave, II: S.C Narr. (Part 1), 225; Macrae, Americans at Home, 209; Black Republican, April 29, 1865; Christian Recorder, Aug. 19, 1865. See also Christian Recorder, July 1, 1865; Dennett, The South

slave in Wake County, North Carolina, could easily sense the change that had come over the plantation on which she resided. “Missus and marster began to walk around and act queer. The grown slaves were whisperin’ to each other. Sometimes they gathered in little gangs in the grove.” In the next several days, the noise of distant gunfire grew louder, everybody “seemed to be disturbed,” the slaves walked about aimlessly, nobody was working, “and marster and missus were crying.” Finally, the word

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