"Colored Citizens, To Arms!"
This 1864 poster was used to recruit African-American soldiers for the 20th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, a Union Army regiment based in New York state. The poster offers the lure of an up-front payment of $375 plus an additional $10 for anyone signing up, but likely more persuasive was the sentiment borne by the stern-looking eagle: "Who would be Free, Himself must Strike the Blow!" Such recruitment efforts were met with an enthusiastic reception by African-American men of fighting age, with thousands enlisting after legislation was passed allowing them to serve in 1863.
Francis & Loutrel
Recruiting Poster, 20th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, c. 1864, broadside, ink on paper (New York: Francis & Loutrel, Stationers & Steam Printers).
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1864 (Circa)
English
Poster/Print
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"Colored Troops under General Wild, liberating slaves in North Carolina"
In this journalistic sketch, a group of African American soldiers liberates a plantation in eastern North Carolina. The troops were the so-called "African Brigade" composed of black recruits from Massachusetts and newly freed contraband slaves from Union-occupied territories of North Carolina. Like all black troops in the Civil War, the African Brigade was led by a white officer, in this case an abolitionist from Massachusetts. Although some Northerners doubted whether freedmen would make effective soldiers, Union officers in the area reported that "recruiting for the African Brigade is progressing lively and enthusiastically...Quite a recruiting fever has seized the freedmen of [New Bern]...Four thousand colored soldiers are counted upon in this [district]." Another officer wrote "One can hardly forget the enthusiasm amongst the negroes of this place..."
Unknown
<em>Harper's Weekly</em> (Jan. 23, 1864), p. 52; available from <em>The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas</em>, Image Reference HW0022.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1864
<em><a href="http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/Conditions.php" target="_blank">The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas</a></em>.
1778, 1387
English
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"God Save Our Noble Union"
<em>The Staunton Spectator</em> was a Whig newspaper that opposed Virginia's secession from the Union. Despite their state's subsequent status as the seat of the Confederacy, Virginians, like many residents of the Upper South, remained divided over the issue of secession in the months after South Carolina and the other states of the Deep South declared the formation of the Confederate States of America. In the 1861 election, in which Lincoln was elected President, Virginia's electoral votes had gone to John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, which opposed secession. This poem, published in the <em>Spectator </em>on January 22, 1861, sings the praises of the "noble Union" and ardently urges that it be preserved, despite the "signs of coming storms."
The Staunton Spectator
The (Staunton, Va.) <em>Spectator</em>, 22 January 1861, from "The Valley of the Shadow," The Virginia Center for Digital History, http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/teaching/vclassroom/vasecess.html.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1861
English
Fiction/Poetry
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"In Defense of My Race and Country": African-American Soldiers on Why They Are Fighting
Slavery and Abolition
Civil Rights and Citizenship
In this activity students read three letters written by African-American soldiers during the Civil War to determine why black soldiers felt compelled to join the Union Army.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2009.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2009
Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
<div><br /><div><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div>
</div>
English
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"James Hopkinson's Plantation. Planting Sweet Potatoes"
Work
Early in the Civil War, on November 7, 1861, a fleet of Union gunboats bombarded the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Confederate planters left hastily, ordering their field hands and house servants to accompany them. Most ignored their former masters and remained. The Union government eventually appointed northern antislavery reformers to manage the lands abandoned by the planters and to oversee the labor of ex-slaves. These reformers wanted to demonstrate the superiority of free over slave labor in the cultivation of cotton. Most freedpeople, however, did not want to grow cotton or produce for the market, preferring instead to grow corn, potatoes, and other subsistence crops. Henry P. Moore, a native of New Hampshire who traveled to South Carolina during the Civil War, took this 1862 photograph after white planters had already left Edisto island. Though Moore may have staged the people in the photo, the clothing, crops, tools, and wagon in the photograph were all authentic.
Henry P. Moore
Henry P. Moore, "James Hopkinson's Plantation. Planting Sweet Potatoes," photograph, 1862, New York Historical Society; from American Social History Project, <em>Freedom's Unfinished Revolution</em> (New Press, 1996), p. 154.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1862
1605
English
Photograph
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"Men of Color, To Arms!"
In this 1863 editorial, Frederick Douglass calls all able-bodied African Americans to take up arms in defense of the Union. He encourages them to travel to Boston in order to join one of the first regiments of black soldiers forming there.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass, "Men of Color, to Arms!," <em>The North Star</em>, 2 March 1863; from<em>The African American Experience: the History of Black Americans from 1619 to 1890,</em> http://unitus.org/FULL/afro-1.pdf.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1863
English
Newspaper/Magazine Article
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"Southern 'Volunteers'"
This Civil War-era lithograph, circulated in the North, lampoons the idea that the Confederate Army was composed of southern "volunteers." A conscript is compelled by force to fight for "King Cotton," despite his protests that he is a "Union man." In reality, both the Union and Confederate Armies relied on conscription to fill their ranks, and in both cases men from the poorest classes were the most directly affected, while the wealthy were offered exemptions from service. Despite the aristocratic dress of the conscripts in the cartoon, it was poor southern whites (especially those from the mountain regions of southern states, where plantation farming was virtually nonexistent) who were most likely to be resentful of conscription and most likely to support the Union.
Unknown
"Southern 'Volunteers'," New York [?], Currier and Ives, circa 1862, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a12086.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1862 (Circa)
English
Cartoon
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"Wanted, a Substitute"
This Civil War-era song sheet refers to a provision in the draft laws passed by Congress in March of 1863 which allowed men to either pay $300 or provide a substitute to avoid serving in the Union Army. The provision was a source of resentment for many poor and working-class northerners, some of whom felt the war had become "the rich man's war and the poor man's fight." Thus the ironic tone of the song's lyrics, heightened by the humorous illustration of the two figures on the song sheet's cover: one man, disheveled in appearance and clearly disgruntled, grumbles "I'm drafted," while his more aristocratic-looking counterpart proclaims "I ain't."
Unknown
Frank Wilder, "Wanted, A Substitute," sheetmusic, (Boston: Oliver Ditson & Co., 1863), available from Johns Hopkins University, Levy Sheet Music Collection, https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/11661?show=full.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1863
English
Music/Song
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
"Why Non-Slaveholders Fought for the Confederacy"
Slavery and Abolition
Historian Greg Downs describes the motivations that drove non-slaveholding white Southerners to fight for the Confederacy and to protect slavery.
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2010.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
2010
Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
<div><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons License" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div>
1380
English
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
<em>A Ride for Liberty</em>
Slavery and Abolition
In 1862, American painter Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) made trips to Union encampments to witness and sketch the war's events. Throughout the war, African-American men, women, and children escaped slavery by fleeing to Union encampments. Union commanders referred them as wartime "contraband," or property forfeited by the rebellious Confederates. Johnson's few surviving depictions of actual episodes from the Civil War include his painting <em>A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves</em>, which he described as having been "seen by myself at Centerville, on the morning of McClellan's advance towards Manassas, March 2nd, 1862." By the end of the war, nearly a million ex-slaves were under some kind of federal protection.
Eastman Johnson
Eastman Johnson, <em>Ride for Liberty--The Fugitive Slaves</em>, 1862, oil on board, Brooklyn Museum, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/495.
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
1862
Used by permission of the Brooklyn Museum.
530, 1619
English
Painting
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)