Newark TAH Day 3

Morning Historian Discussions by Professor James Oakes:

1. Nowhere to Run: The Emancipation of Louis Hughes

2. Nowhere to Run: The Emancipation of Louis Hughes

Afternoon Education Workshop with Kelly Woestman

1. Connections to Day 2 Activities

2. Excerpt from Autobiography of Louis Hughes
3. The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source
4. The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social History
a. 13th Amendment
b. 14th Amendment
c. 15th Amendment
5. African American Family Photograph
6. Additional Resources
a. Read and ponder the Fugitive Slave Law!
b. Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting
i. Connections back to Frederick Douglass and Lincoln: History
in a Box

Note: All PowerPoints will be posted to Slideshare.net and be

publicly available after the seminar. I will share the online
addresses for those.

If you have questions or would like to share how you used this
material in your teaching of American history, don’t hesitate to
contact me at woestman@pittstate.edu. Just put “Newark” in the
subject line. 
Excerpt from Autobiography of Louis Hughes
[Available from: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/hughes/hughes.html]

As before stated, we arrived in Memphis on the Fourth of July, 1865. My first effort
as a freeman was to get something to do to sustain myself and wife and a babe of a
few months, that was born at the salt works. I succeeded in getting a room for us,
and went to work the second day driving a public carriage. I made enough to keep
us and pay our room rent. By our economy we managed to get on very well. I
worked on, hoping to go further north, feeling somehow that it would be better for
us there; when, one day I ran across a man who knew my wife's mother. He said to
me: "Why, your wife's mother went back up the river to Cincinnati. I knew her well
and the people to whom she belonged." This information made us eager to take
steps to find her. My wife was naturally anxious to follow the clue thus obtained, in
hopes of finding her mother, whom she had not seen since the separation at
Memphis

Page 192

years before. We, therefore, concluded to go as far as Cincinnati, at any rate, and
endeavor to get some further information of mother. My wife seemed to gather new
strength in learning this news of her mother, meager though it was. After a stay in
Memphis of six weeks we went on to Cincinnati, hopeful of meeting some, at least,
of the family that, though free, in defiance of justice, had been consigned to cruel
and hopeless bondage - bondage in violation of civil as well as moral law. We felt it
was almost impossible that we should see any one that we ever knew; but the man
had spoken so earnestly and positively regarding my mother-in-law that we were
not without hope. On arriving at Cincinnati, our first inquiry was about her, my wife
giving her name and description; and, fortunately, we came upon a colored man
who said he knew of a woman answering to the name and description which my
wife gave of her mother, and he directed us to the house where she was stopping.
When we reached the place to which we had been directed, my wife not only found
her mother but one of her sisters. The meeting was a joyful one to us all. No mortal
who has not experienced it can imagine the feeling of those who meet again after

Page 193

long years of enforced separation and hardship and utter ignorance of one another's
condition and place of habitation. …..

Full Source Information:

Thirty Years a Slave.

From Bondage to Freedom.
The Institution of Slavery
as Seen on the Plantation and
in the Home of the Planter:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LOUIS HUGHES
MILWAUKEE:
SOUTH SIDE PRINTING COMPANY
1897

COPYRIGHT, 1896.
Electronic Edition.

Funding from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition

supported the electronic publication of this title.

Text scanned (OCR) by Claire LaForce

Text encoded by Teresa Church and Natalia Smith
First edition, 1997.
ca. 400K
Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
1997.
© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It
may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as
this statement of availability is included in the text.

Here’s more information on this project:

Documenting the American South

[Available from: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html]

"North American Slave Narratives" collects books and articles that document the
individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and
human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This
collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former
slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also
included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some
significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920.

* Introduction
* Browse this Collection Alphabetically
* Browse Images by Subject
* Scholarly Bibliography of Slave and Ex-Slave Narratives compiled by William L.
Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
* Guide to Religious Content in Slave Narratives
* About this Collection
The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source
[Available from: http://historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html]
By David W. Blight
Class of 1954 Professor of American History, Yale University, and Director of Yale's
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African

American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves
themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in America
or England between 1760 and 1860 were windows into the nature of slavery itself;
they were first-person witnesses to the will to be known and the will to write among
a people so often set apart and defined out of the human family of letters. American
slaves wrote their personal stories first because they were under such pressure to
demonstrate their own humanity in a sea of racial prejudice. They also wrote to
prove that they could be reliable truth-tellers of their own experience. And they
wrote I-narratives in order to declare their own literary, psychological, and spiritual
independence. The stories that slaves wrote were not only about how they became
free, but were also precious acts, as the critic William Andrews has put it, of “free-
storytelling.” For former slaves, some of whom were still legally fugitives when they
wrote, the pen became an instrument of liberation when neither law nor society
offered the same.

“Why does the slave ever love?” wrote Harriet Jacobs unforgettably in her Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). “Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine
around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away by the hand of
violence?” In language at once so honest and compelling, Jacobs named one of the
deepest dilemmas American slaves faced, especially women: how indeed to trust, to
love children or a partner with all one’s heart when the world of endearment and
family might be torn apart at almost any time by sale, brutality, or flight. With the
remarkable insight of an ex-slave woman who suffered sexual abuse, separation,
and a long struggle to find safety, much less love, Jacobs declared that, “when
separations come by the hand of death, the pious soul can bow in resignation… But
when the ruthless hand of man strikes the blow… it is hard to be submissive. I did
not reason thus when I was a young girl. Youth will be youth. I loved, and I indulged
the hope that the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright lining. I forgot that
in the land of my birth the shadows are too dense for light to penetrate.”

Jacobs tried to free herself from her past in the act of writing her autobiography. So
did Frederick Douglass in the most eloquent and widely read of all the slave
narratives. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845),
the twenty-seven-year-old, who had escaped at age twenty, left many unforgettable
expressions of the meaning of slavery and freedom. In a theme found in many slave
narratives, Douglass described his achievement of literacy as life-giving, as “the
light [that] broke in upon me by degrees,” and that with time, “gave tongue to
interesting thoughts of my own soul.” At the same time, however, Douglass
admitted with stunning honesty that “the more I read the more I was led to abhor
and detest my enslavers,” considering them “a band of successful robbers, who had
left their homes and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange
land reduced us to slavery.” Like Jacobs, Douglass did not sugar-coat his experience;
his was not merely another success story for American readers eager for tales of
triumph over adversity. He warned his reader that his literacy had liberated him to
knowledge and a semblance of power, but it also worked to “torment and sting my
soul to unutterable anguish.” The ability to grasp and use language, Douglass
lamented, “had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It
opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder on which to get out.”

In their powerful metaphors of darkness and lightness and of a pit with no ladder,
Jacobs and Douglass converted yearnings for love and literacy, the one a universal
human craving and the other among the modern world’s most important sources of
power and human self-worth, into ways of understanding slavery and freedom. Both
wrote about anguish, but Jacobs, despite her pain, could no more stop loving than
she could stop breathing, and no one in the nineteenth century wielded the music of
words better than Douglass in describing America’s hypocrisy and its promise. To
understand this paradox, to probe the slaves’ own experience in bondage and their
quest for freedom, dignity, and human rights, there is no better place to begin than
the slave narratives.

Jacobs’s and Douglass’s autobiographies have become merely the two most famous
in a genre that has received tremendous scholarly and pedagogical attention in
recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century, slave narratives were not
considered proper sources for the study of slavery. Ulrich B. Phillips, the first major
historian of slavery to make extensive use of plantation records, deemed them
inauthentic and biased. Phillips did not acknowledge that ex-slaves left any genuine
testimony on what their lives were really like. His American Negro Slavery (1918),
the most authoritative work on the subject as late as the 1950s, pictured slavery as
a benign institution in which masters and slaves acted out natural roles as parent-
like caretakers and chattel laborers who benefited from contact with a superior
civilization. This white supremacist “Plantation Legend” died hard in American
historiography and popular culture.
But the revolution in African American history, which coincided with the modern civil
rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, brought a renewed attention to and use
of the slave narratives. Historians began to make careful use of the narratives as
sources of historical information, and most importantly, as guides to the slaves’
perspective on their own felt experience. With this rediscovered tool of research,
historians and literary critics have been able to open the world the slaves
themselves made and interpreted – their folk life, religious expression, modes of
resistance, mores and values, and their ultimate psychological survival. What
indeed was it like to be a slave? What were the slaves’ daily feelings, yearnings,
crises, and hardships? Why did some special few escape bondage while most could
not? Was slavery a closed world of total oppression, or a world of reciprocal give-
and-take between slaves and their masters for control of production, time, and self-
worth? The best of the slave narratives offer complex answers to these questions.

Autobiography is self-indulgent by definition; as the reconstruction of a personal

story it often masks as much as it reveals. The best autobiographies are not merely
factual summaries of a person’s life; they are artistic creations, plotted narratives
that serve the ends of the author and impose a story on the reader. The slave
narratives were no exception to this trend. But this makes these tales no less
authentic as literary works, or as sources for understanding history. The slave
narratives are both an original genre of American literature and a source for
reconstructing historical experience.

Ex-slaves were constantly under suspicion about the veracity of their stories and the
authenticity of their writing. Some of the more famous narratives, such as Sojourner
Truth’s (1837), were narrated through an amanuensis, since the author was
illiterate. Many slave narratives were published with letters serving as
endorsements from important white abolitionists, attesting to the authenticity of the
author’s work – Lydia Maria Child for Harriet Jacobs, and William Lloyd Garrison and
Wendell Phillips for Frederick Douglass. And many narratives include the phrase in
their titles, “Written by Himself” or “Herself.”

This necessity of endorsement and verification was more a measure of the

prejudices of the white reading public than of the literary abilities of former slaves.
Whatever those prejudices, however, slave narratives garnered huge audiences in
antebellum America, and most slave narrators wrote their own books. Many became
bestsellers, Douglass’s Narrative selling 30,000 copies within the first five years of
its publication. The narratives by Charles Ball (1837); William Wells Brown (1847);
Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, and James Pennington (all in 1849); Solomon Northup
(1853); and Ellen and William Craft (1860) also were widely read. Many Northern
whites were extremely eager to understand slavery from the slaves’ own
viewpoints; they loved stories of escape, ascension tales of overcoming great
obstacles to achieve hope and triumph. As America’s great political crisis over the
expansion of slavery began to sever the political culture and eventually the Union
itself in the 1850s, slave narratives only grew in popularity. Indeed, some scholars
conclude that it was the slave narratives that forged the large reading audience that
Harriet Beecher Stowe then captured in unprecedented numbers with Uncle Tom’s
Cabin in 1852.

One of the best ways to teach about American slavery is first, to help students
understand the overall history of the African slave trade (especially valuable is
Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, 1789), the emergence of slavery in colonial America
(African-born Venture Smith’s story from Connecticut, 1798), its growth as both a
Northern and especially a Southern institution rooted in money-crop agriculture, and
eventually as the dominant economic and political force in the “slave society” that
the South became by the antebellum period. With that accomplished, teachers can
then assign slave narratives that give students access to the slaves’ daily lives,
their psychological worlds, their treatment and experiences in the master-slave
relationship, and their quest for freedom. It is in the slaves’ own voices that we
might come to understand that most ubiquitous of American concepts – “freedom,”
a word and an idea we best comprehend by seeing and feeling its denials.

My Notes:
The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social
History
[Available from: http://historynow.org/12_2004/historian.html]
by Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University

Photographic montage of lawmakers who voted aye for the Thirteenth Amendment
Photographic montage of lawmakers who voted aye for the Thirteenth
Amendment
Lawmakers Who Voted Aye for the Thirteenth Amendment [Photographic montage]
(GLC07033.03)

On June 13, 1866, Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican floor leader in the House of
Representatives and the nation’s most prominent Radical Republican, rose to
address his Congressional colleagues on the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution. Born during George Washington’s administration, Stevens had enjoyed
a career that embodied, as much as any other person’s, the struggle against slavery
and for equal rights for black Americans. In 1837, as a delegate to Pennsylvania’s
constitutional convention, he had refused to sign the state’s new frame of
government because it abrogated African Americans’ right to vote. During the Civil
War, he was among the first to advocate the emancipation of the slaves and the
enrollment of black soldiers. The most radical of the Radical Republicans, he even
proposed confiscating the land of Confederate planters and distributing small farms
to the former slaves.

Like other Radical Republicans, Stevens believed that Reconstruction was a golden
opportunity to purge the nation of the legacy of slavery and create a “perfect
republic,” whose citizens enjoyed equal civil and political rights, secured by a
powerful and beneficent national government. In his speech on June 13 he offered
an eloquent statement of his political dream -- “that the intelligent, pure and just
men of this Republic . . . would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have
freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the
recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich. . . . .”
Stevens continued that the proposed amendment did not fully live up to this vision.
But he offered his support. Why? “I answer, because I live among men and not
among angels.” A few moments later, the Fourteenth Amendment was approved by
the House. It became part of the Constitution in 1868.
The Fourteenth Amendment did not fully satisfy the Radical Republicans. It did not
abolish existing state governments in the South and made no mention of the right
to vote for blacks. Indeed it allowed a state to deprive black men of the suffrage, so
long as it suffered the penalty of a loss of representation in Congress proportionate
to the black percentage of its population. (No similar penalty applied, however,
when women were denied the right to vote, a provision that led many advocates of
women’s rights to oppose ratification of this amendment.)

Nonetheless, the Fourteenth Amendment was the most important constitutional

change in the nation’s history since the Bill of Rights. Its heart was the first section,
which declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States (except Indians)
to be both national and state citizens, and which prohibited the states from
abridging their “privileges and immunities,” depriving any person of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law, or denying them “equal protection of the
laws.” In clothing with constitutional authority the principle of equality before the
law regardless of race, enforced by the national government, this amendment
permanently transformed the definition of American citizenship as well as relations
between the federal government and the states, and between individual Americans
and the nation. We live today in a legal and constitutional system shaped by the
Fourteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three changes that altered the Constitution
during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in
1865, irrevocably abolished slavery throughout the United States. The Fifteenth,
which became part of the Constitution in 1870, prohibited the states from depriving
any person of the right to vote because of race (although leaving open other forms
of disenfranchisement, including sex, property ownership, literacy, and payment of
a poll tax). In between came the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which gave the vote to
black men in the South and launched the short-lived period of Radical
Reconstruction, during which, for the first time in American history, a genuine
interracial democracy flourished. “Nothing in all history,” wrote the abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this . . . transformation of four million human
beings from . . . the auction-block to the ballot-box.”

These laws and amendments reflected the intersection of two products of the Civil
War era – a newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenry
enjoying equality before the law. These legal changes also arose from the militant
demands for equal rights from the former slaves themselves. As soon as the Civil
War ended, and in some places even before, blacks gathered in mass meetings,
held conventions, and drafted petitions to the federal government, demanding the
same civil and political rights as white Americans. Their mobilization (given moral
authority by the service of 200,000 black men in the Union army and navy in the
last two years of the war) helped to place the question of black citizenship on the
national agenda.

The Reconstruction Amendments, and especially the Fourteenth, transformed the

Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and
the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities
could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct
by all levels of government. The rewriting of the Constitution promoted a sense of
the document’s malleability, and suggested that the rights of individual citizens
were intimately connected to federal power. The Bill of Rights had linked civil
liberties and the autonomy of the states. Its language -- "Congress shall make no
law" -- reflected the belief that concentrated power was a threat to freedom. Now,
rather than a threat to liberty, the federal government, declared Charles Sumner,
the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, had become “the custodian of
freedom.” The Reconstruction Amendments assumed that rights required political
power to enforce them. They not only authorized the federal government to
override state actions that deprived citizens of equality, but each ended with a
clause empowering Congress to "enforce" them with "appropriate legislation."
Limiting the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been intrinsic to the
practice of American democracy. Only in an unparalleled crisis could these limits
have been superseded, even temporarily, by the vision of an egalitarian republic
embracing black Americans as well as white and presided over by the federal
government.

Constitutional amendments are often seen as dry documents, of interest only to

specialists in legal history. In fact, as the amendments of the Civil War era reveal,
they can open a window onto broad issues of political and social history. The
passage of these amendments reflected the immense changes American society
experienced during its greatest crisis. The amendments reveal the intersection of
political debates at the top of society and the struggles of African Americans to
breathe substantive life into the freedom they acquired as a result of the Civil War.
Their failings -- especially the fact that they failed to extend to women the same
rights of citizenship afforded black men -- suggest the limits of change even at a
time of revolutionary transformation.

Moreover, the history of these amendments underscores that rights, even when
embedded in the Constitution, are not self-enforcing, and cannot be taken for
granted. Reconstruction proved fragile and short-lived. Traditional ideas of racism
and localism reasserted themselves, Ku Klux Klan violence disrupted the Southern
Republican party, and the North retreated from the ideal of equality. Increasingly,
the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to eviscerate its
promise of equal citizenship. By the turn of the century, the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments had become dead letters throughout the South. A new racial
system had been put in place, resting on the disenfranchisement of black voters,
segregation in every area of life, unequal education and job opportunities, and the
threat of violent retribution against those who challenged the new order. The blatant
violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments occurred with the
acquiescence of the entire nation. Not until the 1950s and 1960s did a mass
movement of black Southerners and white supporters, coupled with a newly activist
Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Reconstruction Amendments as pillars of racial
justice.

Today, in continuing controversies over abortion rights, affirmative action, the rights
of homosexuals, and many other issues, the interpretation of these amendments,
especially the Fourteenth, remains a focus of judicial decision-making and political
debate. We have not yet created the "perfect republic" of which Stevens dreamed.
But more Americans enjoy more rights and freedoms than ever before in our history.
My Notes:
13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery
(1865)
[Available from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=40]

Transcript of 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865)

AMENDMENT XIII

Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.

Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the
13th amendment.

Annotation from National Archives (www.archives.gov):

The 13th amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States, passed
the Senate on April 8, 1864, and the House on January 31, 1865. On February 1,
1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress
submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The necessary
number of states ratified it by December 6, 1865. The 13th amendment to the
United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

In 1863 President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “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.” Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation did
not end slavery in the nation. Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation
Proclamation would have to be followed by a constitutional amendment in order to
guarantee the abolishment of slavery.

The 13th amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War before the Southern
states had been restored to the Union and should have easily passed the Congress.
Although the Senate passed it in April 1864, the House did not. At that point, Lincoln
took an active role to ensure passage through congress. He insisted that passage of
the 13th amendment be added to the Republican Party platform for the upcoming
Presidential elections. His efforts met with success when the House passed the bill
in January 1865 with a vote of 119–56.
With the adoption of the 13th amendment, the United States found a final
constitutional solution to the issue of slavery. The 13th amendment, along with the
14th and 15th, is one of the trio of Civil War amendments that greatly expanded the
civil rights of Americans.
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868)
[Available from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=43]

AMENDMENT XIV

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No
State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities
of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their
respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding
Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of
electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in
Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the
Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being
twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged,
except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation
therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens
shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such
State.

Section 3.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President
and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or
under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress,
or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as
an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United
States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given
aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of
each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including
debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing
insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor
any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection
or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of
any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the
provisions of this article.
Annotation from National Archives (www.archives.gov):

14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights (1868)

Following the Civil War, Congress submitted to the states three amendments as part
of its Reconstruction program to guarantee equal civil and legal rights to black
citizens. The major provision of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship to “All
persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to
former slaves. Another equally important provision was the statement that “nor
shall any state deprive any person of live, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws.” The right to due process of law and equal protection of the law now applied
to both the Federal and state governments. On June 16, 1866, the House Joint
Resolution proposing the 14th amendment to the Constitution was submitted to the
states. On July 28, 1868, the 14th amendment was declared, in a certificate of the
Secretary of State, ratified by the necessary 28 of the 37 States, and became part
of the supreme law of the land.

Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio, the primary author of the first section of the
14th amendment, intended that the amendment also nationalize the Federal Bill of
Rights by making it binding upon the states. Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan,
introducing the amendment, specifically stated that the privileges and immunities
clause would extend to the states “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by
the first eight amendments.” Historians disagree on how widely Bingham's and
Howard's views were shared at the time in the Congress, or across the country in
general. No one in Congress explicitly contradicted their view of the Amendment,
but only a few members said anything at all about its meaning on this issue. For
many years, the Supreme Court ruled that the Amendment did not extend the Bill of
Rights to the states.

Not only did the 14th amendment fail to extend the Bill of Rights to the states; it
also failed to protect the rights of black citizens. One legacy of Reconstruction was
the determined struggle of black and white citizens to make the promise of the 14th
amendment a reality. Citizens petitioned and initiated court cases, Congress
enacted legislation, and the executive branch attempted to enforce measures that
would guard all citizens’ rights. While these citizens did not succeed in empowering
the 14th amendment during the Reconstruction, they effectively articulated
arguments and offered dissenting opinions that would be the basis for change in the
20th century.
15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870)
[Available from: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=44]

Fortieth Congress of the United States of America;

At the third Session, Begun and held at the city of Washington, on Monday, the
seventh day of December, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight.

A Resolution Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Respresentatives of the United States of

America in Congress assembled, (two-thirds of both Houses concurring) that the
following article be proposed to the legislature of the several States as an
amendment to the Constitution of the United States which, when ratified by three-
fourths of said legislatures shall be valid as part of the Constitution, namely:

Article XV.

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude—

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
Annotation from National Archives (www.archives.gov):

15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870)

To former abolitionists and to the Radical Republicans in Congress who fashioned

Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th amendment, enacted in 1870, appeared
to signify the fulfillment of all promises to African Americans. Set free by the 13th
amendment, with citizenship guaranteed by the 14th amendment, black males were
given the vote by the 15th amendment. From that point on, the freedmen were
generally expected to fend for themselves. In retrospect, it can be seen that the
15th amendment was in reality only the beginning of a struggle for equality that
would continue for more than a century before African Americans could begin to
participate fully in American public and civic life.

African Americans exercised the franchise and held office in many Southern states
through the 1880s, but in the early 1890s, steps were taken to ensure subsequent
“white supremacy.” Literacy tests for the vote, “grandfather clauses” excluding from
the franchise all whose ancestors had not voted in the 1860s, and other devices to
disenfranchise African Americans were written into the constitutions of former
Confederate states. Social and economic segregation were added to black
America’s loss of political power. In 1896 the Supreme Court decision Plessy v.
Ferguson legalized “separate but equal” facilities for the races. For more than 50
years, the overwhelming majority of African American citizens were reduced to
second-class citizenship under the “Jim Crow” segregation system. During that time,
African Americans sought to secure their rights and improve their position through
organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and the National Urban League and through the individual efforts of reformers like
Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and A. Philip Randolph.

The most direct attack on the problem of African American disfranchisement came
in 1965. Prompted by reports of continuing discriminatory voting practices in many
Southern states, President Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a southerner, urged Congress
on March 15, 1965, to pass legislation “which will make it impossible to thwart the
15th amendment.” He reminded Congress that “we cannot have government for all
the people until we first make certain it is government of and by all the people.” The
Voting Rights Act of 1965, extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, abolished all
remaining deterrents to exercising the franchise and authorized Federal supervision
of voter registration where necessary.

(Information excerpted from Milestone Documents [Washington, DC: The National

Archives and Records Administration, 1995] pp. 61-63.)
 African American Family

What are some of your initial thoughts about this photograph from the Gilder
Lehrman Collection?

What additional information would be helpful in further analyzing this picture?

What background information would you give your students before you asked them
to analyze this picture?
Here’s more information about the photograph on the previous page:

Portrait of an African-American family in Calhoun, Alabama, cyanotype by Richard

Riley, late nineteenth century. The Gilder Lehrman Collection.
[http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/online/wilberforce/slide12.html]

This photograph depicts a free black family living in the post-Civil War American
South. The dignity and pride in their bearing suggest how consciously they were
throwing off the legacy of slavery for themselves and their children.

Note that the following sources connect us back to Frederick Douglass and
Day 1.
Additional Resources:
Note that the following sources connect us back to Frederick Douglass and Day 1.

Read and ponder the Fugitive Slave Law! [1850]

[Available from:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/display_results.php?id=GLC01862]
Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC01862

Title: Read and ponder the Fugitive Slave Law!

Author: unknown
Year: 1850
Place: Boston, Massachusetts
Type of document: Broadside
Quotation: "Read and Ponder the Fugitive Slave Law!"

Description:
A large anti-Whig broadside, attacking Samuel A. Elliott of Boston, and re-printing
the Fugitive Slave law. Emphasis added with capital letters in some sections.
Declares that the law is against the Constitution, habeas corpus and Christianity.
States of the law, "...which tramples on the Constitution, by its denial of the sacred
rights of Trial by Jury, Habeas Corpus, and Appeal..." Appeals to the public,
"Freemen of Massachusetts, Remember, that Samuel A. Elliott of Boston, voted for
this law, that Millard Fillmore, our Whig President approved it..." Three columns,
large banner headline, text framed in black rules. Backed on linen. Printed at the
Spy Office, with black borders.

Full Text:

Read and Ponder the Fugitive Slave Law! Which disregards all the ordinary securities
of PERSONAL LIBERTY, which tramples on the Constitution, by its denial of the
sacred rights of Trial by Jury, Habeas Corpus, and Appeal, and which enacts, that the
Cardinal Virtues of Christianity shall be considered, in the eye of the law, as CRIMES,
punishable with the severest penalties,--Fines and Imprisonment.... Sec. 5 And be it
further enacted, that it shall be the duty of all marshals and deputy marshals to
obey and execute all warrants and precepts issued under the provisions of this act,
when to them directed; and should any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to receive
such warrant...he shall...be fined in the sum of $1,000... and ALL GOOD CITIZENS
are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of
this law whenever their services may be required Sec. 6. And be it further enacted.
That when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United
States has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory...the
person or persons to whom such service or labor may be due...may pursue and
reclaim such fugitive person, either by procuring a warrant from some one of the
courts, judges or commissioners...or by seizing and arresting such fugitive, where
the same can be done without process, and by taking...such person...before such
court, judge or commissioner, whose duty it shall be to hear and determine the case
of such claimant in a SUMMARY MANNER; and upon satisfactory proof being made,
by disposition or affidavit, in writing, to be taken and certified by such court...[A]
certificate of such magistracy...shall be SUFFICIENT TO ESTABLISH THE
COMPETENCY OF THE PROOF, AND WITH PROOF, ALSO BY AFFIDAVIT, of the identity
of the person whose service or labor is claimed to be due.... IN NO TRIAL OR
HEARING UNDER THIS ACT SHALL THE TESTIMONY OF SUCH ALLEGED FUGITIVE BE
ADMITTED IN EVIDENCE.... Sec. 7. And be it further enacted, That any person who
shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder or prevent such claimant, his agent, or
attorney, or any person or persons lawfully assisting him...or shall aid, abet, or
assist such a person so owing service or labor...directly or indirectly to escape...or
SHALL HARBOR or CONCEAL such fugitive...shall, for either of said offences be
subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not
exceeding six months.

Annotation:
The most divisive element in the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Law,
which permitted any African American to be seized and sent south solely on the
affidavit of anyone claiming to be his or her owner. As a result, free blacks were in
danger of being placed in slavery. The law also stripped runaway slaves of the right
to a jury trial and the right to testify in their own defense. The law further stipulated
that accused runaways stand trial in front of special commissioners, not a judge or a
jury, and that the commissioners be paid $10 if a fugitive was returned to slavery
but only $5 if the fugitive was freed--a provision that many Northerners regarded as
a bribe to ensure that any black accused of being a runaway would be found guilty
(the provision was justified by the supposed costs involved). And finally, the law
required all U.S. citizens to assist in the capture of escapees.
Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting [1851]

Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC04717.16

Title: Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting. At a large meeting of persons from various
parts of the State of New York, held in the City of Syracuse...

Author: Smith, Gerrit (1797-1874)

Year: 1851/01/09
Place: Syracuse, New York
Type of document: Printed document

Quotation: "We pour out upon the Fugitive Slave Law the fullest measure of our
contempt and hate"

Description:

Anti-Fugitive Slave Law Meeting. At a large meeting of persons from various parts of
the State of New York, held in the City of Syracuse,January 9th 1851, and of which
Frederick Douglass was President, the following resolutions and address were
unanimously adopted. The address is the same, and, with an inconsiderable
exception, the Resolutions are the same, as those, which were reported by Gerrit
Smith to the State Convention held in said City, January 7th, 8th, 9th, 1851.

Full Text:

1st. Resolved, that we pour out upon the Fugitive Slave Law the fullest measure of
our contempt and hate and execration; and pledge ourselves to resist it actively, as
well as passively, and by all such means, as shall, in our esteem, promise the most
effectual resistance.

2d. Resolved, that they who consent to be the agents of Southern oppressors for
executing this law, whether as Commissioners or Marshals, or in any other capacity,
are to be regarded as kidnappers and land-pirates.

3d. Resolved, that it is our duty to peril life, liberty, and property, in behalf of the
fugitive slave, to as great an extent as we would peril them in behalf of ourselves.

4th. Resolved, that obviously and grossly Unconstitutional as is this Law,

nevertheless this is not the chief reason why we condemn and defy it:--for equally,
whether they are Constitutional or Unconstitutional, we do condemn and defy all
laws, which insult Him, who is above all Constitutions, and which, aiming not to
protect, but to destroy, rights, are, therefore to be regarded as no laws.

5th. Resolved, that horrible as is this law, we must bear in mind, that it is but a
perfectly natural and not at all to be wondered at exaction of slavery; and that,
hence our first and great work is to get rid, not of the law, but of slavery--as it would
be our first and great work to pursue and kill the mad-dog, instead of pausing, until
we had effected the cure of one of his bites.
6th. Resolved, that between corrupt politics on the one hand and corrupt churches
on the other--between the politicians and parties, who enacted this Law, and the
priests who are preaching its enforcement--there is no hope for this Nation, unless it
shall very speedily be brought to prefer honesty to knavery, both in its religious
teachers and civil rulers.

7th. Resolved, that, were the current religion of this country to be exchanged for
rank infidelity, the abolition of slavery would be comparatively easy.

8th. Resolved, that when the immortal writer of the Declaration of Independence
said: "If we do not liberate the enslaved by that generous energy of our own minds,
they must, they will, be liberated by the awful process" of St. Domingo
Emancipation, he uttered words, which there is but too much reason to believe are
rapidly approaching their fulfillment.

9th. Resolved, that inasmuch as sound principles and sound teachers are as
indispensable in our Institutions of Learning, as in our pulpits, we rejoice to know,
that, under the progress of antislavery sentiment, there are already several Colleges
in our country, which are opened to colored students; and that there are two of
these in which colored students find themselves emphatically at home. There are
Oberlin College in Ohio, and Central College in New York--in the latter of which there
is a colored Professor.

10th. Resolved, that, inasmuch as every National party in this Nation must, because
it is a National party, spare, if not indeed, positively favor, slavery, it follows, that
whoever belongs to the Whig or Democratic party, or to any ecclesiastical National
party, does, however unwillingly or unwittingly, give his influence and support to
slavery.

11th. Resolved, that the time has come, and had long ago come, for gathering a
Northern political party, which shall be both determined and able to carry out the
principles of the Federal Constitution and the principles of humanity and religion, in
overthrowing the base and bloody system of American slavery, and in establishing a
righteous Civil Government....

Annotation:
Smith, a politician from New York, served as a U.S. Representative from 1853-1854.
He was a noted philanthropist and social reformer active in anti-slavery campaigns
and women's rights.