HIST 103A Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Emancipation Proclamation, Emancipation Day, Great Renaming
2 May 2018
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Lecture 16.1: Reconstruction
Victory, Defeat and Jubilee
➢Mourning Lincoln and Union Perspective
○After his assassination, Lincoln became the Union’s martyr
■Grief for him mirrored, amplified, and expressed grief for the war dead
●Mourning was an intensely personal, yet publicly shared practice
○All of the Union suffering and all of the Union dead
■His death was treated like that of a saint
○Tens of thousands watched his funeral train pass by, or filed past his coffin at
public memorials
■Stopped at every major city and had a large parade
■Victorian mourning culture focuses on death
●Death is a ritual that is highly socialized
○Laid to rest on 1875
○How could the country come back together after such suffering?
➢Confederate Experience of Defeat
○Post-war South lay in ruins
■Part of the Southerner’s own hand
■Began to starve
○Tinged with a great sense of fear, even while celebrating Lincoln’s death as
justice
○Many white Southerners expected bloody retribution for their practice of slavery
■From former slaves or Union soldiers, or both
●It never came
■Some of the South’s elite also fled to Europe, Cuba, Brazil, etc
●To other slave societies
●Jefferson Davis was caught and imprisoned in his attempt to flee
●Ex-Patriot movement
○Predominantly from elites
○Elite slave owners misunderstood what the Union meant and what they stood for
■The Union did not stand for bloody retribution
●They wanted instead to remake the south to prevent future
rebellion while also ending the slavery
○They had to shed blood to get there, but they were not
looking for more
○How could the South rejoin the union – and how could former Confederates
re-establish their power?
➢Ex-Slaves’ Jubilee
○Saw their release as their release from bondage
■As a “promised miracle”
●Biblical term
○What did the end of bondage mean?
■Escape from injustice of slavery
●Whipping, family separation, sale, sexual exploitation, rape, etc
■Exercise of civil & political rights
●Held mass meetings, created civic associations, organized
churches, went to school, etc
●Married and had children without the fear of them being enslaved
■More opportunities
●Exercised their freedom by doing things that they couldn’t do
●Great renaming of slaves
○A lot of “Washington”’s and “Lincoln”’s
○Took surnames
■Their master’s name, the name of Union generals,
family members, etc
■Family reunion
●Movement and search for their separated families
○Large wave of ads of ex-slaves looking for their children,
husbands, parents, and other family
○Celebrations of freedom:
■Independence Day (July 4)
●No longer a day that excludes African Americans
○Can be shared as a day for independence for all
■Emancipation Day (Jan 1)
●The day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect
■Juneteenth (June 19)
●Commemorates the Union army landing in Galveston, Texas, the
last refuge of the South of the Confederacy
○The landing served notice that slavery was ended in the last
of Confederate territories by Emancipation Proclamation
●Union military forces made freedom real for people as far as Texas
○How would freed people’s rights and desires be protected while the country
reestablished order?
Wartime Reconstruction (1861-1865)
➢Experiments in free labor:
○The Union experimented with ways to transition from enslaved to free labor
■Sea Islands, SC (1861)
●Taken by Union forces early on in the war in 1861
●Approximately 10,000 enslaved people lived there
●The Union government put these islands under the authority of the
Treasury because the people living there were contraband
○The Treasury has control over property of the US gov’t
●The Treasury sets up schools for enslaved people and their children
●Lands that have been abandoned by slaveowners were divided up
into small plots and distributed to former slaves in return for a
share of the yearly crop (cotton)
○Sharecropping
■Worked for white laborers in other places
■Produced long-stable luxurious brand of cotton,
used for more specific application
●Emphasized use of contracts and wages
○Freely selling labor to someone else
○Working for a share of the product
●Produced all kinds of problems
○Union officials wanted African Americans to work with the
same efficiency they did under slavery, but they did not
■Not productive for producing cotton
○Worker-manager issues sprouted
■New Orleans, LA (1862)
●Taken by Union forces in 1862, but the planters there did not flee,
even as their slaves were free
●Sugar plantations that dominated here cannot be worked on the
same individual plot system like cotton cultivation
○Needed to be quickly processed quickly over a large area,
with work forces & equipment that can work at a high rate
■Intensive labor, which is why they used slaves
●Planters tried to enforce labor in the way they had before, with
violence and threats of force
○As well as contracts to bound their formerly enslaved
workers to new kinds of servitude
Document Summary
After his assassination, lincoln became the union"s martyr. Grief for him mirrored, amplified, and expressed grief for the war dead. Mourning was an intensely personal, yet publicly shared practice. All of the union suffering and all of the union dead. His death was treated like that of a saint. Tens of thousands watched his funeral train pass by, or filed past his coffin at public memorials. Stopped at every major city and had a large parade. Death is a ritual that is highly socialized. Tinged with a great sense of fear, even while celebrating lincoln"s death as justice. Many white southerners expected bloody retribution for their practice of slavery. From former slaves or union soldiers, or both. Some of the south"s elite also fled to europe, cuba, brazil, etc. Jefferson davis was caught and imprisoned in his attempt to flee. Elite slave owners misunderstood what the union meant and what they stood for.
