The Civil War

1861 to 1865

The South went to war to keep us. It said so in its own words.

In 1861, Mississippi declared: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." In Savannah, the Confederacy's Vice President said its corner-stone rested on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."

When freedom came, the money went the other way. In 1862, Washington paid slaveholders up to $300 for each person it freed. That same year, Robert Smalls sailed a Confederate ship out of Charleston to freedom.

From 1863, about 179,000 Black men wore the Union's uniform, and nearly 40,000 of them died. A Black soldier was paid $7 a month to a white soldier's $13. In 1864, at Fort Pillow, Confederate troops massacred the Black garrison.

In January 1865, freed families were given forty acres on the coast. Within the year, most of it was given back to the planters. That year, the 13th Amendment ended slavery, "except as a punishment for crime." That door would not stay closed.

Tap Next to read each record. Every fact in them carries a small [Source] mark. Tap it to see where the fact comes from.

We don't need to raise our voice. The truth, told exactly, is enough.

1861 Proven

Mississippi Leaves the Union

Some people still say the war was about something else. The states that started it said, in writing, what it was about.

On 9 January 1861, Mississippi voted to leave the United States. Its declaration gave the reason: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world." ^[Source 1]

Most of the men who voted saw leaving as the way to protect slavery, the source of white wealth. ^[Source 1]

The other states said the same. South Carolina complained that the free states had "denounced as sinful the institution of slavery." Georgia blamed the North's "fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally abolish slavery." ^[Source 2]

And Texas wrote that slavery was "mutually beneficial to both bond and free." Their words, not mine. ^[Source 2]

1861 Proven

The Cornerstone Speech

In my own Savannah, the Confederacy told the world what it stood on.

On 21 March 1861, Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate States, explained what the new nation was built on. ^[Source 1]

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." ^[Source 1]

That was the cornerstone. We were what they built on.

1861 Proven

The Contrabands of Fort Monroe

Freedom did not wait for Washington. We rowed to it.

The Confederate army had leased enslaved men to build its gun batteries on the Virginia coast. ^[Source 1]

On the night of 23 May 1861, three of them, Frank Baker, James Townsend and Shepard Mallory, took a small boat and escaped to Fort Monroe, held by the Union. ^[Source 1]

A Virginia slaveholder demanded them back. General Benjamin Butler refused, because they were being used to make war on the Union. He called them "contraband of war": not free people, but enemy property. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

Within days, others came. The fort became known as "Freedom's Fortress," and its Grand Contraband Camp grew to hold more than 10,000 people who had freed themselves. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

1862 Proven

Washington Pays the Slaveholders

The United States paid compensation for slavery once. It paid the slaveholders.

On 16 April 1862, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act became law, and slavery ended in the nation's capital. ^[Source 1]

The slaveholders were paid. Commissioners approved more than 930 of their petitions, at up to $300 for each person, and 2,989 people were freed. ^[Source 1]

The people who had been held in slavery received nothing for their years of labor. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the nation had already set the rule: the loss belonged to the owner, not the owned.

1862 Proven

Susie King Taylor

A Savannah girl who learned to read in secret, and then taught a regiment.

She was born on 6 August 1848, in Liberty County, Georgia, to enslaved parents. ^[Source 1]

As a child in Savannah, she went to secret schools run by Black women, though Georgia's law forbade teaching us to read. She wrote later that they went "with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them." ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

In April 1862, she escaped to St. Simons Island, held by the Union. There she opened a school, teaching forty children by day and grown people at night. ^[Source 1]

That same year she began to follow the regiment of her husband and her brothers, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, as its nurse and laundress, and she taught the soldiers to read and write. ^[Source 1]

1862 Proven

Robert Smalls and the Planter

He stole a warship, and his whole family, out of slavery.

Robert Smalls was 23 and enslaved, one of the best pilots in Charleston harbor, though the Confederates would not give an enslaved man that title. ^[Source 1]

On the night of 12 May 1862, he and the other enslaved men of the crew took the steamer Planter. His wife Hannah, their daughter Elizabeth and their baby son were among the 16 people on board. ^[Source 1]

They sailed past the harbor forts, Fort Sumter among them, giving the Confederate signals. By morning, on 13 May, they had reached the Union fleet, and freedom. ^[Source 2]

Smalls handed the Union the ship and its guns. He went on to serve in the United States Congress. ^[Source 1]

1862 Proven

Lincoln Asks Black Americans to Leave

The President who signed the Proclamation also asked us to leave the country.

On 14 August 1862, President Abraham Lincoln invited a committee of Black men to the White House. ^[Source 1]

He told them: "You and we are different races." Between them, he said, was a "broader difference than exists between almost any other two races." ^[Source 1]

"But for your race among us there could not be war," he said. "It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated." ^[Source 1]

The place he had in mind for us was a colony in Central America. Five weeks later, he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

We built this country. We were not leaving it.

1862 Proven

"Without Freeing Any Slave"

Lincoln said it plainly himself. Our freedom was not his first aim.

On 22 August 1862, President Abraham Lincoln answered a public letter from the newspaper editor Horace Greeley. ^[Source 1]

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery." ^[Source 1]

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it." ^[Source 1]

One month later, he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Freeing us had become the way to win. ^[Source 2]

1862 Proven

Island Mound

Before the Proclamation let us in, Black men in Kansas were already fighting.

In August 1862, Senator James Henry Lane began raising the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, the first Black soldiers recruited in the Northern states for the war. ^[Source 1]

In late October 1862, at Island Mound, in Bates County, Missouri, 225 of its men faced 500 Confederates. ^[Source 1]

They drove them off. Ten of them were killed, and twelve wounded. ^[Source 1]

Harper's Weekly told the nation how they fought: "The fight thus became a hand to hand encounter of one man to six." ^[Source 2]

They were the first Black soldiers of the Union to be tested in battle, and the first to die in action. Remember their courage. ^[Source 1]

1863 Proven

The Emancipation Proclamation

It is remembered as the day we were freed. Read what it actually said.

On 22 September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued a warning to the rebel states: the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. ^[Source 1]

On 1 January 1863, he declared that all persons held as slaves in the states in rebellion "are, and henceforward shall be free." ^[Source 1]

It did not touch slavery in the slave states that stayed loyal to the Union, or in the Confederate places the Union army already held. ^[Source 1]

But it also said Black men "will be received into the armed service of the United States." That part changed everything. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union, and for our own freedom. ^[Source 1]

1863 Proven

Tubman at the Combahee

The woman who walked out of slavery came back with an army.

Since her escape from Maryland in 1849, Harriet Tubman had gone back about 13 times to bring out her family and friends, and had given directions to about 70 more. ^[Source 1]

On 1 June 1863, in the Civil War, she helped lead the raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina. It freed more than 700 enslaved people. ^[Source 1]

1863 Proven

Milliken's Bend

Newly recruited, barely trained, they held the line.

On 7 June 1863, Confederates attacked the Union post at Milliken's Bend, on the Mississippi River above Vicksburg. ^[Source 1]

It was held by the 8th, 9th, 11th and 13th Louisiana and the 1st Mississippi Infantry, regiments of African descent, with the white 23rd Iowa: 1,061 men in all. The Black troops were newly recruited, poorly trained and poorly armed. ^[Source 1]

The Union lost 101 killed, 285 wounded and 266 captured or missing. Even the Confederate commander wrote that the Black soldiers resisted "with considerable obstinacy." ^[Source 1]

The Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, wrote: "The slave has proved his manhood, and his capacity as an infantry soldier, at Milliken's Bend." We never needed to prove it. But we did. ^[Source 1]

1863 Proven

The New York Draft Riots

While our men were dying for the Union, the North's largest city hunted us in the streets.

On Monday, 13 July 1863, as the Union draft began, New York City exploded. For five days, mobs turned on Black New Yorkers. They attacked a fruit seller, a nine-year-old boy, and Black men working the docks. ^[Source 1]

They looted and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. The 233 children inside were led to safety by the matron, "barely escaping with their lives." ^[Source 2]

The New York Times reported: "There is now scarcely one brick left upon another of the Orphan Asylum." Without the firemen and others who stood in the way, the children "would have been murdered in cold blood." ^{[Source 3] [Source 4]}

"In all, rioters lynched eleven black men over the five days of mayhem." They beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. ^[Source 1]

Hundreds of us were forced out of the city. ^[Source 1]

1863 Proven

The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner

They were asked to lead the charge. They did.

The 54th Massachusetts was one of the first Black regiments raised by the Union. ^[Source 1]

In July 1863, it led the attack on Fort Wagner, guarding the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. ^[Source 2]

The regiment lost two-thirds of its officers and half of its men. ^[Source 2]

That same year, the Confederate Congress threatened to enslave Black soldiers it captured, and to punish their white officers severely. Lincoln answered by threatening the same against Confederate prisoners. ^[Source 2]

1864 Proven

Fort Pillow

They surrendered. They were shot anyway, because they were Black.

On 12 April 1864, about 2,500 Confederate cavalry under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River in Tennessee. ^[Source 1]

The fort was held by 295 white Tennessee soldiers and 262 men of the U.S. Colored Troops. ^[Source 1]

When the fort fell, Confederate soldiers shot Black Union soldiers who had already been captured. Forrest saw it, and did nothing to stop it. ^[Source 2]

Only 62 of the 262 Black soldiers survived. "Fort Pillow" became a rallying cry for the Union. ^[Source 1]

After the war, Forrest was elected the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. ^[Source 3] The record runs in a straight line.

1864 Proven

Less Pay to Die

Same war. Same bullets. Less pay.

A white private in the Union army was paid $13 a month. ^[Source 1]

A Black soldier was paid $10 a month, and $3 of that was taken back for his clothing. He kept $7. ^[Source 1]

In June 1864, Congress gave the U.S. Colored Troops equal pay, and made it back pay. ^[Source 1]

Even the men dying for this country had to fight it for a fair wage. Some things have not changed enough.

1864 Proven

The Crater

Again: they surrendered, and they were killed.

On 30 July 1864, outside Petersburg, Virginia, Union soldiers blew a huge crater in the Confederate lines and charged into it. Black soldiers were among the last of General Ambrose Burnside's men to go in. ^[Source 1]

The Confederates of General William Mahone's division counterattacked. ^[Source 1]

The Black soldiers suffered far more than their share. They became special targets, and many were killed after they had surrendered. ^[Source 1]

About 3,800 Union soldiers were lost that day. ^[Source 1]

Two days later, their own commander, General Edward Ferrero, wrote: "They were repulsed, but veterans could hardly have stood the fire to which they were exposed." And: "Of the behavior of the officers and men I cannot speak too highly." ^{[Source 2] [Source 3]}

1864 Proven

Saltville

Even their wounded, lying in hospital beds, were not safe.

The 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry was raised at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, mostly from men who had been enslaved. On the march to Saltville, Virginia, white Union soldiers mocked them, pulled off their caps and stole their horses. ^[Source 1]

On 2 October 1864, after two failed charges, they took the Confederate line in a third, and held it for more than two hours, low on ammunition, before pulling back at dusk. ^[Source 1]

Their wounded were left behind. The next morning, Confederates searched for them and killed them. On 3 October, armed men took five wounded Black privates from a field hospital and shot them. On 7 October, men walked into the hospital at Emory and Henry College and shot two wounded Black soldiers dead in their beds. ^[Source 1]

About 45 to 50 Black soldiers were killed. ^[Source 1]

1864 Proven

Camp Nelson

Their husbands and fathers were in Union uniform. The Union put their families out in the snow.

At Camp Nelson, in Kentucky, hundreds of the refugees were the wives and children of Black soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops. ^[Source 1]

On 23 November 1864, in the middle of a winter storm, the camp's commander, Brigadier General Speed S. Fry, had 400 of them forced out. One soldier said: "my wife and children had no place to go." ^[Source 1]

His superiors soon canceled the order. Of the 250 who came back, at least 102 died in the weeks and months after. What became of the other 150 is not known. ^[Source 1]

1864 Proven

Ebenezer Creek

This happened just up the road from Savannah. They followed the army to freedom, and the army left them to drown.

In December 1864, on Sherman's March to the Sea, thousands of freed people followed the Union army toward Savannah. ^[Source 1]

On 9 December 1864, General Jefferson C. Davis crossed Ebenezer Creek with his 14th Army Corps. Then he had the pontoon bridges taken up. ^[Source 1]

The freed people were left on the far bank, with the Confederates behind them. Hundreds drowned trying to swim the flooded creek. ^[Source 1]

Some accounts say about 5,000 people were stranded. The true number is not known. Their names are not known either. ^[Source 1]

1865 Proven

Forty Acres

This is the promise. It was made in Savannah, in writing, and then it was taken back.

On 12 January 1865, in Savannah, General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met with twenty Black leaders, most of them Baptist and Methodist ministers. ^[Source 1]

Four days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15. The islands and the abandoned rice fields of the coast were "reserved and set apart for the settlement of the Negros now made free by the acts of war." Each family was to have "not more than forty acres of tillable ground." ^[Source 2]

It covered the coast from Charleston to the St. Johns River in Florida, the Sea Islands and about thirty miles inland, roughly 400,000 acres. In a later order, Sherman let the army lend them mules. About 40,000 of us settled on it. ^[Source 1]

That fall, President Andrew Johnson overturned the order. Most of the land went back to the planters who had owned us. ^[Source 1]

That is where "forty acres and a mule" comes from. It is not a slogan. It is a written order that was broken.

1865 Proven

The 13th Amendment

Slavery ended. Read the exception.

On 31 January 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. It was ratified on 6 December 1865. ^[Source 1]

Its first section reads: "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." ^[Source 1]

Slavery was over, except for one door left open: a person convicted of a crime. The South walked through that door within months. You will see it in the next era.

1865 Proven

Martin Delany

Harvard would not keep him. The Army made him a major.

Martin Robison Delany was born on 6 May 1812, in Charles Town, Virginia, the son of an enslaved carpenter, Samuel Delany, and a free seamstress, Patti Peace. ^[Source 1]

In 1850 he entered Harvard Medical School. White students protested, and he was limited to a single term. ^[Source 1]

In February 1865, President Lincoln made him a major. His Army record says he "was mustered into service, to date, Feb. 27, 1865, as Major," with the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry: the first Black field officer in the United States Army. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

1865 Proven

The Freedman's Savings Bank

The first thing many of us did with freedom was save.

On 3 March 1865, the same day it created the Freedmen's Bureau, Congress chartered the Freedman's Savings Bank for the people coming out of slavery. ^[Source 1]

It opened dozens of branches. Tens of thousands of freed people put their savings in it, most of them between $5 and $50 an account. Five dollars, from people who had been paid nothing all their lives. ^[Source 1]

1865 Proven

The Freedmen's Bureau

For a few short years, the nation tried to help. Then it quit.

On 3 March 1865, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen's Bureau. The law gave it "the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen." ^[Source 1] Major General Oliver O. Howard led it. ^[Source 2]

From the first day, the law gave it an end date. It would last "during the present war of rebellion, and for one year thereafter." ^[Source 3]

The same law said every male freedman, and every male refugee, could be assigned "not more than forty acres" of abandoned or seized land. ^[Source 4]

It fed people driven from their homes, set up schools and hospitals, oversaw labor contracts, and held military courts to settle disputes. ^[Source 2]

Forty acres, written into the law. An end date, written into the same law. They gave with one hand and set the clock with the other.

1865 Proven

Their Families Freed

A man could die for the Union while his own wife and children stayed enslaved.

Only on 3 March 1865 did Congress free the wives and children of the U.S. Colored Troops. Until then, a man could fight for the Union while his family stayed enslaved. ^[Source 1]

1865 Proven

The Confederacy Turns to the Enslaved

At the very end, the Confederacy asked the people it enslaved to fight for it. Without promising them freedom.

On 13 March 1865, with the war nearly lost, the Confederate Congress passed a law allowing enslaved men to be mustered as soldiers. ^[Source 1]

The law did not free them. It said their status would not change "except by consent of the owners and of the States in which they may reside." ^[Source 1]

Ten days later, Jefferson Davis issued an order that did provide for freeing the men who served. ^[Source 1]

Only a few dozen to a few hundred men were ever gathered. The experiment lasted less than thirty days, until the Confederacy fell. ^[Source 1]

1865 Proven

The U.S. Colored Troops

We fought for our own freedom. One soldier in ten was one of us.

On 22 May 1863, the War Department's General Order 143 created the United States Colored Troops. ^[Source 1]

About 179,000 Black men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army, one in every ten of its soldiers. About 19,000 more served in the navy. ^[Source 1]

Nearly 40,000 Black soldiers died in the war, about 30,000 of them from infection and disease. ^[Source 1]

Nearly 80 Black men became officers. By the end of the war, 16 Black soldiers had received the Medal of Honor. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

When anyone says freedom was given to us, remember these men. They paid for it.

1865 Proven

Juneteenth

Freedom came to Texas two and a half years late, and with conditions.

On 19 June 1865, the day after his troops reached Galveston, Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3. ^[Source 1]

"The people of Texas are informed that," it began, "all slaves are free." It promised "an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves." ^[Source 1]

In the same breath, it told the freed people to "remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages," that they "will not be allowed to collect at military posts," and that "they will not be supported in idleness." ^[Source 1]

We made the day our own anyway. We call it Juneteenth.