These notes are part of the Black Reconstruction Reading Group‘s study material.
Author: Julie S.
Chapter: 4 – The General Strike
Notable Quotes:
“When Edwin Ruffin, white=haired and mad, fired the first gun at Fort Sumter, he freed the slaves.
It was the last thing he meant to do…”
“When Northern armies entered the South they became armies of emancipation. It was the last thing they planned to be.”
“This was to be a white man’s war.”
“Both sections ignored the Negro.”
“Only John Brown knew just how revolt had come and would come and he was dead.”
“What the Negro did was to wait, look and listen and try to see where his interest lay.”
“…as it became clear that the Union armies would not or could not return fugitive slaves, and that the masters with all their fume and fury were uncertain of victory, the slave entered upon a general strike against slavery by the same methods that he had used during the period of the fugitive slave. He ran away to the first place of safety and offered his services to the Federal Army. …this withdrawal and bestowal of his labor decided the war.”
“In a certain sense, after the first few months everybody knew that slavery was done with; that no matter who won, the condition of the slave could never be the same after this disaster of war.”
Initially, northern generals… stupidly… would not interfere with slavery. “…the army chiefs at first tried to regard it [fugitive slaves escaping to union army camps] as an exceptional and temporary matter, a thing which they could control, when as a matter of fact it was the meat and kernel of the war.”
“They tried to send the slaves back, and even used the soldiers for recapturing them. This was all well enough as long as the war was a dress parade. But when it became real war, and slaves were captured or received, they could be used as much-needed laborers and servants by the Northern army.”
“…the quiet but unswerving determination of increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, and to seek the freedom of the Northern armies.”
“Without legal authority and in spite of it, suddenly the Negro became a soldier…. as a soldier, the Negro must be free.”
“It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantations.”
Davis Bend, Mississippi. Nov & Dec 1864 Negro judges and sheriffs “the community distinctly demonstrated the capacity of the Negro to take care of himself and exercise under honest and competent direction the functions of the government.”
Standard of living for Negroes rises where federal government programs put in place
“By 1865, there was strong testimony as to the efficiency of the Negro worker. ‘The question of the freedmen being self-supporting no longer agitated the minds of careful observers.’”
Jan 1, 1863 The Emancipation Proclamation
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