This week’s readings on the experience of the Civil War for African-Americans
sparked a lengthy discussion of America’s suppressed histories. We read Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, published in 1902, as well as speeches by Frederick Douglass, and a story published in 1864 in Harper’s Weekly, “Tippo Saib.” We also read two critical articles, one of which explained the long history of African-American soldiers’ participation in America’s wars, starting with the Revolutionary War. That their presence was erased from pictorial images of the war was deeply disturbing to students.
What we remember as a culture is severely limited, as my students keep discovering in my classes. They often say, “I had no idea such-and-such existed,” and they get how wrong that is. In this case, the fact that a book like Taylor’s existed was quite surprising to them. She was only fourteen when she became a laundress, teacher, and nurse for the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black company in the Civil War. The soldiers were escaped slaves, some of whom were her relatives, and one of whom became her husband.
Taylor didn’t write down her memories until the turn of the century, nearly forty years after the fact. Why, my students wondered? As one later pointed out on our online discussion board, she may have wanted to remind the nation of the sacrifices African-Americans endured to preserve the union at a time when the number of Confederate monuments and memorials was spiking. Another said that she was responding to Jim Crow more than the war, as the last four chapters detail the wrong course America had taken, particularly in the South, since freeing the slaves. Above all, she wanted Americans to remember. As she writes:
There are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war. There were hundreds of them who assisted the Union soldiers by hiding them and helping them to escape. Many were punished for taking food to the prison stockades for the prisoners. When I went into Savannah, in 1865, I was told of one of these stockades which was in the suburbs of the city, and they said it was an awful place. The Union soldiers were in it, worse than pigs, without any shelter from sun or storm, and the colored women would take food there at night and pass it to them, through the holes in the fence. The soldiers were starving, and these women did all they could towards relieving those men, although they knew the penalty, should they be caught giving them aid. Others assisted in various ways the Union army. These things should be kept in history before the people. There has never been a greater war in the United States than the one of 1861, where so many lives were lost,–not men alone but noble women as well.
Taylor understood that as Americans were forgetting the participation of African-Americans in the war, they were also forgetting the cruelty of slavery. For it was to free themselves that black soldiers took up arms. From there, we ended up talking about the danger of suppressing people’s stories (which is what history is, in essence). I shared with the students my experiences in Europe in 2017, when I saw how visible the history of WWII and the Holocaust is in Germany and how suppressed it is in Austria. (I discussed my travels and what I learned in my Aug/Sep 2017 newsletter.) For instance, I had come across many of the “Stumbling Stones” in the streets of Germany that mark the last known residences of victims of Holocaust. Where are such markers, memorials, or signs, my students asked, to indicate where the slave markets were in Southern cities like New Orleans? We have a very long way to go to even begin to impress upon our national psyche the trauma of slavery and its aftermath.
When we came to discuss Douglass speeches, the irony of his conviction that the Emancipation Proclamation would in the future be considered an even more important document in our nation’s history than the Declaration of Independence was not lost on us. As one of the students, Samantha Daluze, wrote in her discussion starter:
Frederick Douglass, in his “January First, 1863” speech, declares that “The fourth of July was great, but the first of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings, is incomparably greater. The one had respect to the mere political birth of a nation, the last concerns the national life and character, and is to determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened, forevermore, with all the hell darkened crimes and horrors which attach to slavery” (114). This made me think about the Tuesday discussion about suppressed histories, as I asked myself, why isn’t the end of slavery a national holiday? It doesn’t even make it on the calendar, yet I wonder whether Douglass would characterize current America as “radiantly glorious,” “infamously blackened,” or something in between.
Yes, indeed. Why is the first of January, the day that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, not even on our radars as a culture? It is too glib to say that we have simply forgotten. As my class will be talking about as we approach Reconstruction, the forgetting was deliberate and willful. There was nothing simple about it.