Confessions of Madison, Warrick, Seward and Brown

Confessions of Madison, Warrick, Seward and Brown PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American criminals
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Confessions of Madison, Warrick, Seward and Brown

Confessions of Madison, Warrick, Seward and Brown PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African American criminals
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description


Black Life on the Mississippi

Black Life on the Mississippi PDF Author: Thomas C. Buchanan
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
All along the Mississippi--on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats--nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a counternarrative to Twain's well-known tale from the perspective of the pilothouse, Thomas C. Buchanan paints a more complete picture of the Mississippi, documenting the rich variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. Buchanan explores the creative efforts of steamboat workers to link riverside African American communities in the North and South. The networks African Americans created allowed them to keep in touch with family members, help slaves escape, transfer stolen goods, and provide forms of income that were important to the survival of their communities. The author also details the struggles that took place within the steamboat work culture. Although the realities of white supremacy were still potent on the river, Buchanan shows how slaves, free blacks, and postemancipation freedpeople fought for better wages and treatment. By exploring the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, Buchanan sheds new light on the ways African Americans resisted slavery and developed a vibrant culture and economy up and down America's greatest river.

Civil War St. Louis

Civil War St. Louis PDF Author: Louis S. Gerteis
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700613617
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
In the Civil War, rough-and-tumble St. Louis played a key role as a strategic staging ground for the Union army. A citadel of free labor in a slave state, it also harbored deeply divided loyalties that mirrored those of its troubled nation. Until now, however, the fascinating story of wartime St. Louis has remained largely unchronicled. By the mid-nineteenth century, St. Louis had become the nation's greatest inland city, providing a "gateway to the West," a riverine crossroads for national commerce, and an ideal base for expansion-minded industrialists from the abolitionist Northeast. Yet as Louis Gerteis reveals, many of its citizens were staunchly dedicated to both slavery and the southern agrarian tradition. For them especially, federal martial law was an outrage, one that only served to nail the coffin shut on their loyalty to the Union. Gerteis's rich and engaging narrative encompasses a wide range of episodes and events involving the lynching of freeman Francis McIntosh and murder of publisher Elijah Lovejoy, the infamous Dred Scott saga (which began in St. Louis), city politics and martial law, battles in and around the city (at Camp Jackson, Wilson's Creek, and Pea Ridge), major river campaigns, manufacture of ironclad combat ships, prison camps and hospitals, and efforts to secure civil rights for blacks while denying the same to former Confederates who would not swear loyalty to the Union. Featuring famous figures like Thomas Hart Benton, John C. Fremont, Claiborne Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Sterling Price, Gerteis's study also sheds considerable light on the participation of women and the status of blacks throughout the conflict, offering gripping images of black and white Missourians contending with the issue of emancipation. Ultimately, Gerteis offers a compelling portrait of a war-torn city-teeming with wounded soldiers, displaced civilians, runaway slaves, federal prisoners, and profiteers-that was forever changed by its wartime experiences, even as it anchored Union victory in the west.

The Carceral City

The Carceral City PDF Author: John Bardes
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469678195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 622

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Book Description
Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow. With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.

To Tell a Free Story

To Tell a Free Story PDF Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
To Tell A Free Story traces in unprecedented detail the history of Black autobiography from the colonial era through Emancipation. Beginning with the 1760 narrative by Briton Hammond, William L. Andrews explores first-person public writings by Black Americans. Andrews includes but also goes beyond slave narratives to analyze spiritual biographies, criminal confessions, captivity stories, travel accounts, interviews, and memoirs. As he shows, Black writers continuously faced the fact that northern whites often refused to accept their stories and memories as sincere, and especially distrusted portraits of southern whites as inhuman. Black writers had to silence parts of their stories or rely on subversive methods to make facts tellable while contending with the sensibilities of the white editors, publishers, and readers they relied upon and hoped to reach.

The Ledger and the Chain

The Ledger and the Chain PDF Author: Joshua D. Rothman
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541616596
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave trade—and its role in the making of America. Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States. In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.

The Broken Heart of America

The Broken Heart of America PDF Author: Walter Johnson
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541646061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
A searing and "magisterial" (Cornel West, New York Times–bestselling author of Democracy Matters) history of American racial exploitation and resistance, told through the turbulent past of the city of St. Louis From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

Murder & Mayhem in Southwestern Illinois

Murder & Mayhem in Southwestern Illinois PDF Author: John J. Dunphy
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439672067
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Southwestern Illinois experienced a plethora of violence during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Settlers and Native Americans clashed at the Wood River Settlement, while Abraham Lincoln dueled on a Mississippi River island. Racial strife led to the lynching of a Black schoolteacher in Belleville in 1903 and a deadly riot in East St. Louis fourteen years later. Benbow City was a latter-day Wild West town of saloons, gambling dens and brothels, and Pere Marquette State Park screened a cache of Nike missiles. From the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr.'s killer to the mystery surrounding Jean Lafitte's grave, John Dunphy examines the bloody ledger of southwestern Illinois.

The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color

The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color PDF Author: Hank Trent
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807165220
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Historians have long discussed the interracial families of prominent slave dealers in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere, yet, until now, the story of slave trader Bacon Tait remained untold. Among the most prominent and wealthy citizens of Richmond, Bacon Tait embarked upon a striking and unexpected double life: that of a white slave trader married to a free black woman. In The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, Hank Trent tells Tait’s complete story for the first time, reconstructing the hidden aspects of his strange and often paradoxical life through meticulous research in lawsuits, newspapers, deeds, and other original records. Active and ambitious in a career notorious even among slave owners for its viciousness, Bacon Tait nevertheless claimed to be married to a free woman of color, Courtney Fountain, whose extended family were involved in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. As Trent reveals, Bacon Tait maintained his domestic sphere as a loving husband and father in a mixed-race family in the North while running a successful and ruthless slave-trading business in the South. Though he possessed legal control over thousands of other black women at different times, Trent argues that Tait remained loyal to his wife, avoiding the predatory sexual practices of many slave traders. No less remarkably, Courtney Tait and their four children received the benefits of Tait’s wealth while remaining close to her family of origin, many of whom spoke out against the practice of slavery and even fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. In a fascinating display of historical detective work, Trent illuminates the worlds Bacon Tait and his family inhabited, from the complex partnerships and rivalries among slave traders to the anxieties surrounding free black populations in Courtney and Bacon Tait’s adopted city of Salem, Massachusetts. Tait’s double life illuminates the complex interplay of control, manipulation, love, hate, denigration, and respect among interracial families, all within the larger context of a society that revolved around the enslavement of black Americans by white traders.

Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865

Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865 PDF Author: Harriet C. Frazier
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786409778
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Slavery and its lasting effects have long been an issue in America, with the scars inflicted running deep. This study examines crimes such as stealing, burglary, arson, rape and murder committed against and by slaves, with most of the author's information coming from handwritten court records and newspapers. These documents show the death penalty rarely applied when a slave killed another slave, but that it always applied when a slave killed a white person. Despite Missouri's grim criminal justice system, the state's best lawyers were called upon to represent slaves in court on serious criminal charges, and federal law applied to all persons, granting slaves in Missouri protection that few other slave states had. By 1860, Missouri's population was only 10 percent slave, the smallest percentage of any slave state in America.