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“A House Divided” Speech (16 June 1858)  

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Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2009

In a brilliant and fearless analysis of the slavery conflict in the United States that would become known as “A House Divided,” Abraham Lincoln addressed the Illinois Republican Party convention in 1858. Having just been nominated its candidate for the United States Senate, he attacked his Democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, as being part of a conspiracy to spread slavery to the entire country. In this speech Lincoln went to the heart of the mass of conflicts and contradictions that had gathered around this crucial issue and cut away all the demagogic debris. Outlining the legislative and judicial steps that were carrying the country further and further from its democratic ideals, Lincoln warned that there was no longer any bar to the ownership of slavery in any of the states and territories.

In addition to its importance in understanding the slavery issue this speech is crucial in the viewing the ...

Article

Aaron  

Laura Murphy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

a former Virginia slave who became an antislavery lecturer, used no last name. Almost nothing is known about him outside of the record contained in his episodic, forty-eight page memoir. He did not provide any information about his parents other than that “hard work and hard usage … killed them.” (Light and Truth 6 He recorded that he had lived in Maryland and Kentucky but that for most of his time as a slave he lived in Virginia owned by a master with seven other slaves three of whom were female Aaron s owner proved especially cruel preferring to personally punish his slaves rather than send them out for a whipping During the summer he forced his three female slaves to work all day and then spend the entire night cooling him and his family with fans while they slept Aaron was forbidden to go to church although ...

Article

Aaron, Jesse  

Pamela Lee Gray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

wood carver, sculptor, and folk artist, was born Jesse James Aaron in Lake City, Florida, to descendants of slaves and Seminole Indians. Aaron attended school for less than one year before he was sent to work as a contract laborer for local farms. Trained as a baker when he was twenty-one years old, he found he enjoyed the creativity it required. He opened several bakeries, worked as a cook at Gainesville's Hotel Thomas from 1933 to 1937, and then cooked for a variety of fraternities and hospitals in Florida. Aaron also worked as a cook aboard the Seaboard Air Line Railroad during this time.

Aaron married Leeanna Jenkins, and when the family settled in northwest Gainesville in the 1930s they opened a nursery. From this point until 1968 when Aaron became a folk artist at the age of eighty one it is difficult to determine what is ...

Article

Aarons, Charlie  

Steven J. Niven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, wagon driver, steamboat laborer, and sawmill worker, was born in Petersburg, Virginia, the son of Aaron and Louisa. Aarons had two siblings, but neither their names nor the surnames of his parents have been recorded. Considering that Charlie's father's first name was Aaron, Charlie probably adopted his father's first name as his own surname upon emancipation. The historian Eugene D. Genovese has argued that after the Civil War many former slaves rejected the surnames assigned to them when they were in bondage and adopted new ones often choosing surnames entitles the slaves called them that connected them to their fathers or to other relatives Some celebrated their newfound liberty by creating new surnames such as Freedman or Justice Genovese notes that in the first decade of emancipation freedmen and freedwomen changed their surnames frequently so that as one freedwoman put it if the white folks get together ...

Article

Abbott, Cleveland Leigh  

Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Tuskegee athletic coach, was born in Yankton, South Dakota, to Elbert B. Abbott, a stonemason, and Mollie (Brown) Abbott. Abbott grew up in Watertown, South Dakota, attending Watertown public schools, where he was a superior student and athlete. He graduated from high school in 1912 with an unheard-of sixteen Arrow letters in athletics.

Abbott entered South Dakota State College in Brookings, South Dakota, in the fall of 1912, selecting a dairy science major and joining the athletic program. His outstanding athletic and academic performance attracted the attention of the college president Ellwood Perisho, an acquaintance of Booker T. Washington Washington promised Abbott a job at Tuskegee contingent on his continued scholastic excellence Abbott did not disappoint maintaining his high marks and earning fourteen athletic letters in four years in track football baseball and basketball In this last he played center captained the team and was named All ...

Article

Abd Al-Rahman, Ibrahima  

Allan D. Austin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

a military leader in Africa, a slave in Mississippi, was born into the rising Bari family of the Fulbe people in the fabled but real African city of Timbuktu. His name is sometimes written as Abdul Rahahman and Abder Rahman. The Fulbe people were prominent leaders in West African jihads from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and, though enslaved, the most persistent adherents to Islam in the Americas. Abd al-Rahman's father and family had moved south to territory soon to be called Futa Jallon in the highlands of present-day Guinea after he and non-Muslim allies wrested power from their animist opposition between 1776 and 1778. Well into the twentieth century the military Bari-Soriya and religious Karamoko Alfiya families, usually peacefully, traded rule over their people and lands.

For about a century Futa Jallon was the strongest nation in the area. In its capital Timbo, Abd al-Rahman ...

Article

Abel [Able], Elijah  

John G. Turner

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2014

Latter-day Saint elder and Utah pioneer, was born in northern Maryland to Andrew Abel and Delila Williams. Abel left the area as a young man. Little is known of his early life; it is unclear whether he was born enslaved or free. One later census identified Abel as a “quadroon,” but others listed him as “Black” or “Mulatto.”

In 1832, Abel was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and soon gathered with the Mormons in Kirtland, Ohio. In 1836, he was ordained to the church's Melchizedek or higher priesthood, making him one of a very small number of African American men to “hold the priesthood” during the church's early years. An expectation for all righteous adult male members of the church, priesthood meant the possibility of leadership positions and the authority to perform ordinances. In December 1836 Abel had become a ...

Article

Ableman v. Booth (Sherman Booth Case)  

Robert H. Baker

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

The court case of Ableman v. Booth stemmed from the capture of a fugitive slave named Joshua Glover just outside of Racine, Wisconsin, on 10 March 1854. Federal marshals accompanying Glover's owner, a Missourian named Bennami Garland, broke into the shack Glover was occupying and forcibly detained him after a spirited resistance. Glover was taken overnight by wagon to the county jail in Milwaukee, thirty miles north. Garland and the federal marshals intended to take Glover before the U.S. district court judge the next morning to authorize his return to Missouri.

Sherman Booth, Milwaukee's most prominent abolitionist and the publisher of the Milwaukee Free Democrat was alerted to Glover s incarceration by early morning and spread the news quickly throughout the abolitionist community While lawyers obtained a writ of habeas corpus from a county court on Glover s behalf to protect him against illegal imprisonment Booth and ...

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Ableman v. Booth; United States v. Booth (1859)  

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Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2009

In 1854 the editor and abolitionist Sherman Booth was arrested in violation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act by inciting a mob to rescue a captive slave from federal marshal Stephen Ableman. As a result of Wisconsin's so-called Personal Liberty statute which passed in response to the 1850 act, however, Booth was released on a writ of habeas corpus issued by the state supreme court. The court also declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.

Five years later, however, the case was brought before the Supreme Court of the United States and Chief Justice Roger Taney, who was already widely despised among northern abolitionists for his decision in the Dred Scott case Taney was joined by all of his fellow justices in determining that Wisconsin s attempt at nullification was unconstitutional He and the Court not only struck down the state court s decision but also confirmed the constitutionality of ...

Article

Abner, David, Sr.  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

landowner, businessman, and state legislator, was born enslaved in Dallas County Alabama, to parents named Sarah and Pete, who had been born in South Carolina. David, like his parents, was the property of a family named Abner. There is some dispute as to his birth date—some giving 1826 and others 1838—but the most reliable date appears to be December 1820, as suggested by a letter from his youngest daughter. It is not known when David took the Abner surname for himself, a common but by no means universal practice for formerly enslaved persons. He was sent to Texas in 1843, driving a covered wagon for the newly married daughter (Thelma) of the man who held title to him.

Her father considered his new son in law unreliable and entrusted David to get his daughter safely to her new home and manage ...

Article

Abolition Movement  

Brenda E. Stevenson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise! No longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties.

(Maria Stewart, 1831)

Article

Abolitionism  

Richard S. Newman, Paul Finkelman, and Carl E. Prince

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

[This entry contains three subentries dealing with abolitionism from the late seventeenth century through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in1865. The first article discusses the definition of abolitionism as differentiated from antislavery activism and its forms including Garrisonian and non Garrisonian abolition The second article describes ...

Article

Abolitionism in the United States  

James Sellman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

During the three decades that preceded the Civil War, abolitionism was a major factor in electoral politics. Most historians use the term abolitionism to refer to antislavery activism between the early 1830s, when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator, and the American Civil War (1861–1865). The term also refers to the antislavery crusade that mobilized many African Americans and a small minority of whites, who saw their goal realized during the Civil War. Historians also commonly distinguish abolitionism, a morally grounded and uncompromising social reform movement, from political antislavery—represented, for example, by the Free Soil or Republican parties—which advocated more limited political solutions, such as keeping slavery out of the western territories of the United States, and was more amenable to compromise.

Abolitionists played a key role in setting the terms of the debate over slavery and in making it a compelling moral issue Yet abolitionists ...

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Abolitionist Lecture Delivered by Frederick Douglass (1841)  

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Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2012

From 1841 to 1847 Frederick Douglass 1818 1895 who had escaped bondage in 1838 lectured on the evils of slavery as part of his work with William Lloyd Garrison s American Anti Slavery Society Douglass eventually differed with Garrison s revolutionary and arguably condescending tactics preferring instead a practical approach that preserved the core values of the republic The speech excerpted below delivered in October 1841 in Lynn Massachusetts contains the seeds of that conflict within the abolitionist movement Douglass states bluntly his concerns that Northerners are out of touch with the slaves experiences and that while their work to end slavery is admirable racism remains a problem even among the most determined abolitionists As an example he points out the irony of the Southern laws that prohibited teaching a slave to read While many Northerners believed that blacks were not smart enough to gain anything from education he states ...

Article

Abraham  

Kenny A. Franks

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

also known as “Prophet,” was a runaway slave who became a prominent leader among the Seminole. Nothing is known about his parents or childhood. Fleeing his master, Abraham escaped south into Florida, and was eventually adopted into the Seminole tribe, with whom he enjoyed considerable status. In 1826 he accompanied a tribal delegation to Washington, D.C., and became an influential counselor to Micanopy, a leading Seminole leader. The Seminole, or Florida Indians, once were a part both of the Muskogee (Creek) nation that had been driven out of Georgia by the early English colonists, and also of the Oconee and Yamasee tribes that had been driven out of the Carolinas following the Yamasee uprising of 1715. They had first settled among the Lower Creeks in the Florida Panhandle and created a haven for runaway slaves. Indeed, Semino'le is the Creek word for “runaway.”

In 1818Andrew Jackson led ...

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Abraham Lincoln Responds to the Dred Scott Decision (1857)  

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Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2009

One of the most important Supreme Court decisions in the history of the United States, Dred Scott v. Sandford had tremendous political ramifications during the turbulent period just prior to the Civil War. Dred Scott (born Sam Blow) sued his master John Sanford (Sanford's name was misspelled “Sandford” by the court) for his freedom on the grounds that he had previously resided on free soil. Scott's former master, an army surgeon named John Emerson, had taken him to the state of Illinois, where slavery was outlawed by the state constitution of 1818, and later to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory (present-day Minnesota), where Congress had prohibited slavery under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. There was precedent for Scott's case; in Rachael v. Walker (1837), the slave of an army officer was freed upon returning to Missouri from Fort Snelling.

The case was argued twice before the Supreme Court in ...

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Abraham Lincoln Responds to the Wade-Davis Bill (1864)  

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Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2009

As though the continuing carnage of the Civil War wasn t enough President Abraham Lincoln had to contend with members of his own Republican Party those interested in advancing the cause of their own legislative authority and a highly punitive plan for national Reconstruction By 1864 the debate over the projected remaking of the broken Union was already well underway Some among the radicals in Lincoln s party feared the sometimes moderate chief executive would advance lenient policies allowing the traitor states to come too quickly back into the federal fold One result was the Wade Davis bill proffered by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Wade of Maryland Besides requiring at least 50 percent of a state s inhabitants to swear their ironclad fealty to the federal union the Wade Davis bill also provided for the punishment of high ranking government officials and for the explicit illegalization ...

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Abron, Lilia Ann  

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Publication History:

Published in print:
14 December 2011
Published online:
28 February 2013

This biography appears in African American Women Chemists (Oxford University Press, 2011), by Dr. Jeannette Brown.

Article

Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq  

David H. Anthony

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Islamic scholar, Jamaican slave, and author, was born in Timbuktu, Mali. When he was two years old his family moved to Jenné in the western Sudan, another major center of Islamic learning and a renowned Sahelian trade city. Heir to a long tradition of Islamic saints and scholars claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad, he was part of one of several dynasties designated as Sherifian or Shurfaa. Abu Bakr was trained and certified in Jenné by several ulama, the highly intellectual stratum of Islamic teachers. He was in the process of becoming a cleric when he was captured. As was true for many Islamized Africans caught in the vortex of the Atlantic slave trade, Abu Bakr's itinerant life had pre slave African and post slave black Atlantic dimensions His path shares the trajectory of many coreligionists from Muslim areas of the continent as well ...

Article

Accommodationism  

Rob Fink

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
09 February 2009

As African Americans fought racial prejudice in the United States following the Civil War, some black leaders proposed a strategy of accommodation. The idea of accommodation called for African Americans to work with whites and accept some discrimination in an effort to achieve economic success and physical security. The idea proved controversial: many black leaders opposed accommodation as counterproductive.

Booker T. Washington served as the champion of accommodation. Born a slave in 1856 Washington received a degree from the Hampton Institute before being invited to head up the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama At Tuskegee Washington used industrial education to promote accommodation by African Americans Because of his background Washington recognized the difficulties faced by southern blacks in their quest for civil rights He knew firsthand that during the 1860s and 1870s whites in the South found it hard to accept African Americans as free No one argued against the ...