In the United States, a freedmen's town was an African American municipality or community built by freedmen, formerly enslaved people who were emancipated during and after the American Civil War. These towns emerged in a number of states, most notably Texas. [1] They are also known as freedom colonies, from the title of a book by Sitton and Conrad. [2]
The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment brought 4 million people out of slavery in the defunct Confederate States of America plus the four "border" slave states that did not secede. Many freed people were faced with the questions of where they would go, what they would eat and how they would survive. Many decided to remain on plantations working as sharecroppers. [3] Many freedmen migrated from white areas to build their own towns away from white supervision. They also created their own churches and civic organizations. Freedmen’s settlements had a greater measure of protection from the direct effects of Jim Crow. "Such places were defensive communities, where black property owners had circled the wagons against outsiders—a “fortress without walls.” Freedmen’s settlements were black enclaves that kept to themselves and until the end of Jim Crow few whites wished—or dared—to live there”. [2]
Education was of the highest priority for the residents of freedmen towns. They started schools, which both adults and children attended to learn to read and write. [4] By 1915 schools built in the Freedmen's settlements were mostly small frame one or two room structures. Textbooks for the schools were typically donated from white schools, but often they were in poor condition. Teachers were very serious about discipline which was strictly enforced by eg. switching students with a brush, or making them stand in a corner on one leg. [5]
To provide help in education and managing the transition of the people to freedom, including negotiation of labor contracts and establishing the Freedmen's Bank, President Abraham Lincoln created the Freedmen's Bureau. In 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was looking for an army officer to run the Freedmen's Bureau. General Ulysses S. Grant proposed General John Eaton, a chaplain with an established reputation as a humanitarian, and who had had authority over Black refugees after the Civil War. [6] However, the position of Bureau commissioner went to another Christian general and Civil War veteran, General Oliver Otis Howard, whose close associations to Freedmen's aid societies had earned him the title of "Christian General". The Bureau was largely staffed by ex-union officers who distributed food to needy Blacks and Whites. [7] They supervised the establishment of free labor agriculture and provided needed funding to set up schools for ex-slaves; however, some were suspected of collaborating with planters to enforce repressive regulations, or to ignore the cheating of Blacks. Some southern Whites suspected the Bureau of being part of a conspiracy to undermine relations between Blacks and Whites in the south by agitating Blacks against trusting of Whites, some of which did have the true interests of Blacks at heart. Both freed people and planters, however, turned to the Bureau for help, which the agency did provide regardless of attempts by some individuals to undermine the Bureau's efforts. [8]
The Freedmen's Bureau was created by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission , which had been created by the War Department in 1863 to assist and advise emancipated slaves in adjusting. It was created by three life-long abolitionists, Robert Dale Owen, James McKaye and Samuel Gridley, who visited the south and gathered testimony from Blacks and Whites, authoring two joint reports and many accounts of individual observations. [9]
After taking office, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the re-authorization and funding of the bureau in February 1866 during Reconstruction. [10]
The Fourth Ward of Houston, Texas is the location of the Freedmen's Town Historic District.
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history following the American Civil War, dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of abolishing slavery and reintegrating the former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was a U.S. government agency of early post American Civil War Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. It was established on March 3, 1865, and operated briefly as a federal agency after the War, from 1865 to 1872, to direct "provisions, clothing, and fuel...for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children".
Forty acres and a mule was part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a wartime order proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha). Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. Many freed people believed, after being told by various political figures, that they had a right to own the land they had been forced to work as slaves and were eager to control their own property. Freed people widely expected to legally claim 40 acres of land. However, Abraham Lincoln's successor as president, Andrew Johnson, tried to reverse the intent of Sherman's wartime Order No. 15 and similar provisions included in the second Freedmen's Bureau bills.
The history of the Southern United States spans back thousands of years to the first evidence of human occupation. The Paleo-Indians were the first peoples to inhabit the Americas and what would become the Southern United States. By the time Europeans arrived in the 15th century, the region was inhabited by the Mississippian people, well known for their mound-building cultures, building some of the largest cities of the Pre-Columbian United States. European history in the region would begin with the earliest days of the exploration. Spain, France, and especially England explored and claimed parts of the region.
African American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.
The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.
The Redeemers were a political coalition in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War. Redeemers were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. They sought to regain their political power and enforce White supremacy. Their policy of Redemption was intended to oust the Radical Republicans, a coalition of freedmen, "carpetbaggers", and "scalawags". They were typically led by White yeomen and dominated Southern politics in most areas from the 1870s to 1910.
The nadir of American race relations was the period in African-American history and the history of the United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the early 20th century, when racism in the country, especially anti-black racism, was more open and pronounced than it had ever been during any other period in the nation's history. During this period, African Americans lost access to many of the civil rights which they had gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legalized racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased. Asian Americans were also not spared from such sentiments.
The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles, are an ethnic group of mixed Native American and African origin associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped former slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or freedmen in the past.
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 is a history of the Reconstruction era by W. E. B. Du Bois, first published in 1935. The book challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, which contended that the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans. Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction and framed the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, slaves were freed by manumission, emancipation, or self-purchase. A fugitive slave is a person who escaped enslavement by fleeing.
The civil rights movement (1865-1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
William Henry Harrison, also known as Bill Thomas, was a state legislator from Hancock County, Georgia.
The African-American diaspora refers to communities of people outside of the United States of African descent who previously lived in the United States. These people were mainly descended from formerly enslaved African persons in the United States or its preceding European colonies in North America that had been brought to America via the Atlantic slave trade and had suffered in slavery between the years of 1526 and 1865. The African-American diaspora was primarily caused by the intense racism and views of being inferior to white people that African Americans have suffered through driving them to find new homes free from discrimination and racism. This would become common throughout the history of the African-American presence in the United States and continues to this day. The spreading of the African American diaspora would begin as soon as slaves were brought over to the New World and would first become a large movement during the American Revolution and into the 19th century by escaping slave owners for a chance at freedom and through serving in both the British and colonial army for their freedom. Canada would abolish slavery in 1803 opening its doors for freemen and fugitive slaves from the states resulting in thousands migrating there to escape slavery. Today many African Americans especially women are leaving the U.S. for an easier life in places like South Africa, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Flower Hill is a ghost town in Bastrop County, Texas, United States. It is located within the Greater Austin metropolitan area.
Freedmen's Schools were educational institutions created soon after the abolition of slavery in the United States to educate freedmen. Due to the remaining opposition to equality between blacks and whites, it was difficult for the formerly enslaved to receive a proper education, among a myriad of other things. Schools were made especially for blacks but were open to anyone regardless of race. These schools were far from perfect; however, they did give African Americans hope and opportunity for their future.
The African American founding fathers of the United States are the African Americans who worked to include the equality of all races as a fundamental principle of the United States. Beginning in the abolition movement of the 19th century, they worked for the abolition of slavery, and also for the abolition of second class status for free blacks. Their goals were temporarily realized in the late 1860s, with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution. However, after Reconstruction ended in 1877, the gains were partly lost and an era of Jim Crow gave blacks reduced social, economic and political status. The recovery was achieved in the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, under the leadership of blacks, such as Martin Luther King and James Bevel, as well as whites that included Supreme Court justices and Presidents. In the 21st century scholars have studied the African American founding fathers in depth.
