african americans in the civil war :: essays research papers fc

African-Americans in the Civil War The foundation for lightlessness participation in the Civil War began more than a c years before the outbreak of the war. Blacks in America had been in duress since early colonial times. In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankinds inviolable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the instauration of hard workerry had become firmly effected in America. Blacks worked in the tobacco palm of Vir snareia, in the rice fields of South Carolina, and toiled in small farms and shops in the North. Foner and Mahoney report in A Ho implement Divided, America in the Age of Lincoln that, In 1776, slaves still forty percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia, but salubrious below ten percent in the colonies to the North. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 provided a demand for cotton thus increase the demand for slaves. By the 1800s slavery was an institution throughout the South, an insti tution in which slaves had few rights, and could be sold or leased by their owners. They lacked any voice in the government and lived a life of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the slave population neer abandoned the desire for freedom or the role to resist control by the slave owners. The slaves reaction to this desire and finish resulted in instantly rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place the strongest reaction in the enlisting of blacks in the war itself. Batty in The Divided amount of money The Story of the Great American War, 1861-65, concur with Foner and Mahoney about the importance of outright rebellion in their analysis of the Nat Turner Rebellion, which took place in 1831. This mutiny demonstrated that not all slaves were willing to accept this institution of slavery passively. Foner and Mahoney note that the significance of this uprising is found in its aftermath because of the legion(predicate) reports of insubordinate behav ior by slaves. 8 Individual acts of defiance ranged from the use of the Underground Railroad - a secret, organized network of people who helped momentary slaves reach the Northern states and Canada - to the daily resistance or silent cave found on the plantations. Stokesbury acknowledges in, A Short History of the Civil War, the cosmea of the Underground Railroad but disagrees with other historians as to its importance. He notes that it never became as well organized or as successful as the South believed.