General Resources
- Changing America – Emancipation
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Behring Center online exhibit. - Resconstruction: American After the Civil War
PBS, 4 hour-long epsiodes, covering post Civil War until the turn of the century. - Historical Context: Black Soldiers in the Civil War
By Steven Mintz.
"Indeed, it seems likely that it was the availability of large numbers of African American soldiers that allowed President Lincoln to resist demands for a negotiated peace that might have including the retention of slavery in the United States. Altogether, 186,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and another 29,000 served in the Navy, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all Union forces and 68,178 of the Union dead or missing." - Black Soldiers in the Civil War
Preserving the Legacy of the United States Colored Troops
By Budge Weidman
"The compiled military service records of the men who served with the United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the Civil War number approximately 185,000, including the officers who were not African American. This major collection of records rests in the stacks of the National Archives and Record Administration." - Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “National Salvation”: A Rediscovered Lecture on Reconstruction
Eric Gardner, Common Place: Journal of Early American Life, Vol. 17, No. 4. (2017).
"What makes Harper’s January 31 [1867] lecture rare is that we have its full text. The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph printed a transcription of “National Salvation” the day after Harper spoke." - The Freedmen’s Bureau Preservation ProjectBy Reginald Washington
"Post–Civil War era records that document the federal government's assistance to newly freed slaves—some of the most valuable records of the black experience in the second half of the 1800s—are now being preserved on microfilm by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)."
- Documents from Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867
"[These] are sample documents from the volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation. Like all the documents in Freedom, they are transcriptions (or, in some cases, images) of originals housed in the National Archives of the United States." Several documents are specific to Maryland, including Governor of Maryland to the Secretary of War, November 18, 1861; Maryland Fugitive Slave to His Wife, January 12, 1862; and Maryland Slave to the President, August 25, 1864. - “Back into the Days of Slavery”: Freedom, Citizenship, and the Black Family in the Reconstruction-Era Courtroom
Giuliana Perrone, Law and History Review, Volume 37, Issue 1 (2019)
"This article explores a series of suits between freedpeople...in which marriage—the linchpin of familial legitimacy—put the disabilities of the slave past, rather than newly granted rights, at the center of the discussion about the meaning of freedom." - Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen
By Eric Foner, 2008.
"Without the courage of the forgotten black legislators of the Reconstruction era, it would be impossible for a black man today to run for president." - Pay Tribute to the Black Women Who Spoke Out About the Sexual Violence
By Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University, 2015
"Similar to their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, African-American women experienced political and economic terror. But these women also endured sexual violence at the hands of white men determined to restore the sexual codes of the slavery regime." - Female Labor Force Participation:The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 and 1880
Goldin, Claudia. 1977. Female labor force participation: The origin of black and white differences, 1870 and 1880. Journal of Economic History 37(1): 87-108.
"The labor force participation for white women more than doubled be- tween 1890 and 1960, increasing from 16.3 percent to 33.7 percent, while that for non-white women remained almost constant (39.7 percent to 41.7 percent)."
- The Reconstruction Amendments: Official Documents as Social HistoryBy Eric Foner, "On June 13, 1866, Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican floor leader in the House of Representatives and the nation’s most prominent Radical Republican, rose to address his Congressional colleagues on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution."
- National Park Service – Jim Crow and Reconstruction
"Although African Americans and their allies had made great strides in the years during which federal armies occupied the South, many of these accomplishments were reversed during the years after Reconstruction... Explore these articles on the Reconstruction Era to learn more." Of particular note to Marylanders may be David B. Simons, John J. Carter, and Hilary and Christina Watson. - South Carolina’s Forgotten Black Political Revolution
By Eric Foner, 2018. "Many black Americans held public office in the former slave state before the promise of Reconstruction faded." - The Strange Career of the Reconstruction AmendmentsFoner, Eric. "The Strange Career of the Reconstruction Amendments",Yale Law Journal, vol.108, 1999.
"My quarrel with [Bruce] Ackerman's account of Reconstruction derives from what I consider an excessively narrow definition of both the process of constitutional change and the historical actors who helped to produce it." - The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
Reconstruction and Its Aftermath, a part of the online exhibition from the Library of Congress.
- Reconstruction’s New Order
An article from the House of Representatives' History, Art, and Archives. "The North’s victory in 1865 ensured that the newly freed slaves would stay free, but their emancipation generated new questions about the future economic and political landscape of the South. Sweeping change transformed the former Confederacy in the decade that followed, as the Northern victors in Congress experimented with ways to improve the lives and opportunities for freedpeople in the South." - Susan Smith McKinney Steward: Brooklyn's First Black Woman Physician
By Ally Malinenko, 2018.
"Dr. Kinney Steward had a very successful practice with locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan but for her, medicine was more than just treatment. It was a means by which she could further elevate and impact the community she loved and fight for racial inclusion and women’s rights. During her life she founded clinics, clubs and suffragette groups." - Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to FreedomBrown, Elsa Barkley. "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture, 7, 1 (Fall 1994), 107-146
- Northern Blacks and the Reconstruction Amendments
"The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, sometimes known as the Reconstruction Amendments, were critical to providing African Americans with the rights and protections of citizenship." Provides descriptions about various primary source materials circulated around the Reconstruction Amendments. - Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1876McPherson, James M. “Abolitionists and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.” The Journal of American History, vol. 52, no. 3, 1965, pp. 493–510.
Note this is available in JSTOR for SU affiliated patrons only.
Maryland Resources
All resources below are freely available web sources focusing on Maryland's specific legacy of slavery.
- Historical Society offers glimpse of African Americans during Reconstruction
By Clara H. Vaughn, 2012.
"By scrutinizing census data, fliers for runaway slaves and other documents from the Reconstruction era, [Krystal] Appiah has been able to weave a fuller picture of what she calls an "understudied period of U.S. history."
"It's really a lot of fun to be able to sketch out so much information about people that we thought to be anonymous," she said." - Maryland State Archives African American Resources
Guide on all the resources held by the Maryland State Archives in regards to the African American Community in Maryland. Resources include government records, African American newspapers, bank records, church records, slave schedules, and more. - Free Black Women: Slavery in a Border State
Access provided to primary source materials in University of Maryland's University Library special collections, including ledgers, diaries, court documents, and newspaper advertisements, among others. Mary Richardson, a free black woman who lived in Frederick County, in particular is highlighted. - Resources on the History of African American Education in Baltimore
Compiled by Iris Leigh Barnes, this site provides a bibliography and a list of research facilities and websites focusing on historical education of African Americans in Baltimore.
Books
Terror in the Heart of Freedom by Call Number: E185.2 .R75 2009ISBN: 9780807888568Publication Date: 2009-06-01eBook and print available
"The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender. Sexual violence--specifically, white-on-black rape--emerged as."
Reconstruction by Call Number: E668 .F66 1988ISBN: 0060158514Publication Date: 1988-05-01"Chronicles how Americans responded to the changes unleashed by the Civil War and the end of slavery."
A Nation under Our Feet by Call Number: E185.2 .H15 2005ISBN: 0674011694Publication Date: 2003-11-10"This is the epic story of how African Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice."
Out of the House of Bondage by Call Number: E443 .G55 2008ISBN: 9780521879019Publication Date: 2003-06-30eBook and print available
"This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as "friends" and "allies" of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal."
