Online ClassroomWelcome to the Online Classroom
People come to the study of slave emancipation for many different reasons, and looking to answer a range of questions. Students and educators need a credible web resource that offers easy access to high-quality classroom and research materials, along with reliable suggestions about where they might find readings that will deepen their knowledge of events they’ve been introduced to in high school, college and university courses. For others the stories that they are looking to uncover may be closer to home: individual researchers and members of local historical societies might recognize in the resources we've assembled here place names that they know well, or historical events that they've heard about from family or friends. For African-American community and church groups, for trade unions and activist organizations, the important series of struggles recounted here may not seem so distant, but resonate in the ways they've experienced the 'making of history' in their own lives, and in our own times. We recognize, and welcome the fact that people come to the After Slavery site for lots of different reasons, and we've tried our best to build an online classroom that will satisfy all these motivations, and inspire those who spend some time working through the units we’ve assembled to undertake research on their own. We hope we've built a site that will appeal to professional historians and their students, but we also want be clear that this site is for all of you, that no one will be turned away for ‘practicing history without a license.’
History ‘from Below’ and the Importance of the Past
We start from the conviction that history doesn't have to be boring or dry. Too many of us were taught that learning history consisted of memorizing an array of names and dates–almost always associated with the 'great men' of the past. As you move through the materials on this site, you'll find that while we don't ignore political parties or men of wealth and influence who played a role in events, the main actors in the story we are attempting to reconstruct are working women and men, black and white–who for a brief time in the period after the Civil War (when, as one former slave put it, the 'bottom rail' was 'on top') enjoyed access to power and stood at the center of the stage of history. The various groups involved in the struggle to shape the new society that emerged after emancipation–slaves and their former masters; Union Army officers and federal authorities. schoolteachers, elected officials, journalists and newspaper editors–together left behind an extensive record that allows us to observe, at ground level, the collapse of one society and the early birth of a new one. With a little imagination about how to approach the study of the past, and some care in selecting documents and images that can convey a sense of the struggle that emancipation set off–in all its richness and complexity– we can move very far beyond history-as-memorization.
There is another problem facing all students of the past: powerful forces have insisted, from time to time, that the teaching of American history should emphasize those aspects of our past that confirm the nation's unique status as a 'beacon of freedom and democracy.' In a powerful essay that concluded his study of Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois showed how this approach had produced a distorted interpretation of our history, and expressed his bewilderment with history-as-propaganda. If "we are going to use history...for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment," he wrote, "then we must...admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish." The material presented here, concerning one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, suggests that our collective past is heavily laden both with incredibly inspiring historical moments when ordinary people tried to lay claim to freedom and equality and other, far less flattering episodes when such attempts were met with unspeakable brutality. None of us alive today are implicated in any of the events recorded in the pages that follow, and perhaps as citizens in a society facing challenges of its own there are lessons to be learned from the past. In any case we believe there is no benefit in purposely avoiding uncomfortable truths from the past, and much to be gained from an honest confrontation with our history, warts and all.
Moving Around the Classroom
The units we have assembled below examine some of the most interesting and significant problems that historians confront in trying to make sense of the aftermath of slave emancipation in the United States. There is a logic to the order in which they are arranged, but feel free to move around and explore topics in which you have a special interest. The first eleven units all relate to the period of Reconstruction, which lasted roughly between the 1862 or 1863, when the Union military began to exercise authority over captured territory in the slave South, until 1876 or 1877, when the last of the state Reconstruction governments, in South Carolina, fell to white conservatives determined to restore white ‘home rule.’ In future we aim to extend the scope of our coverage up through the end of the nineteenth century.
Students and educators should be creative about how they make use of the material presented here. For some users, it might make sense to work through the individual documents on their own, and to follow closely the sets of questions that we've included. For others in seminar or classroom settings, it might work better if you work through the units in teams and groups, or to alternate between analyzing the documents and posing questions of your own about their content. Teachers might want to accompany individual units with a list of suggested further readings, and to ask students to use the document and readings to put together essays on some of the key topics.
Learning on the Web: New Opportunities, Old Habits
The internet offers tremendous opportunities for taking the exciting advances in scholarship on the aftermath of slavery in the United States and sharing them with a broad constituency, well beyond the walls of the university or specialist archives. But learning and teaching on the web can also be problematic. One problem is that many sites are unsuitable for classroom use, offering students source materials whose original provenance is not properly identified, or essays that rely on little or no historical evidence. Another is that many sites are built without any sense of the possibilities for doing something different with the web– something that books and articles, on their own, cannot deliver. Our long-term aim in launching the After Slavery site is to build an interactive educational resource–one that becomes an online meeting place for anyone interested in pursuing this remarkable chapter in our past. As you return to the site from month to month, you will see changes in the kinds of resources available here and growing emphasis on interactive learning.
Each unit that we have assembled for the Online Classroom contains a set of primary sources–excerpts from diaries and letters, government reports, memoirs, handbills, court transcripts, census materials, newspaper accounts–that help to illustrate different aspects of a particular problem. In some places we have accompanied a document with a suitable image and, where possible, we have posted a .pdf copy of the original document, in most cases handwritten. We have worked hard to offer in each unit a range of sources that will help you to understand the complexity and breadth of each problem, but which will also convey a sense of the urgency and excitement which attached to these issues in a period marked by serious tensions over the kind of society taking shape after slavery.
A Word of Thanks
We have tried to select from literally hundreds of thousands of available documents and images the richest, most compelling materials we have come across in our research. The vast majority of these come from either North or South Carolina, but occasionally we have included documents from elsewhere in the South. In carrying out the work required we have been helped by many friends and colleagues, by archivists and institutions whose support has been critical. We want to especially acknowledge the (UK) Arts & Humanities Research Council, whose generous support makes After Slavery possible, and both the W. E. B. Bu Bois Institute at Harvard University and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. We are grateful also to the many archives which have granted us permission to use documents and images on the site: the American Antiquarian Society; the Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the Library of Congress, the Miami University Archives; the North Carolina State Archives and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
A Note on Spelling, Punctuation and Racially-Charged Language
Many of the documents included here were written by people who were barely able to read or write; others by people whose spelling skills weren’t spectacular, or whose handwriting can be difficult to decipher. Spelling and punctuation have been left throughout as they appear in the original documents; where misspellings or other errors in the original render it difficult to determine the meaning of a sentence, the correct spelling has been placed in brackets [ ] immediately after the word in question. Where a word or phrase in the originals cannot be read, [illeg.] appears in its place.
In many of the documents that we have selected, individuals use language that is racially offensive. Often they did this deliberately; at other times their language simply reflects the deeply-held racial prejudices common at the time. We have opted to retain such language in order to faithfully convey the original meaning. Readers should understand that in doing so we in no way condone such usage.
Classroom Units:
1. Emancipation: Giving Meaning to Freedom
4. Freedom, Black Soldiers & the Union Military
5. Conservatives Respond to Emancipation
6. Pursuing Citizenship: Justice and Equality
7. Gender and the Politics of Freedom
8. Planters, Poor Whites and White Supremacy
9. Coercion, Paramilitary Terror & Freedpeople's Resistance
10. Freedpeople and the Republican Party
