Emancipation

The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed four million slaves, about 90 percent of the black population of the United States at the time. Slave emancipation made it legal for Southern black men to challenge their white counterparts for control over the military, political, economic, and social spheres that constituted patriarchal dominance and masculine tradition in the United States. Because freedom from slavery did not alone insure equal rights for blacks, African-American men pursued representation within these arenas in order to gain the power necessary to assert their manhood and to demand and create first-class black citizenship.

For most freedmen, participation in areas that traditionally brought power to white males often defined their notion of freedom and informed their sense of manhood. The connections between violence and slavery produced the context for some bondsmen's (slaves') correlation of freedom and masculinity with combat. Because potential slave revolts scared white planters and inspired black slaves, African-American males sometimes physically challenged white dominance. In his classic autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Frederick Douglass associated manliness with corporeal resistance to slavery. Douglass referred to a fistfight with the brutal overseer Edward Covey as “the turning-point in [his] career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived with [him] a sense of [his] own manhood (Douglass, 113).” Although the avenues for black men to pursue freedom expanded with emancipation, combat remained primary in the struggle for power.

Following emancipation, many freedmen joined the Union army, and by the end of the Civil War about 180,000 African Americans had fought against the Confederacy. Accepting the republican association of manhood with citizenship, education, and independent land ownership, black soldiers moving through the South encouraged and protected the rights of newly freed slaves to organize themselves politically and purchase land, and they helped build new schools, churches, and orphanages. African-American veterans formed [Page 144]political clubs and conventions, led civil rights campaigns, and, backed by the authority of the federal government, promoted black freedom through both the force of arms and the ballot. By fighting capably and bravely for the Union, freedmen destroyed the myths of black male savagery, laziness, buffoonery, and drunkenness that whites had promoted in order to maintain economic and political power.

Congress's First Reconstruction Act (1867) protected black political power, while the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the U. S. Constitution granted citizenship to former slaves and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) established black men's right to vote. The Second, Third, and Fourth Reconstruction Acts, passed in 1867 and 1868, addressed voter registration, the remaking of state constitutions, and the administration of loyalty oaths to former Confederates. Throughout the South, blacks participated in state constitutional conventions. Since many Southern white leaders were barred from voting until their state's constitutions were ratified, this legislation guaranteed that black men would have a voice in postwar Southern politics.

Black politicians actively promoted positive images of black manhood, directly refuting stereotypes about childlike, silly, and easily manipulated black men that had been used by whites who argued for black disfranchisement. Once freedmen gained the ballot during the late 1860s, they challenged white domination in Southern politics wherever the federal government protected their right to vote. Black men played important roles in some state and local governments, while they were functionally excluded from others. Because white intimidation of black voters and politicians was pervasive, the male-dominated arenas of violence, military force, and political representation became intertwined in postwar Southern life. Although black women could not vote, they played important roles in black political movements following the Civil War, sometimes forming their own organizations, most commonly Union Leagues, when men tried to exclude them from decision-making processes.

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