Volume 40, Number 18 · November 4, 1993
Terror in Mississippi
By David Brion Davis
Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Conspiracy
by Winthrop D. Jordan
Louisiana State University Press, 391 pp., $24.95
Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation
edited by C. Peter Ripley, edited by Roy E. Finkenbine, edited by Michael F. Hembree, edited by Donald Yacovone
University of North Carolina Press, 306 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War
edited by Ira Berlin, edited by Barbara J. Fields, edited by Steven F. Miller, edited by Joseph P. Reidy, edited by Leslie S. Rowland
The New Press, 571 pp., $15.95 (paper)
'The Negro,' Frederick Douglass proclaimed at the beginning of the Civil War, 'is the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns.' Investing his hope in the 'desperate insurrectionary movements of slaves,' Douglass saw that his belief in the centrality of racial justice was hotly contested in the North, and knew that justice depended far more on the mysterious workings of providence than on the intentions of white Americans. Late in 1860, at a meeting in Boston honoring the martyrdom of John Brown, Douglass had been heckled and then attacked by hired thugs before he and his followers were thrown out of the hall by the police. African Americans who sought to aid the Union cause frequently encountered a response similar to the insults hurled by some Cincinnati policemen: 'We want you d——d niggers to keep out of this; this is a white man's war.'[1]
Review, 5459 words
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