by Paul Ortiz
David E. Hayes-Bautista writes, “Slavery, many Latinos understood, was the major issue of the Civil War.” Francisco P. Ramírez used the pages of El Nuevo Mundo in California to denounce the Confederacy’s support of the French invasion of Mexico:
It is not strange that the rebels of the South in the United States should be in favor of the establishment of Maximilian’s imperial power in Mexico; for men fanatically attached to the slavery system—who have rebelled against the most liberal republican government in the world and started the current war . . . are capable of anything. . . . Napoleon III, Maximilian, and Jefferson Davis maintain relations of the closest friendship. They support one another, for all of them have an interest in dominating the people, though it be over the bodies of the dead and through rivers of blood.60
As Emperor Maximilian’s invading army cut a destructive path through Mexico, the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner urged the United States to raise an army to drive the European monarch back across the Atlantic Ocean. “I believe this government can drown Jeff Davis and his hosts in the Red Sea, and send three hundred thousand men to Mexico to welcome Maximilian to his imperial throne, with as much canister and grape as would blow him into another region.”61 Turner’s invasion plan was never enacted, but small numbers of African American soldiers, including the future historian George Washington Williams, crossed the border to join republican forces in the struggle against the European emperor.62
The New Orleans Tribune, a Black newspaper, coupled the fate of people in the United States with that of the citizenry of Mexico in its moment of crisis: “For us, men of African Descent, we cannot forget that this undertaking was coupled with the attempt to perpetuate slavery and the Black Code in the United States. We cannot forget that the prospect was to re-establish servitude in Mexico.”63 A few months after the end of the Civil War, the South Carolina Leader, a Black newspaper based in Charleston, waxed enthusiastic about the prospects of abolition in Cuba but warned about the threat of slavery reemerging in Mexico under Emperor Maximilian’s rule. What happened in Cuba and Mexico mattered greatly to Black South Carolinians as they mapped out their own strategies for freedom.64
Black military service changed the very meaning of the war. Northern leaders marveled at the élan of Black troops and the willingness of African American civilians to risk their lives for the Union in a variety of capacities, from fighting on land and sea to providing the United States’ most dependable wartime military intelligence network in the South.65 Secretary of State William Seward observed, “Everywhere the American General receives his most useful and reliable information from the Negro who hails his coming as the harbinger of Freedom.”66 After the Army of the Potomac seized the high ground at Gettysburg thanks to the intelligence of a Black spy, General Robert E. Lee lamented, “The chief source of information to the enemy is through our Negroes.”67
Black men in the ranks drew from their experiences to frame the broader significance of the war. Private William B. Johnson of the Third United States Colored Infantry was one such soldier. As he wrote toward the end of the war, “One particular and interesting feature in Lake City [Florida], is a pond about a mile from town, where the rebels drove the Blacks into, in the summer of ’64, to keep our scouts from bringing them into our lines. Many lost their lives in this way; but thank God they had their time, and now comes ours.” Johnson believed that the Civil War must have a redemptive meaning: “By good behavior, we will show them that we are men, and able to fill any position in life that we may be placed in. There is only one thing I want, that is my vote; let us see what time will do.”68
Junius Browne, a Northern war correspondent who escaped from a Confederate prison camp, recognized Black civilians for saving his life and the lives of Union soldiers. African Americans had created a new branch of the Underground Railroad which aided US prisoners of war: “God bless the negroes! say I with earnest lips. During our entire captivity and after our escape, they were ever our firm, brave unflinching friends. We never made an appeal to them that they did not answer. They never hesitated to do us a service at the risk even of life; under the most trying circumstances revealed a devotion and a spirit of self-sacrifice that were heroic.”69
Harriet Tubman, whom John Brown had called General Tubman, performed all of these duties and more. Harriet Tubman helped lead troops into battle in a series of daring raids in the Sea Islands region of South Carolina, where US forces destroyed plantations, liberated slaves, and recruited the former “contrabands” (slaves) into the Union Army.70 Toward the end of the war Tubman traveled to Camp William Penn in Pennsylvania to talk with the soldiers there about her exploits. One observer noted,
During her lecture, which she gave in her own language, she elicited considerable applause from the soldiers of the 24th regiment, U.S.C.T., now at the camp. She gave a thrilling account of her trials in the South, during the past three years, among the contrabands and colored soldiers, and how she had administered to thousands of them, and cared for their numerous necessities.71
Tubman’s effectiveness as a recruiter was rooted in her ability to create a discourse of the dispossessed. She drew slaves away from the plantations by proclaiming, “Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm,” affirming her people’s belief that their labor had built the nation.72
Senator John Sherman of Ohio depicted the impact of Black troops and civilians—men and women—in battle and behind the lines to achieve victory for the United States: “These slaves have won their freedom by their devotion to our cause. They have from the beginning been true friends. They have borne our flag in battle. They have carried our arms. They have been slaughtered for our cause. They have aided our sick and wounded. They have fed our soldiers when in prison, and have guided their escape. They have performed the humble offices of the camp and the hospital.”73 Senator Sherman wanted it clearly understood that Black war service was saving the Union: “They have never fought against us. They have relied upon our promise, and have performed their part. Without them, and without their presence as a weakness to the enemy, we might not have succeeded.” Sherman argued that Negro manhood suffrage was a minimal precondition for the Reconstruction of the South: “If we put negro regiments there and give them the bayonets, why can’t we give votes? They have joined in putting down the Rebellion; and now to place them at the mercy of those they have helped us to subdue—to deny them all political rights—to give them freedom but leave them entirely subject to laws framed by Rebel masters—is an act of injustice against which humanity revolts.”74
The political significance of Black military service became clearer with each passing day. Abraham Lincoln was deeply moved—and transformed—by the sacrifice of African American men on the field of battle. He told John T. Mills, a Delaware judge, “There have been men base enough to propose to me to return to slavery the Black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee, and thus win the respect of the masters they fought.” Lincoln flatly refused. “Should I do so, I should deserve to be damned in time and eternity. Come what will, I will keep my faith with friend and foe. My enemies pretend I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. So long as I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of restoring the Union.”75 President Lincoln wanted Mills and his readers to understand that the hope of a Union victory in the Civil War was now inextricably bound up with Black emancipation and freedom. Facing the prospects of losing the presidency in the 1864 election, he told Frederick Douglass that he wanted him to organize a slave revolt in the South, what one historian calls his “John Brown plan.”76 It was now the only way Lincoln could see of saving the United States in its moment of deepest crisis.
W. E. B. Du Bois interpreted the mass exodus of slaves from Southern plantations as the first national general strike in US history and emphasized that “without the blacks the war would not have been won.”77 Du Bois asserted, “This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of
work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people.”78 C. L. R. James fleshed out the political significance of the slaves’ general strike: “What I want to emphasize is that it was not only that the blacks brought their forces into the Northern army and gave labour. It was that the policies that they followed instinctively were the policies ultimately that Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet had to use in order to win the war.”79
This rising of the workers was a hundredfold more important than enlightened statecraft; it was the motive force compelling Emancipation and the remarkable period of Reconstruction that followed after the end of the Civil War. At no time in American history has the working class occupied such a position of awesome power. In a speech given toward the end of 1863, Frederick Douglass made it clear that Lincoln’s leadership would not win the war: “We are not to be saved by the captain this time, but by the crew. We are not to be saved by Abraham Lincoln, but by the power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself.”80 Without the uprising of the plantation workers, the nation would have been permanently broken in two: they were not merely heroes—they were the saviors of the republic.81
The movement of ordinary African Americans doing extraordinary things fired the nation’s imagination. One writer juxtaposed the bravery of Black troops on battlefields like Fort Pillow with their precursors in Latin America:
In the United States, Nat Turner . . . Port Hudson, Fort Wagner, Fort Pillow, etc., in Spanish America, against the Spanish hordes during the War of Independence; in Cuba Aponte, Placido, the greatest Cuban poet; F. Vargas Captain of the Cuban Colored Militia . . . and hundreds coldly murdered by Gen. O’Donnell—some of them on the scaffold, and the great majority under the terrible lash; and above all, the numberless victims slain in Hayti by the French soldiery; that most noble specimen of the human race, Toussaint L’Ouverture, murdered by the first Napoleon in the dark dungeon of Fort Joux!82
In invoking the name Plácido—nom de plume of Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, an Afro-Cuban poet executed by the Spanish for his role in the so-called Ladder Conspiracy—the writer was drawing connections between the massacre of Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, and the Spanish suppression of Cuban antislavery insurgents in 1844.83 This act of historical imagination linked the progress of democracy not to events in Europe but to those taking place in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In a speech given to an African American audience in Boston in the final weeks of the war, Wendell Phillips pointed to the global implications of Black self-activity: “In the hands of the four millions of blacks in the Republic was the fate of the black race all over the world. With the ballot the colored men could ensure not only their own redemption but also that of their race from Cuba to Ethiopia. From this rebellion the black men would clutch the power to break the fetters of slaves all over the world.” The atmosphere that evening was electric: “Repeated bursts of enthusiastic applause testified the admiration of the audience during Mr. Phillips’s brilliant oration.” Like Harriet Tubman in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, Wendell Phillips spoke the language of his hopeful listeners; the great abolitionist had captured the zeitgeist of emancipatory internationalism. At the dawning of Emancipation, the Day of Jubilee, African Americans were ready to raise the bar of emancipation higher than ever.84
CHAPTER 4
GLOBAL VISIONS OF RECONSTRUCTION
THE CUBAN SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT, 1860s TO 1890s
African Americans decided that emancipation in one country was not enough. How they came to this belief is instructive for students of democracy. The creative energy unleashed by the African American general strike against slavery transformed the idea of emancipatory internationalism into a powerful social movement. Experience was a great teacher. The way in which Black workers had earned their citizenship was crucial because it now informed their understandings of how politics worked. African Americans had gained their individual rights working together in a great cause for liberation. Black soldiers had withstood the enemy’s onslaughts on the battlefield as disciplined members of regiments, battalions, and rifle squads. Black laborers had downed their tools, quitting Southern plantations first in small groups and then in vast numbers, thus denying the Confederacy the means to provision its armies. African American men and women labored together to dig fortifications, to build roads, and to feed and care for wounded prisoners and escaped Union soldiers.
In religious gatherings, mass assemblies, and state legislatures, African Americans insisted that their newly won citizenship rights could form the basis of a global fight against tyranny. From the beginning, Black churches were critical sites of these discussions. Church meetings—whether held publicly in buildings or outdoors, or held in secret—were events where African Americans had taught each other mutuality, striving, and love for their fellow human beings, values that were always under siege in the nightmarish world of slavery.1 Carrying forward the African ethics of their forebears, slaves revolutionized the slave master’s religion into a belief system that served, in Howard Thurman’s words, “the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.”2 Drawing on the wellsprings of these traditions, the Reverend W. B. Derrick asked if his country was willing to lend a hand to the struggling people of Cuba:
Can it be possible that the offensive, aye, miserable carcass of slavery still lurks around the threshold of our Republic? And treading upon the necks of over a half million blacks. At our very threshold, is Cuba, only a few hours’ sail from us; and the unwholesome stench can be inhaled. . . . At our own door the cry is heard, “Come and help us.” Where are the four millions of our people lately emerged from the house of bondage? Can we remain still? Are we going to act as the brothers did to Joseph? Can we not hear the cry coming up from the slaves of those Islands?3
Radical abolitionists believed that the defeat of the Confederacy did not mean the end of slavery in the United States or abroad.4 When William Lloyd Garrison proposed to close down the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Christian Recorder dissented: “Although we love Mr. Garrison as much as ever, and feel that he will work as faithfully in our cause as ever, we by no means endorse his opinion that the Anti-Slavery Society should be disbanded. The Anti-Slavery Society should keep in existence as long as slaves breathe the air anywhere in the world.”5 The Christian Recorder associated triumphalism in the United States with the betrayal of oppressed people in Latin America: “Disband the Anti-Slavery Society when Cuba, with over half a million of slaves lies at our gates! Disband the Anti-Slavery Society when Maximilian’s government may be permanent, and be made slaveholding. . . . It may be said ‘These are out of the United States.’ But these men—slaves, are our brothers.” Frederick Douglass amplified this theme in a speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1869. Douglass argued that slavery was not yet defeated in the United States and that “we are here to-night in the interest of the negro, but we are here also in the interest of patriotism, in the interest of liberty in America, liberty in Cuba, liberty the world over.”6
African Americans viewed abolition in the United States as a springboard to challenge subjugation everywhere. The Reverend J. B. Sanderson used his 1868 Emancipation Day speech in San Francisco to link the campaign for Black equality to Italian independence, the end of serfdom in Russia, and the liberation of Ireland. Sanderson exulted that “Cuba, the ‘Gem of the Antilles,’ has taken the initiatory steps towards the entire emancipation of her five hundred thousand slaves. The Emperor of Brazil has begun the good work of gradually converting four millions of bondmen into loyal, grateful subjects and citizens.”7 The Christian Recorder wrote, “Steadily is the area of human liberty being enlarged. A few years ago, it was Russia that threw off the manacles of her twenty million white serfs; then, by means of the fiery ordeal of war, America struck the manacles from nearly five million black ones. And now Spain is gradually moving in the same direction.”8
African American communities placed global emancipation in con
cert with their celebrations of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Aaron L. Jackson, the keynote speaker at a ratification celebration in Sacramento, California, swept up his listeners in the history they had all had a hand in making: “I feel to-day, that it has come full and complete, to gladden the hearts of millions of my oppressed people. Then roll on, thou great power of deliverance, guided by the hand of deity, regardless of all obstacles that the puny hand of man can erect to stay thy onward progress!” Jackson believed that the work of emancipation was incomplete: “Stop not within the confines of America, but leap across the briny deep, and encircle the bleeding isle of Cuba, thence to the Brazils, where thousands of human beings are yet groaning under the cruel yoke of slavery!”9
While expressing gratitude for the rights they had earned, African Americans also demanded that their government support human rights abroad. Participants at the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment ratification celebration in Virginia City, Nevada, drew up a list of resolutions that included the following statement: “RESOLVED: That our thanks are due to the Congress of the United States of America for the wise enactment, and maintaining of laws which makes all men free and equal; and that this Government, at no distant day, will extend its might and protecting arm of mercy to the struggling patriots of Cuba.”10
African Americans were creating an idea of citizenship that linked national civil rights and international human rights, deeming one insufficient without the other. These Fifteenth Amendment commemorations open a window into a new theory and practice of American freedom. Black speakers and their audiences articulated the idea that their individual rights were intimately connected with the rights of oppressed people in Latin America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the world. This was an ideology based on the harsh experience of seeing slavery and racial capitalism extinguishing liberty everywhere it went. African Americans understood that the United States had torn itself apart due to its allegiance to a theory of profit-based individualism shrouded in slavery. The nation must never again define freedom in such a way as to place property rights above human rights. Furthermore, Americans could not preserve their liberty at home while crushing it abroad as slavery’s imperial advocates had demanded.