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By Root 1078 0

This experience, like that of their enslavement, they could share with no other Americans. Nor was the dominant society about to rearrange its values and priorities to grant to black Americans a positive assistance commensurate with the inequalities they had suffered and the magnitude of the problems they faced. If the ex-slaves were to succeed, they would have to depend largely on their own resources. Under these constraints, a recently enslaved people sought ways to give meaning to their new status. The struggles they would be forced to wage to shape their lives and destinies as free men and women remain to this day an epic chapter in the history of the American people.

LEON F. LITWACK

Berkeley, California

September 1978

Acknowledgments

AT ITS INCEPTION, this book was to have been a study of black life in the South from the Civil War to the turn of the century. But as the research progressed, the experience of the newly freed slaves took on a life of its own and became the primary focus. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship enabled me to devote a full year to research and writing. Funds provided by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and a Humanities Research Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley afforded me additional time and support to reformulate the project, conduct further research, and complete the writing of the manuscript. The Institute of Social Sciences and the Committee on Research at the University of California also generously provided funds for research assistance, travel, and microfilming expenses.

My travels in search of materials ranged from manuscript libraries and state and federal archives to a remote United States Cemetery outside of Port Hudson, Louisiana, where the gravestones of black Union soldiers, many of them marked “unknown,” stand as monuments to that dramatic moment in American history when armed black men, including recently freed slaves, marched through the southern countryside as an army of liberation and occupation. For the courtesies and generous assistance extended to me, I am grateful to the staffs of the Duke University Library; the Fisk University Library; the Henry E. Huntington Library; the Moorland Foundation Library at Howard University; the Louisiana State University Department of Archives and History; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the South Carolina Department of Archives and History; and the Valentine Museum and State Library in Richmond, Virginia. I should also like to express my appreciation to the Board of Trustees of the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia for their kind permission to use and microfilm The Christian Recorder, a rare and major source of black testimony from the wartime and postwar South that proved indispensable to my work.

The opportunity to draw on the knowledge and insights of many friends and fellow teachers and scholars proved both rewarding and stimulating. Not all of them fully shared my views or approach but their suggestions and critical encouragement were deeply valued. For having first stimulated my interest in the history of slavery and the South, I remain indebted to my teacher and colleague, Kenneth M. Stampp. I am also grateful to Allan Nevins for having invited me to join the series he edited on the Impact of the Civil War—that proved to be the seed of the present volume. Among my associates at Berkeley, Paula S. Fass, Winthrop D. Jordan, Lawrence W. Levine, and Robert L. Middlekauff read and criticized the entire manuscript, bringing to it the insight, imagination, and sensitivity they have demonstrated so abundantly in their own published works. While completing his study of slavery, Eugene D. Genovese generously took time out to scrutinize early drafts of several chapters