African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom

Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

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This innovative book examines how African Americans in the South made sense of the devastating loss of life unleashed by the Civil War and emancipation. During and after the war, African Americans died in vast numbers from battle, disease, and racial violence. While freedom was a momentous event for the formerly enslaved, it was also deadly. Through an investigation into how African Americans reacted to and coped with the passing away of loved ones and community members, Ashley Towle argues that freedpeople gave credence to their free status through their experiences with mortality. African Americans harnessed the power of death in a variety of arenas, including within the walls of national and private civilian cemeteries, in applications for widows’ pensions, in the pulpits of black churches, around séance tables, on the witness stand at congressional hearings, and in the columns of African American newspapers. In the process of mourning the demise of kith and kin, black people reconstituted their families, forged communal bonds, and staked claims to citizenship, civil rights, and racial justice from the federal government. In a society upended by civil war and emancipation, death was political.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2022-11-22
Mått158 x 236 x 18 mm
Vikt458 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieNew Studies in Southern History
Antal sidor201
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781666905717

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IntroductionChapter 1 “Let’s Go to Buryin’”: African American Civilian Funerals and Cemeteries in FreedomChapter 2 “To Repose with Their Comrades”: African Americans and the Creation of National CemeteriesChapter 3 “The Widows and Families of the Heroic Dead”: African American Kinship and Domestic EconomyChapter 4 “The Invisible Army”: African American Religious Life and DeathChapter 5 “We Are Killed All the Day Long”: Testifying and Writing About DeathConclusion “In the Cold Valley and Shadow of the South Land”BibliographyAbout the Author

This well-researched book bridges the scholarship on the cultural history of death and historians' work on African Americans' experiences during emancipation and Reconstruction. Between epidemics in refugee camps and the one-fifth of Black soldiers who perished during the Civil War, as well as the racial violence that erupted across the South during Reconstruction, many Black southerners lost their lives. Ashley Towle explores how African American communities both made sense of these deaths and invoked the memory of the dead to sustain their fight for civil rights and racial justice... In both bringing the concept of mortuary politics to bear on Black southerners' experiences in the years after the Civil War and in tracing how communities made Black deaths matter, Towle makes a significant contribution. Scholars of Reconstruction and emancipation, as well as students and history professionals working with historic cemeteries, will find much of interest here.