African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Ashley Towle

doi:10.5771/9781666905724

Summary

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.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2022
Copyright Year: 2022
ISBN-Print: 978-1-6669-0571-7
ISBN-Online: 978-1-6669-0572-4
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 191
Product Type: Monograph

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 12
Chapter One. Let’s Go to Buryin: African American Civilian Funeralsand Cemeteries in Freedom No access Pages 13 - 42
Chapter Two. To Repose with Their Comrades: African Americans and the Creation of National Cemeteries No access Pages 43 - 74
Chapter Three. The Widows and Families of the Heroic Dead: African American Kinship and Domestic Economy No access Pages 75 - 100
Chapter Four. The Invisible Army: African American Religious Life and Death No access Pages 101 - 124
Chapter Five. We Are Killed All the Day Long: Testifying and Writing About Death No access Pages 125 - 152
Conclusion: In the Cold Valley and Shadow of the South Land No access Pages 153 - 166
Bibliography No access Pages 167 - 182
Index No access Pages 183 - 190
About the Author No access Pages 191 - 191