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Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery

Tekijä: Leon F. Litwack

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
397663,302 (4.23)43
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Based on hitherto unexamined sources- interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution." Contents 1. "The Faithful Slave" 2. Black Liberators 3. Kingdom Comin' 4. Slaves No More 5. How Free is Free? 6. The Feel of Freedom- Moving About 7. Back to Work- The Old Compulsions 8. Back to Work- The New Dependency 9. The Gospel and the Primer 10. Becoming a People… (lisätietoja)
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Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 6) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
Is America misled or misguided? The final pages of “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery” led me to this crossroads after author Leon Litwack closed his outstanding survey of the experiences and expectations of black and white Americans with regard to race relations in the lead up to, during, and immediately after the Civil War with the birth of the 14th Amendment.

If America is misled, it means the founding fathers promised a union they either could not build or had no intention of building. It also means that even had Lincoln lived his plans to bring southerners back into the Union would have given blacks no real say in government or economic opportunity.

If America is misguided then we must assume that the kind of capitalist state based on equal rights and equality of opportunity Americans envision is based on the supremacy of whites and was as much in the 19th century as it is now a pipe dream.

Slavery was baked into the union from the very beginning not only in the design of the Electoral College which gave slave states enough power to elect many US presidents, but also in the promise to return fugitive slaves as if they were Fedex packages gone amiss in the delivery system.

(Today Americans shackled under the Electoral College system see sparsely populated rural states stymie the population centres on the coasts in the election of their president, pace Donald Trump.)

Southern planters had good reason to believe they were betrayed when resistance grew to returning runaways (read “The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War” by Andrew Delbanco), when radical Republicans supported abolitionist sentiments in Congress, and when the north fought mightily to prevent new territories from becoming slave states.

From their perspective it looked as though they were tricked into supporting New England break away from Great Britain. Northerners didn’t believe blacks were any more equal to whites than they did, and as history has shown us (in Isabel Wilkerson’s majestic “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”) northerners weren’t all that accommodating when the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers finally moved north in huge numbers to seek a safer life for their families and better economic opportunity.

Slavery lasted more than 260 years in America. It was so profitable (“The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward E. Baptist) that slaves were used as collateral for speculative loans in property west of the Mississippi and Texas. It was so unusual that English linen manufacturers couldn’t replicate it anywhere else in the world (Sven Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton: A Global History.”)

Four million blacks lived in the South at the time of the Civil War. More than 186,000 blacks fought in the war, mostly on the side of the North. Almost all of these people were illiterate.

With emancipation came the opportunity for black families to reunite, for women to devote time to building their families, for adults to move about the countryside without asking permission, and for black families to openly educate their children. It also gave blacks a chance to reflect on their very names and decide who they wanted to be.

But emancipation did not bring 40 acres and a mule, the rallying cry for blacks who believed the Union Army would give them the resources to start their own farms from plantations taken from the rebels. Many blacks became embroiled in contracts working for their former masters, or others like them, often incurring debt and most usually not improving their independence a bit.

Freedom. Independence. Two concepts not necessarily alligned at the close of the war.

In addition to enduring complete powerlessness for the better part of two and a half centuries, they were repeatedly insulted, beaten, and whipped. Their young and adult women were repeatedly raped. Many thousands of them had their families torn apart by the sale of their family members to other plantations. Children taken from mothers. Husbands taken from wives.

It was in this backdrop that Southerners told themselves that blacks were childlike, incapable of governing either themselves or others, or deserved to take control of their own lives. Southerners sought compensation for lands torn from them in war, but never considered for a moment compensation owing to the slaves themselves.

Southern men considered the blacks lazy, even though it was the blacks from the sweat of their own brows who built the wealth of the South, and southern women despaired when their house slaves abandoned them after emancipation and left them to cook, clean, mend clothes, and entertain on their own. (And cooking and cleaning and particularly ironing in those days ain’t what it is today.)

America is still living with the aftermath of slavery. Politicians cheat to keep blacks from voting. Rich parents cheat to get their largely white children into elite schools. And Silicon Valley apes the Old Boys Clubs of yore.

I was struck by a quote from the black poet W.E.B. Dubois who looked back at the newly “freed” men and women. Their first images of themselves were taken from their white masters. How heroic was their quest to build their self-respect and their dignity from a whole new cloth.

You could also say that the planters — and Northerners who benefitted sometimes directly, and sometimes indirectly from slavery in America— took their identities from their position of power over the blacks. The same could be said of white Americans over the aboriginal peoples. Had Americans not traded in blacks or murdered Indians, would they see their manifest destiny in quite the same light?

Whites were so dependent not just economically but emotionally on free black labour that the destruction of slavery fractured their self-esteem.

In fairness to America, it did not invent slavery or bigotry or white nationalism. These are among the carbuncles of our civilization. It remains an open question whether we will ever rid ourselves of their influence. Emancipation in America was only a beginning. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
About two months ago, my friend Kim Nalley, who is both an internationally know jazz and blues singer and a Ph.D. candidate in history at UC Berkeley, sent around a list of suggested reading about the African American experience and the history of racism in America. I will be going back to that list perhaps every third or fourth book I read until I've worked my way through it.

Checking in at 556 pages, Been in the Storm So Long constitutes a commitment of time and energy, but an extremely worthwhile commitment. I was under the impression that the book would provide an overview of the Reconstruction Era, but in fact Litwack stops right as Radical Reconstruction get going. Instead, the book starts with a description of the conditions endured by the prisoners of slavery as the Civil War neared, continues on to describe conditions and events during the war years, and then covers the first few years after Emancipation. Litwack makes detailed use of letters, diaries, newspaper articles and interviews. He lays on example after example after example of each condition and development he describes. At times it seems like perhaps he's still doing that even after the points been effectively made. However, at all times I felt like the effect created with this tactic was an important one. Because it made each element not just something to be told and then to be moved on from, but instead something to consider over and over again until something like knowledge perhaps had seeped in.

Some of the key historical points, some of which I can say that I knew, perhaps, but often only in a vague manner and are extremely important for every American (at least) to be strongly aware in more detailed ways:

1) Slavery was a horror.

2) The crossing of thousands of escaping slaves across the advancing Union lines and, eventually, into the Union army, was an extremely important factor in the North's military victory.

3) The Southern planter class was determined during and after the war that Emancipation would not in any way mean the end of White supremacy. Acknowledging that slavery was over did not in any way signify to them that Blacks should have any rights whatsoever. That included voting, testifying in court, serving on juries or, in many places, owning land.

4) The occupying Union forces sympathized much more with the White aspirations listed above than with helping protect ex-slaves from getting cheated out of the wages their former "masters" were now supposed to be paying them or even physical attack and murder at the hands of whites displeased by their behavior in one way or another.

That's a very, very short list of the major issues covered in this fascination and essential history. ( )
  rocketjk | Sep 20, 2020 |
This is an admirable work of evidence-based history, presenting the aftermath of the Civil War in the words of the people, black and white, who lived it. This technique delivers not just a tremendous amount of important information but also a nuanced account of the baffling and horrific human experience of slavery. The grotesque and obstinate projections by slaveholders of the supposed satisfactions, but also the lurking threat, of their slaves aptly shows the fierceness of their internal denial of the atrocity they were responsible for. The former slaves' accounts poignantly express misplaced faith in American ideals and values that would redress their wrongs. The lasting impression is of an opportunity missed, as the chance to knit former slaves into the society was discarded and squelched, with Jim Crow racism selected and favored instead. ( )
1 ääni oatleyr | Aug 22, 2020 |
2097 Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, by Leon F. Litwack (read 6 Sep 1987) (Pulitzer History prize in 1980) (National Book Award history prize in 1981) This book is a prime example of what used to be called revisionist history, but it is much more mature than early examples of that genre. I found the early chapters, with their seemingly unending examples of incidents illustrating slave life during the Civil War, rather tedious but the concluding chapters are excellently done and absorbing reading. They illustrate that the freedmen were well justified in their behavior in their actions after the Civil War and before the start of Radical Reconstruction. This book just goes up to the beginning of Radical Reconstruction, covering about 1860 to 1868. It is very well-done and an excellent, excellent book to read. An absorbing book, and how it makes one ashamed that emancipation had to wait till the 1960's to be completed! ( )
  Schmerguls | Jul 23, 2008 |
Leon F. Litwack, in the preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, describes the setting of four million black slaves receiving freedom. Four million people who had lost connection to their African heritage and at the time of the Civil War had been American slaves for generations.
As slaves, they had learned skills of survival, especially how to adjust to the needs and desires of white people. Such engrained skills intended for subservience, now needed to propel them forward into shaping their own lives.
The massive social upheaval confronted white slave owners with the realities of their dependent and exploitative relationships with black slaves. Slaves were confronted with the vulnerability of their white owners. Many were not able or ready to process such life-changing alterations to their perspectives and social constructions.
While reactions to the upheaval are available from the white perspective, very little written history is available from the black perspective. The Federal Writers’ Project compiled interviews with the few remaining former slaves about seventy years after the Civil War. While this is some of the most original source available, Litwack encourages caution in researching the material. The interviews were done decades after the experience, and while such a traumatic occurrence was still fresh in the minds of the interviewees, some particulars of memory may not have been accurate. The interviews were conducted by whites unfamiliar with the life experiences and language idioms of those they interviewed. Of even more concern is the blacks’ lifetime of learned subservience, evasion, and giving the white person what they imagined they wanted to hear. With these cautions in mind, these interviews provide the most authentic and timely revelation of the black experience of emigrating from slavery to freedom.
1 ääni lgaikwad | Oct 7, 2007 |
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Based on hitherto unexamined sources- interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this "rich and admirably written book" (Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution." Contents 1. "The Faithful Slave" 2. Black Liberators 3. Kingdom Comin' 4. Slaves No More 5. How Free is Free? 6. The Feel of Freedom- Moving About 7. Back to Work- The Old Compulsions 8. Back to Work- The New Dependency 9. The Gospel and the Primer 10. Becoming a People

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