Climbing Up to Glory by Wilbert L. Jenkins Page B

South, where the vast majority of African Americans lived and were held as slaves when the Civil War began, I also look at the lives of blacks in the North, who had been free since 1839. Like the few free blacks in the South, they were regularly subjected to white oppression and racial discrimination. A sense of powerlessness was common to all blacks, both slave and free. And thus all blacks, in the North and in the South, saw the Civil War as an opportunity to improve their condition and change their lives. Most slaves were confident that a Union victory would bring them their liberation, and they wanted to serve in the Union forces to help make freedom a reality. Northern blacks, too, were anxious to enlist in the Union forces, believing not only that a Union victory would speed up the process of slave emancipation but also that the victory would lead to increased social, political, and economic opportunities for themselves.
    Blacks played a pivotal role in helping the Union defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. When the war ended in a Union victory, the slaves received their long-awaited day of liberation. Four million formerly enslaved black people were now free. The institution of slavery had been the foundation of the social, political, and economic system in the South. With its demise, Southern society was in disarray, and many questions about the new status of blacks were yet to be answered. The answers to these questions would have a profound effect on its future status.
    This study does not address how blacks responded to white racism and discrimination. Rather, it recognizes blacks as the central actors in their own lives and not as passive objects of a white-dominated society. It is essentially a history written “from the bottom up,” which means that it focuses on those from the lower strata of society and not on the rich and powerful. It emphasizes to a large extent the crucial undertaking of the Reconstruction period: the rebuilding and reinvention of patterns of life and social and economic interaction. Former slaves struggled tenaciously from the moment of emancipation to become independent of white control. They attempted to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families. Freedmen pooled meager resources to establish and maintain their own schools and churches. They struggled to rebuild shattered families and to legalize marital relationships in order to protect them. Freedmen also risked their own lives, at times, to protect family members from white violence.
    Too often scholars write about the historical past as if it has no relevancy for the present. This is a grave error and one of the main reasons why many contemporary Americans regard history as bland, boring, and insignificant for contemporary society. But history must be seen as a process of inquiry and discovery, depicting how the present is shaped by the past. In this book I show how U.S. society of the 1990s was affected by the momentous events of Civil War and Reconstruction. The Union victory gave rise to the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It also led to passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, which formed the pretext for much of the Civil Rights legislation enacted in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, on the basis of the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, President Dwight Eisenhower sent Federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to protect black children while they attended a predominately white public high school, and President John F. Kennedy in 1962 sent Federal troops to the University of Mississippi to ensure the safety of James Meredith, the first black to attend that college. Only by examining the history of blacks during the Civil War and Reconstruction can we begin to understand why issues such as equality and justice for blacks that were heatedly debated by Americans during the 1860s