James Oakes 'The Political Significance Of Slave Resistance'

Stephanie McCurry, in her revolutionary book Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, claims that her book is about “politics and the power in the Civil War South, about the bloody trial of the Confederacy’s national vision, and about the significance of the disfranchised in it.” Choosing to examine both yeoman/poor white women and enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy, McCurry’s book distances itself from the historiography focused on answering the question of “why the Confederacy lost the Civil War.” Instead, McCurry focuses more exclusively on the effects of the Civil War and how war changed both the United States and the world, most notably in Cuba and Brazil. Conjecturing as her primary thesis, McCurry argues that “the power that counts in politics, is often exercised brutally, and almost always wins, but that once in a long while – as in the Civil War South – history opens up, resistance prevails, and the usually powerless manage against all imaginable odds to change the

At the time that the novel takes place, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was in full effect. It gave people and governments the right to apprehend runaway slaves and return them to their owners. The goal of this act was to keep slaves from fleeing and punishing those who tried to help the fugitives or interfere with their capture. Abolitionists from the North often aided fugitive slaves who were looking to become free. Many escaped slaves were fleeing to the North or to Canada to become free people, and the the act was put into place in order to please worried southern slave owners.

The North and South, from 1861 to 1865, lost over six hundred thousand men in an armed and gruesome conflict over the issue of slavery. Despite the North winning militarily, the death rates for both sides were relatively equal. Following the South’s surrender at Appomattox, a time of Reconstruction ensued. Southern beliefs and behaviors, along with the Grant Administration’s growing indifference about freedman issues, influenced Reconstruction politics across the country. White Southerners scored a resounding victory in the Reconstruction Period by passing restriction laws against Negroes and intensified the Southern atmosphere beyond its original Pre-Civil War environment.

In 1774 Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia leaving England behind him. There he worked as an editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Paine traveled with the Continental Army not as a member but as a journalist. Now before he had moved to America Paine had written several other pieces of literature so he was no rookie at being a writer. In fact one of his first pieces was a pamphlet titled The Case of the Officers.

The fugitive laws were laws passed by the united states congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of slaves who escaped from one state into another state or

The end of the Civil War brought along social uneasiness within the Union. Prior to the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln declared the emancipation of slavery throughout the nation, excluding the border states, with their new found freedom came the need of new rights that the federal government must enforce. The federal government granted them citizenship, civil rights, and suffrage (Document G). The illustration found in the “Harper’s Weekly” showed how African American men were given the right to vote freely without the oppression of white supremacy, although this was the Union’s intended goal, this was not the reality of the South. There was an immense change to the lifestyle of the south.

Bleeding Kansas Throughout America’s history, a set of events that happened that leads to the civil war in 1861. There are many controversial issues that arose in the mid-1800's. One issue that leads up to the violence was among people who wanted to abolish slavery in the north and the south and others who didn’t. Bleeding Kansas is a term that is used to refer to a violent period in the Kansas territory.

These readings indicate that there were many limits of freedom in the United States for many people. Slaves were treated like property and at the mercy of their master. Some slaves lived on a plantation and in the excerpt from Rules of Highland Plantation, blacks were not allowed to leave the plantation, sell anything without permission and were responsible to be on call without questioning its timing. These actions benefited the master because as long as they kept their slave at their beck and call at all times of the day and their slave could not leave the property, then their slave could not leave and live on their own. During Andrew Jackson’s presidency, Jackson and his supporters restricted Indians’ rights and tried to seize their lands.

These laws put freedmen in compromising situations; the law obligated Northerners to aid in the capture of all slaves, even freedmen. If any Northerner harbored a Negro or assisted them in their escape, they would be fully prosecuted. With Negroes denied a fair trial, they’re capture and sale was imminent. In order to cut down on this, the Underground Railroad; a secret channel leading slaves to freedom, were forced to stay on top of their game. Now more than ever, white Northerners joined the fight against slavery, angering the South.

The result was the issuing of the “Emancipation Proclamation.” Despite the fact that it merely freed the slaves in the states of the Confederacy where the Union had no power, leaving the institution of slavery untouched in the border states still loyal to the Union, satisfied the demands of blacks and abolitionists at least for the moment. The great value of the Proclamation, besides building support among blacks and abolitionists, was that it brought fear, chaotic despair and deprived the Confederacy of much of its valuable black laboring force. Another aspect of the Emancipation Proclamation was its effect in helping to promote the Draft Riots, which occurred throughout the North in 1863.

It is arguable that Fugitive Slave Act decreased abolitionist activity because it provided incentive for Northerners to comply with it. Federal commissioners who determined whether a person was truly free or not was paid a double fee whenever they decided someone a fugitive. Not only that, but any Northerners caught helping blacks, runaway or not, faced the risk of a thousand dollar fine and up to a year in jail. But, as argued by historian Lincoln Austin Mullen, in his article Fugitive Slave Laws (1793 and 1850), “Northern reaction to the law was swift and angry.

This demonstrates how the acts of the abolitionists persuaded people to join the movement by revealing the power held by the South and how much the North relied on

Not only did the Fugitive Slave Act invoke a never seen before determination in abolitionists across the North, but it also influenced other people to join the movement. The Northerners had now seen the brutality of slavery first hand, it changed their morals in turn affecting their future actions. Many abolitionists were more than happy to see communities and towns coming together to help Fugitive Slaves escape the North, in fact many businesses would help in finding or providing work for the escaped slaves. Fredrick Douglass, a prominent abolitionist who was a slave who escaped from the North, made a speech on his perspective of the Fugitive Slave Act He said “The majority of slaveholders find it necessary, to ensure obedience, at times, to avail themselves of the utmost extent of the law, and many go beyond it. If kindness were the rule, we should not see advertisements filling the columns of almost every southern newspaper, offering large rewards for fugitive slaves, and describing them as being branded with irons, loaded with chains, and scarred by the whip.”

Resistance is a constant feature of American slavery. The African-Americans have resisted and rebelled against their oppressors in many different ways. Suicide has been the most common way to resist slavery, in addition to escaping from the traders before reaching the slaveholders’ houses, or even reaching the European coats. In her novel, Jacobs mentions several different forms of resisting slavery: buying itself, using violence and running away.

Outnumbered by whites and facing federal, state, and local authorities dedicated to preserving slavery, slaves only rarely rebelled. Compared to Caribbean or Latin American slavery, where slaves were more numerous and more often imported directly from Africa, slave rebellions in the United States were smaller and less frequent. This does not mean that slaves simply submitted to their condition. Resistance to slavery took many forms, from individual acts of disobedience to the occasional uprising. The most common form of slave opposition was “day-to-day resistance” or “silent sabotage”: doing poor work, breaking tools, abusing animals, and simply disrupting plantation routine.