Making Freedom: Resisting and Abolishing Slavery in New England and Beyond

1861-1862

1861  Six more states quit the Union; four others follow

His warnings are ignored. When the war begins in April, four more states of the upper South – Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia – sever their ties with the Union and join the Confederacy.  

In forming the Confederacy, Southern leaders insist they are defending the will of God. Its vice-president, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, claims that the nation’s founders had made a grave error by thinking that all men are created equal. “Our new (Confederate) government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea … its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.…We are now the nucleus of a growing power which, if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent." 

But the elite enslavers who control the seceding Southern states are also fearful. According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, author of How The South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, they believe that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marks the end of their way of life. 

“Badly outnumbered by the northerners who insisted that the West must be reserved for free men, southern elites were afraid that northerners would bottle up enslavement in the South and gradually whittle away at it. Those boundaries would mean that white southerners would soon be outnumbered by the Black Americans they enslaved, putting not only their economy but also their very lives at risk.”

1861  With war, enslavers seek to protect investments

1861  Blockade designed to strangle Southern economy

The Confederacy does barter cotton for weapons, ammunition, and ships from British manufacturers. (The owners of successful blockade-runners – mostly light, fast steam ships – are tempted by potential profits of 300 percent to 500 percent per voyage.) But before the blockade begins, planters and Confederate leaders badly miscalculate the power of “King Cotton” to win international recognition and support for their cause. 

They place an embargo on cotton exports to starve the world of Southern cotton – especially Britain which relies on it for 77% of its supply for its burgeoning textile industry. Confederate leaders believe this will force Britain to formally recognize the Confederacy and to intervene diplomatically with other European countries on behalf of the South. To turn the screws, Confederate leaders even burn some 2.5 million bales of cotton in the South to create a cotton shortage. 

But they have not reckoned with the fact that Britain has stockpiled cotton in anticipation of internal conflict in the U.S. By the time the cotton “famine” materializes, the British have turned to other countries that could supply cotton, such as India, Egypt, and Brazil, and urged them to increase their cotton production. 

Meanwhile, President Lincoln has reasons to allow – and indeed, encourage – some trade in raw cotton across military lines. Massachusetts cotton textile manufacturers need cotton in order to stay in business, and Lincoln is unwilling to abandon them: He badly needs the electoral votes of Massachusetts and New York – also home to major cotton interests – to help secure his re-election in the 1864 presidential election. 

Lincoln justifies permitting the cotton trade in occupied Confederate territory to foster Unionism in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee – slave states that have not yet seceded from the Union. He authorizes the issue of federal permits to buy cotton from within the Confederacy, many of which end up in the hands of his friends and political allies. 

There are enormous profits to be made, and the system is rife with corruption. A Congressional investigation launched in 1864 concludes that the between-the-lines trade “induced a spirit of speculation and plunder among the people, who have entered into a disgraceful scramble for wealth during a time of war, waged to save the life of the nation, and has fed that greed of gain which must wound the public morals…. It is believed to have led to the prolongation of the war, and to have cost the country thousands of lives and millions upon millions of treasure.” 

One observer notes that the “mania for sudden fortunes in cotton” means that “every [Union] colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton.” Among the leading profiteers is New Hampshire-born Major General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts state senator before the war and later a Congressman and governor of the state. 

A controversial figure, Butler becomes a very wealthy man with a net worth of $7 million ($200 million today) by his death in 1893. While he has diverse business interests before and after the conflict – including woolen mills in Lowell, Massachusetts that supply clothing and blankets to the Union Army – much of his fortune is believed to have derived from cotton smuggling during the war.

After the war ends, the future of cotton lands remains under White southern control, according to historian Gene Dattel, author of Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power. Northern Republican businessmen are firmly opposed to confiscating land from Southern plantation owners and actively support the resumption of cotton production by means of large plantations. Cotton’s economic importance has not diminished; in fact, the federal government and northern capitalists are well aware that the restoration of cotton production is critical to the financial recovery of the nation.  

Many newly emancipated workers are contracted by Northerners to work on the abandoned plantations as wage laborers. Under federal guidelines, they are promised $10 a month and a 10-hour day. But missing two hours of work a day results in the loss of one-half of a day’s pay, and they are not allowed to leave the plantation without a pass. In some ways, the new boss is much like the old boss: As many as two-thirds of the labor force are thought to have been defrauded of their wages in 1864.

The U.S. gradually regains its position as the world’s leading producer of cotton. By 1870, sharecroppers, small farmers, and plantation owners in the South are producing more cotton than they did in 1860 before the start of the war.

1861  African Americans push to serve in military

1861  Bloody clashes in Baltimore as Civil War starts 

1861  Landscape architect helps persuade Britain to shun Confederacy 

Stauffer, author of  Looking Southward: The Southern Travelogue from Frederick Law Olmsted to the Present, contends that, other than first-person slave narratives – personal accounts by formerly enslaved people of their experiences under slavery in the U.S. – Olmsted’s writings about the South “are the most detailed and accurate description of the region by a contemporary observer.” While Olmsted is not an abolitionist, at least at first, he “gradually becomes anti-slavery.”

In the late 1850s, Olmsted raises money and even acquires weapons for anti-slavery partisans in Kansas, according to Anne Neal Petri, president of the National Association of Olmsted Parks. He also works with the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which assists anti-slavery families to move to Kansas and help build a voting majority in favor of the territory joining the United States as a free state. 

In 1863, after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, Olmsted advises a government commission on integrating Black soldiers into the Union Army. Unfortunately, his key recommendations – for equal pay, respectful treatment, full arms, and extra protections to ensure that Black prisoners-of-war are not re-enslaved – are largely ignored.

In writing about the South, says Stauffer, Olmsted paints a picture of plantations as “primitive places” – small universes unto themselves, feudal societies, where the owner is “judge and executioner.” By contrast, Olmsted champions “public infrastructure for a democratic community.” A dedicated social reformer, he wants to see the South and the rest of the country regenerated through the building of public and democratically accessible canals, roads, town squares, parks, schools, and libraries. 

The fruits of Olmsted’s vision are seen throughout the U.S. His landscape designs include parks and park systems (New York’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Chicago’s Riverside, among others); college campuses (Wellesley College and Smith College in Massachusetts, Stanford University in California, and the University of Chicago in Illinois); and numerous other projects, including institutions for the mentally ill. 

In 1883, Olmsted establishes what is considered to be the first full-time landscape architecture firm in Brookline, Massachusetts. He calls the home and office compound Fairsted. It is now the restored Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site.

1861  Enslaved people declared "contraband of war" 

Word of Butler's announcement spreads quickly among local communities of enslaved African Americans, and the floodgates open. Scores leave local plantations to seek shelter under the guns of Fort Monroe. They set up camps near Union forces with many working as paid laborers on projects to support the Union war effort. 

“Contraband camps” develop around many Union-held forts and encampments. By the end of the war, more than 100 such camps have been established across the South, and an estimated 10,000 escapees from slavery have applied for "contraband" status. The camps include the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, where 3,500 formerly enslaved people work to develop a self-sufficient community. 

After President Abraham Lincoln issues his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, many camp residents sign up to fight the Confederacy in newly formed Black military units. Ultimately, 10,000 African Americans, 3,500 Native Americans, and some members of other minority groups join the United Colored Troops. Their 175 regiments comprise nearly 10 percent of all Union Army forces.

Camp residents have opportunities for education through the assistance of free Black people and missionary teachers recruited from the North by the American Missionary Association (AMA) and other groups. They include the pioneering teacher Mary S. Peake, the first Black teacher hired by the AMA. 

Defying a Virginia law against educating enslaved people, Peake and other teachers hold outdoor classes in reading and writing for “contrabands” and free Black adults and children under a large oak tree near Fort Munroe. In 1863, community members gather under the tree to hear the first Southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. The tree becomes known as the Emancipation Oak. 

Most "contrabands" do not gain full legal freedom until late 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that abolishes slavery.

1861  Freedom order revoked to keep states in Union       

Only 23 enslaved people – including two who “belonged” to an aide of the pro-secessionist former Missouri governor Claiborne Jackson – gain their freedom under the proclamation before Fremont is fired by Lincoln after refusing his request to modify the edict’s emancipation clause. 

Abolitionist leaders protest the dismissal of Fremont, a former U.S. Senator from California and the first Presidential candidate of the new Republican Party in 1856. Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, a Radical Republican and abolitionist, writes that Lincoln's actions have a "chilling influence" on the anti-slavery movement. 

But the Fremont affair has a longer-term and significant impact on Lincoln’s own thinking on emancipation and how and when it should be accomplished. Although he does not yet espouse the idea of immediate emancipation, Lincoln comes to believe that emancipation cannot be a temporary measure, like martial law, that can later be challenged in court; rather, it needs to be put into effect by the federal government in a manner that is incontrovertibly constitutional.

1861  Pro-slavery sentiments roil Massachusetts town   

In the first instance, an enslaved man secrets himself among the hogsheads of sugar on the brig Nautilus before it sets sail from Suriname, at the time a Dutch colony, on the northeastern coast of South America. When the ship arrives in Gloucester, Woodbury and his partner, William Stevens, imprison the man in the local almshouse – which also functions as a jail – intending to return him to his “owners,” probably to preserve their business relationships. The man escapes but is re-captured. 

His case is publicized by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. Under state law, Garrison says, the Suriname man is free as soon he touches Massachusetts soil, and he excoriates Woodbury and Stevens as criminal kidnappers. But there is no indication that the two are prosecuted or that Woodbury’s career as a shipping merchant is adversely affected. The fate of the Suriname man is unknown. 

The second case involves Columbus Jones, a 19-year-old enslaved man, who works on the docks in Pensacola, Florida. Members of a multi-racial crew of the brig Rolerson, partly owned by Woodbury, help hide Jones in the forecastle of the ship before it leaves and heads north. 

Discovered after a few days at sea by the ship’s captain, Jones is isolated from the crew and manacled. During the voyage, the desperate teen breaks three sets of handcuffs, and swears he will die before returning to slavery. After arrival in Massachusetts, the Rolerson captain arranges for another Gloucester brig, the Elizabeth B, that is bound for Pennsylvania to pick up a cargo of coal, to take Jones as far south as Norfolk, Virginia, where he can be reclaimed by his “owner.” 

In the meantime, Albert G. Browne and other Salem, Massachusetts abolitionists notify the Essex County sheriff that the captains of the two vessels have violated the state’s personal liberty law by extraditing Columbus Jones without due process. The captains of both vessels are charged with kidnapping, and an arrest warrant is issued for Woodbury’s business partner, John W. Baker. As a half-owner of the Rolerson, he puts up half the money for the captain’s $2,500 bond, and recruits top lawyers to defend him. 

To great applause in the crowded courtroom, all the defendants are found not guilty. The verdict upholds the return of Columbus Jones to the South, and it is likely he remained enslaved in Pensacola until emancipation.

1862  Lincoln declares freedom for all  

But the jubilation felt in Black and abolitionist communities soon gives way to anxious confusion. Republicans suffer widespread losses in the fall elections because of emancipation. Virulently racist rhetoric from the Democratic Party raises the specter of “scenes of lust and rapine” in the South and a “swarthy inundation” of Black workers in the North. Newspapers trumpet fears of slave insurrection. 

Above all, the news of Lincoln's plans for colonization – transporting free Black Americans to one or more new U.S. colonies overseas – never abates. Indeed, he continues to push his ministers to pursue the effort for voluntary removal. In his biography of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, historian David W. Blight writes: “For Douglass and his family, and the entire abolitionist community, the fall of 1862 was a sleepless watch night that lasted three months.” 

1862  Congress frees all enslaved people in Washington, D.C.  

The Compensated Emancipation Act, sponsored by Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, sets aside $1 million to compensate D.C. enslavers loyal to the U.S. government for the loss of their “property.” The government employs a Baltimore slave trader to assess the value of the enslaved, and enslavers receive a total of $900,000 in compensation.

The new law also allocates $100,000 to pay each newly freed person $100 if he or she chooses to emigrate to Liberia – the former U.S. colony in Africa now an independent country – or other countries such as Haiti. 

A second Compensated Emancipation Act, which Lincoln signs into law on July 12, allows formerly enslaved people to petition for reimbursement for their own value, as long as their former “masters” had not already been compensated. It also allows those who had purchased the freedom of family members to claim reimbursement for the cost.  

The new laws, however, do not cover the tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people who had fled to Washington, D.C. at the start of the war after escaping bondage in slave states. Before the war, the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would have compelled government officials to return the escapees to their “owners.” 

Now those individuals are refugees, and their status is dependent on the outcome of the war. And the war threatens to impact them directly: The Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s military strategy is to invade Washington, D.C., and force U.S. government leaders to sign a truce accepting the establishment of the slaveholding Confederacy as a neighboring nation. 

Abraham Lincoln’s decision to sign the Compensated Emancipation Acts into law in 1862, amid an advance into Maryland by Lee’s troops, is deliberately symbolic. While slavery remains legal at the national level, abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. means that the capital of the United States stands in stark contrast to Richmond, Virginia, the seat of the slavery-upholding Confederacy, just 100 miles away. This sends a message –  particularly to African Americans – that the Civil War is about freedom. 

1862  Ida B. Wells: Exposes lynching horrors with the "light of truth"

Wells soon makes her mark as an anti-segregation activist. In 1884 – 71 years before Rosa Parks’ famous bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama – Wells refuses to give up her seat in the first-class ladies’ car of a Tennessee train and is dragged out by the conductor and two other men. She sues the railroad company for discrimination and wins a $500 award. The verdict is later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court. 

Wells publishes an account of her experiences that circulates nationally through the Black press. Encouraged by the acclaim she receives, she begins to write regularly under the pseudonym “Iola.” She pens articles attacking racist Jim Crow policies, and reports on incidents of racial segregation and inequality, for several local journals including The Free Speech and Headlight. She is invited to join the staff of the paper, and becomes a co-owner.

The Free Speech and Headlight soon emerges as the most radical and talked-about publication in Memphis. And Wells quickly becomes a target of White wrath for her anti-lynching commentaries. In one of her most famous columns, Wells attacks the supposed reason for the lynching of Black men – the rape of White women. She suggests that White women only claim rape after their illicit affairs with Black men have been discovered. She cautions the lynchers that their activities threaten to “sully the reputations of the South’s fairer sex,” according to historian Kenneth W. Goings in an article for the Tennessee Encyclopedia.

In 1892, Wells publishes her groundbreaking research on lynching in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In the pamphlet, she asserts that lynchings are rooted in White fears of Black economic progress, the competition it represents, and the challenge it poses to enforcing the second-class status of Black people in society. (The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950.) 

After conducting further research, Wells publishes The Red Record, a more detailed 100-page pamphlet, describing lynching in the U.S. since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It also covers Black people's struggles in the South since the Civil War.

Also in 1892, three of Wells’ Black friends – Thomas Henry Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Stewart – are shot to death by a White mob following an assault by undercover police on the People’s Grocery, a neighborhood store that the three men had co-owned. A rival White store owner had persuaded a judge that the Black-owned store was “a nuisance,” and the police had been ordered to arrest them.

Wells writes passionately of the atrocity and advises her readers to abandon Memphis and move to the western territories. Many follow her advice. Wells is under constant threat, and the offices of The Free Speech and Headlight are demolished by an angry mob. Fortunately, Wells is out of town when the attack occurs. She moves to New York – continuing her anti-lynching campaign there for three years – before relocating again to Chicago. She does not return to the South for nearly 30 years.

Wells undertakes two speaking tours in Britain – in 1893 and 1894 – to rally international support for her campaign against lynching; thousands gather to hear her speak. She influences public opinion there to such an extent that British textile manufacturers impose a temporary boycott on Southern cotton, exerting pressure on Southern businessmen to condemn the practice of lynching publicly. 

As a prominent Black suffragist, Wells holds strong positions against racism, violence, and lynching that bring her into conflict with leaders of largely White voting rights organizations. She openly confronts White women in the suffrage movement who ignore lynching. Because of her adamant stance, she is often ostracized by White women’s suffrage organizations in the U.S.

Wells helps found the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs to work for women's rights and suffrage. She is present in Niagara Falls, New York for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but her name is not mentioned as an official founder. Wells is also active in the National Equal Rights League, the oldest nationwide human rights organization, founded in 1864 and dedicated to the liberation of Black people in the U.S.   

In 1895, Wells marries widower Ferdinand L. Barnett, a prominent attorney, civil rights activist, and journalist. Together, they have four children to add to Barnett’s two sons from his previous marriage.   

Ida Wells-Barnett’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice, is unfinished at her death in 1931. Edited by her daughter, Alfreda Barnett Duster, it is posthumously published in 1970.

Ida Wells-Barrett is widely celebrated and honored. In 2016, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting is launched in Memphis to promote investigative journalism. In 2020, she is posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation "for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” 

In 2021, a monument to Wells-Barnett is erected in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, close to where she had lived and near the site of the former Ida B. Wells Homes housing project. Created by sculptor Richard Hunt, it is officially called The Light of Truth Ida B. Wells National Monument, based on her quote, "the way to right wrongs is to cast the light of truth upon them.”

1862  Robert Smalls: Sails Confederate ship to freedom 

Impersonating the White captain, C.J. Relyea, to whom he bears some physical resemblance – and even donning Relyea’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help hide his face – Smalls responds with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared to proceed, Smalls sails on into the open seas. 

Once outside of Confederate waters, Smalls has his crew raise a white flag – fashioned from a white bed sheet that his wife had brought on board – and surrenders his ship to the blockading Union fleet. The C.S.S. Planter, formerly a cotton trade steamer, had been outfitted for war by the Confederates with a 32-pound pivot gun, a 24-pound howitzer, and four other guns. It now becomes a well-armed Union warship. 

Smalls quickly becomes a hero in the North for his daring exploit. The U.S. Congress passes a bill awarding Smalls and his crewmen the prescribed prize money under Navy rules for capturing the Planter; Smalls himself receives $1,500 (equivalent to about $46,714 in 2024). With his invaluable knowledge of mines laid near Charleston and of Confederate military deployments in the area, Smalls begins to serve with the Union Navy as a civilian employee. 

His ingenuity, courage, and inspirational example play a critical role in persuading President Lincoln to accept African-Americans into the Union forces. Lincoln had previously rescinded orders by two of his generals to mobilize Black troops. But in a visit to Washington, D.C., where he meets Lincoln, Smalls personally lobbies the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting Black soldiers. After Lincoln gives the go-ahead several months later, Smalls is said to have recruited 5,000 soldiers by himself. They are organized as the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Regiments (Colored). 

Smalls is involved in at least 17 military actions in the course of the Civil War. In one engagement, at Folly Island Creek, South Carolina, Smalls assumes command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its White captain becomes so “demoralized” he hides in the coal-bunker. For his valor, Smalls is promoted to the rank of captain – the first African-American to hold that title – and acting captain of the Planter.   

In May 1864, Smalls is voted an unofficial delegate to the Republican National Convention in Baltimore. Some weeks later, he pilots the Planter to Philadelphia for an overhaul. There he supports an effort to raise money for the education and development of freedmen. Born into slavery and previously denied such opportunities himself, Small first learns to read and write during his time in Philadelphia. 

That same year Smalls is traveling in a city streetcar when he is ordered to give up his seat to a White passenger. Rather than ride on the open overflow platform, Smalls leaves the car. This humiliation of an heroic veteran is cited during a debate in 1867 in the state legislature over a bill to integrate public transportation in Pennsylvania. The bill becomes law.  

After the war, Smalls is a partner in several business ventures – including a store to serve the needs of freedmen, and the development of an 18-mile line for horse-drawn trams in Charleston – before focusing his time and energy on public service. He continues to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation Black politician. 

As a delegate at the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention, he is a part of an effort to make free, compulsory schooling available to all South Carolina children. He is elected to the South Carolina state assembly and later the senate, where he introduces and works to pass key legislation, including the Homestead Act and a civil rights bill. Subsequently, he serves for five non-consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before seeing his state roll back Reconstruction gains in a revised 1895 constitution that strips Black people of their voting rights. 

Robert Smalls dies in 1915, at the age of 75, in the house in Beaufort, South Carolina that he had purchased after the war from the man who had enslaved him. He later allows his former “master's” elderly widow, Jane McKee, to live there until her death. Small is buried in his family's plot in the churchyard of the Tabernacle Baptist Church. The monument to him there is inscribed with a statement he made to the South Carolina legislature in 1895: "My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”

The Robert Smalls House in Beaufort, South Carolina, has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Among many other honors, a logistics U.S. Army support ship, USAV Major General Robert Smalls (LSV-8), is named after him. It is the first Army ship named for an African American. 

In 2o24, state legislators in South Carolina unanimously agreed to memorialize Robert Smalls with a statue on the grounds of  the South Carolina State House – the first Black South Carolinian to be so honored. This will add to the statue of Smalls displayed at the Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. 

1862  Republicans build on military wins to pass progressive laws 

These two pieces of legislation cap six months of Congressional lawmaking that reveal “the revolutionary change in federal law” that takes place from this period on through post-war Reconstruction, according to historian Paul Finkelman. It is made possible because of the war, the ideology of the Republican Party, and the absence from Congress of most pro-slavery Southerners who would have tried to block or defeat such legislation.   

In late 1861 and early 1862, Union forces win a series of crucial victories in the West and gain control of major ports and Confederate strongholds in several Southern states. As military successes multiply, the Republican Congress “begins to remake the nation,” writes Finkelman in an article excerpted from Congress and the People’s Contest: The Conduct of the Civil War, a book he co-edited with Donald R. Kennon.  

Congress changes race relations, attacks slavery, and “creates the political and structural infrastructure of the modern United States,” according to Finkelman. The lawmakers’ actions encourage Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation that leads to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Collectively called the Reconstruction Amendments, they abolish slavery, grant citizenship and equal protection under the law to all people born in the U.S., and establish that the right to vote cannot be denied on the basis of race. 

The summer of 1862 is a watershed: Congress abolishes slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal territories; authorizes the confiscation of enslaved people “owned” by Confederates; formally frees all those who escape bondage and find refuge behind Union lines; prohibits the Union Army from returning escapees to their former enslavers; authorizes the enlistment of Black and Native American soldiers; and creates public schools for African American children in the District of Columbia.

1862  Sculptor honors abolitionists, feminists 

Anne Whitney is born in 1821 in Watertown, Massachusetts. Her parents are Unitarians and abolitionists. At the time she begins studying art, conventions dictate that women cannot take life drawing classes, and art galleries require that the genitalia of sculptures of nude men be covered for women to be present. 

Whitney moves to New York so she can study anatomy at a Brooklyn hospital before studying drawing and modeling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Also a published poet, Whitney exhibits her sculptures in Boston and New York during the 1860s before moving to Rome, Italy. There she becomes associated with a group of female artists and makes works using nude male models – considered improper for a woman at the time.

In 1875, she submits a model sculpture of Charles Sumner, U.S. senator for Massachusetts and an abolitionist, for a blind competition conducted by the Boston Art Committee. She wins the contest and receives the prize money before the judges realize they have selected a work made by a woman. 

Considering it inappropriate for a woman to sculpt a man's legs, they reject her offering and choose another sculpture – by a man, Thomas Ball – for installation in the Boston Public Garden. Responding to the disappointment expressed by her own family and the Sumners, Whitney writes in a letter: "Bury your grievance; it will take more than the Boston Art committee to quench me."

Among Whitney’s well-known public monuments is the 1876 marble statue of Samuel Adams, one of the founders of the U.S. republic, in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. An 1880 bronze and granite replica of that sculpture is installed in Faneuil Hall Plaza in Boston, where Adams gave speeches about British rule and taxation.

As an adult, Whitney lives an unconventional, independent life and has a lifelong relationship with fellow artist, Abby Adeline Manning, with whom she lives and travels to Europe. They are buried alongside each other in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

1862  Lincoln to Black leaders: "Your people should live elsewhere" 

In the White House meeting, Lincoln stuns his visitors by arguing that Black and White people mutually “suffer” from each other’s presence in the same land and should be separated. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both.” Lincoln also blames the war on the presence of Black people. “But for your face among us, there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other.” 

In his biography of abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, historian David W. Blight observes: “To Lincoln, a biracial democracy in America would never be possible. Most black leaders, however, were flushed with new hopes about a future precisely opposite from that outlined in Lincoln’s appeal.” 

Many Black Americans and abolitionists respond angrily to the president’s proposal, holding protest meetings across the North. In a withering critique, Douglass writes: “To these colored people without power and without influence the President is direct, undisguised and unhesitating. He says to the colored people: “I don’t like you, you must clear out of the country.” 

1862  Clergymen push for freedom edict

1862  William Gould: Rows to freedom, serves in Union Navy   

Over the next two and a half years, until the end of the war, Gould serves in the United States Navy. The journal he keeps during that time is the only known record of the war written by a "contraband." 

William Benjamin Gould is born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1837. His father, Alexander Gould, is a White Englishman; his mother, Elizabeth Moore, an enslaved Black woman. The details of their relationship are unknown. William and his mother are the “properties” of a White peanut farmer named Nicholas Nixon, who hires out William to work on construction and renovation projects around the Wilmington area. 

William becomes a skilled plasterer and mason – exquisite molding on the local Bellamy Mansion, now a museum, still bears his initials. He also learns to read and write, which is forbidden by law for most enslaved people, possibly through illicit lessons from White missionaries. 

In his diary, Gould chronicles the timeless monotony of shipboard life, but also the occasional excitement of chasing down Confederate blockade runners, according to an article by New York Times reporter Clay Risen. Gould documents the relative racial equality he finds in the Navy, but also the endless slights and occasional episodes of outright discrimination. For example, White officers occasionally refuse to let Black sailors eat out of the ship’s mess pans because they do not want to use the same ones.

At the end of the war, William Gould is serving on another ship, the Niagara, and receives an honorable discharge from the Navy in Massachusetts. He subsequently marries Cornelia Williams Read, who had also been enslaved. They settle in Dedham, Massachusetts and have eight children together, six of whom serve in the U.S. Army.

His diary ends up packed away in his attic for the next 90 years. 

Meanwhile, Gould builds a successful contracting business in Dedham, commands the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the country’s leading veterans organization, and becomes a respected elder in the community. He dies in 1923 at the age of 85.   

In 1958, Gould’s grandson, William B. Gould III, and great-grandson William B. Gould IV, discover their ancestor’s diary while cleaning out the house. His great-grandson, then in college, becomes fascinated with it. He spends years transcribing and annotating the contents while becoming a prominent legal scholar at Stanford University in California. In 2003, Professor Gould publishes the resulting book, Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor.

In 2021, the town of Dedham renames a local park the William B. Gould Park. It also commissions a statue in his honor, which is unveiled and dedicated in 2023, on the 100th anniversary of his death. The remarkable story of William Gould is now taught in the first, fifth, and tenth grades of the Dedham Public Schools.

1862  U.S. hangs 38 Dakota for alleged war crimes

The war has its origins in a series of treaties – the first signed in 1805 – between the Dakota and the U.S. government. From 1778 to 1871, the United States negotiates treaties with various Native tribes to support westward settler expansion. Typically, tribes agree to surrender their rights to hunt and live in certain areas in exchange for trade goods, annual cash payments, and the right to remain on part of their homelands. 

These treaties – more than 500 of them, all violated or ignored over time by the U.S. government – help set the stage for the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and other U.S. government actions that legalize the theft of Indian land and force tribes who resist treaty attempts to migrate westward to designated  "Indian Territories."

Dr. Elden Lawrence, an ethnic studies professor at Minnesota State University and an author who was born and grew up on the Sisseton Wahpeton Indian Reservation in northeastern South Dakota, described the pressure historically exerted on the Dakota people in relation to treaties in an interview with the Minnesota Historical Society. 

"Everything that they used to get them to sign treaties I think was illegal in a lot of ways – browbeating, brainwashing, and then on the other hand telling them, 'If you sign this treaty, you’re not going to ever have to work or hunt again; we’ll take care of you. Everything will be provided. Every year you’ll get so much money to buy your needs, your pots and pans, but we’ll also have food coming in every month, or once a year for you. The other alternative is: 'We’re going to drive you all the way to the Rocky Mountains where you’re going to starve to death and we’ll never have to worry about you again.'” 

The Santee sign the last of their treaties in 1858 – the same year the U.S. government creates the state of Minnesota. ("Mnisota," meaning "cloudy water" or "sky-tinted water,” is an Indigenous name for the Minnesota River.) By this time, the Santee and the other Dakota tribes have ceded vast tracts of their ancestral homelands to the federal government and reluctantly moved to a reservation twenty miles wide spanning both sides of the Minnesota River. Meanwhile, encouraged by government financial incentives provided by the Homestead Act, White settlers have been moving onto land vacated by the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk peoples.

In 1862, because of a crop failure, the depletion of wild game to hunt, and their restriction to an area that can no longer sustain them, the Santee face starvation. As winter approaches, there is no relief in sight: Promised annuity payments from the U.S. government have not arrived because of Civil War disruption, and traders refuse to advance credit to tribal members for food – or distribute food from warehouse stocks – for fear that the war will prevent them from being repaid. Pervasive racism is also at play. Andrew Myrick, an Anglo trader, remarks, "Let them eat grass, or their own dung."  

Mounting tensions finally erupt in violence when a Santee hunting party steals eggs from settlers in Acton Township, located in Meeker County. The raid leads to the deaths of five settlers. Little Crow (Taoyateduta), a chief of the Mdewakanton band of Dakota, decides to continue the raids. Santee warriors kill other settlers and cause thousands more to flee in an effort to drive all settlers out of the Minnesota River valley. An army of volunteer infantry, artillery, and citizen militia assembled by Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey defeats Little Crow’s forces to bring a swift end to the war. A total of 358 settlers, 77 U.S. soldiers, and 29 volunteers have been killed. Dakota casualties are unrecorded. 

Some 2,000 Dakota surrender or are taken into custody, including at least 1,658 non-combatants, as well as those Dakota who had opposed the war and had helped to free captives held by Little Crow’s band. A military commission sentences 303 Dakota men to death for crimes allegedly committed during the war, including murder, rape, and robbery. Most of the defendants do not speak English, do not know what crimes they are accused of committing, and are not allowed legal representation. The trials themselves are brief; some last less than five minutes.

With White settlers clamoring for revenge, two U.S. generals engaged in the conflict argue that executing the convicted Dakota would “protect” the other 1,000-plus incarcerated Dakota – including women, children, and the elderly – from being massacred by vigilante mobs; in effect, hanging those found guilty would satisfy White blood lust. 

Governor Ramsey – who later calls for the Dakota to be exterminated or driven from the state – writes to President Abraham Lincoln, urging him to sign off on the executions. The president refuses. As legal historian Paul Finkelman describes in a research paper, Lincoln believes that “executing Indian prisoners of war would only serve to justify Confederate executions of black U.S. soldiers (and their white officers). Rather than saving lives, a mass execution in Minnesota could have cost lives in the larger Civil War that was most important to Lincoln.”

Lincoln negotiates the crisis by distinguishing between soldiers in battle and war criminals. After reviewing the records, he concludes that 265 of the Dakota had been convicted only of going to war against the United States, and he effectively pardons them. However, they are sent to Camp McClellan in Iowa where they remain interned for three years; by the time of their anticipated release, one-third of them have died of disease. The 38 Dakota convicted of murder or of rape against civilians fall outside the traditional protections accorded to enemy combatants. Lincoln approves their death sentences.

Another nearly 1,600 Dakota women, children, and elderly are held during the winter of 1862-63 on Pike Island, near Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Hundreds die of disease.  

The U.S. Congress abolishes the Santee and Ho-Chunk reservations in Minnesota, declares their treaties null and void, and expels their residents from Minnesota. They are placed on riverboats and sent to the Crow Creek reservation in present-day South Dakota or the Santee Sioux reservation in Nebraska. The Ho-Chunk later move to Nebraska near the Omaha people to form the Winnebago Reservation. To ensure the Dakota are totally driven from Minnesota, a bounty is created for every Dakota scalp turned in. Little Crow, who had led the first raids, is killed and his scalp collected for bounty. 

An 1863 federal law making it illegal for Dakota people to live in Minnesota remains on the books to this day. Although it is no longer enforced, Dakota tribal leaders consider the law racist and have asked Minnesota state legislators to repeal it.

Viewed in a larger historical context, the U.S.- Dakota War is part of a series of more than 40 conflicts between the U.S. government and Native peoples that come to be called the American Indian Wars. They amount to a systematic attempt to destroy Native American populations and take their land for White settlement – and, in many areas, for agricultural production using enslaved labor. Later, the U.S. government embarks on a policy of assimilating Indigenous people into the dominant Euro-American society.  

In 1971, the Minnesota Historical Society returns Little Crow's remains to his grandson, Jesse Wakeman, for burial. A small stone memorial tablet is installed at the roadside bordering the field where Little Crow was killed. 

On August 17, 2012, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton formally apologizes to the Dakota people, declaring it to be a “Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation.” The Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils formally declare 2013 to be “The Year of the Dakota” and employ the term “genocide” in their resolutions.

In 2016, hundreds of U.S. Army veterans participating with Native Americans in a water protectors’ camp on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to protest the proposed Dakota Access oil pipeline ask tribal elders to forgive them for past injustices inflicted on the tribes.

In a ceremony celebrating a government decision to halt the pipeline pending further environmental review, veteran Wes Clark Jr., the son of retired U.S. Army general and former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark Sr., tells the elders: "Many of us, me particularly, are from the units that have hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. When we took still more land and then we took your children and then … we tried to eliminate your language that God gave you, and the Creator gave you. We didn’t respect you, we polluted your Earth, we’ve hurt you in so many ways but we’ve come to say that we are sorry. We are at your service and we beg for your forgiveness.”