Posted on 03/30/2016 8:33:15 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Even though the Civil War had ended in 1865, political and racial strife continued to northern and southern states. In an attempt to mend the rift, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act in 1867, but many southerners objected to the act saying it favored northern interests and not their own.
At the same time, two groups of disenfranchised Americans lobbied for the right to vote – women and blacks. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among the leading women suffragists. The most prominent among the black suffragists was Frederick Douglas. All these groups wanted was the recognition of equal citizenship which included the right to vote and hold political office.
Blacks first gained their freedom with the ratification of 13th Amendment in December 1865 which read:
(Excerpt) Read more at constitution.com ...
PING!
Now look what we have.
American Indians had to wait until 1924. Heck, even women got the vote earlier than that!
https://archive.org/details/prostratestates01pikegoog
Interesting history of South Carolina when freedmen controlled the government.
So, better this didn’t happen?
In the North, the Negros got the right to vote immediately—and most of them voted Republican.
Ann Barnhart and Ann Coulter both make logical arguments as to why women shouldn’t vote. Our founders intended only propertied white men to vote. Were our founders wise men?
Is it better that whites will soon be a minority in the territory that their forefathers fought and sacrificed to win and populate?
Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, warned against it, and explained why. You’ve never read his statements on it?
Of the ten million Africans taken for slavery, only 388,000 were brought to the United States.
The vote did more for blacks and women than it did for the country.
Republicans should make this their holiday and make sure blacks know where it comes from and how hard the opposition fought it.
Please, let's not let political correctness stand in the way of telling unvarnished truth.
Also, proportionately, more freed-blacks served and died in that cause than Northern whites.
Indeed, the percentages of freed-blacks who served & died was roughly the same as Southern Democrat whites.
Good point, and we should remember, black soldiers weren’t allowed to serve until the second half of 1862, and it started slowly. By the end of the conflict, 179,000 were in the Union army, many if not most never serving in combat, but performing essential duties that previously had been solely filled by white soldiers; after the war a number of black veterans (and eventually, some new enlistments) were assigned to western forts with a number of those winding up in cavalry units.
A freakish handful of black soldiers served (or well after the war, purported to have served) for some of the CSA states’ forces.
Every Republican speaking on the campaign trail today should make it a point to talk about this date in history, and how it was the Republicans who made it possible for blacks to gain the right to vote.
Which was nearly 10% of the Union Army.
Add to those at least 10,000 (16%) serving in the Union Navy.
The death rate from all causes among the Union's two million troops was about 15%.
Among its colored troops deaths were just over 20%.
Colored troops did fight some notable battles, and 18 won the Medal of Honor.
SunkenCiv: "...black soldiers served (or well after the war, purported to have served) for some of the CSA states’ forces."
Well, many tens of thousands of slaves also served the Confederate Army, in a wide variety of infrastructure roles, from building roads & fortifications to miners, teamsters, nurses aids, setting up & maintaining camps, etc., etc.
Civil War historian Allen Guelzo estimates that Lee's Army at Gettysburg, in addition to 75,000 Confederate soldiers included another 30,000 slaves.
Yes, there are scattered reports of slaves serving in combat, but all suggestions for making slaves into Confederate fighting soldiers were squelched until the final days of the war.
No black units ever fought for the Confederacy.
I wasn’t disagreeing that black troops went into combat, only pointing out that by and large, they didn’t serve in combat roles.
I would add that, when they did, the KIA rates were appalling, as they were for everyone who served in that war. Combat KIA for soldiers was about 1.5% (I’d guess that’s a little higher, depending on how one counts outcomes in field hospitals and such), north and south, I’d be surprised if black KIA wasn’t at least a bit higher, because the CSA forces didn’t generally take black soldiers prisoners, preferring to kill them in the field.
I didn’t and still don’t count black slave labor as serving in the Confederate army, any more than “contraband of war” captured slaves who worked on the Capitol dome were serving in the Union army. Captured slaves held by the Union army were basically 100 percent captured from masters living in the Confederacy, which further sapped what passed for a labor force in the South.
The North also had a huge advantage in industry, and built a mostly overwhelming naval advantage. A surprising number of immigrants stormed ashore during the war years, and I’d be surprised if fewer than 90 percent arrived in the Union. Large numbers served as substitutes during the first couple of years, after that black enlistments enlarged to fill the gap between northern native-born whites who didn’t want to serve (in this particular rural area, a very large percentage appears to have signed up in 1861); I’d be a little surprised if the falloff in the substitutes’ numbers in the face of little tet-a-tets like Antietam didn’t factor into the decision to allow recruitment of black troops.
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