This Wicked Rebellion by Michael Edmonds

Author:Michael Edmonds [Michael Edmonds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780870205897
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Notes

1 A wad was a piece of crumpled paper placed between the powder and the bullet when loading the rifles used by both armies. The explosion of the powder often set the wadded paper on fire.

2 An error. This should read September, as should the reference to “Aug. 5th” below.

3 Perhaps “Green Backs.”

CHAPTER 4

Slavery, Emancipation, and African Americans

OF ALL the differences between the North and the South, probably the most provocative was the institution of slavery, about which Wisconsin soldiers had plenty to say. Letters home and to Wisconsin newspapers show Wisconsinites at their best and at their worst, as soldiers expressed a variety of emotions and attitudes toward that institution and the human beings, both masters and slaves, who were a part of it. While many rejoiced at the thought of slavery coming to an end, others proved more cautious, not wishing to interfere with Southern ways of life, and some were openly hostile and deprecating toward African Americans, slave or free. Still others saw slavery as a source of strength for the South, as forced African American labor liberated white Southerners to fight the war. Accordingly, they expressed a desire for slavery to end merely as a war measure against the South and not as a moral imperative.

Whatever their views on emancipation, as Wisconsin’s soldiers observed slavery in practice, they came face-to-face with a social system more complex than they knew from their life in Wisconsin. While many slaves fled to the Union army in search of freedom, the soldiers wrote of cases in which freedom, though attainable, was deferred in order to keep families together. Several correspondents expressed surprise upon discovering that slaves who appeared as white as themselves were not uncommon. As “contrabands” came to the Union army, Wisconsin soldiers shared daily life, and eventually duty and combat, with men formerly held as slaves, noting their customs and expressions, so different from what was seen in Wisconsin. While some were overjoyed with the thought of bringing freedom to oppressed people, racism and inequality abounded, even among soldiers who eventually were fighting as much to free the slaves as to unite the Union. Yet for many of Wisconsin’s men serving in the South, the war was an opportunity to know African Americans not as slaves or contrabands, but as human beings.

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