Climbing Up to Glory Read Free

in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1992).
    Although black source material for this study is limited, a large collection of slave testimony, recorded as part of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, is available. The Federal Writers’ Project interviews are reproduced in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography , 19 vols. and supplements (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972). Slave narratives are also published in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); B. A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); and James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember, An Oral History (New York: Avon Books, 1988).
    Published travel accounts, letters, memoirs, journals, and diaries by Northerners and Europeans who made excursions into the South during this period comment on relations between blacks and whites and on the social and economic conditions and everyday lives of slaves and free blacks. Travel accounts are useful in ascertaining how former slaves perceived their relations with whites and how freedmen interacted with the propertied class of blacks. The best travel accounts of the economic, social, and political activities of blacks during emancipation and Reconstruction are Sidney Andrews, The South since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866); Henry M. Christman, ed., The South As It Is: 1865-1866 (By John Richard Dennett) (New York: Viking Press, 1965); J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities: A Journey through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866); and C. Vann Woodward, ed., After the War: A Tour of the Southern States , 1865-1866 (By Whitelaw Reid) (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). Diaries, journals, memoirs, and letters written by both Northern and Southern blacks and whites who spent some time in various capacities in the South round out the picture provided by the writings of travelers. The best of these are R. J. M Blackett, ed., Thomas Morris Chester: Black Civil War Correspondent, His Dispatches from the Virginia Front (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Patricia W. Romero and Willie Lee Rose, eds., Reminiscences of My Life: A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs (By Susie King Taylor) (New York: Markus Wiener, 1988); Frank [Francis] A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin A. Delany, Sub-Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, and Late Major 104th U.S. Colored Troops (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1883); John W. Alvord, Letters from the South Relating to the Condition of Freedmen Addressed to Major General O. O. Howard (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1870); Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days amongst the Contrabands (New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1968, reprint); and Rupert Sargent Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina , 1862-1884 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1912).
    On the question of Lincoln and the issue of black freedom, see Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); Stephen B. Oates, With Malice toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); LaWanda Cox, “Lincoln and Black Freedom,” in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 175-96; Richard N. Current, “The Friend of Freedom,” in Kenneth M. Stampp and Leon F. Litwack, eds., Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist