"Pursuing Happiness: Black Politics and Family in the Civil War Midwest"

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the American Civil War and the United States Colored Infantry has highlighted the importance of the experience of the Northern Black men who served in these units and their families’ experiences on the home front. The studies over the last decade have emphasized Black political activism in major East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states, highlighting the creation and growth of Black political and social communities, and how these communities perceived the Civil War and acted as their own liberators. This dissertation adds to this growing body of literature by examining two of the states on the Midwestern frontier whose Black communities have received too little attention: Illinois and Wisconsin. In this dissertation, I argue that Black families were able to carve a home in these free states that were still hostile territory. Their white neighbors took to the state legislatures to ensure that Black families remained outside of the political and social processes. Despite this, Black families established thriving communities in this hostile frontier space. Taking up residency in these spaces was only part of the political action in which leaders of these Black communities engaged. Throughout the Civil War period, Black political leaders crafted a dialogue that was aimed at protecting their families and ensuring the survival of their communities. The political rhetoric that emerged from the Colored Conventions, Black newspapers, and other political meetings highlighted protecting Black families and communities as the leaders’ primary objective. Securing political and social rights were beneficial to the entire family. In the post-war period, these objectives remained enforced by Midwest activists, who continued to press for equality in the official halls of the state legislatures and Congress.