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Congressional Medal of Honor -
Slavery, Abolition and the Civil War
There had been opponents to the enslavement of blacks in America ever since colonial days. Slavery had been mostly abolished in the North before 1800. Slave uprisings in the South, most notably Nat Turner's rebellion in Virginia in 1831, dramatically underscored the risks slaves would incur themselves to break their chains of bondage. But it was not until the 1820s and 1830s, when the rising prosperity of the Souths cotton plantations began making slavery more lucrative, that Americans in significant numbers started to raise objections to this peculiar institution. In its early stages, the movement to abolish slavery focused largely on schemes for gradual colonization of ex-slaves in Africa. As time passed, however, the abolitionists became more critical of slaverys inhumanity and more pressing in their demands for quick emancipation.
This mounting combativeness strengthened the cause in the North, but below the Mason-Dixon line, where anti-slave sentiment had once been fairly strong, it inspired defensiveness. By the 1850s the spokesmen for this region were countering the pleas of abolitionists with discourses proclaiming the unalloyed virtues of slaveholding and the sins of free labor. Although it would be problematic to single out the debate over slavery and its expansion into the western territories as the sole causes of the Civil War, there is no doubt that these bitterly divisive issues kindled the secession movement that made that conflict inevitable.
Frederick Douglass (18181895)
Born into slavery on Marylands Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass was determined by his early teens to escape his bondage, and in 1838, he fled northward to settle in Massachusetts. He soon joined the antislavery movement, and by the mid-1840s his commanding eloquence in offering firsthand testimony to the oppressions of slavery had transformed him into one of the movements most persuasive spokesmen. Recalling the figure that Douglass cut at abolitionist gatherings, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: He stood there like an African prince . . . grand in his proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with keen wit, satire, and indignation he portrayed the bitterness of slavery.
Douglasss reforming zeal remained strong all his life. After the Civil War put an end to slavery, he continued to be a leading defender of the rights of African Americans in the era where all too often those rights were ignored.
This likeness bears a strong resemblance to the engraved portrait of Douglass that first appeared in the 1845 edition of his much- celebrated memoir of his life in slavery. It is not clear, however, whether the painted or the engraved likeness is the original.
Sojourner Truth (circa 17971883)
In 1843, obeying what she said was the voice of God, ex-slave Isabella Van Wagener changed her name to Sojourner Truth and set out to become an itinerant preacher. Soon, her skillful sparring on biblical interpretation won her wide respect on the revival circuit and, at the same time, brought her to the attention of abolitionists. By 1850 she was a much-celebrated speaker for the antislavery movement. In serving that cause, this tall, spare black woman dressed in plain, Quakerlike garb entranced audiences with her quick wit and simple speech. Of her impact, fellow abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe once remarked that she could not recall meeting any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence.
As a lecturer after the Civil War, Truth divided her energies between speaking out for female suffrage, championing the rights of African Americans , and urging temperance. To finance her speaking tours, she sold copies of her ghostwritten autobiography and photographs of herself, such as the one seen here.
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