By Dr. Donald R. Shaffer
Instructor, Arts and Humanities Program at American Public University
I was honored to be invited to participate on May 3, 2013, in the “Freedom Rising” symposium at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The purpose of this gathering was to commemorate and explore the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the advent of black military service in the Union Army during the American Civil War. My presentation was part of a three-day program of events, culminating on May 4 with a dramatic performance at Boston’s Tremont Temple Baptist Church delving into the connections between the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, the only successful mass-slave revolt in the Americas, and the coming of freedom for the slaves in the United States.
The title of my presentation was “Celebration and Agitation: The Black Civil War Veterans Reunion at Boston’s Tremont Temple, August 1887.” I drew the material for this talk from my 1996 dissertation and the resulting book, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (University Press of Kansas, 2004). That is, given the dramatic performance at Tremont Temple during the symposium, I wanted to alert the symposium attendees that this was not the first time a celebration of freedom for the slaves had occurred in this location.
That is, in August 1887, a group of about 300 African-American veterans of the Union Army and their supporters gathered at Tremont Temple in Boston for the only known national reunion of former black soldiers and sailors that had served in the Civil War. They came together to commemorate the freedom they had helped win for their race in that conflict, and organize anew to preserve the citizenship rights African Americans had gained in its wake.
The 1887 gathering was one many reunions of Civil War veterans, North and South, that became increasingly common several decades after the war ended, as its horrors subsided, and men that had participated in the war of 1861-65 embraced their identity as veterans and battled anew among each other and more generally with American society over the war’s memory. This conflict over how the war should be remembered was not an abstract exercise, but had tangible implications for how people would live in the United States after the Civil War, and no more so than for African Americans.
African Americans had not only gained freedom in the Civil War via the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but also full citizenship via the 14th Amendment and male voting rights via the 15th Amendment. Yet it was quite apparent to the Tremont veterans that by 1887, the citizenship rights, suffrage, and even sometimes the security of African Americans were under assault. It was especially apparent in the states of the former Confederacy, where white Southerners through various legal means, as well as coercion and violence, sought to reestablish white supremacy. So the black Civil War veterans gathered in Boston in August 1887 to remind the nation that they had risked their lives in the Civil War to save the Union, and to use the memory of that debt of honor to call upon the federal government and the American people to defend the rights and safety of black people in the United States. Although considerable progress has been made in race relations, the Tremont veterans’ meeting in Boston in 1887 continues to have relevance today, and hence the timeliness of the “Freedom Rising” symposium not only to celebrate freedom for the slaves, but also to remind Americans that freedom for all Americans still must continue to be nurtured 150 years after the Civil War.
About the Author:
Donald R. Shaffer is the author of After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (2004) and the co-author of Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (2008). He teaches college-level history exclusively online and regularly posts to his blog, Civil War Emancipation at: http://cwemancipation.wordpress.com.
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