Book Review: Out of this Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Civil Rights in the Civil War Era
Out of this Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Civil Rights in the Civil War Era. By Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2026. Paperback, 272 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by Max Longley
Professor Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. is a history professor at George Washington University in Washington, D. C. As he shares with the reader of this book, he is himself descended from free people of color of the Civil War era. In this context, free people of color means Black and mixed-race people who had freedom before the Civil War broke out, either because they had been born free or because they had been liberated from slavery (by themselves or by former “owners”).
Professor Milteer is, I believe, the first to center a scholarly book on the experience of free people of color in the Civil War era, though many other studies have explored various aspects of the experience of this community in the context of discussing other subjects (like military service). Professor Milteer dived into numerous state archives – including many in the South – not to mention contemporary newspapers, to supplement the existing scholarly literaure about the lives of free people of color.
There were in effect two subgroups of free people of color, North and South, though in each region there were local variations. In the North, freedom was supposed to be the norm. This meant Northern free people of color could quit their jobs, and try to find new ones, without being hunted down, captured, whipped, etc. The big exception was that kidnappers (some of them private, some of them federally-backed) sometimes tried to seize free people of color living in the North and take them into Southern slavery.
Even when Northern free people of color were able to protect their freedom against kidnappers, they faced Northern discrimination. Details varied from state to state – or within states – but methods of persecution included disenfranchisement (in most Northern states), denial (e. g., in Illinois) of the right to testify against whites, bans on marrying whites, refusal (as in Oregon) to let free people of color legally migrate, incidents of refusal of service on streetcars and railways, Jim Crow theater galleries, and illegal-but-unpunished violence.
One freedom which free people of color normally had in the North was the right to protest their own mistreatment and the mistreatment of others of African descent (eg. the enslaved in the South). This right was exercised through newspapers, conventions, protest meetings, and by religious groups (which usually enjoyed religious freedom like white religious groups).
In the South, free people of color were a minority of people of African descent – since most people who possessed such ancestry were enslaved. The very existence of free people of color in the South was increasingly seen by many influential Whites as an anomaly in a society based on race-based slavery. Some suggested that the “problem” of free people of color be “solved” by enslavement or exile. In any event, in addition to insecurity of status, free Southern people of color faced discriminatory policies which were more thoroughgoing than the North’s. For instance, free Southern people of color lacked the freedom of expression and religion which they had in the North. At a time when even white people in the South were denied free expression and freedom of religion on the subject of slavery, free people of color in the South were not allowed to speak out against racial caste, lest it give enslaved people dangerous ideas.
Both in the North and in the South, free people of color strove to make a living as laborers and artisans. Overall, free people of color were poorer than whites. But some free people of color overcame prejudice and discrimination and built up successful businesses. There were even a few professionals. And of course, even if they made only modest livings, the money free people of color made belonged to them, not to a “master.”
When war broke out, even before Confederates began drafting Whites into the Confederate army, the Southern government drafted free people of color as laborers, teamsters and other support specialists – not as soldiers.
The North did eventually accept soldiers of African descent, including free people of color from the North and South, for service in the Union Army. In this connection, Professor Milteer has a disagreement with the pathbreaking 1989 movie Glory, about the 54th Massachusetts. The real-life 54th Regiment was mainly made up of Northern Blacks who had been free before the war, but the movie makes it look as if all the soldiers were formerly enslaved in the South (There were, of course, many real examples of formerly enslaved Black men serving in the Union Army).
During Reconstruction, the prewar free people of color joined, in the North and in the South, the campaign against Presidential Reconstruction and in favor of the egalitarian policy of Congressional Reconstruction. Northern free people of color also renewed the push to eliminate their own region’s discriminatory laws. For a too-brief interval, equal rights were legally recognized regardless of race thanks to the Reconstruction Acts and the Reconstruction Amendments. In the South, those who had been free people of color before the war joined with those who had been liberated from slavery during the conflict in demanding equal voting rights and other rights. Probably because of having a longer experience of freedom, including in some cases the accumulation of property, those who had been free before the war often had a “disproportionate” political influence in Reconstruction compared to the recently enslaved.
This book will greatly improve what people know about an important group which fought for its own progress and freedom while fighting for the freedom of the nation.
It’s surprising, sometimes, to learn that life 150 or more years ago was just as complicated as today. I don’t blame our 8th grade history classes so much as our American tendency to always look forward. This seems like a book that will help us see ourselves a little differently.
It’s sobering to learn that the fights for racial freedoms runs in cycles. There’s a comfort in believing that “the Arc of Justice always bends” toward progress. This book makes me realize we are the same petty, grasping societies today that we have been for thousands of years.
An occasional reminder gives me hope that we can muddle through, sometimes by learning the details of the courage it took to fight and die to keep everyone free.
Does the professor distinguish between the experiences of free people of color in states like Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia with that of Mississippi or Alabama? Or does he lump everyone together into “the South”?
It is a grandiose error of fantastical thinking to believe for a second that anything like a “civil rights movement” – a term that wasn’t even coined until nearly a century after the end of the Civil War – was going on during the Civil War era. James McPherson mistakenly thought there was when he wrote ‘Battle Cry of Freedom,’ but to his great credit – for many historians refuse to admit they’ve erred no matter how much evidence is presented – he eventually admitted he was wrong, and set the record straight in his book ‘For Cause and Comrades.’ It must be pointed out that in the Maoist revisionism of the Civil War that has been occurring the past few decades, the erasing of inconvenient facts, and the whitewashing – no pun intended – of the chosen party into shining heroes has gone on, despite massive evidence against it.
So for that reason, in this supposed majestic war on slavery, hatred, racism and white supremacy – the latter yet another 20th century term that has been retroactively applied to an earlier era, where it did not exist – the fact that five slave states – Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Missouri, Kentucky – remained in the Union and were never forced to give up their slaves by the government that was supposedly fighting against slavery – and a sixth, West Virginia, was added to the Union; and while slavery ended in the South in June 1865 it took another six months to get Northerners to give up their slaves; and that Jim Crow, which politicians evoke to this day in order to race-bait and game the system in order to filch even more taxpayer dollars, was copied lock, stock and barrel from the pre-War “Black Codes” in the North, which not only remained in place during the war, but which remained largely in place after the war – segregation, denial of citizenship or voting rights to blacks – amazing, in this day when the Democrat Party has illegally registered tens of millions of illegal aliens to vote – guys, Joe Biden is eternally grateful – barring interracial marriage and a black person bearing witness against a white person, etc. etc.
No, the Civil War nor its era were a Civil Rights movement – and the collection of facts proving it wasn’t could fill one of the stadiums in which the World Cup is taking place. It could be said, perhaps, that the Civil Rights movement as we know it began with the passage of the 14th Amendment, which gave former slaves US citizenship, confirmed birthright citizenship for the children of American parents, and specifically and unequivocally forever barred birthright citizenship to the children of aliens, both legal and illegal – again, stadiums of evidence for this, and none in support of the abuse of the latter that has shamefully been allowed to go on for nearly a century – but no – the Civil War era was never a Civil Rights movement – and it cannot be retroactively made into one.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Seems pretty straight forward Pard.
“and the collection of facts proving it wasn’t could fill one of the stadiums in which the World Cup is taking place.” Then goes on to double down, and provide zero facts. Jump down and grab a root Pard.
The book is about free people of color. I’m not sure where you are going with your first paragraph argument. If you think that free people of color (whether in the Free States, or the Slave States) didn’t understand that they had a huge stake in the outcome of the war, I would suggest you do some serious research. They definitely viewed the war and it’s outcome as a chance to move toward equal rights (suffrage, running for political office, providing testimony in a court of law, sitting on juries, etc) and they certainly “kicked in like men.”
White supremacy was indeed a common term in the mid-19th century. Get a subscription to newspapers.com, and keyword search it from 1850 to 1865.
What do you think all of the “Colored Conventions” of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were all about. Do you think they met just to have a good time? They were about moving toward ending slavery and gaining equal rights. Additionally, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 predated the 14th Amendment.
Could you please show me exactly where in “For Cause and Comrades” Professor McPherson claims that there was no Civil Rights movement prior to the 14th Amendment? I have the book right in front on me, so I’ll be awaiting your response eagerly.