Unforgettable Sacrifice

Hilary N. Green (Author) Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. A distinguished scholar, her research explores the intersections of race, memory, and education in the post-Civil War American South. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890, co-author of the NPS-OAH Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900, and co-editor of The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham). Edda L. Fields-Black (Foreword By) Edda L. Fields-Black is a Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Her latest book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (2024) uses US Civil War Pension Files to tell the story of the Combahee River Raid, when in June 1863 Harriet Tubman, her ring of spies, scouts, and pilots piloted Colonel James Montgomery, the 2nd SC Volunteers, and one battery of the 3rd Rhode Island Heavy Artillery up the Combahee River to raid seven rice plantations and bring liberation to 756 enslaved people, through the words and using the voices of the Combahee freedom seekers who self-liberated in the raid. One of Fields-Black's many specialties is identifying new sources and methods to recover the voices of historical actors (particularly peasant rice farmers in early and pre-colonial West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast and Blacks forced to labor on rice plantations in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry) who did not author their own written sources.

Note on Language and Sources xi Foreword by Edda L. Fields-Black xiii Porches: An Introduction 1 Part I: Porches of My Mother's Kinkeepers 1 Remembering the Enslavement of Black Pennsylvanians 17 2 Honoring Liberators and the Grand Reception in Harrisburg, 1865 37 3 Joseph Winters's Songs for Self-Made Men 62 4 Cumberland Valley Veterans and the Grand Army of the Republic 89 Porch Lessons I: Rebel, Father, and Veteran 111 Part II: Porches of My Adopted Kinkeepers 5 The Limits of Emancipationist Memory in Richmond 121 6 Black Women and the Persistence ofMemory 145 Porch Lessons II: More Than Names on a Page 173 Part III Porches of My Father's Kinkeepers Porch Lessons III: The Other Syllabus 187 7 Delayed Honor in the Charleston Lowcountry 199 8 "More Than a Footnote" during the Sesquicentennial 221 Toward Black Civil War Memory Studies: A Conclusion 244 Locating Neal, Crawford, and Gabe: An Epilogue 249 Acknowledgments 259 Notes 261 Bibliography 343 Index 375 Photographs follow page 200

Green's research is impressive for both its breadth and depth. . . But perhaps more striking is her engaging writing and her daring willingness to explore outside the box and think about new methodologies, examine non-traditional sources, and blaze fresh approaches to this important topic.-- "Emerging Civil War Blog" Unforgettable Sacrifice is a monumental book. Why? Because historians of Civil War memory have yet to offer a full examination of what the Civil War meant to African Americans. That is, until now. Hilary N. Green brings the reader into the post-Civil War lives of Black men and women who actively commemorated the history of that war, and honored the heroism of the men who volunteered to become soldiers in the United States Army to help defeat the Confederacy and make possible the freedom of four million lives. She arrives at this history by tapping into sources outside of the traditional archive--songs, poems, and the memories shared on porches both North and South, including those of her family. Unforgettable Sacrifice is more than a story of war and memory, however. It's about the meaning of citizenship, and the sacrifices Black Americans made and continue to make to be full participants in our democracy.---Karen L. Cox, author of No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice