Josiah t walls biography examples

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The coming of the Civil War brought the hope of liberation to millions of enslaved people. 

By the middle of the war, the Union had begun to see dismantling slavery and recruiting Black soldiers as necessary to victory.

Individuals like Frederick Douglass made it clear that, with the end of slavery in sight, securing civil rights for the newly emancipated was crucial. 

In 1863, Douglass proposed that formerly enslaved Blacks, if given the vote, would become the U.S.

government’s “best protector against the traitors and the descendants of those traitors who will inherit the hate, the bitter revenge which shall crystallize all over the South, and seek to circumvent the government that they could not throw off.” The nation would need each of them “to uphold in peace, as he is now upholding in war, the star-spangled banner.” 

Douglass, like many others, made the case