Download Civil War Timeline

The Civil War From Nat Turner to Birth of a Nation
Timeline
1777: Vermont ratifies a Constitution outlawing slavery. It is the first antislavery
constitution in history.
1787: Northwest Ordinance. Continental Congress prohibits slaves from entering the
Northwest territories. The ordinance is passed by a majority of the Framers of the Constitution.
1808: Congress ends the Atlantic slave trade. Illegal trade becomes a capital crime.
1811: Louisiana Slave Rebellion. Between 100-250 slaves on sugar plantations 40 miles
north of New Orleans strike for their freedom in the largest slave rebellion in North America (as
measured by the number of rebels). They head toward New Orleans, burning plantations along
the way. Governor Claiborne calls in federal troops and within a day the rebellion is squelched.
1819: A financial panic fuels suspicions over the growing power of the federal
government, especially the national bank; and it incites fears among Southerners and
Midwesterners that northeastern elites are controlling the country.
1819-21: Missouri crisis. In 1819 Missouri petitions to enter the Union as a slave state
in 1819. A crisis ensues. Northern statesmen had long believed there was a tacit agreement
between the two sections: Southerners would gradually end slavery in their states, if
Northerners would not interfere with slavery in the southern states. The crisis dramatized the
degree to which Southerners now sought to expand slavery. Southerners threatened to secede if
slavery was prohibited from Missouri, prompting a compromise: Missouri entered the Union as
a slave state; and all subsequent territories in the Louisiana would enter as free states if north of
the 36 30’ (Missouri’s southern border), and as slave states if south of that latitude.
1821-1845: No new territories acquired, effecting a détente on discussions of slavery.
1822: Denmark Vesey, a South Carolina slave who had come from St. Domingue (Haiti),
plans a massive rebellion in which rebels would strike on Bastille Day (July 14), killing whites
and liberating slaves in Charleston before sailing to permanent freedom in Haiti. The plot is
revealed and 35 slaves, including Vesey, are executed.
1827-29: Freedom’s Journal, the first black-run newspaper (edited by Samuel Cornish
and John Russworm) demands immediate abolition and condemns colonization, a scheme of
shipping freed blacks back to Africa (or another country) that most antislavery statesmen
endorse.
1829: David Walker publishes Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that
justifies slave rebellion and warns white Americans, “for your own good,” that if they delay
justice blacks will win their liberty “by the crushing arm of power.” Walker secretly sends copies
of his pamphlet to blacks in the Deep South, creating furor among white Southerners.
January 1, 1831: William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator.
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October 21, 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Turner led a band of slaves in
Southampton County, Virginia, killing some 60 whites before being captured. The rebellion had
originally been planned to commence on July 4 but was delayed. In its wake over 100 blacks
were killed. Horrified Virginia legislators debate emancipation throughout the state, but the
proposal is defeated.
1832: Nullification Crisis. South Carolina statesmen, increasingly fearful of federal
authority and outraged by Turner’s insurrection, Garrison’s Liberator, and high tariffs that
penalized planters, nullify federal tariffs within the state. President Jackson responded by
sending federal troops to Charleston and privately threatening to have John C. Calhoun, the
architect of nullification, hanged. The crisis ended in a compromise calling for South Carolinians
to heed federal law in return for a gradual reduction in tariff duties.
1832-1960s (except during Radical Reconstruction): Southern legislatures, in
the wake of David Walker’s Appeal, Garrison’s Liberator, and Nat Turner’s rebellion, ban
antislavery writings and images and prohibit speech, debate, petitions, and assembly that
challenges slavery or white supremacy. From the 1830s to the 1960s, white Southerners
effectively silence discussions over black freedom or racial equality in Southern states.
1835-1844: Congressional Gag Rules stifle all discussion of slavery in the nation’s
capital. John Quincy Adams, former president and now congressman, leads the movement to
end the Gage Rules.
1836: John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams and the last living statesmen from the
Revolutionary era, declares that “in case of war” the federal government can legally abolish
slavery in the states.
1840: The Liberty Party, the nation’s first political party calling for the abolition of
slavery, is founded.
1845: Texas is annexed as a slave state.
1845: Frederick Douglass publishes his Narrative, the first of three autobiographies (the
latter two published in 1855 and 1881 (rvd.1892)). Soon he is a world-famous spokesman for
abolition and is hailed by radicals as a “representative American.”
1846-1848: Mexican War begun by a preemptive strike against Mexico in the disputed
territory bordering Texas. American troops entered disputed territory and fired on Mexican
troops. Slaveowning president James K. Polk declares war and presides over an administration
that expands the country by two-thirds.
1846: The Wilmot Proviso, a bill that excludes slavery from the territories newly
acquired from Mexico, is defeated in Congress. Southerners are outraged that the bill is allowed
to be debated.
1848: The Free Soil Party, an outgrowth of the Liberty Party, is founded. Its platform
prohibits the spread of slavery, which would lead to its “ultimate extinction.”
1850: Compromise measures are passed in Congress to stifle southern threats to secede.
They include the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which turned the North into hunting
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grounds for slave catchers and required all northern citizens to participate in a posse to roundup
suspected fugitives, who were denied a jury trial and due process of law. The other compromise
measures included admitting California as a free state; ending the slave trade (but not slavery) in
the Washington, D.C.; settlement of the boundary dispute between Texas and New Mexico; and
assuming debts of Texas when it was an independent republic.
1851: Progressive antislavery politicians such as Charles Sumner, William Seward, and
Salmon Chase call the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and tell their constituents to ignore it
by appealing to “higher law.” When the fugitive Thomas Sims is arrested in Boston, thousands
try in vain to prevent him from being sent back to slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act converts
millions of Northerners to the antislavery cause, convincing them that slavery is now their
problem, not just the South’s; they can no longer wash their hands of the evil.
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, inspired by the Fugitive Slave Act, publishes Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, whose impact is so profound that it prompts President Lincoln to call Stowe “the little
woman who wrote the book that started this great war” when he met her at the White House. It
sells more copies than any other book in the nineteenth century save the Bible.
1851-1861: Southerner statesmen try unsuccessfully to reopen the Atlantic slave trade
and annex the slave colony of Cuba. Illegal slavetrading from Africa and Cuba escalates.
May 1854: Congress passes the Kansas-Nebraska Act, written and introduced by
Illinois senator Stephen Douglas. It repeals the Missouri Compromise and opens northern
territories to slavery.
1855: The Republican Party, an outgrowth of the Free Soil Party, is founded. Calling
slavery an evil, it seeks to prohibit its spread into the territories with the aim of “ultimate
extinction,” which Lincoln says will occur in “not less than 100 years.”
June 1855: The Radical Abolition Party, a successor of the Liberty Party, is founded by
Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Gerrit Smith, and James McCune Smith. Calling slavery a “state
of war,” it revises John Quincy Adams’ interpretation of the war power clause and legally
justifies immediate abolition in every state. It also demands immediate suffrage and equality
before the law for all men and women; violent retribution against intransigent slaveowners; and
the redistribution of land to prevent extreme disparities of wealth.
July 4, 1855: Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
Late 1855-1856: Thousands of antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners,
having emigrated to Kansas, engage in guerrilla war over the status of slavery in the territory.
May 22, 1856: Charles Sumner is bludgeoned almost to death on the Senate floor by
South Carolinian Preston Brooks. The provocation for the attack was Sumner’s “Crime Against
Kansas” speech, which accused slaveholders of raping the virgin soil of Kansas.
May 24, 1856: In Kansas Territory John Brown and seven men enter the proslavery
settlement along Pottawatomie Creek and murder five unarmed men, hacking them to death
with broadswords.
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November 1856: Republican Party’s first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, is
narrowly defeated by proslavery northerner James Buchanan. Southerners threaten to secede if a
Republican is elected president.
March 1857: Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Supreme Court decision that vindicates an
extreme proslavery position. It calls any attempt to exclude slavery from the territories
unconstitutional. (It thus declares the Republican Party platform unconstitutional.) It denies
blacks (including free blacks) any claim to citizenship. In his majority opinion Chief Justice Roger
Taney declares that blacks “have no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” And it
protects slaveholders’ “property” even if they bring their slaves into free states, which opens the
way to make slavery legal in every state.
1857: A severe financial panic depresses northern land values and prices on Wall Street
at a time when the price of slaves reaches an all-time high.
1858: Lincoln challenges Stephen Douglas, the frontrunner for the 1860 presidency, for
the Senate; they agree to a series of seven debates in Illinois, giving Lincoln national attention for
the first time. Lincoln launches his Senate campaign in Springfield with his “House Divided”
speech, in which he declares: “’A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this
government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will
become all one thing, or all the other. . . . We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of
Missouri are on the verge of making their state free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that
the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”
Frederick Douglass stumps for Lincoln and other Republicans in Illinois and other
Midwestern states.
October-December 1859: John Brown and a small army of 21 black and white
comrades invade Virginia and take over the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in the hopes of
distributing arms to blacks and inciting a slave rebellion that will lead to immediate
emancipation. Federal troops led by Robert E. Lee capture Brown and his comrades. On
December 2, Brown is executed for treason. His raid, coupled with controversy over slavery in
Kansas, leads southern Democrats to split from northern (Stephen Douglas) Democrats, ensuring
a Republican president in the 1860 election.
November 1860: Lincoln is elected president, the first antislavery president since
John Quincy Adams in 1824.
February 22, 1861: Jefferson Davis is inaugurated President of the Confederate States
of America on Washington’s birthday. The Confederacy includes seven states: SC, GA, FL, AL,
MS, LA, TX (AR, TN, NC, and VA will join in late April-May). The Constitution guarantees
slavery in any new territory the Confederacy might acquire.
March 2, 1861: President James Buchanan approves a Thirteenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution:
"Amendment XIII: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give
to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof,
including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."
[The proposed amendment is never ratified.]
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March 4, 1861: Lincoln's First Inaugural Address supports the Thirteenth
Amendment:
". . . I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of
these States is perpetual. . . . It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in
its organic law for its own termination.
". . . I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is
unbroken; and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly
enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.
". . . Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.
". . . One section of the country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while
the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.
". . . I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution, which amendment,
however, I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall
never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to
service. . . . I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."
". . . I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords
of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as
surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
August 6, 1861: First Confiscation Act, passed by Congress, confiscates property
(including slaves) used directly in the Confederate war effort.
August 30, 1861: John C. Frémont issues an emancipation proclamation in
Missouri.
". . . The property, real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri who shall take
up arms against the United States, or who shall be directly proven to have taken an active part
with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use, and their slaves, if
any they have, are hereby declared freemen."
September 2, 1861: Lincoln tells Frémont to revoke his emancipation proclamation.
". . . I think there is great danger that the paragraph, in relation to the confiscation of
property, and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends,
and turn them against us---perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky. Allow me to
therefore ask, that you will as of your own motion, modify that paragraph so as to conform to
the" First Confiscation Act."
April 1862: The Battle of Shiloh is the bloodiest battle in the western hemisphere thus
far, with 10,000 casualties on each side in two days. It inaugurates total war.
July 17, 1862: Second Confiscation Act, passed by Congress, frees slaves who have
escaped from disloyal masters into Union lines.
September 17, 1862: Battle of Antietam, “America’s bloodiest day,” with 22,000
casualties, prompts Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and leads to the first
images of dead soldiers widely disseminated through photographs and the illustrated press.
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September 22, 1862: Following a tenuous victory at Antietam, Lincoln announces his
Prelminary Emancipation Proclamation, which will free all slaves of rebel masters on January 1,
1863.
January 1, 1863: Emancipation Proclamation emancipates slaves of disloyal masters.
July 4, 1863: After Grant’s long siege at Vicksburg, Confederate General Pemberton
surrendered unconditionally. Grant’s victory is the most successful of the war: it cut the
Confederacy in two and made the Mississippi River a Union highway. Union casualties are
10,000 compared with 37,000 captured (and starving) Confederates and another 10,000 killed or
wounded. Lincoln is thrilled, saying, “Grant is my man and I am his the rest of the war.” The
loss demoralizes Confederates, and Southerners increasingly join Union regiments or form their
own Union companies.
July 4, 1863: Union troops led by General Meade defeat Lee’s army at Gettysburg in
the bloodiest battle of the war: 23,000 Union casualties and 24,000 Confederate dead or
wounded—one-third of Lee’s army. As Lee’s army retreats, Meade refuses to follow and
possibly destroy the Reel army far from its base. “We had them in our grasp,” said Lincoln. “We
had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours.”
July 15, 1863: Working-class Irish Democrats in New York City and Boston unleash
their rage against the government’s conscription act by rioting and killing blacks. In New York
they burn the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground; over 100 people, mostly blacks, are killed
before Union troops fresh from Gettysburg bring order to the city.
November 19, 1863: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
December 8, 1863: Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress promises amnesty to all
Confederates except for a few high government officials. If 10% or more of the voters in any state
swear an oath of future loyalty to the United States and accept emancipation, the state can reenter
the Union (known as the 10% plan).
Early 1864: General McClellan runs against Lincoln on a Democratic platform that
demands unconditional peace and a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy that would
almost certainly leave slavery in tact in southern states. Lincoln feels certain he will lose
reelection.
July 1864: The congressional Wade-Davis bill is an alternative to Lincoln's generous
terms of amnesty. It requires that over 50% of the voters in each southern state swear an oath of
loyalty to the United States to reenter the Union. And it restricts suffrage only to those men
taking an "Ironclad Oath" that they had never voluntarily aided the Confederacy.
August 31, 1864: Sherman’s army conquers Atlanta and begins its “scorched-earth”
march to the sea. Sherman’s victory dramatically changes northern public opinion and ensures
Lincoln’s reelection.
December 1864: Lincoln pocket vetoes Wade-Davis bill.
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March 3, 1865: Congress establishes the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands under the jurisdiction of the War Department, popularly known as the
Freedmen’s Bureau.
December 6, 1865: 13th Amendment ratified, outlawing slavery "except as a
punishment for crime."
Early 1866: President Johnson pardons thousands of Confederate officers and
statesmen, enabling them to return to power in the South.
1866: Henry Wirz, the commander of the infamous Andersonville Confederate prison
camp, is the only Confederate officer executed for treason or other “war crimes” against the
United States government.
1866: President Andrew Johnson vetoes Freedmen’s Bureau bill that expands the
functions of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that guarantees minimal
rights to all citizens. Congress overrides Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act.
1866 to 1872: Blacks form Union League Clubs throughout the South, in which they
learn of their constitutional rights and register to vote.
1867: Congress passes Military Reconstruction Act over Johnson’s veto. The Act
divides the ten former Confederate states that had not ratified the 14th Amendment into five
military districts. It calls for new constitutional conventions in these states; the new state
constitutions must ratify the 14th Amendment and provide black suffrage in order for the state to
reenter the Union.
August 1867: President Andrew Johnson fires Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who is
collaborating closely with Radical Republicans in Congress.
1868: President Johnson is impeached; he is saved from conviction by one vote.
July 9, 1868: 14th Amendment is ratified, granting citizenship and equality before the
law to all persons born or naturalized in the United States.
November 1868: U.S. Grant is elected president.
February 3, 1870: 15th Amendment is ratified, granting suffrage to black men.
1871-1875: At the request of President Grant, Congress passes a series of Enforcement
Acts enabling Grant to fight the Ku Klux Klan. He proclaims martial law in nine South Carolina
counties and arrests numerous federal marshals in North Carolina and Mississippi. He is
vigorously denounced for interfering with states’ rights.
February 1872: Henry Wilson (Radical Republican from Massachusetts) publishes
History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, vol. 1. The Preface states:
"From the closing months of 1860 to the spring of 1865, the United States presented to the
gaze of mankind a saddening and humiliating spectacle. Treasonable menaces had ripened into
treasonable deeds. A rebellion of gigantic proportions burst upon the nation with suddenness
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and fierceness. Violence held its carnival and reaped its bloody harvest. Millions of treasure and
hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed on the wasting shrine of civil war.
"During that stern conflict, and since its close, thoughtful men have asked why this
Christian nation, with so many ties to bind it together, and with such momentous interests to be
imperiled, was rent and dissevered by fraternal strife. Why was the soil of republican America
reddened with the blood of husbands and fathers, sons and brothers, and bathed with the tears of
wives and mothers, daughters and sisters?
"In the lights of the present, it is now more clearly seen that the dark spirit of slavery was
the inspiration of these crimes against the peace, the unity, and the life of the nation, and that
these sacrifices of property, of health, and of life were the inflictions of the Slave Power in its
maddened efforts to make perpetual its hateful dominion. These bitter fruits of the seeds sown in
colonial times afford another signal illustration of the truth of the inspired declaration that
'righteousness exalteth a nation, and sin is a reproach to any people.'" [Proverbs 14:34]
This three-volume history of slavery and abolition in America does not sell well.
November 1872: Grant is reelected president.
1872-1875: Southerners increase their terrorist campaign against blacks and
Republicans in the South. Ku Klux Klan is at the peak of its power.
1873: Panic of 1873 ushers in a widespread depression that cramps efforts of Radical
Republicans to effect civil rights.
1875: Congress passes and Grant signs into law the last civil rights bill in roughly 80
years. Known as the Civil Rights Act, it is a watered down version of the bill drafted by Charles
Sumner before his death in 1874 and anticipates the Civil Rights Act of 1964: it prohibits racial
discrimination and desegregates public restaurants, hotels, juries, and forms of transportation.
Sumner’s bill had called for desegregating all public schools, but that clause got cut before the bill
was passed. In 1883 the Supreme Court declares that the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional.
November 1876: Contested presidential election between Rutherford B. Hayes and
Samuel Tilden owing to terrorist acts against blacks and Republicans in the key states of Florida,
Louisiana, and Mississippi. Hayes is one vote short of a majority in the electoral college and the
election went to Congress. He agrees to remove the remaining federal troops from the South in
exchange for the Presidency.
1879: Thousands of southern blacks escape southern states and settle in Kansas in the
Exoduster Migration.
February 1881: Jefferson Davis publishes his memoir, The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government, in which he denies that slavery is the cause of the war:
"Slavery is in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident. . . . Generally, [blacks'
ancestors] were born the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and
occupations, reared in heathen darkness, and, sold by heathen masters, they were transferred to
shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity.
"[Blacks] were put to servitude, trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and
civilization; they increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian
laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil
blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches. Their strong local and personal
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attachment secured faithful service. Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on
each other."
Davis’ memoir is a bestseller.
March 1886: U.S. Grant publishes his Memoirs. In his Conclusion he declares that
slavery is the cause of the war, and he implies that the war began with the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850:
"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be
attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some
politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or
the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since
the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is
quite true.
"Slavery was an institution that required unusual guarantees for its security wherever it
existed; and in a country like ours where the larger portion of it was free territory inhabited by an
intelligent and well-to-do population, the people would naturally have but little sympathy with
demands upon them for its protection. The people of the South . . . saw their power waning, and
this led them to encroach upon the prerogatives and independence of the Northern States by
enacting such laws as the Fugitive Slave Law. By this law every Northern man was obliged,
when properly summoned, to turn out and help apprehend the runaway slave of a Southern
man. Northern marshals became slave-catchers, and Northern courts had to contribute to the
support and protection of the institution.
"This was a degradation which the North would not permit any longer than until they
could get the power to expunge such laws from the statue books. Prior to the time of these
encroachments the great majority of the people of the North had no particular quarrel with
slavery, so long as they were not forced to have it themselves. But they were not willing to play
the rôle of police for the South in the protection of this particular institution."
Grant’s Memoirs is the last time until the 1970s that a popular work of history calls
slavery the primary cause of the Civil War.
1895: Booker T. Washington, the nation’s preeminent black leader, publicly endorses
segregation as a pragmatic measure to support black manual labor schools in the South and gain
support of liberal whites.
1896: The United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson upholds “separate but
equal” in defending white supremacy and segregation.
1890: Mississippi becomes the first state to institutionalize literacy tests to disfranchise
blacks.
1898: In Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court rules that Mississippi’s
disfranchising of blacks does not violate the 15th Amendment.
1903: W.E.B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, an elegant attack on black
unfreedom that presciently declares: “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color line.”
1909: NAACP is formed.
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1911: Racism has become so institutionalized and entrenched that the 11th edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica, the most popular encyclopedia in the U.S., with contributions by some of
the world’s most eminent scholars, asserts in its long article on “Negro”:
“Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long
study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole negro race: ‘the negro
children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a
gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort
of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. . . . The arrest or even deterioration in mental
development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the
first place in the negro’s life and thoughts.’”
1915: Birth of a Nation, one of the most popular films in U.S. history, celebrates the rise
of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching as the appropriate means of redeeming the South.
1918: The Southern-bred Yale historian U.B. Phillips publishes American Negro Slavery,
calling American slavery a benign institution and slaves among the best treated workers in
history. His book becomes the standard history of slavery in the U.S. for most of the twentieth
century.
1916-1970: In a leaderless revolution, some 6 million blacks flee the former
Confederate states for the North. Escaping debt peonage, lynching, and a form of serfdom, they
thwart whites’ efforts to restrain them and travel on an “upper-ground railroad” on a massive
scale. The Great Migration transforms American culture. Before it begins, over 90% of all
African Americans live in the South. At its end, roughly half reside in the North. It remakes
New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and numerous smaller cities. It turns
Jazz, the Blues, and Pentecostalism into national institutions. And it contributes to the civil rights
legislation of the 1960s.