Today, we areso going to be talking about the meaning of freedom. I wanted to capture our earlier discussions about the meaning of freedom when we thought about free communities, free black folks in the north and south and how we came up with this way of representing freedom as freedom with a line through it, not quite freedom. Freedom to freedom, this question of freedom and what does it mean. We will talk about what did freedom mean and in particular what did freedom mean to the free people. January of 1865 edwin stanton, secretary of war, and Union GeneralWilliam Sherman had a meeting with 20 preachers in savannah, georgia. They were pastors, lay church leaders. They wanted to find out from these preachers basically what is it that free people want from freedom . What did they expect in the aftermath of the emancipation proclamation . People who were ostensibly representatives of free black folks in the community selected one person, garrison frazier, a 60 sevenyearold man to be the 67yearoldve a man to be the representative of the community. General sherman asked him what did he understand freedom to mean in light of the emancipation proclamation. He said, taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we can take care of ourselves and assist the government in maintaining our freedom. You start to hear some of the language of the emancipation proclamation. Assisting the government in maintaining our freedom. Talking about having the emancipated to work and do that diligently, serve in the military, he is also also reflecting the ability to reap the benefits of their labor. The secretary and a general ask other questions like could block people take care of themselves . Yes they could. Could black people take care of themselves . Yes they could. Did they want to live among white people . Yes, some did but garrison frazier did not. Even as it is couched in this governmental exploration of what was freedom going to mean for free people, they were already thinking about what they wanted freedom to be. This is building on our conversations of freedom and free black life and how precarious it was. We are moving to where freedom could mean something more. What did that freedom mean when we think about it from the perspective of free people . When of the other things that we are connecting to from the earlier part has to do with this question of how do black people appear on the landscape of the u. S. . Started at the beginning of the term talking about whether black peoples experience in the u. S. Is a part of identity formation or if it is about pushing the nation to live out the true meaning of its creed. We are going to be thinking about this question of whether or not free people were pushing the meaning of what this nation was supposed to be and what its founding document claimed for it. In the process of doing that we will see how it is that when people talk about, when historians write about emancipation and this moment of reconstruction, sometimes the question is framed the way that sherman and stanton framed it, which is basically what can free people do for the country and then there is the question of what do free people want for themselves . When we think about this longer process, which we will talk about in the coming weeks about reconstruction about and what happened, what free people want for themselves is either assumed or crowded out by what they can do for the nation. I hope we can keep both questions in balance, think about the relationship of free people to the nation but also and more prominently what free people wanted for themselves. One of the ways we are going to get at that is by thinking about these first a bites of freedom. Lived,where free people where they went to, they were called contraband camps. I will get into why. We will spend the majority of our time talking about how free people defined freedom in many aspects of their lives. You can think about reasons why. If you think about what the experience of African People was in the african in the American Revolution for example ash what happened after the American Revolution what happened after the American Revolution . That graphice have about the freedom with a line through it. They had freedom but it wasnt a complete freedom. There was a real debate about whether or not black men should support the war effort but eventually they do. The emancipation proclamation because it becomes a war measure. To enlist black men and support the union effort. They do anyway thinking they could demonstrate their commitment to the union and the principles of the nation and that that would reflect well on African People. That they were participating in this process. Some refused. Some black men refused to enlist and others were impressed into the army. It was not all soldiers who participated or were ready to jump in for the war effort but many did. In fact they made up about 10 of the union army and about 25 of the union navy. There was a significant buyin for black soldiers. When they participated in the war, they often times in terms of leadership did not get very competent leadership because they were laboring under the systems of racism that kept them from getting primary leaders and they were sometimes denied the ability to hold positions as leaders. Eventually they were allowed to gain some commissions. They had some leadership roles. Were also often times placed at the forefront. Sometimes called cannon fodder. They were put on the front lines of battles and suffered some of the most greatest number of casualties as a result of their service. They suffered casualties because of being placed on the front lines but also because the tenor of the war was so charged at points that it would experience extreme violence because they were free black men but they were viewed as being runaway slaves or Something Like that. Tennessee at a fort in tennessee, there was a group of black soldiers and it basically ended as a massacre of union troops who were trying to surrender. Black troops were often on the front lines and that is what happened in tennessee. Andere holed up in a fort the Union Soldiers were trying to escape. When they tried to escape from the fort, they believed there would be a transport waiting from them and it turns out that there was not. As they were trying to escape and surrender, they were basically massacred and shot as they were fleeing the fort. Similar situation happened in the battle of decatur where there were black soldiers on the front of the union effort. As they rushed in, they were blown up in a mine area. They were massacred as confederate soldiers were screaming no quarter. The only end they could have would be death. There would be no surrender. We can see how black voters were leading the cause of the war by articulating how they could be supportive of the union. There were thinking through and struggling under some of the limitations including being denied pay. That happened pretty early on. Some of them refused to be paid as until they would be paid as much as white voters be paid. Piece of what they did as far as leadership in the war effort was in terms of securing freedoms for their families. I will talk in a minute about the contraband camps and how people would liberate themselves but one thing that also happened for men who served in the military was they were able to gain freedom for their wives and children. They were able to figure out that by serving in the union they could gain freedom for their families and children. We also know that when it comes to pursuing freedom it is not sometimes it is viewed as an individual moment. People make choices for themselves that then there are those who make choices for their families and communities. We start to think about some of the first freedoms and the places where enslaved people started to find their first freedom, it was indie contraband camps. It was in these places where enslaved people ran to the union lines. When they heard there was a union army in the area, they knew they could find freedom there. They knew what the significance of the war was. Some people think they did not know what was going on, but they did. They had a robust, Communication Network so when the union came to their area, they knew what it meant. One of those places of freedom was munro, in virginia near in 1861 wheninia we start to find that these first friday him were during this moment of humanitarian crisis. All at the hands of enslaved people who were liberating themselves. The other places port royal, auth carolina, which was rehearsal for reconstruction, this first moment of looking figuring out what the reconstruction process would look like. In munro, virginia in 1861, relatively early in the war there were three enslaved men from the person who was enslaving them. He was a colonel in the confederate army. They ran to fortress munro and they said they did not want to work anymore for the confederate general the confederate colonel who was there and slaver enslaver. Benjamin butler had no plan for what to do in a situation like that. What was he going to do with these men who were liberating themselves from slavery . He thought quickly about how to handle the situation and determined that these men should be dealt like contraband. Contraband was an idea he pulled from International Law that says any good being transported by a could be treated as contraband. He recognized relatively quickly thesehat idea as treating human beings as property was not a workable idea. You also realized there was a conflict of what was the union going to do with these people after viewing them as property as well but they didnt want to hold formerly enslaved people as property. And this moment we start to lay out the lands in this moment we start to lay out the landscape in which the union can start think about these self emancipating men as laborers in the war and eventually soldiers. He put these men to work in the union camps. It was a good workaround for the time being. They had to figure out what that was going to mean much later, but what ended up happening is not only men are these people company, but there are also women coming, there are children coming, there are elderly people coming. It reallymagine becomes a question, what do we do with these people . They create a work camp essentially and under union guard have these people work for the union. They have women doing laundry and cooking, taking care of the elderly they brought with them. What else was he going to do with them . That pushed the Political Landscape of emancipation. In port royal South Carolina in port royal, South Carolina we can see how it pushed the Cultural Landscape of emancipation. You have self emancipating and the people influence of religious communities that start to set up the equivalent of a humanitarian crisis response. How do we take care of and add resources to the people who are emancipating themselves in South Carolina. They envisioned, these northern missionaries, they were made of missionaries from a variety of denominations including the congregationalists and others and they imagined themselves going down to help people with native resources. They imagined themselves going down to teach formerly enslaved people on how to labor diligently, how to become citizens, how to reproduce families that were moral. Thatwere shocked to find there were already Robust Networks already for education, there were already Robust Networks for religion and churches. People had been taking care of their own spiritual lives. There were already pushing the landscape and what it meant to be free in terms of their families. In this moment they start to set up it starts to look like other elements of reconstruction in terms of establishing some of the landscape for how the government would interact with free people, which later becomes the freedoms bro or which is the freedoms bureau at this point and other elements. In this first freedoms moment, you have these the freedoms bureau or which is the freedoms bureau at this point. Socially, culturally what are we going to do . How are we going to support these communities even if they initially thought it would be leading these communities . And look a little bit more deeply at this question what did it mean to be free from the perspective of self amount self emancipating folks. There is a robust landscape of information. What didnt mean in terms of labor . In terms of mental and intellectual pursuits echo in terms of personal goals, for their families, for their bodies , for their political goals, in terms of office holding, their religious community and even younger fee and movement . Geography and movement . What did it mean to be free . When of the areas we heard from garrison frazier was land. They wanted to be able to be independent but land was in important an important part of it. But they wanted to be able to get the fruits of their own labor. When of the ways we get a picture of what free people wanted is from the now pretty famous letter of a formerly enslaved man named it Jordan Anderson writing to his former in slavery en slaver. Jordan,he things that he basically very memorably verllenges his former ensla on the violence he visited upon him and his family and he says basically in dayton, ohio where he lives he is able to work and get paid every week. His wife is able to be respected and be called by her name as misses anderson. He calculates how much money he would get in back pay if his enslaverd slave were to pay him for the years of Service Without pay, if he had paid mandy for her work as well and subtracted the amount for any care they received while hey were there and calculated that that would be over 11,000. His significant amount. He said, so long as you are able to guarantee that and a few other things, we will come back. Slave is former and enslaver know he wanted to be respected for the work that he did. In another instance, in terms of labor and controlling labor and getting the fruits of their labor, there was an enslaved woman in georgia in the 1860s and she was known for and a disciplined a few times for perfume and going into the vanity and putting on a little bit of makeup and looking at herself in the mirror. Side profile or whatever. She was disciplined for it a few times by for her that is what freedom was going to mean. The ability to do that and do not be policed in that way. She might have responded after immense apartheid emancipation like another woman dead. She was disciplined for not responding like another women another woman did. She was disciplined for not responding. Towas a sense of i am going push back against those is systems of disciplining black labor that were extant at the time. Some people did not want to labor at all. They didnt want anyone to control their labor. When of the ways it manifested itself was not necessarily not to labor but to control labor on the family, whether that the family or wives who were now who now wanted to stay at home. The idea of choosing not to labor was another choice that free people wanted. Or to labor for themselves. To be able to gain the fruits of their labor with what they were able to produce for themselves. That manifested because as garrison frazier pointed out, enslaved people were liberated without land. That meant they had to secure the landowners and engage in sharecropping where they would gain a portion of the crop and profit from that or from having crop liens where they own their own land, they would row their own crop and then have grow their own crop and then have a portion that they would have to the land owner or the person who was assisting them. It was not on the best terms for the formerly enslaved people. Harriet jacobs and the redder we lead today pointed it out. She said friedman with few exceptions were cheated out of the crop of their cotton the letter we read today pointed it out. Freed men with few exceptions were cheated out of the crop of their cotton. Lastly they wanted land and they had good reason to want it and to believe that they would get it because when journal sherman general sherman is a part of the conversation he was having with the ministers in savannah was speaking about what to do with all of these free people who were liberating themselves into joining the union army. It was not creating a drag but having all these people following behind, because they realized the meaning of the union armies presence was pulling people to the army that didnt know what to do with them. They took a swatch of land on the eastern seaboard of georgia and South Carolina and promised to distribute some of that land to the freed people to labor on for themselves and take care of themselves because that is what would have been needed in the very Agricultural Society at the time. That is what people did. He apportioned some land, you could call them like homesteads. That was not able to be fulfilled. We will talk about that more at will later point at a later point. To work and take care of their families. What it means to be free in terms of mental and intellectual processes this is one of the areas where the pursuit of literacy was robust. It was incredibly robust to. Booker t. Washington described it like gang a whole nation trying to go to school. Imagine everyone trying to get into the schoolhouse to learn how to read, and all the elements education afforded. Some of what emerges during this missionaryergency schools. Ur missionary missionaries find there are already schools there. So people like mary pictured here in the corner, the free black woman in hampton who had already been running a free school in hampton for free black folks before the war, so this infrastructure for education among free black folk to educate other black folk that continues on during the. Period during the of emancipation. Then you have people like Harriet Jacobs who go to the south and help establish schools and help teach in the schools. Charlotte horton, you will remember, she is the daughter of james horton. He fought in the American Revolution in philadelphia. She goes down as part of gideon band in South Carolina and she is shocked at the exuberant energy they bring to the classroom space at the capacity they have. She is shocked because the discourse about enslaved people have been that they were not capable of learning, they are wantapable they do not to learn. They have to be forced to work. The kids are desiring to learn, they catch on quick and she writes about how it is really a discredit to the people who have all the resources, have opportunity and then looked down upon enslaved people and the formerly enslaved or their lack of education when the system was built to keep them uneducated, not their black independent will. Their lack of independent will. Even we find these moments where the expectation of what enslaved people wanted is being upturned and challenged. In this way you have these and schools that black people wanted. They wanted their schools led by people who looks like them. People who would not look down on them or come with these preconceived notions about their capacity. Theiruld reflect what experience was. They knew that they wanted education that they were capable of doing the kind of work. Led to the formation of historically black colleges and universities that were rooted in this moment of emancipation. The whole language around education was very fraught, about what kind of education did free people need. Colleges were broken into two models, which i would say is a false dichotomy in a few ways thinking about the value of Industrial Education and teaching people how to labor with their hands versus teaching people in the liberal arts, the romance languages and geography. Had religious institutions like the religious richmond religious richmond theological institute. In places like the brand theological and places like the brand theological these raw places where self emancipated people are being educated. Part of the mission of the educating hands and hearts. What does that call to mind . What are they trying to do . Theyre trying to get them involved. Getting handson. So education could be getting people involved. Getting them involved in the community. What else . Tools, whatthem the they are going to need in the professional world. Prof. Turner ok. So it might be giving them what they need and the professional world. Educating heads, hands, and hearts. Where you could still educate other people. Using what you learned to teach other people. So it was a little bit of all those things, right . Such as educating the head, right, having something in their minds that they could do. So you need to know something about math, geography and history and all these things. Educating the hands for labor. So you know how to do things in the world that need doing. You know how to take care of your house. You know how to build a building. You know how to make a Printing Press and make a newspaper. You have real, practical skills that you can do something with. Educating the heart. Right . Educating folks for service. For thinking about Community Engagement and being involved with people around them. So its a multilayered process of education, its all of these things. Its not either or, not industrial or liberal education, its a whole list. And they viewed it as manufacturing levers. Education was a process of vers. Acturing le a lever, something you might use the lift something up. Subjugation was a process of manufacturing leverage. People who would work in a community and help the community to evolve. It was a very communal sense of what education was for. The was not like for the job you want to have down the road, but for what you can do to help other people, to help communities. And all those ways it disrupted this false dichotomy of liberal versus Industrial Education, and he also say it was disrupted in the ways the people who ran the schools had to negotiate. Sometimes they had to do funding issues of who would give them money if they did Industrial Education. They had to figure out how to tell a story that was going to appease the funders but also do this kind of Holistic Education that they had in mind. What it meant to be free was pursuing literacy, pursuing education from people who were supportive of what their admission was and then having education that could help the m and help the community at large. What did it mean to be free . It was personal. It was a personal freedom. It had to do with what is my name . What am i calling myself . They change their name. We saw that with Harriet Tubman who went to calling herself harriet. They change their names, they took off the names of their enslavers and chose new names. Names like freeman. Recognizing their new status. Changed first names. They did not want to be called something, they changed it to something they didnt want to be called. They changed their names to reflect their family groupings, to and howre kin they wanted to reflect their connections to family members and things like that. They also sought security of the body against violence. Security of the body against violence, against policing that was happening in the communities. In the immediate aftermath of emancipation there were riots. So memphis has a riot. Three days where the assailants were policeman and Small Business owners. They killed about 48 black people and 70 to 80 more were injured. And black women were raped because of their connection to soldiers. This is in part a reflection of how Southern Society and communities were processing the presence of black men in uniform in the south and how they were reflecting the complete transformation of what Slave Society had been. So there is this riot where these people are killed. One of the ways that free people respond to this is by sort of pushing back against this culture of dissemblance. This idea that was put forth by a historian where women, black women in particular would not talk about their lives, particularly around sexuality because they had been so because their bodies and sexuality had been so debased. So rather than talk about it publicly they would not talk about it so they would not be reflected upon that way. But in this instance, black women testified to congressional committees. We have some testimonials going on now. So you may have a sense of what it means to testify in front of a big body of people who may or may not be supporting the story you are trying to tell. And they told their stories to these committees. They wanted their stories to be told. They wanted to have justice for what they experience. And so they had this culture of testimony as well, that developed as telling stories and telling what happened so that they could pursue their personal freedom and protection for their bodies, protection for their families and themselves. And then also sort of recognizing themselves and their own names in who they want to be reflected upon as. What did it mean to be free . So it meant familial freedom. It meant having their marriage s recognized by the federal government. There were instances of mass weddings. So we had talked earlier in the semester about how families were used as tools to discipline and to disrupt the lives of enslaved people. But emancipation is we can have our union and have them formally recognized by the government. So they pursued that. And whats interesting here as they pursued mass weddings, they pursued weddings and recognition, although this was not the only form of forming family. I want to acknowledge that. But they also have these ideas well in advance of the missionaries showing up. There is a good example of a woman in South Carolina who petitions to get her husbands pay. He is a soldier in the army. Its 1861 and she is petitioning to get recognition as his wife so she could also claim his pay so that she could support the family. This is before the federal government is recognizing families and marriage and those relationships. So we can take from that that enslaved people have their own ideas about what it meant to be responsible for one another in these covenant relationships and they lived it out in emancipation. They had their marriages recognized by the federal government. Reconnecting with family was a pride, a key, key, key element of what it meant to be free. Some people traveled hundreds of miles to try to find family members, to reconnect with family members. They place ads in newspapers to find their people. They placed ads in these newspapers for decades up until the turn of the 20th century. People were still placing ads in newspapers saying, i am soandso, i last saw my wife, husband, daughter, son, cousin, auntie here. There were owned by soandso. The last place i knew i went they went to was this. They provided all the information they could to try to reconnect their families. And they did this for decades up until the turn of the 20th century to try to find their family members. But they also suffer the ravages of time and distance. And not every story meant that people were able to reconnect. They had extended kinship networks that they wanted to remain and strengthen. We find instances of people, grandparents trying to take care of their grandchildren. You know, networks of people who had been living together but not necessarily married or biological families, but trying to gain control and support children and other people. So they had these extended kinship networks. They also had single femaleheaded households. They have places where women were taking care of their children. This is that a particular this is a particular challenge for free women, because the federal government did not always recognize women as heads of household. They had to sort of navigate those elements. They sometimes wanted that. And they use court mediated resolutions to deal with any challenges they had in their families, and that happened too. They wanted to get divorces, they wanted to be separated from people. They want to access those resources. Thats a really robust picture of what freedom meant in terms of family. Reconnecting but could also mean reconfiguring. What did it mean to be free . Was Political Freedom that we can see through places like the national friedman convention, which we had talked about in the antebellum period. It started around the colonization, immigration debates e migration debates in the 1830s. These were freeman conventions. There are still having these meanings, talk about what it means to be free. A lot of times they talk about voting, serving on juries, voting for local offices. These where spaces where spaces where they started to craft out what freedom could mean. And they talked about constitutional conventions and participating in them, because one of the things that happened as a result of the civil war and was aolutions reconstruction act that broke the south into military districts and made it so that the states had to rewrite their constitutions to reflect the end of slavery and grant suffrage to freed men. Black men were elected to hold offices. There was a majority in louisiana and South Carolina. And places like virginia they werent a majority, but they did participate actively in the conversations about emancipation. On education, race relations, but they also talked about, you know, what it was that free people wanted that did not necessarily coincide with the federal landscape of emancipation sorry, the federal landscape of voting and suffrage. Talked about issues around gender and sexuality. So they talked about marriage and interracial marriage, but many of them articulated in idea, trying to protect black women from being violated by being raped or by not having control of their bodies are or being viewed in violent ways. What it meant to be free was to participate in the Political Landscape and to shape what the definition would be. What it meant to be free was religious. It meant exodus. It meant this idea of sort of having independent freedom, but it also meant this moment of god broughthat about. For black folks that were christian at this time, they believed this was a moment of god acting on their behalf to liberate them from enslavement. Which is not to say that they sort of weird is passively waiting for freedom, but they understood that god was acting in their lives to bring about a transformation. Actually to a third of black folks being converted to formingnity and independent churches. We talked about how even with the second great awakening, there was not this largescale conversion experience among enslaved people, but certainly by the time of emancipation, those numbers really start to climb. Independent churches. You find there are hundreds of churches created during the period of emancipation, especially in the first five to 10 years after emancipation. A lot of them were rural churches, so they create these independent churches, independent associations, they create independent nominations, so we know in the antebellum period there is an ame church, but in the south, we have the First Independent southern denominations. Do you think or do you know if people converted to christianity because they were free . Prof. Myers or what . Because before they were emancipated you said there was not a large amount of slaves who were christian. I was just asking, do you think that because they were free they saw that as, ok, it would have to do with this . Prof. Myers i dont know that they necessarily saw it i have not seen documentation saying that because god liberated us, we are going to convert. I think it was a good representation of what faith could do. People could convert for that reason. I think it was in some ways may be a more practical elements of people being able to move about and make choices of their own about where to worship, who to worship with, how to worship. Some people had not been in this community at all, you know . The work of the independent associations to actually carry out mission work among black folks is also probably a significant component of that. That is one of the things that the independent associations that we are the people qualified to help the free people. Who better than asiago we are black people ourselves, we know what black people need, but we should be able to carry out this work. And they do that. Elements,l those realizing that this is a moment of god acting and people seeing nats, people having the opportunity to choose for themselves, and also responding to the work of the conventions and churches. So yes, there is this sort of moment of what it means to be free as independent religious worship. And it also had implications for womens leadership and power. Right . See sohing we something we see, you saw in one of the readings today, is how women were playing key roles in forming religious communities. So much so that some of the planters were complaining about one of the women and what she was the Worship Services she was holding. There were women playing Important Roles in religious communities. And that goes through some changes over the period of emancipation, but in a immediate emancipation, women are playing key roles. We see that in petersburg, virginia with the Saint Stephens episcopal church. Which is one of the first black episcopal churches in virginia. And it is founded in part by a formally enslaved black woman from north carolina. She works with one of the ministers there in petersburg to start the church for formally enslaved black folks. Women are playing an Important Role in religious landscape of freedom as well. We also have this woman, reflecting the work of women in the National Womens convention for the baptist church, which ultimately emerges at the end of the 19th century. And then lastly, thinking of this question of what it meant to be free, it meant geography and movement. Harriet jacobs said there is no more need of hiding places to conceal. Conceal slave mothers, referring to her own experience. Hiding in her grandmothers attic in the small crawlspace where she could barely stand. There is no more need for that. Now free people can go where they want. And many do. Many migrate to cities in search of their family members, in search of just freedom, to be able to move their bodies and go where they please. Some of them stayed on the plantations where they have labored as enslaved people. Some are waiting it out and figuring out what did it mean, this transformation of emancipation sort of waiting to see what would happen and then some of them started to move from the plantations. And for other folks sorry. What did emancipation freedom individuals who were homosexual . [inaudible] where are they represented in history . Prof. Myers that is a good question about how same gender loving people were reflected in the landscape of emancipation . That is an area of research where we talked about the issues around forced meeting among enslaved men. This is another one of those areas at the leading edge of scholarship where people are now doing research to uncover the lives of samegender loving folks in slavery. Slavery the queer in working group, and the scholars there are working on projects to uncover these stories. So i think that is in a scenario still unfolding. In terms of rights and responsibilities, the landscape of freedom did not allow for Family Structures to be organized around same gender loving people. That said, there were lots of Family Structures that differed from that sort of victorian model, that heteronormative victorian model of a father and mother and their biological children. Myriadeople had a of structures of families because slavery produced that in ways. They sometimes had units of women and children who live together and formed communities. They sometimes had singleparent households. That could be a father and children or mother and children. There are all these different ways of conforming family, which is one of the ways you could see that. Marriage, again, was an institution that had christian normative ideals about men and women and thats how it was structured. But then even within that framework, free people were disrupting what it meant to be families and be married. They had all kinds of ways of partnering, where you have sweethearting, where you have a partner today that is not your partner tomorrow, or tightly knit relationships. There was a myriad of ways. There was a lot of ways we could start to look for what that experience may have been and try to uncover and read carefully and thoughtfully ask the question. That is the frontier. Thank you for the question. That is the frontier of the research, ill say. Lastly, you saw the return migration. Theyre returning to the places of enslavement as free people. Thats what we get a sense of from Harriet Jacobs lretter. She is saying, sitting here in my grandmothers house and reflecting on what it meant to be free and what it means to be free. She is writing about returning to the place where her family was buried. So many people fled and were able to emancipate themselves into freedom that then came back to places where their families were buried. So places where they found their roots. And in a lot of ways, this return to the places of emancipation, places of enslavement was also the way they helped make freedom meaningful and stayed safe by returning to those places to shape the landscape of freedom as free people. The meaning of freedom, as you could see, was robust. And enslaved people and free people had a very robust sense of what it meant to be free and a lot of different ways of constructing it. But they laid the foundation for making that freedom meaningful. They laid the foundations and in the conversations they had and the conversations between their former enslavers. They laid the foundations in their letters about the schools and in their pursuit of schools and the formation of schools. They lay the foundation for making freedom meaningful and so in so many ways through their activities and through their exchanges with various folks around that process. And in this moment we could say that emancipation marked new marked a new cultural moment. Religiously, socially, culturally, but there were things that were unimaginable at imaginable at this moment that had been complicated in the antebellum period before the war. And so with freedom, with this idea of freedom, free people were able to go forward and start to create a new engagement with the institutions of this country, in such a way that they started to challenge some of those frameworks and tried to sort of reconfigure them, which will be the next set of questions to consider. Now that we know what freedom meant, how did they make the freedom meaningful . That will be the next questions that we take up in our next session, but i will leave it there for today. Unless there are questions. I can take questions there are any lingering questions. Today leave it there for and see you next time. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] listen to lectures in history on the go by streaming , anytime. T anywhere youre watching American History tv, only on cspan3. You are watching American History tv, all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Fdrunday on real america, and world war ii, a 2008 program produced by the franklin d. President ial library and museum which focuses on fdrs involvement with key wartime issues. Here is a preview. We are now in this war. We are all in it, all the way. Every single man, woman and partner in the most tremendous undertaking in our American History. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories, changing of war. To fight a global war, the United States need to mobilize its entire population on what became known as the home front. The government turned to the leaders of large corporations to lead the mobilization effort. The response was astounding. American wartime production produce more than 299,000 jeeps, 88,000000 , 6. 5, 1500 naval vessels million rifles, and 40 billion bullets. By 1945, the United States was producing 60 of all allied munitions and 40 of the world weapons. To American Public was asked conserve scarce goods for military use, products such as gasoline to sugar were rationed, civilian stroke less, ate meat less, and often drink less coffee. Children organized graph drives to salvage rubber and metal for war industries, while their parents joint Civil Defense units, planted victory gardens, and purchased billions of dollars worth of war bonds. Millions of americans began paying federal taxes for the first time, and to control inflation, the government limits on wages, prices, and rents. President and mrs. Roosevelt were at the forefront of this National Mobilization effort, setting priorities and focusing attention on the goals of total victory. Bonds, haveed war blackout shades hung in their windows, and committed the white house to wartime rationing. Couples four sons also served in americas military. During the war, mrs. Roosevelt continued her ceaseless activism that marked her as a public first lady. She was outspoken in her support for racial and gender equality, she championed womens admission into the armed services, and a right for workers to organize. In 1942, she was in england to offer support to americas allies and returned with detailed reports for fdr. A year later, she conducted a 25,000 mile tour of the South Pacific as a representative of the american red cross. The first lady traveled in military transports, putting herself at risk to visit hospitals, military camps, and red cross clubs. During her trip, she saw an estimated 400,000 american servicemen and women. Workers created Economic Opportunities for women and minorities and advanced the cause of the two major social movements. After being threatened by black leaders with a marsh on washington, fdr moved to confront racial admin at Racial Discrimination by creating executive order 8802. Program thisfull sunday here on American History tv. To trying tomes keep people from gathering together, how close are we to remote voting, in that building one chamber closer to that happening than the other . No. It doesnt seem like it. Is there some type of guideline why this virus affects people differently . Ofhink this virus is course, it is much more transmissible than any other viruses we know. Number two, it also appears to be much more serious and severe and deadly than other viruses we know, like influenza. Do you guys have any way of pushing the idea of Disaster Recovery preparedness into the government organizations where it is more of a top priority, second alsost the second most important priority . Im shocked that you said it is the second highest priority. I would say it is oftentimes dead last. Thoughts and ask experts your questions. Join our conversation every morning on washington journal, which starts at 7 00 a. M. Eastern. Announcer 50 years ago on april 11, 1970, apollo 13 blasted off on what was to be the third nasa mission to land men on the moon. Houston, we13 have a problem. This 1970 documentary tells the story of the crisis which nearly left three astronauts stranded in space. This tape recorder has been a big benefit to us in our transit opt to the moon