july 2025 Edition
The Spirit of 1776
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author, Dr. Steven Hahn, who will be the Keynote Speaker at the Remembrance of Benjamin Thomas on August 8th, has spent a career challenging Americans to think differently about this nation’s history. Hahn’s research reveals how Black Americans, whose agency has been ignored by mainstream history, latched onto the Declaration of Independence and, despite oppression, violence, and racial terror, pushed those in power to align the practice of democracy with the liberal and expansive rhetoric in the founding document.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
When it was written, the Declaration excluded most people from pursuing life, liberty, and happiness. Things didn’t get much better by the time the first state constitutions were written. As Hahn explains in Illiberal America, the political community was made up of “propertied or taxpaying men of European descent who shared the Christian, and in most cases Protestant, faith, and whose sovereignty was displayed by representation in government.” In most states, even soldiers who fought in the War of Independence were often prohibited from voting in the first election. There was a movement after the Revolution to include veterans in the vote, but it wasn’t successful.
The truth is, Hahn told Blake Maddux of Artsfuse.org, “those exalted for crafting the Declaration of Independence and framing the US Constitution were not particularly keen on affording rights, privileges, immunities, etc. to those who differed from them in race, gender, national origin, religion, net worth, and level of education - and I presume that the same would apply to sexuality and gender had they been issues at the time.”
The democratic “norms” cherished by so many today came into being during and after the Civil War, with the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were considered so radical that discrimination, violence, and terrorism were used to limit the freedoms embedded in them. So it wouldn’t be until after World War II, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection and due process clauses in the 14th Amendment in favor of protecting people from state lawmakers infringing on their rights, and the subsequent voting acts, that American Democracy began to be practiced more equally and inclusively.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…
In 1777, eight enslaved men in Massachusetts invoked the Declaration of Independence in a petition to the state legislature asking for their freedom. They argued that lawmakers couldn’t ignore their plea after agreeing in writing (by signing the Declaration) that all men are created free and endowed with certain unalienable rights. A few years later, two lawsuits brought by enslaved Black people in the Bay State made a similar argument, but relied more heavily on the Commonwealth’s new constitution, which included the same sweeping claims of equality and liberty. The suits forced a reckoning that ended with Massachusetts abolishing slavery.
Even though by 1804, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey had joined Massachusetts, approving laws that gradually released enslaved people from bondage, Hahn suggests slavery continued to be a nationwide institution until the “War of the Rebellion.” That’s because the Fugitive Slave Law compelled states to return escaped refugees to their enslavers, rendering all states “Slave States” until the Emancipation Proclamation and subsequent 13th Amendment.
The first abolition laws passed in the North were implemented gradually and failed to apply to all enslaved Black people. Those who were released lived in a state of neither freedom nor enslavement. They were not accepted into civil society, could not find recourse for poor treatment or insufficient wages, and they were constantly under threat of re-enslavement.
In addition, since white people didn’t think the enslaved could handle freedom, they assumed crime would increase, as would poverty and vagrancy. As states approved these gradual abolition laws, they added to the criminal code, built penitentiaries, and instituted involuntary prison labor to benefit the state.
“From the colonial period to the Civil War, white northerners regularly characterized free African Americans, as a group, as dependents, vagrants or criminals, who lowered the moral standing of the community,” according to Historian Kate Mason.
As a result, Blacks were disproportionately represented in the prison population, exposing a “racial edge” to incarceration and state-sponsored exploitation, Hahn stated, adding, “Involuntary penal labor became the standard in the North and West before the Civil War, well in advance of the convict labor system that emerged in the postbellum South.”
This wasn’t the only exclusionary tactic Southern Democrats cherry-picked from the North after Reconstruction was halted. The first decades of the 19th century are generally considered to be a time when states furthered democracy by modifying and often eliminating property-owning requirements to allow more white men to vote, including for the Presidency, and they could also hold some elected public offices. But, lawmakers were careful to raise the bar to keep out those they didn’t want involved in government.
“White protestants sought to exclude the foreign-born, and especially foreign-born Catholics, from the political arena or dramatically raised the bar for their entry,” according to Hahn. Northern states devised ways to use the voter registration process to keep out anyone they didn’t want participating, such as literacy tests and long residency requirements. They also employed propaganda to “other” their targets and spread fear of them among the public.
So it was northern states that sowed the seeds that Jim Crow would later reap.
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it…
In multiple books, Hahn argues that African Americans were the architects of their emancipation, and he suggests in The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom that the Civil War was actually “the greatest slave rebellion in modern history.”
“Historians write as if Northern and Southern Blacks had little to do with each other,” Hahn states, “yet we know by the end of the antebellum period, a lot of African Americans in the North were born in the South.”.
In A Nation Under Our Feet, Hahn’s research-rich argument proves that when the actions of so many Black Americans, enslaved and “Free,” southern and northern, are taken together, their agency and resistance to their conditions point toward uprising. Consider the following, before South Carolina fired on Ft. Sumpter:
- at least 311 slave insurrections had occurred in America;
- thousands of enslaved people escaped to states where slavery was “outlawed”;
- many fugitives from slavery established communities where they lived together to better arm and defend themselves;
- the enslaved had vast communications networks that spanned the colonies and later the states;
- free and enslaved communicated and worked together;
- “Vigilance Committees” kept watch on the waterways, harbored fugitives, thwarted slave agents, and prevented kidnappings;
- the Underground Railroad was a Black enterprise;
- between 1827 and 1861, at least 24 Black owned and operated newspapers made the case for freedom and democracy;
- “Free” Black people organized colored conventions, national in scope, to protest racial violence and discrimination, and to mobilize for civil and political rights;
- the “Free” led a national resistance to slavery - “constructed on the Declaration of Independence and Christian morality” - called the abolition movement; and,
- the enslaved engaged in work slowdowns and stoppages; and,
- once war broke out, those stuck behind the Mason-Dixon Line provided vital information to the United States.
Enslavers, sympathizers, and those opposed to emancipation in both the North and South reacted with false narratives that supported a hierarchy of racialized differences, inferiority, and criminality. That then inspired mob violence against Black people and their white allies. So divided was public opinion on slavery and emancipation that, as the War of the Rebellion began, there was no plan in place to deal with enslaved people seeking freedom behind Union lines.
Initially, the U.S. labeled the self-liberated refugees “contraband,” tacitly acknowledging they were considered property. But people didn’t trickle in; they came by the thousands, massing within Union territory. They offered their services to the United States and begged for the freedom to fight, which had been illegal since the Militia Act of 1792. Those who didn’t make it out of the South acted as spies and scouts for the U.S. Army. They knew the lay of the land and waterways, where the guns were stored, and where the rebels hid.
All these actions taken together eroded the institution of slavery and laid the groundwork for President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, that freed those still stuck behind Rebel lines and allowed Black men to join the U.S. military. At the point when the proclamation was made, hostilities were at a stalemate. But within months, U.S. victories at the Siege of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, where Black troops were instrumental, and then success at Gettysburg turned the tide of the war.
In 1865, Lincoln acknowledged the crucial role African American soldiers played, stating, “Without the military help of the Black freedmen, the war against the South could not have been won.”
In Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, Hahn wrote, “The case for slave rebellion does not have to be dug up, teased out, or deconstructed. It is neither hidden, archivally silenced, nor subtly discursive. Quite simply, it stares us in the face.”
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
Leading up to the War, the country was polarized over the boundaries of power, states were running roughshod over individual rights, the Supreme Court limited Congressional muscle and denied Black people citizenship, and a popular nationwide nativist political movement was further restricting the rights of immigrants. When southern state governments rejected the outcome of the Presidential Election and voted to secede, President Lincoln’s attempt to put down their rebellion stretched into years.
By 1863, Lincoln was being urged to “explain the meaning of this long and awful war to a public that has suffered grievous losses and desperately needed perspective in what they had endured and where they were headed,” Hahn wrote in A Nation Without Borders. The author contends, Lincoln, too, had been contemplating the need for such a speech for several months. So, when he was asked to provide a few short remarks at a memorial service in Gettysburg, Penn., Lincoln used the opportunity to construct a thoughtful, deliberate address.
On November 19, 1863, Lincoln set forth a new vision for the nation, built solidly upon the Declaration of Independence, as can be seen in these words from his brief speech:
Freedom: a new nation, conceived in liberty;
Equality: dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal;
Emancipation: that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom;
Popular Democracy: that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Hahn admits the President didn’t use the words “emancipation” or “political democracy,” but by aligning with the Declaration of Independence, they were clearly foundational to his vision of American Democracy. Just how this new Nation-State would become a reality would be left to a future without Lincoln’s leadership.
It is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
With the unconditional surrender of the South, a nation that had been built on slavery dissolved. But without Lincoln to nurture his vision, the country’s white leaders struggled with divergent ideas about the way forward.
Missteps by President Johnson, who wanted a swift reunification, permitted the old guard in the South to reassert themselves. After the war, the rebellious states approved a slew of laws meant to keep Black people subjugated.
In reaction to the Black Codes, African Americans picked up the baton held out at Gettysburg and organized conventions throughout the South to protest and make the case for equal rights. Black Americans from 17 states set up a delegation to bring their message to Washington.
Those representatives were likely part of the group, led by Frederick Douglass, that met with President Johnson at the White House in early 1866. They laid out their concerns and told the President to guarantee their freedom Black Americans needed to become citizens, equal to others, with the right to vote and participate in their government. It has been reported that the meeting was contentious and ended with Johnson lecturing these leaders. The delegates then turned their efforts to Capitol Hill and lobbied for a constitutional amendment to deliver the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
Congress responded with the 14th Amendment, establishing birthright citizenship, due process of law, and individual rights (which legislators believed included universal male suffrage), that would be protected by a stronger central government. The Amendment was a foundation for a new American Democracy and was approved by Congress in 1866 and ratified by the states in July 1868, months before a national election that would solidify the changes.
Just as the United States would not have won the War of Rebellion without the military might of Black Americans, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wouldn’t have won the Presidential election of 1868 without their votes. Some states in the North and South attempted to ignore the new law and limit the Black vote, but their local successes were curbed by the number of disenfranchised white southerners and overwhelmed by a massive Republican voter drive among the newly enfranchised men. The party handily won the Presidency, Congress, and nearly every governorship and legislature. It was a sweep that also brought newly elected Black lawmakers to the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, as well as numerous statewide offices and legislatures.
“It was a political revolution of the sort that few modern societies ever witnessed, displacing wealthy and formidable elites that claimed local sovereignty with one directly tied to the newly procured sovereign of the nation state,” Hahn wrote in A Nation Without Borders.
Even before the 1868 election, hundreds of African Americans served in statewide constitutional conventions where they had a role in writing new, more inclusive, and democratic state governments into existence. Among their contributions to these constitutions were free schools for white and Black children, which, with support from Republicans in Congress, became a requirement for states to reenter the union. As former power brokers watched the Radical Republicans legislate, they began to doubt the direction the nation was taking.
After the election, Republicans in Congress moved quickly to approve the 15th Amendment and clarify that Black men had the right to vote. The rule was ratified in February 1870, the year of the first census to count Black people as a whole person for representation. It was also the year the last of the reconstructed states was admitted to the Union - the southern region would have more representation than ever before.
Grant’s government rebuilt the South’s infrastructure, linked the nation East to West with railroad lines, provided funds for schools, hospitals, asylums and penitentiaries, increased taxes and shifted the burden from the individual to real and personal property, gave women property rights and liberalized divorce and gave Black people the right to testify in court and sit on juries.
“For a time, this social and political revolution moved further than anyone could have imagined in 1861…former slaves were voting, holding office and helping to create new polities and civil societies," stated Hahn.
The “unprecedented” and “almost unimaginable expansion of civil and political rights” raised concerns among many of the educated, protestant, Anglo-Saxon, professional elite men in every state from every region. The expansion of citizenship and voting rights was quickly losing favor among them. In the South, opponents railed against Reconstruction and “Negro Rule.” The North and Midwest, with a historic discomfort toward the enfranchisement of Catholics and immigrants, were influenced by false narratives about rampant Black-led corruption. The West was concerned with protecting “their lands” from Native Americans, Mexicans, and a large influx of Asian immigrants.
John Quincey Adams’ grandson, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., put it this way, “Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice: it means a European and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast: and African proletariat on the shore of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.” Whites, who controlled the levers of government and “mainstream” press, engaged in a campaign to “take back the nation” and “purify” the vote.
By the turn of the century, the white South had successfully wielded violence and fraud to reclaim power and reset social hierarchies. New state constitutions disenfranchised Black people, and with the Plessy v. Ferguson Decision, the Supreme Court legalized segregation. White people in the North, Midwest, and West either agreed with their counterparts in the South or couldn’t be bothered since they were not personally affected. The Federal government lost interest in enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments, and without protection, African Americans returned to their roots to shore up their community and build a national coalition to fight segregation, discrimination, and violence.
The Niagara Movement became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose legal team devised a strategy to expose the inequality inherent in Plessy’s “Separate but Equal” Doctrine, which was the foundation holding up Jim Crow. After some trial and error they focused on schools as the best place to wage their legal battles.
Soon after World War II, the NAACP filed suits in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Once they reached the Supreme Court, lawyers were able to convince the Majority that “separate but equal’ clashed with the 14th Amendment. That was a turning point; from then on, the Court started to apply the equal protection clause and the due process clause as it was intended, and discrimination lost standing.
The expansion of Civil Rights in the 20th and 21st centuries was predicated on the 14th Amendment, Lincoln’s vision, and centuries of Black activism and persistence to make the Declaration of Independence a reality for all Americans.
Before he died, Congressman John Lewis reminded the nation of the constant effort Freedom demands from U.S. “Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”
Upcoming Events
In Remembrance of Benjamin Thomas
“Political Violence, Racial Terror, and the Perpetual Struggle for American Democracy” By Dr. Steven Hahn
Fri. Aug. 8
6:30 pm (doors open at 6:15 pm)
Shiloh Baptist Church
1401 Jamieson Ave., Alexandria
Free
In Remembrance of Benjamin Thomas, join the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project at Shiloh Baptist Church, Benjamin Thomas' home church, to hear an address by leading scholar Dr. Steven Hahn. The award-winning author of A Nation Under Our Feet, a comprehensive history of Black politics before, during, and after the Civil War, which is considered one of the most important works in American social history, asks us to reconsider what we think we know about this nation’s past.
At the Thomas Remembrance event, Dr. Hahn’s address, “Political Violence, Racial Terror and the Perpetual Struggle for American Democracy,” will be given in honor of Benjamin Thomas, who was denied due process and lynched in Alexandria on the same date in 1899. The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project, part of the Office of Historic Alexandria, invites the entire community to this free event. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. and the hour program begins at 6:30 and will be followed by a book signing. A Nation Under Our Feet and Illiberal America: A History will be available to purchase.
Black Family Reunion
Sat. Sept. 6
11-3 p.m.
Outside of the Alexandria Library Barrett Branch, 717 Queen Street
Free
It’s Back! Join your friends and neighbors at the next Black Family Reunion outside of Alexandria’s Barrett Branch Library and enjoy the food, music, and dancing. There will be opportunities to record memories and donate photographs and documents to the Special Collections archives. All are welcome!
Tables of Conscience: Banned Books Dinners
Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Dubois
Sunday, Oct. 12
6 -9 p.m.
Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, Michael Eric Dyson
Friday, Nov. 14
6-9 p.m.
The Tables of Conscience Dinners are back and this time, featuring banned books! How much fun and resistance-y is that? These small book-themed dinner parties (8-12 guests) raise funds for the Memorial Scholarship Program set up in honor of Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas. They are hosted in the homes of community members and offer a great opportunity to build relationships while discussing a book that someone thinks is too dangerous for you to read. Tickets cost $125.00 per person and are available through the ACRP website.
Fundraising Campaign
Remembrance Student’s Banned Truth Tour
This Fall, we hope to launch a program for the Remembrance Student Club and expose a new group of ACHS students to Alexandria’s rich African American history through a series of field trips that would culminate with a student showcase where scholarships will be awarded. Since 2022, the students have brought a richness to our programs, events, and ACRP community - they are the secret sauce that keeps us going. The kids who joined us on the pilgrimage to Montgomery have graduated, presenting an opportunity to reset. This Fall, we want to offer a program to connect our students with Alexandria’s local shared history. On the Banned Truth Tour of Alexandria, students will learn about Alexandria’s African American history, including content on the historic communities, the domestic slave trade, the Civil War, and the fight against Jim Crow laws and segregation. This history will be distilled into field trips taken on three Saturdays. Students will be asked to research a topic related to what they have learned and create a project (performance, essay, paper, exhibit, website, documentary) for a Showcase Competition in the Spring of 2026. To learn more click here.
Volunteer Researchers Needed
ACRP is going to launch a new subcommittee--the Committee of Inquiry. Its task is to interrogate the history of Alexandria from the close of the Civil War until the passage of the 1902 Virginia Constitution to fully document the shared history of this City.
The committee is seeking volunteer researchers, while those with post-graduate backgrounds in Reconstruction, African American History, 19th Century elections and politics, courts, or constitutional and human rights law are most needed, we encourage anyone with a strong interest and research skills to apply for a slot. Applicants must attend a virtual info session in the fall. The committee plans to work November 2025-June 2026. Applications are on ACRP’s homepage.
Upcoming Committee Meetings
The Steering Committee of the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project will meet on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025 at 5:30 p.m. at Alexandria Black History Museum.
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project Faith Initiative’s next clergy coffee will be held on Friday, Sept. 5 at Alexandria Black History Museum.
Alexandria Community Remembrance Project
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP) is a city-wide initiative dedicated to helping Alexandria understand its history of racial terror hate crimes and to work toward creating a welcoming community bound by equity and inclusion.
In Memoriam
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Office of Historic Alexandria
City of Alexandria, Virginia
ACRP@alexandriava.gov