Coming for to Carry Me Home

Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow

J. Michael Martinez

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781442215009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Coming for to Carry Me Home examines the history of the politics surrounding U.S. race relations during the half century between the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and the dawn of the Jim Crow era in the 1880s. J. Michael Martinez argues that Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republicans in Congress were the pivotal actors, albeit not the architects, that influenced this evolution. To understand how Lincoln and his contemporaries viewed race, Martinez first explains the origins of abolitionism and the tumultuous decade of the 1830s, when that generation of political leaders came of age. He then follows the trail through Reconstruction, Redemption, and the beginnings of legal segregation in the 1880s. This book addresses the central question of how and why the concept of race changed during this period.

Table of contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Prologue: “We Have the Wolf by the Ear”
• Chapter 1: “The Crimes of This Guilty Land Will Never Be Purged Away but with Blood”
• Chapter 2: “Mr. President, You Are Murdering Your Country by Inches”
• Chapter 3: “The Bondsman’s Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Unrequited Toil Shall Be Sunk”
• Chapter 4: “An Ungrateful, Despicable, Besotted Traitorous Man—An Incubus”
• Chapter 5: “The Progress of Evolution from President Washington to President Grant Was Alone Evidence Enough to Upset Darwin”
• Chapter 6: “Radicalism Is Dissolving—Going to Pieces, but What Is to Take Its Place Does Not Clearly Appear”
• Chapter 7: “We Have Been, as a Class, Grievously Wounded, Wounded in the House of Our Friends”
• Epilogue: “We Wear the Mask That Grins and Lies”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author