Beginning of Essay
The foundation for black participation in the Civil War began more than a hundred years before the outbreak of the war. Blacks in America had been in bondage since early colonial times. In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankind’s inalienable right to life, libe ....

Middle of Essay
.... They lacked any voice in the government and lived a life of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the slave population never abandoned the desire for freedom or the determination to resist control by the slave owners. The slave's reaction to this desire and determination resulted in outright rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place the strongest reaction in the enlisting of blacks in the war itself. Batty in The Divided Union: The Story of the Great American War, 1861-65, concur with Foner and Mahoney about the importance of outright rebellion in their analysis of the Nat Turner Rebellion, which took place in 1831 ....