Black military participation earned emancipation rather than receiving it passively.

Evidence

In the 1860s, the “violent Fermentations” that John Adams had predicted erupted into the Civil War, leading to emancipation and the resulting amendments that ended slavery and codified citizenship for African Americans. This was not freedom given; this was freedom earned. Some 179,000 Black men, 10 percent of the Union army, fought in the war. An additional 19,000 served in the navy. Black women participated too, most notably one well-armed conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman; a Union spy, she led as many as 300 Black soldiers in destroying a Confederate supply depot on the Combahee River on June 2, 1863. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 801

Categorization

• XREF: Calls back to John Adams’ ‘violent Fermentations’ prediction about slavery, tying the chapter to the earlier Adams material in this book. — connects to: Black Civil War service marked blacks as loyal Americans unlike other ‘foreigners’ — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 540
• CANDY: The Harriet Tubman Combahee River raid detail (300 soldiers, June 2, 1863) is a vivid, shareable fact.