Newly freed Black Americans embraced democracy instead of seeking revenge

Evidence

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors, as so many white Americans feared. Rather they did the opposite. … During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. The role Black Americans played in bringing about Reconstruction has often been overlooked, because until 1870 and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which finally granted Black men the right to vote, no Black people had ever been allowed to serve in any elected office in the U.S. Congress or in most states and so their names do not often appear in the political histories. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 143

Categorization

• XREF: The mistaken expectation that freed slaves would seek vengeance was a white American fear this chapter directly addresses; connects to the book’s central reframing that Black Americans were the most loyal defenders of founding ideals.