Read The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism for Free Online Page A

the same time, at Gettysburg, the Union defeated the South’s second invasion of the North.
    Now slavery began to crumble more quickly. Blue-coated troopsranged ever more widely through the cotton belt. A column raided through the bayous of central Louisiana, where they rounded up Eliza and Andre Dupree, Felo Battee, and hundreds of other African Americans from the parishes where Solomon Northup had toiled after he had been kidnapped from freedom. The soldiers “drove us like cattle,” Battee later remembered. He and the liberated men were herded ontothe tops of the boxcars, while the women were crowded inside them. The train unloaded Eliza Dupree and the other women onto steamers bound to leased-out “Government farms,” while the soldiers marched Andre Dupree, Battee, and the remaining men overland to the Mississippi, offering them the same choice that had been presented to James Douglass and Cade McCallum.
    Andre Dupree and Felo Battee joinedthe 81st U.S.C.T. regiment. Meanwhile, Eliza Dupree appreciated the plentiful rations available on the “Old Hickory” labor camp—food was getting scarce in the Confederate-held areas—but she had little interest in toiling under armed supervision any longer. She slipped away, walked fifty miles to Baton Rouge, and got a job in an army hospital. A few months later, as she stirred a giant iron potof boilinglaundry outside the tents, Andre walked up to her through the billowing steam. His regiment was at Camp Parapet, completing its training. Someone had told him where she was, and he came to find her on a one-day pass. 7
    By 1864, the crippled Confederate Army was too weak to launch major offensives. But it could still make the Union spend oceans of blood for every advance in Virginia,Tennessee, and Georgia. The pro-war resolve of the white northern press began to sag. Volunteering declined. Resistance to the draft increased. The weaker-willed began to talk of a negotiated peace, which was exactly what Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy were now playing for. Instead, Andre Dupree, James Douglass, Cade McCallum, and 200,000 other African-American men kept the faith, becoming theincrement that helped the war-weary Union to persist in its effort through 1864 and 1865. They paid a high collective price: 40,000 black soldiers died, and a similar number of African Americans may have died in the camps and in the chaos of the war-devastated South. One day, Andre’s brother-in-arms Sylvester Caffery came to Eliza and told her that Andre had died of cholera.
    Yet there was birthas well as death in the refugee and army camps. Here the once-enslaved found each other for the first time, or again. Here they laid the groundwork for African Americans’ claim to civic and political identity in a postslavery society. For instance, take Lucinda Howard, who had been shipped from Virginia to New Orleans for sale right before the war—along with her sisters Emily and Margaret. An agentbought all three for a Mrs. Welham, who owned the “Oneida” labor camp in St. James Parish. Lucinda was only fifteen when the Yankees came in 1862. She ran first. When her sisters and other girls whom they knew followed her, they found Lucinda at the Bonnet Carré camp, doing the heavy labor of levee repair and making a wage. They also met her man, a black soldier named Abram Blue. And they stoodwith her as the provost marshal, the military commandant who governed civilians living in the camp, married Lucinda to Abram “under the flag,” as the saying went.
    The certificate that the commandant gave them proved that Abram and Lucinda had been married in a legal ceremony, one sanctioned by the national state itself. Unlike prewar marriages, which enslavers erased at whim, these weddings hadthe force of law. They established the claim of a man and a woman to choose to stay together, to not be separated by the desires of a white person, to make decisions for their own lives and their own blood. Abram and Lucinda