The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves' Civil War

Abraham H. Galloway (1837-1870) was a fiery young slave rebel, radical abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out of bondage to become one of the most significant and stirring black leaders in the South during the Civil War. Throughout his brief, mercurial life, Galloway fought against slavery and injustice. He risked his life behind enemy lines, recruited black soldiers for the North, and fought racism in the Union army's ranks. He also stood at the forefront of an African American political movement that flourished in the Union-occupied parts of North Carolina, even leading a historic delegation of black southerners to the White House to meet with President Lincoln and to demand the full rights of citizenship. He later became one of the first black men elected to the North Carolina legislature.
Long hidden from history, Galloway's story reveals a war unfamiliar to most of us. As David Cecelski writes, "Galloway's Civil War was a slave insurgency, a war of liberation that was the culmination of generations of perseverance and faith." This riveting portrait illuminates Galloway's life and deepens our insight into the Civil War and Reconstruction as experienced by African Americans in the South.

• The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era
• What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
• Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri (Studies in the Legal History of the South Ser.)
• Children of Fire: A History of African Americans
• Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• A Global History of Modern Historiography
• Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
• They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I