Mixed Race Studies

Abraham Galloway is the Black figure from the Civil War you should know about

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2022-02-08

Elizabeth Blair, Senior Producer/Reporter, Arts Desk

He has been compared to James Bond and Malcolm X, though his name has largely been left out of the history books.

Abraham Galloway was an African American who escaped enslavement in North Carolina, became a Union spy during the Civil War and recruited Black soldiers to fight with the North. That’s the short version. The fuller picture would include his work as a revolutionary and being one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina Senate.

David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War, calls him a “swashbuckling figure who wouldn’t take sass from Northern or Southern or Black or white, Union or Confederate.”

When Cecelski was doing research for another book about maritime slavery, he kept coming across Galloway’s name. “And the stories were sort of so different than what I had been taught about slavery or the Civil War, or the role of African Americans in the Civil War,” he says…

Read or listen to the story (00:05:07) here.

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

University of North Carolina Press
September 2012
352 pages
17 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2190-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-3812-9

David S. Cecelski

AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS

• 2012 North Caroliniana Book Award, The North Caroliniana Society
• Ragan Old North State Award, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association

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.