Abraham Galloway Is the Black Figure From The Civil War You Should Know About

[appalachiablue]

- Engraved portrait of Abraham Galloway from William Still's Underground Railroad, published 1872.
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- NPR, Feb. 8, 2022.

He's 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 one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina state 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.

"Galloway is like the super-secret agent who travels from North Carolina to the Mississippi River Valley," the late historian Hari Jones told me when I interviewed him for a story on Civil War movies. "[He] gets captured by the Confederates, escapes, takes on two, three men at one time. He's that kind of a guy, but he's almost unbelievable because he's been left out of the narrative for so long." Galloway was a man with swagger who openly carried a pistol in his belt.

"He was a very attractive, very charismatic, you know, fly type of individual," says poet and playwright Howard Craft. "And he comes strapped all the time," marvels actor Mike Wiley. Craft wrote a one-man performance based on Cecelski's book, starring Wiley. Galloway was born 185 years ago today, on February 8th 1837, in a small fishing village on the Cape Fear River. He and his mother were enslaved; Abraham worked as a brick mason. At age 20, he escaped to Philadelphia and then Canada...

More, https://www.npr.org/2022/02/08/1077673414/abraham-galloway-civil-war-black-history
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- Abraham H. Galloway (Feb. 8, 1837 – Sept. 1, 1870) was an American politician who served as a Republican state Senator in North Carolina. Born in Smithville (now Southport, North Carolina) in 1837. A former slave who played an important role in supporting the Union Army's success in North Carolina, he served in the North Carolina senate during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. His death in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1870 was honored by attendance from more than 6,000 people.

He is remembered, in part, by a historical marker placed in Wilmington in 2012, a project spearheaded by a local committee, now known as the "Friends of Abraham Galloway", as recorded in the Wilmington Journal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Galloway

[LakeVermilion]

1. Thanks for posting...

Apparently we can't count on our text books.

[Ray Bruns]

2. I am sure he is in my old textbook from my old virginia high school.

Here, let me see.

1858
1859
1860
1866
1867.

Wait a minute. I think they missed something.