This is the story of abraham h. galloway (1837–70), 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 United States during the American Civil War. A freedom fighter in what theNew Orleans Tribune, the first African American newspaper published below the Mason-Dixon Line, called “a Second American Revolution,” Galloway burned with an incandescent passion against tyranny and injustice. His war was not the one that we are accustomed to seeing in history books, however. Galloway’s war had little to...

In the third year of the civil war, a new england abolitionist named Edward Kinsley walked the streets of New Bern, North Carolina. The seaport was usually a town of 5,500 inhabitants, but at that moment it overflowed with thousands of fugitive slaves who had escaped from the Confederacy. The setting was one of excess in all things: hardship, disarray, fear, heartbreak, joy. Federal troops crowded into colonial homes and antebellum manors. Downtown buildings lay in charred ruins: retreating Confederates had burned some of them, and a Union general torched others after snipers shot at his sentries. The Confederates had...

Abraham galloway grew up in a world that gazed out to the open sea. He was born on 8 February 1837 in a little hamlet of ship pilots and fishermen called Smithville.¹ The village perched at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, twenty-eight miles downriver of Wilmington, North Carolina. At the time of Galloway’s birth, Smithville had a population of roughly 800 inhabitants, nearly half of them slaves. Pilots had settled there by the inlet a century earlier so that they could watch for ships signaling for their services as they approached the river’s mouth from the Atlantic. Smithville...

In early 1857, young abraham galloway vowed to depart the world of his childhood. At twenty years old, he had lived by the banks of the Cape Fear River all his life and had never traveled more than a day’s journey from his friends and family in Smithville and Wilmington. But that spring he and a friend grew determined, they later explained, “that liberty was worth dying for, and that it was their duty to strike for freedom even if it should cost them their lives.”¹ His friend was a slave named Richard Eden, a barber by trade and a...

Galloway did not reside peacefully in kingston and lay bricks for very long. After his escape from bondage and his arrival in Canada West, he threw himself into the struggle to end slavery in the United States. Between 1857 and 1861, as the United States moved closer and closer to disunion and war, he traveled through some of the darkest, most dangerous corners of the continent’s abolitionist movement. We see him, however, only in fleeting glimpses, and his whereabouts were reported mainly in rumor and innuendo. According to Robert Hamilton, the African American publisher and editor of New York City’s...

Galloway arrived in new york city from port-au-prince on 1 April 1861, less than two weeks before the shelling of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.¹ Immediately, according to James Redpath, he headed into the southern states. Redpath’s incendiary assessment of Galloway’s purpose—“to go South to incite insurrections”—stirred up images of a torch-wielding Nat Turner or John Brown descending on the Confederacy, but his far more behind-the-scenes mission probably posed a greater threat to the Rebel cause. At the recommendation of George Stearns, Massachusetts war leaders had recruited Galloway to serve as a spy inside...

A long way from the mississippi river, a very different scene was unfolding along the salt marshes and quiet bays of the North Carolina coast. Brigadier General Ambrose Burnside’s forces had carved out a long slice of the state’s coastline running 100 miles north to south that would remain in Union hands for the war’s final three years. By taking such a vast territory, Burnside’s armada opened a strategic back door to the Confederate capital in Richmond, eliminated a base for privateers and blockade-runners, and deprived the Confederacy of much of the state’s agricultural wealth for the remainder of the...

When edward kinsley boarded the union steamerdudley buckfor his voyage home, he must have been both exhilarated and relieved. His mission to aid the recruitment of black soldiers in New Bern had seemed bound to fail until he met Abraham Galloway and his compatriots and agreed to their conditions. Almost instantly, his work in New Bern blossomed. Only a few days before he left for Boston, Kinsley had watched in awe as fugitive slaves marched into New Bern by torchlight with Galloway at their head, claiming a complicated freedom in ramshackle camps where they hoped to build a...

Although no longer a union spy, galloway continued to travel deep into the Confederacy at least occasionally during the fall of 1863. His contacts behind enemy lines remained extensive even after he turned his attention to black recruitment and political organizing. The farlung nature of his connections can be measured by his success that November, in Brigadier General Wild’s words, at “manag[ing] to get hismothersent out of Wilmington, N.C.”¹ Wild’s astonishment was understandable. Wilmington lay seventy-five miles beyond Union lines and was one of the most heavily fortified and guarded cities in the Confederacy. The seaport’s importance to...

Galloway carried that fire to the white house in the spring of 1864. On 29 April he led a delegation of black southerners to a meeting with President Lincoln. This extraordinary moment grew out of months of grassroots organizing and indicated a significant shift in the freedpeople’s political priorities. With thousands of former slaves already serving in the Union army, Galloway had begun to turn his attention from African American military recruitment to the achievement of voting rights and political equality after the Civil War. Over the winter of 1863–64, he sought to carry the radical political culture that...

On a lovely summer day in new bern, galloway watched the mustering of the 1st North Carolina Colored Heavy Artillery, one of the African American regiments recruited primarily among the local slaves who had managed to reach Union lines.¹ The scene inspired him to write—or, presumably, to dictate to a literate colleague—his impressions of the black soldiers and their families and send them to William Lloyd Garrison at theLiberator. According to Galloway, the regiment’s day began with a worship service at its camp on the outskirts of the city. “It was a delightfully pleasing afternoon,” he related....

As galloway took his seat among the 144 delegates at the National Convention of Colored Men of the United States on 4 October 1864, he cut a compelling figure and carried a special kind of moral authority. The convention assembled at Syracuse’s Wesleyan Methodist Church at seven o’clock that evening. Galloway’s appearance and the arrival of the small contingent of other southern delegates had been much anticipated. Galloway was one of only sixteen delegates representing the newly liberated slaves in the southern states and, with the Reverend Samuel J. Williams of Roanoke Island, one of two delegates representing North Carolina.¹...

When he returned to new bern, galloway discovered what one distraught eyewitness called “a city of the dead.” The yellow fever epidemic had passed with the coming of the first hard frost, but grief and loss now burdened nearly every family.¹ At the same time, the streets churned with new refugees, orphaned children, and the sick. As the power of the Confederacy crumbled, new waves of slaves fled into the city, far more than could possibly find housing. Many fashioned makeshift shelters out of pine boughs and lived in the surrounding forests. Deserters from Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern...

Less than two weeks after the emancipation day celebration in New Bern, Union forces finally captured Fort Fisher. Not long after, they occupied Smithville, the village of Galloway’s birth. The fall of Fort Fisher gave the Union control over the Cape Fear River and cut off the Confederacy’s last major supply line to Robert E. Lee’s troops in Virginia. The Union’s military progress now proceeded swiftly. Sherman’s army had taken Savannah, Georgia, just before Christmas and would soon move northward through the Carolinas. African American activists felt the end of the slaveholding republic approaching rapidly. The war’s ultimate meaning, as...

Abraham and martha ann galloway left the home of martha Ann’s parents in Beaufort and moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, sometime after the Raleigh freedpeople’s convention in the fall of 1865. The move marked the beginning of a kind of political exile for him. After the convention’s delegates chose a more cautious course, Galloway disappeared from public life for more than a year. He removed himself from state and national groups in which he had previously been a leading figure and does not seem to have been involved in the new incarnation of the North Carolina Equal Rights League. He...

Galloway died unexpectedly on 1 september 1870 at his mother’s home in Wilmington. Most reports indicate that he succumbed to “fever and jaundice,” but many years later his wife, Martha Ann, recalled that he had long suffered from chronic rheumatism and “heart troubles.”¹ One of his obituaries refers to a lingering illness, but he died so quickly that Martha Ann could not return from a visit to New Bern in time to be at his side. His mother tended to him in his last hours.² At the time of his death, Galloway was only thirty-three years old. He and Martha...