Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner

Note on the Text

vii Note on the Text By Jean Lee Cole Freedom’s Witness makes accessible to students and general interest readers the early writings of Henry McNeal Turner. It includes the vast majority of Turner’s writings published between 1862–1865 in the Christian Recorder, the denominational newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, based in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania, and focuses on those writings that demonstrated Turner’s involvement in and thinking about the Civil War and emancipation, his involvement with the A.M.E. Church, and his personal experiences in the war. Turner had a decades-long relationship with the Christian Recorder, and also published in a variety of other publications, including two he founded in the years surrounding the turn into the twentieth century: the Voice of Missions and the Voice of the People. Portions of three letters have been previously published: excerpts from the first letter in this collection appeared in A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865, edited by Edwin Redkey (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and the first two columns in Chapter 3 were also edited by Redkey and published as “‘Rocked in the Cradle of Consternation:’ A Black Chaplain in the Union Army Reports on the Struggle to Take Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in the viii NOTE ON THE TEXT Winter of 1864–1865” in the journal American Heritage (December 1980). The columns are, whenever possible, reproduced in their entirety in order to capture the breadth of Turner’s interests and concerns , as well as the richness of African American life in Washington and in the military during this period. However, in Chapter One, some portions of individual columns, and some in their entirety , have been omitted. Nearly all of the omitted material concerns the minutiae of everyday church business; the content and extent of all exclusions are described in the footnotes. Even though Turner’s letters were hastily written and hastily edited , they required only minimal editing for publication in book form. This edition retains Turner’s exact wording wherever possible ; the very few editorial emendations required for grammar or sense have been indicated either with square brackets or in footnotes . Inconsistencies regarding spelling and capitalization (e.g., capital vs. Capitol, secesh vs. Secesh) have been rectified, and some punctuation has been regularized to facilitate reading by a twentyfirst –century reader. Scholars and researchers are encouraged to consult the Recorder itself. The most complete archive, held by the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia, is available on microfilm; a roughly edited full-text electronic version is available through Accessible Archives. For this edition, the microfilm copy was used as the source text; all transcriptions were checked against the microfilm for accuracy. ...