Chittenden County Historical Society: Lecture with Rolf Diamant - Vermonters and The Blockade Board’s Backdoor War

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From the organizer:

Vermonters and The Blockade Board’s Backdoor War

In June 1861, the United States Navy Department convened a small working group in Washington DC to rapidly put in place an ambitious strategy to guide a total blockade of the Confederacy: 3,500 miles of coastline and 180 ports. This small group of four individuals, known as the “blockade board,” set in motion plans for a series of amphibious landings, from North Carolina to Louisiana in support of the expanding United States naval blockade, which UVM adjunct associate professor of history, Rolf Diamant, calls the “backdoor war.” The intended and unintended consequences of this backdoor war contributed to the hollowing out of the Confederacy’s slave-labor based economy, the acceleration of emancipation, the final defeat of the rebellion, and an end to slavery. Spearheading the amphibious landings in the Gulf were Vermonters fighting with the 7th and 8th Regiments. As they advanced deep into the Mississippi Delta, a region with one of the highest concentrations of enslaved people in the South, Vermont soldiers interacted with thousands of self-emancipated African Americans both as refugees, and later as soldiers in the United States Colored Troops. Diamant will explain how Vermonters played a consequential but little understood role in this social revolution; first arming and training freedmen; then accepting commissions to lead black troops into battle; and finally in service with the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction.

Rolf Diamant is a UVM adjunct associate professor and former superintendent of five national parks. He is co-author with Ethan Carr of the new book Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (LALH – 2022), and co editor and contributing author of A Thinking Person’s Guide to America’s National Parks (Braziller —2016.). He has lectured on the causes and consequences of the American Civil War including on the protection of Yosemite Valley (1864) in the wider context of war-related legislation and reforms. Rolf served as a gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission (2011-2015.)

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