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Josiah Thomas Walls (1832-1905)

Josiah Thomas Walls was born a slave in Winchester, Virginia on December 30, 1842.  He was conscripted by the Confederate Army and captured in Yorktown by Union forces in 1862.  Walls then enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops Infantry Regiment in 1863 where he rose in rank to First Sergeant.  Prior to his discharge from the Army in 1865, Walls married Helen Ferguson of Newnansville, Florida. After leaving the U.S. Army, Walls settled in Alachua County, Florida and became active in local politics.  After passage of the U.S. Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, Walls joined the newly formed Republican Party in Florida.  He was an elected delegate to the 1868 state constitutional conventions and shortly afterward was elected to the lower house of the State Legislature in 1868.  He advanced to the State Senate representing the 13th District, which was mostly Alachua County, in 1869.  First elected to the Congress in 1870, Josiah T. Walls became Florida...

Facts About Abraham Lincoln and his Views and Behavior regarding Africans/Blacks and Slavery

In the 1840s, the self-educated Abraham Lincoln represented slave owner Robert Matson, who wanted to once again enslave a free, mixed-race woman. Lincoln lost the case, and Jane Bryant and her children were declared officially free. They later settled in Liberia. In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd. Her family in Kentucky enslaved Black men and women. While serving as an elected representative in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln supported Zachary Taylor, a slave owner, in Taylor’s 1848 bid for the presidency. •One of Lincoln’s most representative public statements on the question of race relations was given in a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857. In this address, he explained why he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have admitted Kansas into the Union as a slave state: ”There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races … A separation of the races is the only perfect ...