All of God's Children

This book is about an ordinary man who lived in extraordinary times during the period of slavery in southern history. Abraham was born into an institution which viewed him as three-fifths of a white person by the United States Constitution. He was sold into the slave state of Georgia from South Carolina in 1856, one year before the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. This decision proclaimed in March of 1857 declared that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and could not sue in federal courts. A United States citizen had a constitutional right to take his slave property into any state or territory based on the property clause of the Fifth Amendment. This book is not about the life of an invisible historical figure in a remote period of time in Southern and United Sates history. It's about a real person and his family who survived the brutality and savagery of slavery. This book is about a people who experienced disenfranchisement, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, the loss of property through trickery, and deceit. It's about a man who left his wife and four small children to join the union army. He wanted to be free. He arrived in Savannah on a cold rainy wind- swept day; dressed in raggedy clothes with worn out shoes with holes in each one. His body exposed to the near freezing cold and rainy weather of February 1865. On March 7, 1865 he enlisted in the union army with Company C, Thirty-Third Regiment United States Colored Troops. Abraham knew that his fate and the destiny of thousands of other slaves and free African Americans rested upon the outcome of union victory.