Lecture to focus on slave turned spy

Southerners fought for the Confederacy. Northerners fought for the Union. Abraham Galloway fought for the slaves.

The North Carolina slave-turned Union spy played the role of double agent and often felt neither side fighting the Civil War was protecting the interests of blacks, according to a Havelock native who will feature Galloway in his lecture Sunday afternoon in New Bern.

“Very quickly, he starts to feel like he’s fighting a war against both sides,” said Dr. David Cecelski, who teaches Southern history at Duke University in Durham. “Galloway was fighting the Union in some ways as hard as the South.”

Cecelski, raised in Havelock by parents John and Yvonne Cecelski, will present “The Fires of Freedom: Abraham Galloway’s Civil War” at 2 p.m. Sunday in New Bern’s Masonic Theater. The free program is sponsored by the New Bern Historical Society through its Dr. Richard K. Lore Lecture Series.

“Galloway is a good story — he sort of breaks all the molds,” Cecelski said. “This isn’t your grandmother’s Civil War we’re talking about here. He really was an extraordinary man.”

The independent scholar and college professor said he is working on a book about Galloway, and some stories about the early civil rights leader were included in his recent literary release, “The Waterman’s Song.”

The son of a white father and slave mother, Galloway was trained as a brick mason and allowed to work for pay, Cecelski said. Galloway fled to the North in 1857 and, after a sojourn in Canada, became a prominent abolitionist and antislavery speaker.

Gen. Benjamin Butler recruited Galloway into the Union Army’s secret service, and he gathered valuable intelligence on Confederate activities in Virginia and North Carolina, Cecelski said.

Galloway initially refused to recruit blacks for the Union, citing racism in the North. He insisted that black soldiers receive equal pay as their white comrades and schooling for their children, according to Cecelski.

After the Civil War, Galloway was active in politics, winning election to the N.C. Senate and helping to organize the state’s first black schools and civil rights groups.

“Abraham Galloway is a way to open up what makes the Civil War in Craven County so exciting,” Cecelski said. “Many of the African-Americans in the Havelock area organized schools and sort of set that example for the rest of the South.”

A native of Havelock who spends his summers in the Harlowe community, Cecelski said he’s proud of his deceased father, a U.S. Marine master sergeant, and his mother, a longtime resident who has been active in a local garden club and served on the Havelock Appearance Commission.

Cecelski received his doctorate degree from Harvard and has written several books on black history in eastern North Carolina. He received the 2002 Mayflower Society Award for Non-Fiction from the N.C. Literary and Historical Association and the N.C. Wildlife Federation’s Governor’s Achievement Award, among other distinctions.

He teaches at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.

The program will be held in New Bern’s Masonic Theater on Hancock Street. A reception in the Attmore-Oliver House on Broad Street is scheduled to follow.