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Remembering Reconstruction’s Lost Generation

Remembering Reconstruction’s Lost Generation

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Benjamin Franklin Randolph was part of a generation that changed the nation’s political history. Born free and raised in Ohio, he attended Oberlin College and after graduating he served as a principal of a Black public school in Buffalo New York. Like many Black northerners of his generation, he saw the Civil War as a pivotal moment in the race’s larger destiny. In December 1863, Randolph volunteered to serve in the Civil War and joined the 26th United States Colored Infantry Regiment.[1]

 

“The Late Rev. B.F. Randolph of South Carolina,” Harper’s Weekly, October 25, 1868

 

After the war, Randolph remained in South Carolina and joined the most important Black political project of his generation. During Reconstruction, he participated in an 1865 Colored Convention in Charleston, joined the Freedmen’s Bureau, and established weekly newspaper for freedmen. “I am desirous of obtaining a position among the freedmen where my qualifications and experience will admit of the most usefulness,” Randolph plead. “I don’t ask position or money. But I ask a place where I can be most useful to my race.”[2]

Motivated by the promise of the new political epoch, he labored tirelessly alongside a larger cohort of freeborn and recently freed Black Americans to make a new world in the postbellum South. In 1867, he was elected as a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868 and played a major role in crafting radically democratic provisions in the document that introduced the first system of public schools in the state’s history and granted the franchise to landless men.[3]

Randolph not only served as a beacon for South Carolina’s movement toward abolition democracy but also became a national leader in the Republican Party. He attended the 1868 Republican National Convention that elected Ulysses S. Grant and was nominated by his peers to be one of the nation’s first African American Presidential Electors. He used his growing celebrity to campaign for Republican candidates across the state of South Carolina, shaping the political project that he saw as central to the larger march toward black America’s new destiny.  On October 15, Randolph was in the midst of that very work, campaigning for the Party of Lincoln and Grant in the state’s increasingly violent upcountry region. The next day, while changing trains to head to another campaign event, he was gunned down in broad daylight by three unmasked white assailants.[4]

My book Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation explores the world that Randolph and his political cohort built, as well as the later efforts to remember the legacy of their political world in the face of the larger cultural attack upon their political project by proponents of the Lost Cause who were actively rewriting Reconstruction’s history to reflect their own white supremacist vision of the nation. This “Reconstruction generation,” composed of the Black teachers, missionaries, journalists, and politicians travelled to the South to aid in the destruction of slavery and established the region’s first Republican Party. [5]

The production of this countermemory was inextricably connected to the violence and tragedy that befell the Reconstruction generation’s political leaders. Just as white mobs dealt death with caustic abandon and the white southern press offered various levels of euphemistic cover to justify the campaigns of extralegal violence, the Reconstruction generation sought to fully memorialize both major and minor political figures from their era. When Ida B. Welles reflected before an 1889 conference of Black journalists that “no requiem, save the night wind, has been sung over the dead bodies,” she not only captured the depth and texture of the violence that shaped postbellum South but also crystallized the funereal cadence of an emergent countermemory of the larger era.[6]

Benjamin Randolph’s funeral serves as one of the first moments where this eulogistic memory was used to provide a forceful defense of Reconstruction’s larger importance in the Black world. In the immediate aftermath of Benjamin Randolph’s assassination, prominent members of the Lowcountry’s political bloc began to deploy Randolph’s death to reconstitute the bonds of the state’s Republican coalition. “He seemed to fully comprehend the fact that our State had been very much broken, the fragments scattered, and to gather them up, and properly unite them, master workmen were required,” lamented northern-born Jonathan Wright. “In every sense of the word, he was a master workman.”[7]

Wright hoped that the Randolph’s legacy would “be felt by generations yet unborn,” a sentiment echoed by many of his Republican colleagues in the legislature. Stephen Swails, a free-born Black New Yorker who had met Randolph in 1864 when both men were stationed in the Lowcountry with different USCT regiments, commented “Senator Randolph is dead, but he still lives in the memories of the Senators who are now here, and his memory will be ever cherished in the hearts of the people of this State.” Another northern-born Republican politician remarked “it is our duty to erect a monument to his memory, not only to mark his resting place, but to commemorate the cause for which he lived and for which he so nobly laid down his life.” Free-born Charlestonian Charles D. Hayne called for a memoriam page in the upcoming issue of the Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina.[8]

 

Memorial insert for Benjamin Randolph in December issue of the Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of South Carolina

 

More than a local or regional story, the effort to produce a Black countermemory of Reconstruction was part of a larger project of Black sectional reconciliation. A wave of new Black newspapers purporting to be truly national in scope and scale, covered the events in the South with close scrutiny. Black journalists forged relationships with Reconstruction-era politicians and traded information to provide the paper’s growing readership with up-to-date political news. Leading editors opined on the actions and events in the South with concern—and at times consternation. In response, a new wave of southern-based Black newspapers emerged in the century’s penultimate decade to confront both the false myths propagated by the white southern press and challenge the whiggish narratives put forth by northern Black leaders about the perceived failures of Black southerners in acquiescing to the New South political order and abandoning Reconstruction.[9]

A.M.E. Metropolitan Church, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1900

 

Nowhere did this new national Black public sphere collide with the production of Black history more than in the Bethel Literary and Historical Society. Founded in 1881, the Bethel Literary was hosted in an auxiliary hall of Washington’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. At once a lyceum and cultural hub of Black Washington’s nascent talented tenth, the Bethel Literary was one of the central nodes in the larger national Black public sphere that connected Black communities across the nascent national network of Black newspapers. “Every Washington correspondent of the Colored press, and there were more then than now, gave conspicuous notice to this institution, and the editors of their home papers often continued the discussion,” observed the Bethel Literary Society’s historian.[10]

The Bethel Literary not only held regular discussions about the history of Reconstruction but also played a major role in marking the passage of the Reconstruction generation. In 1895, the Metropolitan A.M.E. church hosted the funeral of Frederick Douglass. Before the century’s end, John Mercer Langston and Blanche K. Bruce would also receive the equivalent of state funerals at this citadel of Reconstruction-era memory. Following Langston’s funeral, the Washington Bee’s famed editor W. Calvin Chase reflected on the larger epoch-defining meaning of the triumvirate’s passing. “Their wisdom, patriotism, statesmanship, their race love may not be fully appreciated by the present generation,” remarked Chase. “But the men of the future will look in amazement and wonder that these men could have been so brave, so true, so constant amid such adverse conditions.”[11]

In this way, the Reconstruction’s generation’s countermemory was especially sensitive to the moments when major figures passed away. By the twentieth century’s second decade, the rapidly dwindling number of remaining Reconstruction-era leaders was a point of genuine concern for the stewards of Black history in the national press. In 1917, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national magazine, The Crisis, published a piece reflecting on the passing of the previous political generation. Of the three figures profiled in the photograph, only P.B.S. Pinchback was still alive. Three years later during an effort to capture oral histories and collect archival material from the Reconstruction era, one interviewee lamented “I have long felt that the last opportunity to collect data concerning this interesting period is while this present generation lives. The next generation will have no interest in it.”[12]

 

“Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, August 1917

 

In many ways, Chisholm captured her era’s deep cultural turmoil over the legacy of Reconstruction. Woodrow Wilson had recently ousted a generation of Black officeholders from the federal government, the Republican Party had been made essentially moribund in the South by formal disfranchisement measures, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation exploded as a sensation in American popular culture, reflecting a broader embrace of Confederate memory in the national consciousness.[13]

And yet, Black countermemory persisted during the nation’s Jim Crow years. In Columbia, South Carolina, Randolph Cemetery, which had been established in 1872 to commemorate the legacy of Benjamin Randolph would serve as the final resting place for many of the era’s Black political leaders.

 

“Randolph Cemetery,” National Park Service, June 23, 2022

 

Far from forgetting the story, local communities and national institutions sought to preserve the story of Reconstruction, building the intellectual and cultural scaffolding for a new historical vision that would not only challenge the myth of the Lost Cause but also provide a blueprint for the Second Reconstruction—the American Civil Rights Movement. Blood soaked and hard won, the story the Reconstruction generation and their descendants crafted offers a deep and textured portrait of what it means to think deeply about the past. It is a story worth remembering.

 

[1] “Rikers Island-Trained USCT Regiments’ Chaplains,” New York Correction History Society, www.Correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw-usct/2rikersusctchaplains.html

[2] “Rikers Island-Trained USCT Regiments’ Chaplains.”

[3] Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, Negro in South Carolina, 383; Thomas C. Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 131-34; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), chap. 7.

[4] Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 54-57, 60.

[5] Robert D. Bland, Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026). On the use of generation in African American history, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sarah L.H. Gronningsater, Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Andrew B. Lewis, Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights  Generation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009).

[6] Irvine Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Wiley and Company, 1891), 186. On the broader cultural history of funereal thinking in Black life, see LeRhonda Manigault Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); David Roediger, “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700-1865,” The Massachusetts Review 22 (Spring 1981): 163-183; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

[7] Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 14.

[8] Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 15-16, 44-45.

[9] On the postbellum Black press and public sphere, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107-46; Penn, Afro-American Press; Benjamin Fagan, Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers: Black Organizing and the Press for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026); Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Henry Lewis Suggs, ed. The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

[10] John W. Cromwell, History of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association, 15-17, 21-22

[11] “Hon. B.K. Bruce Dead,” Colored American (Washington, DC), March 19, 1898; “Death of the Triumvirate,” Washington Bee, March 26, 1898.

[12] “Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, August 1917, 181; Helen James Chisolm to Monroe Work, February 14, 1920, in Scurlock et al., “Additional Information and Correction,” Journal of Negro History 5 (April 1920): 248.

[13] Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). On the production of Lost Cause memory during the early twentieth century, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 394-97; Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003); Paul McEwan, The Birth of a Nation (British Film Institute, 2015).

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Previewing the December 2025 JCWE

Previewing the December 2025 JCWE

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With this issue of the journal, we complete six years as coeditors and feel inspired by the work of so many of our professional colleagues who keep scholarly journals functioning and humbled by Bill Blair’s much longer tenure in this role. Our term has been shaped by COVID-19’s disruptions of daily life and shutdowns of archives and by the contraction of the academic job market. But the 2025 volume gives evidence of steady and perhaps even resurgent scholarly interest and activity. Most visible are the articles, bolstered by significant research and dedicated writing and revising, along with the book reviews that reveal the continuing vibrance and diversity of the field. And behind all that lies the invisible work of the reviewers who assessed those works so carefully and of the editors and staff who keep the journal functioning. Looking ahead to 2026, we are hopeful this surge in scholarly activity will continue as we all find meaning in our shared intellectual enterprise in these dire times for academia, the United States, and the world.

This issue includes two research articles, a roundtable, a historiographical review essay, and the usual complement of book reviews. The articles remind us of historians’ commitment to the virtue of deep dives, revealing what we can learn by looking closely at topics others might think are already understood. In “Higher Laws, Racial (In)Equality, and Democratic Violence: Theodore Parker’s Abolitionist Theology,” Benjamin Park examines Theodore Parker’s views of religion, violence, and abolition and the influence of his public writings and speeches. Over more than two decades, Parker turned toward not only toward abolitionism but justifications for extralegal violence against slavery, particularly after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Parker’s religiously based support for radical actions against slavery remind us of the role religion played in the spread of abolitionism. At the same time, Parker’s ongoing belief in pseudo-scientific views of racial hierarchies reminds us that abolitionism and antiracism were not one and the same.

In “Soldiers Were Apt to Get Drunk Whenever They Got a Chance”: The Control of Alcohol in Wartime Washington, DC, 1861–1865,” Nathan Marzoli examines the US Army’s surprisingly unsuccessful efforts to regulate alcohol consumption in wartime Washington, DC. The capital remained under civilian control and under the regulation of a US Congress and local authorities subject to lobbying from local businessmen. As multiple law enforcement agencies struggled to confront soldiers’ drinking, they could not decide on common strategies or policies, and many civilian and military officers and backed down in the face of businessmen’s opposition. The history offered here shows us some of the complications of joint civilian/military governance and some of the challenges of regulating alcohol in a city filled with soldiers.

With the challenges COVID-19 posed to archival work and the production of scholarly articles, we—like other journals—have experimented with new formats. One of the most successful has been the regular appearance of roundtables, where scholars discuss important, often emerging topics in the literature. In “The State, Unfreedom, and Emancipation in the Western Borderlands: A Roundtable,” moderator Paul Barba poses provocative questions about the relationship between a thriving literature on borderlands and the questions of freedom and unfreedom that often structure Civil War Era scholarship. The panel—composed of María Esther Hammack, Max Flomen, Naomi Sussman, Vivien Tejada, and Alex Stern—wrestles with questions about the relationship between borderlands scholars’ emphasis on uneven state authority and the meta-narratives of state power that often suffuse scholarship on the Civil War era. The panel helpfully examines the convergence of borderlands scholarship’s emphasis on competing sovereignties, diverse Indigenous polities, and varied slave regimes with the questions of and Black self-emancipation and slavery and emancipation that are, rightly, central to the historiography of the Civil War era.

In the historiographical essay, “Reconstruction and the Regulation of Sexuality,” Felicity Turner brings the history of sexuality into conversation with the history of Reconstruction, beginning with a monumental book in each of the two fields and exploring the literatures’ convergences and divergences across a wide range of topics, including marriage, immigration, sexual violence, same-sex sexuality, trans-ness, contraception, reform, and state regulation. Turner’s essay helps demonstrate the benefits of seeing post–Civil War struggles to define freedom not only in opposition to slavery but also in many other possible ways.

This volume also includes yet another stellar lineup of book reviews. We applaud the authors of new books, the scholars who are willing to take up the work of reading and assessing them, and the field that has sustained decades-long debates and discussions that continue to inspire (and sometimes frustrate) us all and remind us why what we are doing is worth the doing. 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Alternative Fictions: The New Lost Cause in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Alternative Fictions: The New Lost Cause in the Post-Civil Rights Era

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“What if the South Won the Civil War?” Answers to this question reflect shifts in collective memory as authors use artistic license to reframe the real-world past.[1] Mackinlay Kantor’s answer in 1960 signaled the impending shift in the Lost Cause ideology within an emerging cultural landscape that was being reshaped by the Civil Rights Movement. Though slavery is still not the cause of Kantor’s Civil War, the South ends the practice to keep pace with other nations. By the mid-twentieth century, growing numbers of southerners still could not admit to fighting for slavery and maintained that the peculiar institution was far more humane than abolitionists claimed, but also were uncomfortable celebrating a South that upheld the system. The most recent generations of “alt histories” of the war serve as a barometer of the Lost Cause’s new place in the post-Civil Rights cultural landscape, tracing hidden truths authors buried beneath the surface of history. Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (1992), Howard Ray White’s The Trilogy (2018) both use a post-Civil Rights era version of the Lost Cause, but have markedly different memories of the past. Turtledove wrote in the Lost Cause style most historians refer to in studies of modern memory. White’s narrative reflects a variant of the Lost Cause that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s that warrants its own label, the New Lost Cause.

 

Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (1992) highlights how deeply entrenched the Lost Cause remains in the white American psyche even amongst more progressive thinkers in the post-Civil Rights-era. Guns of the South rejects aspects of the Lost Cause. Slavery is depicted as cruel an immoral and is the outright cause for secession. Even so, Turtledove falls into the Lost Cause mythos of the southern gentlemen and frequently romanticizes Confederate leaders, especially Robert E. Lee. Lee becomes the second Confederate president and begins the process of abolition. In one scene, Lee visits wounded Union soldiers. A man asks Lee if he came “to gloat,” but another defends Lee, saying, “Come on, Joe, you know he ain’t that way.” Lee confirms that he “came to see brave men.”[2] Thomas Mallon explains how Turtledove used Lee as “a sort of Mandela” figure, implying race tensions would have eased sooner under a gradual emancipation platform than our world’s Reconstruction.[3] David Blight’s theory of white America achieving social reconciliation by agreeing to honor the bravery of both sides and ignore the role of slavery shines through even as Turtledove blames slavery for the war.[4] This is the power of the Lost Cause: even when denying states’ rights as the war’s cause, white memory clings to Reconciliation and forgiveness to the point of distorting the truth.[5]

Guns reflects the growing international scope of white nationalist movements. Twenty-first-century South Africans bring AK-47s to the Confederacy to help establish the South as a white supremacist nation, hoping to prevent the collapse of Apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s. Turtledove foreshadowed the growing international connections between white supremacists. The late twentieth-century’s revolution in personal computing and internet access allowed white supremacists around the world to share ideas online.[6] The Lost Cause and Confederate symbols can be found in many foreign and domestic forums today not just as a white supremacist symbol, but a generalized stance against a multicultural liberal consensus.”[7] Over the past two decades, online white identitarians have increasingly embraced the Confederate flag to the exclusion of more incendiary symbols like the Swastika, which is more likely to be banned by most websites’ rules of conduct.[8] The Afrikaners who time-traveled from 2014 to 1864 hoped that saving the Confederacy would strengthen the white supremacist movement in the 21st century. Post-Civil Rights Movement, American white supremacist organizations that had formerly been at odds, such as the Klan and Neo-Nazis, began working together as they lost political power, and the internet allowed like-minded white supremacists from around the world to commiserate and plan together.[9]

This post-Civil Rights era moment of cultural reinvention created what I call the “New Lost Cause.” Formed in the wake of the late twentieth-century white power movements, the New Lost Cause was part of growing international white supremacist movement that foreshadowed the rise of the alt-right. Post Civil Rights-era literary works in the New Lost Cause use much of the classic Lost Cause mythos but are broader and more flexible in their historical details.

 

For example, the preposterously titled The CSA Trilogy: An Alternate History/Historical Novel about Our Vast and Beautiful Confederate States of America — A Happy Story in Three Parts of What Might Have Been — 1861 to 2011 has a New Lost Cause memory of the war that has proven useful to the alt-right.[10] Since the 1990s, the Neo-Confederate movement has created a more masculine version of the Lost Cause that works to apply to politics well beyond race. The book is broken into three parts, covering the CSA’s acquisition of new territory and political development through 2011, which White presents as historically possible, claiming even the fictional details are based on sound evidence and reasoning.

The New Lost Cause gives white supremacists a mythos that frames whites as victims of the politically correct and anyone left of center as Communist demagogues. The CSA Trilogy, in which racism only exists in the US rump state, declares the South could have avoided the unpleasantness of the Civil Rights Movement if it had been allowed to self-direct its policies. Nearly every character states their precise racial background, by percentage, upon introduction. In White’s world, blood quantums still matter, but the CSA is still more racially diverse than the “woke” liberals of the North claim to be. Thus far, The CSA Trilogy is bizarre, but still within the Lost Cause narrative that the North caused more race tensions than it solved through the war and Reconstruction.

White’s New Lost Cause coopts progressive language to make white supremacist ideas sound more palatable to those on the fringes of the alt-right and offers a semblance of cover from accusations about white supremacy. For example, “diversity” is literally the CSA’s national anthem, but its meaning is unconventional. For White, diversity “does not mean diverse cultural behaviors” nor does it “mean political agitators can desecrate the monuments erected to Confederate heroes.” Everyone speaks English and follows white customs; assimilation to the dominant culture is critical in this white supremacist utopia.[11] In the modern CSA of 2011, Trumpism and the alt-right have crept in. The mainland country is protected by a “national fence” built by undocumented immigrants, and there is little environmental regulation, limited voting rights, and few labor unions. The immigration policy in White’s idealized Confederacy ensures the population is always at least seventy percent white, reflecting the common critique from the right that too much immigration from the wrong sort of places will destroy the country. Some of these ideas are familiar: the Lost Cause has always aimed to limit the voting rights of African Americans, the dislike of labor unions makes sense for those who wanted to control others’ labor, and it is no secret that the Lost Cause favors whiteness. The New Lost Cause uses almost all of the original Lost Cause, but adds to it by emphasizing cultural assimilation, disregarding environmental regulations, and demanding stringent border control. The alt-right can more easily adapt the New Lost Cause to the current political landscape than the original Lost Cause.[12]

Like the founders of the Lost Cause, who created a new history for political purposes, the New Lost Cause is being written by people who know the real history, but want to create a more politically useful story.[13] By using obviously fictitious elements, Clark makes the true parts of his story stand out: readers see slavery in all its gory detail and are reminded that progress is not guaranteed. In The CSA Trilogy, White presents fiction as the truth, and then gives readers a second fiction as a possibility. But those lies compound to create a frightening picture rather than an aspirational one. The changing landscape of alternative histories shows how much American memories of the Civil War have metamorphosed between the war’s end and today. Emancipationist memory still emphasizes freedom, but also the lack thereof. The Lost Cause and now the New Lost Cause emphasize political utility and have mutated themselves to remain culturally relevant and rhetorically powerful.

 

 

[1] Kathleen Singles, Alternate History : Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=39ca3bdf-e949-3f9b-bb91-3f70e62306ea.; Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate History.” History and Theory 41, no. 4 (2002): 90–103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3590670.

[2] Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South. Ballantine, 1992. 192.

[3] “South Africa scraps legal foundation for apartheid system.” UN Chronicle, September 1991, 29+. Gale In Context: Biography. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A11547537/BIC?u=tulane&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=7e2de43c.; Thomas Mallon, “Never Happened.” The New Yorker, November 13, 2011. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/21/never-happened.

[4] Subsequent works, such as Brian Jordan’s Marching Home, have suggested Blight’s emphasis on Blue-Grey reunions overstates the degree of white veterans’ reconciliation, or that the theory only describes white male reconciliation, in the case of Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War. Even so, Blight’s central argument that white Unionists agreed to tolerate the Lost Cause narrative of the war and to downplay the role of slavery holds firm. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001.; Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War. 1st ed. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015.; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

[5] Turtledove is not the only author to point to slavery as the cause and still be influenced by the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause permeates even Dread Nation (2018) and its sequel Deathless Divide (2020) by Justina Ireland, which are otherwise Emancipationist stories. The duology imagines a world where the dead suddenly come to life at Gettysburg. Ireland tackles the complexities of relative freedom, colorism, and the ability to pass for white. Emancipation and all its nuances are at the heart of both stories. Even so, there are instances where the main character unironically uses “the War of Northern aggression” or “the War between the States,” both of which are strongly associated with the Lost Cause.

[6] The trends towards digital forums accelerated in the 2000s and today most white nationalism and alt-right conversations happen online rather than in person. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home, White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018. 12, 237; Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Beacon Press, 2019.

[7] Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home, White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 238.

[8] For example, see: Margaret Crable, “Germany’s Strange Nostalgia for the Antebellum American South.” USC Dornsife, 31 Mar. 2021, https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/germanys-nostalgia-antebellum-american-south/.

[9] Belew, Bring the War Home.

[10] Howard Ray White, The CSA Trilogy: An Alternate History/Historical Novel about Our Vast and Beautiful Confederate States of America — A Happy Story in Three Parts of What Might Have Been — 1861 to 2011, 2018.

[11] White, The CSA Trilogy. 146.

[12] White is not the only writer to challenge such issues from the standpoint of the New Lost Cause. Many others, usually connected to the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the League of the South, have used their narrative of the Civil War as the historical proof for their modern political beliefs. For examples, see: James Ronald Kennedy, and Walter Donald Kennedy. Yankee Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home. Columbia, South Carolina: Shotwell Publishing, 2021.; Paul C. Graham, Confederaphobia: An American Epidemic. Columbia, South Carolina: Shotwell Publishing, 2017.; Wilson, Clyde N. Annals of the Stupid Party: Republicans Before Trump. The Wilson Files 3. Columbia, So. Carolina: Shotwell Publishing LLC, 2016.

[13] Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Kris Plunkett

Kris Plunkett is a PhD candidate at Tulane University studying Civil War memory. Her dissertation traces the evolutions of Civil War memories from the war’s end to the present. When she’s not in the archives, Kris coaches the speech and debate team at St. Mary’s Dominican High School.
Announcing the Winner of the 2024 George and Ann Richards Prize

Announcing the Winner of the 2024 George and Ann Richards Prize

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Guy Emerson Mount has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2024. The article, “Shall I Go? Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914” appeared in the December 2024 special issue, Black Internationalism in the Era of Emancipation, guest edited by Brandon R. Byrd.

The prize committee was impressed by the article’s “innovative approach and its illuminating insights” and praised it for creating “an innovative historical arc that illuminates how white state crafters sought to tackle the problem of emancipation through colonization.” The committee called the article “beautifully written” and predicted that it “will not only offer scholars of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and US imperialism a new way to think about the connections between these topics but also fuel further conversation about the place of the Pacific in the histories of nineteenth-century America.”

Mount is an Assistant Professor of History and an affiliate in African American Studies at Wake Forest University. He teaches courses in Atlantic History, Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Global History of Reparations.  He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago under the direction of Tom Holt.  While at Chicago, he co-founded the Reparations at UChicago Working Group which first uncovered the University’s historical ties to slavery while organizing alongside residents of the South Side of Chicago for reparations.  Previously he held a Carter G. Woodson fellowship at the University of Virginia and a tenure-track position at Auburn University where he was granted the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2022. His current book project, from which the winning article is derived, is tentatively titled Black Elsewheres: Slavery, Empire, and Reconstruction in the Black Pacific.

Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era. The journal is grateful for the service of this year’s prize committee: Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London (chair); Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Gabriel (Jack) Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Previewing the September 2025 JCWE

Previewing the September 2025 JCWE

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This issue exemplifies the wide sweep of the Civil War Era as scholars understand it, and the success of the journal’s now fifteen-year-long effort to promote broadminded interrogation of the many forces that shaped the middle of the nineteenth century and reveal their impacts.

The issue opens with Yael A. Sternhell’s “The Archive / An Archive,” an exploration of the transformed view of archives among historians and of the creation of canonical Civil War archives. The essay is in dialogue with December 2022 special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris, and it is drawn from Sternhell’s November 2024 address at the Southern Historical Association meeting, where her book War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (2023) received the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The book examined the creation of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, historicizing the drive to fashion such an archive, the ways the archive was shaped to reflect contemporary interests and concerns, and the impact of those archival choices on later scholarly production. The essay not only summarizes some of those findings but also draws Sternhell more deeply into the productive debate over how scholars should approach archives not simply as consumers of them but as analysts and critics, part of a broader archival turn in the humanities that asks how we have access to sources and what to do about the silences and absences in archives.

James Howard’s “‘Enlarged by Caucus and Compromise’: Freethinkers, Celebrity Preachers, and the American Anti-Slavery Society” examines the 1850s accommodations between Garrisonians and politically oriented evangelicals like Henry Ward Beecher and George Cheever, as they sought to build an antislavery movement capable of encompassing a wide range of religious beliefs. He demonstrates that Garrisonians in the American Anti-Slavery Society marginalized freethinkers like AASS original member Orson Murray in hopes of diminishing religious critique of the abolitionist movement. The article joins a growing wave of revisions of Garrisonianism that question prior portrayals of its radical rigidity and also contributes to recent scholarship that advances our understanding of the varieties of Northern religion in the antebellum period, several examples of which have appeared in recent issues of the Journal of the Civil War Era.

In “The Crisis of Household Government and the Rise of Democratic Conservatism before the American Civil War,” Mark Power Smith explores the rise of a particularly partisan form of conservatism in the 1850s United States. Through analysis of editorial coverage of two high-profile legal cases involving prominent Democratic men who punished their wives’ lovers, Power Smith argues that Northern Democratic editors created a defense of patriarchal households against what they saw as the corrupting family forms espoused by foreign radical movements and their partisan adversaries. Through these cases, Power Smith connects the cultural debates over masculinity and family structure to the emerging Democratic embrace of conservative patriarchy.

In this issue’s review essay, Rana Hogarth analyzes how historians have approached eugenics and the gaps in scholarship concerning the Civil War’s impact on racial science. Hogarth argues that Civil War scholars have focused on the relationship between US victory and the growth of racial egalitarianism, while historians of eugenics have ignored the era completely. By reading these literatures together and emphasizing more recent scholarship, Hogarth illuminates connections between Civil War debates about race and the untidy origins of eugenic thought and the ways the Civil War left its mark on twentieth-century race science.

The issue also includes the usual run of excellent book reviews, a tribute to the hard work of associate editor Megan Bever, to the scholars who continue to write provocative works, and to the enduring commitment to professional engagement in our field who agree to review books in a busy and tumultuous time.

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Call for Muster Contributors

Call for Muster Contributors

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Muster is looking for contributors! We are looking for scholars from a wide range of perspectives to add new voices to our roster. Please read the announcement below and reach out to rbland4@utk.edu if you have any questions. The deadline for applications is October 1, 2025.

 

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Conversation with Shae Smith Cox

Conversation with Shae Smith Cox

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In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever has a conversation with Shae Smith Cox, Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University about her book, The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939 (LSU Press, 2024).

Teaching the Civil War: Analyzing the Clinton Massacre Using Authentic Tasks

Teaching the Civil War: Analyzing the Clinton Massacre Using Authentic Tasks

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Today’s Muster continues our series Teaching the Civil War. Each post in the series has examined a different method that college and K-12 teachers have used to make the Civil War era come alive in the classroom. In Todays ‘s post, University of South Dakota professor Lindsey Peterson explores teaching the history of emancipation through the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project’s document collection and public memory of the 1875 Clinton Massacre

 

“You hear a great deal about the massacre at Clinton, but you do not hear the worst,” reported Sarah Dickey, a white educator from Ohio who had moved to Mississippi to teach freedpeople during Reconstruction. Writing to President Ulysses S. Grant in the aftermath of the violent race massacre, she solemnly added, “It cannot be told.”[1] Yet, in the following weeks and months, freedpeople, Confederate veterans, politicians, and others documented the events in Clinton, leaving behind an archival record filled with contradiction and debate. Black Americans worked diligently to ensure that the massacre in Clinton was remembered as a deliberate attempt to suppress their rights and justify the restoration of white political and economic dominance in Mississippi. Describing the events at Clinton as a “premeditated massacre of the whites,” however, White Democrats framed their accounts as a justification for the state’s “redemption” from Republican rule during the 1875 election.[2] I use the richness of these conflicting records and authentic tasks to teach students about emancipation as a process.

 

Including freedpeople’s accounts of the Clinton Massacre, the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project provides a vast collection of primary sources to support teaching emancipation as a process. As a project co-director, we are making over 20,000 records sent to Mississippi’s governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction freely available online at cwrgm.org. To increase classroom engagement with Reconstruction, we are developing a backward-designed curriculum that instructs students that emancipation was a non-linear process. Utilizing a series of authentic tasks, the curriculum teaches research method and the practical application of historical reasoning skills for future careers. Content on the Clinton Massacre is central to this approach, providing students with a valuable opportunity to explore emancipation as an uneven process and engage with historical methodology.

 

Screencapture of freedman Edward Gilliams’ testimony about the Clinton Massacre at CWRGM.

 

The Clinton Massacre

 

The Clinton Massacre marked the beginning of the end of Reconstruction in Mississippi. What began as a Republican political rally and barbecue on September 4, 1875, quickly escalated into a brutal massacre orchestrated by White Liners, a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party determined to suppress Black political power. Freedpeople gathered at Moss Hill to hear political speeches in the lead-up to the November elections. To foster open dialogue, Republicans invited a white Democratic speaker, state senate candidate Amos Johnston, to address the crowd. Johnston’s remarks proceeded without incident, but when Republican speaker Captain H. T. Fisher, a former Union officer and newspaper editor, took the stage, he was heckled by a white attendee from nearby Raymond. The rally erupted into violence, leaving three white and five Black attendees dead. In the following days, White Liners terrorized the countryside, lynching between thirty-five and fifty Black Americans and one white Republican supporter. Despite pleas for federal intervention from Governor Adelbert Ames and others, President Grant, weary of Southern unrest, refused to act. His decision enabled the Democratic Party’s violent “redemption” of Mississippi in the 1875 election and paved the way for Jim Crow segregation.[3]

 

Analyzing Perspectives on the Clinton Massacre

The first authentic task asks students to use post-massacre accounts to judge culpability. However, the real objective is to help students consider the importance of perspective, recognize the limitations of primary sources, and practice the historian’s craft. In this task, students are divided into groups and are assigned different accounts. After reading their assigned source, each group answers:

  • What kind of source is it?
  • Who created it?
  • When was it created?
  • Why was it created?
  • What can it tell me?
  • What can’t it tell me?

Chart showing the sub-questions students consider. A student note-taking guide (not pictured here) provides space for students to brainstorm individually, in their assigned groups, and as a class.

These questions are crucial in helping students understand the author’s positionality. For example, Confederate veteran General J. Z. George’s testimony is found in campaign materials supporting Democratic candidates in the upcoming election.[4] Other sources include two eyewitness accounts by freedmen, Edward Gilliam and Jerry Carpenter.[5] The final source is a letter from U.S. Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont to Ames, conveying President Grant’s request that Ames exhaust all local resources before seeking additional troops.[6] All primary sources include transcriptions and audio recordings in plain English and Spanish to support special education students and English language learners.

The class then reconvenes to collaboratively establish a timeline of the facts and determine who should be held responsible for the massacre. Reconciling and discussing the differences in their findings facilitates a discussion exploring how perspective impacted their findings, the assignment of blame in history, and how historians piece together the past with limited and often contradictory sources.

Assessing Election Integrity in the Wake of Clinton

In a second authentic task, students take on the role of Pierrepont, who has just received a letter from Ames assuring him that free elections can be held in the aftermath of the Clinton Massacre.[7] Students are also provided with a letter written by the citizens of Vicksburg to Ames, warning that if protection is not provided for Black voters in Warren County, they will not be able to vote due to racist violence.[8]

After reading the letters, students must write a reply from Pierrepont to Ames, addressing his claim that Mississippi will be able to hold free elections using evidence from both letters and secondary research to support their position. In doing so, they practice analyzing primary sources with contradictory information and writing argumentatively. It also encourages an understanding of the complex positions held by state and federal political leaders, who must balance the interests of multiple constituencies.

Evaluating Historical Public Memories of the Clinton Massacre

In the final authentic task, students analyze how the Clinton Massacre’s collective remembrance has evolved.[9] Acting as members of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History tasked with reviewing public marker submissions, students assess three historical markers and determine which should be adopted, justifying their choice using primary and secondary sources. Their report summarizes the narrative communicated by each marker, evaluates its accuracy, and explains why the Clinton Massacre deserves a public plaque.

 

Photograph of the original 1949 Clinton historical marker referencing the Clinton Riot (left), photograph of the Clinton Riot marker erected in 2015 (center), and photograph of the Mississippi Freedom Trail marker dedicated on September 23, 2021 (right). Images courtesy of Mississippi History Now.

The first marker, erected in 1949, refers to Clinton as the “scene of a bloody riot… during the election campaign that overthrew Carpetbaggers,” reflecting the Lost Cause interpretation of Reconstruction as a time of excessive federal power while minimizing racial animosity. The third marker from 2021 differs dramatically, noting “In the days that followed, White militias and outlaws terrorized area African Americans, killing as many as fifty men and driving others to Jackson for the safety of the federal garrison.” These differing accounts serve political purposes, most clearly represented by the 1949 marker, which frames the massacre as a glorious campaign to redeem the state from oppressive federal policies, supporting contemporary racial terrorism and Jim Crow laws.

Using authentic tasks helps students explore how various groups, such as freedpeople, Confederate veterans, and politicians, documented the Clinton Massacre, highlighting the significance of differing historical accounts in understanding the massacre’s role in the end of Reconstruction in Mississippi. By utilizing authentic tasks, students gain a deeper understanding of emancipation and the Reconstruction era and the value of historical reasoning skills in analyzing complex historical events.

K-12 and community college educators interested in teaching emancipation as a wartime and postwar process are encouraged to explore CWRGM’s educator resources, including lesson plans, workshops, and National History Day materials. New materials, including those referenced above, are continually being added, so please check back often.

[1] “The Clinton Riot,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, Mississippi), September 29, 1875.

[2] Edward Gilliam, “Legal Document from Edward Gilliam to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 10, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 5 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-05-20 and Jerry Carpenter, “Legal Document from Jerry Carpenter to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 10, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 5 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-05-27.

[3] Edwards Pierrepont, “Letter from United States Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 14, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 6 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-06-15.

[4] Adelbert Ames, “Letter from Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames to United States Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont; October 16, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 11 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-11-01.

[5] Citizens of Warren County (Miss.), “Letter from the Citizens of Warren County, Mississippi, to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 14, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 6 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-06-12.

[6] Jones, “The Clinton Riot of 1875,” Mississippi History Now.

[7] Melissa Janczewski Jones, “The Clinton Riot of 1875: From Riot to Massacre,” Mississippi History Now, September 2015, accessed March 1, 2025, https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/the-clinton-riot-of-1875-from-riot-to-massacre.

[8] Quoted in Melissa Janczewski Jones, “Clinton Riot (Massacre) of 1875,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, August 7, 2019, accessed February 2, 2025,   https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/clinton-riot-massacre-of-1875/.

[9] “The Clinton Riot,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, Mississippi), September 29, 1875, accessed January 27, 2025, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016926/1875-09-29/ed-1/seq-1/.

Lindsey R. Peterson

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and the Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. Peterson has over twelve years of experience teaching U.S. history, developing curriculum, and facilitating continuing education workshops for history teachers.
The Militia Act of 1903 in Historical Context

The Militia Act of 1903 in Historical Context

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Recent events have turned public attention to the previously obscure Militia Act of 1903 and the even more obscure historians and political scientists interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century insurrection law. President Donald Trump claimed that the measure vests him with the power to federalize members of the California National Guard to curb what he claims is a rebellion by persons protesting U.S. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement activities in Los Angeles or an uprising that is preventing enforcement of federal immigration law. These claims are now being litigated in federal district and federal appeals courts.

The Militia Act of 1903, following the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795, authorizes the president to federalize state militia under the conditions that common and constitutional law authorizes the president to declare martial law.  Federal law and Supreme Court precedent permit the President to federalize state militia and declare martial law only in response to an invasion, a rebellion, or another event, sometimes described as an “uprising,” that prevents federal courts from enforcing federal laws. Federal law and judicial precedent clearly give the president absolute discretion to determine whether to exercise these powers in response to an invasion, a rebellion, or another event that closed federal courts.  No one disputes that Trump under the Militia Act is authorized to decide whether to federalize state national guard members should the United States be invaded by Spain, the former Confederate States repeat their attempt at secession, or massive riots close all federal courts in Texas.[1]

Trump is making a different and more dubious exercise of executive power in California.  He is claiming that the Militia Act of 1903 empowers him to define what constitutes an invasion, a rebellion, and an uprising that prevents federal law enforcement, and then determine whether under his definitions the United States is experiencing an invasion, a rebellion, or an uprising that prevents federal law enforcement. History casts doubt on these claims.  The Militia Act was intended to empower the president to federalize the state militia to confront military forces or the equivalent of military forces. That measure gave the president no power to federalize state militia to confront sporadic violence by protestors who do not resemble in any way a military force.  The events in Los Angeles are inconsistent with common understandings of invasion, rebellion, or uprising that prevents the execution of federal laws in place when the Militia Act of 1903 was adopted.  Presidential power to declare by fiat that the triggering conditions for federalizing the state militia exist, while supported by a passage in Martin v. Mott (1827), is inconsistent with the text of the Militia Act and late nineteenth century judicial precedents, most notably Ex parte Milligan (1865).[2]

 

Text and History

The Militia Act of 1903 was designed to improve the capacity of the United States to fight wars at the turn of the twentieth century, after the difficulties the United States military experienced during the Spanish-American War trying to  combine regular, full time military forces and part-time members of state militia. The provisions focus on training members of the national guard for military combat.  The text prescribes important roles for the Secretary of War and War Department. None speak of the Attorney General, the Justice Department, or any other federal officer or institution charged with law enforcement. The Secretary of War, Elihu Root, in his annual report described the measure as ensuring “preparation in advance for the organization of volunteers in time of war.”[3]

Section Four declares that state national guard may be federalized “whenever the United States is invaded, or in danger of invasion from any foreign nation, or of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States, or the President is unable, with the other forces at his command to execute the laws of the Union in any part thereof.” No federal law permits the president to call the state militia into service under any other conditions, no matter how dire matters may seem to the president or the president may claim.  Root allayed concerns that the national guard might be put into service for routine law enforcement or in circumstances where the United States was not facing a military threat. When asked by a major in the Georgia national guard whether the bill authorized the president to use state national guard in “the suppression of insurrections and strikes,” a controversial matter in 1903, Root noted that the duty of state national guard continued to be “defined by the constitution” and that “the regular army would be employed” for “the suppression of insurrections and disturbances.”[4]

 

Rebellion 

The Supreme Court in the nineteenth century classified as a “rebellion” only massive uprisings aimed at overthrowing the existing government. Courts during the 1860s and afterwards routinely described the Civil War as a rebellion. United States v. Irwin (1888) spoke of the Mormon rebellion of 1857-58, in which Mormon militia attempted to drive all U.S. authorities out of Utah. The Supreme Court during the Civil War and Reconstruction pointed to two other rebellions that had occurred in the United States.  The Amy Warwick (aka The Prize Cases) (1862) declared that Shay’s Rebellion (1786) was a rebellion. Western Massachusetts farmers attempted to prevent the implementation of any law by closing the local courts. Ex parte Milligan spoke of Dorr’s Rebellion as a rebellion.  Dorr assembled a military force committed to overthrowing the government of Rhode Island. [5]

Civil War commentary frequently explored the difference between a rebellion and an insurrection. Webster’s Dictionary in 1865 treated the two as distinctive.  The text informed  readers that a revolt is an attempt to overthrow the government and an insurrection is an effort to resist the legal authority of the government.  More often, Civil War opinions and commentary spoke of rebellions as more extensive or ambitious insurrections. The term rebellion,” Francis Lieber, the leading constitutional commentator on Civil War issues, wrote, “is applied to an insurrection of large extent.” Many state courts agreed that a rebellion was an insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government. Martin v. Hortin (1865), quoting from General Henry Halleck, Elements of International Law and Laws of War, declared that “the term rebellion is applied to an insurrection of large extent or long duration; and is usually a war between the legitimate government of a State and portions or parts of the same, who seek to overthrow the government.” The Supreme Court of the United States adopted a similar distinction between insurrections and rebellions in The Amy Warwick when describing the Civil War as “no loose, unorganized insurrection, having no defined boundary or possession.” Numerous state cases quoted or paraphrased this passage.[6]

Thus, nineteenth-century disorders that were not “insurrections of large extent or long duration” fell outside the legal definition of a rebellion. The Supreme Court in In re Debs (1895) unanimously rejected claims that the Pullman strike was a rebellion even though the strike paralyzed the Midwest and presented severe challenges to local authorities. “Whatever any single individual may have thought or planned,” Justice David Brewer declared, “the great body of those who were engaged in these transactions contemplated neither rebellion nor revolution.” The justices similarly limited rebellions to the places in which the rebellion was actually occurring or where there was a threat that the government might be overthrown in entirety. Ex parte Milligan famously declared that no rebellion existed in Indiana during the Civil War.  The Supreme Court in Bean v. Beckwith (1873) similarly held that there was no rebellion in Vermont during the Civil War that would justify military authority to arrest and detain civilians.[7]

 

Judicial Process and Law Enforcement

Whether the president was capable of enforcing federal law in the nineteenth century depended on whether courts were open, whether judicial orders were being obeyed, and, according to the concurring opinion in Milligan, whether the legal system remained in control of the government.  Milligan turned on the federal courts being “open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction.” Judicial opinions after Milligan made clear that the same principles governed federal use of the military, federal or state, to enforce the law.  Justice Stephen Field declared,  “I know of no law that was ever enacted in the United States, which would justify a military officer in enforcing the payment to him of a debt due from one loyal citizen to another loyal citizen, neither being in the military service, or residing in a state declared to be in insurrection, or in which the courts of law were not open and in the peaceful exercise of their jurisdiction.”[8]

This emphasis on judicial process explains the use of the plural “laws” in all the Militia Acts rather than a presidential power to call on the military to enforce a particular law.  When courts are closed, judicial process is unavailable for any claim of legal right. When courts are open and functioning, by comparison, judicial processes are available for determining whether those thought to be insurrectionists or rebels have valid legal and constitutional claims.  Insurrectionists and rebels often claim that they have a legal right to resist illegal or unconstitutional edicts.  They become insurrectionists and rebels when courts are open only when their claims are judicially rejected and they do not cease their violent opposition.  An alleged insurrectionist or rebel who respects court orders is not an insurrectionist or rebel.  Brewer in In re Debs declared that no rebellion occurred when the offending parties obeyed judicial decrees declaring their tactics during the Pullman strike illegal. “[W]hen in the due order of legal proceedings the question of right and wrong was submitted to the courts, and by them decided,” he wrote, the strikers “unhesitatingly yielded to their decisions.”[9]

 

Presidential Discretion

The Militia Act of 1903, following the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795, vests the president with absolute discretion to federalize state militia only when certain objective triggering conditions exist. Nothing in the text gives the president the discretionary power to determine whether the United States has been invaded, is experiencing a rebellion, or lacks functioning federal courts in a particular jurisdiction. The Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan determined without any deference to the president that a presidential decision to impose martial law in parts of Indiana at the end of the Civil War was unconstitutional.  Justice David Davis’s opinion concluded the conditions under which martial law might constitutionally be imposed were absent: Indiana was not being invaded, was not a site for rebellion, and the civil courts were open. Presidential decrees or federal laws to the contrary, the majority opinion in Milligan bluntly concluded, “Martial rule can never exist where the courts are open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction.”[10]

The Supreme Court and Supreme Court justices in various post-Civil War cases decided after Milligan similarly determined without any deference to other governing officials that no rebellion or any other condition existed that augmented presidential or federal powers. Justice Field in Bean did not defer to any federal official when declaring no rebellion existed in Vermont in the wake of the Civil War. Justice David Brewer in In re Debs evinced no tendency to defer to the President or Congress when rejecting counsel for the government’s claim that a rebellion existed in Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike and was as non-deferential in U.S. v. Ju Toy (1905) when declaring no rebellion existed in California that justified denying Chinese immigrants access to judicial process.[11]

Supreme Court practice from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century indicated that the broad language about presidential discretion to federalize state militia in some antebellum cases, most notably Martin v. Mott, had either been silently overruled or narrowed to the particular facts of the case and principles underlying the decisions. Martin concerned a suit by a member of a state militia who objected to federalization when the United States was invaded during the War of 1812. Justice Story opinion declared, “the President (is) the sole and exclusive judge whether the exigency has arisen.” That claim, however, was immediately modified by Story’s concern with the disciplinary and other problems that would result if state militiamen could object to their deployment during an invasion.  The full quotation is:

“Is the President the sole and exclusive judge whether the exigency has arisen, or is it to be considered as an open question, upon which every officer to whom the orders of the President are addressed, may decide for himself, and equally open to be contested by every militia-man who shall refuse to obey the orders of the President?”

The Supreme Court never cited Martin when, after the Civil War, the justices adjudicated lawsuits by civilians claiming that presidential use of the military for law enforcement violated their constitutional rights and interests.  Martin was limited to suits by militiamen challenging their deployment. Milligan supplied the rule when presidents claimed the triggering conditions for using military for law enforcement existed.  In 1932, a unanimous Supreme Court in Sterling v. Constantin held that the justices could determine whether the United States had been invaded, was fighting a domestic rebellion, or was experiencing an uprising that closed the courts when determining whether presidential uses of federal or state militia violated constitutional rights or interests.[12]

 

Conclusion

Americans from the ratification of the Constitution to the passage of the Militia Act of 1903 recognized that Congress could empower the President to federalize state militia only under the wartime or wartime analogue conditions under which Congress could empower the President to impose martial law. These conditions were limited to a foreign invasion, a domestic rebellion, or some other violent uprising that caused judicial proceedings in part of the United States to be suspended. The state militia federalized by the Militia Act were expected to confront troops or the equivalent, not criminals or scattered violent protestors. Interpreting the Militia Act of 1903 or any other federal measure, to give near absolute discretionary power to the president to determine when vast wartime powers may be exercise, Ex parte Milligan noted, would subvert the strict limitations of  in the militia acts and threaten constitutional democracy in the United States by enabled the president and subordinates to “substitute military force for and to the exclusion of the laws,” and govern as they “think right and properly, without fixed and certain rules.”[13]

 

[1] 1 Stat. 424 (1792); 1 Stat. 264, 264 (1795).

[2] 25 U.S. 19 (1827); 71 U.S. 2 (1866).

[3] 32 U.S. Stat. 775 (1903); G. David Crocker, et al., “South Carolina Judge Advocates of the United States Army Reserve, South Carolina National Guard and South Carolina State Guard,” South Carolina Lawyer, 48, 53 (January 2019); 32 U.S Stat. 776-79 (1903); “Root Favors the Canteen,” The Cleveland Leader (OH), December 1, 1865).

[4] 32 U.S. Stat. 775, 776 (1903); “Dick Militia Bill,” The Montgomery Advertiser (AL), May 15, 1903.

[5] United States v. Irwin, 127 U.S. 125, 128 (1888); See James Buchanan, “Proclamation—Rebellion in the Territory of Utah,” April 6, 1858, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-rebellion-the-territory-utah ; The Amy Warwick, 67 U.S. 635, 691 (1862); See Milligan, at 129. For a discussion of Shay’s Rebellion, see Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford University Press:2016), 88-101; For a discussion of Dorr’s Rebellion, see Marcus Alexander Gadson, Sedition: How America’s Constitution Order Emerged from Violent Crisis (New York University Press: New York, 2025), 37-65.

[6] Insurrection, Dr. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 702 (London, Bell & Daldy 1865); Francis Lieber, Instruction for the Government of Armies of the United States, in the Field (D. Van Nostrand: New York, 1863), 34; Keely v. Sanders, 99 U.S. 441, 448 (1878); Martin v. Hortin, 64 Ky. 629, 633 (1865) (quoting H.W. Halleck, Elements of International Law and Laws of War (J.S.Lippincott & Co.: Philadelphia, PA, 1866), 151; The Amy Warwick, 67 U.S. 635, 673 (1862); Smith v. Brazelton, 48 Tenn. (1 Heisk) 44, 55 (1870); Hill v. Boyland, 40 Miss. 618, 630, 632 (1866); Pennywit v. Kellogg, 13 Ohio Dec. Reprint 389, 390 (1870); Texas v. White & Chiles, 25 Tex. Supp. 465, 544 (1868); Hall v. Keese, 31 Tex. 504, 543 (1868).

[7] For a discussion of the Pullman Strike, see David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, 1999); In Re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 597-98 (1895); Milligan, at 121-22; Bean v. Beckwith, 85 U.S. 510, 514 (1873)

[8] Milligan, at 140-41 (Chase, CJ., concurring); Milligan, at 128; Mitchell v. Clark, 119 U.S. 633, 647 (1884).

[9] In Re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 597-98 (1895)

[10] Milligan, at 121-22, 127 (1866)

[11] U.S. v. Ju Toy, 198 U.S. 253, 274 (1905) (Brewer, J., dissenting)

[12] Martin, at 29-30; 287 U.S. 378 (1932).

[13] Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 124-25 (1866).

Mark Graber

Mark Graber is the University System of Maryland Regents Professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Professor Graber is recognized as one of the leading scholars in the country on constitutional law and politics. He is the author of A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford 2013), Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, 2006). His most recent book is Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War (Kansas, 2023).
Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

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In today’s Muster, Associate Editor Robert Bland discusses the JCWE’s June special issue on material culture with guest editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts. Dr. Cashin is a professor of history at Ohio State University and author of War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018) and editor of War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era (2018). Dr. Roberts is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021).

Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Thank you both for making time for this interview. In the introduction for the special issue, you remark that “the Civil War, like all wars, only intensified the relationship between people and material things.”

I wonder if you could speak about these intensified relationships people of the Civil War era had with the material world and how examining this material world provides a new lens on the war?

Joan Cashin: Wars always involve ferocious struggles over material resources, such as food, timber, housing. Wars also generate powerful symbols, which have often been materialized. Flags, for example. This is kind of obvious, but there’s a tremendous struggle during the war to keep the enemy from getting a flag, or to capture the enemy’s flag. I found references to men in both armies who will do almost anything to keep their flag in their hands. And, on the other side, of course, soldiers who will do almost anything to wrest it away.

These material objects have tremendous symbolic power. After the war, of course, there’s a brisk traffic in material objects that are war artifacts. Some of them are rather ordinary objects, and some of them are associated with famous people. Some of them are connected with ordinary men and women such as civilians, soldiers, Blacks, whites, the enslaved, free people.

Robert Bland: But it seems like this is a powerful human impulse. To hold on to and preserve objects that memorialize an embodied history. It seems like the material culture questions are often adjacent to the way we now inquire into the silences in the production of the past and the ways scholars seek to “trouble the archive.”

Alaina Roberts:  Well going off that idea, of silences in the past, when I talk to my students about, you know, if you’re thinking of something that’s not an archival document, but rather something material about the Civil War era, which I teach about a lot, they’re often going to think of a uniform. And that uniform, in their minds, is usually worn by a white person, a white soldier. So I was really happy and appreciative that we were able to bring out the way material culture is important to people of color in this issue, like African Americans and Native folks, today and historically. Because as historians, we know everyday people are engaging in the use of objects and in that memorialization process.

But it’s still taking time to reach the everyday folks, that idea that it’s more than, for example, just a uniform. That it’s about people’s everyday lives and the way symbols take on more meaning for everyone.

Robert Bland:  Along those lines, I wonder if you could speak about the authors and the pieces that they have written. The special issue includes articles about Civil War-era trunks and their relationship to legal culture, school buildings and the materiality of freedom that those buildings embodied, and the process of collecting objects in the public history of the Cherokee nation.

What do the stories of objects like trunks, schoolhouses, and museums tell us about the current state of Civil War-era material culture?

Joan Cashin: I’m really proud of the two articles that we published, one by Laura Edwards and one by Amy Murrell Taylor. Both of them are discussing objects that appear to be rather ordinary, but they both make the strong case that these objects mean a lot to people in the past. Laura Edwards talks about how owning a trunk and filling it with objects is one way that non-elite people can preserve valuable material objects. And it’s a way to also exercise some small measure of privacy. What’s in the trunk belongs to them and nobody else.

Amy also delves into what might seem like a rather ordinary wooden building in the countryside. But she shows how that schoolhouse meant a great deal to the Black community. It is a symbol of their emancipation, the fact they can now build their own institutions. The building also serves as a church and as a post office.

There’s also a struggle around the different parties on how the building was designed and debates about how it should be used.

Alaina Roberts: I really appreciated that Amy’s article allows us to get a different perspective on something I think is very commonly discussed in African American historiography, which is education. It’s always, you know, African Americans after the Civil War, the first thing they want to do is get their children education and also get themselves the ability to read and write because they viewed it as the key to upward mobility.

I think Amy’s article is really great because it allows us to ask of this schoolhouse, what are the actual building elements of the foundation? What are the issues of contestation with the land that this place is built on? How are the white school teachers having conversations with Black students and parents? Or, what’s going on with the white woman who’s interested in kind of taking over this space for her own purposes? There are all these different competing parties in the essay.

Joan Cashin: To that point, I hope we can persuade archivists to preserve material objects that often come in with the manuscripts. I’ve seen this off and on throughout my career. There’ll be boxes and boxes of manuscripts, but sometimes there are a couple of boxes of personal possessions. Sometimes, however, they are thrown away. I was doing research in Virginia years ago and there was this was a big manuscript collection. There were some personal objects that were owned by the women in the family—white and black women—objects that pertained to white women before the Civil War, and black women during and after. And an archivist threw them away.

I also think that there are all kinds of objects out there in private hands. They sometimes show up for sale on the market—there’s a huge market in Civil War artifacts, and they’re not all about uniforms, bayonets and bullets. There are also objects pertaining to the civilian experience and to emancipation. And I hope that museums will consider buying some of those objects.

Robert Bland: Along those lines, there is an ongoing debate over the politics of museums and the uneven history of power embedded in the collection acquisition process. Alaina, pivoting to your roundtable, I would be interested to hear you say a little bit about the discussion around the We Are Cherokee exhibit. You framed the discussion around the exhibit as an “act of reconciliation.” I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you understand curatorial work and public history as part of a longer process of reconciling historical trauma.

Alaina Roberts: Well, my first book dealt with getting historians and non-historians to see what’s happening in Indian territory with Native Americans who are enslaving Black people as part of our broader narrative about the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. I see the roundtable as part of that, but then also part of trying to make folks understand that it’s also connected to the discussions that we’re currently having— less now than a few years ago—about racial reconciliation in this country.

And so, there are conversations that have been had in the museum studies world and in the academic world about telling, for example, the American story as something that involves people of multiple races. But that hasn’t happened in the world of Native American public history and Native-focused museum studies in the same way. There are people like Amy Lonetree who have published on museum studies and examining how Native Americans have been setting up their tribal museums and cultural centers. But those have been primarily looking at tribes that did not own slaves. And, as I have traveled throughout Oklahoma for the past decade, I have seen that most of these museums [of former slaveholding tribes] totally ignore that history.  They’re doing the same whitewashing that American museums were doing, you know, decades and decades before.

And so, the roundtable was really meant to celebrate that there finally was an exhibit and a tribal nation that was looking to actually acknowledge this history; not just acknowledge, but show how influential Black people were in the Cherokee Nation, the discrimination that they faced because of the actions of the government, and what steps need to continue to be taken to really incorporate people of African descent in the nation today.

Robert Bland: In closing, I want to ask you to describe the current state of Civil War-era material culture history. What do scholars in other subfields of Civil War history miss by not more carefully grounding questions of material culture in their examinations of the nineteenth century America?

Joan Cashin: I think they’re missing a lot of the human experience. It’s clear when you do manuscript research that the material world matters a lot to people in the past. And there may not be a material artifact in the collection, but you’ll find it in the written evidence, detailed descriptions of objects that people have, or want to have, or they have lost. They are trying to preserve things because of their connection to their lives. This is another way to get at historical experience.

Alaina Roberts: I appreciate that material culture and the way we study, engage, house, and display material culture can be representative of our modern moment, and that it changes depending on how we’re thinking about history.

In terms of museums, I am hoping that they will be reflective of changes related to inclusion in the United States and in tribal nations.

Joan Cashin: I’ve thought a good deal about Alaina’s points on museum professionals and how they look at all these issues. And I think some of them are receptive. Some of them are interested in these new ideas. Not all of them. Occasionally, I talk to someone who doesn’t understand why the lives of ordinary people are important—they’re still focused on the powerful few.  But I don’t deal with people like that too much and I’m hoping that the situation is changing.  I’m hoping that they’re going to move in step with historians on all these issues.

 

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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