Richards Prize
The Richards Prize for the best article in each volume year of The Journal of the Civil War Era is named in honor of George and Ann Richards, generous benefactors of Penn State’s Civil War Era Center, which is the editorial home of the journal. The editors of the journal created the $1,000 Richards Prize in 2011 to recognize George and Ann Richards for their contribution to the center that now bears their name and to Civil War era scholarship generally.
Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s George and Ann Richards Prize
Kimberly Welch has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2022. The article, “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” appeared in the December 2022 special issue, Archives and Nineteenth Century African American History, organized and guest-edited by Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry.
In announcing their unanimous selection of Welch’s article for the Richards Prize, the selection committee wrote, “A close analysis of a single court case in 1840s New Orleans, ‘The Stability of Fortunes’ sheds new light on African American women, property ownership, and race in the nineteenth century United States. Welch approaches the study through an examination of the court case and its related documents as an intentionally curated archive used and produced by Black Americans for their benefit. Welch reveals a fascinating story of how a successful Black businesswoman used her resources and intentionally created documents to defend and secure her estate for her mixed-race children. After the death of the man who had been her romantic partner for over fifty years, his unscrupulous relatives sought to use her race against her and her children to acquire her estate, yet through the intentional production of numerous documents over the course of her life, she successfully defended her property ownership in court. “The Stability of Fortunes” is an important contribution to the scholarship on free Black Americans and how they navigated American slave society. Welch concludes that a methodological approach in which court records are read as archives reveals strategies and ‘competing intentionalities of their curators’ in such a way that gives us a deeper understanding of these histories.”
Dr. Welch is associate professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University. She is the 2022 recipient of the Dan David Prize, the world’s largest prize for practitioners studying the human past. She is the author of the book, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (UNC Press, 2018), a historical and socio-legal study of free and enslaved Black Americans’ use of the local courts in the slave South. Dr. Welch currently is working on a book that features Eulalie Mandeville, the principal subject of “The Stability of Fortunes.”
The Richards Prize committee consisted of Jameson Sweet, Rutgers University; Erika Pani Bano, Colegio de México; and Wayne Hsieh, United States Naval Academy.
Past Winners
2021 – Cynthia Nicoletti, “William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker,” Volume 11 Number 4 (December)
The article examines the work of William Henry Trescot, who lobbied Andrew Johnson to issue pardons to former Confederates and return lands that had been seized from enslavers and placed in the custody of the Freedmen’s Bureau. In announcing its selection of the article, the prize committee praised Nicoletti’s “meticulous archival research” and “novel methodological approach” to the topic of pardoning ex-Confederates. In the committee’s words, “‘William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker’ makes a substantial contribution to the scholarship on the Reconstruction era and strengthens our understanding of its legacies. The denial of freedpeople’s demands for land redistribution as an essential foundation of self-determination and restorative justice was far from inevitable, as Nicoletti concludes.” As the article itself demonstrates, “the nation that emerged from the struggles of the Civil War was one that was actively made by men like William Henry Trescott.”
2020 – Catherine A. Jones, “The Trials of Mary Booth and the Post-Civil War Incarceration of African American Children,” Volume 10 Number 3 (September)
Drawn from a fragmentary archival record, Jones’s essay examines the wrongful 1882 murder conviction of Mary Booth, a fourteen-year-old African American girl in Virginia. It shows how African American children were transformed into carceral subjects following emancipation and how, in response, Black Virginians fought for greater access to the justice system and for juvenile justice reform. In the words of the prize committee, “Professor Catherine A. Jones overcame the fragmentary documentary record to write a compelling narrative about a black girl caught in an unpredictable, often brutal, legal system. The author handled the complex legal maneuvers with skill, without ever losing sight of the human dimension of the story. The essay gives us new ways to think about freedom and unfreedom in the postwar South, and it illuminates new aspects of the history of childhood, African Americans, and women.”
2019 – Caroline E. Janney, “Free to Go Where We Liked: The Army of Northern Virginia after Appomattox,” Volume 9 Number 1 (March)
Janney’s essay examines the period immediately following the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. It shows that the actions of these soldiers while being disbanded presaged the violent opposition to the social and political changes wrought by emancipation in the postwar South. In the words of the prize committee, Janney’s “systematic interpretation of the disbanding of the Army of Northern Virginia reveals at once the dynamism of military history to explain broader social and cultural issues.” Furthermore, “her measured nuance helps the reader to understand that ‘surrender’ at Appomattox and general emancipation were not just a ‘finish’ or a ‘start,’ but rather both a panoply of contested beginnings, endings, and turning points in regional, national and racial identities. To that end, Janney encourages readers to center contingency and context when investigating the past.”
2018 – Joshua A. Lynn, “A Manly Doughface: James Buchanan and the Sectional Politics of Gender,” Volume 8, Number 4 (December)
Lynn’s essay draws from a wide variety of sources to show how sectional tensions and competing notions of gender intersected during the 1856 presidential campaign. In the words of the prize committee, his deft analysis of the debates over James Buchanan’s fitness for the presidency shows that “concepts of manhood and masculinity could not be understood outside of sectional debates over slavery and sovereignty. Wildly divergent political characterizations of Buchanan’s bachelorhood and body revealed that gender itself had become ‘sectionalized by the intractable question of slavery.’” The committee praises the essay as an example of “sophisticated analysis communicated in clear and engaging prose and holding promise as a model for scholars in other fields of study.”
2017 – Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, “‘On Behalf of His Race and the Lemmon Slaves’: Louis Napoleon, Black Northern Legal Culture, and the Politics of Sectional Crisis,” Volume 7, Number 2 (June)
Gronningsater’s essay offers a new perspective on the famous Lemmon Slave case, in which New York courts freed eight enslaved people brought to New York by Virginia slaveholders while in transit to Texas prior to the Civil War. The article recounts the little known story of African American legal activists, like the abolitionist Louis Napoleon who petitioned a New York court for the writ of habeas corpus that eventually freed the Lemmon slaves. In the words of the prize committee, Gronningsater shows how African American abolitionists like Napoleon “developed tactics to free slaves who were in transit through New York, pressed New York’s leaders to challenge the expansive property rights of southern slave owners, and creatively influenced the national debate about sectionalism. This article, in sum, is a model of legal, political, and social history told with enviable élan.”
2016 – Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy,” Volume 6, Number 3 (September)
Neely’s essay asks why the Confederacy did not turn to guerrilla warfare in the waning days of the Civil War and looks to Confederate national mythology for the answer. Challenging the conclusions of historians who argue that southerners ultimately rejected guerrilla warfare for fear that it would undermine slavery, he counters that Confederate citizens evinced little fear that partisan warfare would put the South’s institutions, including slavery, at risk. Delving into popular fiction by William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Edmund Ruffin, Jane Tandy Hardin Cross, and Sally Rochester Ford, among others, he finds a literary tradition that articulated a distinct southern nationalism through romantic portrayals of guerrilla war heroes. But romantic invocations of noble guerrillas withered in the face of grim military reality. The reason the Confederacy’s military leadership did not endorse guerrilla warfare in the waning days of the conflict simply was because they did not believe it was a viable strategy for ensuring the survival of the nascent nation. The prize committee complimented Neely for revisiting this old debate in a creative and novel way and praised the essay as a “model article” that is “theoretically sophisticated and beautifully written.”
2015 – Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood, “‘We Do Not Care Particularly About the Skating Rinks’: African Americans Challenges to Racial Discrimination in Places of Public Accommodation in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Massachusetts,” Volume 5, Number 2 (June)
Bergeson-Lockwood’s essay recounts how African Americans in Boston fought discrimination in public accommodations on a variety of fronts, including the press, the courts, and the legislature. The prize committee praised it as “a smart article that ties together legal, political, and social history.” The committee highlighted the article’s unique contribution to scholarship on civil rights by noting, “This work should be useful for anyone interested in the still under-studied question of how ‘race’ worked in the post-Civil War North, what kinds of antiracism were possible, and how and where racial restrictions developed.”
2014 – Ted Maris-Wolf, “‘Of Blood and Treasure’: Recaptive Africans the Politics of Slave Trade Suppression,” Volume 4, Number 1 (March)
Maris-Wolf’s essay tells the story of America’s determination to suppress the African Slave Trade during James Buchanan’s administration. Paradoxically, the administration’s posture against the slave trade initially won the approval of abolitionists and proslavery extremists alike. The essay deftly recounts how the resultant debates over what to do with recaptive slaves “liberated” by the U.S. Navy only deepened the growing sectional divide over slavery, however, moving the country closer to civil war.
2013 – Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” Volume 3, Number 4 (December)
Glymph’s essay tells the story of Rose, who was among the leaders of a slave insurrection in South Carolina during the Civil War. Challenging our focus on the legal genesis of wartime emancipation and its impact on enslaved men, the essay highlights the often violent means by which enslaved women sought to claim their freedom during the conflict. Acknowledging the difficulty of bringing Rose’s story to light, the prize committee announced, “We were impressed by the compelling narrative of war and emancipation that Dr. Glymph wove from scraps of an enslaved woman’s life. We also admired the way she connected localized slave insurgency with the larger military war effort during the waning days of the war, as well as her nuanced explanation of women’s role as both the creators and recorders of armed rebellion. For all of these reasons, we find this article to be an example of outstanding historical research and writing, the kind that can inspire established scholars and students alike.”
2012 – Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Volume 2, Number 3 (September)
Emberton’s article re-examines the meaning of African Americans’ military service in the Civil War, demonstrating that this service was a double-edged sword. While many argued that the self-sacrifice entailed in military service justified African Americans’ claims for full citizenship, opponents argued that their capacity for violence, even in defense of the state, made African Americans unfit to enjoy the full privileges of citizenship. Praising the author’s groundbreaking approach to this subject, Stephen Berry of the University of Georgia and Nancy Bercaw of the Smithsonian Institution noted, “No one examines how disturbing it is that we all so easily equate the sine qua non of citizenship with committing murder in the name of the state. No one except Carole Emberton. Her piece is powerful, beautiful, mind-expanding, almost philosophical, and it is a model not merely of Civil War scholarship but of what historians can do when they are working at the top of their game.”
2011 – Anne E. Marshall, “The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early Twentieth Century Kentucky,” Volume 1, Number 3 (September)
This article examines early twentieth century efforts by the Lexington, Kentucky chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to block stage productions of the popular play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Marshall demonstrates how the stage and the cinema became battlegrounds in the fight for the memory of slavery and emancipation. In announcing the award, the prize committee praised the essay for conveying a sense of the rich “dialogue over how slavery ought to be remembered” and demonstrating “how this was not just a local Kentucky issue, but also something that resonated nationally.” Marshall’s research demonstrates a creative way of exploring historical issues that expands the parameters of the Civil War Era in ways that correspond with the goals of the journal.
