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Removing the White Supremacy Marker at Colfax, Louisiana: A 2021 Success Story

Removing the White Supremacy Marker at Colfax, Louisiana: A 2021 Success Story

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On May 15, 2021, state officers, parish officials, and private citizens gathered in Colfax, Louisiana to watch local contractors remove an historical marker in front of Grant Parish Courthouse. Erected on June 14, 1951, the sign’s bold white letters announced that a civil disturbance claimed the lives of “three white men and 150 negroes.” The sign’s second, and final sentence, assured readers that the deaths ended “carpetbag misrule” and restored order to the South. The sign’s brevity belied the event’s importance. The lopsided slaughter of Black men and their families on Easter Sunday of April 13, 1873, emboldened a generation of white supremacists who viewed Black political power as a threat.[1]

The small marker’s removal represented years of effort from activists and students. In 1989, Black convict-journalists of The Angolite first challenged the “Riot” sign’s white supremacist roots. They first gave voice to the Black victims of what they titled the “Tragedy at Colfax.” Local activists continued the fight for the sign’s removal. As Louisiana State University graduate students Jeff Crawford and I participated in the latest, and what would be, final attempt to have the marker removed. 

Our involvement with the marker in late 2016 came after reading LeeAnna Keith’s The Colfax Massacre (2008). In that book she described two signs: the 1951 Riot sign and a marble obelisk in the town’s cemetery dedicated in 1921 to three men who died “fighting for white supremacy” in the 1873 massacre. We visited both. Each sign’s brazen omissions and admissions shocked us. On the drive back to Baton Rouge, we discussed how and why these signs remained standing and came to no good conclusions.[2]

The menace conveyed by both markers lingered in our heads after the visit. Though less outwardly offensive, the Riot marker seemed more egregious than the one dedicated to white supremacy. Its continued presence on public property perpetuated the myth that Black political power represented disorder. To us, the marker’s existence also condoned violence as a valid avenue for those dissatisfied with the democratic process.

Even with this realization, what could we do? A whites-only government had authorized the message. Would the State of Louisiana today be willing to send a new message by removing or revising the sign?

In early 2017, before the well-publicized monument removals in New Orleans and Charlottesville, Jeff and I lacked the experience required to answer these questions. Hindsight now offers some clarity. Willingness to remove depended entirely on individual officials and legal authority. New Orleans white Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration arranged for its prominent statues of Confederate elites to be removed. Whereas North Carolina’s legislature prohibited any such actions by state officials and pushed citizens to take more drastic steps.[3]

Pragmatists by nature, Jeff and I planned for resistance. Our road trips in central and northern Louisiana confirmed the region’s small “c” conservatism that was reluctant to change of any sort, especially regarding race and memory. Rather than simply asking for removal or maintaining “empty pedestals,” we planned to offer Colfax authorities two options: removal and preservation of the marker in a museum or permission to erect a new and more accurate marker beside the “Riot” marker.[4]

The point here was not capitulation. By early 2017, nearly seventy years after the “Riot” marker’s placement, the plaque was an historical artifact. It symbolized white southerners’ commitment to the Lost Cause ideology that imagined Black Americans as second-class citizens just a few years before the Supreme Court deemed segregation unconstitutional. As such, removal without museum placement or leaving an empty marker post never crossed our minds.

Our choices were also deliberately tactical. We guessed that if local authorities publicly rejected a well-researched compromise position, then their biases would become public record. If successful, we hoped that a second historical marker set in opposition would encourage onlookers to seek out the truth about the tragedy and draw their own conclusions.

To that end, we started with who owned the sign and the state’s procedure for historical markers. No longer in existence, legal counsel from the Department of Commerce and Industry’s present incarnation, the Louisiana Economic Development (LED) initiative, informed me that the sign’s fate was now in the hands of the Department of Culture and Tourism. Over email, the department’s research director assured us that anyone could request a state historical marker so long as they secured the property owner’s permission, covered the costs, completed a form, and had their language approved by LSU’s Department of History. We hoped to install a replacement plaque that would accurately explain the Colfax Massacre and its long-term significance.

The Grant Parish Police Jury (GPPJ) proved to be the toughest barrier to any change of the Riot marker. The police jury exercises authority over the land where the marker sat. At the time, those of us close to the project assumed land ownership gave the GPPJ power over the sign itself.

After speaking with the GPPJ’s public liaison, I learned that before any action could be taken, the issue would have to be brought before the Jury at their monthly public meeting. In preparation for the meeting, I sent Jury members provisional language for a new sign, a short list of sources regarding the massacre, and the contact information of LSU professors who offered to answer any of their questions.

In early May I was slated to speak with Jury members. My hope was that by having the solutions at hand, the Jury would have no decision except to act. I was completely wrong.

While we hoped to initiate a discussion of a difficult topic, the meeting’s tone changed once they understood that our provisional language condemned the incident as a massacre for the sake of white supremacy. One member asked if Jeff and I had any affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement. Another member worried that making any kind of change would attract negative attention to the city and cause violent protests. Others in the body claimed that no public interest existed to change the marker. I offered the truth: we appeared before them as concerned private citizens and students of history who believed that the public deserved an accurate sign.

Luckily, by this point, my presentation piqued the audience’s interest. People at the meeting on other municipal business asked me for more elaboration as I stood in front of the Jury. Still the Jury members claimed that the broader community had no interest in the marker. The predominantly white jury (it had one Black member at the time) reached no definitive conclusions that evening. The board thanked me for my time and promised to contact their legal counsel about the options I presented.

In the months following the meeting Jeff and I learned that we had little reason to be hopeful. Communication with the Jury became intermittent, many of my texts, phone calls, and emails went unanswered. When we finally made contact, the member I spoke to said that there were not enough votes to make any changes to the marker and that no substantive public opinion existed on the issue. As such, rather than voting, the Jury decided to table the issue.

Believing that only a groundswell of local pressure could both bring the matter to a successful vote, Jeff and I scheduled a meeting with Colfax’s Mayor Ossie Clark. At that meeting, Mayor Clark convened some of the local activists responsible for both honoring the memory of the massacre’s Black participants and restoring the event to public memory. The meeting removed any doubt that we had regarding public support. As the activists disclosed their experiences, the Jury’s omission of residents’ previous efforts to remove, or contextualize the sign, confirmed the local officials’ quiet conspiracy to thwart any attempts to correct the sign’s inaccuracies.

Beneath the wealth of information shared between all parties, and commitments to continue to fight, rested inertia, the Jury’s most formidable weapon. For everyone at the meeting, the Riot marker agenda was something to be done in the extra hours of an already busy life. Mr. Clark and his guests were visibly exhausted by their long efforts to remove the sign in addition to their roles as public officials, educators, ministers, and community leaders.

Thanks to the agency of a white resident of Houston who traced his roots to one of the original “veterans,” the impasse broke in early 2021. Dean Woods had grown up in the vicinity, but he had come to deplore the harsh language of the historical marker. His citizen’s inquiry to the Office of Louisiana Economic Development, facilitated by the LSU History Department, inspired a legal workaround to the resistance of the Grant Parish Police Jury.

Through her own research, LED Assistant Secretary Mandi Mitchell determined that in fact, by way of legacy as the successor to the original Department of Commerce and Industry, LED owned the sign and possessed the authority to remove it. In hindsight, our effort created a template of action for Ms. Mitchell. Our interactions with Grant Parish officials laid bare how the Jury would react and ascertained which members were interested in action. Maybe most importantly, our failed effort made the need for legal leverage clear.

In the end, it was this legal technicality that enabled the removal of the Riot marker and ended this (asymmetrical) war of attrition between past and present. The Jury remained unphased by the historical evidence or the offers of inter-agency cooperation Ms. Mitchell offered at her presentation. With no other options left, aside from a costly legal battle, the Jury acquiesced to the marker’s removal.

The battle for Colfax’s memory remains half won. Only the Jury’s single Black member appeared at the removal to show his support. The effort to properly memorialize the lives lost on Easter Sunday April 1873 is not over. Though the Riot marker will be housed in a state museum, no memorial stands that recognizes those murdered or explains why such a tragedy took place. There is still cause for optimism. At minimum, the marker’s quiet removal at the behest of a public official suggests that other monuments and markers can be removed without the fanfare that first accompanied the flurry of removals in the wake of  the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and George Floyd’s murder. The removal also hints that a larger public will exists to reclaim a civic landscape marred by previous generations’ commitment to white supremacy.

 

[1] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877—1st Perennial Classic ed (New York: Harperperennial, 2014), 313; James K. Hogue, “The 1873 Battle of Colfax: Paramilitarism and Counterrevolution in Louisiana,” paper presented at the 1997 Southern Historical Association Conference, Atlanta, GA; LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiv-xv; Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and The Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008), 253-54.

[2] LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre, vii.

[3] “See all 4 Confederate monument removals in New Orleans in photos and video,” nola.com, 07/22/2019, accessed: 06/23/2021, https://www.nola.com/news/politics/article_3a11f27b-bce2-5a2c-98ac-53ab0d67d259.html; Karen L. Cox, “Why Confederate Monuments Must Fall,” newyorktimes.com, 08/15/2017, accessed 06/23/2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/opinion/confederate-monuments-white-supremacy-charlottesville.html.

[4] “Empty Pedestals: What should be done with civic monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders?” historynet.com, October 2017, accessed: 06/23/2021, https://www.historynet.com/empty-pedestals-civic-monuments-confederacy-leaders.htm.

Tom Barber Jeff Crawford

Tom Barber earned his PhD from LSU in 2019 and currently works as a Child Protective Investigator for Florida’s Department of Children and Families. Jeff Crawford is completing his doctorate at LSU.

Isaac Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour” and the Many Visions of Frederick Douglass

Isaac Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour” and the Many Visions of Frederick Douglass

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Hired out to the brutal Edward Covey, a young Frederick Douglass worked to exhaustion during the week and spent Sundays “in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree,” alternating between flashes of “energetic freedom” and “mourning,” he wrote in his Narrative. Beyond the woods, on the broad Chesapeake Bay, sailed “beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen . . . to me so many shrouded ghosts.” With time, “My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.”[1]

Frederick Douglass did not know his birthday but believed it to be February 1818, a year and a few months before Walt Whitman’s May 1819 arrival along northern waters in Suffolk County, New York. Whitman elegized a nineteenth-century expansive creativity in “Song of Myself, 51.” “The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them./And proceed to fill my next fold of the future….Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”[2]

It is easy to divide the harborside writers into neat categories: the white poet, the Black activist. But even more than Whitman, Douglass contained multitudes, however much we might seek to fix him as a prophet, a politician, a guide. More consistently than Whitman, Douglass sought to unsettle our sense of what we know and how we know it.

So, too, the celebrated installation artist Isaac Julien aims to unsettle our senses in his mesmerizing multi-screen film exhibition “Lessons of the Hour,” commissioned by the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery. Past and present wilt in images of Douglass in repose, in action, and in mourning.

Already, a few weeks after my most-recent viewing, Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour” seems a vivid but vague dream, unnervingly powerful and unnervingly difficult to describe. It resists the reviewer’s ultimate escape—the invitation to just go see for yourself—since it is only available selectively. Like a dream it feels private, something that should not be spoken of, yet like something that must be spoken of, with urgency.

 

Multi-screen images of actor portraying Frederick Douglass in a dark exhibition space.
Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2019 (installation view, detail), ten-screen installation, 35mm film and 4k digital, color, 7.1 surround sound. 28’46”. Courtesy of the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.

Writing about a filmmaker as gorgeous as Julien, and a writer as intricate as Douglass, is like eulogizing your favorite orator. You must describe the very standard you will not be able to meet. Still it is worth a try.

For the recent installation at McEvoy Foundation of the Arts in the Dogpatch/Portrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, a mile down the San Francisco Bay from the Chase Center, Julien and his collaborator Mark Nash selected an entrance gallery of photographs from the Civil Rights Movement, both the iconic and the more timely and soon to be iconic. The back wall sets the tone of the exhibition: Lorraine O’Grady’s performance work Art Is…, images from Harlem’s 1983 African-American Day parade in which 15 young actors and dancers “dressed in white framed viewers with empty gold picture frames to shouts of ‘Frame me, make me art!’ And ‘That’s right, that’s what art is. We’re the art!’”[3] That frame, that joy, and that confusion evoke the artfulness of daily life and the artifice of designating its limits.

In the room beyond O’Grady’s images, Julien’s lustrous still images line a long gallery. Attendees see Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray Douglass on a train. Photographer J. P. Ball poses subjects in his studio. Ottilie Assing reads a book. From this gallery’s shadowy far end, noise rumbles from a dark entrance that is marked with red tape arrows and a sign explaining the necessary protocols. Inside the dark installation, five or six backless, elliptical ottomans face ten screens hanging from the ceiling, four quite large, six of smaller size.

If your timing is right, and you sit just as  as the film begins, the dark room lightens and then lightens some more. Douglass, inhabited by Shakespearean actor Ray Fearon, walks a path through the woods. It is fall. He is wearing an extraordinary full-length coat, a luxurious red. The screens divide. On some, the path, on others the woods, on others the back of Douglass’ head, on others his face, on others images elliptically connected to the words he begins to say. You see Douglass.  You see what he sees as well as the thoughts in his mind.

There is no introduction. Douglass, examining a large, oddly shaped tree stump, begins to talk about a mistake he made, a mistake of perception. Once, walking the woods, he thought a tree was a wild beast, until he approached closer and realized his error. It is all a question of vantage. For a moment, we ourselves join Douglass in that confused vantage, and see the woods through the ten different screens.

Then, the sound of a whip. A tree becomes a lynching tree; feet dangle and fade.

The screens fade and lighten. A woman, Anna Murray Douglass, played by Sharlene Whyte, solitary as Penelope, sews brilliantly blue fabric. On other screens, art on the walls, paintings, and a print of Fort Wagner are displayed. Douglass’s taste is visible; he himself is not.

And then he is, but not inside the home. Douglass’ voice tells us that he has traveled thousands of miles. The rhythm of the passenger train meets the rhythm of the sewing machine. Anna Murray Douglass in a house back in the United States, Frederick Douglass on a train bound northward through Scotland en-route to a lecture hall that Douglass enters to applause.

Already at least four Douglasses. The incarnation of white America’s cruelty. The lauded public speaker. The absent husband. And also, the visual theorist, familiar to scholars through the work of Celeste-Marie Bernier (whose work Julien draws richly upon), Deborah Willis, Aston Gonzalez, and many others.[4]

What, precisely, do people who are not scholars make of this Douglass, not oracle but essayist? I visited the exhibit twice during COVID, when people were sparse, masked, and distanced. During the six times I sat through the 30-minute film, I never was able to ask anyone that question.

Douglass begins his lecture, drawn from his 1861 address “Pictures and Progress,” with a mordantly funny observation about the boredom of staring at other people’s photographs. As Douglass speaks about the political and aesthetic problems of representation, we see multiple images: on some screens a crowd listens, on others Black photographer J. P. Ball arranges Anna Murray Douglass.

Douglass begins to speak of the agonies of slavery, words drawn from his familiar memoirs, and the images fade to gray. A whip sounds, crackling and evil. Cotton on one screen, on four, on ten, and Black hands picking it. And now, at last, we have arrived at the Douglass that most people, presumably, came to see: the witness to and critic of slavery. The rural silence of crickets hums unseen behind the fields. Scotland’s lecture halls feel far away.

Douglass then relates the famous line from his 1845 Narrative of the Life about never seeing his mother except for a few hurried visits at night. Just as we settle into the familiarity of the lines, we see and hear other people. Anna Richardson and Ellen Richardson, British Quakers who helped raise funds to purchase Douglass’ legal freedom, walk the beaches, writing Send Back the Money in the sand, singing the Scottish Free Church’s antislavery song of the same name. On other screens, Douglass walks the fields and cliffs and beaches of Scotland, alone. Images pass: paintings and sketches on walls; people in trains, a lit match that quiets the noise; and then the familiar Douglass line that learning to read had been a curse.

As Douglass begins to narrate his childhood in Fells Point, Baltimore, we enter several Baltimores, past and present. Some screens show FBI surveillance file footage of protests against the 2015 police murder of Freddie Gray. On other screens, other Baltimores appear: 19th century ships in the harbor, a helicopter ride over the touristic Inner Harbor of today. Douglass speaks of the terrible reality of the slave trade.

At last, the 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” and a montage of the horrors of patriotism. On some screens, fireworks revert into their cores, on others terrifying white people march in slow-motion 1950s parades. During my final visit, the prosecution was midway through the presentation of the evidence of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Of course this was a coincidence, and of course it was no coincidence at all.

The exhibition was completed long before George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, yet his killing and the trial of his murderer run through the films nonetheless. The footage of future murders of Black men by police run through the films as well. Such is the power of Douglass’ prophecy, and of Julien’s artistry.

And then the prophet concludes with still-timely words about the shocking crimes of America “in this very hour,” meaning Douglass’s hour and our own, to building applause from a Scottish audience that is now much more diverse and more modernly dressed than in the opening frames. Water swells through the screens, as Douglass’s tone settles into one more reproach against patriotism (and the presumptions of American democracy): Douglass left republican America a slave and returned from monarchical England a free man.

Instead of this hero, Julien closes instead with a stranger, beautiful vantage: Darkness broken first by a beast: a magnificent horse that Douglass is walking through the Scottish countryside. The horse’s uncanny eye dominates one screen, Douglass alongside the horse in others. In another he climbs an ancient volcano. The horse is beautiful. The volcano is beautiful. Douglass is beautiful. Anna Murray Douglass’ sewing returns in a magnificent blue coat Douglass wears as he walks the horse. But what does all this beauty have to do with the horrors we have seen?

Instead of an answer, silence. The room settles into dark. A few moments later, the woods of Maryland. We have begun again, at the monstrous tree, prepared for our return passage through cruelty and back to the engulfing waters.

Long as my description has been, it is still entirely inadequate. With the exception of J. P. Ball, a partial vision of one of Douglass’ sons, and anonymous men in the Scottish audience, the exhibit is a meditation on the women in (and also kept out of) Douglass’ life: Anna Murray Douglass, Helen Pitts Douglass, Ottilie Assing, the Richardsons.[5]

When Douglass published My Bondage and My Freedom, his follow-up to the Narrative, his subtitle pointedly distinguished his life “as a slave” from his life “as a freeman.” So, too, did he document the struggles to turn freedom into equality. The free Douglass never stopped looking backward to slavery but also never stopped being the aesthete, in awe of beauty of the present. So, too, in “Lessons of the Hour,” the body of the films belong to Douglass the prophet and Douglass the slave, but the opening and closing place us with the free Douglass moving silently through a nature he remains in awe of.

 

1870 portrait of Frederick Douglass
Photo by George Francis Schreiber, April 26, 1870. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

The films are immersive and humbling. They are many films, running in different combinations depending on your seat. From the back-center, an overwhelming montage. Up close, the images flicker out of the corner of the eye, like warnings.

What a peculiar dream it is. By the lights of sequential, cautious history, the films are a jumble, or more kindly an evocation. Douglass’ speech combines his 1845 memoirs, his 1852 July 4th speech, his 1861 address, and others. Anachronisms intrude, like the Fort Wagner image on the wall during a scene that seems to take place at least a decade before the 54th Massachusetts fought on those sands. For a history of Douglass that analyzes Douglass’s complexity in sequence and context, David Blight’s massive biography is surely the best place to turn, along with older biographies by Nathan Huggins and William S. McFeely.[6]

Julien unravels a different truth. He creates a reservoir of associations, in which Douglass is at once the runaway slave, the celebrated orator, the aging art critic, and the dignified family man; where the women in his life are always his lovers and also always his abandoned ones; where Douglass is always 13 and 23 and 35 and 67.

At my final visit, in that closing darkness, a gallerist woke us from the swim of our thoughts to remind us of the time, of the need to admit others into a space that had felt, in the watery silence, like our own secret. Outside, we blinked at San Francisco’s piercing light, checked phones for Floyd trial updates.

Two weeks earlier, tugs and machinery nudged the container ship Ever Given free from the banks of the Suez Canal, where Ever Given had clogged the world’s shipping lanes and inspired countless memes. Now, in front of us, as we read about the prosecution’s witnesses, rows of container ships filled the San Francisco Bay, backlogged in the crush of traffic, waiting for their chance to unload. One of them, anchored directly off Dogpatch, seemed to be that very ship Ever Given, painted green. For a moment, it staggered me, the world brought home so rapidly, to such a beautiful spot. But the ship in front of me turned out to be not Ever Given but its smaller, but otherwise nearly identical sister ship Ever Front. My eyes had deceived me.

 

[1] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 63-64, available at https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html.

[2] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 51,” available at https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51.

[3] “Art Is…performance 1983,” available at http://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/.

[4] Celeste-Marie Bernier, African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Bernier and Andrew Taylor, If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Bernier and Bill E. Lawson, eds., Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass, 1818-2018 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Willis, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual Hisotry of Conflict and Citizenship (New York: NYU Press, 2021); Willis, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: New Press, 1994); Aston Gonzalez, Visualing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015).

[5] For more on this subject, see Leigh Fought, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[6] David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980); William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Poliitics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1948); John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008).

 

 

 

 

Greg Downs

Greg Downs is a Professor of History at UC Davis and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era. He is the author of Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (UNC Press, 2011) and After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard, 2015) and (with Kate Masur) co-editor of The World the Civil War Made and co-author of the National Park Service National Historic Landmark Theme Study on Reconstruction.

From Gray to Blue: An Odyssey of Deserting the Confederate Army and Joining the U.S. Army

From Gray to Blue: An Odyssey of Deserting the Confederate Army and Joining the U.S. Army

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Though radical at first, the U.S. Army’s recruitment of Confederate prisoners of war and deserters was not unreasonable by the winter of 1863-1864. “Thousands of Union soldiers were nearing the end of their three-year voluntary enlistment and draft calls were causing riots in Northern cities.”[1]  Combined with prolonged indecision from Lincoln’s War Department, several Federal prison commanders became emboldened to tacitly enlist witting ex-Confederates into Federal regiments. Indeed, each of these southerners had their motivation(s) to serve their former enemy: desperation from imprisonment, disillusionment with the Confederacy’s cause, or a determination to survive by any means. Among these pioneering “Galvanized Yankees” were brothers Samuel Kael Groah and Andrew Jackson Groah.

Image of two men
L-R: Samuel Groah and Andrew Groah (Ancestry.com)

On April 18, 1861, one day after Virginia voted to secede from the United States, the two Shenandoah Valley natives answered the call to arms. Along with approximately 2,600 fellow militiamen, the brothers quickly assembled at the Harpers Ferry Armory to arm and prepare for the anticipated civil war. On May 19, 1861, the Groah brothers mustered into the Fifth Virginia Infantry Regiment of the First Brigade Virginia Volunteers, commanded by Brigadier General Thomas Jackson. On July 2, 1861, the Groah brothers received their baptism by fire at the Battle of Hoke’s Run. During the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas, the First Brigade and its commander earned their reputable sobriquet “Stonewall.”[2]

Over early 1862, fortunes changed as these rebels weathered the ill-fated Romney Expedition, retreated in defeat at the First Battle of Kernstown, and camped at Rude’s Hill nearby New Market, Virginia. As troops neared the end of their one-year service term, the Confederate Congress authorized bounties and furloughs to encourage reenlistments. For reasons unknown, Samuel and Andrew “deserted from the company at Camp Rude’s Hill, April 6, 1862. Refused to reenlist.”[3] Incidentally, just ten days later, the Confederacy mandated three years of service for new recruits and an additional two for those serving since 1861.[4]

Despite its grandeur, the Stonewall Brigade suffered a staggering desertion rate. The Fifth Virginia alone reported 315 desertions throughout 1862-1863.[5]  Unlike other Confederate troops serving far from their homes, Virginians could escape to their homesteads, but not without risks. “Patrols were actively searching every possible hiding place of those recreant.”[6] In August 1863, the Confederacy offered a pardon to known deserters and those accused of absence without leave, hoping clemency could entice their return within twenty-days.[7] The matter also proved challenging for Federal commanders. One Major General reported Confederate deserters concealed in wooded hills “who preferred to live as outlaws rather than risk the chance of being returned to the rebel army.”[8]

On September 7, 1863, seventeen months since their desertion, Samuel and Andrew were arrested near Beverly, West Virginia by order of Union Brigadier General William Averell.[9] Presumably, the brothers fled the Shenandoah Valley, traversed the Allegheny Mountains, and took refuge in Unionist territory until Averell’s search-and-destroy raids prompted their discovery. Samuel and Andrew were next transported by rail to Wheeling, West Virginia and jailed in the Athenaeum, a warehouse/theater-turned transitory prison depot for captured Confederates, suspected spies, civilians who refused the oath of allegiance, dissenting local journalists, and court-martialed Union soldiers. Lacking ventilation, confined to small cells or shared spaces, and often with a ball and chain affixed to their legs, some inmates unsurprisingly dubbed the Athenaeum “Lincoln’s Bastille.”[10] Samuel and Andrew’s imprisonment was brief. On September 19, 1863, they were released by order of Union Brigadier General Benjamin Kelly, commander of the Department of West Virginia.[11] In October 1863, their cases underwent disposition in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Portrait of general, building, portrait of general
L-R: William Averell (Library of Congress); period etching of the Athenaeum (West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture, and History); and Benjamin Kelley (National Archives and Records Administration)

Rather than be sent to a prisoner of war camp, the Groahs opted to serve the United States. Such desires were not uncommon among Confederates detained in the North. As one Federal prison commander noted, “many of them have been conscripted in the rebel service and are now anxious to be avenged for the wrongs done them…Others were induced to enter the rebel service through misrepresentations of wicked and designing men.”[12] Ex-Confederates willing to aid the Federal war effort, the Commissary-General of Prisoners instructed, “may be permitted to do so when the examining officer is satisfied of the applicant’s good faith and that the facts of his case are as he represents them.”[13] Perhaps, the Groahs shared their paternal lineage to Pennsylvania as well as recounted the allure of secession in 1861, best summarized by one Union officer: “they eagerly embraced a cause promising to disrupt the established commercial and social status of the country, having in any change hope of possible advantage and fear of nothing worse than their present position.”[14] Such plausible factors were sufficient to enroll the brothers into the U.S. Army.

Andrew enlisted November 30, 1863 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania and mustered into the Third Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery Regiment.[15] Andrew’s service with the Third Pennsylvania, then a coastal defense battery, was limited to Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. On March 17, 1865, he was reassigned to the Fourth U.S. Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of six units comprised of rebel prisoners-turned Federal soldiers.[16]  Uneasy of sending them to the frontlines, the U.S. Army’s high command dispatched these “Galvanized Yankees” to the Great Plains. Among other tasks, these soldiers manned frontier outposts, guarded supply wagons, and, on occasion, quelled Native American uprisings. The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, in particular, epitomized this struggle for expansion on the American frontier.[17]  In June 1865, Andrew arrived at Fort Sully, located on the east bank of the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota, for the monotonous assignment of garrison duty at a truly desolate location. “There was no grass or wood within two miles.”[18] Andrew remained at Fort Sully until his regiment moved to Sioux City, Iowa in September 1865. There, on November 27, 1865, Andrew was discharged.[19]

Military camp with Native Americans sitting on ground
Native Americans gathered with U.S. soldiers at Fort Sully, 1865 (American Antiquarian Society)

Samuel enlisted January 7, 1864 in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania and mustered into the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment.[20]  Unlike his younger brother, Samuel fought against his former Confederate brethren. Between May-August 1864, the 148th Pennsylvania saw action at the Wilderness, Po River, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Totopotomoy, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Deep Bottom, Strawberry Plains, and Ream’s Station.[21] In September 1864, Samuel was detailed to his division’s headquarters where he served until the Confederacy’s surrender. Briefly assigned to the Fifty-Third Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment after the war, Samuel was discharged on June 30, 1865 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.[22]

Battle Scene with smoke and fighting
Thure de Thulstrup’s painting of the Battle of Spotsylvania (Library of Congress)

Perhaps, the most notable of Samuel’s service transpired during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. On May 10, 1864, he was wounded in action near the Po River.[23] There, a forested section near the Federal line became engulfed in a blazing inferno, presumably sparked from Confederate artillery. Samuel and his fellow soldiers, were, quite literally, forged in fire. Despite his injury, Samuel remained in the ranks. Two days later, the 148th Pennsylvania stormed the “Mule Shoe” salient, whose entrenched rebel defenders included the Fifth Virginia – Samuel’s prior Confederate unit. “Within thirty minutes, the Stonewall Division virtually ceased to exist as a command.”[24] How poetic that among the Federal soldiers who contributed to the demise of one of the Confederacy’s most revered units was a former Confederate from its very ranks. Truly, an emblematic scene of the Civil War.

Perhaps, the most enduring element of the Groah’s journey is rooted in their unshakeable brotherhood bond. Though Virginia was their home, and, by extension, the Confederacy their cause, these brothers also recognized the importance of family and survival. Indeed, some may shame them as Southern Unionists, turncoat opportunists, or scalawags. Yet, as the United States approaches the 160th anniversary since the commencement of the American Civil War, Samuel and Andrew also embody the torn loyalties and complexities of the nation’s most cataclysmic conflict.

 

[1] Dee Brown, The Galvanized Yankees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 3.

[2] “Confederate Soldiers from the State of Virginia – Groah, Samuel K – Fifth Infantry,” Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Virginia, Record Group 109, Microfilm 324, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., https://catalog.archives.gov/id/96414285, Accessed April 14, 2021; “Confederate Soldiers from the State of Virginia – Groah, Andrew J – Fifth Infantry,” Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Virginia, Record Group 109, Microfilm 324, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., https://catalog.archives.gov/id/96414274, Accessed April 11, 2021.

[3] Ibid.

[4] James Martin, “Civil War Conscription Laws.” In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress, Washington, D.C., November 15, 2012, https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2012/11/civil-war-conscription-laws/.

[5] Lee A. Wallace, Jr., 5th Virginia Infantry, 1st Edition, (Lynchburg: H.E. Howard, Inc., 1988), 77.

[6] Sanford Cobb Kellogg, The Shenandoah Valley and Virginia, 1861 to 1865: A War Study, (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1903), 125.

[7] U.S. Department of War, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume 30, Part 4, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1890), 489.

[8] U.S. Department of War, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 2, Volume 6, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 207. Author’s Note: “Returned” is a reference to prisoner of war exchanges between the Union and Confederate armies throughout the early portion of the Civil War.

[9] “Confederate Soldiers from the State of Virginia,” National Archives.

[10] Edward L. Phillips, “Wheeling’s Athenaeum 1854-1868,” West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly 17, no. 2 (April 2003), http://www.wvculture.org/history/wvhs/wvhs1722.html.

[11] “Confederate Soldiers from the State of Virginia,” National Archives.

[12] The War of the Rebellion, Series 2, Volume 6, 820.

[13] Ibid., 186.

[14] Ibid., 197.

[15] “4th US Volunteers, Go-J,” Compiled Service Records of Former Confederate Soldiers who Served in the 1st Through 6th U.S. Volunteer Infantry Regiments, 1864-1866, Record Group 94, Microfilm 1017, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., accessed through Fold3, https://www.fold3.com/image/119078638, Accessed April 11, 2021. Author’s Note: The Groah surname is interchangeably written as “Grovah” on Andrew’s Union Army paperwork.

[16] “4th US Volunteers,” National Archives.

[17] Stephen Kantrowitz, “Jurisdiction, Civilization, and the Ends of Native American Citizenship: The View from 1866,” Western Historical Quarterly 52 (Summer 2021): 194.

[18] “Old Fort Sully.” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/pierre_fortpierre/old_fort_sully_pierre.html. Accessed April 21, 2021.

[19] “4th US Volunteers,” National Archives.

[20] “Compiled Military Service Record of Private Samuel K. Groh, Company I, 148th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.” Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, Record Group 94, Microfilm 398, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., https://catalog.archives.gov/id/66390638. Accessed April 11, 2021. Author’s Note: The Groah surname is interchangeably written as “Groh” on Samuel’s Union Army paperwork.

[21] Kate M. Scott, ed. History of Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, (Syracuse: D. Mason & Co., Publishers, 1888), 180.

[22] “Compiled Military Service Record of Private Samuel K. Groh,” National Archives.

[23] Joseph Wendel Muffly, et al., The Story of Our Regiment: A History of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers, (Des Moines: Kenyon Printing & Mfg Co., 1904), 1054.

[24] Jeffrey D. Wert, A Brotherhood of Valor: The Common Soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade, C.S.A. and the Iron Brigade, U.S.A., (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 300.

Kyle Nappi

Kyle Nappi is a descendant of the brothers Samuel Kael Groah and Andrew Jackson Groah and the great-great-great-grandnephew of William Welsh. An alumnus of The Ohio State University, Kyle serves as a national security policy specialist in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. He is also an independent researcher and writer of military history (chiefly the World Wars), having interviewed ~4,500 elder military combatants across nearly two-dozen countries. Kyle would like to acknowledge the archival assistance of Grand Valley State University's Leigh Rupinski and Tracy Cook.

JCWE Editors’ Note, June 2021 issue

JCWE Editors’ Note, June 2021 issue

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This issue, like many since the journal’s inception, reflects the chronological and thematic breadth of the field of the Civil War Era. It includes three original research articles, the Tom Watson Brown Award essay, a review essay, and the usual complement of incisive book reviews.

The Tom Watson Book Award honors the finest book on the “causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War” and is presented by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the Society of Civil War Historians. In 2020, the award went to Thomas J. Brown for his excellent study Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (2019). At a virtual gathering, to replace the in-person banquet at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, Brown delivered an intriguing analysis, titled “Iconoclasm and the Monumental Presence of the Civil War.” Brown’s essay places the debates about memorialization (up to November 2020) within a longer trajectory of critique and iconoclasm. Brown adroitly analyzes works by artists and writers An-My Lê, Kehinde Wiley, Natasha Trethewey, and Krzysztof Wodiczko and concludes with a stirring examination of the community takeover of the Robert E. Lee Monument on Memorial Avenue in Richmond. The essay is a terrific example of how historians can help contextualize and clarify the terms of contemporary public debate.

The issue’s three research articles are just as stimulating and wide ranging. In “‘Sustaining the Truth of the Bible’: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy,” Joel Iliff examines James W. C. Pennington’s effort to combine orthodox Bible scholarship and abolitionism, against abolitionists who advanced more heterodox biblical interpretation and against slaveowners and European theologians who insisted that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Grounding Pennington in a transatlantic world of biblical scholarship and debate, Iliff offers a fascinating intellectual and religious history and also significantly expands the conversation about the relationship between religion and black abolitionism.

Lesley J. Gordon likewise combines biography, intellectual discourse, and political practice in her “‘Novices in Warfare’: Elmer E. Ellsworth and Militia Reform on the Eve of Civil War.” Gordon shows that Elmer Ellsworth was more than just the dynamic leader of the Zouave movement and a prominent early casualty of the war. He was, in addition, an ambitious and serious participant in 1850s debates about militia reform and the future of the “citizen soldier.” The demands of war itself ultimately outmatched Ellsworth’s vision, but his ideas offer an intriguing window into longstanding debates on how best to make soldiers of citizens.

Marcy S. Sacks examines the roles of pets and other domesticated animals in “‘They Are Truly Marvelous Cats’: The Importance of Companion Animals to Union Soldiers during the Civil War.” Focusing on soldiers’ drawings and letters, Sacks explores how northern soldiers observed, nurtured, and described domesticated animals, and she analyzes the meanings of those relationships. Cats, dogs, mice, pigs, and other animals, she argues, helped soften the experience of wartime and, just as crucially, enabled soldiers to communicate through discourses of sympathy and sentimentalism, thus projecting their own humanity. Through their representations of animals, particularly in letters to women and children, soldiers showed that they remained capable of experiencing emotions and thus of returning safely home at war’s end.

In an expansive review essay, noted transnational scholar Enrico Dal Lago examines the role of the Civil War Era in the discipline’s global turn. In “Writing the US Civil War Era into Nineteenth-Century World History,” Dal Lago analyzes works of scholarship that have attempted to embed Civil War Era history into world history and the relationship between a once-domestic-facing field and an increasingly globally focused discipline.

As always, this volume includes excellent, informative reviews of books that address the Civil War Era. Book Review Editor Kathryn Shively works assiduously to broaden the coverage and participants in these reviews. In the process, she and we depend on the professionalism of our writers, on view in this issue. We also depend on publishers to provide the books that we review, an increasing challenge during the pandemic. Shively and our book review authors continue to offer heroic and largely selfless service in sustaining this crucial aspect of our professional life.

“A Grand Thing”: The Rebirth of Milwaukee’s Soldiers’ Home

“A Grand Thing”: The Rebirth of Milwaukee’s Soldiers’ Home

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When the U. S. government lived up to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural promise to “care for him who shall have borne the battle,” it chose Milwaukee as one of the sites for the three original branches of the National Asylum (later Home) for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS). The first men moved into a few farm buildings on a hill west of the city in 1867; in 1869, an impressive, several-stories high structure was completed. Over the next two decades, massive wings were added to the main building and a couple of dozen other structures—including a theater, a chapel, and a library—were built.  By 1900, 2,000 Civil War veterans lived there. They were mostly white—although a few African American veterans were admitted—and mostly single. Many were immigrants.  And they came from all over the United States.

At about that time, Orlando Burnett, a writer for a western Wisconsin newspaper, visited Milwaukee to report on the Home. His article began with a section called “Memories Round a Bedside.” A proud staff member told him of the convenience of having a card containing the patient’s medical and personal information attached to the foot of his bed in the hospital ward.  “When he dies,” he noted, “we have here all his record.” Burnett noticed that “[t]he man in the bed stirred uneasily.”  The oblivious guide went on to talk about the man as though he wasn’t lying a few feet away. But Burnett could not shake the image of the old soldier. “The man on the bed must have been somebody once. . . . Women had once admired his fine-lined face and kissed it.”  Now, however, it had assumed “the pallor that the angel Death paints us with when nature reports that the machinery is worn out.” Years ago the man had been “young and full of fire. He had marched from home with cheers in his ears, and he had seen the foe.  He had thought great thoughts on picket duty under the stars, and he had done a man’s work in the world.” But now he was so weary that he could not close his mouth, and he cared little about what people thought when they looked at him. “He was rather a tired child—this big, old man, who once marched with Gibbon and Bragg [Generals John Gibbon and Edward Bragg, commanders of the famed Iron Brigade]. And as he lay on his pillow, the white bed clothes wrapped about the thin, gaunt frame, he brought no explanations or beseechings. He seemed to want nothing of God but a chance to sleep for ten million years.” Before going on to describe the home’s 1400-seat theater, the well-stocked library, the spotless kitchen, the anti-drinking Keeley club, and the ways in which the men who could work were occupied and the men who could not were disciplined, Burnett admitted, “It knocks a man’s theological systems into little pieces to see an old man who fought for a nation on his death bed.”[1]

The iconic main building of the Northwestern Branch of the NHDVS in Milwaukee, from a nineteenth-century postcard.

The melancholy tone continued as he broadened his gaze. A fifth of the men in the home were kept in the hospital, where they were treated for old wounds and new maladies, from cancer to injuries caused by accidents to cuts and bruises suffered in fights. Although many received pensions, most were quite poor, and could probably not support themselves outside the home. “Many of them are thus saved from the poor house.”   The men were largely “out of touch with home and women, who gladden life and smooth the pathway to the grave. Death and separation have done their work and the old fellows, stoical, serene, free from cares, await their end.” The administrators who showed Burnett around the Home were no doubt hoping for a cheery account of the good work being done on behalf of the old soldiers—and the article did provide a positive report.  But the tone of the piece was bittersweet, at best, and deeply ambiguous.[2]

Although exaggerated—Burnett was clearly working through some of his own anxieties about aging and mortality—the condition and status of the men living in the home, particularly the poor, speechless, slack-jawed veteran of the Iron Brigade, represented in many ways the odd position of Civil War veterans in late nineteenth century Wisconsin and the United States, where they were both honored and neglected.

A century later, and sixty years after the last Civil War veteran had died, the buildings in which those veterans lived had fallen into a similar kind of dignified neglect.  Like all NHDVS facilities, the Veterans Administration had taken over the Northwestern Branch in the 1930s. A few decades later, a new VA hospital was built down the hill from the old Home. The Veterans Administration repurposed some of the old buildings for offices, employee housing, storage, and other mundane purposes—the old library and bowling alley were still in use, for instance, and the regional veterans’ benefits office and the massive Wood National Cemetery were also administered from offices located in the historic complex.  But most of the roughly two dozen buildings that had survived from the first two or three decades of the Home’s existence fell into a state of elegant, even romantic disrepair. Treasured by those who admired their architecture and historical importance, the structures were twice been honored by preservationists: the state of Wisconsin created the National Soldiers’ Home Historic District in 1994 and the federal government created the Milwaukee Soldiers Home National Historic Landmark District in 2011.

And yet the Home’s main landmark, the old main building that could be seen for miles around, ending up laying empty for a number of years, as forgotten, it seemed, as the old soldiers who had lived there a century before. Indeed, as I wrote in my 2017 essay for Gary Gallagher’s and Matt Gallman’s Civil War Places, “In a way, the old buildings are now stand-ins for the old soldiers,” shunted aside and forgotten. “Some of the buildings are in appalling condition, with construction fences blocking entrances, roofs sagging raggedly, and paint faded and chipped.  The clumsily executed stained glass window of a mounted Gen. U. S. Grant, presented to the home by the [Grand Army of the Republic] in the 1880s, has been removed from the old Ward Theater because the building is untenable.” As someone who often drove or walked or rode my bike on the Hank Aaron Trail that runs through the grounds, I was intimately familiar with the tragic deterioration of many of the buildings, and in 2011 the historic district was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s List of Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places. As I wrote, the Home “represents the best intentions of Americans seeking to honor and protect the heroes of the Union at the same time it reflects the inability of Americans to adequately understand those veterans.  My Soldiers’ Home reminds us of a time when the men who had fought and won the Civil War came to be seen as charity cases dependent on the public’s good will, rather than as heroes deserving of the country’s gratitude.”[3]

Even as the buildings continued their decline, the organization “Save the Soldiers’ Home,” leading a coalition of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Milwaukee Preservation Alliance, tried to raise money and ideas through public education.  I was actually involved for a time with one of its committees. But an initial effort to get bids for preserving and redeveloping the old buildings failed, and it seemed the buildings would continue their slow, inevitable decline.  

But the project gradually gained momentum behind a shrewd redevelopment plan, earning buy-in from local veterans organizations, the Veterans Administration, and the city government. After over two years of construction, in March 2021, the old main building and several other of the smaller nineteenth century buildings (the headquarters and a few duplexes built for officers of the NHDVS) opened as housing for homeless veterans! Altogether, the $44 million project created 101 housing units, with a mix of single bedrooms with shared living spaces to one to three and even four-bedroom apartments. Women veterans have their own wing, and all residents have access to fitness facilities and a business center. The VA will also provide on-site support services, including counseling, sobriety maintenance, and employment assistance.  The housing is meant to be permanent, not transitional or temporary; residents will pay no more than 30 per cent or their income in rent.[4]

Over 120 years ago that forgotten newspaper writer wrote this of the veterans he met in Milwaukee and the last home most would occupy: “It is a grand thing that these refuges are provided; and we honor the men who wrecked their futures in many cases to hold the republic together.” He meant it ironically, in a way, but it is a worthy ending to this Memorial Day story about new beginnings: both for a place that deserves to be remembered productively, and for the men and women who have borne our country’s more recent battles.[5]

[1] Lancaster (Wisconsin) Teller, August 11, 1898. The Iron Brigade was the only fully “western” brigade in the Army of the Potomac. Made up of the Second, Sixth, and Seventh Wisconsin, Nineteenth Indiana, and the Twenty-fourth Michigan, it fought at Antietam and Gettysburg and lost more men than any other brigade in the Union army.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “My Soldiers’ Home,” Gary Gallagher and Matt Gallman, eds., Civil War Places: Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of Its Leading Historians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 168, 169; “America’s Most Endangered Historic Places—Past Listings,” https://savingplaces.org/11most-past-listings#.WZA7I2eWzVM, accessed, August 13, 2017.

[4] David Walter, “Renovated Soldiers Home Almost ready for homeless Vets,” VAntage Point: Official Blog of the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs, February 13, 2021, https://blogs.va.gov/VAntage/84463/renovated-soldiers-home-almost-ready-homeless-vets/, accessed April 4, 2021.

[5] Lancaster (Wisconsin) Teller, August 11, 1898.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Marten

James Marten is professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and a former president of the Society of Civil War Historians. He is author or editor of nearly two dozen books, including his most recent, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s George and Ann Richards Prize!

Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s George and Ann Richards Prize!

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Catherine A. Jones has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2020. The article, “The Trials of Mary Booth and the Post-Civil War Incarceration of African American Children,” appeared in the September 2020 issue.

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.”

Dr. Jones is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (2015). She is currently working on a book about the history of child incarceration in the post–Civil War era. The prize committee consisted of Sarah E. Gardner, Mercer University; Joan E. Cashin, The Ohio State University; and Brandon R. Byrd, Vanderbilt University.

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.

For more information, visit  https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/.

 

We’ve Always Been Here: Rediscovering African American Families in the U.S. Census

We’ve Always Been Here: Rediscovering African American Families in the U.S. Census

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When I initially began examining United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiers, I primarily focused on Civil War pension records. As previously noted, these rich primary sources can illuminate the forgotten lives of African Americans in many ways but do not (nor does any single historical record) tell the whole story of the lives of USCT soldiers and their kin. Since hundreds of thousands of people (for various reasons) never applied for a pension, other records fill in the archival silences. As a result, I turned to the U.S. Census to explore the complex living situations of USCT soldiers.

The U.S. Census is an excellent primary source that one can use to investigate the families of USCT soldiers before and long after their military service ended. Since many African Americans did not apply for pensions, the U.S. allows one to examine many people, regardless of their pensioner status. Another benefit to the source is that, due to the quantitative data collection of domiciles, it is possible to uncover a more nuanced understanding of household dynamics for people every decade. Thus, it becomes possible to locate numerous people, even across multiple generations, that do not always make appearances in other historical records. For instance, using the U.S. is plausible to trace fluid familial construction for William Butler (a Philadelphian-born Sixth the United States Colored Infantry soldier) before and decades after the Civil War. Thus, studying African American families has always been an available and accessible primary source.

Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Throughout the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century, each iteration of the U.S. census asked for specific data on the nation’s inhabitants. Census enumerators asked for a multitude of information on each occupant that included (but was not limited to) an individual’s age, race, birthplace, marital status, full-time wage-earning occupational status, ownership of real or personal estate, literacy, the birthplace, and names of the individual’s parents, and some issues of mental illness. This quantitative information is exceedingly valuable in denoting how African American families fought against and continually adapted their living situations to protect and empower each other in their lifelong battle against racial discrimination.

Even with all the valuable data that the U.S. Census yields, it is important to recognize that there are significant issues in the historical record when attempting to study the families of USCT soldiers.[1] One of the most glaring problems with the source is how historically devalued the unpaid of women, regardless of their race. In many cases, census enumerators (sometimes conducting quick surveys) categorized women as either “keeping house” or holding no occupation at all. Such assessments ignored the important contributions that women made to their families, including but not limited to cooking, cleaning, gathering raw materials to create and sell goods in local markets, washing clothes, watching other people’s children, and bearing and raising their children. Additionally, some women successfully found seasonal and temporary wage-earning employment critical in keeping their families economically stable.[2] It is important to use critical analysis respectfully and accurately acknowledge how women contributed to their household in differing ways. Thus, a blank space in the U.S. Census often does not reflect how their families valued women. It is also critical to recognize that households sometimes included fictive kin—individuals that families treated as “kin” even if there were no adoptive, biological, or marital ties—for their household’s survival.[3] Even if the historical record or families explicitly state it, the continual opening of residences to non-blood-relative individuals says otherwise.  Collectively, these examples highlight that using the U.S. Census requires a careful eye to acknowledge the complexity of African American households beyond the limited interpretation of a federal government record.

A brief examination of William Butler reveals how invaluable the U.S. Census to studying USCT veterans and their families. As his pension records denote, Butler enlisted in the Sixth United States Colored Infantry on August 8, 1863.[4] Unfortunately, on September 29, 1864, he was severely injured in the right thigh during the Battle at Chapin’s Farm in Virginia. After the conflict, a surgeon decided to amputate Butler’s right thigh. After receiving a medical discharge on May 29, 1865, Butler applied for and received an invalid pension of eight dollars per month. By 1866, Butler’s monthly pension payout increased to fifteen dollars after the pension agent categorized Butler as “totally disable,” implying that he would be unable to resume physically demanding, wage-earning work as a civilian. The Bureau of Pensions’ higher pension grading, at least, in this case, highlights that it realized that visible wartime wounds could hinder, if not eradicate, a veteran’s postwar employability.[5]

The U.S. Census thankfully fills in some gaps in his life. In 1850, Butler (along with Henry Anderson and Henry Johnson) lived as fictive kin in the Gilbert household. Robert and Gracy Gilbert undoubtedly appreciated the three men’s additional wages (working as a laborer, porter, and farm laborer, respectively) since the couple had two adolescent children. Gracy’s unpaid work and Richard’s wage-earning employment as a laborer made their financial stability difficult for the young family.[6] The bonds that these seven African Americans created reveal that familial definitions transcended blood and marriage. All three fictive were critical to keeping their household together, for themselves and each other.

1870 Census of William Butler. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

Twenty years later, Butler was fictive kin in an interracial household with Alexander and Jane Elligood and Maggie Reagan. Alexander worked as a laborer. Both James and William were domestic servants, while Maggie (categorized as “unemployed”) found various ways to contribute to their residence. William’s occupation provides a unique avenue to examine gender since he performed a job that some people considered “women’s work.” Maybe he cared more about earning a wage than the gendered perception that some people may have had about working as a domestic servant.[7] At the same time, his employment reveals that even though a pension agent labeled Butler “totally disabled,” he performed physically demanding work, which brought him two forms of income when many African Americans struggled to establish one. Finally, this household was unique as Maggie, a white woman, cohabitated with African Americans when Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had a well-established record of large and small-scale racial violence.[8]This household was aware, at some level, of the longstanding local racial tensions. Nevertheless, they instead focused on surviving and supporting each other.

While William Butler is not a representative case, but more an example of how to examine one’s life across multiple sources to uncover the pre-service and postwar life of a USCT soldier. The accessibility of the U.S. Census and the fact that many veterans and kin did not apply for a pension make it a valuable resource. Furthermore, in instances where there are pensions, it would behoove one to cross-reference with the U.S. Census to find more information about how African Americans constructed their lives in their unending battle against racial discrimination. In short, this federal government record offers another opportunity to understand and discuss who USCT soldiers were far beyond their time in the U.S. Army.

 

[1] Judith Giesberg, “ ‘A Muster-Roll of the American People”: The 1870 Census, Voting Rights, and the Postwar South,” Journal of Southern History 87, No. 1 (February, 2021), 38-41, 50-51; Margo Anderson, “The Missouri Debates, Slavery, and Statistics of Race: Demography in Service of Politics,” Annales de démographie historique, No. 1 (2003),  29-34.

[2] Nancy Folbre and Marjorie Abel, “Women’s Work and Women’s Households: Gender Bias in the U.S. Census,” Social Research 56 No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), 547-549.

[3] Edward Norbeck and Harumi Befu, “Informal Fictive Kinship in Japan,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 60, No. 1 (February, 1958), 102-117; Linda M. Chatters, Robert Joseph Taylor, and Rukmalie Jayakody, “Fictive Kinship Relations in black extended families,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), 297-312.

[4] Undated Pension Slip, in William Butler, Sixth USCI, pension file. National Archives Records and Administration, Washington, D.C.

[5] Kelly D. Mezurek, For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016), 226; James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 49.

[6] Seventh Census of the United States, 1850;(National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls); Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

[7] U.S Census Bureau, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, M593 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1870).

[8] Please refer to the following studies on nineteenth-century racial discrimination (including violence) against African Americans in Philadelphia, Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880—1910 (Durham: Duke University, 2006); Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. He received his bachelor’s degree (2008) from the University of Central Florida. Later, he earned his master’s degree (2010) and doctoral degree (2017) from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. His monograph, The Families’ Civil War, is forthcoming June 2022 with the University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series.  You can find him on Twitter at @PHUsct.

UVA Unionists: A Digital Project Studying University of Virginia Alumni Who Stayed Loyal to the Union

UVA Unionists: A Digital Project Studying University of Virginia Alumni Who Stayed Loyal to the Union

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Note: “UVA Unionists” is one of two digital projects at the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History that shed light on the area’s untold Unionist stories. The other project, “Black Virginians in Blue” [link to Will Kurtz’s Muster blog post], launched in April. See Will Kurtz’s recent Muster post on this project.

 

In October 1913, the Staunton Daily News called attention to a “grave oversight on the part of our Virginian schools and colleges.” The University of Virginia and other institutions had kept careful records of their Confederate alumni and celebrated them with reunions, banquets, and monuments. But they had “almost entirely overlooked their sons who were in the Federal forces.” The writer praised these “neglected alumni,” insisting that their wartime achievements—if properly recognized—would bring honor and fame to Virginia’s colleges. As Virginians “rejoice in a re-united land,” he observed, they could “surely remember with pride their sons who saw the path of duty differently.” Later that month, UVA’s Alumni News reprinted the article and confessed that “no complete list has been made of the University alumni who saw service in the Union army.”[1]

Now, more than a century later, the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History has answered that call. We transcribed antebellum student catalogues and systematically searched databases on Ancestry.com, Fold3.com, and Newspapers.com. We examined pension and service records at the National Archives and manuscript collections across the country. After four years of research, we have identified 68 UVA students, alumni, and faculty members who served in the Union military. We have also found dozens more who supported the Union cause as civilians, including Congressman Henry Winter Davis and Maryland Governor Thomas Swann. Our “UVA Unionist” project, which officially launches on May 4, tells these men’s stories.

Portrait of Henry Winter Davis
Congressman Henry Winter Davis (National Archives and Records Administration)

In April 1861, these UVA Unionists ranged in age from 14 to 57, with a median age of 26.5. The Staunton Daily News editor assumed they “must have been northern boys…who stuck to their people and their native land.” In reality, two-thirds were born in the South: in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina. Nearly half came from slaveholding households, and several belonged to prominent political families. Stephen Kennedy and Charles Ewing were the sons of United States Senators, and army surgeon John Fox Hammond was the brother of South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond.[2]

Before the war, most UVA Unionists were doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, or students. Forty-eight (71 percent) served as officers during the war, and seven ultimately became generals. Only about thirty, however, served on the front lines. The others spent the war as prison guards, paymasters, recruiters, medical personnel, or home guards. Two UVA Unionists died during the war: James Gilliss, superintendent at the Naval Observatory, died of a stroke in February 1865, and his colleague Alexander Pendleton died of an unknown disease later that month. Many others, however, suffered from illness or injury, and at least six became prisoners of war. Most served the Union cause faithfully, and only one man deserted from the army.[3]

After the war, as UVA’s faculty and alumni embraced the Lost Cause, they largely erased these men from the university’s history. The Alumni Bulletin valorized UVA’s Confederate veterans, and an 1878 catalogue noted the Confederate service of more than 2,000 alumni. UVA hosted a Confederate reunion in 1912, and President Edwin Alderman asked alumni to donate their wartime relics—“anything Confederate”—to the university. These publications, however, mentioned only a small handful of UVA Unionists, and the university’s ceremonies and monuments excluded them entirely. One alumnus insisted “there was no Union feeling in the state,” and another agreed that secession brought “all, almost without exception, to the same mind.”[4]

To be sure, the overwhelming majority of UVA alumni supported secession and sided with the Confederacy. Our research suggests that half of all antebellum alumni served in the Confederate military, including 89 percent of the men who attended UVA in 1860-61. Only about 1 percent of UVA’s students, alumni, and faculty served in the Union military. Our project does not attempt to equate these figures. It does, however, shed light on the deep divisions within the nineteenth-century South. Roughly 300,000 White southerners and 150,000 former slaves served in the Union military, and UVA’s Unionists are part of this larger story.[5]

Most were political moderates who fought not to abolish slavery but rather to preserve the Union. Eight men were already serving in the United States military when the war began, and ten more enlisted by May 1861. As James Winslow, a Unionist who attended UVA in 1861, explained, loyal Americans would “maintain the integrity of the Union…if it cost every drop of blood & every dollar in the country.” New York merchant Robert Shannon agreed, recruiting men to “sustain the government” and fight the “holiest war in which patriots ever engaged.” Arkansas editor William Fishback declared the Union the “best government on earth”—a beacon of hope in a world ruled by despotism and heresy.[6]

Image of newspaper page
The Unconditional Union, which William Fishback began publishing in 1864 to champion the Union cause in Arkansas (Microfilm, University of Arkansas)

Despite their moderation, many UVA Unionists ultimately accepted emancipation as a military necessity. Missouri lawyer James Overton Broadhead, for example, began the war as a proslavery Unionist. He served in Missouri’s 1861 constitutional convention, where he forcefully defended both slavery and Union. During the war, however, his convictions slowly evolved. In 1862, as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, he upheld the First Confiscation Act and instructed army officials to liberate Confederate owners’ slaves. The following year, he urged Missourians to adopt gradual emancipation. Although the plan would keep many African Americans in apprenticeships for decades, Broadhead explained, it would establish the “great leading distinction between slavery and freedom…the negro would no longer be a thing, but a person.”[7]

Missouri lawyer James Overton Broadhead (Library of Congress)

After the war, most UVA Unionists hoped to quickly reunite the country, and they largely opposed the “radicalism” of Reconstruction. Broadhead, for instance, severed ties with Republicans and became a leader in Missouri’s Conservative Party. He argued that Congressional Reconstruction “deprived our people of both religious and civil liberty” and denied them a “republican form of government.” He denounced Republicans’ experiment in biracial democracy and championed reconciliation with former Confederates. The country, he claimed, “needs repose and order,” and he could “never justify the acts of reconstruction, or the plunder of the Southern people.”[8]

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin Dowell
Oregon editor Benjamin Franklin Dowell (Oregon Historical Society).

A handful of UVA Unionists, however, became champions of freedom. Robert Shannon served as a federal commissioner in Louisiana, where he vigorously enforced the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He imprisoned White Louisianians for terrorizing former slaves, arrested election officials for keeping freedmen from voting, and arraigned state judges for failing to defend African Americans’ rights. Oregon editor Benjamin Franklin Dowell defended African-American suffrage and civil rights, insisting the right to vote made former slaves “not only free in name but in fact.”  Most famously, Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis became an architect of Congressional Reconstruction. He co-authored the Wade-Davis Bill, helped pass the Thirteenth Amendment, and fought for legal and political equality for all men.[9]

Despite their small numbers, these UVA Unionists remind us of the ideological power of the Union, which enshrined political liberty and economic opportunity for all White men. Benjamin Dowell, for instance, championed the “republican principles” of self-government and vowed to live under “the stars and stripes, as long as life shall last.” These men’s stories remind us of the conservatism of most loyal Americans and help explain the failures of Reconstruction. But they also speak to the Civil War’s contested and transformative potential and reveal the ways that southern intransigence both hardened northern resolve and embedded the ideals of biracial democracy in the Constitution. Their devotion to the Union belies the Lost Cause myth of southern unity and reveals the deep and enduring divisions in the nineteenth-century South.[10]

 

[1] The Staunton Daily News, 14 October 1913; University of Virginia Alumni News 2, no. 4 (29 October 1913), 37.

[2] The Staunton Daily News, 14 October 1913.

[3] See Brian Neumann, “UVA Unionists: The University of Virginia’s ‘Neglected Alumni,’” Magazine of Albemarle Charlottesville History 78 (2020), 73-108.

[4] Albert T. Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor, or Was Secession a Constitutional Right (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866), v; James M. Garnett, “Personal Recollections of the University of Virginia at the Outbreak of the War of 1861-65,” Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia, 3rd ser., vol. 5, no. 3 (July 1912), 338; William W. Old, “The Student Volunteers of 1861,” Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia, n.s., vol. 5, no. 5 (March 1906), 292-295; Students of the University of Virginia: A Semi-Centennial Catalogue with Brief Biographical Sketches (Baltimore: Charles Harvey, 1878).

[5] William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xiii.

[6] James A. Winslow to John B. Minor, 21 May 1861, Papers of John B. Minor, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; New York Daily Herald, 21 May 1861; Unconditional Union (Little Rock, AR), 23 January 1864.

[7] Fremont (OH) Weekly Journal, 19 October 1860; Journal of the Missouri State Convention Held at Jefferson City and St. Louis, March 1861 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1861), 114-233; James O. Broadhead to Bernard G. Farrar, 2 February 1862, in Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, 1st ser., vol. 1, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 425-426; Journal of the Missouri State Convention Held in Jefferson City, June 1863 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1863), 297.

[8] Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 22 August 1866; Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI), 24 September 1874; St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, 26 September 1882.

[9] The Daily True Delta (New Orleans, LA), 11 February 1864; The New Orleans (LA) Republican, 5 January 1868, 3 May 1868, and 6 June 1868; The Natchez (MS) Democrat, 25 July 1868; The Oregon Sentinel (Jacksonville, OR), 5 December 1868; Bernard C. Steiner, Life of Henry Winter Davis (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1916); Gerald S. Henig, Henry Winter Davis: Antebellum and Civil War Congressman from Maryland (New York: Twayne, 1973).

[10] Weekly Oregon Statesman (Salem, OR), 28 April 1862; The Oregon Sentinel (Jacksonville, OR), 26 November 1864.

 

 

 

 

Brian Neumann

Brian Neumann received his PhD from the University of Virginia and serves as editorial assistant for the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. He is the author of Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis (forthcoming from LSU Press) and “UVA Unionists: The University of Virginia’s ‘Neglected Alumni,’” Magazine of Albemarle Charlottesville History 78 (Albemarle County Historical Society, 2020).

Disney and Battlefields: A Tale of Two Continents

Disney and Battlefields: A Tale of Two Continents

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In the United States, significant portions of land have been set aside for battlefield parks to commemorate the actions of past generations and interpreted these spaces with regard to how they have shaped the present. In turn, as Edward Linenthal has argued, they became sacred ground.[1] As a result, some historians and members of the public have viewed infringements on those battlefields as a violation of that sacred ground.

In the 1990s, the Disney Corporation twice invaded such sacred places, first in France’s Marne-la-Vallee and second in Northern Virginia. The results could not have been more different. In France attention focused on the damage done to French culture by a U.S. conglomerate and in Virginia the outcry was over Disney doing “to American history what they have already done to the animal kingdom—sentimentalize it out of recognition,” to use Shelby Foote’s words.[2] By studying the two episodes, the different cultures of battlefield preservation and war remembrance in Europe and the United States illustrate that not preserving a battlefield does not mean forgetting nor does it mean ignoring the sacrifices of soldiers in the past.

On December 19, 1985, Michael Eisner, the CEO of the Disney Corporation stepped in front of the camera to announce that Disney had decided to build a new theme park and resort area just to the east of Paris. Eisner stated: “We are hopeful that our current negotiations will result in a definitive agreement to bring Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney to France and the European Community . . . Walt Disney would certainly feel at home here because European literature inspired so many of his fantasies and characters.” The article indicates that the selected location near Marne-la-Vallee, was located on the western edge of a World War I battlefield.[3] This was one of the very few mentions of the proposed park’s proximity to a battlefield.

Seven years after Eisner’s Paris press conference, on April 12, 1992, Euro Disney Resort opened its gates. Only two years later, on September 28, 1994, the Disney Corporation announced the abandoning of a very different theme park project in the vicinity of another battlefield of a different war, Disney’s America in northern Virginia near Manassas/Bull Run. While it was the uncontrollably spiraling costs of, what had by then become, Disneyland Paris that brought down Disney’s America, some in the historical community assumed they had tamed the mouse with their protests.

The locations of these planned theme park projects near battlefields of great national importance are surprisingly similar. In the course of the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, the 9th German Cavalry Division advanced as far as the village of Crecy along the Grand Morin.[4] This placed the troops just north of the British Army and within 10km (a little over 6 miles) of modern day Disneyland Paris. In contrast, the distance between Disney’s America and the Manassas National Battlefield Park was about 8 miles. Therefore, both parks were located in similar close vicinity to the opening engagements of their respective wars. Paris and Washington, D.C. also have an extensive cultural scene of museums and on their own accord attract a vast number of tourists. Disney even had plans to offer packages that would include day-trips into Washington.

The close proximity of the new theme park in France to the early battlefields of the Great War was a topic of discussion, but never a prominent one. The New York Times reported that “Mickey and Pluto will frolic near the edge of history” when the talks between Disney and the French government came to a successful conclusion.[5] References to World War I or the Great War, dissipated quickly, but so did Eisner’s smile.

When Eisner visited the Paris Bourse for the stock launch in 1989 eggs literally flew in his face. Chants of “Mickey, Go Home!” were not even the worst word choice as French movie director Ariane Mnouchkine suggested that the arrival of Disney in France represented “a cultural Chernobyl.”[6] The notion of a cultural conflict was widespread as even Le Figaro noted decades later, “Deux cultures, deux imaginaires s’affrontent.”[7] France has historically jealously guarded against any form of anglicization of its language and made efforts to promote French culture. At the same time, the battlefield near the new park did not hold the same gruesome reminders as those farther afield at Verdun or along the Somme. It was the arrival of a cultural icon from the United States and its possible impact on French culture that drew attention not the proximity to Great War battlefields.

Hoping for a better reception, on November 11, 1993, Eisner made another trip in front of the press to announce yet another theme park. Located in Virginia, the proposed park centered on history, telling aspects of the history of the United States until 1945, but also near history with its close proximity to the Bull Run/Manassas Battlefield. The 1,200-acre park would in the words of Peter Rummell, president of Disney Design and Development Co., “make this [history] real but also make it fun. An intelligent story, properly told, shouldn’t offend anybody. . . . But we won’t worry about being politically correct.” The Los Angeles Times wondered if making historical events such as slavery, the Depression, and the Civil War “fun and exciting for the whole family” was an invitation for problems.[8] As expected the eggs, this time figuratively, quickly started flying in Disney’s direction as the Disney Corporation had miscalculated the public opposition.

Haymarket, Virginia, where the park was supposed to rise, was “in an uproar. Neighbors are lining up against neighbors. Families are split. For the history-soaked region 40 miles from the nation’s capital, the fight is shaping up as a second Civil War: for or against Disney.”[9] The proximity to Manassas National Battlefield Park brought opposition from individuals who had already successfully derailed plans for a shopping center near the park in the late 1980s and did not want commercialization near these sacred grounds. With regard to the Civil War, concerns centered on how a Fort Sumter-like replica and a naval engagement between Monitor and Virginia would tell the complicated story of the rebellion. In the words of Democratic Representative Robert G. Torricelli (N.J.), “Americans should learn about the Civil War from historians, . . . ‘not Minnie and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.’”[10] David McCullough was far more outspoke when he called the plans, “This is the creation of a new city, a new edge city, sprawl at its worst. And this is the panzer division of developers moving in.”[11] Ironically, even the French did not seem to have used such harsh language to oppose their park.

Two years after his enthusiastic statements and promises of resilience in the face of “political correctness,” Rummell beat retreat. He explained the cancelation of the park: “We recognize that there are those who have been concerned about the possible impact of our park on historic sites in this unique area, and we have always tried to be sensitive to the issue.”[12]While money was a significant factor in the cancelation, historians and community leaders celebrate what they perceived as their success.[13]

Beyond the failure and success of building theme parks near battlefields, these Disney projects illustrate the very different attitudes taken towards these areas of death and destruction. Both the Great War, in which France lost around 1.7 million soldiers and civilians, and the American Civil War, were defining as well as traumatic moments in each country’s past. In the United States, national cemeteries and battlefield parks dot the landscape. In France, massive cemeteries and battlefield monuments are a reminder of the carnage. There are still trenches and bunkers all around the northern parts of the country; yet, there is no massive battlefield park. Arguably it would be impractical to create a park that stretches from Channel to Switzerland, eliminating millions of acres of farm land. However, the French have created small parks, like at Verdun.[14] A vastly different memorial landscape from that which exist in the United States, where it is increasingly popular to preserve entire battlefield park, at least try to, and to treat these field as sacred beyond development.

In the end, France and the United States remember their pasts in very different ways. The United States is somewhat unique in that it created massive battlefield parks, something impracticable in most of Europe. With the parks anchored so deeply in the public memory of the American Civil War, a theme park infringing on such a sacred space was unthinkable as was the cultural impact Disney would have on the telling of history. The French worried about the impact of Disney and U.S. culture on France; however, the proximity of the park to the early battlefields of the Great War was not a major topic of disagreement. Maybe, there is something the United States can learn from France’s attitude that not all battlefields need to be preserved to remember those who fought and died in major wars of the past.

[1] Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

[2] Charles Krauthammer, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Mouse?” Time, June 6, 1994. Available at http://wesclark.com/jw/krauthmr.html.

[3] New York Times, December 19, 1985.

[4] “Battle of the Marne, and Advance to the Aisne, http://www.lightbobs.com/1914-battle-of-the-marne.html

[5] Frank J. Prial, “The Talk of Paris,“ New York Times, August 13, 1985.

[6] Jeff Chu, “Happily Ever After?” Time Europe Magazine, March 18, 2002.

[7] Camille Lestienne, “Disneyland Paris: L’Inquiétude des Riverains en 1989 face à la ‘Bétonisation,’” Le Figaro (Paris), February, 24, 2017. Special thanks to Andrew Houck for helping me with some French newspaper research.

[8] Jube Shiver, Jr, “With Liberty and Justice for Mickey,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1993.

[9] Deborah Sharp, “Disney Plans worry Locals / Rural Virginia again is a Battlefield,” USA Today, December 7, 1993.

[10] Stephen C. Fehr and Michael D. Shear, “For Disney, Fight Takes New Twist,” Washington Post, June 17, 1994.

[11] “Historians Oppose Disney America in Virginia,” CNN NEWS 8:10 pm ET, May 11, 1994.

[12] “Disney Cancels N. Va. History Park,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 29, 1994.

[13] Michael Wiebner, “The Battle of Bull Run: How Insurgent Grassroots Lobbying Defeated Disney’s Proposed Virginia, Theme Park,” Campaigns and Elections (December 1994 / January 1995).

[14] Thank you to Chip Fulcher, Craig Bruce Smith, Jen Murray, Brooks Simpson, Caitlin G. DeAngelis for their helpful comments on Twitter and Sabrina Mittermeier (Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks Middle Class Kingdoms (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020)) who kindly visited one of my classes to talk about her book.

 

 

 

 

 

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

Texas Secession: Whose Tradition?

Texas Secession: Whose Tradition?

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The Texan secessionists are at it again.  In a bill submitted to the Texas State Legislature on January 26, 2021, state representatives have sparked, in legal form, the question of Texas secession once more.  According to the author, Rep. Kyle Biedermann of Fredericksburg, TX, House Bill 1359 offers Texans “of all political persuasions” the opportunity, through referendum, to prime the engines of Texas independence. “Texas is seen as the bastion of freedom and a leader of free enterprise,” Rep. Biedermann has argued.  “A robust economy, financial solvency, and capacity for massive energy production worthy of the world state… are all indications that the Republic of Texas would not just survive, but thrive as an independent nation.  Now is the time for Texas to lead.”[1]

Advocates are claiming Texas’s right to secede is based on Article 1, Section 2 of the state constitution, which states: “All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their benefit.”  Rep. Biedermann, moreover, contends that “the federal government is out of control and does not represent the values of Texans,” nor those of “our Founding Fathers [who] established [liberty] with their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.”  It is, thus, “un-American and unpatriotic to not make our voices heard.”[2]

Within this rhetoric of secession there is an obvious appeal to Texas’s “inherent” roots and entitlements. Tradition, we are led to believe, empowers modern-day Texans to reject the oppressions of a centralized state apparatus, to throw the yoke of burdensome taxes, regulations, and restrictions.  It is their imperative, proponents say, to embrace Texas’s “sacred” past of political independence.

A review of Texas’s history of secession, however, reminds today’s observers that Texas secession was hardly just about preserving a righteous or freedom-fostering form of government.  Texas secession, in both the 1830s and 1860s, was about power and prosperity.  During the first two movements, secessionists sought to recalibrate Texas’s future by delineating the haves and the have-nots, the winners and losers of (an imagined) Texas society.  Power, nineteenth-century secessionists believed, certainly resided in “the people,” but the contest over who could claim the mantel of “the people” – and whose interests the government would serve – was often the very source of the secession movements themselves.

The first secessionist movement emerged at the cross-section of competing visions of conquest and colonization.  In the 1820s and 30s, “Texas” existed as both the far northeastern reaches of Mexico and the de facto western frontier of Anglo-America.  Anglo-Texas’s raison d’être, in the eyes of Mexican officials, was to create a buffer zone between the rest of Mexico and the Indigenous nations of the North, who for generations had rendered much of the Hispanic colonial apparatus impotent and vulnerable.  “Rarely a day passes that this capital [of San Antonio] is not attacked by the Indians,” declared Governor Antonio Martínez in April 1819.  “I predict with sadness that this province will be destroyed unwittingly by lack of inhabitants, and I myself by lack of the resources which are necessary for subsistence.”  Thus, when Moses Austin and his son Stephen reached out to the Spanish and then Mexican officials with their schemes to bring “civilization” to Texas, their Hispanic allies were optimistic that they had solved their so-called Indian problem.[3]

Anglo-American colonists generally understood the bargain they had struck with the Mexican government, and during the first decade-plus of colonization, Anglo settlers enthusiastically aided Mexican locals and officials in their quest to conquer or “pacify” their Indigenous adversaries.[4]  But Anglo-American colonization in Texas also drew energy from another violent impulse: a commitment to the exploitation of enslaved Black people.  Although a number of their Mexican counterparts wholly understood – and accepted – anti-Black slavery’s role in “civilizing” Texas, Anglo-Texans faced an increasingly hostile government response to their violent, cotton-generating institution, particularly as controversies surrounding its legality brought into relief the growing disconnect of Anglo-Texas from the Mexican heartland.[5]

By the 1830s, Mexican officials – desperately trying to assert state authority – were actively working to end the enslavement of Black people in Texas.[6]  Anglo-American colonists, who were still committed to destroying or displacing the Indigenous people of Mexico’s northern frontier, felt betrayed.  Had they not, per their original agreement, brought “civilization” to the region?  Why, then, as Stephen F. Austin explained, was “a war of extermination… raging in Texas – a war of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race”?  Secession, they reasoned, was their only recourse.  A tyrannical government that solicited help from “the merciless savage” and instigated Black rebellion, that supposedly catered to the most inferior of people at the expense of Anglo-American “life, liberty, and property,” was deserving of overthrow.[7]  In short, Anglo colonists rebelled against Mexico in 1835-36 because Mexico had lost sight of “the people” – who in this historical moment were generally anti-Black supporters of Native annihilation.[8]

“The Eagle of Liberty: The Free Eagle of Mexico Grappling the Cold Blooded Viper, Tyranny or Texas,” in The Anti-Texass Legion, Protest of Some Free Men, States and Presses Against the Texas Rebellion (1844).  Abolitionists were among the first to interpret Texas secession as a movement to advance anti-Black slavery.  Library of Congress.

Anglo-Texas would not join the United States until the mid-1840s, mostly because the question of Texas cession had become too politically volatile, at home and abroad.[9]  In the interim, the Republic of Texas – a nation that restricted citizenship to “all free white persons” – would represent a debtor refuge, a place where White slaveholders from the East could relocate, with enslaved Black people in tow, to escape their self-inflicted financial troubles and start their slave-based enterprises anew.[10]  The enslaved population in Texas swelled from at least 2,000 people in the mid-1830s to some 28,000 by 1845.  When Texas elected to join the Union that year, admission promised “the most abundant prosperity… the dawning of a new era indeed for Texas.”[11]

Then, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party won the U.S. presidential election.  Although U.S. federal failures to stimy Native resistance in Texas had for years bred anti-general government sentiment among many Anglo-Texans, the threat of “Black Republicanism” in the United States, along with recent evidence of internal Black rebellion (known to contemporaries as “Texas Troubles”), provided the primary impetus for Texas secession 2.0.  “We believe it is the intention of the Black Republican party to use the force of the Government to extinguish the system of slavery, and we do not intend to wait till we are so weak we cannot resist,” declared the Dallas Herald.[12]  Convinced that the Lone Star Republic’s constitution provided secessionists with the legal rationalization for abandoning the Union, Anglo-Texans organized a secession convention in late-January 1861 and a state-wide referendum the following month.  Official tallies reported a smashing victory for secession, with 46,129 votes in favor and 14,697 against.  Apparently secessionists were left with no other choice: “the non-slave-holding States… have formed themselves into a great sectional party… based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.”  It also didn’t hurt that “the Federal Government… has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border.”[13]

“An Heir to the Throne, on the Next Republican Candidate,” 1860. Racist fears of “Black Republican” rule galvanized White Southerners, especially in Texas, against Abraham Lincoln, his administration, and ultimately the Union. Library of Congress.

Texas secession, both in the 1830s and 1860s, was thus as much about clarifying the relationship between the government and “the people” as it was about delineating relations – power and entitlements in particular – among the various inhabitants of the region.  The question was not simply How should the government serve the people? but also Whom should the government serve and at whose expense?  These concerns cut to the heart of the 1861 secession argument: Texas had to leave the Union and join the Confederacy for the sake of “holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits – a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”[14]

One necessarily wonders, then, what “values” are driving the current secessionist movement in Texas, especially if it is, by its own admission, drawing its energy from the secessionist traditions of the past.[15]  Perhaps modern-day secessionists speak only of a return to just government in the abstract, of government as the will of the people operationalized.  Or perhaps they aren’t well versed in Texas secessionist history and think secession was simply about ending generalized state-sponsored oppression in Texas.  Or perhaps they intend to refashion the body politic of Texas yet again, to restore the original secessionist visions of “the people” of Texas – White supremacy and all.  I suppose time will tell.

 

[1] For the text of the bill, see https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB01359I.pdf#navpanes=0.  Rep. Biedermann’s website lays out a rationale for the bill: “Representative Biedermann Files the Texas Independence Referendum Act,” Jan. 26, 2021, https://kylebiedermann.com/representative-biedermann-files-the-texas-independence-referendum-act/.

[2] Kyle Bidermann, “The federal government is out of control.” Dec. 8, 2020, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/kylebiedermann/posts/1714929152003141; “Texit FAQ: Texas Independence Referendum Act,” Jan. 26, 2021, https://kylebiedermann.com/texit-faq/.  It is unclear who counts as the “Founding Fathers” to Rep. Biedermann.  Notably, the authors of the 1875-76 state constitution were part of a “counterrevolutionary” movement of so-called Redeemers who sought to roll back the “Radical Republican” programs designed to assimilate the freedpeople (through state protections and schools) into a post-slavery society.  Carl H. Moneyhon, Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle for Reconstruction (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 138-54, 188-205. For the 1876 state constitution, see H.P.N. Gammel, ed., The Laws of Texas, 1822-1897, Vol. 8 (Austin: The Gammel Book Company, 1898), 781.

[3] Antonio Martínez to Commandant General, Apr. 1, 1819, in Virginia Taylor, ed., The Letters of Antonio Martínez: Last Spanish Governor of Texas, 1817-1822 (Austin: Texas State Library, 1957), 217–18; Mattie Austin Hatcher, ed., The Opening of Texas to Foreign Settlement, 1801-1821 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1912), 354-55; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 143-52, 182-201.

[4] See, for instance, Francisco Ruíz to Antonio Elosúa, June 11, 1831; Francisco Ruíz to Antonio Elosúa, Aug. 1831; Ramón Músquiz to Green C. DeWitt and the Gonzales Commissar of Police, Oct. 15, 1831; Antonio Elosúa to Manuel Lafuente, Oct. 15, 1831; Diary of Capt. Manuel Lafuente, Oct. 18 to Nov. 26, 1831, all in Malcolm D. McLean, ed, Papers of Robertson’s Colony in Texas, Vol. 6 (Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington Press, 1979), 268, 335, 468, 470, 557–65.

[5] Mexican general Manuel de Mier y Terán was one of the more prominent voices in sounding the alarm of Anglo colonists’ “strong and indissoluble connections with [their] neighboring government.”  Manuel de Mier y Terán to Guadalupe Victoria, Mar. 28, 1828, in Jack Jackson, ed., Texas by Terán (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 33, 36–37.  For examples of Mexican complicity in anti-Black slavery, see Eugene C. Barker, “Native Latin American Contribution to the Colonization and Independence of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 46 (Jan. 1943): 320; Census Report of Nacogdoches, 1828, in University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, Residents of Texas, 1782-1836, Vol. 2, 214, 216, 218, 242;

[6] Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 97-157.  Max Flomen’s recent contributions to The Journal of the Civil War astutely highlight the “unintended consequences” of Euro-American imperial warfare in Texas, especially how state-on-state warfare created fissures where “alternative emancipations” could thrive.  Max Flomen, “The Long War for Texas: Maroons, Renegades, Warriors, and Alternative Emancipations in the Southwest Borderlands, 1835-1845,” The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar. 2021): 36-61; and “Insurrections, Indigenous Power, & the Empire for Slaver in the Southwest,” Mar. 30, 2021, Muster,https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2021/03/insurrections-indigenous-power-the-empire-for-slavery-in-the-southwest/.

[7] Stephen F. Austin to Senator L. F. Linn, May 4, 1836, Eugene C. Barker, ed. Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1919: The Austin Papers, Vol. 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1924), 344–48; The Declaration of Independence Made by the Delegates of the People of Texas, Washington, Mar. 2, 1836, in Gammel, ed., The Laws of Texas, Vol. 1, 1063–66; Paul D. Lack, “Slavery and the Texas Revolution,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Oct. 185): 181-202.

[8] Notably, Rep. Biedermann also has filed House Bill 3013, termed “The Alamo Heroes Act,” which seeks to advance a Texas exceptionalist interpretation of the first secession movement, one that does not “dishonor the moral character of our brave Alamo Defenders.” “Biedermann Files the Alamo Heroes Act,” Mar. 5, 2021, https://kylebiedermann.com/biedermann-files-the-alamo-heroes-act/.

[9] William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 355-71.

[10] Sec. 6 of the Republic constitution stipulated citizenship for White immigrants, while Sec. 10 explicitly excluded “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians.”  Constitution of the Republic of Texas, 1836, in Randolph B. Campbell, ed., The Laws of Slavery in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 52-53; Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 284-88.

[11] Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, Secret Report on the Present Situation in Texas, 1834, in Jack Jackson, ed., Almonte’s Texas: Juan N. Almonte’s 1834 Inspection, Secret Report and Role in the 1836 Campaign (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2003), 253; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989), 55; Llerena Friend, ed., “Contemporary Newspaper Accounts of the Annexation of Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Oct. 1945): 274.

[12] Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Dallas Herald, December 19, 1860.  Of course, Black resistance – fugitivity in particular – already had a long history in Anglo-Texas.  See, Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2020), especially 165-83; James D. Nichols, The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-Mexico Border (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 57-79, 125-46; Sean M. Kelley, “‘Mexico in His Head’: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2004): 709-23.

[13] William Winkler, ed., Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861 (Austin: Austin Printing Company, 1912), 62-63, 87-90; Dale Baum, The Shattering of Texas Unionism: Politics in the Lone Star State during the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 42-81.

[14] Winkler, ed., Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 61-62

[15] As Rep. Biedermann has explained, one of his goals is to have “the whole country, the whole world” think: “Oh my goodness, those Texans are at it again.”  Andrea Zelinski, “What the Newest Lone Star Secessionists Want,” Texas Monthly, Feb. 11, 2021, https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-secession-kyle-biedermann/.  The Civil War, they argue, did not “settle” the question of secession.  “Can Texas Legally Secede from the Union?” Texas Nationalist Movement, Jan. 29, 2019, https://tnm.me/news/political/texit-is-it-illegal-for-texas-to-leave-the-union/. The modern-day ties between Texas secessionism and “defense” of the Alamo are also illustrative.  “The Alamo Needs Your Help,” Texas Nationalist Movement, accessed Mar. 25, 2021, https://tnm.me/alamo/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Barba

Paul Barba is an assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2016. His first book project, tentatively titled Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands, tracks and analyzes the multiple forms of slaving violence that emerged, dominated, and intersected throughout Texas from the early eighteenth century into the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is currently under contract with the University of Nebraska Press. Prior to Bucknell, Dr. Barba served as a managing editor at the Journal of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos.

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