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The Lost Cause in the Children’s Room: Toys and Memory

The Lost Cause in the Children’s Room: Toys and Memory

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My first conscious exposure to the American Civil War came sometime in the seventh grade when Kabel 1 showed Gettysburg on May Day. As a child, whose parents had watched many Western movies, this film created a fascination with the conflict in North America. In the following week, I tried to recreate Gettysburg battle scenes with LEGO minifigures and forgot my earlier play sessions with Playmobil Confederate and Revell Union Artillery sets stored in another box. During the 1990s, toy companies produced a significant number of Civil War era toy sets. While many of these have disappeared from the shelves, the second-hand market is buzzing with these items. Toy enthusiasts continue to perpetuate some of the outdated and even Lost Cause assumptions about the Civil War. As Trae Welborn and Patrick Lewis start to solicit essays for a book on Civil War era related video games, we might also want to think about toys and their impact on children and adults[1]. As historians, we constantly craft narratives of the past. Perhaps, we should also consider crafting in other mediums, for example, interlocking plastic bricks or plaster. Combining our narrative and artistic creations, we can reach a younger audience and work against the perpetuation of Lost Cause narratives.

By the early 1990s, children and collectors could find a wide array of Civil War-era related toys. I certainly had a few of these without understanding the meaning or even most basic narrative of the conflict in question. For children, toys are primarily about fun and play. However, these toys also become avenues for inquiry and learning about what the toy represents, be that a knight, pirate, or Civil War soldier. In those formative moments, children may encounter the many falsified narratives of the Civil War and embrace them as truth. Toymakers have used the Civil War for inspiration to make a wide variety of different toys.

In 1995, Revell, producer of plastic scale models and model kits both in the United States and Germany, produced the following figure sets: Union Infantry, Union Artillery, Confederate Infantry, Confederate Engineers. Collectors had to do some assembly but for the most part their work was limited to painting the figures.

One year earlier, Playmobil, a German toy company, released four play sets: two mounted rebel soldiers, a single rebel infantryman, a three-figure artillery piece, and finally the three-figure covered wagon of the “Virginian Mountain Boys,” transporting weapons and gold bags. These four sets remained in the lineup until the early 2000s. The sets were part of the Western series, which also included U.S. soldiers, a stereotypical movie-influenced U.S. fort, Western town sets, and even Native American figures.[2]

LEGO Soldiers and ArtilleryLEGO, a Danish company, marketed a similar but much shorter-lived and less extensive Western theme in 1996. The otherwise pacifist company’s unusual foray into the violent West included gun-wearing bandits, Native villages, a few town structures, and finally U.S. military sets.[3] The LEGO series neither included Confederates nor did its brief follow-up set promoting the Lone Ranger movie. However, considering the massive adult fan community, third party sellers are today selling Confederate soldiers and even Gatling guns, among other items.[4] These items are available directly on the producers’ websites, such as brickarms.com, brickwarriors.com, or brickmania.com, eBay, and even Amazon.com.

The adult fan community has used the wide variety and availability of toys to produce stop motion videos and displays recreating historic moments to encourage children’s fantasy, creativity, and learning.[5] With a viewership far exceeding many of the documentaries available, this is not just about toys, but also about learning history in fun and creative ways. However, many of these videos present an outdated, oversimplified, or even falsified interpretation of the Civil War. Historians should deeply care about the narratives presented in these recreations.

The Playmobil community is relatively small, but has nevertheless produced some interesting Civil War-era history videos. For example, Timpo Toys Land uploaded a six-minute battle stop motion film that clearly was influenced by Gettysburg. Using the soundtrack of John Buford’s scenes in Gettysburg, the video opens with the Playmobil western fort where U.S. forces prepare for a battle the following morning. Set on a green plain with two fence lines, the battle pitches rebel and U.S. forces against each other. The battle ends with a U.S. victory, derogatorily referring to U.S. forces as Yankees.[6]

Similarly, AciesFilms attempted a full battle of Gettysburg stop motion film. Inspired by Gettysburg, the first forty seconds feel very much like the narrated section at the start of the movie. AciesFilms never completed the entire battle, leaving viewer with only the first day’s fighting. While entertaining, the film is clearly designed to teach history as there are explanations and even a map of the battlefield for reference.[7]

The few Playmobil Confederates on YouTube does not speak to the popularity of the toy or the success of Playmobil’s Western theme but reflects in large part to the popularity among adult fan community. There are no large conventions bringing together Playmobil fans, especially not in the United States. In contrast, LEGO has a massive adult fanbase, websites devoted to the resale of LEGO pieces and sets, websites focused on MOC displays (LEGO fan jargon for My Own Creation), and officially supported LUGs (LEGO User Groups). Ironically, LEGO never produced Confederate soldiers, but there are a large number of LEGO Civil War era creations and fan films often designed to teach history.

For example, at BrickFair Alabama 2020, a father-son duo, Bob and Boston Sharp, presented an elaborate slice of the Battle of Fredericksburg in front of Marye’s Heights. Within the first minute of the interview, they mention that their inspiration came from Gods and Generals, an epic pro-Confederate Lost Cause biopic of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. In addition, regarding the sources used, the builders mention a map in a heritage book. That supposedly was their entire research.[8]

The builders incorporated a number of Lost Cause-influenced film scenes, such as a slave protected her master’s home in Fredericksburg from looting U.S. soldiers. Even more, they also explained correctly that the 69th New York constituted the Irish Brigade and incorrectly that the 24th Georgia constituted the Confederate Irish Brigade. The clash of Irish Brigades has been eloquently refuted by historians but remains alive in Lost Cause narratives.[9]

Despite the lack of official LEGO Confederates, there are a number of figures visible throughout the video that look like the CSA equivalent of the official LEGO U.S. soldiers from the Western theme, likely a homemade print or one of the purchasable custom figures. In the interview, Bob Sharp claims to have a history degree, to be a historian, history teacher, and owner of a vast library. His son also lauded Gods in General as a great depiction of the battle. Such a vast display of the Battle of Fredericksburg will create awe for a young viewer who might then hear these problematic stories from individuals who claim historical authority and accept what they saw and heard as accurate history.

Another clear example of a Lost Cause influenced LEGO display comes in an interview with Gary Brooks. Brooks had cooperated on a display of the Battle of the Wilderness for BrickFair Virginia 2014.[10] On his Flickr page, Brooks includes what looks like a cropped map from the American Battlefield Trust to outline the size and location of his Wilderness diorama.[11] Brooks explains his choice of location based on the importance of the first meeting between U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant and rebel leader Robert E. Lee. Considering the limitations of building with LEGO, Brooks acknowledges that the display is lacking in tree cover and thus not perfectly accurate. However, Brooks claims that there were fewer soldiers burning to death on the southern end of the battlefield and thus it was less terrible. While the display has many fascinating vignettes to offer the viewer, there are problems.

Brooks in the interview explains that the goal of his displays is to teach people about the Civil War. While starting off positively, he claims that one cannot understand the modern United States without understanding the Civil War. Instead of slavery or race, Brooks focuses on how the war turned the United States from “are” to “is,” and created an unified country. Worse, he points to Lee as a person for whom state identity came first and, embracing Lost Cause arguments, that Lee “did not like slavery at all.”[12] To illustrate the impact of his work, Brooks mentions a conversation about the Civil War with a child at another convention and how he communicated more in twenty minutes than public school supposedly had done. He does raise a point about giving children and even teenagers the opportunity to like and learn history by playing and building with LEGO toys.

Thankfully, Confederate toys are a rarity these days, at least when it comes to major toy companies. However, as historians, we should worry where our future students might get their first exposure to history. Imagine a young impressionable mind being told Civil War history by a seemingly knowledgeable adult at a LEGO convention in front of a massive and impressive looking Civil War-era battle scene, and that adult telling them that Lee was a benevolent slaveholder. It will leave a lasting impression.

As Civil War historians, we are constantly fighting battles about historic reality on social media, in public presentation, in print media, and of course in the books we write. However, for many of us, once students arrive in class, they have already formed opinions about the basic stories of the Civil War and it is difficult to unteach certain key tenants. Maybe toys are another way to counteract the Lost Cause.  We should consider to collaboratively build a Civil War-era LEGO display to take to conventions or make videos with which to present a counter narrative.

 

[1] Patrick A. Lewis, James Welborn, eds., Playing at War: Identity & Memory in American Civil War Era Video Games (Under Contract, Louisiana State University Press); Nick Sacco, “Interpreting Slavery Though Video Games: The Story of Freedom!” Muster (blog), The Journal of the Civil War Era, May 12, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/05/interpreting-slavery-through-video-games-the-story-of-freedom/.

[2] www.klickypedia.com An inquiry to Playmobil about the series and its discontinuation went unanswered.

[3] www.brickset.com

[4] https://www.brickwarriors.com/civil-war/

[5] http://www.bricktothepast.com/

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfLgrnbuRUw

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jLvkwUp6Wk&t=204s

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obhyXu11gDM&t=740s

[9] David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY22gmMurXY

[11] https://www.flickr.com/photos/80813941@N08/14422147835/

[12] Adam Serwer, “The Myth of the Kindly General Lee: The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed,” The Atlantic (June 4, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/.

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.

A White Man’s Empire: The United Stated Emigrant Escort Service and Settler Colonialism during the Civil War

A White Man’s Empire: The United Stated Emigrant Escort Service and Settler Colonialism during the Civil War

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It is hard to deny that immigration is one of the most contentious political issues of our time. In the years since the 2016 presidential election, the use of xenophobic and nationalist language to support restricting immigration has become increasingly common, even coming directly from the Oval Office. Critics have accused the current administration of racist immigration policies, ranging from the so-called “Muslim Ban” in 2017 to the continued incarceration of thousands of migrants along the U.S. border, the increasing restrictions on asylum status, and cuts to refugee resettlement quotas. Although the United States has not always been hostile towards immigration, its migration policies have long been xenophobic. Even the historical instances in which the U.S. government has encouraged immigration and migration reveal precedents to modern xenophobia and nationalism. While in 2020 nationalist rhetoric drives policies that limit immigration, Civil War era nationalism fueled support for migration to the American West and fulfilled a desire to ensure white settlement in areas under the control of American Indians.

During the Civil War, the United States actively encouraged the immigration and migration of white people as part of its empire-building mission in the American West. As Alison Clark Efford’s recent review essay on empire and immigration in the Journal of the Civil War Era demonstrates, historians are increasingly analyzing the Civil War era with an imperial framework.[1] This trend is reflected in recent posts on this blog contending that the Civil War was a war for settler colonialism, which “requires the removal of Indigenous people in order for settlers to permanently occupy the land.”[2] Migration policies were an important part of the settler colonial effort. The federal government’s concern about migration, even as the nation descended into civil war, is evident in the number of influential policies promoting westward migration established between 1861 and 1865. While the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railroads Act, both passed in 1862, are the most well-known examples of wartime legislation encouraging westward migration, another lesser known federal government initiative, the United States Emigrant Escort Service, played a valuable role in sustaining migration to the West as battles began to rage in the East.

Old photograph of a group of men sitting.
Captain Medorem Crawford (farthest to the left) is pictured here with his brother, LeRoy, who he employed as his assistant on the Emigrant Escort Service expeditions in 1862-4. The other men in the photograph are unidentified, but since the photo was taken circa 1864, it is possible that the other men were also involved with the Emigrant Escort Service.

An act of Congress in March 1861 established the United States Emigrant Escort Service “for the protection of emigrants on the overland routes between the Atlantic Slope and the California and Oregon and Washington frontier.”[3]Many congressmen supported the Emigrant Escort Service following the Utter-Van Ornum emigrant train massacre in September 1860, which left 29 of 44 emigrants murdered, and several captured by the American Indians who allegedly perpetrated the attack. The act afforded emigrants with a military escort providing “protection not only against hostile Indians, but against all dangers, including starvation, losses, accidents, and the like.”[4] It was passed the same day as numerous other bills designed to facilitate white settlement in the West, including bills to create the Territory of Dakota and survey its land, to organize the Territory of Nevada, and to complete geological surveys in Oregon and Washington Territory.

Medorem Crawford, an emigrant to Oregon in 1842, accepted an appointment as Captain of the Emigrant Escort Service in April of 1861. Since westward migration routes were so varied, Crawford and his soldiers would guide emigrants west from Omaha, where many believed the route became more dangerous. Crawford guided the emigrants along the California-Oregon Trail until the trails split, after which point numerous soldiers with the agency would guide smaller groups as they split up along the various trails to California, Washington, and Oregon. In 1862 Crawford reported that “no emigrants have at any time been troubled by Indians while in the vicinity of my company,” although he felt many likely would have run into trouble along the route “had it not been for the protection afforded them by the Government.”[5] The United States Emigrant Escort Service escorted over 10,000 white emigrants west in the fall of 1862 alone.[6]

As more and more emigrants traveled west under military escort, tensions with numerous Indigenous nations intensified, especially those with lands along emigrant routes. Tensions were especially high with the Northern Paiute, Bannock, and Western Shoshone bands, referred to by whites as “Snake Indians” after the Snake River that runs through their lands. White migrants repeatedly accused Snakes of perpetrating violence along emigrant roads, though numerous captains in the Emigrant Escort Service emphasized that only those who strayed too far from the main train escort met violence from Indigenous peoples or other white emigrants.

Portrait of William Pickering
William Pickering pictured as Governor of Washington Territory during the Civil War, when he was a strong advocate of the United States Emigrant Escort Service and settler colonialism in the American West.

William Pickering, Governor of Washington Territory, demanded the punishment of American Indians accused of violent confrontations with white emigrants, lamenting the “terrible human butchery of our own white American population of men, women, and children” as they attempted to travel West.[7] Pickering believed crimes against white emigrants needed to be avenged, and urged the Army to conduct retaliatory expeditions against the Snakes in 1863, led by captains from the Emigrant Escort Service, Medorem Crawford and Reuben L. Maury. Pickering also encouraged increasing federal government protection of emigrant routes until it completely deterred “any black hearted redskin or whiteskin devils in human shape from injuring or jeopardizing either the life or limb or property of any one man, woman, or child who may desire to travel across any part of the soil of the United States between the Missouri and the Columbia Rivers.”[8] As Pickering’s nationalist vision indicates, he believed that white emigrants had the right to travel and settle where they pleased, without regard to or interference from the people on whose land they were settling. The Emigrant Escort Service played a key role in this vision by providing military protection to westward migrants, and although it diverted soldiers that could have been used to fight the Confederacy, the service was a fundamental component of nationalist migration policies that promoted permanent white settlement in the American West during the Civil War. The service led expeditions again in 1863 and 1864, demonstrating how these nationalist policies continued, even in spite of the Civil War, for the sake of settler colonialism.

The United States Emigrant Escort Service operated from 1861 to at least 1865. Major General Grenville M. Dodge reported that in the summer of 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, nearly 12,000 emigrants passed through Nebraska headed out West. Nonetheless, the end of hostilities in 1865 brought renewed focus on the settler colonial project in the West, and the necessity for a traveling escort system would soon be largely replaced by the scores of garrisons and forts built throughout the West. By the end of the decade, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad made an escort detail nearly obsolete.

Although the United States Emigrant Escort Service was a short-lived initiative, it had lasting effects. In late 1865 General Dodge wrote that the protection of emigrant roads during the Civil War had produced an “immense yearly emigration which is forming a mighty empire now nearly in its infancy.”[9] The Emigrant Escort Service, especially alongside other initiatives like the Homestead Act, reflects the larger objectives of the war as a war for settler colonialism, and represents the implementation of migration policies designed to create an empire for the benefit of white emigrants. Like language surrounding efforts to encourage immigration and migration westward during the Civil War era, the increased restriction of immigration under the current administration is largely discussed in nationalist and xenophobic terms. Although different times and different circumstances may have prompted different measures, United States migration policies remain influenced by nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, like that which led to the formation of the Emigrant Escort Service over 150 years ago

[1] Alison Clark Efford, “Civil War-Era Immigration and the Imperial United States,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 2 (June 2020): 233-253.

[2]Michelle Cassidy, “The Contours of Settler Colonialism in Civil War Pension Files,” Muster: The Blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, published June 28, 2019, accessed April 21, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2019/06/the-contours-of-settler-colonialism-in-civil-war-pension-files/. See also Paul Barba, “A War for Settler Colonialism,” Muster: The Blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, published March 3, 2020, accessed April 21, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/03/a-war-for-settler-colonialism/. For more on settler colonialism see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-93.

[3] The final Army Appropriations Bill for 1862 (H.R. No. 899) had an amendment attached which provided $50,000 for the United States Emigrant Escort Service. For the debate on the Emigrant Escort Service amendment see 36th Cong, 2nd session, Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, Also, of the Special Session of the Senate (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Printing Office, 1862), 1212-3, 1219, and 1249-51. See also Secretary of War Simon Cameron to Captain Henry E. Maynadier, April 4, 1861, in The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 50, ed. United States War Department (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), 460 (henceforth OR series: volume).

[4] Secretary of War Simon Cameron to Captain Henry E. Maynadier, April 4, 1861, OR I:50, 460.

[5] Medorem Crawford, “Report on the Emigrant Road Expedition from Omaha, Nebr. Ter., to Portland, Oreg., June 16-October 30, 1862,” OR I:50, 155.

[6] Crawford, “Report on the Emigrant Road Expedition.”

[7] William Pickering to General George Wright, October 21, 1862, OR I:50, 189.

[8] William Pickering to General Benjamin Alvord, October 18, 1862, OR I:50, 182.

[9] Major General G. M. Dodge to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph McBell, November 1, 1865, OR I:48, 343.

Stefanie Greenhill

Stefanie Greenhill is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky. She is completing a dissertation on refugees who fled from the Confederacy under duress during the Civil War, entitled, “Escaped from Dixie:” Civil War Refugees and the Creation of a Confederate Diaspora.

Labor, Democracy, Law, and International Reconstruction

Labor, Democracy, Law, and International Reconstruction

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The three essays posted here relate to a session planned for the June, 2020 meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians.  The authors’ abbreviated comments, to be expanded at the rescheduled meeting in 2021, convey tantalizing glimpses of the global scope of America’s post-war Reconstruction.

In “Free Labor, Emancipation & Reconstruction’s Global Lens,” Erik Mathisen frames the humanitarian efforts of an Egyptian-based consul in relation to the world-wide systems of coerced and dependent labor. Brooks Swett, in “A World ‘Transfixed’: The International Resonance of American Political Crises during Reconstruction and at Present,” singles out the presidential election of 1868 for special attention, observing how ballots cast by former slaves became a reference point for Britons experiencing their own “Leap in the Dark” towards their own expanded electorate.   James Shinn, in “Reconstruction at Sea: The American Campaign to Reform International Neutrality, 1865-1871,” sketches a campaign to make a bitter Anglo-American diplomatic dispute over the Alabama an opportunity to reform basic norms of great power statecraft.

We witness across these three vivid and fresh accounts a world shrunk by steam transportation and by the 1866 launching of regular trans-Atlantic telegraphy. We see engagement of Americans with cosmopolitan discourses of ascendant free labor, democracy, and codified international law, three particularly intriguing realms of global reform across the last third of the nineteenth century.

Most of all, we see figures from the Republican Party building on the nationalist – and revolutionary – vanquishing of the Confederate slaveocracy.[1]  With military victory by force of arms largely completed, Lincoln’s injunction to “act anew” and “think anew” opened opportunities to use comparatively peaceful means of sustaining and expanding international influence.  In 1864, Karl Marx had termed the Union’s “rescue of an enchained race” as “an earnest of the epoch to come.” Admittedly, the Republicans featured in these posts did not serve as a revolutionary vanguard of Marx’s “social reconstruction of the world.” Yet to offer that observation neither undermines the reality of Republicans’ ambitious global vision nor the consequential results of the party’s endeavors beyond U.S. borders.[2]

 

[1] Gregory P. Downs, The Civil War Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

[2] Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011), 48.

Robert E. Bonner

Robert Bonner is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College. He is now completing a biographical study of Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens titled Master of Lost Causes and launching a book-length account of Confederate commerce raiding, privateering, and slave trading, titled Slaveocrats At Sea: The Global Menace of a Maritime Southern Confederacy.

A World “Transfixed”: The International Resonance of American Political Crises during Reconstruction and at Present

A World “Transfixed”: The International Resonance of American Political Crises during Reconstruction and at Present

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The conditions of the global pandemic have made us keenly aware, once again, of the interconnectedness of the world we share. Recent protest movements against systemic racism have radiated from the United States to distant places. Reporting the reactions of people around the world to American events, The New York Times has described many as “transfixed by the unrest in the United States over police brutality, racism and President Trump’s response.”[1] Even before this spring, in the past few years the dynamics and content of political movements around the world have suggested intertwined experiences. Many people have attempted to explain parallels among so-called populist uprisings and centrifugal forces gripping nations geographically far removed from one another. Rapid travel and social media have certainly bound our world more closely, but do they fully account for the political convergences we have witnessed?

The era of Reconstruction, though an age of telegraphs and steam rather than Twitter and Snapchat, presents analogous puzzles for historians. As scholars have pointed out, the reunification of the United States coincided with the consolidation of other powers, including Italy, Germany, and Japan.[2] To what degree did advances in technology and communication contribute to patterns of nation-state formation in the mid- to late nineteenth century? To what extent were the developments in disparate places related? In particular, how should we understand the emancipation of four million people within the United States in relation to abolition in other societies? Historians have made forays into answering these questions. Emerging work builds on W. E. B. Du Bois’s insistence in Black Reconstruction that Americans awaken to the “worldwide implications” of Reconstruction and the resounding impact of its curtailment.[3] New scholarship also expands on earlier comparative studies. Initial results are evident in an assortment of conferences and edited volumes.[4]

As we reflect on Reconstruction and its international resonance, we might recall a specific moment – the election of 1868. In November of that year, the United States held the first national election in which African American men in the former Confederacy could vote, introducing a new and potentially powerful force in electoral politics. The election came on the heels of a momentous few years. The Republican Congress had wrested control of Reconstruction from President Andrew Johnson. The Reconstruction Acts of March 1867 had set in motion the expansion of suffrage in the South and prescribed the process for adopting new state constitutions. In the spring preceding the presidential election, an impeachment trial narrowly resulted in Johnson’s acquittal. In the South as election day approached, the Ku Klux Klan (founded in 1866) waged a campaign of terror, targeting African Americans and white Republicans.[5]

International observers, particularly within the British government, were riveted by these events and the prospect of a tumultuous election. British officials’ own domestic, imperial, and diplomatic preoccupations drove their profound interest in American politics. At the time of Radical Reconstruction, British politicians and intellectuals were in the throes of reassessing British institutions and debating the organization and representation of the colonies. At home, the Reform Act of 1867 had almost doubled the British electorate. Although hailed as the “Leap in the Dark,” this legislation retained significant restrictions on the franchise and was far more limited than the changes underway in American governance.[6]Looking to the United States as a laboratory in which to watch political experiments unfold, British officials speculated about where the expansion of American democracy might lead and how it would alter the nation’s role in the international sphere. Marveling at the rapidity and unpredictability of developments in the United States, they worried about how these changes might disrupt the British Atlantic. One prominent British cabinet member observed, “On the whole the American Revolution (for the practical change in their government amounts to nothing less) is watched with more interest than any other event of the moment.” He added, “It is hard to see how a majority of Congress, with the president in opposition, is to govern a conquered country half the size of Europe yet this they must do or fail.” British leaders’ calculations about a shifting international order drew on their interpretation of changes in the relationship between the federal government of the United States and the American electorate and public.[7]

Now, looking back on the election of 1868 and the contests of U.S. Reconstruction reminds us how protracted the struggle for equality, voting rights, and basic safety for African Americans has been. If we also consider the international interest the election inspired, we can better appreciate the stakes of that election for both voters and witnesses at the time. Awareness of the international ramifications and responses might enhance our understanding of the acute historical significance of both 1868 and 2020. A similar insight animated Du Bois’s work in 1935 and promises to sharpen our analysis of Reconstruction and its striking relevance to our own times.

[1] Rick Gladstone, “Dear America: We Watch Your Convulsions with Horror and Hope,” The New York Times, June 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/world/americas/global-protests-george-floyd.html.

[2] See Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Charles Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24, 579.

[4] These include the David Prior, ed., Reconstruction in a Globalizing World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018) and a 2018 conference on “Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reinterpreting Reconstruction in the Atlantic World,” held at the College of Charleston.

[5] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), chapters 6 and 7.

[6] Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For the basic provisions of the Reform Act of 1867, see “Second Reform Act,” Living Heritage: The Reform Acts and representative democracy, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/houseofcommons/reformacts/overview/furtherreformacts/.

[7] Brooks Swett, “Fashioning a New Democracy and Empire: Reconstruction of the American Union in the Shadow of Britain, 1865-1885,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, manuscript, chapter 3.

Brooks Swett

Brooks Swett is a doctoral student in nineteenth-century U.S. history with a focus on Anglo-American exchanges and relations at Columbia University.

Reconstruction at Sea: The American Campaign to Reform International Neutrality, 1865-1871

Reconstruction at Sea: The American Campaign to Reform International Neutrality, 1865-1871

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The CSS Alabama sank off the coast of France in June 1864. For two years, the Confederate commerce raider had prowled the world’s oceans, capturing and burning dozens of Union merchant vessels. Yet when the Alabama met its end, it left behind more than a devastated U.S. merchant fleet; it also left behind a complex international legal dispute: the “Alabama Claims.” In the years that followed, American jurists and policymakers would seize on the Alabama Claims case as an opportunity to “reconstruct” the laws of international neutrality. Thus, at the very same time that Republicans were building a new political and legal order at home, they were also trying to create a new political and legal order for the world. These parallel post-war projects had more in common than we might assume.

The controversy over the Alabama hinged on the ship’s origins. Since the Confederacy lacked proper shipbuilding facilities, the Alabama was constructed in Great Britain. It was also outfitted with British armaments and manned by a largely British crew. While British neutrality rules should have prevented such overt help for a foreign combatant, Confederates were able to skirt the law thanks to loopholes and lax enforcement.[1]

The British government’s negligence sparked outrage in the United States. “As news arrived of the plunder and the burning by the Alabama of one ship after another,” one observer later recalled, “there was not a soldier at the front . . . whose wrath was not kindled against the English Government.”[2] Nor did American anger die down when the Civil War ended. Spurred on by northern commercial interests, the U.S. government pressed Britain to pay tens of millions of dollars in compensation for lost ships and cargo. In response, British officials offered only minor concessions. A diplomatic stalemate ensued, and only in 1872 was the dispute finally, peacefully resolved.

For one group of legal thinkers and policymakers, the Alabama Claims dispute presented an opportunity to overhaul the laws and norms that governed how neutral states should conduct themselves in foreign wars. Charles Sumner, Francis Lieber, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, George Bemis, and other leading American jurists had long complained that existing national laws regulating neutrality were inadequate. In their view, what was needed were new international rules capable of restraining neutrals and preventing future Alabama-like schemes. Since treaty-making was the principal way in which international law was enacted in the nineteenth century, a treaty with Britain represented the most promising vehicle for introducing such rules.

To this end, American jurists proposed a spate of new, more stringent neutrality rules that they hoped would form part of any agreement with Britain. Much of their energy went toward closing the loopholes in British law that had allowed for the construction and deployment of the Alabama. But some jurists went further, arguing (for example) that neutral states should no longer be allowed to sell arms to foreign combatants, and that permanent courts of arbitration should be created for the purpose of settling neutrality disputes. Ultimately, several of these ideas were incorporated into a pivotal 1871 treaty between the United States and Britain.

Some jurists also attempted to lay down new rules about when states should declare neutrality, particularly in cases of foreign civil war. Britain had issued its proclamation of neutrality for the U.S. Civil War in May 1861, two months before large-scale fighting broke out. To American jurists, this “hasty” proclamation seemed in retrospect to have been a critical boost for the Confederacy, setting the fledgling nation on its feet and “warming [it] into life.”[3] In the future, they argued, foreign states should declare neutrality toward intra-state wars only after fighting had begun, and then only if the insurgent party met certain criteria. In this way, American jurists hoped to create a new international order less hospitable to rebels, and more hospitable to established states—an international order, in short, that supported and reaffirmed the Westphalian principle of national sovereignty.

It is in this sense that American jurists’ campaign for international neutrality reform complemented the more familiar process of Reconstruction inside U.S. borders. Political theorists describe sovereignty as having two sides or “faces”: an internal one, concerning a state’s authority over its own territory, and an external one, concerning a state’s authority to act independently on the world stage.[4] During Reconstruction, the United States consolidated its internal sovereignty by suppressing many of the “counter-sovereignties” that had previously served as rival centers of power and authority.[5] The campaign for international neutrality reform that accompanied the Alabama Claims dispute with Britain represented a parallel consolidation of external sovereignty. By placing limits on other states’ ability to interfere in U.S. domestic affairs, it shored up national sovereignty abroad, at the same time that Reconstruction was shoring up national sovereignty at home.

Ultimately, this “Reconstruction at Sea” was partial and incomplete; many of its most ambitious proposals went unrealized (at least at the time). Yet the campaign for neutrality reform reminds us that the problems that confronted post-Civil War policymakers were not merely domestic in scope. What Charles Sumner had observed in the midst of the Civil War—that “Foreign Relations have been hardly less absorbing than Domestic Relations”—remained just as true in the Reconstruction Era.[6]

 

[1] Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1872 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).

[2] Frank Warren Hackett, The Geneva Tribunal of Arbitration 1872. The Alabama Claims (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911), 45.

[3] George Bemis, Hasty Recognition of Belligerency and Our Right to Complain of It (Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1865), iii.

[4] Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[5] Steven Hahn, “Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation-State,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (September 2013): 307-330. The term “counter-sovereignties” is from Hahn, “What Sort of World Did the Civil War Make?” in eds. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 341.

[6] Charles Sumner, Our Foreign Relations… Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, before the Citizens of New York, at the Cooper Institute, Sept. 10, 1863 (New York: Young Men’s Republican Union, 1863), 5.

Free Labor, Emancipation & Reconstruction’s Global Lens

Free Labor, Emancipation & Reconstruction’s Global Lens

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When Charles Hale arrived in Cairo in October 1864, he brought the Civil War with him. The new Consul-General of the United States in Egypt, Hale had made his name as a journalist, and as a politician, having served in the Massachusetts state legislature. A Boston brahmin who came of age in the 1840s and 50s, Hale saw the world through the prism of a titanic global struggle between slavery and freedom. So when a case crossed his desk only a few months after the end of the Civil War, it is perhaps not surprising that Charles Hale saw an opportunity to carry on that struggle, even if thousands of miles from home.[1]

A Danish explorer, Alexandrine Tinné, had prevailed upon Hale in the autumn of 1865 to protect a number of African servants who had travelled with her on her explorations of the White Nile. To shield them from potential enslavement, she had paid to place them as students in the American Mission School. To add to their protection, Tinné wanted Hale to make them protégés of the American consulate—that is, foreign persons protected by the United States, short of enjoying rights as citizens. She didn’t have to work hard to convince him. Slavery, argued Hale in a letter to his superiors, was alive and well in Egypt, and given “the superb position which our country at this moment occupies in the face of the world, with reference to slavery and the negro race,” it was incumbent on the State Department to extend protection abroad to persons under threat of enslavement, just as African Americans and their allies were struggling to protect freedpeople from re-enslavement at home. To up the ante, Hale recounted how British authorities in Egypt had undertaken much the same action. The “same principles which lead Great Britain to object to forced labor on the Suez Canal,” argued Hale, “and to involuntary domestic servitude in Egypt,” ought to apply in the application of American power abroad as well. Ultimately, Hale was unsuccessful. Yet, both his attempt and his failure is instructive. All but daring the State Department to flex its muscles, Charles Hale saw Egypt as a new front in a global conflict: a conflict in which free labor was anything but ascendant.[2]

By the middle of the 1860s, free labor had never seemed more pervasive, or more fragile. In the nineteenth century, driven largely by an age of emancipation that brought about the slow, halting collapse of the transatlantic slave trade and, later, slavery itself, free labor emerged as a force in its own right. This was particularly true in the United States, where free labor served as the ideological bedrock of the Republican Party.[3] But what had seemed like the answer to solving the “slavery question” looked threadbare, even by the beginning of the Civil War. By then, emancipatory projects in the Caribbean had demolished the idea that free labor would bring about the flowering of former slave colonies, as political economists had claimed it would.[4] Formerly enslaved people threw innumerable wrenches in the works as well, demonstrating that would-be free laborers wanted more than just a wage. And while wage laborers in Northern Europe and the United States grew in number, their wages and living conditions remained poor, in spite of widespread labor organization that sought to reverse the trend.[5] Free labor may have been on the march in parts of the American South by the later stages of the Civil War, but for roughly three decades, the movement of hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from India and China to the Americas had showed at least by the 1840s, that coercion could come in many forms.[6] Though American advocates deemed free labor a grand experiment, many parts of the Atlantic World had already tried it. The results had been checkered at best.[7]

Not all U.S. consuls were like Hale, burning with conviction about role of the United States as a global leader in the march of free labor. Most were men on the make—fortune seekers on the ragged edges of a globalizing capitalist economy, with diplomatic passports in their pockets and their ears tuned to insider information on the docks. But though self-interested, American consuls faced big questions all the same: about the place of the United States in the world, the role that the republic might play in an increasingly dominant capitalist economy and, for men like Hale, the limits of the United States’ devotion to the principles of free labor.

What Charles Hale’s adventures in Egypt suggest to us is that there are some powerfully important stories to be told about the history of free labor that place Reconstruction in a broader, global frame. While he might have seen the victory of free labor over slavery in the United States as a triumph, Hale’s experience suggests just one facet of a larger story of emancipation: as a long, halting process that continued on through the Civil War, and remains a shadow cast over our own moment in the present day. Reckoning with the history of slavery and capitalism by focusing not only on the moment when these two forces came to form a seamless whole, but instead on what happened when coerced labor began to change its shape, offers opportunities to check the historical victories we all-too easily declare in broader national narratives. Systems of coercion not only withstood the age of emancipation, but became ever more difficult to disentangle, as capitalism entered into an age of consolidation, and searched an imperial globe for cheap labor, at a distance from consumers. This was the world Charles Hale looked out on.

 

[1] For a biography of Hale, see Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner, 1928-58), 8: 96-97.

[2] Charles Hale to William Seward, 9 September 1865 and 27 October 1865 (roll 4), Despatches from United States Consuls in Alexandria, Egypt, 1835-1873 (T45), Department of State (RG 59), National Archives, Washington DC.

[3] For the backdrop to this history, see Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the political valences of free labor in the American context, the classic remains Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

[4] Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[5] David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967).

[6] On British indentured labor from India, beginning in the 1830s and 40s, see, for example, Brian Connolly, “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838-1860,” Past & Present 238 (2018): 85-119. For Chinese indentured labor, see, for example, Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) but also Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

[7] On the question of free labor’s blindspots, one of the best works remains Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Erik Mathisen

Erik Mathisen is a lecturer in U.S. History at the University of Kent. He is a historian of the United States, with broader interests in the history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World, the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and the global clash between labor and capitalism over the ‘long nineteenth century.

Gettysburg and July 4, 2020: Four Historians Respond

Gettysburg and July 4, 2020: Four Historians Respond

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After the gathering of armed militia at Gettysburg National Military Park on July 4, 2020, JCWE editors asked four historians to respond, three of whom have especially intimate connections with the park, one of whom had expressed his outrage to us. Their responses are below in this special Muster post in response to the many events occurring during the Summer of 2020.

Scott Hancock, Gettysburg College, connects his own BLM demonstrations and reactions by often armed militia at the Gettysburg National Military Park with the lyrics of the Public Enemy’s 1990 title track in a post entitled “Fear of a Black Planet (Part I).”

Peter S. Carmichael, the Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, offers some personal reflections of as a witness to the events and as a Civil War era scholar with intimate connections to the site in “Gettysburg National Military Park and July 4, 2020: Personal Reflections.”

Jennifer M. Murray, Oklahoma State University, sheds light on the history of white supremacist gatherings at Gettysburg National Battlefield and contextualizes the July 4, 2020 armed militia event in “Ground Zero: The Gettysburg National Military Park, July 4, 2020.”

Mark Grimsley, The Ohio State University, reflects on the Black Lives Matter movement and its current disruption of the white privilege embedded in the American cultural landscape in his essay titled “All the Stars Aflame.”

Gettysburg National Military Park and July 4, 2020: Personal Reflections

Gettysburg National Military Park and July 4, 2020: Personal Reflections

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To be surrounded by men and women in festive patriotic attire and jungle fatigues, and holding a range of rifled weaponry was not how I expected my protest to end on July 4th. For much of the day my conversations with members of the Alt Right were uninteresting and largely forgettable. I was with my colleague Scott Hancock and a few other individuals in what can best be described as a teach-in at Gettysburg National Military Park. We came with signs that stressed the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy and posters that acknowledged the role of the enslaved on the battlefield. Nothing in my nearly 35 years of doing interpretation at Civil War sites, where I have encountered zealous defenders of the Confederacy, prepared me for the crowd of right-wing extremists who descended upon Gettysburg.  They were not the Lost Cause disciples of your parent’s generation.

As many have seen on You Tube, Scott had had an intense experience earlier in the morning at the Virginia monument, where the  self-deputized defenders of Gettysburg were angry and aggressive.  Scott handled the situation with bravery and integrity while always being respectful of the other side. It was a masterful performance and should be required viewing for all public historians.

Around mid-afternoon, Scott and I reached our designated area. Things were slow, and I ventured to the National Cemetery, the epicenter of the Alt-Right rally. What an amalgamation of people that included militia groups, extreme libertarians, anti-government folks who identified with the colonials of the American Revolution, neo Confederates, bikers, and Klansmen sans the white hoods. Noone occupied the rostrum, no one used a megaphone, and no one emerged from the crowd as a spokesperson. Chants of U.S.A and All Lives Matter erupted from time to time without provocation or purpose.

It was immediately apparent that law enforcement officials had lost control of the event. At one point a squadron of bikers raced through the gates of the National Cemetery–so much for respecting the memory of the fallen soldiers  at Gettysburg. Because Pennsylvania is an open carry state, brandishing firearms in public, including semi-automatic weapons, is perfectly legal. God forbid, though, that someone carry a beer in public as that would violate the state’s sacred open-container law.

For some members of the Alt-Right, the battlefield was merely a stage to act out their gun-toting fantasies of protecting Americans from radical forces. Others came to Adams County energized  by what they had seen along Richmond’s Monument Avenue, believing that Gettysburg’s monuments  would be targeted next. The uniformed militia groups, from what I witnessed, saw themselves as backup for the NPS police and Homeland Security. They seemed disconnected  from the “civilians”  screaming all lives. The militia, usually in dark green uniforms, and black helmets, marched across the battlefield with the precision of a reenacting unit filled with middle-aged men. It was bizarre to see a Twilight Zone episode unfolding on the battlefield.

At the end of the day, I was chatting with a fellow who, in a very heartfelt way, was explaining why he found the Black Lives Matter movement so divisive. I listened, and then listened some more, and in the meantime, I got separated from the rest of the group as we all headed back to our cars. When I reached the Taneytown Road, I was accosted by a man who ordered  me to “take my fucking sign and get across the fucking road.” I decided to interpret his lack of civility as an invitation to stay. Ten to fifteen of his friends encircled me, and I have no doubt that they were waiting for me to come their way the entire time. They were incensed by my poster, which read “10,000 slaves in Lee’s Army” with “#Black Lives Matter” at the bottom of the sign. To lift up the experience of African Americans was bad history in their opinion, when poor whites, especially the Irish, also got shot at Gettysburg. Why was I not telling the full story? When I tried to explain that I was carrying a poster and not a billboard, and that I couldn’t possibly address all the historical actors at Gettysburg, they just screamed obscenities at me. Two women repeatedly told me that I didn’t know anything about history and that I was a “fucking moron.” I am not such a moron, however, to have told them that I taught at Gettysburg College. Where was my knowledge lacking? They never specified. I expected a Lost Cause rant, but only one person played the loyal Confederate slave card. The folks in front of me didn’t know enough to be the intellectual heirs of Jubal Early.

Their verbal stoning of me was really over Black Lives Matter, because the movement, in their minds, was hypocritical and racist. They yelled about the media’s coverup of black people killing black people in Chicago and elsewhere. They also charged that black cops were guilty of police brutality, but that only white police officers were being blamed. And finally, they screamed at me about the funding for Black Lives Matters, insisting that donations go to Islamic extremists who will be led into race war by President Barrack Obama.

The people who surrounded me were delusional, to be sure, not especially bright or well-informed, driven by rage, apoplectically racist, politically paranoid, financially insecure, and convinced that their grievances against society are being ignored by all elites. One might wonder why I bothered to engage them in the first place?  I didn’t think it was right to abandon my ground when I had every right to stand there, but I didn’t do this out of spite. As an historian, I feel an obligation to try to understand all classes of people, especially when their perspective is vastly different from my own.  I wished I knew more about the economic and social status of the small mob, but from all appearances, they are not living the American Dream. I found them to be loathsome, but even so, their lives matter, and they are deserving of serious study if we are to fully understand why the working poor are drawn to reactionary ideologies. To conclude that the cause of white supremacy alone explains the Alt-Right gathering at Gettysburg, and that the disease of racism reveals itself as something handed down from one white generation to the next, is to ignore how the unique social conditions of today have  produced and sanctioned a vile and brutal form of institutional classism and racism.

All The Stars Aflame

All The Stars Aflame

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It is pleasant and sunny on this Ohio morning in mid-July 2020.  The temperature is still in the low 70s:  a good time for my 8-year old daughter Chloe and me to weed the flower beds in our backyard.  “Tell me a story,” she says, as she often does.

“About what?”

“Our family.”  She means our forebears.  Of late we’ve been tracing our family tree on Ancestry.com.

“The people on my mom’s side of the family,” I say, “enslaved other people in South Carolina.”  I would not long ago have said “owned slaves,” and it still sounds odd to my ears to express it the new, disquieting, but more accurate way.  “They grew mostly cotton.  What do you suppose is involved with growing cotton?”

She guesses that it involves planting, harvesting, and processing the cotton.

“It also involves weeding.  A lot of it. That is what slaves mainly did:  weed the rows of cotton.”

Like most of us, Chloe dislikes weeding, and the idea that people could be forced to spend their entire lives at this chore makes an impression.  She asks how our ancestors thought it was okay to make people do this.

The actual answer to this is complicated but I just say, “The Bible.  Slaveholders would point to Bible verses, like Leviticus 25, verse 44:  ‘Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.’”  “Heathen” are people who don’t believe in God.  Europeans saw Africans that way, and when they enslaved them they also made them Christians, and taught them Bible verses like that to make them think that slavery was okay.

Chloe does not miss the contradiction that people who were now converted to Christianity could still be heathens.  Our ancestors did not miss it, either.  “They told themselves that they were civilizing Africans, that their lives as slaves in America were better than their lives in Africa.  Of course, once the slaves knew about the Bible they also knew about the Exodus. When they worked in the fields they would sing songs, and one of them was . . .”—I start to sing:

“Go down, Moses

’Way down in Egypt land.

Tell ol’ Pharaoh

Let my people go.”

They were singing about oppression and freedom and there wasn’t anything their masters could do about it.  “People find ways to resist,” I tell Chloe.

Chloe knows something about that.  We have a “Black Lives Matter” sign in our yard and have marched together in a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Later we take our 2012 Honda Civic to a shop to have the muffler assembly replaced.  We enter the shop wearing masks.  None of the three men inside is wearing one; I can read on the face of the man behind the cash register that he isn’t too happy we are.  Wearing a mask, or not wearing one, in the United States in the midst of a global pandemic is a political statement.

One of the men leaves to drive our Civic onto a hydraulic lift to have a look at the muffler.  I shoot the breeze with the other two.  I happen to mention that Dan Snyder is changing the name of the Washington Redskins.

I might as well have picked my nose and eaten the booger.  The man behind the desk grimaces in disgust. “I’m just sick of it,” he says.  Everybody is offended by everything, he says—oblivious to the fact that he himself is offended that Snyder is changing the name of the Redskins.  What’s next? The Atlanta Braves?  The Cleveland Indians?

“The Pittsburgh Steelers,” offers the other man.  “Because it offends thieves.”

I don’t challenge them because it would be pointless.  You can’t change anyone’s mind without first taking time to get to know them and as for “speaking truth to power”—well, how much power have these guys really got?

Very little, I think.  Like me, they possess white skins, and for centuries that has in itself conferred power.  But those centuries are behind us and the curtain is at last closing upon the era of white dominance.  That is what the man is really sick of.

I can understand: I was born in North Carolina in the waning years of legal segregation.  One of the first things I learned was that white people were better than other people.  It is a hard thing to unlearn.  Part of me will never unlearn it.

The repair shop is within walking distance of our house, so Chloe and I leave the car and head home on foot.  We talk some about what the man said and what he really meant.

Back in the 1960s, I tell her, a Black man named James Baldwin wrote a letter to his young nephew on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, telling him in a way that was eloquent and heart-breaking that he must love the whites who would insist he was worthless.  I had to paraphrase much of what Baldwin said for Chloe but I have his words before me and can tell them to you directly.

“Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame.  You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. . . . Well, the black man”—and he could just as well have said the Native American, the Hispanic, or the Asian—“has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar:  and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”

Look up:  all the stars are aflame.

Ground Zero: The Gettysburg National Military Park, July 4, 2020

Ground Zero: The Gettysburg National Military Park, July 4, 2020

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Seven score and seventeen years after the roar of Union artillery and Confederate rifle fire fell silent on the Gettysburg battlegrounds, Adams County endured another invasion.

This one, on July 4, 2020, brought a Civil War-sized company of right-wing extremists, some heavily armed, onto the nation’s most hallowed ground in response to rumors that Antifa intended to burn an American flag in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.

Although the Antifa threat proved false (again), the day’s incidents forced the Civil War community to take notice.  If we are angered or dismayed at these demonstrations, we should not be surprised.  Gettysburg has long been a landscape at the epicenter of debates over the war’s legacies and interpretations.  The fiasco of July 4 is best understood as yet another layer in the history of a landscape that has been perpetually used, misused, defiled, and promoted.

Photographs and videos of the demonstrations quickly emerged on social media.  One photograph captured a vehicle parked along Seminary Ridge displaying a Ku Klux Klan flag.  If this seems shocking, we must recognize that the battlefield has long hosted KKK rallies, many paralleling the rise of the Second Klan.  Likely the largest Klan gathering occurred in September 1925.  Thousands poured into Gettysburg, gathered on Oak Ridge, and enjoyed two days of festivities.  In the winter of 1926, local children roaming the battlefield with sleds in tow would find the town’s Klansmen “safeguarding” sledding paths on Seminary Ridge and Baltimore Street.[1]

The battlefield remained a platform for racist discourse through the 20th century.  In 1963, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace visited Gettysburg and promised to stand for defense of the Constitution.   A tangible manifestation of white supremacy appeared in 1967 when a cross was burned on Steven’s Knoll.   As the new century dawned, Klansmen continued to rally at Gettysburg.  I spent nine summers working for the NPS as a seasonal interpretive ranger and remember walking by various KKK “1st Amendment” rallies.  Klansmen planned a rally at Gettysburg in the fall of 2013, only to be canceled because of the government shut down.  During the battle anniversary in 2017, a similar incident occurred when armed vigilantes and Klansmen descended upon the town reacting to another supposed Antifa threat.  The event passed with relatively little notice, although a man from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, one of the “militia men,” accidently shot himself in the leg.[2]

We must ask ourselves why the nation’s most infamous white supremacist group gathered on a landscape where Abraham Lincoln envisioned a “new birth of freedom” for the nation?

No man had done more to craft Gettysburg’s place in our nation’s collective consciousness than John Bachelder, the battle’s first historian.  His creation of the “High Water Mark” thesis defines Gettysburg, and specifically Pickett’s Charge, as the moment when the Army of the Potomac stood against the rising tide of the powerful Confederate army.  Paul Philippoteaux’s “The Battle of Gettysburg” Cyclorama opened to critical acclaim from northern viewers in Chicago in 1883, but in time the Gettysburg Cyclorama came to be interwoven with Lost Cause ideology and a pro-Virginia version of the battle.  In 1897, the Confederate Veteran applauded the Cyclorama’s painting of “brave Pickett and the gray-coated heroes.”  The “out-numbering enemy” repulsed the charge, but the Cyclorama captured “a tale of heroism unequaled in history.”[3]  The agency acquired this painting in 1942 and made it central to the battlefield’s interpretation.  Yet the “High Water Mark” narrative does more than fashion a story that honors the deeds and sacrifices of both Union and Confederate soldiers.  It offers a specific moment in time when the Confederacy lost their best hope for independence.  That moment in time, William Faulkner later romanticized, occurred “for every southern boy fourteen years old.”[4]

In 1913, aging Union and Confederate veterans stood at the “High Water Mark” and clasped hands across the stone wall in a staged exercise of fraternal reconciliation.  Typical of the era’s reconciliationist sentiment, Virginia’s Governor William Hodges Mann extolled, “We are not here to discuss the Genesis of the War…but to talk over the events of the battle.”[5]

And so it would be for many generations.

Yet July 4, 2020, was hardly the first time that the right mobilized to protect their heritage and the sanctification of Gettysburg.  Responding to a 2000 Congressional directive to include a discussion of slavery at national Civil War sites, Gettysburg’s interpretive theme changed from the long-standing “High Water Mark” focus to “A New Birth of Freedom.”[6]

Gettysburg became ground-zero for a renewed national discourse about the Civil War and its implications.  Letters and emails poured into the park’s administrative office, many with refrains accusing the agency of “erasing history,” promoting a “liberal agenda,” and buckling to “historical revisionism.”  The Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Heritage Committee unleashed a vigorous writing campaign to the Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt declaring that Gettysburg intended to “alter” the Civil War narrative.  One resident of Bishop, Georgia, complained to his congressman that discussing slavery at Civil War sites was “not only a misrepresentation of history,” but was “irrelevant to the purpose in preserving the battlefields.”  Writing on Confederate flag letterhead, a resident of Missouri declared that the Confederacy had not been established to preserve slavery, but to execute a second American Revolution.  A North Carolina resident viewed a discussion of slavery as a “declaration of war,” threatening “we will respond” because “southerners are tired of these bigoted unhistorical attacks.”[7]

Such voices have long been a part of the history of the Gettysburg battlefield.  On July 4, 2020, we saw the faces associated with these voices.  And they came armed.

Generations of Americans have struggled for control of the Gettysburg narrative and the battlefield—and will continue to do so.  Only in understanding the landscape’s complicated history can we better grapple with what happened on the nation’s most “hallowed ground” on July 4, 2020.  Those demonstrations stand in direct contradiction to the very memory of the soldiers who stood in defense of the United States of America and for the notion that “all men are created equal.”  We, as a nation, must recognize and admit the complexity of our past, and in particular of our nation’s most decisive epoch—the American Civil War.  Anything less is a disservice to the memory of the 700,000 Americans who died in the conflict “gave the last full measure of devotion.”

[1] “Two-Day Celebration of Ku Klux Klan Officially Opens This Morning With Thousands of Members Here For Affair,” Gettysburg Times, September 19, 1925; “Klan To Safeguard 3 Coasting Hill,” Gettysburg Times, February 15, 1926.

[2] “Armed “Patriot” Accidently Shoots Self in Leg at Gettysburg Battlefield,” PennLive, July 1, 2017.  The “militia man,” Benjamin Hornberger, is now running for the 9th Congressional District seat in Pennsylvania.

[3] “The Battle of Gettysburg,” Confederate Veteran, June 1897, 307. For the most comprehensive reading of the Gettysburg Cyclorama see: Sue Boardman and Kathryn Porch, The Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama: A History and Guide (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 2008).

[4] Roy Appleman to Regional Director, November 4, 1946, Folder 833, Box 46, Subject Files 1937-1957, NARA Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

[5] Governor William Hodges Mann, July 3, 1913, in Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg: Report of the Pennsylvania Commission(Harrisburg, PA: 1913), 143-146.

[6] Superintendent John Latschar, “Gettysburg: The Next 100 Years,” presented at the 4th Annual Gettysburg Seminar, March 4, 1995; For a discussion of how the 2000 directive was implemented at Gettysburg see: Jennifer M. Murray, “On A Great Battlefield”: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 156-158.

[7] Scott Williams to Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, undated; Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Heritage Committee Comment Card to Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, Folder 6, Box 5; G. Elliott Cummings, Commander, Maryland Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, to Alan Hoeweler, President, FNPG, September 28, 1995, Folder 5, Box 5 (Unprocessed Central Files, 1987-present), Gettysburg National Military Park Archives, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; A Johnson to Congressman, September 5, 2000, Folder 7, Box 50; Timothy Manning, Folder 7, Box 50 (Unprocessed Central Files, 1987-present), Gettysburg National Military Park Archives, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Jennifer M. Murray

Dr. Jennifer M. Murray is a military historian, with a specialization in the American Civil War, in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. In addition to delivering hundreds of Civil War battlefield tours, Murray has led World War I and World War II study abroad trips to Europe. Murray’s most recent publication is On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014. Murray is also the author of The Civil War Begins, published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in 2012. She is currently working on a full-length biography of George Gordon Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War. Murray is a veteran faculty member at Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute and a coveted speaker at Civil War symposiums and roundtables. In addition, Murray worked as a seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010).

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