Category: Blog

How to Build a Winning Coalition: What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Pennsylvania’s Republicans in 1860

How to Build a Winning Coalition: What Today’s Democrats Can Learn from Pennsylvania’s Republicans in 1860

By | | Comments 1 comment

American politics during the late antebellum era was divisive and deeply polarized, just like the present. A few key battleground states, most prominently Pennsylvania, decided the outcome of national elections. To win the Keystone State in 1860, Republican Party managers employed keen coalition-building skills. They adapted readily to changing circumstances. Hard experience taught them that a campaign aimed only at the party’s base would fall short. Republicans also passed over their most visible leaders and instead chose a lesser-known presidential candidate. Democrats in 2020 would do well to heed the techniques Republicans employed in 1860.

Photograph of Morton McMichael. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Nobody understood these imperatives better than Morton McMichael, editor of the Philadelphia North American, the largest Republican newspaper in the nation’s second largest city. He labored mightily to break the Democratic hold on Pennsylvania. The immense bound volumes of his North American, which remain available for scrutiny at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, offer a how-to window for achieving partisan success.[1]

Pennsylvania Republicans ran a campaign in 1856 that was memorable, passionate—and disappointing. Supporters of its presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, lambasted the Democratic Party’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the ham-handed efforts of the Pierce administration to open Kansas Territory to slaveholders. They focused on the “single issue”—that Democrats had become accomplices of the Slave Power. But opponents of the Democrats were divided, especially in Philadelphia, a booming manufacturing city where many native stock residents disdained immigrants and where antagonistic groups of immigrants—notably, its Catholic and Protestant Irish—clashed with each other. Republicans tried to ally with the many nativist Know Nothings who had created the American Party, but a full coalition proved elusive. Thumping margins in the city carried Democrats to statewide victory in 1856 and Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan to the presidency.[2]

A severe economic downturn that began in September 1857 triggered major political repercussions in the Keystone State. U.S. railroad construction had boomed during the 1850s, creating heavy demand for Pennsylvania-manufactured rails, locomotives, and rolling stock. But when demand suddenly slumped, many Pennsylvania workmen lost their jobs. With a heavier commitment to manufacturing and mining than any other state, Pennsylvania already favored a protective tariff. That sentiment intensified amid the economic misery. Protectionists argued that a tariff on cheap British iron was the key to restoring prosperity; it would revive moribund iron manufacturing and anthracite coal mining.

Enthusiasm for tariff protection reframed Pennsylvania politics. Nativists proved receptive to complaints that free trade depressed American wages and enabled “foreign labor” to compete unfairly with “American labor.” Protectionists, pushing an economic nationalist agenda, insisted the home market would provide prosperity for all if not undercut by imports. So likewise, protectionists blamed Southern Democrats for blocking new tariff legislation in Congress and clinging selfishly to free trade ideologies. Even more galling, the Slave Power appeared to celebrate the misery of free Northern workers and crow that slave labor was superior to free labor. As historian James Huston explained, the tariff issue “subsumed much of the nativist argument” and provided a more tangible focus for anti-Southern resentments.[3]

The North American pushed the protectionist message and rebranded Republicans as the “People’s Party.” An overflow audience of 5,000 launched the new endeavor at Philadelphia’s National Hall on June 14, 1858. Speakers led by editor McMichael blasted the just-adjourned Congress for failing to alleviate the distressed iron industry and its many unemployed workmen. People’s Party founders proposed to “expel mere sectionalism” and to focus instead on “the happiness and prosperity of the people.” They downplayed overt nativist appeals. In October the new party triumphantly carried Philadelphia by over 6,000 votes, posted large gains in coal-mining counties, and rolled up a decisive statewide margin of over 25,000. In so doing, it all but obliterated the state’s Democratic representation in Congress.[4]

New York Senator William H. Seward, the odds-on favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, spoke out for the tariff. He returned from a trip to Europe dazzled by the sprawling manufacturing cities in England and Scotland, where he saw “railroads crossing each other in all directions, bringing in coal and iron ore to the forges, whose fires, blazing from hundreds of chimneys, makes the night as brilliant as the day.” The United States should encourage its own manufactures, Seward contended, rather than remain dependent on foreign suppliers.[5]

But Seward would not lead his party in 1860. McMichael and his political allies, worried by Seward’s somewhat undeserved reputation as an antislavery radical, helped Abraham Lincoln wrest the Republican nomination away from the New York senator. Seward also was hurt by the suspicion that his welcoming stance toward immigrants and Roman Catholics made him unacceptable to former Know Nothings. People’s Party managers judged that he could not maximize their potential vote; today’s Democrats may need to make similarly hardheaded calculations in the weeks and months to come.[6]

Prominent Pennsylvanians advised Lincoln that his campaign in the state needed to focus on tariff protection. Alexander McClure, who chaired the People’s State Central Committee, explained that outside speakers coming to Pennsylvania should be “thoroughly familiar” with the tariff, which had “not been nearly so prominent in your struggles in Illinois as it has been here.” It would be the vital “overshadowing question” in parts of the state where “the Conservative element predominates.”[7]

Early twentieth century promotional sign for the Philadelphia North American. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

James E. Harvey, Washington correspondent for the North American and McMichael’s right-hand man, frequently wrote to Lincoln. Harvey rejoiced that Republicans would not be “burthened by Mr. Seward” and predicted that victory was within reach so long as the campaign was “conducted judiciously.” Eastern Pennsylvania had a significant “American [Party] element,” but with Lincoln as the candidate “the decent Americans are with us” and the North American would help keep them there. The “People’s” label, Harvey noted, was a device to attract Americans and disaffected Democrats; he cautioned Lincoln against creating a separate Republican organization that would duplicate the People’s campaign.[8]

From June through early November, People’s promoters created a continual spectacle in Philadelphia. A “Grand Mass Meeting” on June 25 filled Penn Square at Broad and Market Streets, where City Hall now stands. Speaker after speaker insisted that only the Lincoln ticket would secure tariff protection. As evening skies darkened, torch-bearing “Wide Awakes” paraded in shiny black oilcloth regalia and the crowd enjoyed a display of colorful fireworks. Comparable events continued during the summer and fall. On October 1, the “Grandest Political Torchlight Procession Ever Witnessed” coursed through the city’s streets. As Election Day neared, the North American castigated a flurry of “monstrous falsehoods”—that Lincoln would ignite slave insurrections and that Republican Wide Awakes were mobilizing to invade the South. It reassured its readers that Lincoln was “A CONSERVATIVE.”[9]

Lincoln won absolute majorities both in Philadelphia and statewide; he thereby assured his national plurality. The results were a mirror image of the outcome four years before. Then, a united Democratic Party had bested its fractured opposition in the city, state, and nation. In 1860, Pennsylvania Republicans managed to duplicate that same feat, aided by a poisonous Democratic split. But Lincoln’s victory in the Keystone State promised no crusade against slavery. As historian Russell Weigley concluded, the results in Pennsylvania showed that the South had “nothing to fear.” The People’s campaign deprived “southern fire eaters” of any “justification for secession.”[10]

The Republican Party’s rise to power between 1854 and 1860 contains lessons that remain pertinent. As I write, Democrats face an incumbent whom they regard as corrupt and dangerous. He clings to power even though his supporters constitute a minority of the national electorate. The level of partisan acrimony is intense. The People’s Party in Pennsylvania demonstrated the advantages of building a big tent. It assembled a heterogeneous hodgepodge—former Whigs, disaffected Democrats, iron manufacturing and anthracite coal mining interests that clamored for tariff protection, those tired of being bullied by the South and the Slave Power, those worried about immigration, and those repelled by the Buchanan administration’s corruption. At stake ultimately, the North American insisted, was “the great principle of self-government”—“the right of the majority to govern.”[11]

In 1860 Republicans also decided fatefully to look beyond the cluster of familiar names and find a less celebrated candidate with potentially wider appeal. This winnowing process offers Democrats today a worthy model. They must find a candidate who can do two things: win an electoral college majority, and persuade the losers of the 2020 election to accept the outcome. The latter, we must remember, eluded their illustrious predecessor in 1860.

 

[1] For background and context, see Robert L. Bloom, “Morton McMichael’s North American,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 77 (1953), 164-80; Arthur M. Lee, “Henry C. Carey and the Republican Tariff,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 81 (1957), 280-302.

[2] James E. Harvey to Henry C. Carey, December 7, 1856, Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 394-448 passim.

[3] Philadelphia North American, October 7, 1858; James L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 137, 146-47, 155-56, 231.

[4] Philadelphia North American, June 16, 1858 (special supplement); “Independent,” June 17, 1858, in Philadelphia North American, June 18, 1858.

[5] Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860), 3020-21; William L. Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 1832-1852 (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 27, 32; Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 151-82.

[6] Michael F. Holt, The Election of 1860: “A Campaign Fraught with Consequences” (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017); 88-89, 113-14; Jack Furniss, “Devolved Democracy: Federalism and the Party Politics of the Late Antebellum North,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 4 (December 2019), 546-68, esp. 553, 559.

[7] Alexander McClure to Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1860, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

[8] James E. Harvey to Abraham Lincoln, May 21, June 5, June 13, and June 25, 1860, Robert Todd Lincoln Collection of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Library of Congress. See Daniel W. Crofts, “James E. Harvey and the Secession Crisis,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103 (April 1979): 177-95.

[9] Philadelphia North American, May 28, 30, June 5, 22, 27, September 13, October 4, 6, 27, 30, and November 1 and 2, 1860.

[10] Russell F. Weigley, “The Border City in Civil War, 1854-1865,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russel F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 392, 414.

[11] Philadelphia North American, May 28, June 8, and June 28, 1860.

Daniel W. Crofts

Daniel W. Crofts, Professor Emeritus of History at The College of New Jersey, has written extensively about the North-South political crisis that culminated in secession and Civil War. He was awarded the University of Virginia's Bobbie and John Nau Book Prize for his 2016 volume, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (University of North Carolina Press).

Editors’ Note: March 2020 Issue

Editors’ Note: March 2020 Issue

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Cracks in the Foundation: The Fourteenth Amendment and Its Limits

In March 2018, we convened a conference titled “The Many Fourteenth Amendments” at the University of Miami. The timing was propitious. Not only did 2018 mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the amendment’s ratification but also the issues that would come to define the amendment—birthright citizenship, corporate personhood, equal protection, civil rights, disenfranchisement—were front and center in our daily political lives and the immediate relevance of the gathering was apparent to all. The title and the organization of the conference were designed to emphasize the multiplicity of origins, meanings, and legacies of this revolutionary amendment. Four key themes guided the program: the amendment’s genesis and its implications for corporate personhood, citizenship and immigration, and civil rights.

The quality of the papers presented was universally high, but in selecting contributions for this special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era, we chose essays that both were well grounded in the nineteenth century and would challenge readers to think expansively by casting new light (or throwing new shade) on the amendment’s multiple origins and even more numerous legacies. The Fourteenth Amendment played a critical role in a “Second Founding” of the nation that promised freedom for formerly enslaved people, but that founding was alloyed with more conservative visions of the remade nation. To embrace the new potential the amendment offered, formerly enslaved people together with allies had to confront the deeply racist conceptions of the nation that predated, and long survived, Reconstruction. While born out of the Civil War era, the Fourteenth Amendment would go on to lead a life, indeed multiple lives, of its own, and it is vital for scholars who work in the nineteenth century to understand and grapple with those larger and longer reverberations.

We begin with an ending. The Fourteenth Amendment often is celebrated as a triumph, the keystone of the “Second Founding” that attempted to bring the Constitution and the country in line with the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address by introducing a more egalitarian vision of citizenship, which promised social equality, civil rights, and equal protection under the law. Lisset Marie Pino and John Fabian Witt throw cold water on this view by challenging us to think of the Fourteenth Amendment not as a beginning that opened new possibilities but as an ending that foreclosed them. With the Fourteenth Amendment, they argue, Reconstruction switched tracks from one relying on war powers to protect freed people’s rights and status to a far less immediate and reliable one that rested on the courts and malleable interpretations of the law, thus ushering in an era of “paper rights that the federal government failed to vindicate.” When viewed in this way, the Fourteenth Amendment was not the triumph of Radical Reconstruction but rather its “betrayal” and “ending.” The essay forces us to grapple with many of our assumptions about the amendment and to question whether it deserves its celebrated place as a high-water mark of interracial democracy. The authors invite us to speculate, at least briefly, on what might have been accomplished without relying on the amendment to deliver on the promise of emancipation and to entertain a conflicted and perhaps darker view of a revolutionary amendment that, in this telling, may have forestalled revolution.

Stephen Kantrowitz urges us to consider the Fourteenth Amendment and US citizenship from another unfamiliar perspective, as part of the United States’ continued imperial expansion onto sovereign Indian lands. Tracing their twin genealogies, he reveals how African American and Native American citizenships ran in parallel courses, intersecting through legislation and the Fourteenth Amendment but possessing profoundly different origins, intents, and implications. For African Americans and their white allies, nonracial national citizenship was a long-sought and hard-fought milestone in the struggle for racial equality. However, lawmakers who advocated for Native American citizenship during this period had something different in mind: namely, land and how to take it. Whereas for African Americans, citizenship stood in opposition to slavery and white racism, for Native Americans, it was the antithesis of sovereignty. By “reducing” Native Americans to citizens, land-hungry white Americans could more readily strip them of their autonomy and with it their recognized, legal claims to valuable lands. Thus, the expansion of national citizenship to Native Americans was “a tool of the conqueror.” By expanding the story of national citizenship to include Native Americans during the Civil War era, Kantrowitz confronts us with a very different and disturbing vision of citizenship: “as instrumental, as compulsory, and as war by other means.”

Evelyn Atkinson’s article explores the amendment’s legal and political aftershocks in another unexpected direction. Set in Reconstruction California, her work shows how debates surrounding Chinese exclusion and “coolie” labor were inextricably and deliberately linked to the claiming of constitutional rights for corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment. By following the history and logic of In re Tiburico Parrott (1880), she explains how in subsequent rulings the Supreme Court would come to assert the existence of corporate personhood. The constitutional rights of corporations and Chinese labor were bound together from the very beginning, argued by the same lawyers, in the same courtrooms, and often in the same breath. That the claims of these two seemingly divergent interests could evolve in tandem reveals the “striking power of corporations in shaping the federal courts’ interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Building on this insight, Atkinson prompts historians to grapple directly with the central role that corporations played in crafting Reconstruction-era arguments about free labor and equal treatment. Indeed, while many of the protections won by racial minorities under the Fourteenth Amendment would be chipped away by subsequent court decisions, corporations continued to employ the amendment “as a shield.” Very much part of the burgeoning literature on “Greater Reconstruction,” Atkinson’s work casts a bright light on the darkly ironic process by which political and legal fights over the status of some of the nation’s most powerless people resulted in new guarantees of rights for its most powerful.

If corporate protections won in this period have persisted, civil rights protections have witnessed a transformation, as Christopher Schmidt’s essay reveals. This work takes a long view of civil rights, from the antebellum era through the twenty-first century, and it traces “two genealogies of civil rights, one of a concept, the other a term.” The authors of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment crafted the category of civil rights to include specific protections: the right to make contracts, to own property, to bring a lawsuit, to testify in court, and to legal protection of persons and property. In light of this, Schmidt shows, civil rights became “a language of limitation” that could close off access to broader conceptual rights, among them access to public accommodations including lodging, streetcars, trains, restaurants, or theaters. Nevertheless, during and immediately after Reconstruction, the concept and category of civil rights operated together in complementary, if complicated, ways. But by the time the Supreme Court issued its infamous decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) the concept and the category had diverged. This shift has enduring consequences, as Schmidt shows, and when twentieth- and twenty-first-century activists, from the NAACP to Freedom to Marry, sought to protect civil rights, the legal pathways and language available to judges and activists to access the many facets of civil rights “had been lost.”

Readers of this special issue might well conclude that these historians of the Fourteenth Amendment share a somewhat gloomy outlook. They would not be entirely wrong, but, in this, these essays have lots of recent company. Certainly, the historiographic trend has been to view the triumphant narrative of the Civil War and its consequences—within which the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment represents a culmination—with growing skepticism. Instead, historians of the Civil War era have been inclined to highlight unintended and secretly intended consequences, to expose missed or squandered opportunities, to question motives, and, most of all, to calculate the fearsome costs. Scholars of race and civil rights have begun to rewrite, and in some cases unwrite, a freedom narrative that has emphasized the emancipatory forces of the earliest days of Reconstruction in effect downplaying the tragedies and failures of the postemancipation United States. Yet the Fourteenth Amendment has not found its place in this emerging trend, and it has yet to be fully incorporated into the scholarship that stresses the limits of Reconstruction. By shifting our focus away from the optimistic view of the amendment, these essays allow us to see how the “Second Founding” also rested on the cornerstones of capitalism and racial exclusion, undermining the most lofty aspirations of the era of emancipation. By showing another side of the amendment, one much less hopeful, the essays in this special issue not only break important new ground in the scholarly exploration of the continually unfolding history of this vital living amendment but also speak directly to the historical and historiographical moment in which we find ourselves one hundred and fifty years later.

Michael T. Bernath and M. Scott Heerman

Michael Bernath is the Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami. He specializes in nineteenth-century American history with particular emphases on the Civil War Era, the South, and cultural and intellectual history. His first book was Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (UNC Press, 2010). Scott Heerman is a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century U.S. history, teaching at the University of Miami as an assistant professor. His research focuses on slavery and emancipation in the U.S. and Atlantic World, and his first book is The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country (UPenn, 2018). 

When John Brooke Came Marching Home Again, Hurrah?

When John Brooke Came Marching Home Again, Hurrah?

By | | Comments 2 comments

“When John got out his books that night, Meg’s heart sank, and for the first time in her married life, she was afraid of her husband.”[1]

Judy Giesberg recently reminded Muster readers how much the Civil War shrouds Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in print and on screen. The March sisters miss their Christmas presents just after Fredericksburg. Their chaplain-father serves in Virginia. Marmee volunteers at the Soldiers Aid Society until she leaves to care for Father. The Hummels starve with their breadwinner in uniform, and Amy attends a fair to raise money for freedpeople. In reality it was the author, however, not her father, who went to war. She served as a nurse in Washington, just after Fredericksburg, until typhoid fever nearly killed her. The experience led to her Hospital Sketches, but medicinal mercury shortened her life. She struggled with depression and alienation thereafter, which biographers link to the war. A veterans’ marker adorns her grave today.[2]

Eric Stoltz (bizarrely uniformed as both a sergeant and an officer) and Trini Alvarado as John Brooke and Meg in Little Women (1994). Brooke never appears in uniform in the 2019 film. Courtesy of Richly Rooted.

Re-reading Little Women after watching Greta Gerwig’s new film version–and looking at it through the lens of new literature on the difficult post-war readjustment of some Civil War veterans–I’m suddenly struck by the possibility that a veteran in the book serves as a stand-in for this side of Alcott. John Brooke is Laurie’s tutor, a soldier, and eventually Meg’s husband. Alcott based him on her brother-in-law John Pratt. She eventually embraced Pratt, but most readers dismiss Brooke as decent and boring. Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle are exceptions, countering that “there is no more loathsome character anywhere” in American literature. They highlight the infamous episode where new housewife Meg fails to make jelly that gels. Brooke comes home to a mess, a distraught wife, and no dinner. The authors are appalled at how he “laughs at her in front of his friend!”[3]

On the surface, such tensions in the Brooke family seem to reflect no more than trite comedy about newlyweds and new parents, complete with breezy prose and a happy ending. But with the recent literature on veterans in mind, we should return to Brooke. Smitten with Meg in 1863, he complains of his poverty and status before describing plans to enlist when Laurie goes to college. Brooke accompanies Marmee to Father’s bedside and endears himself to the family. Returning home, he woos Meg, who almost refuses his proposal until she relents to spite Aunt March. Her parents mandate delay; she is too young. We next see Brooke three years later. Alcott’s description is worth unpacking:

“She came suddenly upon Mr. Brooke.” From the 1896 edition of Little Women. Courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

John Brooke did his duty manfully for a year, got wounded, was sent home, and not allowed to return. He received no stars or bars, but he deserved them, for he cheerfully risked all he had, and life and love are very precious when both are in full bloom. Perfectly resigned to his discharge, he devoted himself to getting well, preparing for business, and earning a home for Meg.[4]

In 1864, John Pratt dodged military service and moved his family into the Alcott’s home, but his avatar “manfully” joined the army in another bit of Alcott revisionist history. He saw combat and was wounded badly enough to earn a discharge. Two years passed before Brooke recovered and could earn a living. Alcott never hints at chronic physical pain, but Brooke has changed. Reconsider the jelly incident. Meg apologizes, reflecting Marmee’s advice on subservience, but difficulties continue. Meg overspends on silk for a dress and blurts out that she hates poverty. Her under-employed and embarrassed husband sulks until Meg broaches a reconciliation that results in twins. Her nervous devotion to her children, however, again drives John away. Here Meg remembers Marmee’s admonitions:

John is a good man, but he has his faults, and you must learn to see and bear with them, remembering your own….He has a temper, not like ours—one flash and then all over—but the white, still anger that is seldom stirred, but once kindled is hard to quench. Be careful, be very careful, not to wake his anger against yourself, for peace and happiness depend on keeping his respect. [5]

“Both felt desperately uncomfortable.” From the 1896 edition of Little Women. Courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

In another book, that would be a mother’s warning about a potentially abusive husband. The effect is jarring; Marmee only praised Brooke before he enlisted. No stranger to suppressed anger, she has seen his inner demons. Meg too is “afraid” as John reads her expense accounts. Brooke pouted, but Meg and Marmee imagined worse. Indeed, Meg is later frantic that Brooke will be “harsh” with their tantrum-throwing son when he decides to stay alone in the child’s nursery. Despite John’s orders, Meg slips inside when sudden silence leaves her “imagining all sorts of impossible accidents.” What did she think John had done? [6]

Alcott to be sure stresses Brooke’s goodness. He is not her villain. Yet his wife and mother-in-law fear him, and years pass before the couple finds peace. One need not enter the current debate over post-traumatic stress disorder in the Civil War to acknowledge Brooke’s touchy disquiet and its effects on others. That was not a storybook ending, and it never appears on screen, but many veterans’ struggles to re-enter society were a real part of the war’s legacy. That included the nurse who wrote Little Women. One wonders how many of her original readers recognized someone even closer to home in John Brooke.

 

[1] Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868-69; reprint ed. with afterword by Nina Auerbach, New York: Bantam, 1983), 265. My thanks to readers Melissa Blair, Judy Giesberg, Nancy Noe, and Anne Sarah Rubin.

[2] Judy Giesberg, “Castles in the Air: A Review of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women,” Muster, January 7, 2020, accessed January 15, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/01/castles-in-the-air-a-review-of-greta-gerwigs-little-women/; John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 234, 239-41, 250-56, 260-85, 290-94, 315, 368-69; Martha Saxton, Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography (New York: Noonday Press, 1995), 9, 101-3, 191, 196-98, 217-19, 221, 229-30, 230-40, 251-68, 309-11.

[3] Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, “No One Likes Meg,” Avidly: A Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, July 18, 2016, accessed January 15, 2019, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/07/18/no-one-likes-meg/.

[4] Alcott, Little Women, 112-29, 148-63, 211-220, 224 (quotation, 224).

[5] Alcott, Little Women, 257-69 (quotation, 263).

[6] Alcott, Little Women, 367-73 (quotation, 371).

 

 

 

Kenneth Noe

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. He is the author of three books and a forthcoming volume from LSU Press on the effect of weather on the Civil War.

An Anti-Filibuster Alliance: Latin America and Opposition to U.S. Expansionism

An Anti-Filibuster Alliance: Latin America and Opposition to U.S. Expansionism

By | | Comments 0 Comment

When we think of a filibuster today, we likely think of the increasingly disappearing action by a Senator to hold up a piece of legislation by continued speech; however, in the mid-nineteenth century, filibusters were military strong men who desired to project and expand U.S. power into the Caribbean. The war with Mexico in 1846 set the United States on a trajectory toward expansion and created an assumption in Latin America that the United States had turned from a beacon of republicanism into an imperial, autocratic oppressor similar to Russia. This is an image the country still struggles with in Latin America.

During the 1850s, Central America and Cuba became repeated targets of private filibuster armies. Historians have done much to explain the role of these southward expansion projects in the causation of the Civil War.[1] However, these studies do not take into consideration Latin America and the reactions of the states in the region. Considering the tension-laden relationship between the United States and Latin American states, it is worth looking back in time to see the origin of Latin America’s mistrust as well as early coping mechanisms against U.S. expansionism.

Setting off the turbulent decade of the 1850s was Narciso López, who in 1850 and 1851 tried unsuccessfully to free Cuba from Spanish rule. However, nobody could rival the illustrious William Walker and his adventures to capture Sonora and Baja California in 1853, or his odd career in Nicaragua. Even if the filibusters were limited in scope and even more in success, they put fear into the minds of the people in Central America, worrying that what had happened to Mexico could happen to them, or that a filibuster would take over their government.[2] Therefore, some of the Latin American states assumed it best to form an alliance against U.S. aggression.

Engraving of John Randolph Clay, 1853. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In November 1856, the U.S. Minister to Peru, John Randolph Clay, reported to Washington the content of what he termed the “Continental Treaty” between Peru, Chile, and Ecuador. He had tried for a while to figure out its details. In his letter, Clay explained that the treaty was a reaction to U.S. activities in the Caribbean basin. He pointed to the recent protest by the Peruvian Minister Resident in Washington regarding U.S. recognition of the new William Walker regime in Nicaragua. Considering the controversy surrounding the Walker government, the Peruvian protest and creation of an anti-filibuster treaty should not have come as a surprise.[3]

However, Clay blamed outside forces for the new treaty between the three Latin American states. In his letter to William L. Marcy, President Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of State, Clay wondered if Brazil was behind the decision to form a continental alliance against the United States, indicating that Clay viewed the Brazilian Empire as a rival in Latin America. Despite lacking evidence, he called on Washington to “not permit Brazil, to continue to act secretly against our interests in South America.” Trying to give reasons, Clay wrote, “They think to attain this object, by exciting the prejudices of the inhabitants throughout South America by representing us as foreign to them ‘in blood and religion.’”[4] Despite Great Britain often appearing as the rival for U.S. interests in Latin America, Brazil was just as significant a rival to worry about.

Even a year later, Clay continued to worry about Latin American countries forming defensive alliances against the United States. Ignoring the war against Mexico and recent filibusters, Clay in sanctimonious fashion wrote, “I should regret if the Government of Peru participated in the idea, that there was anything in the foreign policy of the United States subversive of the rights of any of the HispanoAmerican Republics, as the suspicion, besides being unjust, might induce Peru to act in a manner to weaken the friendly relations existing between the two Nations.”[5] Despite his country being frequently the aggressor in the last decade, Clay failed to understand Latin American fears regarding U.S. threats to their sovereignty.

As the United States disintegrated into rebellion and war, its attention to Latin American affairs declined. However, the European intervention to collect debt in Mexico and eventual French invasion caused renewed concerns about Latin American security.[6]

Withdrawal of the French forces from San Juan Bautista, capital of the Mexican state of Tabasco, on February 27, 1864. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

By early 1862, as word spread about the allied landing in Vera Cruz, the Peruvian President worried about the intentions of the three European governments: was this more than just debt collection? He was certain that the American states would resist any attempt by European powers to reconquer lands in the Americas.[7]

The events in Mexico continued to concern the Peruvian government, and the new U.S. minister in Peru, Christopher Robinson, reported that the people of Peru not only sympathized with the Mexicans but felt a heightened sense of patriotism as well. Clubs had formed with the goal to create a union among the Spanish-American countries, allowing them to jointly deal with foreign threats. Even more, the clubs called for the creation of national guard units to prepare for Peru’s defense. Robinson claimed that the club looked to the United States as a bulwark against reconquest and expressed their sadness at the rebellion in the country, which had made the Mexican situation possible. This represented a dramatic change in attitude, according to Robinson. Initially, Peruvians had looked favorably to the secession crisis and a possible victory of the southern states, as it precluded renewed filibuster expeditions against Latin America.[8]

The Latin American side is a story lacking in most accounts of the 1850s filibusters. While we know much about how the government’s decision to prevent filibusters from using U.S. soil to prepare for invasions impacted northern and southern political attitudes, leading eventually to the rebellion of some southern states, the reactions of Latin American governments remain absent. In light of the unjustified war of aggression against Mexico and the incorporation of vast amounts of Mexican land, the United States lost much of its role-model image for Latin American states, and the filibusters only confirmed that. It is therefore not surprising that Latin American states sought to defend themselves against such acts of aggression with defensive alliances.

At the same time, a closer examination of Latin American relations during the Civil War may yield a far more complex picture than U.S.-Latin American scholarship has so far provided, with rivalries that not only involved France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States, but also the Brazilian Empire. This is a story that moves well beyond the power center in Washington or filibuster ground zeros, and into the hall of presidential palaces in Lima, Bogota, or Caracas.

 

[1] See Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Slavery, Race and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

[2] See Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

[3] John Randolph Clay to William L. Marcy, November 10, 1856, Despatches from United States Ministers to Peru, Volume 12, September 4, 1855-December 26, 1856, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NARA).

[4] John Randolph Clay to William L. Marcy, November 10, 1856, Despatches from United States Ministers to Peru, Volume 12, September 4, 1855-December 26, 1856, NARA.

[5] John Randolph Clay to Lewis Cass, July 11, 1857, Despatches from United States Ministers to Peru, Volume 13, January 1, 1857-December 27, 1857, NARA.

[6] See Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph Over Monarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

[7] Christopher Robinson to William H. Seward, February 25, 1862, Despatches from United States Ministers to Peru, Volume 18, November 6, 1860-June 12, 1863, NARA.

[8] Christopher Robinson to William H. Seward, June 10, 1862, Despatches from United States Ministers to Peru, Volume 18, November 6, 1860-June 12, 1863, NARA.

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.

Author Interview: Jack Furniss

Author Interview: Jack Furniss

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Today we are sitting down with Jack Furniss, author of “Devolved Democracy: Federalism and the Party Politics of the Late Antebellum North,” which appeared in our December 2019 special issue. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2018, he served as a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) at Oxford University. He is currently teaching History and Politics at Old Palace School, a high school in south London.

Thank you for taking time over the holiday break to speak with us about your work. What inspired you to write on this subject?

The more I’ve studied nineteenth-century politics, the more I have wanted to try and write something like a guidebook or handbook to antebellum party politics. Specifically, I wanted to show how the rules and structures of political competition – dictated by federalism – played an active role in shaping how parties operated and competed. Superficially, the two-party system of the mid-nineteenth century can appear to resemble our own – especially as the party labels remain the same today. Yet the nineteenth century was a very different time and place, and I wanted to show how the balance of federalism has changed and how, as scholars, we have to recognize the significance and consequences of nineteenth-century politics being far more local than its modern counterpart.

As the issue editor, Rachel Shelden, stated in her editor’s note, this entire special issue focuses on federalism and how “most nineteenth-century Americans understood their relationship to the government, both in theory and in practice” (499). Can you start us off by explaining what the term federalism refers to, and how it has shaped the American political system?

Federalism refers to the particular system of government enshrined in the constitution, which divides power and sovereignty in the United States between one central, national government and a series of state governments. The immediate question becomes what the relationship should be between these different levels of government and which tier has responsibility for acting on any given issue. The constitution holds some answers but also leaves plenty of ambiguities. While the balance of power has shifted over time, the federal system has always resulted in federal and state governments contesting and sharing power and responsibility. As a result, federalism has shaped public policy in the United States since the founding. It lay at the heart of arguments over slavery and citizenship in the early republic and continues to structure debates over everything from universal healthcare to marijuana. Within the realm of electoral politics, it helps explain why parties choose their presidential nominees after a series of state primaries and why the president is then chosen by the electoral college rather than a pure national vote.

Thanks for providing that overview! You lay it out very clearly. In your article, what is your specific argument—the main “take away” for your readers?

My article argues that placing federalism at the heart of our analysis of late antebellum northern politics forces us to reconsider the factors that explain the triumph of the Republican Party by 1860. Anti-slavery, of course, remains central to understanding the formation, appeal, and success of the Republican movement. But what I show is how Republicans’ widespread electoral success owed much to their ability to remain fluid and flexible, adapting their party structure and ideology to suit varied local circumstances across the Union. In the first half of my article, I document the many ways that federalism dictated a devolved political system that ensured electoral politics played out on many independent, state-level theatres, rather than one national stage. As a fledgling organization – only formed in 1854 – the Republican movement proved more adept than their Democratic opponents at remaining a coherent national organization despite being comprised of a disparate collection of state-level parties. Operating as a federal system in this way, Republicans matched horses for courses, building a series of electoral coalitions tailor-made to the different temperaments of individual northern states.

This interplay between state power and federal power is truly fascinating. To elaborate on the previous question, why do you think it is so vital for historians of this period to consider federalism in their analysis?

Fundamentally, I think it gets us closer to the history that nineteenth-century Americans lived. Federalism forces historians to look beyond national actors in Washington. By doing so, it makes the stories we want to tell more complicated – involving more locations and more people – but it better reflects the realities of the mid-nineteenth century. The national government was a fraction of the size it is today. Despite the burgeoning transportation and communication revolutions, Americans still lived predominantly local lives and understood nationalism through state and local allegiance. In an era of growing sectional crisis over slavery, national issues of course existed. But we gain new insights by exploring them from the bottom up.

In my own work, understanding national politics from the viewpoint of the states has yielded numerous benefits. As my article here argues, antebellum politics is revealed to be less stable and less ideological when examined state by state. Along with many other scholars like Stephen Engle, Judy Giesberg, A. James Fuller, and William Harris, I’m trying to restore state governors – largely forgotten by historians of the last fifty years – to the status they enjoyed among their contemporaries. Governors sat at the intersection of local and national government and help us understand how the federal system functioned as a whole. The papers of state executives contain neglected sources, like petitions for pardon, that provide a compelling snapshot of how citizens and non-citizens understood and interacted with government at different levels on an almost daily basis. For a fuller exposition on this, the articles in this issue by Laura Edwards and Kate Masur offer brilliant accounts of how federalism framed nineteenth-century Americans’ everyday encounters with law and government.

Your article focuses especially on the Republican Party, as you mentioned earlier. Can you provide a specific example of where you see federalism at play?

As I talk about in the article, the electoral calendar provides a particularly powerful illustration of how federalism shaped party politics. Americans today complain about an endless election cycle. They’d be less jaded if they knew how things used to be. Our modern mid-terms are at least usually over in one night. Mid-term elections in the antebellum era were spread over eighteen months! State elections were scattered sporadically across different years and different months within those years. The fact that states felt no need to align reflected the limitations of national political identity in this era. And what I try and show in the article is that these details are not simply ephemera, an arsenal for the most niche of trivia nights. This calendar had consequences. It meant that parties, rarely having to run simultaneously across a large number of states, could continually adapt their form and messaging to changing circumstances. It gave local and state elections heightened importance as they served as opinion polls for subsequent contests.

The results in particularly important states did even more than predict future contests, they were sometimes seen as deciding them. When Pennsylvania went to the polls in October 1860, the newspapers judged that their gubernatorial contest would decide Lincoln’s fate the following month. Backing up their claim, the turnout in Pennsylvania’s governor election exceeded that in the presidential election – a phenomenon hard to imagine today.

Now that this is in print, what is the focus of your next project?

I have two projects on the go at the moment. First, I’m revising my book manuscript – States of the Union: The Rise and Fall of the Political Center in the Civil War North. States of the Union rediscovers and maps the centrist politics that allowed northern politicians to persuade a fundamentally conservative people to provide electoral backing for the revolutionary measures needed to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery. Second, I am in the early stages of a new project, Reconstruction in an Age of Empires. This will place Reconstruction in international context, exploring how the challenge of realizing greater racial equality in the United States was beset by international headwinds driven by European nations in the process of growing and justifying their global Empires.

Many thanks, Jack, for participating in this interview. Readers, be sure to check out his full article, available through subscription and on Project Muse.

Teaching Military History with the Official Records

Teaching Military History with the Official Records

By | | Comments 1 comment

 

Title page, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Ser. 1, Vol. XI, Part II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884). Published in 128 volumes between 1881 and 1901, the Official Records, as they are commonly known, remain an indispensable source for Civil War historians and can be invaluable for classroom use as well.

Every time I teach my Civil War and Reconstruction course, I meet students who probably would not have taken any other history class. The enormous popular interest in military history, as most academic historians know, can draw students into the discipline. At a time when boosting course enrollments and attracting new majors is imperative, the Civil War’s battles, campaigns, and leaders can provide very powerful marketing opportunities. Yet military history presents fascinating pedagogical opportunities as well. Civil War battles generated mountains of paper—official orders and reports, soldiers’ letters and diaries, and some notoriously self-serving memoirs, among others—and within this abundant archive there are materials for countless projects that can introduce students to the joys, vexations, and rewards of writing history.

Most students enter college having consumed history from books, movies, or historic sites, but without having produced history themselves. For this reason, every history course must address historical methods: how to ask good questions, evaluate primary sources, handle deficient or conflicting evidence, and reach judicious conclusions. Military history, including study of battles and campaigns, offers an invaluable starting point for wrestling with these problems, because the sources reflect the confusion of battle, the fog of war, and the impulse to shift blame or claim credit. “Battle history looks deceptively simple from the outside,” wrote historian Kenneth W. Noe, but “even for a seasoned scholar it can prove the hardest, most mentally taxing work of one’s career. Never again will one use so frequently the skills we teach young scholars in methodology and historiography courses, especially the selecting and weighing of conflicting evidence.”[1]

Portrait of General Robert E. Lee, February 18, 1865. This photograph was taken nearly three years after Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia on June 1, 1862. His first major test in this role would come a few weeks later, between June 25 and July 1, during the Seven Days Battles. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Eager to guide undergraduates through some of these methodological mazes, I created an assignment that capitalizes on the wealth of material available in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, usually referred to as the Official Records or the OR. A staple of historical research since it was published by the U.S. War Department between 1881 and 1901, the Official Records comprise 128 volumes (plus 31 naval volumes) packed with orders, reports, letters, casualty returns, and other pieces of the vast paper trails left by Civil War armies and navies.[2] The OR’s pedagogical possibilities are boundless, but I decided to focus the assignment on two high-level accounts of the same event: General George B. McClellan and General Robert E. Lee’s reports of the Seven Days Battles, fought just east of Richmond, Virginia, from June 25 to July 1, 1862.[3]

Not only were the reports penned by opposing commanders in a massive series of battles that are sometimes overshadowed by Antietam and Gettysburg, they also invite students to think about how, and for what purposes, historical documents were created. McClellan wrote his four-and-a-half-page report two weeks after the Seven Days Battles ended, while his army was still perched on the Virginia Peninsula between the York and James Rivers. This meant that the clashes remained vivid in his mind, though he had not yet received reports from all of his subordinate officers. Lee’s report, in contrast, runs to nine pages and was written eight months later in March 1863. Thus, although the events were less fresh, Lee  had the benefit of reading what lower-echelon officers had written about the Confederate side of the battle.

With this background in mind, the documents open a range of questions for students to explore in their roughly five- to seven-page papers. Whose account, if any, seems more reliable, and why? What do the reports tell us about their authors, both as generals and as people? What do they reveal about the nature of Civil War combat, as viewed from army headquarters, and what do they obscure? Can they be combined to create a single coherent narrative? Or are the accounts too contradictory? I encourage students to pursue the questions that interest them most, so long as they develop and defend a clearly-stated thesis, and the assignment does not require research beyond the class notes that put the Seven Days Battles into broader context. The point is to introduce students to the richness of the OR, the complexity of reconstructing what happened in a Civil War battle, and the difficulties of weighing discrepant accounts of the same events.

George B. McClellan. Major General Commanding U.S. Army, c. 1862. This lithograph was published by J.H. Bufford in 1862, while McClellan commanded the Army of the Potomac. McClellan’s first major campaign as army commander culminated in the Seven Days Battles, during which his army was driven away from the outskirts of Richmond. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Of course, the OR could be used in assignments for students of all levels, from high school through doctoral study, and can empower them to ask and answer questions of all sorts. They might compare how an army commander and a junior officer experienced the same battle, for example, or analyze two documents written by the same person at different stages of the war. The OR also contains valuable material on non-battlefield events and issues, including the treatment of prisoners of war, military-civilian relations, the process of emancipation, and much else. Plus, the OR is available, free of charge, to anyone with an Internet connection, making it ideal for instructors teaching online courses, those who work at institutions with less-than-stellar libraries, and anyone who is concerned about the rising cost of textbooks. Most importantly, the OR enables students to do the same kind of work done by professional historians—and to explore the same trove of documents that has sustained generations of groundbreaking research on the Civil War.

 

[1] Kenneth W. Noe, “Jigsaw Puzzles, Mosaics, and Civil War Battle Narratives,” Civil War History 53, no. 3 (September 2007), 237.

[2] On the OR, see Alan C. Aimone, “Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Essential Civil War Curriculum, accessed January 17, 2020, https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/official-records-of-the-union-and-confederate-armies.html. The complete OR can be found online at http://collections.library.cornell.edu/moa_new/waro.html.

[3] On the Seven Days Battles, see Brian K. Burton, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and Brian K. Burton, The Peninsula and Seven Days: A Battlefield Guide (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods is Associate Professor of History at University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) and Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, 2014), which received the 2015 James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association. His most recent book is entitled Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (North Carolina, 2020).

Teaching the Reconstruction Era Through Political Cartoons

Teaching the Reconstruction Era Through Political Cartoons

By | | Comments 8 comments

During this past fall semester I received an email from a curriculum coordinator at a local school district. She stated that a high school history teacher was running short on time, but wanted to spend one day with his students discussing the Reconstruction era before the end of the semester. The teacher wanted to bring in someone who had knowledge of the period and would be willing to lead a discussion on the larger themes of the era. As a Park Ranger at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, I’ve worked hard over the past few years to study Grant’s presidency and to better understand the Reconstruction Era. I also served as the first Social Media Manager for Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort, South Carolina, on an interim basis in 2017 and 2018. Needless to say I anxiously jumped at the opportunity to speak with students about Reconstruction.

As I have previously discussed on this website, one of the biggest reasons the Reconstruction era is so misunderstood is that it is rarely taught in the classroom. When it is taught, the narrative will often focus on stories of scandal, corruption, and mistreatment of former Confederates. The broader focus of current historical scholarship—which emphasizes the legal, political, and economic changes that brought about a new spirit of equality and civil rights in American life—is often left out. And the reality for many teachers is that having one day to teach Reconstruction is a luxury. So what could I do to help this teacher have a productive experience for his students?

The most relatable content for middle and high school students when it comes to Reconstruction are the many hundreds of political cartoons that were created at the time. When looking at good examples for classroom use, the best online resource I have come across is Princeton University’s digital collection of Thomas Nast cartoons. Featuring more than 500 cartoons that cover a range of topics—emancipation, civil rights, women’s rights, immigration, and party politics, among others—I picked out six of my favorite works and brought them with me for the classroom presentation. Each one focused on a different topic.

When I arrived for the presentation (along with a colleague of mine), we spread the cartoons throughout the room and began with a short introduction to the students. We explored some of the larger themes of Reconstruction and briefly discussed the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. From there we had the students get out of their seats and participate in a “gallery walk.” We asked the students to walk around the room the same way they’d visit a museum and to then stand by the political cartoon that they thought was the most interesting. We then gave the students about five minutes to closely analyze each political cartoon and to make a decision.

“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, 1869. Photo courtesy of Princeton University.

At this point we had each group explain their political cartoon to the rest of the class. What did they see in the cartoon? What was the message being conveyed? Who was the intended audience for this cartoon? How might someone disagree with the message of this cartoon? Was the cartoon persuasive? I went through this checklist of questions and had the students lead the conversation with occasional input from the park rangers. One example I used for this exercise was “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” designed by Nast in 1869. Students observed the messages of the cartoon (“Universal suffrage,” “Come One Come All,” “Self Government”) and took note of the various people sitting at the table and pictures of the wall. They quickly picked up the larger themes of the cartoon: democracy, liberty, equality, and the idea that the United States should be a beacon of freedom for people of all nations. In addition to the questions I posed during the discussion, this cartoon could in turn lead to further discussions about whether or not Nast’s vision of America has been fulfilled. Through this short exercise we were able to introduce Reconstruction to the students, several of whom expressed their appreciation for our visit.

Another tool I have developed for classroom use is a visualization of the broader themes of Reconstruction and how they connect with one another. This document represents my best attempt to highlight four crucial ideas:

1. The central questions of Reconstruction
2. Changes to the U.S. Constitution through three Amendments
3. The experiences of various groups who lived through Reconstruction
4. Resistance to Reconstruction and its eventual replacement by Jim Crow legislation

A Visualization of the Reconstruction Era. Courtesy of the author.

I have used this visualization for a few classroom visits in the past, and I think students like the way it summarizes a complex time period on one sheet of paper. Nevertheless this document is very much a work in progress and I invite feedback from readers of this blog to improve it.

If you work with students in a middle, high school, or college setting, how do you go about teaching Reconstruction, particularly if you’re running on limited time? Let us know in the comments.

Nick Sacco

NICK SACCO is a public historian and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in History with a concentration in Public History from IUPUI (2014). In the past he has worked for the National Council on Public History, the Indiana State House, the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and as a teaching assistant in both middle and high school settings. Nick recently had a journal article about Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with slavery published in the September 2019 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He has written several other journal articles, digital essays, and book reviews for a range of publications, including the Indiana Magazine of History, The Confluence, The Civil War Monitor, Emerging Civil War, History@Work, AASLH, and Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He also blogs regularly about history at his personal website, Exploring the Past. You can contact Nick at PastExplore@gmail.com.

New JCWE Editors Selected, Will Assume Position January 15

New JCWE Editors Selected, Will Assume Position January 15

By | | Comments 3 comments

The Journal of the Civil War Era and the Richards Center at Penn State are thrilled to announce our new JCWE co-editors, Greg Downs and Kate Masur, who will assume the position effective January 15, 2020.

Gregory P. Downs is Professor of History at University of California-Davis. He studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particularly, he investigates the transformative impact of the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the role of military force in establishing new meanings of freedom. He is the author of three monographs on the Civil War era and Mapping Occupation, an interactive digital history of the U.S. Army’s occupation of the South (www.mappingoccupation.org).

Kate Masur is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She specializes in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery in both the North and South. Masur, a faculty affiliate of the Department of African American Studies, is author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (2010) and numerous articles on emancipation and black politics during and after the Civil War.

In 2015, Downs and Masur co-edited The World the Civil War Made, a collection of essays that charts new directions in the study of the post-Civil War era. The two also co-authored The Era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study published in July 2017. Downs and Masur wrote about their NPS work in The Atlantic Online and The New York Times, and they co-edited a Reconstruction special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era that includes a forum on the future of Reconstruction studies and a roundtable conversation on Reconstruction in public history and memory.

We are truly excited to have them join our team, and we extend thanks to everyone involved in the search process—including the Richards Center Academic Advisory Board, which reviewed applications, interviewed candidates, and made their recommendation—as well as the other excellent applicants for their dedication to the field of Civil War studies.

 

Castles in the Air: A Review of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women

Castles in the Air: A Review of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women

By | | Comments 3 comments
Little Women, 2019. L-R: Eliza Scanlen (Beth), Saoirse Ronan (Jo), Emma Watson (Meg), and Florence Pugh (Amy). Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

Impatient for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women to come out, I watched the 1994 movie again to bide my time. Susan Sarandon (Marmee) and Winona Ryder (Jo) steal the show, delivering the movie’s most memorable lines critiquing Victorian gender expectations, such as when Marmee dismisses a neighbor’s concerns about her daughters’ rough-housing with the boys with the comment, “feminine weaknesses and fainting spells are the direct result of our confining young girls to the house, bent over their needlework, and restrictive corsets.” Or when Jo joins a conversation between Friedrich and other self-important professor-types with: “I find it poor logic to say that women should vote because they are good. Men do not vote because they are good; they vote because they are men, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country.” Drop. The. Mic. Jo! Beyond Marmee and Jo, though, the other performances are less memorable.

Little Women, 1994. L-R: Winona Ryder, Trini Alvarado, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon and Claire Danes. Credit: Columbia Pictures.

I have loved the 1994 movie since it came out, use it alongside of the novel in my teaching, and shared it with my own children. But in Gerwig’s hands, the lives of the March sisters and their mother come to life in a way that will make it hard to look back. The new film is textured, moving, and devastating in its exploration of what it feels like to grow up in a society that tells girls they can be or do anything and then fails to support women who do.

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women for nineteenth-century girls who stood at the edge of adulthood. The first part captures the independence enjoyed by middle-class, northern white girls before marriage, a time when they could dream about the future and about what sort of women they wanted to be.[1] In their dreams they grow up to be actors (Meg), pianists (Beth), authors (Jo), and artists (Amy)—”castles in the air” is what Alcott called them. “I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous; that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream,” exclaims Jo.[2] But in Victorian America women had only two paths to adulthood: happy wives or spinsters.

The second part explores the girls’ transition to adulthood. Alexis de Tocqueville commented on “the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in America” thought and spoke; once married, though, they gave up their independence for the “bonds of matrimony.”[3] There were few contemporary examples of marriages that made room for women’s ambitions, their “happy boldness.” Alcott’s parents were iconoclasts, but in the end, Bronson Alcott’s transcendentalism and the family’s abolitionism were sustained by Abigail May Alcott—Louisa’s mother—and her willingness to support her husband’s ambitions, even when they drove the family to poverty.

Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s mother and the inspiration for Marmee. Courtesy of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House.

Because it starts at the end, when the March sisters are grown up, the new film focuses on all of the compromises, big and small, that the girls made as they prepared to leave behind their castles in the air. For Meg, this means forgetting her dream of marrying well, and Amy gives up on her art. But whereas Alcott’s big compromise at the end of the novel was to marry off Jo, her avatar who famously intended to remain a “literary spinster,” Gerwig’s brilliant ending leaves open the possibility that Jo found a way to realize her ambition. Gerwig’s decision to structure the film as a flashback allows each sister to defend the compromises she made to find her way forward. The March sisters do this when they repeat a maxim of nineteenth-century feminism, that marriage is a financial transaction, which sounds as unromantic, unsparing, and accurate today as it did in the 1860s.

Jo’s marriage transaction is in the trailer: Jo, played by Saoirse Ronan, reluctantly agrees to marry off the book’s protagonist for more money and in return for retaining copyright of the book. “If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money,” she says, “I might as well get some of it.” The line is not in the novel, but Alcott surely would have approved. Amy, played by Florence Pugh, delivers the film’s longest and most damning critique of coverture. When Laurie, played by Timothée Chalamet, questions Amy’s determination to marry for money, she responds with:

I’m just a woman, and as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family, and if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property, so don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

It’s appropriate that Amy delivers these lines, as next to Jo, she is the character that audiences have the strongest feelings about. Shirley Li in The Atlantic applauds Pugh for rescuing the youngest sister from her reputation as the “brat running around in an outfit made up of hand-me-downs, or the young woman flirting her way into the heart of Jo’s best friend.”[4] Gerwig’s Amy makes the fully rational decision to marry Laurie on her own terms.

Gerwig’s greatest feat may be in giving Meg more depth. It is easy for readers who identify with Jo to dismiss Alcott’s marriage-obsessed Meg, but not so for Emma Watson’s Meg who, on the day of her wedding, looks Jo in the face and says, “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t make them unimportant.” What woman today enjoying the fruits of second-wave feminism would deny any woman a future of her own choosing, whether it is becoming a “literary spinster” or marrying a poor teacher? Yet Meg reminds viewers of the transactional nature of marriage when she sells the $50 worth of silk she bought to make a dress in order to buy her husband a coat. Kudos to Gerwig for retaining that bit from the novel, as it follows the thread of marriage-as-transaction. The result is a more fully formed Meg, one that maybe we can stop pretending we don’t see a little of ourselves in.

Given Gerwig’s considerable talent, it is unfortunate that Beth is still so insipid, lifeless. It may be Alcott’s fault. Beth’s greatest ambition, her castle in the air, was “to stay home safe with Father and Mother.”[5] In the movie, Beth’s final illness and her death drive the action. As Jo makes her way home to care for Beth, she relives scenes from her childhood, allowing viewers to meet the sisters as girls with big dreams. And, as in the novel, Jo’s grief over Beth’s death reignites her authorial ambitions. But Beth, played by Eliza Scanlen, is disappointing. She exists only to redeem the other characters—that was her very Victorian purpose in the original and it remains so today. Surely, we are ready for a better—or actually, a worse—Beth, one with some flaws.

Laura Dern (Marmee) and Saoirse Ronan (Jo). Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

I was surprised how readily Laura Dern replaced Sarandon in my heart as Marmee. We get to see Abigail Alcott in her, something of her ambition, the compromises she made. Like when Mr. March—recently returned from serving as a chaplain in the Civil War—floats the ludicrous idea of following Friedrich out to California for some new adventure. Marmee, a flash of anger in her eyes, nips the idea in the bud, reminding Mr. March (played by Bob Odenkirk) that he has a family to support. And, as anyone who has not been living under a rock already knows, Dern gets her own drop-the-mic line about controlling her anger when she tells Jo, “‘I’ve been angry every day of my life.’” Giving Marmee back her anger reflects what Greta Gerwig read in Abigail’s letters and locates the film in a moment when the principles of equality that Alcott’s generation wanted for their daughters–and that generations of feminists fought for—cannot be taken for granted.[6]

The Civil War that provides a backdrop to the novel makes a few appearances in the movie, with more time spent on women’s war work than on men’s military service. We see Marmee at the offices of the soldiers’ aid society, one of several scenes intended as a commentary on Alcott family values and to mark the Alcotts as abolitionists and racial egalitarians. (Another one was when Jo sits in the segregated section of the New York theater and then joins in a raucous, integrated, post-show dance.) Muster readers familiar with Alcott’s 1863 Hospital Sketches will recall that Tribulation Periwinkle complained about the hospital work of women of color and accused them of stealing. Marmee’s close working relationship with the woman of color at the aid society appears to have been marred by no such tension. There seems to be less talk of slavery in this film; for instance, Laurie does not chastise Meg for dressing in silk, despite her family’s boycott of slave-produced products—instead he scolds her for drinking champagne. Amy is not forced to defend her family’s abolitionism to her classmates in the new film. In place of these moments that might have reminded viewers about the Civil War and what was at stake in it, Gerwig places the March women in integrated spaces. This is a missed opportunity.

Fortunately, Mrs. Hummel’s wartime service is not overlooked in the film. She does not go to the aid society for blankets or supplies, although her husband is serving in the army—or maybe she did and was turned away by someone suspicious of her claims or dismissive of her lack of respectability. The Hummels’ Civil War was marked by quiet destitution, and Gerwig brings this point home clearly.

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is a superb film exploring the emotional worlds of Victorian girls and women for a new generation of viewers. Hopefully, it moves people to rediscover the novel or turn to it for the first time.

 

[1] A good place to start exploring Victorian girlhood is Steven Mintz’s summary and footnotes in Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 84-87.

[2] Louisa May Alcott, “Chapter 13: Castles in the Air,” in Little Women (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868-1869; New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 2018), 130-8.

[3] Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, ed. Francis Bowen, trans. Henry Reeve, Esq. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1840; Cambridge, UK: Sever and Francis, 1862), 242, 245.

[4] Shirley Li, “Greta Gerwig’s Little Women Gives Amy March Her Due,” The Atlantic, December 23, 2019, accessed January 4, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/12/greta-gerwigs-little-women-finally-gives-amy-her-due/603886/.

[5] Alcott, Little Women, 135.

[6] For more on Marmee, see Sarah Blackwood, “’Little Women’ and the Marmee Problem,” The New Yorker, December 24, 2019, accessed January 4, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/little-women-and-the-marmee-problem.

 

Judy Giesberg

Judith Giesberg holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities and is Professor of History at Villanova University. Giesberg directs a digital project, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, that is collecting, digitizing, and transcribing information wanted ads taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for family members lost to the domestic slave trade.

Putting Women Back Where They Belong: In Federalism and the U.S. History Survey

Putting Women Back Where They Belong: In Federalism and the U.S. History Survey

By | | Comments 1 comment

To say that women do not figure prominently in the historiography of federalism is an understatement, to say the least. What could debates about the relationship between states and the federal government possibly have to do with women, particularly before the Civil War, when they lacked the rights necessary to access these levels of government? Everything, as I argue in “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance,” which appeared in the December 2019 special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. More than that, attention to federalism makes it possible to integrate women into parts of U.S. history survey courses where they are usually relegated to sidebars.

“A Visit from the Old Mistress,” by Winslow Homer, 1876. Courtesy of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Why is federalism about women? Conventional approaches define federalism in terms of those areas of law and governance—states and the federal government—that lay beyond the reach of most women before the Civil War. But new scholarship has extended federalism to include all of the governing order’s layers, including those to which women of all races and ethnicities had some access: those linked to the state, such as county, municipal courts, and other local governing venues, as well as those that were not linked to the state, such as churches, voluntary organizations, and families. In fact, new work suggests that states and the federal government were more accessible to women and men without the full range of rights than previously thought. Of course, access did not translate into leverage. Race, ethnicity, and class shaped women’s influence within these venues. Still, this new vision of federalism moves all women from the margins to the center, showing them to be more involved in the business of governance than previously assumed.[1]

How does this vision of federalism work in the context of the U.S. history survey? The new republic’s founding provides a good example. Surveys generally include some treatment of Revolutionary-era state constitutions, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution. But the discussion usually ends there, as if states and the federal government constituted the entirety of the governing order and, moreover, that it excluded women. That was hardly the case. Petitioning, as recent work shows, allowed access even to these arenas. Local courts and other bodies at the county and municipal level, moreover, continued to operate much as they had in the colonial era. Not only did these local jurisdictions still serve as the primary governing arena for most people, but they also exercised considerable discretion over the issues that directly affected the lives of most people, including most women. It was not just the location of these venues, although that helped; it was also the body of law in operation there that made them accessible to women. Local areas had wide latitude in the area of public law, a specific, open-ended body of law, which oversaw matters relating to the general welfare–everything from interpersonal violence and property disputes to poor relief and pretty much anything else that touched on the public order.[2]

Why does public law in local jurisdictions make women more visible? It shifts the narrative from exclusion to inclusion. In one sense, the founding fathers did not remember the ladies, as Abigail Adams suggested they do: women did not acquire the rights necessary for full participation in the new institutions of government set up at the state and federal levels. But that is only part of the story. Public law as practiced in local jurisdictions remained accessible not just to all women, but also to men whose race, ethnicity, or class left them without the rights necessary for full participation at the state and federal levels. Access did not imply equality, as I’ll explain below. But the key point here is that women were accustomed to being part of the public order—not in all its layers, but in some. That matters.

“Justices Court in Back Woods,” painting by Tompkins Harrison Matteson, 1850. Courtesy of ARTstor.

How did women access public law when most did not have the full range of rights? Historians have tended to focus on other bodies of law, namely those that focused on the rights of individuals at the state and federal levels. But, in fact, a number of different bodies of law circulated in the new republic: not just civil or private law (which primarily protected individual rights) and public law (including criminal and the regulation of matters relating to the social order generally), but also equity, the laws followed by merchants, various military codes, and the legal rules associated with religious denominations. They all worked differently. In particular, rights were not necessary to access public law, the body of law over which local jurisdictions had considerable discretion. Cases went forward as an offense against the public order, not a rights-bearing individual, which meant that married women, minor daughters, and sometimes even enslaved women could make claims within it.

What kinds of claims did women make? All kinds. Married and enslaved women claimed property for themselves. Free black women claimed ties of belonging—citizenship—to the places where they lived, as historian Martha Jones has shown. All women challenged violence committed against them by their husbands, fathers, employers, and masters as well as physical violence, sexual assault, rape, and other injustices committed by third parties. But their complaints were not just about themselves. They also acted on behalf of friends, family members, and neighbors. Collectively, these cases suggest the issues that concerned women as well as the extent to which they involved themselves in the governance of their communities.[3] The frame of public law accentuated the communal implications of their individual actions, by turning an offense against a single woman into a public matter: it was not just one woman who was hurt by a husband’s excessive force; the entire community was. See a selection of online sources provided here.[4]

What effect did their claims have? These cases could have transformative effects for individuals, when they were successful. Collectively, they formed potent legal principles that placed outer limits on expressions of patriarchal authority—but only in particular places. Local cases addressed particular problems in specific communities. They did not become a general body of law, applicable over wide spaces. Women’s claims, moreover, did not necessarily challenge the structural hierarchies of the social order, even in local areas. The system accommodated them. It could, because change was not really the point of this area of law in which women worked. To the contrary: public law upheld the existing social order, including the rigid hierarchies that defined it in this period. All those who stepped out of their place fared badly. To the extent that anyone of subordinate status had credibility, it was because of the social ties that defined their subordination. The system favored the wives and daughters of respectable, white men and those who maintained their own reputations within their communities. Poor white, free black, and enslaved women had more difficulty. They could maneuver in this area of law, although they needed stellar reputations and connections to powerful people to do so—which meant that they were most successful when they conformed to the rigid hierarchies of the time. The outcomes also affirmed those hierarchies. Husbands or masters convicted of abusing their wives or slaves were disciplined because they had abused their authority, not because patriarchal authority itself was problematic. Women were allowed to keep property, without acquiring property rights that would have made such cases unnecessary.

How do women’s legal actions fit within narratives of U.S. history? Bottom line: all of the cases brought by women in local courts are a central part of the history of the founding. The political landscape of the time not only included complaints about such things as women’s property ownership and sexual assault, as well as debates in the Federalist Papers, but also managed to diffuse those issues, to the point where the memory of them has almost disappeared altogether. All of that is part of federalism—and the politics of the new republic. Incorporating public law in municipal and local contexts recovers the history of the majority of students sitting in the survey class. It was not that women never owned property, until married women’s property acts. It was not that women remained silent about their own problems and those of their communities, until they had the right to vote. Incorporating public law illuminates the effects of federalism in real people’s lives, making abstract concepts more concrete and more meaningful.

 

[1] For an overview of this work, see Laura F. Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (Spring 2018): 121-47. As recent scholarship has shown, the right of petitioning provided formalized access to states and the federal government to those without rights and played a significant role in directing public policy. See Maggie Blackhawk, “Petitioning and the Making of the Administrative State,” Yale Law Journal 127 (2018): 1448, and “Lobbying and the Petition Clause,” Stanford Law Review 68 (2016): 1131.

[2] Hendrik Hartog’s pathbreaking article, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 4 (July 1985): 899-935, opened up the legal world beyond state and federal law. Also influential in this regard is Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For the operation of public law at the local level, see Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

[3] For a particularly revealing study, see Meggan Farish, “Rethinking Violence, Legal Culture, and Community in New York City, 1785-1826” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2018).

[4] For other examples of cases, see Edwards, The People and Their Peace, particularly pp. 55-202. The points here are based not just in my own research, but also in the work of others. For examples of African American women claiming freedom, rights, and belonging, see Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Anne Twitty, Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in America’s Confluence, 1787-1857 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For African American women’s property claims, see Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Wives also advocated for themselves through divorce cases; see Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon: The d’Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Laura F. Edwards

Laura F. Edwards is the Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University. Her research focuses on women, gender, and the law in the nineteenth century, particularly the U.S. South. In addition to articles on these topics, she has published four books: A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (2015); The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009); Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (2000); and Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997).

Recent Muster Posts

Read the Journal Online at Project Muse

Access the journal on Project Muse

Follow us on Twitter