Sad to say, the gulf between economic history and mainstream history is as wide today as ever. Undoubtedly many forces have contributed to this state of affairs, but one historical breakpoint was the controversy over slavery during the 1970s, prompted by publication of Time on the Cross, by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in 1974.[1] Perhaps because of the subsequent divergence, when a new round of studies appeared some years later, written by historians specifically concerned with economic aspects of slavery, the authors drew very little on research by economic .
One claim in recent literature that is often repeated is that in the antebellum period, enslaved workers produced an outsized proportion of the total value produced in the U.S. economy – the Gross National Product (GNP). A case in point is this statement on the website of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture: “Men, women and children, pushed by the whip, produced cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco valued at well over half the gross national product.”[2] The exhibit provides no source for this claim, but it seems likely to originate with Edward Baptist, who wrote: “All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.”[3] Baptist’s calculation is egregiously exaggerated, conflating inputs with outputs and adding items that are not even part of GNP. As such, it has been roundly criticized by economists.[4] But what would be a more accurate answer to the question?
It is not an easy question to answer because there is no direct aggregate data on the value of the goods and services enslaved people produced. Because enslaved persons represented only about 12 percent of the US population in 1860, one might simply dismiss the “One-Half” claim out of hand as a physical impossibility. To get closer to the answer, Paul Rhode recently constructed a bottom-up estimate of the aggregate value of goods and services produced by enslaved people, adding their share of each of the major staple crops, agricultural improvements, home production, and domestic service.[5] Applying the same methodology to each of the antebellum census years, Rhode’s results are summarized in Table 1. The bottom-line conclusion is that the enslaved produced about the same share of GNP as their share of the population. On the one hand, one might have expected the share to be larger, because the “labor-force participation rate” of the enslaved was higher. This is economics-speak for the fact that enslaved women were compelled to do field work, while enslaved children began work in their pre-teen years. On the other hand, most of the enslaved worked in agriculture and domestic service, where the value of output per worker was lower than the economy-wide average.
The Rhode article may be compared to another recent article, co-authored by economist Mark Stelzner and historian Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History.[6] The objective is the same: to estimate the value of goods and services produced by enslaved workers as a share of GNP. But the approach is entirely different. Lacking direct aggregate data on enslaved production, the authors reason that the expected value of that production should have been reflected in the market prices of enslaved workers. On its face, this method epitomizes model-based theoretical analysis, complete with references to “rational economic agents in a perfectly competitive economy” (144) and “present value [asset] pricing theory” (145), exactly the features that historians so often find objectionable in economic . The approach seems particularly questionable in that slave prices reflected expectations of production value across many years into the future, whereas the objective here is to estimate the value of production in one particular year (so that it can be compared to GNP).
Despite these issues, the Stelzner-Beckert results invite comparison with those of Rhode. Table 1 presents both sets of figures. (The range for Stelzner-Beckert reflects alternative assumptions for the discount rate: the interest rate at which future returns are “discounted” because of their remoteness in time.) As may be seen, both studies find that the share of the GNP produced by enslaved people was about equal to, or slightly below, their share of the population. To some degree at least, it seems reassuring that two such different approaches yield roughly convergent results.
The share of GNP produced by enslaved workers is of course only one item in the larger conversation about the place of slavery in US history.[7] But when a topic engages a broad segment of the public, as slavery does, mistaken or misleading factoids can have great staying power. We cannot expect to control or curtail this process, but awareness of basic magnitudes belongs in the knowledge sets of historians of all stripes.
[1] The book itself is Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). A critique by economic historians was Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). For a recent overview, see Eric Hilt, “Revisiting Time on the Cross after 45 Years: The Slavery Debates and the New Economic History,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1 (2020): 456-483.
[3]The Half Has Never Been Told (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p. 322.
[4] For example, Alan Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Cotton, Slavery and the New History of Capitalism,” Explorations in Economic History 67 (2018), p. 13.
[5] Paul Rhode, “What Fraction of Antebellum US National Product did the Enslaved Produce?” Explorations in Economic History 91 (2024): 1-15.
[6] Stelzner and Beckert, “The Contribution of Enslaved Workers to output and Growth in the Antebellum United States,” Economic History Review 77 (2024): 137-159. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
[7] For my take on the role of slavery in US economic growth, see “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 36 (2022): 123-148.
Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History Emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1982. His book Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (2013) won the Alice Hanson Jones Prize from the Economic History Association. Wright’s most recent publications are “Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Reconsidered,” Economic History Review (2020); and “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2022).
The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Yael A. Sternhell is the recipient of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Sternhell earned the award for War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil Warwhich was published in 2023 by Yale University Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of Tom Watson Brown, a dedicated student of the Civil War.
In making its selection, the prize committee stated:
“This volume explores how the documentary collection best known as the Official Records was assembled by officials of the US government in a process that reflected embedded agendas, various priorities, assumptions about what to include and exclude, issues of organization, and other concerns that fundamentally shaped the most important documentary editing edition ever produced by a federal agency. Historians will have to wrestle with this revealing work and its implications for the writing of Civil War history; thanks to Sternhell’s trailblazing scholarship, they will never again view the Official Records in quite the same way.”
The Watson Brown Book Award jury consisted of Brooks D. Simpson (chair), Diane Miller Sommerville, Susannah Ural, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.
Dr. Sternhell will be honored at the SCWH banquet taking place this November during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held this year in Kansas City, Missouri.
Winner Biography
Dr. Yael Sternhell is associate professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Harvard University Press, 2012) and War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023). Her work has won awards from the Southern Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians and both of her books were shortlisted for the Lincoln Prize. In 2024-2025 she will be the Weinstock Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard University.
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).
While pondering the future of digital history, historian Edward L. Ayers argues the field should not only replicate archives and build new tools. It must also feature interpretation, explanation, and explication, and when it accomplishes these things, it can contribute original knowledge and perform a democratic service in meaningful and enduring ways.[1]Digital history, therefore, presents a unique opportunity and responsibility to preserve, interpret, and disseminate historical resources to scholars and the public alike, an especially important goal to the recovery work of Black voices during the Civil War era.
Launched in 2019, the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (CWRGM) aims to do just that. Co-directed by Dr. Susannah J. Ural (The Frank & Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University) and myself (Digital Humanities Assistant Librarian at the University of South Dakota), CWRGM is making the state’s Civil War- and Reconstruction-era governors’ records freely available online at CWRGM.org. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, CWRGM is digitizing, transcribing, subject tagging, and annotating over 20,000 of the letters, telegrams, and petitions sent to the state’s governors between 1859–1882. Presently, we offer over 11,500 of these diverse records to genealogists, educators, students, scholars, and others at the site.
The CWRGM collection is far less about Mississippi’s governors than readers may assume. Rather, it allows us to listen to the concerns, frustrations, and fears of thousands during one of the most pivotal periods in U.S. history. While the majority of the authors are white men, the collection is rich with African American history. For instance, we can see Lambert Moore, a freedman from Holly Springs, challenge a tax on the earnings he made from hiring himself out during the war.[2] Users can hear Albert Snowden’s pleas to Governor James Lusk Alcorn for protection from the white supremacist violence erupting in the state in the early 1870s.[3] Letters about Permilia Finley, the matron of Vicksburg’s City Hospital, highlight challenges to her leadership by disgruntled whites in 1871.[4] Others, like a letter supporting the pardon of Franklin Dunn, a white man who was convicted of killing the white employer of a biracial freedwoman named Eliza Row, reveal postwar tensions over Black women’s labor.[5]
By editing a collection full of resources authored by and about African Americans it became our responsibility to increase its public access in a responsible manner. Information management scholar Purdom Lindblad reminds us of this ethical imperative, “There is an inherent violence in archival work, silencing and obscuring…people and sources….”[6] These concerns are magnified when working with materials pertaining to the histories of impoverished people, indigenous peoples, people of color, women, and members of the queer community, among others. While CWRGM employs a number of strategies to combat this, we also launched an expansive effort to subject tag the collection with the goal of ensuring the discoverability of its marginalized voices.
One of the most dynamic solutions to document discoverability has been the ability to explore the collection by topic, in addition to keyword and advanced search mechanisms. When CWRGM researchers review transcriptions, they add subject tags from internally controlled vocabularies in the following nine categories: people, places, organizations, businesses, events, occupations, military units, vital statistics, and social identifiers. For example, references to enslaved people (such as servants, slave, servile population, etc.) are tagged with the subject term “African Americans–Enslaved People.” Users can then use this tag to access all documents in the collection that contain this subject tag.
The vocabulary for subject tags is internally created by CWRGM editors who attempt to mimic LOC Subject Headings wherever possible but eschew them when their terminology is outdated or minimizes discoverability, or does not exist, which is the case for most named people in the collection.[7] While the LOC Authorities are expansive and offer a vocabulary shared by numerous other projects, their terms frequently fail to capture the experiences of historically disempowered people, especially enslaved and freed people, so it became necessary to create a new vocabulary. And, as the “African Americans–Enslaved Peoples” subject tag demonstrates, creating our own controlled vocabulary allows us to engage in reparative metadata practices by adopting more appropriate, contemporary terminology.[8]
Our subject tagging features serve as the backbone of CWRGM, ensuring content discoverability and accessibility. Keyword searching limits user access to documents that include terminology verbatim in the transcriptions. For example, at CWRGM keyword searching the transcriptions yields 56 results when using the term “Negros,” 343 for “Negroes,” 248 for “Negro,” and 239 for “Black.” “African American” never appears in the transcriptions. Applying the subject tag “African Americans” within transcriptions allows users to find 1,495 documents, significantly improving user access to the collection regardless of the authors’ variable terminology and spellings.
Screen capture of the “Crimes (alleged)–Cadaver Procurement and Sales” subject tag https://cwrgm.org/item/S32083811
The vastness and diversity of the collection presents numerous challenges, however. Deciding what to tag, for instance, was no easy task and required an expansive review of the historical literature. For example, we turned to Tera Hunter’s Bound in Wedlock to identify, tag, and explain unlawful cohabitation laws, and Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for Their Pound of Flesh was critical to our efforts to tag illegal cadaver sales.[9] Adding subject tags to these topics increases their discoverability, but their connections to a white supremacist legal system also risk depicting Black actors in the collection as inherently criminal. Adding annotations to subject tags, therefore, is key to contextualizing the term for users. Consequently, CWRGM is indebted to the experts whose research recovers the histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial, gendered, and sexual violence because their critical theories in race, gender, sexuality, class, and anti-colonialism drive our tagging and annotation mechanisms.
Screen capture of the pop-up annotation associated with the subject tag, “Crimes (alleged)–Unlawful Cohabitation” in “Letter from Major C. C. Shackleford to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; July 20, 1868.” See the fill subject list here. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_784-968-01-31 https://cwrgm.org/item/S32030987
Our desire to create interoperability within and between our project and others, also threatened overregularization as one subject term may encompass many different meanings of experiences, depending on its context. For example, subject tags do not capture the intersectional nature of people’s identities found in the collection. The “African Americans” tag captures one identity but cannot account for factors like gender or class, and fails to highlight multi-racial identities, which are rarely straightforward in the text regardless.
These concerns drove CWRGM’s adoption of nested tags and faceted search. We began to nest subject tags, moving from the more general to the more specific, “African Americans–Enslaved People” and “African Americans–Enslaved People. Contraband of War,” for instance. Users can now find all references to African Americans regardless of their labor status under the more general subject tag “African Americans,” but they can also parse their research by specific labor and military identities. We realized early on we could not apply nested subject tags in intersectional ways, however. The tag “African Americans–Historically Free and Newly Freed. Women,” for instance, would help users find documents specifically referring to freed women, but they would no longer be findable under the “Women” subject tag. The limitations of subject tagging in this format meant we had to focus on a single group identity per subject tag and instead, create more access points to the collection.
Screen capture of the facet options available for the Social Identifiers category.
The introduction of advanced and faceted search to the website, however, allows users to select multiple facets to customize their search. For example, the Social Identifiers page organizes documents by family structure, sex and gender, and legal status, among other facets. Other subject categories pages, such as Events, offer even more facets. Users can even narrow down results to those documents that include more than one subject tag, such as documents containing the “African Americans” and “Women” tags, in some ways rectifying our inability to apply single intersection subject tags. They can also be placed into more than one facet category, highlighting the multidimensional aspect of a term. For example, the “Emancipation & Self Emancipation” tag is discoverable under the legal, military, and political facets on the Events page.
Scholars invested in the recovery of African American histories, especially Black women’s voices, work under some of the most difficult archival conditions. Historian Ula Taylor asserts Black women’s efforts at self-protection shaped their representation in the public record, which therefore requires innovative strategies when researching African American women’s histories. Those untrained in African American studies are therefore at risk of misinterpreting Black women’s lives. Prolific scholars Saidiya Hartman and Thavolia Glymph offer models for “retrieving minor lives from oblivion” in their scholarship. Scholars like Taylor, Hartman, Glymph, and many others, therefore, have had to rely on some of the most creative and rigorous historical methods and theoretical ideas to uncover the lives of Black women in the archive.[10] By rooting CWRGM’s collection and its subject tagging in their critical histories, however, digital history can help users with diverse backgrounds and interests access an equally diverse and rich collection.
Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and incoming Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. You can learn more about her work at lindseyraepeterson.com.
[2] “Petition from Lambert Moore to Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey; September 28, 1865,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_771-956-10-16.
[3] “Letter from Albert Snowden to Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn; March 19, 1871,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_786-972-11-15.
[4] “Letter from John R. Hicks to Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn; January 3, 1871,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_786-972-01-01.
[5] “Letter from E. Jeffords to Mississippi Governor Ridgley C. Powers; January 6, 1872,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_794-979-03-03.
[6] Purdom Lindblad, “Archives in the Anthropocene,” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, February 15, 2018, accessed April 25, 2021, https://mith.umd.edu/archives-in-the-anthropocene/. See also J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “‘To Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Archival Science 19 (2019): 71–85, accessed March 5, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1. See also Christina Boyles, Andy Boyles Petersen, Elisa Landaverde, and Robin Dean, “Postcusodial Praxis: Building Shared Context through Decolonial Archiving,” Scholarly Editing 39 (April 2022), accessed March 4, 2024, https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/39/a-generative-praxis/.
[9] Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2019) and Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).
[10] Ula Taylor, “Women in the Documents: Thoughts on Uncovering the Personal, Political, and Professional,” Journal of Women’s History, 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 187–196.
Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and incoming Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. You can learn more about her work at lindseyraepeterson.com.
The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Bland will become the journal’s new Digital Media Editor in June. He succeeds Dr. Hilary Green, who served as Digital Media Editor since 2020. Dr. Bland is assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. His research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory. He is currently at work on a book project that examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. The book explores the efforts of Black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed the so-called Compromise of 1877. It illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, and local schools and the simultaneous debate in the national Black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We are excited to welcome Dr. Bland to the journal, and we thank Dr. Green for her outstanding service to the journal. She creatively guided the JCWE blog, Muster, through the pandemic; stewarded our social media presence in a complex time, and expandedMuster’s readership. We are grateful for all her work and hope she won’t be a stranger.
Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.
Junior Ranger programs are popular educational activities at our national parks. Children complete a short exercise connected to the park’s theme and receive a badge. The best junior ranger programs provoke age-appropriate revelation about the big picture without merely simplifying the material presented to adults. Andersonville National Historic Site’s standing junior ranger program, “Captured! A Prisoner of War Story,” puts children in the shoes of U.S. prisoners of war. Kids make tough choices throughout the program about what to bring into prison and how to react to prison realities. At the end of the program, children draw cards and learn whether they survived Andersonville. About two out of three make it out alive.[1]
Junior Ranger booklet, badge, and patches, undated, National Park Service.
Andersonville NHS also hosts periodic Junior Ranger Days on select weekends. On Saturday, April 27, 2024, the park organized an event around the theme of “Life as a Civil War Soldier.” Their Facebook page indicated that children would “learn to drill as a Civil War soldier.” A photograph depicted a smiling boy dressed in a Confederate uniform and holding an Enfield rifle. Another advertisement showed Confederate reenactors relaxing around a campfire.[2]
The advertisement raised eyebrows. In addition to the image and the text, the event fell on a weekend loaded with Confederate symbolism. It took place one day after the anniversary of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender to Major General William T. Sherman in 1865. A year later, that surrender day marked one of the first Confederate Memorial Days. In what was almost certainly a coincidence, the park’s event coincided with the local SCV observance of Confederate Memorial Day. “I can’t say whether children will actually be wearing Confederate uniforms, but that’s not really the point here,” Kevin Levin wrote. “Union soldiers didn’t drill at Andersonville. They starved. They fell victim to disease. They died.” Levin added that he suspected the park staff did not deliberately seek to disrespect the 13,000 U.S. soldiers who perish at the prison.[3]
Andersonville National Historic Site responded to public criticism ahead of the event. “The purpose of a living history event at Andersonville is never to glorify or make light of the events that took place here or in any way disrespect the men who suffered as prisoners,” an NPS representative added to the original Facebook post. “Our purpose is that by showing a small part of what Civil War soldiers experienced we will make a connection and spark an interest in learning that will last a lifetime.”[4] More than one critic asked whether the living history experience would include shooting prisoners for crossing the small wooden fence, or “deadline,” inside the prison.
Andersonville National Historic Site, Facebook post, April 18, 2024, edited to include last paragraph, April 19, 2024.
At least one notable neo-Confederate personality praised the National Park Service for the event ahead of time. “Wonderful event being held at Andersonville Prison,” Monuments Across Dixie posted on X. “Children will learn how northern blockades and destruction of the South caused the Southern people to not be able to property feed northern prisoners. Oh the irony of northern war crimes effecting their own people.” Viewed more than 2,000 times, the poster connected the event to Confederate History/Heritage Month. It underscored fears by Levin and others that, despite the park staff’s stated intentions, the advertisement catered to the people in the past—and their sympathizers in the present—responsible for 13,000 dead U.S. soldiers.[5]
Monuments across Dixie, X post, April 19, 2024
The announcement and the social media skirmish that followed came and went as a flash. After a few hours’ reflection, it became clear that this Junior Ranger Day’s emphasis on Civil War drilling missed another important anniversary: the 1869 Decoration Day. While African Americans celebrated an Emancipation Day at Andersonville on January 1, 1869, they held a Decoration Day that April. Many of the same people—national cemetery workers, northern teachers, and African American students—were involved in both events. Future Decoration (and, later, Memorial) Days encompassed elements of freedom celebrations and remembrance days.
While the National Park Service observes Memorial Day each year, it has not commemorated its 1869 predecessor. This unfortunate omission continues despite the park’s concern for increasing African American visitation in a predominantly Black region of the country and its active national cemetery that increasingly reflects the diversity of the U.S. military. Decoration Day at Andersonville has been documented by historians, most recently by a team of researchers from the University of Alabama, the University of West Georgia, and Georgia Southwestern State University between 2017 and 2020. The resulting publication, In Plain Sight, centered African American history from the settlement of southwest Georgia through the Civil War sesquicentennial. From building the stockade and being imprisoned as U.S. soldiers to transforming the prison graveyard into a national cemetery, African American experiences were central to the place’s history. Yet it would be difficult for anyone visiting the park since its enabling legislation in 1970 to learn this history. Andersonville is Black history as well as the erasure and minimization of Black history.[6]
Detail of “Sketch of Andersonville, Ga. and Vicinity,” showing school at the old Confederate hospital and African American houses. “Cemetery File,” Entry 576, Box 3, RG 92, National Archives and Records Administration.
Andersonville’s Decoration Day in 1869 came amid waves of violence that characterized Reconstruction. At the beginning of 1868, at least two hundred freedpeople lived on the land leased by the Confederacy and seized by the U.S government at the end of the war. Adult men had registered to vote and participated in elections in November 1867 and April 1868. Adults and children learned to read and write at the “Sumter School,” a school established by the American Missionary Association in an old Confederate Hospital. Many families had loved ones employed by the U.S. government landscaping a larger national cemetery to replace the shoulder-to-shoulder burials of the prison graveyard. These monthly government jobs paid lower than local contracts negotiated by the Freedmen’s Bureau, but working at Andersonville had its benefits: it was not plantation work; there was a school; and since summer 1865, it had proven to be a safe refuge from planters and overseers. However, the new cemetery plan went against government instructions to minimize costs. When the Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs realized the scale and cost of the project, he directed local officials to change course. In a flash, most of the workers lost their jobs.[7]
Detail of “Sketch of Andersonville, Ga. and Vicinity,” showing the layout of the never-finished new cemetery in relation to the old cemetery. “Cemetery File,” Entry 576, Box 3, RG 92, National Archives and Records Administration.
When most of the unemployed chose to stay at Andersonville, local whites sent an ultimatum to the Freedman’s Bureau. In July 1868, local authorities sanctioned—and participated in—a raid that evicted scores of unemployed men, women, and children from their homes at gunpoint. Those who remained or returned took caution, armed themselves, and posted sentries to ward off night raids by disguised men on horseback. Despite threats of being fired, Floyd Snelson and other cemetery workers organized a “Grant Club” and marched through the streets near the Andersonville depot in September. Making good on his threat, the cemetery superintendent, a Democrat, fired Snelson but reversed his decision later that afternoon. Elections that November were marked by violence and intimidation that suppressed Black participation. At the beginning of 1869, the Ku Klux Klan drove off a northern minister collecting depositions about the violence. In one small victory, cemetery workers took revenge on the superintendent by reporting that he was illegally renting out government mules.[8]
Ku Klux Klan threat, February 12, 1869, in Pierson, Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, 18.
As bad as it was, Andersonville in 1868 could have been worse. In Camilla, only 75 miles away, African American marchers protested the ousting of twenty-eight Black representatives from the Georgia State assembly. White men shot down marchers in what became known as the Camilla Massacre. The Georgia Historical Society erected a marker acknowledging the murders in 2023.[9]
It was within this experience of violence that African American students at Sumter School, preparing for a spring examination, learned that white Georgians were planning to decorate the graves of Confederate guards on Tuesday, April 27, 1869. These rebel graves were adjacent to U.S. graves and on the outside of a small wooden fence. Students reached the cemetery at 7:30 a.m., shortly before sunrise. Preempting the Confederate mourners, students spread oak leaves and flowers on the 13,000 Union graves and the graves of Confederate guards. “The ladies and gentlemen who came during the day from Macon and Americus covered their soldiers’ graves with beautiful bouquets,” a northern teacher wrote, “but had none for the martyred sons of the Union.”[10]
Floyd Snelson, undated, Historic Dorchester Academy, Liberty County, Georgia.
Decoration Days were much bigger in the following years and involved thousands of people making their way to Andersonville. The 1869 Decoration stands out because it was performed after a year of firings, protests, threats, and violence. It was an act that could be interpreted in many ways. Was the placing of oak leaves and flowers on Confederate graves an act of forgiveness? Did it assert moral superiority? Was it a continuation of subtle subversion perfected under slavery but still applicable in the violence and recent backsliding of Reconstruction? Perhaps it meant different things to the scores of students who participated.[11]
Marching like soldiers is not the only way to implement experiential learning at Andersonville. The park hosts events at other times of the year, such as Memorial Day and Wreaths across America, focusing on the graves. Rather than duplicate these events, an experiential learning Junior Ranger Day in April could focus on the experience of African Americans at Andersonville in the Reconstruction Era. What was it like to go to school in an old Confederate hospital a year or two after the end of slavery and before statewide public education? Or it might encourage students to put themselves in the shoes of postwar workers at Andersonville. Who built the massive brick wall that surrounds the national cemetery or hauled in earth to raise and flatten the landscape? Who replaced wooden headstones, selected saplings, and planted grass? Why were the Confederate guards reinterred in Americus?
Developing engaging historical programming is more difficult than doing the research or writing the report. It will take more work to decide how to best present the findings of In Plain Sight, but that is a decision for the career professionals in the National Park Service. Perhaps living history is the best way to present this information. Or, perhaps, there are other interactive ways to learn about the past without trying to conjure it in dress and dialogue. At the very least, though, Andersonville NHS should not try to be just a Civil War site with drilling and cannon demonstrations, especially ones that seem to honor the Confederacy.
The Civil War history at Andersonville is as complex and tragic as anywhere else on this continent. Serious and honest reflection about its wartime history will wring out any nostalgia for the Civil War. If one looks for it, the site’s postwar history offers a crash course in Black experiences during Reconstruction in the Deep South. Andersonville is Black history and Reconstruction history even when the National Park Service forgets. It will be Black history and Reconstruction history when the National Park Service remembers. Let that day be soon.
[1]. Freeman Tilden, Interpreting our Heritage, 4th edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 34-35.
[2]. Andersonville National Historic Site, Facebook Post, April 22, April 24, 2024.
[3]. David Silkenat, Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 231-35; A. H. Stephens Camp 78, “Annual Confederate Memorial Service at Oakgrove [sic] Cemetery,” Sumter Secessionist (April 2024), pg. 1; Kevin M. Levin, “Playing Civil War at Andersonville Prison Camp,” Substack, published April 19, 2024.
[4]. Andersonville National Historic Site, Facebook Reply, April 19, 2024, to Facebook Post, April 18, 2024.
[5]. Monuments Across Dixie (@Across_Dixie), “Wonderful event being held at Andersonville Prison…,” X, April 19, 2024.
[7]. Return of Qualified Voters, Sumter County, Election District 13, July 8, 1867; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed May 22, 2017); citing Georgia, Office of the Governor, Returns of Qualified Voters under the Reconstruction Act, 1867, Georgia State Archives, Morrow, Ga.; American Missionary Association Archives, Boxes 26-32, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans; D. H. Rucker to Edwin M. Stanton, April 23, 1868, in “Cemetery File,” Entry 576, Box 3, RG 92, Records of the Quartermaster General, National Archives and Records Administration; [Montgomery C. Meigs] to J. M. Schofield, August 21, 1868, in “Cemetery File,” Entry 576, Box 3, RG 92, NARA; M. C. Meigs to R. Saxton, August 29, 1868, in “Cemetery File,” Entry 576, Box 3, RG 92, NARA; “Andersonville,” Boston Daily Advertiser, April 18, 1868, clipping in “Cemetery File,” Entry 576, Box 3, RG 92, NARA; See also Kutzler, et al., In Plain Sight, ch. 3.
[8]. Affidavit of Floyd Snelson, May 20, 1869, Letters and their enclosures received by the Commission Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1863–70, M1064, roll 0444, RG 94, Record of the Adjutant General’s Office, NARA; H. W. Pierson, A Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, with “Statements” of Outrages Upon Freedmen in Georgia, and an Account of My Expulsion from Andersonville, Ga., by the Ku Klux Klan (Washington, D.C.: Chronicle Print, 1870); Kutzler, et al., In Plain Sight, ch. 3.
[10]. “Georgia. The Work in Andersonville,” American Missionary 13, no. 7 (July 1869), 147-48; Kutzler, et al., In Plain Sight, ch. 3. Given the variability of Confederate Decoration Day and possibility of individual error in recording the event, it is possible this took place on April 26 instead of 27, 1869.
[11]. On Memorial Day at Andersonville, see Adam H. Domby, “Captives of Memory: The Contested Legacy of Race at Andersonville National Historic Site,” Civil War History 63, no. 3 (September 2017): 262–263; Kutzler, et al., In Plain Sight, chs. 3-4; American Missionary Association, Teacher’s Monthly Report, “Sumter School,” Sumter County, Georgia, March 1869, American Missionary Association Archives, Box 28, No. 22307, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans.
Evan Kutzler is an Associate Professor of U.S. and Public History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and co-author of In Plain Sight: African Americans at Andersonville National Historic Site, A Special History Study (National Park Service, 2020). He worked as a seasonal park ranger at Andersonville in 2015.
The Civil War and Reconstruction transformed immigration policy in the United States, marking the transition from a sub-national to a national policy for regulating the admission, exclusion, and removal of foreigners. Before that turning point, Congress played almost no role in regulating immigration, other than naturalization policy (for white people) and passenger acts setting conditions on ships. The Civil War eliminated some of the worst abuses of the old state-level system. Ironically, however, the newly empowered federal state created during Reconstruction could restrict immigration much more comprehensively than any state—as Chinese laborers soon discovered to their detriment.
In the era of slavery, states and towns used their police power to control mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. In the Northeast, states and cities imposed taxes and bonds on foreign paupers. Ship captains passed along the cost to passengers in higher fares. Local jurisdictions deported the poor out state and sometimes overseas. In the Old Northwest (today’s Midwest), state and territorial governments used bonds and taxes to exclude and monitor free Black people. Southern states policed the movement of African Americans, both free and enslaved, and passed laws imprisoning black sailors visiting from other countries and from other US states.[1]These local measures rested on the states’ sovereign power to regulate their internal affairs. Insofar as they affected foreigners, they constituted the immigration policy of the United States in the antebellum era.
Figure 1: As a condition of her entry into the state of Missouri, Lydia Medford, described as a thirty-year-old “washer,” entered into a bond of $10 with, with two men providing security for her good character and behavior. Washington University in St. Louis, Freedom Bonds Collection.
When it came to regulating mobility before the Civil War, local police power prevailed over federal commerce power. Defenders of slavery supported fugitive slave laws but resisted any other form of federal authority over mobility across and within their borders. If Congress had the power to control immigrant admissions, they feared, it could potentially use that power to control the movement of free black people and perhaps even the interstate slave trade.Migration, in other words, presented a political and constitutional problem in a slaveholding republic.[2]
The Civil War, with the secession of eleven states from the Union and the abolition of slavery, removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy. Yet, in the absence of slavery, Congress would not have regulated—let alone restricted—immigration earlier. Even though the abolition of slavery cleared a path for the emergence of a national immigration policy, in other words, it did not make that policy inevitable.
Nobody before the end of the nineteenth century, not even the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, wanted to restrict European immigration numerically. Some nativists in the antebellum era called on Congress to extend the waiting period for naturalization, or to regulate migration by paupers, but to no avail. When the Supreme Court invalidated the immigration laws of New York and Massachusetts as violations of the Commerce Clause in Henderson v. New York(1875), state officials responded by demanding, crafting, and implementing a new federal law. The Immigration Act of 1882—the first general immigration law in US history—followed the model set by the states, imposing a head tax on all passengers and excluding the most vulnerable. Yet admission was the norm for European immigrants throughout the nineteenth century, and it remained so until the 1920s.[3]
Chinese immigrants fell into a different category. In Chy Lung v. Freeman, decided simultaneously with Henderson in 1875, the Supreme Court invalidated a California immigration law taxing Chinese immigrants. A short-term victory for those who challenged the law, Chy Lung also signaled that Congress could exclude foreigners much more effectively than any state. Anti-Asian restrictionists pressured Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which discriminated on grounds of race and class by barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years. The era of national immigration control was underway.[4]
It was at this time, also, that immigration came to be defined as a matter of national security In Chy Lung, the Court noted pointedly that allowing “a single State” to make determinations regarding entry and removal would allow that state to “embroil us in disastrous quarrels with other nations.” In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889)—better known as the Chinese Exclusion Case—the Court moved beyond the commerce power and ruled that authority to control immigration was inherent in national sovereignty. “Every nation, to preserve its independence, had to guard against “foreign aggression and encroachment,” Justice Field wrote in Chae Chan Ping. It did not matter whether the threat came from the actions of a foreign nation “or from vast hordes of its people crowding in upon us.”[5]
Figure 2: Cartoon by Thomas Nast published in Harper’s Weekly on April 1, 1882, a month before the Chinese Exclusion Act became law. At the “Temple of Liberty,” a soldier reads from a huge document labeled “US Passport” to a forlorn Chinese immigrant in traditional garb with an exaggerated queue. The soldier’s uniform and the fortress evoke imperial Europe, while the caption rebukes the United States for abandoning its tradition as a haven of liberty and a refuge for all. “E pluribus unum (except the Chinese).” Chinese in California Virtual Collection: Selections from the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
In Chae Chan Ping, the Supreme Court assigned power over immigration to the “political branches” of the federal government—Congress and the executive—which could admit or exclude foreigners as they saw fit, with minimal interference by the courts. On the basis of this plenary power, rooted in Chinese exclusion, the national government has since controlled US immigration policy as, in the first instance, a matter of national security.[6]
States and cities today can no longer determine whom to admit, exclude, or deport from the country. Any attempt to do so intrudes on federal power, as established by 150 years of law. But local jurisdictions can and obviously do continue to regulate immigrants’ lives after arrival. Many of them support federal immigration policies, cooperate with national agencies such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or call for more restrictive and punitive laws. Texas’s recent SB4 law has precedents in California’s Proposition 187 (1994) and Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB 1070) (2010). Measures like these deliberately blur the lines of authority and seek not just to regulate immigrants within states but to deter immigration per se.[7]
Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting in Arizona v. U.S. (2012), pointed approvingly to the antebellum laws “restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens, including convicted criminals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks.” As a sovereign state, Scalia claimed, Arizona had “the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory.” The majority disagreed and struck down most of SB 1070’s provisions, though they upheld the power of state police to investigate immigration status.[8]
While states and cities cannot defy federal immigration law, neither can the federal government order them to participate in enforcing that law. Many local jurisdictions today seek not to monitor or expel immigrants but to integrate them and protect them from federal surveillance. There are clear echoes here of the personal liberty laws of the antebellum era, which operated as a state-level counterweight to oppressive national power.
The real counterweight in the nineteenth century, however, came from the opposite direction. The Civil War and Reconstruction decisively tilted the balance of power away from states toward the federal government in the name of racial justice. Although Chinese immigrants remained ineligible for US citizenship, their American-born children were birthright citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment also extended equal protection and due process not just to citizens, but to all legally resident persons under the jurisdiction of the United States, including unnaturalized immigrants. The expanded federal government that protected these new rights, however, also secured control over immigration policy and proceeded to regulate and restrict immigration to an extent beyond the reach of any individual state.
[1] Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 2021); Michael A. Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[2] Kevin Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
[3]Henderson v. Mayor of City of New York, 92 U.S. 259 (1875); Kenny, Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic, 112–20; 191–93, 205–06; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 181, 184–92; Mae M. Ngai, Immigration and Ethnic History (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 2012), 4.
[4]Chy Lung v. Freeman, 92 U.S. 276 (1875); Kenny, Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic, 193–94; Texas Senate Bill No. 4, An Act Relating to the Enforcement … of State and Federal Laws Governing Immigration (2017). In March 2024, US Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar cited Chy Lung in her argument before the Supreme Court seeking to block Texas’s SB 4 law, which criminalizes unauthorized entry into the United States. Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the same point about the danger of individual states controlling national borders in a press release on March 19 responding to the Supreme Court’s refusal to block SB 4.
[5]Chy Lung v. Freeman, 92 U.S. 276 (1875); Chae Chan Ping v. United States 130 U.S. 581 (1889).
[6] This plenary power doctrine provided the basis for a national immigration policy in the United States. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court upheld the so-called travel ban on Muslim immigrants based on the precedent set in Chae Chan Ping 120 years earlier.
[7] California Proposition 187, Illegal Aliens Ineligibility for Public Benefits Verification and Reporting Initiative Statute (1994); Arizona SB 1070, The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (2010).
Questions of slavery, freedom, and violence are at the heart of this journal issue. For decades, historians have described how enslaved people during the Civil War saw new possibilities for escape with the presence of US military forces nearby, and how profoundly their actions shaped the course of the war and the dynamics of postwar freedom. The articles published here advance our understanding of these crucial dynamics, contributing new insights about the lives of enslaved people, emancipation and military occupation in the border states, the impacts of postwar violence on the process by which US presidents are elected, and the history of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has come to epitomize organized white supremacy in the United States.
Focusing on Missouri, Iain Flood’s “Proving Disloyalty: Enslaved People and Resistance in Missouri’s Guerrilla Households” demonstrates enslaved people’s intimate familiarity with enslavers’ households in an area where most slaveowners were relatively small farmers. This intimacy meant they could be coerced into supporting pro-Confederate guerrilla networks but also that they had information that could be valuable for US forces. Flood shows how enslaved people created a “second supply line” by carrying intelligence out of guerrilla households and into the hands of US soldiers. Army officers recognized that value of such information and promised freedom in exchange.
In “Reconstruction, Racial Terror, and the Electoral College,” Michael W. Fitzgerald and Mark Bohnhorst offer a new history of Reconstruction-era debates about the selection of presidential electors. Absent a clear mandate in the US Constitution, antebellum states increasingly codified the idea that electors were chosen by popular vote, not by the legislature. But in 1868, amid white southerners’ violent campaigns to suppress the Black vote, Florida canceled its presidential canvass and had its legislature select electors, and Alabama considered doing the same. These developments prompted the introduction in Congress of a sixteenth constitutional amendment that required popular selection of electors. Although the amendment enjoyed bipartisan support and passed the Senate, it died in the House. Fitzgerald and Bohnhorst’s account helps us understand a part of the American constitutional order that, unfortunately, has become newly relevant since the chaotic 2020 election.
Katherine Lennard’s article, “Brother Dixon: College Fraternities and the Ku Klux Klan,” uses the life of Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864–1946) to discuss the complex interpenetration of secret societies, white college fraternities, and the Ku Klux Klan in the years after the Civil War. Dixon, who wrote popular and controversial novels glorifying the Klan in the early twentieth century, was a member of the fledgling Kappa Alpha fraternity at Wake Forest College. Lennard demonstrates that Dixon’s stories about the Klan drew heavily on the iconography of white college fraternities and on their exclusionary, intimidating practices. In representing the Klan this way, Dixon distanced it from its original incarnation as a lawless, pro-Confederate, white supremacist organization and made it appear more familiar to members of the college-educated white elite across the United States.
In his review essay, “Possessed: Understanding the Lives of Enslaved Americans,” Christopher Bonner provides a sweeping examination of recent scholarship on slavery and enslaved people, with an emphasis on the crucial question of how historians balance attention to structure with focus on the agency of the enslaved. Bonner points to Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) as an essential work that has informed much subsequent scholarship on how enslaved people managed to make meaning, find pleasure, and leave traces of their lives in circumstances where their choices and actions were drastically constrained. Bonner’s essay will help readers understand current dynamics in the field and appreciate the significance of continuing to try to understand how enslaved people experienced the world.
We are pleased to announce a number of editorial transitions. This issue is the last to which Luke Harlow contributed as associate editor of review essays and Kathryn Shively as associate editor for book reviews. Harlow served in that role for five years, demonstrating his commitment to a broad view of the field and to careful editing in essays like Chandra Manning’s state of the field on religious history to Alaina Roberts’s essay on the history of Black people in and around the Five Tribes of Oklahoma to Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman’s review of digital history work. Harlow extended his time in the position to help the editorial team manage the challenges of the early years of COVID. Shively oversaw the book review section for three years and heroically continued to solicit books and find reviewers—with unstinting attention to diversity in both the books we reviewed and the reviewers we invited—even in the depths of the pandemic. Each was a complete pleasure to work with, and we are immeasurably grateful for their service to the journal. We wish them the very best as they move on to other projects. From 2021 to 2023, Mikala Stokes, a PhD candidate at Northwestern, assisted Shively with the book review section, supported by funding from the Northwestern University Department of History. Stokes now moves on as well, and we applaud her as she works toward completion of a dissertation on Black men, family relationships, and political activism in the antebellum North.
We are delighted to welcome Catherine Jones (UC Santa Cruz) and Megan Bever (Missouri Southern State University) as review essay editor and book review editor, respectively. As we write this editors’ note, Bever and Jones have been in position for a couple of months already. We are excited for their continuing contributions. Finally, we thank Edward Green, a Penn State PhD candidate, for stepping in as editorial assistant over the summer, and we welcome Heather Carlquist Walser back into the role she ably filled earlier in our tenure.
Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of recorded interviews between the JCWE book review editor and the authors of the works reviewed in the journal.
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Those who study the Civil War and Reconstruction are all too familiar with acts of terror, especially those committed by white vigilantes bent on securing Democratic political dominance and white supremacy. In Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Chad E. Pearson examines Reconstruction-era violence through the lens of labor suppression and finds continuity between the goals and tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations, such as Law and Order Leagues and Citizens’ Alliances, who used violence to combat organized labor. In this interview, Chad Pearson, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas, discusses his study with Megan Bever, book review editor for the Journal of the Civil War Era. Professor Pearson discusses the study’s broad chronological scope—it reaches back as far as the Second Seminole War and extends into the twentieth century—his case study approach, which takes the reader far beyond the Reconstruction South to Missouri, Idaho, and Pennsylvania. In addition to discussing the role of the Klan in violently reining in disaffected laborers, Pearson also discusses how Civil War service and free labor ideology wove their way through the late nineteenth-century managerial organizations that benign-sounding language of open shops and citizenship to disguise acts of terrorism.
Today we share an interview with Hidetaka Hirota who edited the December 2023 JCWE special issue on the transpacific connections in the Civil War era. Hidetaka Hirota is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (2017).
What interested you in doing this special issue on the transpacific connections to the Civil War era?
The project is rooted in my scholarly interests in the Civil War era, U.S. immigration history, and transnational history. Originally trained as a historian of transatlantic immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, I have followed trends in the field of the Civil War era and been particularly interested in attempts to internationalize the Civil War era by placing developments in the United States within broader geographical and transnational contexts.
At the same time, as my current research pays increasing attention to Asian immigration and Pacific history, I developed growing interests in Civil War America’s connections with Asia and the Pacific. This dimension has received relatively scant attention in international Civil War scholarship, which tends to focus on the relationship between the United States and the Atlantic World, although there are important works that examine the perceptions of Asian labor and Asian immigrants’ experiences in the Civil War era, such as Moon-Ho Jung’s study of the importation of Chinese workers to the post-emancipation South. Inspired by these works, I have become deeply interested in how race, labor, empire, and gender in the nineteenth-century United States were shaped by engagements with Asia and the Pacific. When Kate Masur and Greg Downs, the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era, asked me if I’d be interested in developing a special issue on Civil War America’s relations with Asia and the Pacific, I eagerly accepted their invitation.
What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain from the special issue?
I hope that readers see how transpacific connections were integral to U.S. history in the Civil War era. The special issue illuminates two themes. One is the emergence during the 1860s and 1870s of new discourses that challenged dominant gender and racial ideologies in the nineteenth-century United States because of diplomatic exchanges with Japan and Black Americans’ transpacific migration to that country. The other is the rights of Asians in the United States in the Civil War era. The meanings and boundaries of freedom and citizenship for Asians might sound familiar to colleagues in the field, but the special issue shows how transpacific systems of human trafficking and the United States’ overseas expansion provided important contexts in which Asian immigrants pursued their rights in postbellum America.
Beyond these specific themes, I hope that the special issue invites historians to consider Asia and the Pacific as they study the United States in the Civil War era more generally. I also want to see more integration of Asian American history into Civil War era scholarship. The purpose of the special issue is to stimulate, rather than conclude, inquiries along these lines. Focusing on the Japanese and Chinese contexts with strong attention to the Pacific rim, the special issue has an admittedly limited scope. I’d particularly look forward to seeing more research on Pacific Islanders in Civil War America.
After this forum, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project?
I am currently working on a book project that examines the fundamental tension in U.S. history between nativism against foreigners and demand for their labor. Opponents of immigration criticized foreign workers for allegedly lowering American wage standards and threatening Americans’ employment. And yet, the industrial, commercial, and economic development of the United States created insatiable demand for immigrant labor. My project traces how this tension evolved over the importation by American employers of contract workers from Asia, Canada, Mexico, and Europe between the 1880s and the 1920s. Viewing imported workers as unfree, servile people, organized labor pressured the federal government to pass the Foran Act in 1885. Known as the alien contract labor law, it criminalized the importation of contract workers from abroad and punished their importers with fines and imprisonment. For the next four decades, government officials extensively applied the alien contract law to prevent labor importation, while capitalists and business owners constantly evaded the law to obtain foreign labor.
By examining racial, economic, and gender discourse on foreign labor, the transnational business of importing contract workers, and federal officials’ efforts to enforce the alien contract labor law, my project illuminates how a national immigration regime emerged in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Antipathy to contract workers from Japan, India, Canada, Mexico, and diverse European countries in this period was founded upon the racist and nativist view of Chinese labor as a form of slave labor in the Civil War era. My project, in this sense, illuminates the legacies of the era for the development of U.S. immigration policy.
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).
Today we share an interview with Tian Xu, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California.” Tian Xu is a postdoctoral fellow at SUNY Buffalo’s Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. His work has been published in Journal of American Ethnic History and The New Rambler.
What interested you in contributing to this special forum on the transpacific connections to the Civil War era?
During the Civil War era, transpacific communities started to take roots in the American West. These communities of course became enmeshed in the American sociolegal debates over slavery and freedom, but they were also active participants in the country’s everyday search for meanings of enslavement and emancipation. This encounter fascinates me. I have chosen the lens of legal mobilization to understand how transpacific subalterns, in this case, Chinese women migrants, navigated the Civil War era legal devices to further their own life plans.
What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain from your article on Chinese women’s use of the law for demanding rights and justice in California?
I hope this article could decenter terms like rights and justice and attract readers’ attention to alternate concepts like survival strategy and agency. The Chinese women in this article migrated under the shadow of a transpacific marketplace of human trafficking. The dearth of primary sources makes it hard to ascertain the actual degrees of freedom they managed to enjoy through legal action. For them, California’s courts and their openness to nonwhite population’s use of habeas corpus writs offered an imperfect but nonetheless useful legal space to voice their preferences in life. Nonetheless, these preferences were constrained by patriarchal expectations within and without the courtroom. Not unlike Barbara Fields’ Black Marylanders, what Chinese women demanded (and what they could get) was “no fixed condition but a constantly moving target.”[1]
The women’s actions were met with at least two competing imperial approaches of governance carried out by American authorities. The first approach sought to regularize the sociolegal status of Chinese women and fit them into the emancipationist, patriarchal civic ideals of the Civil War era. The question of how this approach panned out is covered by the article’s discussion over domestic habeas corpus cases in the antebellum and Civil War decades. The second approach gave up on inclusion and sought to expel Chinese women as unworthy immigrants at America’s gates. The immigration cases after the Civil War, especially the legal battles that led to the famous Chy Lung case, reflect the preponderance of this approach’s persuasion. My article identifies the 1870s as a key decade when the exclusionist strategy overshadowed the emancipationist one. But this does not mean that the latter ceased to function. In practice, the tensions and overlaps between the two continued to create room for Chinese women’s legal action. I would be grateful if readers see the contested nature of this historical development.
After this forum, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project?
I am currently working on two projects that speak to each other. The first is a book project about the Pacific genesis of immigration lawyering in America. Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans played a central role in this history. I am making the case that the durability of anti-Asian laws since the 1870s put lawyers at the center of a transpacific “migration industry” and gave rise to the first modern immigration bar in the United States. The second is a project that compares immigration lawyering for the Chinese with military pension lawyering for Black Union families after the Civil War. The comparison explicates the role of race in the expansion of the US administrative state, which created immigration and welfare barriers for minority groups but also gave rise to meaningful, racially specific legal service markets. Instead of characterizing such lawyering as civil rights action, I am interested in how these lawyers’ work served to legitimate unjust laws and/or unjust law enforcement while facilitating resistance.
Thanks!
[1] Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 193.
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).
Questions of slavery, freedom, and violence are at the heart of this journal issue. For decades, historians have described how enslaved people during the Civil War saw new possibilities for escape with the presence of US military forces nearby, and how profoundly their actions shaped the course of the war and the dynamics of postwar freedom. The articles published here advance our understanding of these crucial dynamics, contributing new insights about the lives of enslaved people, emancipation and military occupation in the border states, the impacts of postwar violence on the process by which US presidents are elected, and the history of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has come to epitomize organized white supremacy in the United States.