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Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo

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Our final review for this week’s roundtable comes from Nina Silber, Professor of History and American Studies at Boston University. You can read all of the roundtable contributions by clicking on the links in the guest editor’s introduction.

In this imaginative and deeply moving book, George Saunders has re-envisioned the moment when President Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie died, in February 1862, ten months into the Civil War. Saunders’ novel is an odd and unconventional book, composed of fragments of actual historical writing and fictionalized historical passages, along with the musings of individuals who have died and now inhabit the cemetery where Willie’s body has been interred. This is the “Bardo” of the book’s title – a sort of in-between place, poised between the land of the living and a more definitive afterlife – and the book’s central premise involves the struggle to get Willie, and his father, to fully accept death so that Willie can leave this disturbing transitional world.

More than just a meditation on Willie’s tragic demise, the book is also a much larger deliberation on the overwhelming onslaught of death that gripped Americans in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It evokes, for example, the sentimental reflections of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who, pondering the misery of losing a child to slave traders, likens that to an experience that would have been familiar to many American families of the 1850s. “Has there never been,” Stowe asks her readers, “in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave.”[1] Indeed, this is precisely what Abraham Lincoln does in Saunders’ book: so grief-stricken is he by Willie’s death that he visits his burial site, opens his coffin, and even lovingly cradles his dead body. And even if the literal handling of the body has more to do with Saunders’ artistic rendering than historical truth, he nonetheless captures the profound sadness Lincoln felt at this moment, a grief that numerous historians have attested to, including some who are quoted in these very pages.

Photograph taken in Matthew Brady’s studio showing Willie Lincoln, center, Tad Lincoln, right, and their cousin Lockwood Todd, 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Also in the spirit of Stowe, Saunders’ book is a story about empathy: about learning to see and feel the full spectrum of the human experience, and especially human suffering. For Lincoln this means confronting not just the death of his child but the thousands and thousands of deaths on the battlefield. Saunders references the battle at Fort Donelson, which occurred just a few days before Willie died, to show the exponential mounting of Civil War casualties, beyond what anyone living had anticipated. “The dead at Donelson, sweet Jesus,” writes one of Saunders’ imagined informants. “Heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top of two on top of three.”[2] As historian Drew Faust has suggested, death at Fort Donelson, and even more so at battles yet to come, forced Americans in these years to reckon with the very meaning of death, grappling with what such monumental sacrifice might signify not just for individual families but for an entire nation. One suspects that Saunders, having read Faust, has exactly this point in mind: to consider how Lincoln may have worked through his sadness about Willie’s death into a larger reflection on Civil War mortality. As Lincoln begins to accept the finality of Willie’s passing we become privy to the president’s inner thoughts: “Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.”[3]

Willie’s death, in short, teaches Lincoln that he must pursue the war, swiftly and efficiently. It also forces Lincoln to think about what the killing means, what purpose, in short, the war would serve; fragments of the Gettysburg Address are even beginning to form in his mind. Saunders moves, perhaps, a bit too mechanically from this one episode of Lincoln’s private suffering to the Lincoln overseeing matters of great national import, yet much about his way of describing the president’s thought process – logical and ponderous, even in contemplating grief – rings true.

Although Saunders, like many historians, sees Lincoln primarily motivated to wage a war that would preserve a society giving opportunity to free white men, the author by no means neglects the horrors of slavery and how that, too, comes to weigh on Lincoln’s conscience. Thus the Bardo holds not only white characters but also, in a segregated section, black ones as well. This group includes Litzie, a young light-skinned woman who has endured such an unspeakable litany of abuse she has been rendered mute. Frequently accompanying Litzie is Mrs. Francis Hodge whose feet and hands have been worn away to bloody stumps. Like the white characters, the black ghosts, too, are moved by the sight of Lincoln cradling Willie’s dead body and see a chance to make their stories known to a figure from that “other place.” And, just like the white spirits, the black ghosts also have the ability to pass through Lincoln’s body, even affecting the living president’s thoughts and feelings. As Lincoln turns away from the cemetery and towards the task of waging a monumental war, he leaves with a black ghost clinging to his form, perhaps even to remain with him in perpetuity.

I suspect Saunders wants us to see this black figure, literally, as the weight upon Lincoln’s conscience. In this, Saunders advances an interpretation that, despite the fantastical scenario, would find favor with many historians: that the impulse to do right by black men and women may not have come completely naturally to Lincoln, but that the circumstances of the war gave the Civil War president a stronger sense of empathy that allowed him to move just a little bit closer towards addressing the human suffering of both white and black Americans.

 

[1] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93.

[2] George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (New York: Random House, 2017), 152.

[3] Saunders, 306.

Nina Silber

Nina Silber is the Jon Westling Professor of History at Boston University and recently served as the President of the Society of Civil War Historians. Her most recent book is This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (Chapel Hill, 2019).  She’s currently at work on a history/memoir about her father, a central figure in the mid-twentieth century folk revival.

A New “Alternative” History: Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines

A New “Alternative” History: Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines

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Because most are poorly-plotted, barely-disguised apologies for the Lost Cause, many historians have a low tolerance for “alternative histories” of the Civil War. Whether in the form of Confederate memorials like Silent Sam or Harry Turtledove novels, folks love to fantasize about what the United States would have been like if the South had won. Missing from most of these alternative histories is any mention of slavery, or when it does appear, as in Turtledove’s 1992 novel The Guns of the South, it appears as a foil to highlight the noble characteristics of Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee. However, a promising new alternative history, which may be of interest to scholars and history buffs alike, breaks this mold and makes slavery central to its narrative.

Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines, a new Civil War alternative history set in the twenty-first century, imagines a future “dis”-United States that has avoided civil war altogether. The nation is now governed by something akin to the Crittenden Compromise, where federal law sustains slavery where it existed, while prohibiting its further extension. By the time we meet the novel’s protagonist, Victor, a former PBL (“Person Bound to Labor”), slavery has been abolished in all but the “Hard Four” slave states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and “Carolina.” In exchange for his freedom, Victor has become a bounty hunter for the U.S. Marshals, scouring the free states in search of runaways who have liberated themselves from the highly industrialized–yet no less brutal–business of twenty-first century slavery. Traumatized by his childhood on just such a corporate plantation, Victor is haunted by dreams of his violent upbringing, yet he excels at his job as a slave catcher. He performs so well because he cherishes his own freedom, such as it is. Victor is not quite free; the Marshals have fitted him with a tracking device in case he decides to run. But how long will he be able to continue his horrific career? Will his cold, hard heart, that slavery has given him, finally be warmed and softened to the plight of those he pursues? And if it does, will he survive?

Resistance is a popular term these days, as it has been in slavery studies for at least half a century. Winters teases out the complicated meanings underlying individual resistance to an entrenched system of exploitation. By demonstrating a symbiotic relationship between slavery, capitalism, and American democracy, the novel challenges readers to imagine what true resistance would look like and how far enslaved people might be willing to go to achieve it.

Underground Airlines is a fast-paced thriller with the heart of a slave narrative. Winters has earned a reputation as a sci-fi/detective novelist, and this novel reflects that. Think John Grisham meets Solomon Northup. Victor is a flawed, hard-edged man who wants to do the right thing. Standing in his way is a conglomerate of detached, yet brutal, government bureaucrats who will stop at nothing to see the law carried out. And all the hard, philosophical questions concerning slavery are there: How does an enslaved person maintain a sense of his own identity and morality separate from that of his enslavers? What are the limits of the “slave community”? How does trauma shape the people we become and the choices we make? How long can a house divided against itself stand?

Winters answers that last question definitively: a long damn time. It’s 2016, but there is no sign of slavery “dying out” in the Hard Four, despite immense national and global pressure. The times have changed, but slaveholders have adapted, using modern technology to keep slavery profitable and more efficient. They have powerful lobbyists who buy Congressional support. All the corporate shenanigans that allow Starbucks and Amazon to avoid taxes and reap mega profits also allow companies like Garments of the Greater South to evade the various anti-slavery financial mechanisms that the U.S. and its global allies have instituted. And finally, injustice’s oldest allies–racism and apathy–prevent most Americans from caring too much about what happens “down there,” much less to the black people who live stigmatized and segregated in free cities throughout the rest of the country.

Sound familiar?  It should. Underground Airlines is as much a story about today as it is about the past. In that sense, it recalls the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A., which imagines a white supremacist fantasy world where the Confederacy won, but that world looks a lot like the world we actually live in. If C.S.A. challenged the sanitized text-book version of the Civil War that so many Americans grow up believing, then Underground Airlines continues this work by provoking readers to consider whether Winters’s fictionalized world differs in any meaningful way from the “real” one we inhabit everyday. For scholars of Civil War-era history, the dystopian alternative universe Winters has created feels a lot like home.

Today’s contribution to our fiction roundtable comes from Carole Emberton, associate professor of history at University of Buffalo. You can read previous and subsequent entries by using the links here in the guest editor’s introduction.

Carole Emberton

Carole Emberton is associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo. Her book Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War was published 2013. She is currently at work on a new project exploring the vernacular memories of the Civil War and emancipation contained within the Federal Writers’ Project’s Ex-Slave Narratives.

James McBride’s Reimagining of John Brown and His Legacy

James McBride’s Reimagining of John Brown and His Legacy

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Below you will find the third review in our Civil War fiction roundtable, from Hilary Green, an associate professor at the University of Alabama. Previous and subsequent reviews in the series are available by following the links in the guest editor’s introduction.

The controversial figure of John Brown–and his connections to race relations, sectionalism, and the politics of memory–has influenced statues, songs, public murals, and even Jacob Lawrence’s “The Legend of John Brown” graphic series. For white Americans, John Brown is cast as either a fanatical zealot or a martyr for the abolitionist cause. African Americans have typically viewed him as a freedom fighter who used violence for equality and social change.[1] Scholars have yet to mine fully the surviving oral traditions and archival materials that hint at motivations and experiences of African Americans who supported and later actively remembered John Brown as a freedom fighter. Questions remain regarding why enslaved men, women, and children would follow a charismatic leader, even if meant possible death or retaliation against members of the African American community? Why would freeborn black Pennsylvanians open up their homes, churches, and pocketbooks to fund John Brown’s war against slavery? These are tough questions for scholars interested in recovering these historical voices. This is where literature can play a role.

Writers of historical fiction are able to erase the silences present in the archives and existing scholarship. James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird (2013) builds on the literary tradition seen in Charles Chestnut’s Marrow of Tradition (1901), William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and David Bradley’s Chaneyville Incident (1981). McBride masterfully and imaginatively explores the above questions through the protagonist of Henry “Little Onion” Shackleford. Opening with the 1966 discovery of Shackleford’s slave narrative, the novel follows a young enslaved boy who navigates slavery and sectional politics from 1856 Kansas Territory to 1859 Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Organized in three parts, the protagonist’s journey is a plausible narrative delving into the interior lives of the enslaved and John Brown’s complicated legacy.

McBride introduces readers to Henry Shackleford by following genre conventions of the slave narrative. True to form, Shackleford opens the account by providing some of his life history, describing the enslaved community from which he emerged, and portraying the enslavers’ world in Kansas Territory. McBride, however, disrupts the familiar narrative in the first sentence – “I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.”[2] When an altercation results in the death of his father, Henry becomes Henrietta (nicknamed “Little Onion”) in order to survive as a fugitive. Rather than correct the mistaken gender identity, Henry embraces the confusion, explaining to his readers: “Truth is, lying comes natural to all Negros during slave time.”[3] Afraid, without kin, and a witness to his father’s brutal death, he chose life and followed John Brown’s army until opportunity permitted a clearer path to freedom.

John Brown, abolitionist and freedom fighter. Courtesy of the National Parks Service.

That opportunity emerges during the Pottawatomie Creek massacre. McBride’s description of the post-massacre retribution against African Americans reads like a scene from Harriet Jacobs’ depiction of Edenton following Nat Turner’s rebellion.[4] The violent reality of John Brown’s army prompted Henry to flee. While in flight, he encounters Nigger Bob, an older African American who doubts “Henrietta’s” true identity but nevertheless assists the young protagonist. Henry’s life as a fugitive, this time from John Brown’s army is short lived, however. When captured by one of Brown’s sons, Henry laments in the chapter entitled “Prisoner Again” that “I was full-blow back in his army and the business of being a girl again.”[5] After the Battle of Osawatomie where his son Frederick is brutally murdered, John Brown departs for parts unknown to his followers. Before leaving for two years, the protagonist recalls him saying to Owen and his other sons present: “Bury Fred right. And take care of Little Onion.”[6]

Throughout the novel, McBride deftly weaves historical accounts of John Brown’s exploits and enslaved people’s experiences with his own literary imaginings. Readers are able to understand how a scared enslaved boy tries to reject the violent life associated with John Brown. After Osawatomie, Little Onion searches for replacement parents in Nigger Bob and Pie, a prostitute who plies her trade at a brothel that attracts ruffians of all political stripes. Ultimately, Little Onion finds his surrogate father in John Brown and his brothers among the white and black members of Brown’s army. Happenstance allows the protagonist not only to survive as a fugitive traveling with John Brown’s army, but also to meet Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman during Brown’s pre-Harpers Ferry’s recruitment tour of the eastern United States and Canada. By the final section, Little Onion’s inclusion in real historical events appears natural in the fictional Civil War era world crafted by McBride. Henry-Little Onion has fully embraced John Brown’s mission. He recruits for the Harpers Ferry attack among freeborn and fugitive African Americans. The chapter titled “Unleashing the Hive” sees the unfolding events of Harpers Ferry, Brown’s capture, and Henry-Little Onion’s escape so that he can “tell the stories” to future generations.[7] McBride returns to real historical events of the trial, hanging of Brown and his army, and early African American remembrances of Harpers Ferry in the concluding pages.

John Brown House (Ritner Boarding House) operated by the Franklin County Historical Society, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the author.

Here, McBride taps into how African American collective memories of the American Civil War at the Pennsylvania-Maryland-West Virginia border allowed for the persistence of John Brown’s legacy as a freedom fighter. In the war’s aftermath, the nation strongly encouraged border African American residents to forget John Brown’s raid, the Civil War enslavement of freeborn African Americans, and the military experiences of those who either enlisted or were drafted. Remembrance became a political act essential to postwar African American border identity. These African Americans refused to accept the hegemonic Lost Cause and Reconciliationist impulses. Through oral traditions and postwar commemorations in segregated African American spaces, they developed and sustained a Civil War collective memory that empowered them to actively remember–while the nation purposefully forgot–well into the twentieth century. Thus, James McBride’s acknowledgement is as powerful as the opening prologue. He recognizes and celebrates the actions of ordinary African Americans “who, over the years kept the memory of John Brown alive.”[8]

The Good Lord Bird deepens our understandings of sectional debates over slavery, violence, and the diverse African American experience on the eve of the American Civil War. Moreover, it provides important insights into the role of memory, violence, and the intersectional contours of African American remembrance of the Civil War through Henry-Henrietta-Little Onion and those who sang “Blow ye trumpet blow” at the hanging of John Brown and in subsequent years.[9]

 

[1] See R. Blakeslee Giplin, John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

[2] James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013), 3.

[3] McBride, 30.

[4] Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (Boston: 1861), 97-104, Documenting the American South, accessed October 15, 2018, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html.

[5] McBride, 77.

[6] McBride, 123.

[7] McBride, 427.

[8] McBride, 459.

[9] McBride, 457.

Hilary N. Green

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).

Slavery and the Historical Imagination: A Review of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man

Slavery and the Historical Imagination: A Review of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man

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Today’s contribution to our fiction roundtable comes from Timothy J. Williams, assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon. You can read previous and subsequent entries by using the links here.

In 1997, Patrick Chamoiseau, author of a dozen works about his native home of Martinique, published Slave Old Man in Creole and French. Now in 2018, the beautiful English translation by Linda Coverdale makes this short yet sophisticated novel accessible to American audiences. Set “in slavery times in the sugar isles,” or the early nineteenth-century French West Indies, the novel illustrates the raw operation of plantation slavery in a place that white southerners both coveted and critiqued in the Civil War era. The French West Indies were strategic islands in a broader world system of slavery and sugar. As Matthew Karp explains, southern slaveholders kept a watchful eye on these islands as part of a broad, “hemispheric defense of slavery.” After the French abolished slavery on the islands in 1848, they explicitly argued that economic decline on the islands was the fault of disorder that emancipation wrought.[1] Thus, a story of an escaped slave, young or old, would have (and did) instill fear in the minds of the region’s ruling classes.

The novel follows the one slave least expected to escape—a silent and sagacious old man who is never named in the novel—as he flees his master, running and limping through a rain forest, with a bloodhound on his heels. This simple plot of the escape of a never-named old slave man, however, is the only thing simple about Chamoiseau’s novel. When the structures of enslavement—mastery, violence, fences, and patrols—crumble, the reader is left with a disorder so palpable that it becomes transcendent. In the process, the novel at once unearths the traumatic world of slavery and the nature of history.[2]

Indeed the slave old man’s “Master,” though he rarely inhabits the narrative’s foreground, acts as sadistically as Simon Legree or Edward Covey. To underscore the master’s inhumanity, Chamoiseau manufactures an alter ego for him in a ferocious hound, or “mastiff.” “The slaves hated these dogs in a way that can no longer be imagined,” but “the mastiff expressed the cruelty of the Master and that plantation.”[3] He was the “master’s rudderless soul” and the slaves’ “double suffering.”[4] The master trained this brooding creature to maul any slave who ventured beyond the pale. Yet slave old man managed to go undetected long enough to escape. When the dog realized slave old man had run, undetected, he howled so ominously that the master unleased his rage, literally, and sent the dog into the forest after his runaway property.

Thus slave old man embarks on an epic journey into a primeval forest, pregnant with the waters of new birth. The jungle assembled the body which he never felt he possessed in slavery: “His run had propelled his flesh to its ultimate limit and his formerly separate organs, reacting en masse, passing beyond all distress, kept on going, leaving him panting with innocence in a hazy awareness of himself he had never known before.”[5] In his flight, though the mastiff’s thumping paws “almost matched the rhythm of his heart,” slave old man “rediscovers a primordial darkness” and “feels himself penetrating into the cavern of ages.”[6] He emerges from the cavern not “slave old man” but “the old man who had been a slave.”[7] And, for the first time in the novel, Chamoiseau moves the narrative from third-person omniscient to the first person.

This is a hero’s journey of classical epic. At one point, falling into a spring of “icy-icy water,” the old man who had been a slave encounters “once again the nightmares of the slave-ship hold,” indelibly marked in his memory.[8] A will to live helps him free himself and continue his flight. Despite breaking a leg bone, encountering a snake, and ultimately meeting the mastiff “face-to-face,”[9] the slave old man invokes the memories of his ancestors, draws from their strength, and becomes himself in the process. Rather than spoil the book’s plot entirely, suffice to say that the journey ends. But for historians, it’s not so much the journey that matters as the way Chamoiseau uses the novel as a broader philosophy of history.

The novel provokes a meditation on history that will likely interest scholars across disciplines. In the book’s final chapter, an anthropologist discovers bones, including that from a broken leg, which he described as “a cartload of memoires–histories–stories and eras gathered together.”[10] Instinctually, he feels that these bones powerfully tell a story of shared humanity. Though historians generally don’t work in ossuaries, the brittle pages of archives, like bones, likewise expose complex, haunting human records.

Integrating memories and stories are of great interest to cultural historians of gender such as myself. But we often fail to move out of the tidy work of categories inspired by the social science side of our academic heritage. I have grown increasingly frustrated with the continued reliance on invented paradigms (i.e., honor, southern manhood, martial manhood, restrained manhood, and even intellectual manhood, which is the subject of my first book).[11] Chamoiseau’s world of slavery and freedom, however, is messy, violent, visceral, corporeal, and animal. There are few neat “categories of analysis” when it comes down to bones and memories, but Chamoiseau’s old man slave/slave old man/man who had been a slave asks us to think about the categories we use and why we use them.

Slave Old Man is many things. Just a little more than 100 pages in length, it is a translation; a story of enslavement and escape; a discourse on the nature of French West Indies; the story of an old man, or an old slave, or both, but a man nonetheless; and a meditation on history. But we also cannot miss its moral significance as another reminder of the pernicious and lasting legacy of New World slavery and white supremacy in our own time. Thus, this new English translation contributes to and extends a vibrant and politically significant genre of neo-slave narratives, pioneered in the midst of the Civil Rights movement by Margaret Walker, and sustained by Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and most recently Colson Whitehead, whose prize-winning Underground Railroad (2016) Manisha Sinha reviewed for Muster.[12] This novel may not be as easy to read or teach as Whitehead’s, but it serves an important purpose nonetheless.

 

[1] Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 89, 132.

[2] Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man: A Novel, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: The New Press, 2018), 3.

[3] Ibid, 21, 26.

[4] Ibid, 32.

[5] Ibid, 42-43.

[6] Ibid, 45, 50, 51.

[7] Ibid, 57.

[8] Ibid, 63.

[9] Ibid, 86

[10] Ibid, 118.

[11] Timothy Williams, Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

[12] Manisha Sinha, “The Underground Railroad in Art and History: A Review of Colson Whitehead’s Novel,” Muster (blog), Journal of the Civil War Era, November 29, 2016, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2016/11/underground-railroad-art-history-review-colson-whiteheads-novel/.

Timothy J. Williams

Timothy J. Williams is assistant professor of history in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States, especially the South in the Civil War era. He is the author of Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (2015) and editor (with Evan A. Kutzler) of Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863-1866 (2018).

Confederate Widow Confidential: Varina Tells (Almost!) All

Confederate Widow Confidential: Varina Tells (Almost!) All

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Today we share the first post in our roundtable on recent Civil War fiction. The guest editor’s introduction, by Sarah E. Gardner, includes links to all the posts and can be found here.

The cover of Charles Frazier’s Varina: A Novel identifies its author as the “bestselling author of Cold Mountain.” When Cold Mountain, his first Civil War novel, appeared in 1997, it stayed on the New York Times list for over a year and won him the National Book Award. The star-studded film in 2003 earned $175 million worldwide, and Renée Zellweger collected an Oscar for her performance as Ruby Thewes. The relationship between Ada Monroe and Ruby Thewes was a nuanced counterpoint to Ada’s love story with Inman, and it emerged as a paean to female friendship and to wartime survival.

Some scholars took umbrage at the book’s particularly whitewashed landscape. Frazier was reprimanded—at times savaged—for the absence of black voices. People of color were few and far between in his story; for instance, at one point, an enslaved woman was carried to the riverside to be drowned by a white preacher, disposing of her as if an unwanted kitten. Frazier concentrated on how those fighting for the Confederacy were fighting for “home,” rather than to shore up the slave power (and by association, white supremacy)—and so the perpetual wrangle continues.

Thus Varina, his fourth novel, confronts issues of race and southern identity, and perhaps signals penance. Frazier’s main character, James Blake, is described as a black child orphaned by war then adopted by Jefferson and Varina Davis. After surrender in 1865 and despite his protests, he was torn from the Confederate First Family. This backstory is based on Jimmie Limber, a refugee featured in Elizabeth Botume’s First Days Amongst the Contrabands.[1]

Jimmy Limber, or James Henry Brooks, lived for about a year with the Confederate First Family. He transformed into James Blake in Frazier’s novel Varina. Courtesy of Encyclopedia Virginia.

In the novel, Blake accidentally discovers his former protector nearly forty years after their forced separation. He seeks out “V” (as she is called throughout the novel) and insists upon answers about his heritage. Over the course of several Sunday afternoons, the former first lady of the Confederacy reminisces, prompted by Blake’s interrogation, and the tale unfolds. Frazier and James Brooke do not let V off the hook. When she confides to James about the days “when we all took care of one another,” James retorts “who is we?” During formalized exchanges, James poses uncomfortable questions: “Did you own me?” “Was I your pet?” Further, he challenges her memory of her “friendship” with Ellen, the (enslaved) African American house servant who accompanied her on the flight from Richmond. She recalled in an interview that Varina may have been a good mistress, but Ellen was happier with her freedom. But V attends Ellen’s wedding, proclaiming sisterhood.[2]

Frazier threads “truth and reconciliation” into the book’s clever patterns of warp and weft. V is alternately self-deprecating and self-serving. Her acerbic observations—drawn from both her own writings and those of Mary Chesnut—as well as Frazier’s scintillating insights, rattle and snap throughout the book. Frazier allows his leading lady’s memory to be selective, indeed blatantly faulty. She exhibits self-pity by reporting how black silk ran out by the time of her young son Joseph’s funeral in 1864: several months pregnant, she was reduced to using “a muddy brew of walnut hulls and indigo” to dye her mourning costume.[3] In another segment, Frazier shows Varina reading House of Mirth, complaining she cannot abide any novels set in the South. Frazier hints she is an aging Lily Bart, but a feistier version, as V confesses: “At least I had my little suicide pistol to comfort me.”[4]

The newlyweds Jefferson Davis and Virginia Howell, who went on their honeymoon to visit the grave of Davis’s first wife, the daughter of President Zachary Taylor. Courtesy of Essential Civil War Curriculum.

Frazier allows V to filter her responses through her lament of endurance. She survived her father’s repeated financial failures, trading V on the southern marriage market. She survived her honeymoon, being taken to the grave of Jefferson’s first wife. She survived her husband’s bullying older brother, the family patriarch, Joseph Davis. She survived the death of five of her six children who predeceased her, but proudly posed with four generations near the end of her life. She survived the war, her husband’s sinking prospects, and the spring of 1865 when “a hundred thousand tragedies played out.” [5] Her husband’s capture, imprisonment, and exile all contributed to a quake-like instability. She struggled as her husband’s betrayals became legendary; Jefferson Davis’s involvement with a devoted female admirer caused scandal and further alienation.

With her husband’s death in 1889, Varina Davis made her way to Manhattan to live by her wits and her pen. (This factoid, Frazier maintains, launched him on his journey to creating “V”.) She parted company with most former Confederate widows and her homeland. Was she disloyal? A pragmatist? Rebel, or no rebel at all? She was perhaps happy to leave the crumbling Confederate states behind, done with mourning, as she tartly advised her surviving daughter: “Don’t you wear black. It is bad for your health, and will depress your husband.”[6]

Joan Cashin’s superb 2006 biography, First Lady of the Confederacy, projected a convincingly modern, albeit flawed, protagonist. Frazier echoes and expands this image, making excellent use of recent scholarship and many details are clearly drawn from the meticulous research of recent Civil War scholarship whose authors, regrettably, are omitted from his slim bibliography[7]

Jefferson Davis’s second wife, his helpmeet in the White House of the Confederacy, his defender and devoted ghost writer during the post-war years, is not a household name. But the distinctiveness of her name lingers—a faded mural on a Richmond building in the 1970s proclaimed: “Varina Ice Company.” As a political wife saddled with daily Scylla and Charybdis dilemmas—her character and context remain compelling. By taking in Jimmy Limber, the “Ice” Queen Varina appears a tantalizing puzzle to deconstruct. And once cracked open, who can put Varina back together again?

Charles Frazier has produced a brilliant and riveting glimpse of Varina’s life, immersing himself in his characters’ time and place. We are transported and in his debt, as he grapples with the mesmerizing, with the mercurial, and with riddles the Civil War still evokes. Varina emerges full of caution, compassion, grit, and woe. Frazier’s power lies not just in his authenticity but in the way he applies his gift of imagination to this epic era and haunting Confederate emblem.

[Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that Jefferson Davis’s first wife was the daughter of James K. Polk. His first wife was Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor. The post has been corrected. Our apologies for the error.]

 

[1] Elizabeth Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands (Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1892).

[2] Charles Frazier, Varina: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2018), 312.

[3] Ibid, 115.

[4] Ibid, 57.

[5] Ibid, 42.

[6] Ibid, 352-3. This was a “deathbed” directive in 1906.

[7] Frazier mentions Elizabeth Botume’s First Days Amongst the Contrabands but doesn’t include it in his bibliography. And his list of only five sources—three from the twentieth century—fails to cite current scholarship, particularly on African Americans, from which he clearly draws, including Jim Downs’s Sick From Freedom and Jean Yellin’s Harriet Jacobs.

Catherine Clinton

Catherine Clinton is the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas San Antonio; she has published nearly thirty books, including The Plantation Mistress (1982), Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004) and Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2009). Her Fleming Lectures appeared in 2016: Stepdaughters of History. Her forthcoming edited volume, Confederate Statues and Memorialization, will inaugurate her new series (co-edited with Jim Downs) HISTORY IN THE HEADLINES, to be published by UGA Press. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016, she is working on her project on Union soldiers and madness during and after the Civil War.

Fiction Fights the Civil War

Fiction Fights the Civil War

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This week, Muster begins a series on recent fiction about slavery and the Civil War. Interest in how the war is represented in popular literature remains unabated because the legacies of slavery and the war endure, a point emphasized by Carole Emberton in her roundtable review of Underground Airlines. Who determines the meaning of those legacies in large measure informs our current political moment. And though that might be true of any period in the last 150 years, it seems especially so now, one year after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

Urgency does not lessen the difficulty of dislodging dominant narratives, however. “Deeply embedded in American mythology of mission, and serving as the mother lode of nostalgia for antimodernists and military history buffs,” David Blight explained, the Civil War remains very difficult to shuck from its shell of sentimentalism. “Over time,” he continued, “Americans have needed deflections from the deeper meanings of the Civil War. It haunts us still, we feel it […] but often do not face it.”[1] The politics of memory is a tricky business, as Blight and others have demonstrated. This roundtable looks at recent works that stare into the belly of the beast, that seek to reimagine what the war might mean.

It opens with Catherine Clinton’s review of Charles Frazier’s Varina (2018), which Clinton reads as an atonement to Frazier’s blockbuster 1997 novel Cold Mountain. Frazier’s creation of James Blake, an African American child orphaned by the war and adopted by the Confederacy’s first family, allowed the author to confront head on those topics he evaded in his debut novel. In so doing, he also forced himself to grapple with his own role in perpetuating a narrative of the Civil War that ignores (or denies) the centrality of slavery to the conflict.

Timothy J. Williams reviews Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man, published originally in French and Creole in 1997, but only recently translated into English by Linda Coverdale. The world Chamoiseau created is governed by power structures erected by sugar planters in colonial Martinique. But once the old man escapes the plantation, he dissolves into the colony’s primordial “forestine soul” where time is not marked by particular events that occur in sequential order. In this world, Williams explains, distinctions evaporate, including those between past and present, between Africa and colonial Martinique, between memory and history.

Slave Old Man is not the only epic tale reviewed in this roundtable. Hilary Green reviews James McBride’s Good Lord Bird (2013), an imaginative retelling of John Brown’s final years. The novel suggests that Brown was a man of twists and turns. Or, to borrow from Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey, Brown was a complicated man. And Green notes in her review of the (in)famous abolitionist occupies an ambiguous position in American memory. In this novel, McBride engages this conflicted legacy by turning attention away from Brown, although his presence lingers, to an invented character, Brown’s ersatz son, Henry Shackleford. Henry emerges as the tale’s protagonist, a Telemachus-figure in search of his patrimony. Henry’s recollections, the literary device that frames the novel, offer readers a way into African American collective memory.

Carole Emberton’s review of Ben Winters’ genre-bending novel Underground Airlines (2016) reminds readers that not all counterfactual narratives of the Civil War avoid slavery’s legacy. Instead of imagining a world in which the Confederacy had won, Winters’ imagines a world in which the Civil War had never taken place, a world in which slavery still exists in four states and shows no signs of dying out. The novel’s protagonist, a former slave turned fugitive slave catcher, is every bit as complicated as John Brown. And the world in which he inhabits is as every bit as complicated as our own, in large measure because it is our own.

The series concludes with Nina Silber’s review of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). It is commonplace for publishers to boost their lists by claiming for one of their titles, “the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year.” In the case of Lincoln in the Bardo, however, publicists were not far off the mark. The novel was Saunders’ first in nearly a two-decade career as one of the nation’s most acclaimed writers of short fiction. It is perhaps fitting that Saunders returned in this novel to the Civil War and its persistent influence on contemporary society. The titular story of his first collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” a tale of a dilapidated theme park set in the not-too-distant future, shares with his first novel an interest in haunted landscapes and similarly offers a meditation on horrific violence. That story ends in a bloodbath, with little sense that the repetitive loop of commemoration and violence will end. Lincoln in the Bardo ends differently and, as Silber suggests, holds out the possibility for both empathy and justice.

 

Now that the roundrable has ended, our guest editor’s concluding post can be found here.

 

[1] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.

Sarah Gardner

Sarah E. Gardner is Distinguished Professor of History at Mercer University. She is currently writing a book on reading during the American Civil War.

“The Most Potent Money Power”: Slave Traders, Dark Money, and Elections

“The Most Potent Money Power”: Slave Traders, Dark Money, and Elections

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With the 2018 midterm elections approaching, the role of money in politics once again looms large in American political discourse. For many, shadowy super PACs, mega-donors, and dark money stand in stark contrast to the sanctity of the individual voter. Political actors recognize and deploy this, with politicians going to great lengths to avoid seeming beholden to monied interests.[1] This, however, is not a new issue in American politics. Fears of wealth’s influence resonated in the nineteenth century as well, as electoral combatants used accusations of purchased influence to attack their opponents’ legitimacy. Even as the Civil War loomed, such rhetoric helped shape the terms of debates over the Union’s future. We see this with particular clarity in Virginia, as Virginians wrestled with secession during the secession winter. Much as opponents of slavery had long accused the “Slave Power” of wielding undemocratic political influence, those combating secession summoned fears of slave money (particularly that spent in the political arena by slave traders) to undercut disunion’s democratic legitimacy and to bolster the Union.

Slave traders and their political influence had long been an obvious rhetorical target. As the most obviously odious of all the actors within the slave system, they could be (and were) attacked with particular venom. And connection to them and their ill-gotten gains could prove damning. In 1844, Horace Greeley blamed slave traders for Martin Van Buren’s defeat in that year’s Democratic Convention, citing their desire to see Texas annexed in order to increase the prices of the enslaved, while in the 1850s a Stephen Douglas mouthpiece attacked a rival as the “the nigger traders’ candidate for President” for opposing homestead legislation.[2] Linkages to slave commerce—and to the money generated therefrom—was a potent rhetorical tool in the parlance of the antebellum United States.

Slave Auction at the South, 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In 1860 and 1861, as state conventions assembled to debate secession, the possibility that slave traders’ lucre might influence the course of gained heightened significance. Such fears had considerable credibility even within slave states where Unionist delegates hailing from regions with lower enslaved populations clashed with their counterparts from the plantation belts. In Richmond, Virginia, capital of both the commonwealth and the mid-Atlantic’s slave trade, delegates met for two months within blocks of the city’s slave-trading district and with one eye on their potential influence over the proceedings. Delegates heightened their vigilance as the convention’s Unionist majority endured an outdoor political campaign with mass meetings and demonstrations whipping the city into a frenzy.[3]

Those opposed to secession quickly attributed these mobs to the malign influence of slave traders in a practice reminiscent of contemporary accusations of “astroturfing” and of paid protesters. When, for example, a delegate issued a particularly stirring call for maintaining the Union, a crowd marched on the Mechanics’ Institute where the convention sat in session. Unionists argued that this mass action (which originated near Richmond’s slave jails and auction houses) had clearly been “gotten up by negro traders.”[4] Two weeks later, after secessionists ascended the state capitol and unfurled a Confederate flag, the New York Tribune complained that such mob activity revealed that Richmond’s slave traders had “let themselves loose” upon the city and inaugurated a “Reign of Terror” designed to intimidate delegates.[5]

Virginia State Capitol. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Besides instigating protests, Virginian Unionists were convinced that slave dealers were bankrolling the secession movement in the commonwealth. Elizabeth Van Lew, future United States spy and a relative of the slave jailer Silas Omohundro, fumed in her diary that when slave traders hoisted the Confederate flag in Richmond they proved that they had been “fabricating for years” a plot against the Union.[6] A correspondent of Shenandoah Valley minister and educator George Junkin similarly feared that slave dealers had engaged their “immense capital” in “buying up votes and presses, and paying agents to get up county secession meetings.”[7] A convention delegate concurred in this assessment and, even after an initial two-to-one vote against immediate secession, wrung his hands over the “the powerful influence exerted by the most potent money power, that has ever existed in Virginia… the power of the Traders in negroes.” These, he correctly noted, operated their own bank, and had considerable capital of their own to throw into the secession cause. “The interest of these people,” he feared, “is entirely with the seceded states, and to promote it, they would sacrifice every other interest in the state, without the least scruple.”[8] A well-funded group of single-issue voters, then, threatened the sanctity of the democratically elected convention and to take Virginia to war on their own behalf.

John Minor Botts. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Virginia’s secession and the onset of war perpetuated claims that Richmond slave brokers had hacked the electoral process using the proceeds of their traffic. John Minor Botts, one of Virginia’s most famous Unionists, complained that “the gamblers and nigger traders of Richmond spent ten thousand dollars” to steal his slot in the convention and thus wield influence within that body. Their campaign succeeded, and their dark money thus secured secession “for the exclusive benefit of the holders and dealers in slaves.”[9] The abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher, meanwhile, shared Botts’s paranoia, arguing that “a conspiracy of slave traders” had “dragooned” Virginia “out of the nation” via a campaign of influence and intimidation that frustrated the will of the people.[10] The Unionist Wheeling Daily Intelligencer put things most pointedly. Richmond’s slave trading class, it argued, had been “the first to embrace Secessionism:” it “contributed the first money,” raised the first flag, and headed “All the processions, by day or night.” “They were,” in short, “the leaders of every Secession enterprise.” These dealers in humanity’s actions, then, were not out of interest in the common good but to defend their own businesses, elevating the good of the few over the needs and voices of the people.[11]

Because many United States citizens persistently believed in a silent Confederate majority in favor of restoring the Union, wealthy, influential slave dealers remained a useful excuse for explaining the lengthening conflict. Their corrupting influence and deep pockets, the argument ran, enabled a minority to beat the drum for war over the wishes of most Southerners. A Cleveland periodical thus claimed that while most Virginians desired reunion, large slaveholders and “negro traders” opposed this and held them in political bondage.[12] Another paper blamed “the negro-traders, the blacklegs, the overseers, and all the parasites of slavery” for abetting secession and for the ongoing war.[13] Though such claims became less convincing as the war dragged on, the idea that secession had been not only legally but democratically illegitimate thanks to the undue influence of a monied class remained broadly compelling.

The surviving evidence is inconclusive regarding the actual role of slave-trading money in the political crisis of 1860-1861. Certainly many slave dealers were politically active, and contemporary testimony does place them in the thick of anti-Union activities; after the war, one of their own implicated many leading slave traders, for example, in running the secession flag up over the state capital in Virginia.[14] Their surviving correspondence, however, gives little indication of a broad conspiracy. Regardless of the reality of their actions, however, the threat of slave trading capital deployed in the political process remained rhetorically useful for proponents of the Union. By playing on existing fears of slaveholders’ dominance, their notoriety, and their widely known profits, Unionists made them into plausible enemies. Though they ultimately failed politically, blaming secession on slave dealers’ money and purchased influence provided a compelling scapegoat, allowing Unionists could tout their own authority amidst the secession crisis and to discredit their opponents. They thus joined a long and, as contemporary events show, ongoing history of using political financing as an issue in shaping electoral behavior and determining the legitimacy of the democratic process.

 

[1] Peter Overby, “Every Position Donald Trump Has Taken on How He’ Is Funding His Campaign,” NPR, July 14, 2016, accessed October 15, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2016/07/14/485699964/every-position-donald-trump-has-taken-on-how-he-is-funding-his-campaign; Beto O’Rourke, “Make a Donation,” Beto For Senate, accessed October 15, 2018, https://betofortexas.com.

[2] Excerpted in “The Negro Traders as Politicians,” Christian Advocate, January 14, 1864; quoted in George M. Stephenson, The Political History of the Public Lands From 1840 to 1862: From Pre-Emption to Homestead (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1917), 217.

[3] Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 281-282, 315-323.

[4] “Secession at Richmond,” Orleans Independent Standard, March 1, 1861.

[5] “From Virginia,” New York Tribune, March 17, 1861.

[6] David D. Ryan, ed. A Yankee Spy in Richmond: The Civil War Diary of “Crazy Bet” Van Lew (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Boos, 1996), 30, 33.

[7] D.X. Junkin, George Junkin, D.D., LL.D.: A Biography (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1871), 516.

[8] Quoted in Bruce S. Greenwalt, “The Correspondence of James D. Davidson, Reluctant Rebel” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1961), 35, 41.

[9] John Minor Botts, The Great Rebellion: Its Secret History, Rise, Progress, and Disastrous Failure (New York, 1866), 240; “From Richmond,” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, February 27, 1861; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 277.

[10] Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses in America and England, From 1850 to 1885, on Slavery, the Civil War, and the Development of Liberty in the United States (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1887), 373.

[11] “Late News From the Rebel States,” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, August 17, 1861.

[12] “The Situation at Richmond,” Cleveland Morning Leader, October 13, 1862.

[13] “Slaveholders Unionists,” Herkimer Democrat, April 29, 1863.

[14] “Notice,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 5, 1860; James L. Apperson, Amnesty Petition, June 21, 1865, Case Files of Applications from Former Confederates for Presidential Pardons (“Amnesty Papers”), 1865-67, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s-1917, Record Group 94, NARA. Accessed via www.fold3.com.

Robert Colby

Robert Colby is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His dissertation, "The Continuance of an Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South," examines the ways in which the domestic slave trade shaped the course of the Civil War and the experience of emancipation. You can follow him on Twitter, @rkdcolby86.

Utilizing Film in Our Courses on Slavery and the Enslaved

Utilizing Film in Our Courses on Slavery and the Enslaved

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Teaching the history of slavery in the United States well, like teaching any complex topic mired in historical mythologies and mixed public interests, is a daunting task. Pedagogical approaches to slavery have to face off against centuries of public misconceptions and avoidance. I constantly try to engage and inform students who have longstanding perceptions about the institution and those who were a part of it. Their typical ideas about slavery are expressed in declarations and queries made in class such as: “My middle school teacher told us that the Civil War was not about slavery.” “Are you saying that Africans actually sold other Africans?!” “Why didn’t slaves resist their enslavement?”

Other young scholars file into my classes who generally (not necessarily genuinely) want to know more about U.S., African American, southern or Civil War history, but not so much about that “difficult” aspect of our national past that included two and half centuries of racialized human bondage. They want to learn more about the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution, but not Sally Hemings, Ona Judge, or Dunmore’s Proclamation. They prefer analyzing Civil War battle strategies and statistics, not locating the primary documents that speak to the hard fight for and against black freedom. Many are inspired by the heroic work of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and others, but recoil at descriptions of the horror of their lives under the lash. Of course, this is what we sign up for—enhancing our students’ knowledge and pushing their intellectual boundaries beyond the comfort zone of what they “know,” or hope, to be truth.

Certainly great research monographs, comprehensive survey texts, and primary sources—increasingly published and online— along with historical novels and shorter works of fiction with black bondage as subject, intellectually engage and capture the attention and imaginations of those who study slavery in our lecture halls and seminar rooms. So too do documentaries, feature length “Hollywood” movies, independent film and TV mini- and full-length series. In the most recent issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era, I contributed a review essay of recent films, miniseries, and television shows that can help guide educators in navigating these complex issues.[1] I encourage scholars to take full advantage in our classrooms (with proper trigger warnings administered) of this growing, and diverse, filmography of slavery.

The institution of slavery has, since the premiere of the film industry, contributed to Hollywood’s evolution as an essential outlet of U.S. popular culture. Indeed, the nation’s fascination with black bondage, plantation life and the Lost Cause were some of the first historicized subjects screen writers and producers drew on to attract, and amuse, broad audiences. Indeed, the institution of black bondage had been such a part of the nation’s history from the period of European colonization forward, that many early films about the nation’s history necessarily included slavery and enslaved people, even if only in background faces, locations and cultural references. This pattern continued through Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s, 40s and 50s and beyond. Indeed, much of what made “gold” for pre-Civil Rights era Hollywood were the blockbuster films with superstar actors and slavery as a storyline or backdrop. These films were aimed to attract mostly white adult and juvenile audiences, although certainly black moviegoers patronized them too. White actresses Shirley Temple, Vivian Leigh, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen O’Hara and many others starred in these films. Equal numbers of popular white thespians, if not more, did so as well.

Black entertainers benefitted too from the being a part of these film projects, including Oscar recipient Hattie McDaniel, George Reed, Kenny Washington, wildly popular Bill Bojangles Robinson, James Baskett, Rex Ingram and first black contract actress Madame Sul-Te-Wan. Likewise, one of these “big” films, Foxes of Harrow (1947) starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara, was the first movie adapted from a novel penned by an African American writer, Frank Yerby.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, featuring Irving Cummings. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

As one rightfully imagines, films on the big and small screens, capture the political and social sentiments of their era. These changing perceptions of African Americans and African American history provide an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate to our students changes in popular ideas about race and “races,” to help them trace the evolution of racialization, and to demonstrate how these popular biases find themselves in popular culture, but also in scholarship. Early films about slavery, with rare exception, express the racism of the “nadir.” Edwin Porter’s and Thomas Edison’s 1904 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, employed the same tropes found in blackface and black minstrelsy, coon shouters, tom shows, and other forms of popular entertainment of the time. The slavery historiography of the period, stamped by the most lauded southern historian of the era, Ulrich B. Phillips, likewise proclaimed the happy go lucky, lazy, promiscuous, superstitious, submissive and loyal slave found in most of these early film productions, whether romantic comedies, epic dramas, or animation.

What our students will be able to really see in classroom screenings is that as the public began to embrace different images of black Americans culturally, politically and economically, filmed portrayals of African American slavery also changed. The 1950s, therefore, not only swept in the national civil rights era and global decolonization efforts, but also an evolving slavery filmography that included many more films about African American self-determination manifest in bondspersons’ direct and indirect resistance efforts.

This trend deepened in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1977 airing of the mini-series Roots: The Saga of An American Family, for example, brought a more realistic depiction of slave life across multiple generations into the living rooms of more than the nation’s population. Roots was possible because two decades of black political activism and progress, along with a new social history of slavery largely researched, written and edited from the perspective of the slave, made the trials and triumphs of these bondspeople palatable to a U.S. audience who seemed to really want to know what black slaves, and their slavery, was like.

Roots, neither the early version nor its 2016 remake, gave us a perfect filmed discourse on its subject. The problems with the miniseries, like all the other films about slavery, however, provide wonderful opportunities for students to explore the diversity of the slave experience across generations, regions, and genders, as well as in relationship to the kinds of masters and mistresses they encountered, the types of labor they performed, and the kinds of resistance strategies they devised both individually and collectively. It also allows them to turn a critical eye to the methodological practice and interpretations of historians.

Promotional photo for the television series “Underground.” Courtesy of Sony Pictures Television.

No film, or even movie series, on this immensely complicated and important subject is flawless or comprehensive. There are some works, however, that provide the kind of visual content to our students’ learning process that can “bring to life” the slave’s experiences and humanity, while also inspiring meaningful, critical discourse on historiography, methodology, national mythology and popular culture practices. Examples of this filmography are listed below that I have found can be employed in some manner to help illustrate and spark discussion and analysis of these relevant topics. Each one either engages the mythology, or realities, of the experience of slavery in a manner that can assist in our difficult task of relating this complex subject to the diverse young scholars in our classrooms.

 

Slave Family Life

Huckleberry Finn (1939)

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Slaves (1969)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Sankofa (1993)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Sexual Violence and Miscegenation

Birth of a Nation (1915)

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Band of Angels (1957)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Queen (1992)

Sankofa (1993)

Jefferson in Paris (1995)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

Belle (2013)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Resistance

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Band of Angels (1957)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969

Burn! (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

A House Divided: Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion (1982)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Quilombo (1984)

Sankofa (1993)

Amistad (1997)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

African Cultural Remembrance and Retention

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Tamango (1958)

Burn! (1969)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Sankofa (1993)

Amistad (1997)

Quilombo (1984)

 

Relationships between Plantation Mistresses and their Bondspersons

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Mandingo (1975)

Quilombo (1984)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Queen (1992)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Relationships between Plantation Masters and their Bondspersons

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Band of Angels (1957)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1987)

Sankofa 91993)

Jefferson in Paris (1995)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Enslaved Women’s Lives

Foxes of Harrow (1947)

Tamango (1958)

Slaves (1969)

Mandingo (1975)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Queen (1992)

Sankofa (1993)

Beloved (1998)

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

Slave Labor and the Economy

Burn! (1969)

Roots (1977; 2016)

Quilombo (1984)

Sankofa (1993)

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Birth of a Nation (2016)

Underground (2016-2017)

 

[1] Brenda E. Stevenson, “Filming Black Voices and Stories: Slavery on America’s Screens,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 488-520. The article is available through subscription and on Project Muse.

Brenda Stevenson

Brenda Stevenson is the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. The author of four books, her intellectual interests center on the comparative, historical experiences of women, family, and community across racial and ethnic lines.

“Better men were never better led”: October 1864 and the Crisis in the Union Armies at Petersburg

“Better men were never better led”: October 1864 and the Crisis in the Union Armies at Petersburg

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In early October 1864, Gen. U. S. Grant planned a trip to Washington. He believed that 30,000 to 40,000 troops were gathered in “depots all over the North” and wanted to “see if I cannot devise means of getting [them] promptly into the field.” Although he canceled the trip, his concern was well placed.[1]

The Army of the Potomac had begun the summer of 1864 with more than 100,000 men, but the massive casualties incurred during the Overland Campaign, along with the redeployment of some units, had left it with about 50,000 effectives at the end of the summer. Replacements did appear throughout the fall, but the Army of the Potomac was a very different organization than it had been three months earlier, and Union generals were almost as worried about the preparedness of their men as they were about the Confederates they faced across the wrecked Virginia landscape.

A lot was being asked of these men. Soldiers were constantly adjusting their lines, improving old earthworks, and destroying or modifying captured enemy works. Moreover, the wood and dirt fortifications, hard-used by the men, subject to heat and rain, and fouled by decomposing bodies and human waste, constantly had to be rebuilt. Others dug mines and countermines, while still others created primitive minefields by planting “torpedoes.” These major construction projects occurred during nearly constant skirmishing, scouting, and artillery duels. By early fall, insects, rats, lice, dirt (and, when it rained, bottomless mud) further plagued the men who were digging, fighting, and dying in the Union trenches.[2]

Fort Sedgwick near Petersburg. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Throughout the fall campaign, Grant and his generals fretted about the readiness of new recruits, frequently reorganized units, and, on occasion, delayed operations until a time when more battle-ready men were available. Gen. Winfield Hancock worried that his men, particularly replacements, were being asked to work too hard; “there are a good many recruits in the command whom we are trying to drill, and I have not allowed them to be worked within the last few days on that account.”[3] In early October, Gen. G. K. Warren, a famous worrier, warned that “We need time to get our new levies in order, and no matter how great the pressure, we cannot succeed with them till they have at least acquired the . . .rudiments of their drill and discipline.”[4] Gen. Nelson Miles complained that some of his regiments “are mainly composed of substitutes who have recently joined, and the frequency of desertions among this class of men renders it necessary that they be placed in positions where they can easily be watched and guarded.” In fact, Nelson wanted his new soldiers to be moved out of the trenches so they could be better trained and disciplined.[5]

At the other end of the Union position, north of the James River, Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James was also going through growing pains. Butler complained of a group of about 300 “unorganized recruits” intended as replacements for a New York regiment. They seemed to have been sent by the War Department without orders or leaders; “the captains that have been commissioned have deserted them and cannot be found.” The men had elected their own officers, but had become “a mob.” Butler wanted them sent to their intended regiment so they could be integrated into “good companies.” “Otherwise, they are worse than useless for months.” This was apparently not the only time a group of reinforcements had appeared without clear directions. “We have suffered so much from these new organizations rendering men useless that I trust that where there is no organization we shall not wait for a mob to make one.”[6]

These desperate messages remind us that, despite our hindsight-influenced sense that the Confederacy was on its last legs by October 1864, that was not necessarily how Union commanders saw it. They doubted the capacity of their men to withstand the rigors of this new—to them—form of warfare, and seemed to be worrying that the effectiveness of the army had hit a tipping point. They had to make Grant and the War Department aware, through more negative than usual rhetoric describing their men, that winning the war required further investment in men and training.

But a decidedly different rhetorical style reflected another of the war’s imperatives. Butler bragged that at Chaffin’s Farm his 2500 black soldiers had “carried intrenchments at the point of the bayonet” that had previously stymied twice the number of white troops. “Treated fairly and disciplined, they have fought most heroically.” The same day he declared that he could break the Bermuda line between the Appomattox and the James Rivers “with 3,000 negroes” and asked for more black regiments.[7]

This flag, “One Cause, Once Country,” was the regimental flag of the 45th USCT, several companies of which fought with Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James at Petersburg. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Butler’s message to the “Soldiers of the Army of the James” on October 11 featured fulsome praise for the officers and men of every unit in his army, including the Third Divisions of the Eighteenth and Tenth Corps, both of which were comprised of black troops. “Better men were never better led, better officers never led better men,” Butler declared. In addition to congratulating dozens of white officers, he spent several paragraphs noting the heroics of black soldiers, from the private who bayonetted a Rebel officer trying to rally his men to the sergeant who led his company into the enemy’s works after their captain was killed. Several black soldiers were noted for their gallant action to take over for disabled color bearers, despite being wounded themselves. By the time Butler wrote his message, at least four of the companies in the Sixth U. S. Colored Troops were led by black sergeants after their officers had been killed or wounded, and several companies in other regiments also went into battle behind black sergeants. Butler ordered a “special medal” created in their honor.[8]

Butler was a famous self-promoter, and he drew glory from the excellent performance of black units that many commanders were reluctant to command. But he also knew that, even as the fighting qualities of white soldiers seemed to be on the decline, the black troops fighting for the freedom of their race needed to be seen as effective, showing high morale and leadership possibilities.

The war was, in fact, entering its final phase in the fall of 1864—but the generals could not be sure of that. As a result, they shaped their messages to illustrate the immediate needs of the army, arguing that the army’s poor condition required urgent measures and implying that victory could still slip away. But a few also highlighted the contributions of the black soldiers, hoping that the aftermath of the war for African Americans could be shaped by public recognition of their loyalty and courage.

 

 

[1] Grant to Gen. George G. Meade, October 3, 1864, The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 51. Hereafter call the OR.

[2] Earl J. Hess details the growth of the entrenchments around Petersburg, and the lives of the men who built them, in In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), esp. 50-77.

[3] Hancock to Meade, October 15, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 238.

[4] Warren to Meade, October 1, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 20.

[5] Miles to Maj. H. H. Bingham, Acting Assistant Adjutant General, Second Corps, October 11, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 160.

[6] Butler to Grant, October 12, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 184.

[7] Butler to Stanton, October 3, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 65.; Butler to Grant, October 3, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 65.

[8] Gen. Benjamin Butler, “Soldiers of the Army of the James,” October 11, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 42, Pt. 3, 161, 163, 167-170.

 

James Marten

James Marten is professor of history at Marquette University and a past president of the Society of Civil War Historians. The author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America, Co-edited, with Caroline E. Janney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021); America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), and Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

The Other Lawrence Massacre: Sectional Politics and the 1860 Pemberton Mill Disaster

The Other Lawrence Massacre: Sectional Politics and the 1860 Pemberton Mill Disaster

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Political polarization often magnifies the public significance of a tragedy. As Americans prepared for a bitterly contested presidential election in early 1860, a gruesome industrial accident in Lawrence, Massachusetts, reignited conflict between champions and critics of wage labor. Unlike the violent episodes of 1856 and 1863 in Lawrence, Kansas, the Pemberton Mill Disaster seemed distant from issues of sectionalism and slavery, but it quickly became a political Rorschach test: some viewed the calamity as evidence of the need for repentance or reform, while others regarded the smoking ruins as proof of the superiority of slavery.

Pemberton Mill, built in 1853 by John A. Lowell and J. Pickering Putnam, was one of Lawrence’s newest and largest textile mills. Lowell and Putnam sold out during the Panic of 1857, but prosperity returned under new owners George Howe and David Nevins, and New England textile output reached record levels in 1859. By 1860, the mill’s 650 looms devoured 30 tons of cotton each week and employed nearly 1000 people; most were women and girls, and many were Irish immigrants.[1]

“Ruins of the Pemberton Mills, at Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Morning after the Fall,” Harper’s Weekly 4, no. 160 (January 21, 1860), 33. Several images of the smoking ruins of the Pemberton Mills circulated widely in the American and European press, including this image which made the cover of Harper’s Weekly.

Late in the afternoon of January 10, 1860 – a cold, snowy Tuesday – around 600 workers were toiling in the mill’s six-story main building when the south wall collapsed and pulled the entire structure down with it. Onlookers rushed to free hundreds of people entombed in a mountain of brick, iron, wood, and machinery, but progress was slow. Around 9:30pm, a lamp overturned and ignited an inferno fueled by raw cotton and leaking oil.[2] The “whole mass of ruins has become one sheet of flame!” reported a journalist. “The screams and moans of the poor, buried, burning, and suffocating creatures can be distinctly heard, but no power on earth can save them.”[3] Trapped, a foreman tried to slit his throat rather than be burned alive. A girl caught in a machine ripped off two fingers to make a desperate escape.[4] Between 90 and 150 people died and scores more were seriously injured; among the dead was fourteen-year-old Margaret Hamilton, who arrived that morning for her first day of work.[5]

Inevitably, observers drew conflicting lessons from the horror. Ministers deemed it an act of divine judgment and a reminder to repent.[6] Soon, however, an inquest blamed human negligence, not heavenly wrath, for the suffering. Its report attributed the collapse to faulty iron supports, shoddy masonry, and excessive loads of machinery (recently added to maximize output) and named four engineers and architects as being especially responsible for the ghastly blunder, although none received any punishment.[7] The report absolved the mill’s past and present owners of culpability, but other observers accused them of sacrificing workers on the altar of profit. The New York Herald blamed what it called the “Lawrence Massacre” on cost-cutting capitalists who had killed and maimed over five hundred “white slaves of the North” by skimping on construction.[8] Long after 1860, critics ranging from pioneering feminist author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to the Knights of Labor cited Pemberton Mill to illustrate capital’s inhumanity to labor.[9]

“The Building of the Pemberton Mills,” Vanity Fair 1, no. 4 (January 21, 1860), 56. Northern periodicals, like the New York-based Vanity Fair, blamed the Pemberton Mills disaster on business owners and contractors who settled for substandard building construction.

Responses took a peculiar twist in the South, where analysis of the tragedy became entwined with proslavery ideology. In the 1840s and 1850s, a vocal squad of southern theorists began to defend slavery as the best possible relationship between employers and workers of any race. They carefully avoided alienating nonslaveholding southern whites, but the abstract defense of slavery did percolate into popular publications.[10] Outraged by John Brown’s recent raid on Harpers Ferry and steeling themselves for a Republican victory in the looming presidential election, proslavery journalists pounced on the Pemberton Mill catastrophe to make provocative comparisons between wage labor’s brutality and slavery’s benevolence.

Some southern editors echoed northern criticisms of the wage-labor system they blamed for the catastrophe. The Richmond Daily Dispatch, for instance, applauded the New York Herald’s denunciation of Boston elites who excoriated slavery while sending northern millhands to be slaughtered on the factory floor. Tellingly, however, the Dispatch added its own overtly proslavery gloss to a passage attributed to the Herald but actually written by the Richmond editor, who savored the bitter irony that “the white slaves of Lawrence were massacred” while toiling to enrich “fine old Boston gentlemen” who had armed antislavery activists in Kansas and supported John Brown. Even as the “white slaves at Lawrence are mourning over their kith and kin slain by their philanthropic masters,” gloated the Dispatch, “the black chattels of the South are making merry with their holiday festivities.” The Virginian closed with a loaded question: whose lot – “that of the cotton picker in Georgia, or the cotton weaver in Massachusetts” – was “the preferable one?”[11] A New Orleans editor the same Herald article and opined that in the “strife between labor and capital in Massachusetts, labor has to endure what a Southern slave is never made acquainted with.”[12] The southern press transmuted the Herald’s bitter rebuke into an explicitly proslavery comparison between the northern and southern labor systems.

Even without northern inspiration, southern journalists wove proslavery arguments into coverage of the calamity. Three days after the disaster, a New Orleans editor carped that if it had occurred in the South, New England writers would have blamed it on slavery. In fact, he insisted, no “Southern master” was capable of the “fiendish cruelty” of northern capitalists who exposed operatives “of their own color and race” to dangerous working conditions.[13] From North Carolina came a similar argument couched in ostensibly innocuous terms. “Far be it from us to contrast slave labor with white labor in any offensive sense,” wrote a Raleigh editor. “But we must say that, as a general rule, there is more care manifested for the comfort and safety of black laborers in the South than is shown for white laborers in the North.” The latter had no masters to “bind up the broken limbs,” “provide for the poor cripples,” or care for them in old age.[14]

To be sure, none of these southern journalists openly endorsed the enslavement of white laborers. Their tone and timing anticipated the “whataboutism” rampant in modern American politics. But by weaving proslavery doctrines into their critiques of the society which produced the Pemberton Mill tragedy, southern editors escalated sectional strife as American voters anticipated a uniquely momentous election. Among those who visited Lawrence after the disaster was Abraham Lincoln, who passed through the somber town just days after giving the speech at New York’s Cooper Union which catapulted him toward the Republican nomination.[15] The Pemberton Mill disaster cast a long shadow over the climactic moments of antebellum politics.

 

[1] Alvin F. Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008), chapter 1.

[2] Ibid., chapters 2-3.

[3] Quoted in An Authentic History of the Lawrence Calamity (Boston: John J. Dyer & Co., 1860), 9.

[4] Authentic History, 15, 20.

[5] Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence, 38.

[6] Authentic History, 38-46.

[7] Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence, 91-109.

[8] “The Lawrence Massacre Again,” New York Herald, January 16, 1860.

[9] Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Tenth of January,” Atlantic Monthly 21, no. 125 (March 1868): 346-362; George E. McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement (Boston: A.M. Bridgman & Co., 1887), 122-123

[10] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[11] ”The Lawrence Calamity,” (Richmond) Daily Dispatch, January 18, 1860.

[12] “Wholesale Slaughter of Northern Operatives,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 23, 1860.

[13] “Southern Slaves – Northern Operatives,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 13, 1860.

[14] “The Calamity at Lawrence,” (Raleigh, NC) Semi-Weekly Standard, January 18, 1860.

[15] Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 185-186, 190.

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).

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