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Congressman Charles Hays and the Civil Rights Act of 1875

Congressman Charles Hays and the Civil Rights Act of 1875

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The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution dramatically transformed American society during the Reconstruction era. The amendments abolished slavery, established the concepts of birthright citizenship and equal protection of the laws, and granted all men the right to vote, regardless of color. For most members of the Republican Party, enforcing legal and political equality extended the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all races. These Reconstruction Amendments provided a tangible answer to the question of freedpeople’s status in American society following emancipation. Many moderates and conservatives in both parties, however, made a distinction between legal and political equality—which enabled men of all backgrounds the chance to participate in republican governance on an equal basis—and “social equality,” a shorthand term to describe the debate over racial integration in everyday life. These political leaders earnestly warned against any legislation covering the latter. They warned that such legislation would promote government overreach and the forced integration of black and white Americans in social situations.[1]

Not all Republicans felt this way about “social equality,” especially its black membership. The debate first emerged after Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner introduced a bill on May 13, 1870, that would have outlawed racial discrimination in public transportation, facilities, schools, cemeteries, and in jury selection. The bill created a firestorm. As one Democratic newspaper in McConnelsville, Ohio, complained, Sumner’s legislation meant that “every man, woman and child, of the Anglo-Saxon or Caucasian race, going forth into public, must expect to encounter at every turn the man of African descent.” Anyone who understood “the superiority of the white over the black race” had a duty to fight “social equality with an inferior race.”[2] Sumner and his radical counterparts unsuccessfully lobbied another four years to get enough votes to pass a Civil Rights bill. During these debates, however, one unlikely ally emerged when Congressman Charles Hays of Alabama passionately spoke in favor of Sumner’s legislation. Hays’s eloquent speech to the House of Representatives on January 31, 1874, outraged the white South and troubled conservatives throughout the country, but his powerful challenge to bigotry and white supremacy in American society continues to resonate today.

Alabama Congressman Charles Hays. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hays was born in 1834 to a prosperous family in the black belt region of Greene County, Alabama. After his father died at a young age, Hays built upon his inheritance and expanded his investments in both land and slaves. By 1860—still at the tender age of 26—Hays owned more than two thousand acres of prime cotton-growing land, almost one hundred enslaved African Americans, and an estate valued at more than $112,000. He was a reluctant secessionist when Alabama first declared itself out of the Union, but after the firing at Fort Sumter he joined the Confederacy and eventually attained the rank of major.[3]

After the war Hays successfully sought a pardon from President Andrew Johnson and took a pragmatic approach to politics. More interested in a quick end to federal oversight of Reconstruction than rehashing the results of the Civil War, he joined the Republican Party. According to biographer William Warren Rogers, Jr., he soon became a prominent member of the Union League in Greene County. Hays was then elected to Congress in 1869 with strong support from black and white party members in Alabama’s 4th Congressional district.[4]

While Hays initially favored a speedy return to civilian rule in Alabama, the acts of political terrorism being committed by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War horrified him. He gradually moved towards the radical wing of the party. Hays supported enforcement legislation to punish the KKK and came to believe that Sumner’s push for racial integration in social situations was justified.[5] Although a terrible economic depression raged through the country in 1874 and dominated both newspaper headlines and Congressional debate, Hays nevertheless believed that the time was right to push the civil rights issue forward.

As Hays began his remarks to the House, he lamented that “passion and prejudice have ruled the hour” in the South. “I shall receive the censure of those who sit and worship in the temples of a dead past,” but it was his sacred duty to promote “liberty and freedom” for his black constituents in Alabama and elsewhere. Citing his former experience as a slaveholder, Hays stated that he knew African Americans were hard workers who were oppressed not because of their natural inferiority—which was a lie—but because of the “storms of hate” heaped upon them by white racists. “Newspapers, politicians, demagogues, and inciters of sectional hate” were promoting a false portrait of what a civil rights bill would bring to American society, according to Hays. In his view the purpose of such a bill “[did] not force anything” on white society other than “the right of the colored man to be the equal of the white man.”[6]

Hays then attacked the notion that black and white Americans could not associate together or enjoy the same rights and privileges. He noted that “thousands of the most intelligent men of the South” who now opposed the civil rights bill “were born and raised upon the old plantations. Childhood’s earlier days were passed listening to the lullaby song of the negro nurse, and budding manhood found them surrounded by slave association.” In other words, blacks and whites had intermingled and even lived together in the days of slavery without any fearful talk of “social equality.” What had changed? “Now that they are free and receiving the enlightenment of education,” the freedpeople were seen as a threat to the social order of white supremacy and “not entitled to the protection of society,” according to critics of the bill.[7]

“These Few Precepts in Thy Memory,” a political cartoon about the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by artist Thomas Nast, 1875. Photo courtesy of Princeton University.

Unlike many of his white contemporaries, Hays acknowledged that the South—indeed, even his own remarkable fortune—had been built on the backs of the enslaved. They had “molded our fortunes, built our railroads, erected our palatial mansions, and toiled for our bread” without compensation. Similar to other Lost Cause proponents at the time, Hays celebrated the “faithful slaves” (including his own) who stayed on plantations and refused to run away during the Civil War. But he again differed from prevailing notions by expressing his sincere “debt of gratitude to them” and stressing the importance of righting a historic wrong. In supporting civil rights, Hays pledged to do his part to “pay the debt” that had been incurred through generations of unrequited toil for the benefit of himself and his ancestors. He concluded his speech by pointing out that the white south’s continued resistance to federal authority was largely responsible for the creation of more civil rights legislation. They “would not listen to reason . . . [had] rushed blindly on in the wonted paths of prejudice and hate,” and failed to understand that “the past is gone, and the present is upon us.” Meeting the needs of the present ultimately meant granting “to our colored fellow-citizens every right that belongs to a freeman, and every privilege that is guaranteed them by the Constitution.”[8]

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was passed by Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant following the death of Charles Sumner. It would be the last civil rights law passed by Congress until 1957. The law was poorly enforced and widely criticized, however, and in 1883 the Supreme Court declared in the Civil Rights Cases that the law was unconstitutional. The court held that the federal government only had the authority to ban acts of discrimination by state and local governments, not private individuals and business owners.[9] Nevertheless, the legacy of Charles Hays’s words would endure and his arguments were utilized in future fights for civil rights in America.

 

[1] Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88-89.

[2] “The Negro in Congress,” The Conservative, June 3, 1870; U.S. House of Representatives, “Fifteenth Amendment in Flesh and Blood – Legislative Interests,” U.S. House of Representatives, 2018, accessed August 2, 2018, http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Fifteenth-Amendment/Legislative-Interests/.

[3] William Warren Rogers, Jr., Black Belt Scalawag: Charles Hays and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993), 1-13.

[4] Rogers, 14-44.

[5] Rogers, 62-64.

[6] 43 Cong. Rec. 1096 (1874).

[7] 43 Cong. Rec. 1096 (1874).

[8] 43 Cong. Rec. 1096-1097 (1874).

[9] The provision banning racial discrimination in public education was removed from the final version of the bill. For the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Civil Rights Act of 1875, see Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). The full text of the decision can be seen at Harvard University, “Civil Rights Cases (1883),” 2018, accessed August 3, 2018. http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/sites/all/files/Civil%20Rights%20Cases%201883.pdf.

Nick Sacco

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

What the Name “Civil War” Tells Us–and Why It Matters

What the Name “Civil War” Tells Us–and Why It Matters

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What do Americans call the conflict that tore their nation apart from 1861 to 1865? And what difference does it make what name they use? Today most call it the Civil War, but as I discuss in my recent article in the September issue of the journal, Americans have not always agreed on that name.[1] It became the common usage in the early twentieth century as part of sectional reunion and reconciliation. But by obscuring the meaning of the war, the choice of Civil War played a role in perpetuating a division over the war’s meaning and thereby contributed to today’s debates over Confederate symbols.

A few avid defenders of those symbols talk of the War of Northern Aggression, and at least some people assume it is the South’s name for that war. And if not that, they think, white southerners surely call it the War between the States. Yet in a 1994 Southern Focus Poll, still the most extensive poll on attitudes toward the Civil War, when asked the war’s name only 6.5 percent of southerners answered War Between the States, and fewer than 1 percent offered War of Northern Aggression.

That name came into use only in the second half of the twentieth century. Before the 1950s, almost no southerners used War of Northern Aggression. It emerged out of white southern resentment of federal intervention in race relations during the civil rights era, and its use grew after that, encouraged by the neo-Confederate movement. As the Southern Focus Poll showed, however, even then relatively few southerners adopted it.[2]

War between the States has had a wider acceptance and a much longer history; the Focus Poll’s results reflected a decline in its usage. Surveys in the South Atlantic and Gulf South states, conducted by the Linguistic Atlas of the United States in the mid-twentieth century, found more southerners called it the War between the States, although still fewer than 25 percent. The polls also showed the upper-class and well-educated were the most likely to use it, which probably reflected the strength of the Lost Cause among the white South’s elite at that time.[3]

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the major champion of the Lost Cause, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, campaigned for War between the States to be the name of the war.   They believed it testified to the legality of secession and therefore the existence of a Confederate nation. Indeed, the UDC argued that the “States” in the name referred not to the individual states but to the “United States” and the “Confederate States”—two independent nations. The Daughters’ crusade contributed to its increasing use in the twentieth century, but as shown in the South Atlantic survey, War between the States really took hold between 1940 and 1965 when whites mobilized to fight all challenges to white racial control. As with the use of the War of Northern Aggression and the flying of the Confederate flag, white southerners’ contemporary embrace of Confederate memory owes as much to the confrontations of the 1960s as to that of the 1860s.[4]

The survey in the South Atlantic States also showed a surprising result; in those states the name Confederate War was slightly more common than War Between the States. Its use declined as that of War Between the States rose, and it had all but disappeared in the later Gulf South survey and the 1994 Southern Focus Poll. Nevertheless, its persistence in the years before 1940 points to the fact that despite efforts by the leaders of the Lost Cause, white southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had used a variety of names for the war. The Confederate War sometimes included the additional phrase “for Independence,” and both it and War for Secession, another name that had adherents, highlighted the white South’s view of the war’s cause.

Usage of Civil War/Rebellion in U.S. Newspapers, 1860-1920. This graph includes only references to Civil War and Rebellion/War of the Rebellion. Courtesy of America’s Historic Newspapers. For more information, see the “Note on Statistical Methods” below.

As the surveys suggest, and other measures including usage in newspapers and book titles also demonstrate, the most common name for the war in the South was always Civil War. Even in the Southern Historical Society Papers, which began publication shortly after the war and which scholars consider the voice of the most intractable former Confederates, Civil War appeared twice as often as War Between the States.[5]

In the twentieth century, northerners, too, most often used Civil War, as surveys in New England and the upper Midwest showed. They had not always favored that name, however. President Abraham Lincoln most often used Rebellion. During and immediately after the war, most northerners also referred to the Rebellion rather than to the Civil War. That usage persisted into the late nineteenth century, illustrated in the title on the volumes of the government’s official history, The War of the Rebellion. Beginning in the late 1880s, many northerners abandoned Rebellion for Civil War. After 1900 in newspapers, book titles, and government documents Civil War became the war’s most common and all but official name; on three occasions between 1905 and 1911, Congress ratified the use of Civil War.[6]

Usage of Civil War/Rebellion in Sample of Book Titles, 1861-1920. This data comes from an online search of the Library of Congress catalog, using the keyword terms “War of the Rebellion” and “Civil War.” As with newspapers, the graph here includes only the two dominant names for the war. For more information, see the “Note on Statistical Methods” below.

Northerners supported the use of Civil War in part to accommodate their former foes, who maintained secession was legal and therefore they had not been rebels. White southerners considered Rebellion not just inaccurate, but insulting, particularly after the term became associated with labor and anarchist violence in the 1880s. The northern shift in usage, therefore, reflected a commitment to reunion and to at least a degree of sectional reconciliation. During the Spanish American War, many thought, the South had proved its loyalty and nationalism. Intensifying racism, North as well as South, no doubt also played an important role. The North’s concessions to the white South’s feelings, however, had limits. Overwhelmingly, northerners refused to accept War Between the States, which they rightly viewed as acknowledging the justness of secession.[7]

Some white southerners still insisted on War between the States. And some African Americans still chose names that emphasized the centrality of slavery and emancipation to the war, as Frederick Douglass and other African Americans had during the Civil War, when they promoted names such as Abolition War or The Slaveholder’s Rebellion. For most people in the North and South, though, Civil War was the war’s name.[8]

The choice reflected and facilitated reunion and reconciliation, but at the cost of obscuring the causes and consequences of the war. Civil War also made it all too easy for both sides to continue to believe their actions has been noble and justified, their behavior honorable. Neither side wrestled, as Lincoln’s second inaugural address had urged Americans to do, with their own and the nation’s failings.   Reconciliation proved a positive development for the country but came at that high price. It rested on a sense of mutual innocence and contributed to the nation’s failure to understand the meaning and implications of the war.

The choice of the name Civil War, therefore, certainly reflected and may have contributed to the failure to construct a memory of the Civil War that encouraged Americans to address the centrality of slavery to the war and in American history and to ask whether the country had lived up to the war’s achievement of emancipation by promoting racial equality.

Today’s battles over the Confederate flag and monuments emerge, in part, out of that failure.   These disputes over Confederate symbols owe more to today’s divisions over the role and treatment of African Americans than they do to sectional divisions of the past or the memory of the Civil War. That the nation never agreed on or came to terms with what the war meant, facilitated by a sanitized memory of the war symbolized by the choice of the generic name Civil War, makes it easy for both sides to claim that history vindicates their position.

 

[1] Gaines M. Foster, “What’s Not in a Name: The Naming of the American Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 416-454. The article is available both through print subscription and on Project Muse.

[2] “Frequencies,” Q#44; “Crosstabs—Southern Sample,” #44; and “Open Answers,” from “Southern Focus Poll, Fall 1994,” Center for the Study of the American South, 1994, http://hdl.handle.net/1902.29/D-30614 Odum Institute [Distributor] V1 [Version]. On use of War of Northern Aggression, see also Andy Hall, “‘The War of Northern Aggression’ as Modern, Segregationist Revisionism,” Dead Confederates, June 21, 2011, http://deadconfederates.com/2011/06/21/the-war-of-northern-aggression-is-modern-segregationist-revisionism/.

[3] The journal has collected additional data into an online appendix on their website. See Appendix 3, https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/whats-in-a-name-appendices/.

[4] 63 Cong. Rec. 138 (December 12, 1914).

[5] Appendix 2, https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/whats-in-a-name-appendices/.

[6] Appendices 3 and 1, journalofthecivilwarera.org/whats-in-a-name-appendices/. 58 Cong. Rec. 3,733 (March 1, 1905); 59 Cong. Rec. 929-930 (January 11, 1907); 61 Cong. Rec. 1,787-88 (February 1, 1911).

[7] For differing views on reunion and reconciliation see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 351-53; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Nina Silber, “Reunion and Reconciliation, Reviewed and Reconsidered,” Journal of American History 103, no. 1 (June 2016): 59-83.

[8] Frederick Douglass, “Emancipation, Racism, and the Work Before Us: An Address Delivered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 4 December 1863,” in Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches Debates and Interviews, vol. 3, 1855-1863, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 3: 598-609, and Douglass, “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” 3: 521-43.

Note on Statistical Methods

The first graph, on usage in newspapers, comes from data collected using the online database, America’s Historic Newspapers. When I completed my searches in 2008, the website included over 300 newspapers from all states. I searched for the following names of the war: Civil War, the Rebellion, War of the Rebellion, Slaveholders’ Rebellion, War Between the States, Confederate War, War for Secession, the Late Unpleasantness, and the Lost Cause. I recorded the total number of “hits” for each name by year from 1860 to 1920. Since “hits” on War of the Rebellion also turned up in a search for Rebellion, only the total for Rebellion was included in subsequent computations. With the help of Katie Eskridge, a random 5 percent sample of stories that included either Civil War or Rebellion were read to determine if they actually referred to the American Civil War. For each year, the percentage of stories that did concern the American Civil War was then applied to the overall total, with the resulting number used in the computations. In order to measure comparative usage (rather than the number of stories about the war in any given year), the total number of mentions of each name were then converted to a percentage of usage for that year. That year’s percentages were then graphed. For clarity, the graph provided in the post includes only references to Civil War and Rebellion/War of the Rebellion. The other terms rarely exceed 3-5 percent of the total.

For the second graph, I compiled a database on books published on the Civil War between 1861 and 1920 that are in the Library of Congress through an online search of its catalog, using the key word terms “War of the Rebellion” and “Civil War”—which included most books on the war no matter the title. (For example, both Pollard’s Lost Cause and Alexander Stephens’ Constitutional View of the Late War were included). I then compiled a database of titles, by year published, author, name, general name, and where the book was published. Here, too, the raw numbers were converted into percentages of names used in each year. I then created a cross tab and graphs. As with newspapers, the graph here includes only the two dominant names for the war.

William Pencak, “The American Civil War Did Not Take Place,” Rethinking History 6, no. 2 (2002): 217-21, uses a different sample, of memoirs and general histories catalogued in Civil War Books, and he finds an emergence of Civil War as the common name in 1910, slightly later than the graph here.

Gaines M. Foster

Gaines M. Foster teaches history at Louisiana State University and is the author of Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South.

Bringing Peace after Destruction: Civil War Era Monuments and the Memory of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862

Bringing Peace after Destruction: Civil War Era Monuments and the Memory of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862

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As the fall semester loomed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, protesters ignited a movement to remove “Silent Sam,” an infamous memorial dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1913. The monument honored students who served in the Confederate armed forces during the Civil War. After the anguish of Charleston in 2015 and Charlottesville in 2017, some community members urged the university to remove “Sam,” which had become a rallying point for local activists. By 2018, the perception of the bronze shrine transformed into an eyesore, sparking local debates around the campus that fit into a much larger movement around the United States to remove Lost Cause memorials.[1] On August 20, 2018, protestors toppled the monument, which altered the way students interacted with Civil War memory on their campus.

While Confederate shrines have kindled public debates in the last few years, monuments are not new points of contention. As many argued against Jim Crow segregation and for civil rights in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, Native peoples began addressing monuments glorifying white gallantry and Native suffering in a war that coincided with the Civil War. Hundreds of miles away from the combat at Second Bull Run or Antietam, Minnesotans rallied to fend off displaced and starved Mdewankaton Dakota. After the U.S. government broke treaties and failed to issue annuity payments to the Dakota on time, havoc and death flooded the Minnesota River Valley. Hundreds of whites and Dakotans perished in both battles and imprisonment, and by the end of September 1862, the federal army quelled remaining Dakota attacks.[2]

An 1883 lithograph depicting the execution of 38 Dakota men in Mankato. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By the time of their surrender, the Dakota people faced further displacement and even execution. After the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato on December 26, 1862, this region experienced political and cultural unrest, leading to a series of expeditions to hunt down and kill all those who did not abide by federal policy and fled imprisonment. By 1863, the Dakota had lost all possession of their traditional homeland; no longer could they honor their ancestors or commemorate those executed in 1862.

At the fiftieth anniversary of the mass hanging, Mankato welcomed a new addition to their historical landscape. Community members gathered around a new granite monument which read “Here Were Hanged 38 Sioux Indians,” a public display continuing the notion of Native defeat in the region.[3] The monument held historical value to the white population, as many believed that it offered the public a clear understanding of a valued event in American history: thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged for their brutal actions against peaceful Minnesotans, which for the longest time was the master narrative in remembering the conflict.[4] In fact, the monument displayed the chronicle of brutality, suffering, and death on the spot where the Dakota men hanged, which they wanted contemporary Natives to remember.

A photo of the Mankato Hanging Monument in 1918. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

As Minnesotans defended this monument, Native people sought change to the landscape to offer not only reconciliation between the Native and non-Native communities, but also a space to honor their fallen ancestors.[5] By the 1950s, Native people insisted on a revision of the public displays that dotted the map around Mankato. While other monuments glorified the white victor, opponents of the “Hanging Monument” headed the movement to alter the historical consciousness. Activists led protests, yet Mankato officials did not budge—besides moving the monument to a more publicly visible location near the interstate in 1965. Not only did this monument provide a biased history of the Dakota War, but visitors to Mankato now saw the shrine as they entered town. Fed up with the bureaucracy, activists painted and poured red paint on the Hanging Monument, symbolizing the brutality the Dakota endured during the nineteenth century.

Official opinions did not change as red paint flowed down the sides of the monument; however, national movements ushered change into the region. The American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) and Vietnam War protests of the 1970s sparked a new interpretation on remembering the past.[6] For example, as civil rights and identity debates flourished around the United States, Minnesota State University students began to debate the school’s mascot, the Indians, as a way to offer ideas of inclusion and diversity. Coinciding with these protest movements, university drama guild students staged a play that provided a discourse on “white man’s mistreatment of the Indians.” After the dramatic rendition of Indian suffering, a display which “plagued audience members’ consciousness,” the actors brought out a replica Hanging Monument to prove how Mankato played a role in America’s colonization and forced assimilation of Native people. An observer of the play mentioned, “We are all sick and tired and sad… and I felt along with the rest of the audience that we also should fight no more forever.”[7] Mankato residents felt the need to not only move forward, but also display their past accurately and impartially. After these events the city relocated the monument, not from community pressure, but because of impending construction work. Since removal, no one knows what happened to the monument—it was buried, destroyed, or hidden out of shame—and many Dakota are okay with that. Verna Wabasha, a retired State Indian Affairs Commission Worker, added that it’s a “derogatory rock, and it should stay buried.”[8]

“Forgive Everything Anyone” is written on a bench at Reconciliation Park, with ceremonial objects attached to the Scroll Monument. Photo courtesy of the author.

On the ground that once provided space for the Hanging Monument, a new park sits to bring reconciliation and peace to all those living in Mankato. Reconciliation Park hosts three monuments: a large bison stands tall, representing an accurate rendition of Dakota culture and the prime animal they hunted; the Winter Warrior monument stands in remembrance of the 125th anniversary of the mass hanging; and a large scroll lists the names of the thirty-eight men executed.[9] Every year during the “38 plus 2 Memorial Ride” the monuments transform from physical reminders to objects of honor, remembrance, and commemoration. Men and women from the Lower Brule Indian Reservation in South Dakota journey hundreds of miles to commemorate their fallen ancestors. The trek ends at Reconciliation Park, where the participants tie, lay, and secure mementos on the monuments which stay safely fastened until the next year’s remembrance ride. In the town that brought death and displacement to the Dakota people, the visual interpretations and anti-Indian displays bring peace to the community and honor those who survived and endured white colonization.[10]

Removing Confederate monuments is a fraught process; one side wants to honor their historical past, while the other side argues against the violence and racism associated with that memory. While there is a difference between Lost Cause shrines and monuments that embodied a notion of white victory over Native peoples, the way in which they extol hatred troubles our movement towards a comprehensive understanding of history. Monuments always shape public memory of the past, but instead of relying on public displays of commemoration, we should work to find healing by telling inclusive stories. Communities like Mankato have reconciled and pushed for peace to understand America’s troubled past—a process that communities with Lost Cause monuments should not ignore.

 

[1] “Confederate Monument,” UNC Graduate School, accessed August 20, 2018, http://gradschool.unc.edu/funding/gradschool/weiss/interesting_place/landmarks/sam.html.

[2] Aaron Sheehan-Dean, ed., A Companion to the U.S. Civil War: Volume 1 (West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2014), 380-381.

[3] “A Gruesome Monument,” Willmar Tribune, Willmar, Minnesota, November 13, 1912, 2; Melodie Andrews, “The U.S.-Dakota War in Public Memory and Public Space: Mankato’s Journey Towards Reconciliation,” in The State We’re In: Reflections on Minnesota History, eds. Annette Atkins and Deborah L. Miller (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), 52.

[4] Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth, Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988), 1.

[5] Atkins and Miller, 57.

[6] Ibid., 54.

[7] Marion Struzyk, “Indians brings guilt home,” MSC Daily Reporter, Mankato, Minnesota, June 2, 1971.

[8] Dan Linehan, “Students search for missing monument as part of history class,” The Free Press, Mankato, Minnesota, May 14, 2006.

[9] Atkins and Miller, 56-57.

[10] Ibid.; Tim Krohn, “38 plus 2 memorial ride begins,” The Free Press, Mankato, Minnesota, December 22, 2011; Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, “Introduction: Manipi Hena OWas’in Wicunkiksuyapi (We Remember All Those Who Walked),” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 1/2 Special Issues: Empowerment Through Literature (Winter-Spring 2004): 158; Atkins and Miller, 57.

John R. Legg

John R. Legg is a graduate student at Virginia Tech studying Native Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Alongside his studies, John also works as a graduate assistant with Paul Quigley in the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. His current research focuses on the public memory and commemoration of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and its connection to Civil War history.

Summering with Confederate Statues

Summering with Confederate Statues

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Our family just returned to California after spending much of the summer driving around the South promoting our new book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. We logged about 1,700 miles in the car, visiting thirteen towns and cities in six southern states. We dined on local delicacies—from BBQ in Lexington, North Carolina, to hot tamales in the Mississippi Delta—and toured more museums, plantations, and battlefields than our two young daughters, who accompanied us, care to remember.

And everywhere we went, our family saw memorials to the Confederacy. Most took the form of statues, but there were also busts of Confederate generals; streets, highways, counties, and parishes named for Confederate leaders; and an entire building dedicated to the Confederacy—Confederate Memorial Hall—in New Orleans. By our conservative count, during our five weeks on the road we encountered at least three dozen objects or places that honor the Confederacy or the individuals who inspired and fought for it.

That these memorials are inescapable in the modern South is, of course, hardly earth-shattering news. A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals that while 113 Confederate symbols have been removed in the three years since a Confederate-flag flying white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, at least 1,740 remain.[1] Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Confederate memorials are located south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Yet the ubiquity of Confederate monuments in Dixie was a striking thing to witness, even for American historians who’ve lived in and studied the South for decades.

Equally striking are the wildly different responses to Confederate memorials in the southern communities we visited. In some places, the monuments are deeply divisive, so much so that they’ve become targets of vandalism or, in the case of New Orleans and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they’ve been removed from the pedestals upon which they stood for over a century. In other communities, they hardly register protest at all.

By the end of the trip, the two of us realized that our book tour, during which we were frequently asked what should be done with Confederate memorials, functioned as a documentary project of sorts. It captured where—in the late summer of 2018, on the first anniversary of the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right Rally to defend the town’s Robert E. Lee statue—the South stood on the monument question.

Our first stop was Charleston, South Carolina, where the enormous John C. Calhoun monument (1896) towers over Marion Square, a lovely park in the center of the city. The statue is just a block away from Emanuel AME Church, whose steeple is visible to the right and where white supremacist Dylann Roof massacred nine black worshippers in 2015. State law prohibits the removal of this tribute to the South Carolina statesman who defended slavery as “a positive good.” Municipal efforts to add a contextualizing plaque to the monument that would explain and condemn Calhoun’s proslavery stance have stalled.[2]

While critics of the Calhoun monument are disappointed by the failure to take down or even contextualize the memorial, its supporters have in recent months left tokens of affection, including these flowers, at its base.

After Charleston, we visited Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the two of us did our doctoral work at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Over the past few years, students, faculty, and community members lobbied UNC to remove Silent Sam, its 1913 Confederate statue. University officials refused to comply, citing a 2015 state heritage law that makes removal difficult. History graduate student Maya Little, who is pictured here dumping red paint, mixed with her blood, on Silent Sam in a symbolic protest of the memorial in late May, faces disciplinary action from both the state and the university. There were significant developments in the Silent Sam story just a few weeks after we returned home to California.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Hosterman.

In Asheville, North Carolina, Blain inspected the recently defaced Robert E. Lee Dixie Highway memorial (1926). This monument, and an adjacent one honoring Confederate colonel and governor Zebulon Vance, have been vandalized on multiple occasions since 2015.

On our way into Atlanta, Georgia, we stopped at America’s largest Confederate monument, which is carved on the face of Stone Mountain, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. The future of this massive bas-relief sculpture, which depicts Confederate president Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and was completed in 1972, has become a hot-button political issue in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial race. Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams has denounced it as a proslavery “blight…that should be removed” or at least not supported with state money. Her Republican opponent Brian Kemp has pledged that as governor he would “protect Stone Mountain and historical monuments in Georgia from the radical left.”[3]

In Blain’s hometown of DeRidder, Louisiana, we visited the Beauregard Parish courthouse, which had long honored Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard with a bust that sat in the center of the lobby. Though the bust, and the parish’s name, has generated little public controversy among the local citizenry, the small tribute now sits in a hallway, having been moved after an extensive renovation of the historic building. Meanwhile, the police jury, the governing body of the parish, voted 9-1 in the summer of 2017 to ask the city of New Orleans for its equestrian statue of Beauregard. New Orleans officials had removed the Beauregard monument, along with several others, earlier that spring. An African American police juror cast the lone vote against the request, saying, “This is not what we want for our city.”[4] Nothing came of the police jury’s effort.

In the spring of 2017, New Orleans took down its four Confederate and white supremacist monuments, including the equestrian statue of Beauregard mentioned above and a statue of Robert E. Lee (1884) that sat in a roundabout in the heart of the city. The Lee monument’s empty pedestal is an arresting sight when viewed from the National WWII Museum (left), a place that, unlike Confederate statues, pays homage to soldiers who fought for the United States and against tyranny and oppression. The Lost Cause ideas embodied in these monuments remain alive in the nearby Confederate Memorial Hall Museum (brown building in photo on the right), which first opened in 1891. Its central exhibit on the coming of secession never even mentions slavery.

The Confederate monuments we saw in several towns in Mississippi, including Jackson, Vicksburg, Yazoo City, and Greenwood, have provoked little, if any, public outcry. Here Blain and our elder daughter Eloise take a close look at Greenwood’s Confederate statue (1913), which occupies a conspicuous place on the lawn of the Leflore County courthouse and which, like several other monuments we visited, stands in jarring juxtaposition next to an American flag. During the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, disenfranchised African Americans seeking to register to vote in the courthouse regularly clashed with city authorities and other opponents of integration in the shadow of this statue.

The final stop on our tour was Oxford, Mississippi, which has two prominent Confederate statues. The first (pictured here) was erected on the University of Mississippi campus in 1906 and was the place where white rioters opposed to the desegregation of the school rallied in 1962. The second statue was installed on the city’s historic downtown square in 1907 with the assistance of William Faulkner’s grandmother. Some residents have called for the latter statue to be removed, while in 2016 the university added a contextualizing plaque to the former. The contextualization effort was not entirely successful. Critics pointed out that the plaque failed to explain how the statue had promoted Lost Cause myths about the Civil War and slavery. The university later installed a revised plaque.[5]

On the night of August 20, several weeks after we got back to California from our trip through the South, protestors in Chapel Hill toppled Silent Sam from his perch. The UNC Board of Governors, one of whom insisted a few days later that the statue should be returned, directed university officials to develop a plan for the removed statue by mid-November. University chancellor Carol Folt has since stated that they will look at all options, “including one that features a location on campus to display the monument in a place of prominence, honor, visibility, availability and access.” While her language does not suggest that re-installing the monument on its pedestal is a foregone conclusion, it does raise questions about whether the concerns of Silent Sam’s critics will be adequately addressed.[6]

In the meantime, like the Lee column in New Orleans, Silent Sam’s pedestal, surrounded by temporary fencing, stands empty—an apt reminder, for us at least, of the place of Confederate veneration in twenty-first-century America.

Photo courtesy of Hilary Edwards Lithgow.

 

 

[1] “Whose Heritage? A Report on Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 4, 2018, accessed August 30, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/20180604/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.

[2] Abigail Darlington, “Proposed John C. Calhoun Plaque in Limbo after Charleston City Council Can’t See Eye to Eye on It,” Charleston Post and Courier, January 9, 2018, accessed August 30, 2018, https://www.postandcourier.com/news/proposed-john-c-calhoun-plaque-in-limbo-after-charleston-city/article_2a798a66-f58c-11e7-b4ef-73fa27cd5008.html.

[3] Jill Nolin, “Abrams: State Should Not Fund ‘Monument to Domestic Terrorism,’” Valdosta Daily Times, August 3, 2018, accessed August 30, 2018, http://www.valdostadailytimes.com/news/local_news/abrams-state-should-not-fund-monument-to-domestic-terrorism/article_643e4ecd-ff18-564d-a33f-0f5ca80e57e8.html; Ross Terrell, “Ga.’s Republican Gubernatorial Candidates Condemn Stone Mountain Protest,” WABE, Atlanta NPR-affiliate, July 4, 2018, accessed August 30, 2018, https://www.wabe.org/ga-s-republican-gubernatorial-candidates-condemn-stone-mountain-protest/.

[4] Rachel Steffan, “Uncertain Destiny for PGT Beauregard Monument,” Beauregard Daily News, July 31, 2017, accessed August 30, 2018, http://www.beauregarddailynews.net/news/20170731/uncertain-destiny-for-pgt-beauregard-monument; Pamela Sleezer, “Statue Outrage,” Lake Charles American Press, June 14, 2017, accessed August 30, 2018, http://www.americanpress.com/news/local/police-jurors-vote-to-ask-n-o-for-confederate-figure/article_c1599fd0-5108-11e7-a17b-7bb1ba422077.html.

[5] John Neff, Jarod Roll, and Anne Twitty, “A Brief Historical Contextualization of the Confederate Monument at the University of Mississippi,” University of Mississippi Libraries, May 16, 2016, accessed August 30, 2018, https://history.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/08/A-Brief-Historical-Contextualization-of-the-Confederate-Monument-at-the-University-of-Mississippi.pdf; Stephanie Saul, “Ole Miss Out if Its Confederate Shadow, Gingerly,” New York Times, August 9, 2017, accessed August 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/us/ole-miss-confederacy.html.

[6] Jane Stancill and Tammy Grubb, “UNC Leaders Told to Develop ‘Lawful and Lasting’ Plan for Silent Sam by Nov. 15,” Raleigh News and Observer, August 28, 2018, accessed August 30, 2018, https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article217416735.html.

 

Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle

Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle are professors of history at California State University, Fresno. Their most recent book is Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, which was published by The New Press in 2018. For additional information on the book, see www.denmarkveseysgarden.com.

Editor’s Note: September 2018 Issue

Editor’s Note: September 2018 Issue

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The September issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era will soon be arriving in your mailboxes. For a preview of the excellent work within its pages, see our editor’s note reprinted below.

This volume combines exciting new work in the military history of the Civil War with essays exploring postwar culture and memory. Written by leading scholars in the field, the essays that follow push scholars to expand the definition of southern Unionism, remember that the natural environment is a powerful determinant in military engagements, consider what names Americans gave the war—and when and where those names were used—and look again at how the postwar Klan was organized. A review essay puts the recent flurry of films and series depicting slavery in context by taking a long look at slavery on screen.

In an essay derived from her Fortenbaugh lecture, Thavolia Glymph writes enslaved women into the history of southern Unionism. Acting on their antislavery politics, southern black women expressed their Unionism through words and actions, playing key roles in supporting the Union war effort and driving the army to embrace emancipation. For their trouble, these women were neglected, mistreated, and then forgotten; historians who continue to portray southern Unionism as an all-white affair add insult to injury. No more, thanks to Glymph’s new essay.

Readers looking for a new explanation for the U.S. Army’s failed 1862 Peninsula Campaign will find much to consider in Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s essay detailing how Confederates used nature to their advantage. George McClellan brought his massive army into the ecologically complex peninsula at the worst possible time, a period of intense rains in midst of drought. There, his men discovered swamps where they expected streams and rivers where they should not have been. Nature was a formidable opponent, and in it McClellan’s opponents found a useful ally. Worn down, undernourished, and defeated, McClellan’s despondent men trudged through a hostile environment. Worst of all, nature aggravated McClellan’s natural tendencies; his “reactionary style and lack of aggressiveness” were no match for the peninsula’s “incredibly gooey mud.”

Gaines Foster’s essay is a striking reminder that what we call wars matters, for, “the name is important in defining the purpose of a war and shaping support for it.” To explore the names Americans used for the war fought from 1861 to 1865, Foster discovered new source collections and made imaginative use of digital tools. By 1911, Congress had debated what to call the war three times before settling on “Civil War,” a term that did not make all white southerners happy but did satisfy most of them. A number of Americans proved willing to weigh in on which name was the right one, recording their preferences in surveys that began in 1907 and continued until the 1990s; these public usage polls record the persistence of labels such as “Rebellion” and the near absence of “War of Northern Aggression.” As the title of the essay indicates, what’s not in a name is as important as what is, for as Foster shows, “Civil War” implied no blame on either side and effectively sidestepped slavery as a cause of the war.

Once in a while, historians make surprising archival discoveries that open up new questions or help us to answer nagging ones. In his essay, “The K. K. Alphabet,” Bradley Proctor describes two discoveries—an encrypted letter and the cipher necessary to read it—that, although perhaps not new, until now have not been put together. With the cipher, Proctor was able to read an 1868 letter from one Klansman to another; his article describes what the letter reveals about the KKK’s inner workings. But that is only half of the story. That the letter was found in a family collection in South Carolina and the cipher in Tennessee reopens questions about Klan organization, which we generally think was local in nature but may have been the work of a network of elite southern families who intentionally sought to extend the reach of the Klan in the postwar South.

Brenda Stevenson rounds out this issue with a review essay exploring a century of films and television series about slavery. Readers who still mourn the cancelation of the series Underground (2016–17) will find little to console them in this essay that traces Hollywood’s love affair with racist stereotypes, but a few will be inspired to search YouTube for clips of some of the more obscure films Stevenson describes, such as Band of Angels (1957) and Tamango (1958), two early efforts to portray enslaved people as heroic. From its earliest appearance in Thomas Edison and Edwin Porter’s fourteen-minute 1903 film Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the 2013 movie 12 Years a Slave, producers and directors have been fascinated by the story of slavery and have tried to portray it on screen. Some efforts have succeeded more than others, but even success has not completely cured Hollywood’s corporate financiers of their squeamishness about portraying enslaved characters as fully human and at times heroic. What progress has been made is compellingly laid out for us in Stevenson’s fine review essay.

Judy Giesberg

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

Comparing Home Rule in Hungary and the U.S. South

Comparing Home Rule in Hungary and the U.S. South

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Home rule, defined as the gaining of political autonomy, is usually associated with the struggle for autonomy in Ireland. Twice defeated, the Irish Republic claimed its independence before home rule took effect.[1] While the British debated home rule in 1886 and 1893, the U.S. South was working toward its own version of what may be seen as home rule. Removing the final vestiges of Reconstruction, former slave states had assumed internal control over social, political, and racial matters by 1900, with the Supreme Court’s affirmation of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson, and the virtual elimination of African American voting in the South thanks to poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.

Where a comparison between Ireland and the U.S. South may seem fruitful, I want to instead suggest Hungary as an intriguing comparison of home rule’s implementation. In both countries, racial or ethnic groups assumed control by embracing racially or ethnically exclusionary policies. A comparison of these home rule experiences will help historians gain a better understanding of some of the racial and political problems associated with the failures of post civil war reconciliation.

Like the separatism of the southern states, Hungary had resented Austrian/Habsburg rule and had rebelled in 1848.[2] Their failure to gain their independence had placed Hungary at the mercy of the Austrians. However, Austria’s fortune declined as a result of diplomatic faux pas during the Crimean War and military setbacks against the Italian-French alliance in 1859, and again with the Prussian-Italian alliance of 1866. Nevertheless, like the former Confederate states during Congressional Reconstruction, Austria still ruled Hungary directly during the early 1860s, removing much political autonomy.[3]

Realizing the unsustainability of such direct governments, in 1864, the Austrian legislature (the Reichsrat) determined an accommodation with the Magyar (a Hungarian ethnic group) was in order, which would require major concession to the Hungarians.[4] This was a situation similar to the southern states, where the end of Reconstruction meant the slow abandonment of African Americans and the restoration of political power to white elites.

Ödön Tull’s Coronation of Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elisabeth as King and Queen of Hungary on June 8, 1867. Courtesy of nobility.org.

Similar to the political compromise of 1877 in the United States, on July 18, 1866, Emperor Franz Josef invited the prominent Hungarian politician Ferenc Deák to Vienna to search for a compromise solution. The negotiations were successful and on February 17, 1867, the Hungarian parliament received permission to restore the historic Constitution of 1848, with some modifications. Hungary now had its own ministry, responsible to the Hungarian parliament.[5]

This compromise measure, called the Ausgleich, meant that henceforth Franz Josef ruled over Austria-Hungary: two states, two crowns, united in his person. Hungary contributed to the joint army and budget, but was independent in its domestic affairs. The Ausgleich was effectively an agreement between two “equal semi-sovereign states.”[6] The Austrian state had undergone dramatic constitutional revisions, similar to the United States as a result of the Reconstruction amendments and the reenvisioning of its constitutional relationship.[7]

In contrast to the U.S. South where home rule went hand in hand with the disenfranchisement of African Americans and Jim Crow segregation, Hungarians first instituted home rule and then used that newfound power to implement ethnically exclusionary policies. Hungary embarked on a policy of Magyarization by preventing non-Magyar minorities from accessing politic power. Hungary’s voting population, divided into fifty different categories and electoral districts, were gerrymandered to benefit the ruling Magyar class, very similar to the modern electoral maps of the United States. Even though less than half of Hungary’s population was Magyar, they occupied 90 percent of the parliamentary seats.[8] Gerrymandering districts to benefit ethnic or racial groups, and creating ethnic or racial categories to disenfranchise people, are tactics that were employed (and still are employed) with similar effect in the states of the former Confederacy.

However, ethnic or racial oppression did not end with disenfranchisement. The United States embraced an extensive system of racial oppression, and by the time of the Great War, Hungary had gained the reputation of being the Völkerkerker (dungeon of people) of Europe. Just like white Southerners, Magyar were under the assumption they were a “master race” superior to the backward “Slavic” people, who were mostly peasants.[9] However, there was a difference. Hungary created an environment in which people could shed their ethnic identity and take on the Magyar identity to become a full part of society. In contrast, most African Americans could not change their racial status to white. However, the principle of exclusion based on superiority racial superiority was the same.

At the same time that Jim Crow laws took effect and Southern states worked on gaining home rule,[10] the Hungarian home rule government forcefully implemented Magyarization. By 1880, Magyar instruction was compulsory. Telegraph and postal service exclusively operated using the Magyar language. The Magyar elite suppressed “any political or social movement which challenged the hegemonic position of the Magyar ruling classes.”[11] The main difference to the U.S. South was that Magyarization followed the granting of home rule rather than being part of the assumption of power.

Another point of comparison is commemorative. By the 1890s, irreconcilable Kossuthists had emerged and demanded once more the independence of Hungary.[12] The Ausgleich had been an unacceptable outcome for the old revolutionary leaders. Lajos Kossuth remained committed to independence and had not acknowledged the legitimacy of this compromise government. Just as Confederate veterans and emblems offered a rallying point for segregationists in the 1960s, Kossuth offered a symbol for those opposed to the legitimate government of Hungary and Austria.[13] Kossuth had not accepted Franz Josef as emperor, just like some Southerners never accepted defeat in the Civil War.

Funeral procession for Lajos Kossuth in Budapest, April 1, 1894, reprinted in Zeffiro Ciuffoletti, Das Reich der Habsburger 1848-1918 – Photographien aus der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie (Vienna, Austria: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 2001).

Somewhat comparable to the twenty-thousand residents who wished farewell to Jefferson Davis in New Orleans five years earlier, when Kossuth died hundreds of thousands participated in funeral parades around the country, among them veterans of the 1848 struggle with their ragged battle flags.[14] Politician Julius Justh gave a powerful eulogy for Kossuth, saying “In Louis Kossuth, we mourn one of the greatest, most honorable, and most selfless figures of history. He is not only our dead, but the dead of humanity . . . for the services of Kossuth were larger, worldwide in significance, immortal.”[15] Southerners could hardly have stated the importance of their cause and leaders any better. Just like Confederate veterans who accomplished more off the battlefield and in death, so too did Kossuth achieve more in death as a symbol of resistance than he every did alive.

When the United States disintegrated into separatist rebellion, the country faced a deadly struggle that did not end in 1865. As white southerners reasserted their political, social, and economic influence, they removed protections and benefits from the African American community to create a white supremacist environment, culminating with statues to Confederates, Jim Crow segregation, and the exclusion of African Americans from the polls. By 1900, the U.S. South had gained home rule. Like the U.S. South, Hungary experienced a separatist rebellion in 1848. By 1867, Hungary gained home rule in the Ausgleich. Just like the racism permeating the Southern states, so too did the Hungarians embrace a conviction of racial superiority that lead to a vigorous Magyarization campaign. While oppression and home rule in the United States lasted until the 1960s, and arguably are still ongoing, the Great War changed everything for Hungary, though it did not end its xenophobic, supremacist attitude. A comparison of these two home rule situations illustrates the failures of post-Civil War reconciliation within the transatlantic state system.

 

[1] Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 1867-1921 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998).

[2] See István Deák, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians 1848-1849 (London: Phoenix Press, 2001).

[3] For more, see Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

[4] Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London: Routledge, 1998), 338.

[5] Arthur J. May, The Habsburg Monarchy: 1867-1914 (1951; New York: Norton Library, 1968), 34-35.

[6] Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Habsburg (1963; New York: Penguin, 1983), 239-240, 294.

[7] See recent Muster posts on the Fourteenth Amendment by Christopher Bonner, Andrew Diemer, Hilary Green, Aaron Astor, and Martha S. Jones; all links appear in the introduction, Martha S. Jones, “A Muster Roundtable on the Fourteenth Amendment,” Muster (blog), The Journal of the Civil War Era, July 9, 2018, https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/07/a-muster-roundtable-on-the-fourteenth-amendment/.

[8] Bideleux and Jeffries, History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (New York: Routledge, 1998), 364-365; May, 42-43.

[9] Crankshaw, 298.

[10] See Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, eds., The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South (Arlington: University of Texas, 2012).

[11] Bideleux and Jeffries, 363, 367; May, 261-262, 374.

[12] May, 267.

[13] John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

[14] Donald E. Collins, The Death and Resurrection of Jefferson Davis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

[15] May, 346-347.

Niels Eichhorn

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

Teaching the Intersection of Abolitionism and Indian Rights

Teaching the Intersection of Abolitionism and Indian Rights

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Though abolitionists advocated for both the slave’s cause and the Indian’s cause before the Civil War, their concern for Native American rights is not well understood. This is partly due to the fact that while scholars recognize abolitionist opposition to Indian removal, abolitionist support for Indian rights is seen as primarily a postwar phenomenon. In fact, as I argue in my article in the June 2018 special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era, abolitionists were concerned about Indian rights throughout this period. It was their engagement with the Indian’s cause that led abolitionists to develop several important antislavery arguments.[1]

There are many ways to incorporate abolitionist concern for Indian rights into undergraduate classes. My article focuses on how Indian removal debates in the 1830s informed abolitionist arguments against black colonization and contributed to the emergence of the Slave Power idea in the late 1830s. One or both of these topics could easily be incorporated into a lesson on the antislavery movement. Below are a few ideas that use primary sources referenced in my article, all of which are easily located either in print or online.[2]

To explore abolitionist opposition to Indian removal, you might orient a classroom discussion around the second Liberator masthead, which appeared from April 23, 1831, until February 23, 1838. Students could consider what the artist is arguing by placing Indian treaties in the slave-market scene (see the left bottom of the image, after “the”). Is this image meant to specifically invoke the Indian Removal Act, which became law in May 1830? Or is it a more general critique of U.S. policy with respect to Native Americans? In announcing the new masthead, William Lloyd Garrison wrote, “Down in the dust, our Indian Treaties are seen,” making the latter reading a strong possibility.

The Liberator masthead, as it appeared after April 23, 1831. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Historian Mary Hershberger has posited that the masthead’s appearance in April 1831 was in direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.[4] But nothing in the image specifically references the Cherokee Nation; they are “Indian” treaties, not “Cherokee” treaties. Perhaps the masthead is meant to invoke both the immediate issue of Cherokee removal and the longer history of Indian dispossession. If so, then the Liberator’s black and white readers would have recognized the image’s dual purpose, for abolitionists were broadly concerned with Indian rights in 1831.

That year, black abolitionists used northern opposition to Indian removal to garner support for their fight against African colonization. Black abolitionists referenced Indian removal at anticolonization meetings held in Brooklyn, New York City, and Providence in 1831, summaries of which were reprinted in the Liberator. In his report on a black anticolonization meeting in Baltimore in 1831, Garrison also referenced Cherokee removal.[5] A major source of frustration for abolitionists was that colonization had significant public support, including among many antiremovalists. Students might use these documents to consider the following questions: How did black and white abolitionists use the debate over Indian removal to challenge support for African colonization? Why might abolitionists have hoped that such arguments would be persuasive? How did abolitionists respond to evidence that these arguments did not appear to be successful in changing antiremovalists’ ideas about colonization?

There is also the question of who or what is responsible for Indian removal. In my article I read the placement of the treaties in the Liberator masthead as evidence of an emergent critique of slavery’s role in Indian dispossession. This idea grew more prominent in antislavery rhetoric as the decade progressed. As black abolitionist Maria Stewart said in 1833, “The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved home. Then they stole our fathers from their peaceful and quiet dwellings, and brought them hither, and made bond-men and bond-women of them and their little ones.”[6]

Given abolitionists’ growing recognition of slavery’s relationship to Indian removal, it is worth considering why Garrison changed the masthead when he did, so it no longer referenced Native Americans after February 23, 1838. Removal was hardly a settled issue at this time. As my article demonstrates, antiremoval activism by the Cherokees and their supporters continued through the spring of 1838. Furthermore, although the Cherokees were unsuccessful in preventing forced removal in 1838 and 1839, they were not the only Native people fighting dispossession in this period, as John Bowes’ recent work on northern Indian removal reveals.[7] The ongoing Second Seminole War, which began in 1835, offered further evidence of Indian resistance to removal. Students may know something about Cherokee removal and the opposition campaign that the Cherokees and their allies waged against it, but this is an excellent opportunity to enlarge their understanding of antiremoval and its connection to antislavery. Garrison’s decision to change the Liberator’s masthead gives the incorrect impression that abolitionists had lost interest in the Indian’s cause by 1838.

In fact, when abolitionists convened in Philadelphia in mid-May 1838, to celebrate the opening of Pennsylvania Hall, both the Second Seminole War and Cherokee removal were very much on their minds. This is another moment worth exploring in the classroom because it is rich in primary sources from multiple perspectives. A number of relevant sources appear in the official record of the Hall’s opening, History of Pennsylvania Hall, Which Was Destroyed by a Mob, On the 17th of May, 1838, which was reprinted many years ago; more recently, it has been digitized by HathiTrust.[8] Among the documents it contains is John Ross’s letter to the Pennsylvania Hall Committee responding to their invitation to speak at the opening ceremonies. Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, declined to attend, but he hoped that the Cherokee cause might still be discussed. He even wrote a second letter expressly for that purpose and sent two Cherokee leaders to Philadelphia with it. For reasons that are not entirely clear, though worth considering with your students, this second letter was not read aloud at Pennsylvania Hall.

Students might compare Ross’s first letter with the second, given that he intended the latter one as his public statement on Cherokee affairs. Students might consider what Ross wanted attendees at Pennsylvania Hall to know about Cherokee removal, compared to what they actually heard.[9] Before Ross’s first letter was read aloud, white abolitionist Charles Burleigh spoke on “Indian wrongs.” This speech raises a number of interesting questions that intersect with those raised by the Liberator masthead. For Burleigh, Indians had been wronged in the past and in the present; he condemned the contemporary policy of Indian removal and the long history of white violence against Native people. Why did Burleigh believe that abolitionists should support Indian rights? What did he imagine they should do to prevent future wrongs and rectify past injustices? How do ideas about Indians inform his appeal? It is worth calling students’ attention to the fact that Burleigh’s speech was given extemporaneously; the transcript in the History of Pennsylvania Hall was reportedly assembled from “scanty notes.”[10]

The day after Burleigh’s speech, with near unanimity, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 attendees approved a short statement and two resolutions condemning Cherokee removal. What did they hope to accomplish by sending these resolutions? How might John Ross, who was sent a copy, have reacted to them? You might also ask students to consider Garrison’s response to Burleigh’s speech, especially in light of his decision to change the masthead just a few months earlier. It was Garrison, not Burleigh, who explicitly linked Cherokee removal to the expansion of black chattel slavery. In fact, Garrison chastised Burleigh for not identifying slavery’s insatiable need for land as the cause of Indian removal.[11] Burleigh’s speech notwithstanding, by 1838 abolitionists regularly insisted that the forcible relocation of Native people served slaveholding interests. Their engagement with the antiremoval cause led abolitionists to a recognition of what they would soon begin to call the Slave Power.

Finally, there is the question of why Pennsylvania abolitionists invited John Ross, a wealthy slaveholder, to speak at their event. As I show in my article, abolitionists knew that some Cherokees participated in the institution of slavery, including through their ownership of enslaved people. According to the Pennsylvania Hall Committee’s invitation, it was important for Ross and other Cherokees to attend so that they could counter popular ideas about Indians’ supposed inability to become “civilized.” How might abolitionists have reconciled the fact that some “civilized” Cherokees, including Ross, owned slaves?

The significance of Indian rights to the development of abolitionism is lost if we teach Indian removal separately from the antislavery movement. Important arguments about black colonization and the Slave Power emerged from abolitionists’ opposition to Indian removal. Equally important was the role that Native people like John Ross played in maintaining abolitionist interest in the antiremoval cause. That relationship was complicated by the fact of Indian slaveholding, but it was nonetheless crucial to abolitionist support for the Indian’s cause.

 

[1] Natalie Joy, “The Indian’s Cause: Abolitionists and Native American Rights,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (June 2018): 215-242. This is available to subscribers of the journal or on Project Muse.

[2] If you need more context to set up this discussion, the debates surrounding Indian removal are readily available, including antiremoval arguments made by the Cherokees and their white allies. For example, see Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, ed., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, 2d ed. (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2005); Jeremiah Evarts, Cherokee Removal: The “William Penn” Essays and Other Writings, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

[3] Liberator, April 23, 1831.

[4] Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 37.

[5] “Anti-Colonization Meeting,” Liberator, July 2, 1831; “A Voice from New-York!” Liberator, February 12, 1831; “A Voice from Providence!” Liberator, November 5, 1831; “A Voice from Baltimore!” Liberator, April 2, 1831.

[6] Maria W. Stewart, “An Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall, Boston, February 27, 1833,” reprinted in Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 63.

[7] John Bowes, Land Too Good For Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).

[8] History of Pennsylvania Hall, Which Was Destroyed by a Mob, On the 17th of May, 1838 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969). Available on HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003875260.

[9] For Ross’s first letter, see Ibid., 69. Both letters were reprinted in The Papers of Chief John Ross, 2 vols., ed. Gary E. Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), I: 635, 636-638.

[10] History of Pennsylvania Hall, 67-69.

[11] For the resolutions, see Ibid., 114. For Garrison’s response, see Ibid., 71.

Natalie Joy

Natalie Joy is an Assistant Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. Her current book project considers the relationship between Native Americans and the antislavery movement from the late 1820s to the early 1860s.

Long Haired Sixties Radicals

Long Haired Sixties Radicals

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Louisa was fifteen when the revolution began, and her enthusiasm was undimmed when she wrote her memoirs sixty years later. She recalled the spectacle: houses illuminated with candles, bells ringing, tar barrels burning, flags waving. Most of all, she remembered the people. “I can never forget how those men used to look standing on some impromptu platform,” she wrote, “with the wild light of the bonfires on their faces, and their hair which men wore longer in those days, blown back from their faces by the wind, or the energy of their own movements.” Their vitality still thrilled her: “such light in their eyes! So much hope and so much courage.”[1]

These stirring scenes might evoke a campus protest in 1968, but they came from South Carolina in December 1860. Louisa McCord Smythe was the daughter of writer and lawyer David J. McCord and Louisa McCord, an accomplished author, fierce proslavery theorist, and ardent secessionist. Smythe’s recollection reminds us that secession was especially popular among younger southern whites.[2] It demonstrates that although secession was a defensive, reactionary move, it also inspired hope among those who saw the Confederacy as what historian Michael T. Bernath has termed a “moment of possibility” – an opportunity for change of all sorts, from improving women’s education to stemming the tide of democracy.[3]

“Edmund Rubbin [i.e., Edmund Ruffin].” Born in 1794, Edmund Ruffin was an early and vocal proponent of secession and fired one of the war’s first shots in April 1861. Although much older than many other long-haired secessionists, Ruffin’s hairstyle marked his identification with their cause. As the Confederacy collapsed around him in 1865, the luxuriantly-maned fire-eater committed suicide. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

It also illuminates a largely neglected visual signature of secessionist politics, a hirsutal affirmation of everything Smythe’s neighbors were celebrating: long hair.

Trimmed, wavy hair was fashionable for white men in late antebellum America, so those with longer locks stood out.[4] Not all were fire-eating disunionists, of course, but during and after the 1860-1861 secession crisis, particularly in cities along the troubled Union-Confederate border, long hair marked the class, section, and ideology associated with secession. From Virginia to Arkansas, secessionists, many in their twenties and thirties, sent a political message just as powerful as that of a century later. In the 1960s, long hair signaled a provocative, bodily challenge to behavioral norms and political elites.[5] In the 1860s, secessionists’ long hair made a comparably defiant statement, albeit on behalf of preserving, not subverting, the South’s peculiar social and political hierarchies. Unionists and secessionists alike identified long-haired men as members of the “chivalry”: the notoriously radical and vehemently proslavery southern elite. The image became a stereotype familiar to reporters, law enforcement officers, and anyone seeking to clarify regional difference.

Northerners regularly associated long hair with southerners, especially those of elevated rank and extreme politics. In his autobiography, Bostonian Charles Francis Adams, Jr., recalled that Lucius Q.C. Lamar, a fierce secessionist congressman from Mississippi, “looked the Southern college professor – lank, tall, bearded, long-haired, and large-featured.”[6] A newspaper correspondent covering Abraham Lincoln’s March 1861 inauguration described the audience as a massive crowd of “old and young, of male and female,” with “but few Southerners, judging from the lack of long haired men in the crowd.”[7] A wartime passenger on an Ohio River steamboat looked askance at a “very Southern looking young man with long hair, and an extensive display of very suspicious looking jewelry,” who was denouncing Lincoln as a racial egalitarian.[8] To a Union prisoner of war, Confederates in Charleston were “long haired secession devils.”[9] Perhaps no one epitomized the secessionist image better than Roger A. Pryor, a Virginia politician and newspaper editor who traveled to South Carolina to press for an immediate attack on Fort Sumter in hopes that this would propel his own state out of the Union. Contemporaries regarded the long-haired and heavily armed Virginian as “the very embodiment of Southern chivalry.”[10]

Roger Atkinson Pryor, 1828-1919. A generation younger than Ruffin, Roger A. Pryor was an equally ardent secessionist who worked as a newspaper editor and diplomat before serving in Congress and later in the Confederate Army. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Authors used the long-haired secessionist image to spice their narratives or vent their anger, but for Unionists who risked imprisonment or execution to ferret out information along the dangerous border, identifying friends and foes was deadly serious. Albert D. Richardson, a New York Tribune correspondent who was later captured and then escaped from a Confederate prison camp, read Kentuckians’ loyalties in their appearance – including their hair. The “sinewy, long-limbed mountaineers” passing through Louisville were likely on their way from eastern Kentucky to Indiana to enlist in the Union army, while the “pale, long-haired young men” heading the other direction were obviously Confederate recruits.[11]

Hairstyles even offered vital clues to Allan Pinkerton, the famous detective who uncovered a plot to assassinate president-elect Lincoln when he passed through Baltimore en route to Washington in early 1861. Pinkerton recalled that Barnum’s Hotel was the “favorite resort” of Baltimore’s southern sympathizers, and he identified them by their hair. During the evenings, “the corridors and parlors would be thronged by the tall, lank forms of the long-haired gentlemen who represented the aristocracy of the slaveholding interests.”[12]

“The rebel chivalry as the fancy of ‘My Maryland’ painted them; as ‘My Maryland’ found them.” This cartoon was printed in the pro-Union magazine Harper’s Weekly in 1862. It mocks the ostensibly exaggerated pretensions of the secessionist “chivalry” and depicts two stereotyped images: the secessionist as flowing-haired cavalier and the secessionist as mangy ruffian. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Pinkerton believed that the plot’s mastermind was Cypriano Ferrandini, a Corsican barber who worked in the hotel basement. Allegedly, Ferrandini had proclaimed that the “hireling Lincoln shall never, never be President,” and declared his readiness to die “for the rights of the South and to crush out the abolitionist.” Pinkerton depicted Ferrandini as “a fitting representative of so desperate a cause,” complete with “black eyes flashing with excitement, his sallow face pale and colorless and his long hair brushed fiercely back from his low forehead.”[13] Ferrandini was never charged with a crime, but Lincoln passed through Baltimore under cover of night to evade his long-haired would-be assassins.

From flappers’ bobbed hair to the forced haircuts inflicted at Indian boarding schools, hairstyles are closely tied to our identities and our ideals. After the Civil War, secessionists’ hairstyles were largely forgotten, though they are echoed in the southern outlaw image which, like other recent long-haired figures, emerged in the 1960s.[14] Ironically, the style of the chivalry was reborn among the rural working class.

[1] “Louisa McCord Smyth Recollection,” South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

[2] Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Henry James Walker, “Henry Clayton and the Secession Movement in Alabama,” Southern Studies 4, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 341-360.

[3] Michael T. Bernath, “The Confederacy as a Moment of Possibility,” Journal of Southern History 79, no. 2 (May 2013): 299-338; John F. Kvach, De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).

[4] Amy D. Scarborough, “Hairstyles and Head Wear, 1820-1859,” in José Blanco F., ed., Clothing and Fashion: American Fashion from Head to Toe, 4 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016), II, 151-152.

[5] David Farber, The Sixties: From Memory to History, new ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 274-276, 281-282; Gael Graham, “Flaunting the Freak Flag: Karr v. Schmidt and the Great Hair Debate in American High Schools, 1965-1975,” Journal of American History 91, no. 2 (September 2004): 522-543.

[6] Charles Francis Adams, Charles Francis Adams, 1835-1915: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), 47.

[7] “Inauguration Ceremonies of the President Elect,” Cadiz (OH) Democratic Sentinel, March 13, 1861.

[8] Silas, “From ‘Down the River,’” Evansville (IN) Journal, December 24, 1862.

[9] Charles D. Duncan to Dear Father and Mother, March 31, 1865, in John E. Duncan, “The Correspondence of a Yankee Prisoner in Charleston,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 75, no. 4 (October 1974), 220.

[10] “Glorious Defense of Sumter!!” New York Tribune, April 19, 1861.

[11] Albert Deane Richardson, The Secret Service: The Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1865), 164.

[12] Allan Pinkerton, The Spy of the Rebellion (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1884), 59.

[13] Ibid., 63-64.

[14] Kirk Hutson, “Hot ‘N’ Nasty: Black Oak Arkansas and Its Effect on Rural Southern Culture,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 1995), 185-211.

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).

Introducing New Associate Editor and New Editorial Board Members

Introducing New Associate Editor and New Editorial Board Members

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The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce five new scholars who are joining our editorial board, as well as a new associate editor. We would like to thank all of the editorial board members who are cycling off this year: Lorien Foote, Fay Yarbrough, Brian DeLay, Matt Gallman, and Manisha Sinha. And special thanks to Greg Downs, who is leaving his position as associate editor. We are deeply appreciative of the commitment each of you has demonstrated in advancing Civil War studies.

Welcome to Luke Harlow, who is joining us as associate editor. Luke is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 (Cambridge, 2014), which received a Kentucky History Award from the Kentucky Historical Society. Luke will be working with Stacey Smith, Associate Editor, to recruit historiographic review essays for the journal.

The first of our new editorial board members is Rabia Belt. Rabia is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on disability and citizenship. She teaches at Stanford Law School. Her scholarship ranges from cultural analysis of disability in media, to contemporary issues facing voters with disability, to the historical treatment of disabled Americans. She is currently writing a book titled, Disabling Democracy in America: Disability, Citizenship, Suffrage, and the Law, 1819-1920. In 2015, the American Society of Legal History named her a Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar for her paper, “Ballots for Bullets? The Disenfranchisement of Civil War Veterans.”

Angela Pulley Hudson is Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Real Native Genius: How an Ex-slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (2015)—winner of the 2016 Evans Biography Prize from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies—and Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (2010). She co-edits, with Andrew Frank and Kristofer Ray, the “Indians and Southern History” series from the University of Alabama Press and is a senior editor of Native American history for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History.

Stephen Kantrowitz is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Afro-American Studies and the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on race, politics, and citizenship in the long nineteenth century. He is the author of More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012), which was a finalist for both the Lincoln Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize, and Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000), which won several scholarly awards and was a New York Times Notable Book. He is currently at work on a book on Native Americans and citizenship in the Civil War era.

David Silkenat is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (2011), Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (2016), and Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (2019). He is the Chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America.

The last addition to the editorial board is Brenda E. Stevenson. She is UCLA’s Nickoll Family Endowed Chair and Professor of History and African American Studies. Her research areas are: gender and family; American South and slavery; African Americans; race and film; and racial/ethnic conflict. Her book publications include: Life in Black and White, Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins, and What is Slavery? She is editor of the Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke, co-author of Underground Railroad, and contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Black Women’s History. Professional accolades include: a Guggenheim Fellowship, SHA’s John Blassingame Award, a Berlin Prize, a NHC Fellowship, the OAH’s Rawley Prize, the Ida B. Wells Award, and a Gustavus Meyer Book Prize.

The Story Continues: Women and the American Civil War

The Story Continues: Women and the American Civil War

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Today we share the first Field Dispatch from our latest addition to the correspondent team, Angela Esco Elder. Angela is an Assistant Professor of History at Converse College in South Carolina. She is currently revising her dissertation on Confederate widowhood for publication; her dissertation won the SHA C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize and St. George Tucker Society’s Melvin E. Bradford Dissertation Prize. Elder recently published a co-edited collection, Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln. On Muster, she will be writing on women’s history and gender history topics.

Todd Heisler, “Final Salute” series, 2008. Courtesy of the New York Times.

On July 7, 2018, numerous headlines informed the public of a “US service member killed in ‘insider attack’ in Afghanistan.”[1] The statement came just days after our Facebook feeds filled with Fourth of July red, white, and blue, with videos of fireworks, coordinated family outfits, and patriotic inspiration posted in abundance. Not long before that, Memorial Day brought its share of American flag memes and quotes about soldiers’ sacrifices. Summer holidays offer a powerful reminder that American freedom is intertwined with American death. Yet, even as we offer our condolences and prayers to the families of fallen heroes, the national narrative often remains on the one who gave “the ultimate sacrifice.” We focus on the deceased soldiers. We print their stories. What about those loved ones, who are sentenced to life?

When I started graduate school, I found myself drawn to stories of loss in the Civil War, sifting through letters tucked away in archives across the South. This was not a topic I expected to fall into. I blame Stephen Berry and John Inscoe, who sent me into the University of Georgia archives to find a seminar topic. The Special Collections in Athens weren’t as fancy as they are now. Back then, the archives existed in a room tucked away in a dated corner of the library, walls overburdened with artifacts, sunlight catching the dust as it floated lazily through the air. Or perhaps that’s the nostalgia of a first archival experience speaking. Either way, in I walked, wanting to read something about women and the Civil War. I have since come up with theory-laden scholarly justifications to support this pursuit, but at the time, the honest truth was that I was just interested in it. I loved stories. I loved writing. I was curious what the war was like for women and had no idea there was already a vast amount of scholarship behind it. So, I began reading through boxes of correspondence.

At some point in that first week, I stumbled across the story of William and Rosa Delony. I had just walked past the location of their Athens home that morning, now a downtown parking lot. They had a summer wedding in 1854. When Will left to fight for the Confederacy, they had three children under the age of four. I fell into their letters, a quiet conversation of paper and ink. They bore the separation as well as they could, focusing on the future, but the couple had their challenges. On his ninth wedding anniversary, Will found himself in Gordonsville, Virginia, miles from Georgia with a “longing for home makes my army life almost insupportable.”[2] What Rosa didn’t realize, and what I didn’t realize, was that I was holding one of his last letters.

Telegraph to Mrs. P. Stovall, October 6, 1863. Courtesy of the University of Georgia Archives.

I flipped the page and the next thing in the folder was a smaller slip of paper, a telegram to a neighbor with the instructions, “on account of her condition, break the news to Mrs. Deloney as best you can.” Will had received a mortal wound in his left thigh. He died in a Union hospital. Rosa was eight months pregnant with their fourth child. And then there was me, 150 years later, sitting in this uncomfortable metal chair, holding a smudged wisp of paper that changed a family’s life.

But the story didn’t end with this telegram, or with Will’s death. There was more in the box. Rosa had her baby, a girl, in November 1863, and turned her attention to bringing her husband’s body home. She wanted his remains in Georgia with her, to have a place to visit and mourn. Then, in July 1866, that final daughter, now a toddler, died of whooping cough.

Delony family plot in the Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens, Georgia. Courtesy of the author.

Two months later, Rosa buried Will’s body beside this tiny grave. In 1863, Will had not been able to contain his excitement as he planned a trip home to Georgia for Christmas and the birth of his child. Now, he lay beside her in the Oconee Hill Cemetery. If Rosa could have chosen, she would not have planned for this chain of events. But at least now, in the midst of her uncertain future, one thing was certain. Will was finally home with his child. This was the first time I really thought about what it meant for women to live through and beyond the Civil War.

Certainly, she wasn’t the only one to live through a loss. At the Georgia Historical Society, I read a January 30, 1865, letter from a wife to her husband, who served in Company H, 2nd U.S. Colored Troops:

I have waited and longed and longed and waited for a letter from you but seems all in vain why dont you write to me and let me hear some thing from you. Not since October last have I heard one word from you…relieve my anxious mind the children are all anxious to see you and hear from you…[3]

This letter was found close to a body at the site of the Battle of Natural Bridge, in Florida.

At the Kentucky Historical Society, I spent time with a letter between Lucinda Helm and her daughter-in-law, Emilie Todd Helm, dated October 21, 1863:

My son, my son, my first born, my first born, my pride, my hope – Oh this wicked war of oppression—I know he died gloriously fighting for the freedom of his country but I can not feel that…the loss of my child, my darling son, how can I out live him?[4]

Lucinda’s son died during the Battle of Chickamauga. She would live another twenty-three years without him.

At the Tennessee State Library and Archives, I picked up the letter of farmer Asa V. Ladd, dated October 29, 1864:

My dear wife and children, I take my pen with trembling hand to inform you that I have to be shot between 2 and 4 o’clock this evening. I have but a few hours to remain in this unfriendly world. There is 6 of us sentenced to die in room of 6 union soldiers that was shot by Reeves men. My dear wife dont grieve after me. I want you to meet me in heaven. I want you to teach the children piety…I must bring my letter to a close leaving you in the hands of God. I send you my best love and respect in the hour of death…good-by Amy.[5]

Surrounded by several hundred spectators, Asa was tied to a post, blindfolded, and shot at 3:00 p.m. This letter serves as yet another reminder of a woman who lived through and beyond the Civil War.

Many scholars have moments like this, stories that grab them, shake them, and demand attention. We spend months and years of our lives with these characters and stories. And they change us. When I read a news bulletin about warfare or refugees or disease or famine, I now think of the women within and behind these stories. Instinctively, many historians search for the absent voices, the underrepresented voices, the voices not invited to the table. For those of us who teach, we often ask our students after lectures or readings, “Why does this matter? What is the significance of this event? What is the big picture?” I’ve heard it said that the death of a single Civil War soldier is like a stone dropped in a pond, sending out ripples. But I don’t just want to study the stone, I want the story of the pond. Throw in a handful of stones, perhaps 750,000 or so, and well, welcome to the world of Civil War studies.

 

[1] “US service member killed in ‘insider attack’ in Afghanistan,” BBC News, July 7, 2018, accessed July 9, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44751902.

[2] William Delony to Rosa Delony, May 14, 1863, Delony Family Papers, Hargrett Special Collections, University of Georgia Archives, Athens, Georgia.

[3] C. Ann Butler to William Butler, January 30, 1865, C. Ann Butler Letter, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Georgia.

[4] Lucinda Helm to Emilie Todd Helm, October 21, 1863, Helm Family Papers, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.

[5] Asa V. Ladd (Gratiot St. Prison in St. Louis), to wife, October 29, 1864, Asa V. Ladd Papers, 1864, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville.

Angela Esco Elder

Angela Esco Elder is an assistant professor of history at Converse College. She earned her doctorate at the University of Georgia, and the following year she was the 2016-2017 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. Her research explores gender, emotion, family, and trauma in the Civil War Era South. She is the co-editor of Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln.

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