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“Confederate Monuments…What To Do?”: Historians’ Town-Hall Meeting on Memorialization—and Racial Injustice

“Confederate Monuments…What To Do?”: Historians’ Town-Hall Meeting on Memorialization—and Racial Injustice

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Today we conclude our series of reports on relevant panels at the 2018 OAH that will be of interest to readers. Our last entry in the series discusses the future of Confederate monuments in the American landscape, authored by Jonathan Lande. The earlier reports can be found here and here.

Confederate monuments like this statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, rise from the earth throughout the South as well as in other regions of the country. “Lee Monument, Monument Avenue & Allen Avenue, Richmond, Independent City, VA.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

On Friday evening at the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in Sacramento, OAH President and Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities Edward Ayers led a town-hall meeting titled, “Confederate Monuments: What To Do?” to analyze the problem of memorialization, especially of the Confederacy, and what historians can do to help the nation move forward.[1]

Ayers contextualized the controversy. He said the question of Confederate monuments in public spaces erupted after the murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.[2] He added that it heated up further following the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue erected in New Orleans on February 22, 1884.[3] The murder of a counter-protester at a white supremacist rally around the Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, threw more fuel on the debate in the summer of 2017.[4] Finally, noting the relationship between the monuments and the long-simmering problem of racial injustice that would come to define the session, Ayers mentioned Stephon Clark, an unarmed African American shot by police in Sacramento just a month before.[5]

Ayers orchestrated the conversation by asking questions of the panelists first and, after each response, inviting the audience to participate. The panel included Turkiya Lowe, Chief Historian of the National Park Service; Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia; and John Kuo Wei Tchen, Inaugural Clement A. Price Chair of Public History and Humanities at Rutgers-Newark and member of the New York City’s Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers.[6] Since the session was meant to facilitate a town-hall discussion, Ayers framed it so as to not privilege panelists’ voices over others. He gave the audience a platform to contribute throughout the meeting.

He laid the groundwork for a dialogue, first asking: “What do the monuments say to those who want to keep them?” Coleman responded. After gathering information from the monuments’ defenders, she said defenders see Confederate monuments as symbols of men who fought for their homes, defended their version of the Constitution, and often associated the figures with their ancestors. Tchen reminded the room that communities throughout the country erected monuments that cause violence, so all regions need to reflect. Adding further complexity, Lowe noted that the statues are artistic expressions.

Ayers then opened the floor to the audience. A high-school teacher said he valued the monuments as objects that he could use to tell the story of the Civil War. Another audience member echoed the teacher’s remarks, suggesting that as a historian the elimination of artifacts made him cringe, yet he admitted reservations, acknowledging the violence monuments cause.

Ayers turned to this violence next. He asked, “What’s the rationale of removing the statues?” Coleman outlined three reasons gleaned from research. Those wanting the statues taken down explain that the monuments are examples of the enduring disenfranchisement of people of color. Others grow impassioned because memorialization of traitors signals the power of white privilege in America. Finally, Coleman said that some approach statues from personal experience, remembering the laws establishing the monuments being passed in the same legislative sessions that stripped freedom and citizenship from African Americans. Lowe added that some monuments lack a direct relationship to historical fact, and Tchen expanded the question, addressing the violence caused by the erasure of events related to all populations of color.

This stereograph card of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson allowed viewers to see Jackson in three dimensions and for admirers to “visit” the Confederate monument whenever they looked through the stereograph’s lenses. D. H. Anderson, “Stonewall Jackson’s Statue,” Richmond, Virginia. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

At this moment, Ayers turned to the audience, and the conversation addressed possible solutions. An audience member inaugurated the conversation, describing significant historical places that remain invisible to the public. He mentioned the relative absence of markers at Fort Pillow, where Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men massacred African American U.S. army soldiers. As a solution to the predominance of Confederate monuments, he suggested more focus be given to how to memorialize events and people who remain unnoticed, which would counteract the presence of Confederates in public space. Coleman remarked that a growing number of voices call for similar action in Richmond. As monuments memorializing the slave trade and the black freedom struggle pop up, she said, some call for Richmond to become a “monumental city.” She added that it is critical to engage the art community because artists strike emotions. Tchen said ephemeral efforts by arts groups in New York have long annotated historic locations. An audience member encouraged historians to raise monuments to other role models, yet another declared her skepticism of simply adding statues and, instead, invited historians to engage in what she called, without description, “authentic conversations.” Most often, though, participants’ suggested adding more statues to offset the Confederate monuments.

The possibility of building more statues led Ayers to a final question: “Can addition be a model?” Constructing more monuments adds history, making for a solution that surely seems enlightened to Clio’s ilk, though not all. Ibram X. Kendi contends that only adding monuments fails to counteract Confederate monuments and that monuments should only honor the United States.[7] Unfortunately, a vigorous examination over the merits of manufacturing more historical markers and contextualizing those standing never gained steam. Those looking for a definitive answer to the session’s framing question left wanting; but in the last half hour, the conversation offered insights into the true nature of the problem that, if more fully understood, may help the nation move forward.

Towards the end of the session, an audience member said the panel had scarcely addressed the culture that erected the monuments in the first place. She hoped for more discussion over the racial intolerance that funded the monuments and led to the deaths of unarmed black men.

Undoubtedly, connections between Confederate monuments and racism are at the heart of the problem. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown, the construction of monuments spiked at the same time when states enacted Jim Crow laws and in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the civil rights movement intensified.[8] In public debates, furthermore, racial violence and racial identities continue to be the locus of contention. As the panel acknowledged, monuments mean different things to members of society. Lowe put it succinctly in her remark: “What is one person’s art is another person’s violence.” As Coleman noted, defenders of Confederate markers hold on to them as heirlooms and do not appreciate that the monuments terrorize African Americans. As a result, she said, “These sides do not hear each other because they are expressing themselves through places of pain.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly yet nevertheless important to note, the session revealed that Americans continue to wrestle with the issue of Confederate monuments because of the ongoing problems of racism. As the conversation closed, it was clear that until Americans redress racial injustices and rebuild civic trust to support a productive dialogue the problem of Confederate monuments will continue to embroil communities throughout the country.

This does not mean historians should stop looking for solutions to this particular instance of racial violence, though. In fact, it means the opposite.

The problem of Confederate monuments is exactly where historians have the expertise to eradicate this vestige of racism. Indeed, beyond the session, historians have offered a range of solutions in opinion pieces and in public conversations. Some historians suggest the monuments be left as heaps of rubble or empty pedestals, recalling oppressive regimes while not celebrating them.[9] Others advocate relocating monuments to National Parks, where rangers can contextualize, or they call for the total removal of Confederate symbols.[10] The record number of historians who penned Op-Ed’s and appeared in the media compelled Catherine Clinton and Jim Downs to host a conversation of Civil War historians over the controversial monuments, which will appear in the forthcoming Confederate Statues and Memorization (with the University of Georgia Press) and make for a means to facilitate classroom discussions for years to come. As the public conversations and OAH session demonstrate, historians can provide their ideas on these ciphers of racial injustice.

Historians’ contributions remain critical to the debate, and historians should continue to raise their voices. As John Hope Franklin observed, historians have excited racial and nationalistic hatred, yet he noted that historians could also promote humanity, pointing out the unfulfilled promises of democracy.[11] Ideally, historians will strive for Franklin’s notion of the scholar as humanitarian, and the public debate over monuments creates the space for historians to endeavor toward the humanitarian-historian ideal. So, even if the solutions elude us, we should linger on the vexing question of what to do with Confederate statues, and other racist markers scarring the landscape, as long as it is necessary.

 

[1] The American Historical Association (AHA) declared in a 2017 statement the importance of considering why the monuments were erected, whether the monuments should remain, and where to relocate them if the decision is made to remove them; the OAH endorsed the statement not long after. “AHA Statement on Confederate Monuments, August 2017,” accessed April 17, 2018, https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/statements-and-resolutions-of-support-and-protest/aha-statement-on-confederate-monuments; “OAH endorses AHA Statement on Confederate Monuments,” August 31, 2017, accessed April 17, 2018, http://www.oah.org/programs/news/oah-endorses-aha-statement-on-confederate-monuments/.

[2] “The Victims: 9 were Slain at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church,” NPR News, June 18, 2015, accessed April 23, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/18/415539516/the-victims-9-were-slain-at-charlestons-emanuel-ame-church.

[3] Amber Nicholson, “Robert E. Lee Monument,” New Orleans Historical, accessed April 23, 2018, http://www.neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1279.

[4] Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Brian M. Rosenthal, “Man Charged After White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Ends in Deadly Violence,” August 12, 2017, accessed April 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-protest-white-nationalist.html.

[5] Frances Robles and Jose A. Del Real, “Stephon Clark was Shot 8 Times Primarily in His Back, Family-Ordered Autopsy Finds,” New York Times, March 30, 2018, accessed April 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/us/stephon-clark-independent-autopsy.html.

[6] Gregory Schneider, “An African American Leader Brings a Provocative Take to Expanded Civil War Museum,” The Washington Post, April 15, 2018, accessed April 17, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/an-african-american-leader-brings-a-provocative-take-to-expanded-civil-war-museum/2018/04/15/6a7daba4-3db4-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d03c5153e8dc. To see the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers Report, see: http://www1.nyc.gov/site/monuments/index.page.

[7] Kendi quoted in Jeremy Miller, “Do Confederate Monuments Belong in National Parks?” Sierra, September 24, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/do-confederate-monuments-belong-national-parks.

[8] Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage?: Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” April 21, 2016, accessed April 18, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.

[9] Steve Lubar, “Leave the Durham Memorial on the Ground,” August 15, 2017, Medium, accessed February 1, 2018, https://medium.com/@lubar/leave-the-durham-memorial-on-the-ground-4a3713f2bf5e; Kevin M. Levin, “Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments,” The Atlantic, August 19, 2017, accessed April 17, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/why-i-changed-my-mind-about-confederate-monuments/537396/.

[10] For a list of historians’ opinion pieces, see Megan Kate Nelson’s frequently updated list, “Historians Take on White Supremacist Memorials: A Round-Up,” Historista, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.megankatenelson.com/historians-take-on-white-supremacist-memorials-a-round-up/.

[11] John Hope Franklin, “History — Weapon of War and Peace,” Pylon 49, no. 3/4 (Autumn-Winter, 2001): 297-276.

Jonathan Lande

Jonathan Lande is finishing a year teaching history at Tougaloo College as the Brown-Tougaloo Exchange Faculty Fellow and recently defended his dissertation on African American deserters and mutineers, wartime emancipation, and anti-black racism in the courts-martial during the Civil War at Brown University. This fall, he will be researching at the New York Historical Society while teaching at the New School as the Irene and Bernard Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow before assuming the position of Assistant Professor of History at Weber State University.

Two Visions of Abolition and Emancipation: An OAH “State of the Field” Roundtable

Two Visions of Abolition and Emancipation: An OAH “State of the Field” Roundtable

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Today we continue our series of reports on the recent Organization of American Historians annual meeting with a concise summation of a lively discussion on abolition and emancipation, recorded by Evan Turiano.

Our first report from the 2018 meeting can be found here and the final report on the Confederate monuments town hall can be found here.

“Was abolition a fundamentally radical or conservative movement?” Joshua Rothman, Professor of History at the University of Alabama, presented this question as one of several that the panel of esteemed nineteenth-century historians could pursue at the OAH Conference’s “State of the Field: Abolition and Emancipation” roundtable session. This question proved central, engaging both the panel and the audience of nearly 120 people, who packed the hall of this primetime panel. The answer, it turns out, largely depends on context: are abolition and emancipation best understood in relation to the political and social movements that preceded them, or in relation to the shortcomings of Reconstruction that followed?

The panel featured a range of distinguished scholars whose research projects touch on emancipation from different angles. Stephen Kantrowitz, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, expressed in his opening remarks an interest in moving beyond the “slavery/freedom binary” and described the fruits of liberal emancipation as “disappointing.” He also called for an understanding of emancipation in the context of continental history, and of American empire. Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair of American History at the University of Connecticut, assumed the opposite stance in her opening remarks. She warned that the long-fought scholarly efforts to overturn whiggish “slavery to freedom” narratives are at risk of being overdone, and can flatten the radical transformations inherent to abolition. She also warned that emancipation is too often considered as a contingent moment, one of wartime desperation, which obscures the long fight for abolition. Kidada Williams, Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University, considered emancipation from the Reconstruction era, and expressed particular interest in how an expanded source base, one that amplifies black voices, can add to our understandings of emancipation.

In her opening remarks, Chandra Manning, Professor of History at Georgetown University, laid out what she thought to be the three primary sites of conflict in the modern historiography on abolition and emancipation. First is the conflict between those arguments that emphasize the important agency of the enslaved, versus those that emphasize the hard power of enslavement and the meaningful ways in which it limited agency. The second debate is whether emancipation began quickly and decisively, or whether it was deferred to slowly as a desperate act. The final, most central debate Manning posed regarded whether or not we can collapse different forms of exploitation together: Does emancipation matter? How much did the material condition of African American laborers really change? More specifically, was Reconstruction doomed to fail from the start, or was it overthrown?

Joshua Rothman then posed the first of Manning’s questions to the panelists on frank terms: Does emancipation matter? Stephen Kantrowitz answered first. “Of course emancipation matters,” he said, but he urged that it be considered in the context of what follows. In this light, according Kantrowitz, we are left with the sense that things could have gone differently after emancipation. Sinha also began by asserting that emancipation matters a great deal. She contended with Kantrowitz and others that we cannot include the “overthrow of Reconstruction” in our study of emancipation. This sort of “post-post-revisionist” conflating of two distinct events, according to Sinha, undercuts the transformative aspects of emancipation. Manning disagreed somewhat with Sinha on this interpretation. She described the marrying of emancipation and Reconstruction as being both fruitful and dangerous, suggesting that it can reveal some imperfections inherent to how emancipation played out.

In a question posed from the audience, Thavolia Glymph, Professor of History at Duke University, expressed shock that the state of the field was such that “Does emancipation matter?” was still an open question. She received the first applause of the session. From the panel, Manisha Sinha echoed Glymph’s frustrations. She questioned some of Stephen Kantrowitz’s earlier points, urging that the study of American imperialism cannot be allowed to undercut our recognition of abolition’s radicalism. Kantrowitz acknowledged that the focus on Reconstruction’s failures has created a somewhat troubling trend in public-facing history, the idea that, “slavery didn’t end, it just changed.” He points specifically to Ava DuVernay’s award winning 2016 documentary 13th as evidence that much of the public has lost sight of the transformative aspects of emancipation. A division was clear, and an audience question from Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, laid it out in concrete terms: Does focusing on emancipation in relation to Reconstruction mean that we under-study what came before? When we look at the shortcomings of Reconstruction, do we lose sight of the processes behind abolition and emancipation?

From the panel, Chandra Manning tried to organize the room’s increasingly clear rift back toward the historiographical question she had attempted to pose earlier. She posited that the question at hand was whether Reconstruction’s overthrow was the product of shortcomings inherent to emancipation, or of separate, outside forces. Both of these, according to Manning, were worthy of serious consideration. Sinha pushed back, reminding the audience that the former of the two theses, that Reconstruction’s failures were inherent to emancipation, did not have a “respectable genealogy.” Former slaveholders were the first to propose these ideas, as Sinha points out, in an effort to build a mythical Confederate narrative. Instead, she argued that the field must consider emancipation and abolition on their own terms, and understand Reconstruction as a project that was overthrown by external forces. In a final audience comment, Richard Blackett reminded everyone that abolition was “the most radical movement of its time,” and that we cannot say that nothing has changed in its wake.

This panel, delivered before a packed, often tense room, revealed that the study of emancipation and abolition is host to more conflict than consensus. The stakes of the fundamental question at hand are very high: How should we understand the Civil War? How do we make sense of slavery in relation to other forms of unfreedom throughout American history? Where do we break off the U.S. History survey course—is emancipation an end, a beginning, or neither? This panel made it clear that these questions are open but are certainly in good hands.

 

Evan Turiano

Evan Turiano is the Macaulay Honors College Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Looking West at the OAH: New Views on Southern Expansion, Slavery, and Imperialism

Looking West at the OAH: New Views on Southern Expansion, Slavery, and Imperialism

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This week, we are publishing reports on the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in Sacramento. We are highlighting panels and roundtables that intersect with the Civil War era and that we believe will be of great interest to our readers. Our first comes from Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, who attended a fascinating roundtable about the Civil War in the West. The other two reports are available here and here.

Looking backwards from secession in 1860, historians often focus on a trajectory of slavery and anti-slavery that frames western expansion as instrumental to the rising regional tension that led to war. A current movement within scholarship looks at the Civil War era in continental or international terms and reexamines the role of the West in both the antebellum and wartime periods. The opportunities present in the expansion of our geographical focus westward was highlighted by a roundtable session, “The Old South in the New West: Southern Expansionism and Empire Building in the American Borderlands.” William Deverell (University of Southern California) served as chair alongside panelists Stacey Smith (Oregon State University), Andrew J. Torget (University of North Texas), Maria Angela Diaz (Utah State University), and Kevin Waite (Durham University). Since this followed a roundtable format, each panelist gave a brief presentation of their research and questions for the field before the chair opened the conversation to the room.

Andrew J. Torget’s research examines southern expansion into Mexico in the first half of the nineteenth century as part of the western expansion of slavery and the international expansion of the cotton economy. As southern slaveholders moved into Mexican territory they had to explain the system of cotton and slavery to a new regime and their presence sparked a debate over the place of slavery in the newly independent nation. This debate helped cause the Texas Revolution and the creation of the Texas Republic, which Torget argued was everything the Confederacy wanted to be a couple decades later. The cotton and slave society set up in Texas ultimately failed, however, due to low international support and the collapse of the cotton economy during the Panic of 1837, leading to its necessary annexation into the United States.

While Torget framed his research as more of an economic opportunity rather than a chance at imperialism, Angela Diaz situated her scholarship more squarely in the discussion of empire. She argued that communities such as Pensacola, Florida, saw themselves as staging grounds for further colonization and questioned what happened to these southern communities when they reached out to conquer the west and Latin America. She also questioned the place of race in this southern expansion. While the American South had a binary white-black system where race was part of socio-economic status, that binary breaks down in more diverse areas such as territory taken from Mexico, cities like New Orleans, or countries in Latin and South America. When expanding west and south, Southerners had to put their structure against places that were racially and culturally very different than their own.

In his presentation, Kevin Waite posed questions about what southerners saw and expected when they looked west. There is a tendency to interpret this western expansion as an attempt to simply create space for plantation agriculture, but that type of system was not feasible in areas of the west and Latin America. He argued that even where plantation agriculture and chattel slavery could not take root, slaveholders expanded their political structure and preserved systems of unfree labor. Southerners had to recalibrate their ideas as they moved into the west, but they still upheld paternalism, unfree labor, and what they considered the natural order of society to preserve their political power and support their southern system of slavery.

Stacey Smith raised similar questions with her research on Jessie Benton Fremont, wife of John C. Fremont who credited herself with saving California from slavery during her search for good domestic help. A slaveholder offered her an enslaved woman, which she refused due to her free soil stance, and this action, she claimed, encouraged others to vote anti-slavery in California. Like Waite, Smith argued that even where the cotton economy could not flourish the institution of slavery could have still expanded to perform other labor in the west. In locations such as California, slavery would have been part of a patchwork of coercive labor and Smith raised questions about the racial and regional diversity of slavery as well as the opportunity to research the role of white women in these debates.

As a conclusion to the panel presentations, William Deverell asked what opportunities were missed in studying the west or Latin America in scholarship that looks only at the expansion of slavery in the South and abolition in the North. One common thread in the panelists’ answers was that they did not see a single slave conspiracy of expansion, a fear that northerners held in the lead up to secession. Instead, they saw smaller schemes or actions to spread slavery that add up to make it appear like a larger conspiracy to expand the slave power.

The ensuing discussion began with one audience member pointing out that reframing expansion also offers a different interpretation to post-war expansion and imperialism, both in the West and abroad. Torget added that southerners had broader horizons for slavery than usually studied and Waite asked at what point the expansion of slavery became sectionalized. It is easy for historians to read history backwards from the Civil War, but these questions invite historians to project forward from the events and reevaluate our narrative of history.

This discussion was followed by two audience questions about empire and imperialism. The first asked each panelist what empire looked like to them, since many had not brought up the term in their remarks. Diaz explained that her subjects saw themselves as at the center of a pro-slavery imperialist ideal and that slavery was at the heart of American imperialism during this period. Torget remarked that American expansion into Mexico and the Texas Revolution caused the creation of a new country (Texas) and an imperialistic war with Mexico. Waite and Smith took a different approach to the question; Waite remarked on the difference between expansion and imperialism and Smith pointed out the importance of timing—expansion could be imperialism before the Mexican-American War or simply expansion of southern ideas into United States territory once that land was annexed.

The second question about empire asked what happened to southern imperialism once slavery was gone, pointing out southern anti-imperialistic views around the turn of the century. While Waite did not see much of a change in the ideas about conquering non-white peoples, Torget remarked that the expansion of slavery as a form of political power was no longer relevant which changed the dynamic of expansion in the South. Diaz also reminded us that we could not underestimate the damage to the south (both physical damage and the blow to confidence and southern interests) brought about by the Civil War.

Another audience member asked if there was something about American slavery that made it inherently expansionist and whether southerners wanted to expand only due to slavery. Diaz responded that expansion was a combination of racial, economic, and geo-political factors. Southerners saw geo-political opportunities in this expansion, for example in commercial connections with sugar planters in the Caribbean and Latin America. Torget added that expansion was not inherent to the south or the institution of slavery, but was the experience of America. Southern interest in this expansion lay in political power because they felt vulnerable during the antebellum period in ways that northerners did not.

In addition, the audience posed questions about the defense of peonage in the west as pro-slavery language, the transfer of ideas west about Native Americans from removal policies, and connections between chattel slavery and interactions with other forms of unfree labor in the west. These questions and the panelists’ discussions revealed plenty of opportunity for new scholarship on the institution of American slavery, the trajectory of westward expansion, and placing American history into continental and international context. As these scholars demonstrated, looking west and south asks historians to rethink the narrative of expansion, secession, and slavery. This reanalysis of southern expansionism adds new complexity to the narrative of American history and will hopefully lead to rich new scholarship.

Kathleen Logothetis Thompson

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and universities and leads tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse, a blog on the long Civil War.

Beyond Add Women and Stir: Ideas for Teaching about Women, Gender, and Reconstruction

Beyond Add Women and Stir: Ideas for Teaching about Women, Gender, and Reconstruction

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“The Fifteenth Amendment, Celebrated May 19th, 1870.” James C. Beard (designer), Thomas Kelly (publisher), 1870. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library.

For most folks teaching the U.S. survey, just getting to Reconstruction can feel like an accomplishment. The convention of dividing U.S. history surveys at the Civil War often means the postwar period ends up wedged into the last distracted days of the term. Calls to integrate women more fully into how we teach Reconstruction to undergraduates can sound like an invitation to add complexity and scope at precisely the moment in the term when it is least welcome. Even in courses dedicated to the Civil War era, Reconstruction’s messiness can feel like a frustrating sequel to the narrative coherence of the war’s progress and resolution.

Despite the constraints, I want to suggest that it is both vital and possible to help students explore women’s roles in the era’s redefinition of citizenship and sovereignty. As my historiographical survey in the March 2018 issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era demonstrates, putting women at the center of our study of this period doesn’t just enrich the narrative; it reveals different registers of political action and raises important questions about we understand historical change.[1] What follows are two suggestions for how teachers might introduce students to some of these insights, even with limited time.

If you have twenty minutes: Suffrage, Citizenship, and Contests over Inclusion

1. Reading and looking: In class, ask students to read the text of the Fifteenth Amendment and examine Thomas Kelley’s lithograph, “The Fifteenth Amendment, Celebrated May 19th 1870,” which depicts celebrations of the amendment that took place in Baltimore, Maryland.[2] (~5 minutes)

2. Think/pair/share: What do these two sources reveal about what the Fifteenth Amendment meant for African American men and African American women? What do they suggest about the relationship between suffrage and African Americans’ expectations regarding citizenship? Ask students to reflect on the materials individually for 2 minutes and discuss with another student for 3 minutes. If helpful, ask them to describe how men and women are depicted in the lithograph and what these depictions suggest about contemporary ideas about how gender inflected citizenship. Gather their contributions as a class (on the board, in a GoogleDoc, etc). (~5 minutes)

3. Gather and contextualize: Use students’ reflections as the foundation for presenting the conflict around women’s exclusion from suffrage and tensions among abolitionists and women’s rights activists, centering on Frances Harper’s response.[3] For students who already have the language of intersectionality this episode often resonates with contemporary concerns. For those who do not, it is an opportunity to introduce the concept in a historical context that illustrates the challenges of sustaining political coalitions and implementing reformist visions, even in a context of political transformation. (10 minutes)

4. Going further: For more ideas on teaching feminists’ New Departure that followed this controversy, consult Kathi Kern and Lina Levstik’s 2012 Journal of the Civil War Era article, “Teaching the New Departure: The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony.”[4]

If you have an hour: Freedom, Citizenship, and Gender

Students are usually quick to appreciate the relationship between African American men’s military service and their postwar claims to full rights as citizens. This creates a useful opening for discussing what those ideas meant for women. Thavolia Glymph’s article “Rose’s Civil War,” from the December 2013 issue of the JCWE, illuminates how those connections constrained but did not dictate enslaved women’s wartime strategies. The article provides a compelling examination of one enslaved woman’s participation in the perilous process of self-emancipation that also sheds light on the archival challenges of uncovering women’s actions. Having students put Glymph’s article in conversation with select primary sources (such as Frederick Douglass’s July 6, 1863 speech promoting black enlistment and brief documents from the Freedmen and Southern Society Project) facilitates students’ explorations of how military exigency shaped men and women’s wartime experiences in ways that also influenced postwar citizenship. Discussing these texts together provides an opportunity to share with students how historians of women and gender continue to expand our understanding of where politics happened, who participated, and how.

1. Before the class meeting, have students prepare two readings: Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War” and Frederick Douglass, Address at a Meeting for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments, Philadelphia.[5] While Douglass’s speech is often quoted (“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U. S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”) read in its entirety, it suggests the complex political stakes of military service, including for African American women. (“Do I hear you say still that you are a son, and want your mother provided for in your absence?–a husband, and want your wife care for?—a brother, and want your sister secured against want? I honor you for your solicitude. Your mothers, your wives and your sisters ought to be cared for . . .”)

Questions to invite students to consider:

– Union policy shaped the composition of Union forces, but so did other factors. How did geography determine the ways African Americans could participate in the war? How did gender?

– Glymph asserts that enslaved women’s roles in the Civil War have been overlooked. What does she suggest accounts for this oversight?

– Addressing his 1863 audience Douglass stated “we are American citizens.” Glymph, writing in 2013, notes of enslaved women in the war that “they were not citizens.” What’s going on in these different claims? Is there a gap between these assertions? What accounts for it if so?

2. In class, in small groups, assign students one of the documents below. In their small groups ask students to read the documents and discuss what their document reveals about African American women’s expectations in the wake of emancipation. (~15 minutes) Have each group give a two-minute report summarizing their document and the expectations or demands it seems to convey. (10 minutes)

– Patsy Leach’s 25 March 1865 affidavit. (Her affidavit highlights the risks of military service, including for family members who remained on plantations.)

– Harriet Hill’s 5 February 1866 petition. (Hill was seeking the return of her children and compensation for their labor. She cast her demands as a right.)

– Anna Irwin’s 27 February 1866 statement. (Irwin and other women provided an accounting of their work as washerwomen for the Union and made demands for compensation.)

– Hucksters’ petition, 21 May 1866. (In an appeal that emphasized their loyalty to the U.S., women working as hucksters sought relief from local policies undermining their ability to earn a living.)

– Proceedings in Loucy Jane Boyd vs. L.W. Willis, 24 May 1866. (Boyd sought remedy from the courts after having been raped by Willis.)

3. Invite entire class to put all the readings into conversation with each other. Questions you might consider raising include:

– While Frederick Douglass’s speech is relatively well known, the individual documents you read are not, and indeed it took a massive scholarly project of archival review and publication to make them available to us today. What accounts for the relative visibility of one source and the relative invisibility of others generated at the same time?

– We often think about citizenship as a category defined in law, most famously through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Yet in recent years historians have drawn attention to how women and men shaped the meaning of citizenship through popular political action and by making demands on the state. Using these documents as a guide, what do you think were key features of citizenship for their authors?

– Rose of Pineville did not survive the Civil War. What kinds of demands and actions might she have engaged in after the war if she had?

Women’s history is American history. While demographics alone seem to dictate that we integrate women more fully into how we teach about the past, they do not resolve the challenges that attend actually doing so. Reconstruction is a particularly fruitful context for thinking about how to approach these challenges because it is a period that shapes the boundaries of our contemporary political debates in so many ways: our understandings of citizenship and equality, our expectations regarding the power and the limitations of the state, and our sense of the persistence of violence, racism, and political exclusion.

Inviting students to think about how women participated in Reconstruction provides an opportunity for connecting the past and the present by encouraging them to see the seams in historical narratives—how the questions we ask and where we look in trying to answer them can fundamentally change the narrative. It also invites students and teachers to reflect on continuities than can feel like anomalies: the messiness of politics and the precariousness of coalitions. For women, Reconstruction, even at its height, was an incomplete revolution that nevertheless held enormous potential, not least by virtue of the dialogic relationship between popular politics and state actions it laid bare.

 

[1] Catherine A. Jones, “Women, Gender, and the Boundaries of Reconstruction” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 1 (March 2018): 111-131, accessed April 17, 2018, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/687205.

[2] For additional information on the lithograph, visit Amanda Hinckle, “Celebrating a Milestone: A Lithograph Honoring the Fifteenth Amendment,” Unreserved, the Winterthur Museum and Library Blog, http://museumblog.winterthur.org/2018/03/15/celebrating-a-milestone-a-lithograph-honoring-the-fifteenth-amendment/.

[3] “Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association,” The Revolution, May 27, 1869, Internet Archive, accessed April 17, 2018, https://archive.org/details/revolution-1869-05-27; C.C. O’Brien, “‘The White Women All Go for Sex’: Frances Harper on Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Reconstruction South” African American Review 43, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 605–20; Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[4] Kathi Kern and Linda Levstik, “Teaching the New Departure: The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 1 (March 2012): 127-141, accessed April 14, 2018, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/466643. See also Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[5] Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 4 (December 2013): 501–32, accessed April 14, 2018, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/525399; W. D. Kelley, Anna E. Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass, Address at a Meeting for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, accessed April 17, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.22007/. Douglass’s speech is also available in excerpted form in Christian G. Samito, ed., Changes in Law and Society during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 115-119.

Catherine Jones

Catherine Jones is associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (Charlottesville, 2015). She is currently working on a book about the incarceration of children in the post-Civil War era.

Online Survey from the Society of Civil War Historians

Online Survey from the Society of Civil War Historians

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The Society of Civil War Historians Executive Board has created a short online survey to solicit feedback about their organization and about the affiliated journal (i.e. The Journal of the Civil War Era). If you subscribe to the journal and/or are a member of the SCWH, please take a few minutes to complete it. The feedback is anonymous, and it will help the SCWH and the JCWE team learn more about how we can best serve those who study the Civil War era. Thank you for your participation, and we look forward to hearing from each of you!

Politics of the English Language: Views from 1850

Politics of the English Language: Views from 1850

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As a practical tool and a badge of belonging, language is central to our sense of self. The United States has no official language, but the status of its dominant tongue shapes many contemporary conflicts over immigration and national identity. In the name of unity and assimilation, supporters of the English-only movement seek federal legislation to make English the national language and end bilingual education. Many of their opponents, in contrast, support an “English Plus” approach which would facilitate English language training while rejecting its enshrinement as the sole national language. Some argue that the English-only position cannot be divorced from nativism and racism, pointing to historical cases like Indian boarding schools, in which linguistic nationalism was entwined with white supremacy.

This discussion will not end soon; nor are many of its elements particularly new. In 1850, U.S. senators held a brief but fascinating debate over language which revealed intriguing patterns in partisanship, regionalism, and notions of belonging. Their arguments reveal that language has always been controversial in a nation seeking to balance “pluribus” and “unum.”

Clipping from “President’s Message,” (Ottumwa, IA) Des Moines Courier, December 13, 1850. Given the limits of technology – and the longstanding tradition of delivering annual presidential messages by the written rather than spoken word – President Fillmore’s 1850 message to Congress was disseminated among citizens through newspapers like this one. Courtesy of the Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers Project, Library of Congress.

President Millard Fillmore unwittingly triggered the debate when he sent his annual message to Congress in December 1850. Today, the State of the Union Address is a media event, delivered in person and broadcast live. In 1850, Fillmore followed then-standard protocol and simply wrote the message for clerks to read to Congress. Later, it was distributed nationwide through pamphlets and newspapers.

Fillmore presided over a rapidly-changing country. Massive immigration from Germany and Ireland, mostly into the North, had swelled the foreign-born population to 9.7% of the total by 1850.[1] Backlash came swiftly, as nativists assailed the newcomers, especially Irish Catholics, as cultural, political, and economic threats.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-Mexican War had redrawn the country’s borders and expanded its citizenry. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), Mexico ceded California and most of the modern-day Southwest – some 500,000 square miles – to the United States. The treaty also brought tens of thousands of Mexican citizens under the U.S. flag; they had one year to decide whether to remain, and accept U.S. citizenship, or depart for Mexico. Most, including around ten thousand people in California, opted to stay. After a fierce congressional struggle, California gained statehood as part of the Compromise of 1850. That December, two California senators – William M. Gwin and John C. Frémont – took their seats in Washington.[2]

“Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico” [1847]. Printed just before the U.S. conquest of California and New Mexico in 1848, this map shows the Mexican territories of Alta California (light pink) and Nuevo Mexico (green) as they appeared in 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

On December 12, Gwin proposed that the Senate commission and print two thousand copies of a Spanish translation of Fillmore’s message.[3] Undoubtedly, he wanted to send the translated document back to his constituents, particularly Spanish-speaking Californios, some of whom owned vast sheep and cattle ranches and participated actively in politics.

Five days later, the Senate debated Gwin’s proposal. Gwin opened with an ingenious argument: aware of the rising nativist tide, he asserted that immigrants from abroad “ought to be prepared to read these documents” in English. But this case, Gwin contended, was different because Spanish speakers in California and New Mexico were not immigrants; they had simply remained in their homes, and translating the annual message would have “a favorable effect” upon them. Gwin tried to deflect the discussion away from the contentious issue of immigration and onto a question of fairness toward his unique constituents.[4]

The subsequent debate covered rather familiar ground. George E. Badger of North Carolina agreed that this case was exceptional. The Californios had been made American citizens “almost against their consent,” and while he hoped they would learn English, complete assimilation would take time. Since they had no access to Spanish-language sources of information about U.S. politics, providing the translation would hasten, not delay, cultural and political adjustment. Henry S. Foote of Mississippi expressed mortification that anyone would object to Gwin’s plan, since it would educate Spanish speakers in American citizenship.[5]

Opponents were unconvinced. Augustus C. Dodge, an Iowan, reversed Gwin’s argument and proclaimed that he would rather translate the message for immigrants who deliberately chose to relocate, than for a conquered people. Other critics noted that nothing comparable had been done when the U.S. acquired Louisiana or Florida, areas with significant French- and Spanish-speaking populations. William L. Dayton (New Jersey) and James W. Bradbury (Maine) raised a classic slippery-slope objection, warning that the Senate would be asked to print in every language spoken nationwide. Isaac P. Walker (Wisconsin) proposed amending the resolution to print translations in German and Norwegian; his purpose, he readily admitted, was to torpedo Gwin’s efforts. Wisconsin’s 90,000 Germans and Norwegians, he insisted, spoke no English but did not request translations. Foote retorted that Gwin’s constituents wanted the translation because they lacked newspapers which could print public documents in their native tongue, whereas Germans could read Fillmore’s message in the thriving German-language press.[6]

William McKendree Gwin c. 1844-1860. Born in Tennessee, Gwin began his political career in Mississippi before moving to California in 1849; shortly thereafter, the Democrat was elected as one of the new state’s first U.S. senators. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Gwin’s proposal ultimately failed when the Senate voted 27-16 in favor of Bradbury’s motion to table the resolution; thus, an ‘aye’ vote signaled opposition to providing a Spanish translation. Broken down by party and region, the vote reveals trends not visible in the brief debate and reveals how partisan and ideological concerns shaped senators’ decisions.[7]

Both major parties were split, with Democrats more likely to oppose Gwin’s resolution than Whigs: 68% of Democrats voted to table, compared with 59% of Whigs. The lone Free Soil senator, Salmon Chase of Ohio, voted against tabling.

Northerners and southerners were similarly divided over Gwin’s proposal, with southerners (68% voted to table) somewhat more inclined to oppose the translation than northerners (58% voted to table). When broken into eastern (east of Ohio and Alabama) and western subregions, the geographic distinction is clearer: southwestern and northeastern senators were strongly against Gwin’s proposal, with 75% of each group voting to table, while southeasterners were somewhat less opposed (57% for tabling) and northwesterners were actually in favor of the translation (only 42% supported tabling).

Combining regional and party affiliations exposes interesting patterns: Northeastern and southeastern Democrats unanimously opposed translation, perhaps because they saw it as a bid to spread the message of a Whig president in the far West, and because they faced a rising wave of nativism back home, particularly in northeastern cities. Thus, they had several motives to oppose Gwin. Southwestern Democrats were next most likely to support tabling, followed by northeastern Whigs. For the former, opposition was probably driven by partisanship, while for the latter, regional rivalries and nativist sentiments were probably paramount.

Northwestern Democrats were evenly split. Most were critical of nativism and courted immigrant voters, although partisanship may have dampened their enthusiasm for translating a Whiggish speech. Interestingly, the only two states whose senators united in favor of Gwin’s measure were in the northwest: Ohio and Illinois.

Most southeastern Whigs opposed tabling Gwin’s resolution; under less nativist pressure than their northeastern counterparts, they had less reason to oppose spreading the Whig message by translating Fillmore’s words. Finally, northwestern Whigs (and the only Free Soiler, a northwesterner) unanimously opposed tabling the resolution. With partisan incentives to support translation and less nativist pressure upon them than their northeastern colleagues, northwestern Whigs emerged as Gwin’s staunchest allies. Since Gwin was a southern-born Democrat, the vote reminds us that politics always make strange bedfellows.

Gwin’s resolution has been overshadowed by the Compromise of 1850 which preceded it and the ethnic and sectional strife which followed throughout the 1850s. But the debate and vote on Gwin’s proposal demonstrate the complexity of conflicts over language and belonging. Amid an era of mounting sectionalism, other influences, including partisanship, nativism, and nationalism, clearly shaped the discussion and vote prompted by Gwin’s proposal. In unsettled political times, success clearly depends on building coalitions, no matter how unlikely they may seem.

 

[1] Paul Schor, Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation, trans. Lys Ann Weiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 140.

[2] Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 62-86; William Henry Ellison, A Self-Governing Dominion: California, 1849-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 78-101.

[3] Congressional Globe, 31 Cong., 2 Sess., 35 (December 12, 1850).

[4] Ibid., 66 (December 17, 1850).

[5] Ibid., 66-67 (December 17, 1850).

[6] Ibid., 66-68 (December 17, 1850).

[7] The votes that are discussed in the following paragraphs are listed on ibid., 69 (December 17, 1850).

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).

William H. Seward’s Foreign War Panacea Reconsidered

William H. Seward’s Foreign War Panacea Reconsidered

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As William H. Seward allegedly stated in 1861, “if the Lord would only give the United States an excuse for a war with England, France, or Spain, that would be the best means of reestablishing internal peace.” This is probably one of the most famous and most widely quoted sentences in Civil War diplomatic history.[1] The quote often serves to illustrate Seward’s attempt to prevent the outbreak of the Civil War by instigating a foreign war. The quote, along with Seward’s infamous April Fools Day Memoranda to President Abraham Lincoln, has provided the basis of what has become known as Seward’s “Foreign War Panacea.” Seward’s plan was to provoke a conflict with a European colonial power over an outstanding issue in the Americas as a way to remind Southerners of their duty to defend the United States, thus ending the secession crisis short of war and restoring the Union.[2]

Portrait of Secretary of State William H. Seward, Brady National Photographic Art Gallery. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

However this quotation, often credited to Seward and recorded by the representative of the Hanseatic City of Bremen, Rudolph Schleiden, has never been properly verified in the Schleiden Papers. While the quote is Schleiden’s words, the sentiment captures Seward’s attitudes in the first months of 1861 rather well. Properly attributing this famous sentence serves as a reminder of how important consulting the original sources is, especially non-English source material. Furthermore, with the recent scholarly debate surrounding the secession crisis, revisiting the Foreign War Panacea illustrates the complexity of Seward’s character and his political designs during secession winter.

Following Abraham Lincoln’s election victory, seven southern states seceded from the Union by early February, plunging the country into crisis, and the president-elect made his first cabinet appointment: New York Senator William H. Seward as Secretary of State. As Daniel Croft has eloquently shown, Washington was abuzz trying to find a compromise solution until hours before Lincoln’s inaugural, including an amendment protecting slavery.[3] For most of the first few months of 1861, Seward operated under the assumption that there was a substantial Unionist population in the South, which needed time to regain political influence. A foreign war as a means to unify the country could help Southern Unionists overcome secessionist opposition and end the crisis short of domestic conflict. Seward closely connected domestic and foreign politics.

Seward had a long-standing interest in foreign relations and had used anti-British sentiments for his own political advancement. As Senator, he had frequently met with diplomatic representatives in Washington and developed friendships with, for example, Rudolph M. Schleiden, who was one of three German diplomats in Washington. Born in the Duchy of Holstein, Schleiden had participated in the 1848 uprising of his home region, after which he successfully lobbied for Bremen’s new Minister Residency in Washington. His two German colleagues were the Prussian minister, Friedrich Freiherr von Gerolt, and the Austrian minister, Georg Ritter von Hülsemann. Recent Civil War diplomatic history has relegated Schleiden to the undeserved status of “a foreign emissary,” without his name ever appearing.[4] Even German scholars have deemphasized Schleiden in favor of Freiherr von Gerolt who, Enno Eimers for example claimed, occupied a more influential position in Washington. These scholars read German Unification back into the Civil War era, prematurely granting the Prussian minister a role he would occupy later in the decade.[5] Despite this fall from favor, Schleiden remains an important diplomat; he was much better connected than von Gerolt and rivaled only by the British Minister, Richard Bickerton Pemell, Lord Lyons, when it came to trade and maritime law questions.

Rudolph Schleiden, c.1835. Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Kiel, Germany.

Since coming to the United States in 1853, Schleiden had befriended many influential politicians, among them Seward and his political nemesis, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Schleiden was well aware of Seward’s political-motivated animosity towards Great Britain, which was no secret in Washington’s diplomatic corps. Already in December, well before South Carolina seceded, the British minister had reported to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell, “My own view of the matter is that it is extremely important that no pretext should be afforded to either one side or the other for asserting that Great Britain has any disposition to interfere in the domestic quarrel. There are no wanting grave statesmen in this country who hold that a Foreign War is the only remedy for the internal dissensions of the Confederation. A contest with England, dangerous and unprovoked as it might be, would be the only means, in the opinion of many, of producing an adequate excitement.” [6] Lyons’s fear soon materialized in many off-handed statements by Seward at Washington dinner parties.

On January 29, Schleiden included the aforementioned sentence in his report to the government in Bremen. At the start of the paragraph, Schleiden explained that Seward still assumed that preservation of the Union was a distinct possibility. Schleiden editorialized that such an outcome was unlikely. Seward supposedly saw secession just as another form of party conflict that had become more violent than normal, but that a foreign war would bring the country back together after inaugural day. Following this summary of the conversation with the senator, Schleiden mentions the infamous sentence. There are no quotation marks, which indicates that not Seward but Schleiden is speaking, and that the words placed in Seward’s mouth are actually those of Bremen’s minister resident.[7] When it came to official correspondence, Schleiden was a meticulous reporter; he would not have forgotten quotation marks if the words were directly from Seward, which he shows on a number of occasions in other letters. The statement is likely Schleiden’s, but this does not negate Seward’s interest in starting a foreign war to bring the two sections together again. Seward made further comments of that nature to Schleiden in mid-February.[8]

Image of part of Schleiden’s January 29 letter. The fateful sentence is at the end of the paragraph.

Seward’s desire to end the secession crisis and prevent war by precipitating a foreign war continued even after Lincoln’s inaugural. On April 1, almost a month after assuming office, Seward sent a brief missive to Lincoln with policy suggestions, commonly known as his April Fools Day Memoranda. Prominent among the suggestions was to demand explanations from France and Spain, seek support from Great Britain, Russia, Mexico, and other Latin American countries, and potentially declare war against France or Spain. Seward hoped such a conflict could unify the country, even as the country was less than two weeks from the first shots of war.[9] Seward was still under the illusion that Unionist sentiments were strong throughout the South and Southern Unionists could still preserve the Union.

Even though it is clear that the central quote supporting the existence of Seward’s Foreign War Panacea actually originated with Schleiden, this knowledge does not detract from Seward’s thinking about a foreign war. The Foreign War Panacea was an outgrowth of Seward’s desire to prevent a civil war and it reflects his overestimation of Southern Unionist support. However, even after the first shot on Fort Sumter, Seward remained interested in a peaceful reunification of the Union, and Schleiden offered him a tool to do so again in April. If nothing else, the above elaboration should remind historians about the importance of consulting the original archival material, instead of relying on the summaries of others.

 

[1] Howard Jones, Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 41.

[2] Norman B. Ferris, Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 9-12; Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1997), 11-16; Ralph H. Lutz, “Rudolph Schleiden and the Visit to Richmond, April 25, 1861,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1917), 207-16.

[3] Daniel W. Crofts, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

[4] Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 21.

[5] Enno Eimers, Preussen und die USA, 1850 bis 1867: Transatlantische Wechselwirkungen (Berlin, Germany: Duncker und Humblot, 2004).

[6] Lyons to Russell, December 4, 1860, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, The American Civil War through British Eyes: Dispatches from British Diplomats (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 2005), 1:5-8.

[7] Schleiden to the Senate foreign relations committee, January 29, 1861, 2-B.13.b.1.a.2.c.I, Ministerresident, Staatsarchiv, Bremen.

[8] Schleiden to the Senate foreign relations committee, February 12, 1861, 2-B.13.b.1.a.2.c.I, Ministerresident, Staatsarchiv, Bremen.

[9] William H. Seward to Abraham Lincoln, April 1, 1861, Abraham Lincoln Papers: Series 1, General Correspondence, 1833 to 1916, Library of Congress.

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.

Winner of the 2017 George and Ann Richards Prize Announced

Winner of the 2017 George and Ann Richards Prize Announced

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Congratulations to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, winner of the George and Ann Richards Prize!

Gronningsater has won the 2017 George and Ann Richards Prize for her article, “‘On Behalf of His Race and the Lemmon Slaves’: Louis Napoleon, Northern Black Legal Culture, and the Politics of Sectional Crisis.” The $1,000 prize is awarded annually for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era. The article appeared in the June issue. We also interviewed Sarah on Muster.

Gronningsater’s essay offers a new perspective on the famous Lemmon Slave case, in which New York courts freed eight enslaved people brought to New York by Virginia slaveholders while in transit to Texas prior to the Civil War. The article recounts the little known story of African American legal activists, like the abolitionist Louis Napoleon who petitioned a New York court for the writ of habeas corpus that eventually freed the Lemmon slaves. In the words of the prize committee, Gronningsater shows how African American abolitionists like Napoleon “developed tactics to free slaves who were in transit through New York, pressed New York’s leaders to challenge the expansive property rights of southern slave owners, and creatively influenced the national debate about sectionalism. This article, in sum, is a model of legal, political, and social history told with enviable élan.”

Gronningsater is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current book manuscript, The Arc of Abolition: The Children of Gradual Emancipation and the Origins of National Freedom, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. It explores the long, legal transition from slavery to freedom in New York from the first widespread Quaker emancipations in the 1750s to the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments at the close of the Civil War.

The Richards Prize recognizes the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who have been instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: Historical Memory and Gift Shops at Civil War Historic Sites

Exit Through the Gift Shop: Historical Memory and Gift Shops at Civil War Historic Sites

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When I was a graduate student living in Indiana, I made a point of visiting historical sites connected to the Civil War throughout the state. One of my favorites was the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville. Situated in a quiet neighborhood in northwest Indiana, the site preserves and interprets the study where Wallace maintained his personal library. Built between 1895 and 1898, the $30,000 structure was constructed from royalties Wallace earned through his 1880 book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, one of the most popular works of Christian literature since its release and the subject of a famous 1959 film starring Charlton Heston. Visitors to the site learn about Wallace’s life as a Civil War general in the United States Army, his stint as Governor of New Mexico territory, and his talents as a writer.[1]

Two Confederate kepis for sale at the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in 2014. Photo courtesy of the author.

During my most recent visit to the site a few years ago, something struck me while going through the museum gift shop. As I peered through a selection of books and other assorted items, I saw two Civil War kepis with Confederate flag stickers stuck onto the front of the hats. Even stranger, the label on top of the hats described them as “enlisted” hats, and not a single item associated with the United States military—the one Wallace actually fought for—could be found in the gift shop. What were these items doing at the museum of a U.S. General? More specifically, what did mean to see these hats at a museum dedicated to General Wallace, whose efforts at the battle of Monocacy delayed Confederate General Jubal Early’s unsuccessful march to Fort Stevens, a mere five miles from the nation’s capital?[2]

Perhaps these items reinforce Wallace’s desire for sectional reconciliation, a theme he frequently discussed as a popular speaker at Civil War veteran commemorations. Through these speeches he popularized a common belief that battlefields and blue-gray reunions were places for discussing military strategy, not politics. At the dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Battlefield National Military Park in 1895, for example, Wallace complained that “I am truly unable to understand the Northern soldier who would persecute a soldier of the Confederacy. If there is one such in this assemblage, this is the place above all other for introspection . . . Remembrance! Of what? Not the cause, but the heroism it invoked.”[3]

Whatever may have been the motivation for placing Confederate kepis at the museum of a Union General, the sight provoked within me a number of thoughts about the role of gift shops at Civil War historic sites and what they can tell us about the ways people remember the past.

For one, memory scholars have utterly neglected the role of gift shops and commercialized kitsch in shaping memories of the Civil War. Countless books in recent years have studied postwar reminisces from veterans, public iconography, historical marker texts, museum exhibits, ghost tours, and interpretive programs at historic sites, but almost nothing on gift shops.[4] What is particularly curious about this omission lies in the quantity and prevalence of the items sold in these spaces. Gift shop items ranging from teddy bears, postcards, clothing, posters, toy guns, magnets, replicas of historic documents, and books are sold at these places. They often represent the only tangible item countless millions of people take home from their visit to a historic site. As museum professional and exhibit designer Margaret Middleton persuasively argues, the gift shop represents the values of a museum just as much as its exhibits. The leaders of these institutions, however, often separate the two:

The offerings in the exhibits reflect the museum’s values, which educators and exhibit developers take very seriously. However, when it comes to offerings in the gift shop, a lot of museums will defer culpability. Our gift shop is run by an external vender, they shrug. We don’t pick what gets sold or how it’s displayed. Maybe true, but do you really have no say? What about that time you demanded that the cafe (also run by an external vendor) take peanuts off the menu? . . . Our values are only as strong as our demonstrations of those values. The museum’s mission shouldn’t stop at the gift shop door.[5]

These points lead to my second thought: what meanings do these material artifacts evoke within historic site visitors? How do those meanings interact with visitor experiences at other places within the historic site? For example, how might an interpretive program depicting the horrors of war convey a different message from the one conveyed in a gift shop where toy guns are sold? How might a program on the history of American slavery be compromised when there are no books on the topic that are sold in the gift shop? The National Park Service announced shortly after the Charleston AME Massacre in June 2015 that they would be pulling all Confederate flag standalone items from their gift shops, but what were they doing there in the first place? What did it mean to have those items on display while promoting the Civil War Sesquicentennial’s theme of “Civil War to Civil Rights”?[6] For scholars of Civil War memory and memory scholars in general, there is a treasure trove of research material waiting at historic site gift shops throughout the country.

A typical gift shop at a Civil War historic site. Sailor’s Creek Battlefield State Park. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

History teachers and professors can also use gift shops to teach their students about historical memory. The next time your class visits a Civil War historic site, design an activity that includes a tour of the gift shop. Using the above questions or ones of your own creation, have your students consider the messages the gift shop conveys and contemplate how those messages interact with other learning materials at the historic site and in their classroom. Just like the exhibits, artifacts, and marker texts displayed at a historic site, the gift shop can offer a significant learning experience for students in and of itself.

I do not mean to suggest that all Civil War historic sites should sell the same items in their gift shops or that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to the questions I raise. But a critical appraisal of the content in these gift shops by scholars, teachers, and public history professionals is desperately needed. Hopefully this essay can be a starting point for such discussions in the future.

 

[1] The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum’s website is ben-hur.com, highlighting the strong emphasis on Wallace’s literary talents as a central theme of the historic site. To learn more, see “General Lew Wallace Study & Museum,” General Lew Wallace Study & Museum, 2018, accessed February 8, 2018. https://www.ben-hur.com/.

[2] Gail Stephens, Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2010).

[3] Henry V. Boyton, ed., Dedication of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, September 18-20, 1895 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896), 274-279. See also Nick Sacco, “‘This Will Be Our History and Our Glory’: Civil War Memories and the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Indiana.” Paper presented at Indiana Association of Historians Conference, Anderson, Indiana, March 8, 2014, accessed February 17, 2018. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XB4yoBCxyCKxSXeNCtGAQuLxDBV2RfngGLn1nCqSiiY/.

[4] Two studies that very briefly explore Civil War gift shops are Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) and Megan A. Conrad, “From Tragedy to Tourism: The Battle of Gettysburg and Consumerism.” Master’s thesis, Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, 2015, accessed February 16, 2018. https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/downloads/5qf85n935d.

[5] Margaret Middleton, “It’s Time for Sexism to Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Medium, December 4, 2017, accessed February 15, 2018, https://medium.com/@magmidd/its-time-for-sexism-to-exit-through-the-gift-shop-bb5a4b559831.

[6] Doug Stanglin, “National Park Service Pulls Confederate Flag Items from Gift Shops,” USAToday, June 25, 2015, accessed February 16, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/06/25/national-park-service-confederate-flag-sales-items/29264025/.

Nick Sacco

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

New Field Correspondent at Muster

New Field Correspondent at Muster

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The Journal of the Civil War Era editorial staff and board are excited to announce a new field correspondent at Muster–please join us in welcoming Angela Esco Elder to the team! Dr. Elder will be writing dispatches on gender and women’s history topics.

Christopher Hayashida-Knight, our previous correspondent who focused on such issues, has had to leave our team due to other commitments. We wish him well, and please feel free to drop him an email or comment on one of his posts to say thanks.

Dr. Elder is an Assistant Professor of History at Converse College. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a PhD in History, she became the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. Her dissertation, which explored the experience of Confederate widowhood, won the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize and St. George Tucker Society’s Melvin E. Bradford Dissertation Prize in 2017. She is currently revising it for publication.

In addition to book chapters, encyclopedia articles, and book reviews, Dr. Elder has published a co-edited collection, Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln. She has previously written for Muster, authoring a post in December 2016 on how Confederate widows coped during the holiday season. She has also presented her research at numerous conferences, including the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Society of Civil War Historians, and Southern Association for Women Historians. Dr. Elder can be contacted at angela.elder@converse.edu.

Welcome, Angela!

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