Category: Blog

The Many South Carolinas in the Americas

The Many South Carolinas in the Americas

By | | Comments 0 Comment

In recent years, the transnational turn in Civil War scholarship has finally started to include Latin America. While Mexico with the French-Mexican Conservative Alliance has long attracted a significant amount of scholarship, the rest of Latin America has not. Recent works by Evan Rothera and James Sanders offer glimpses into the Latin American connections and possible comparisons. From a transnational perspective, it is refreshing that both deal with the overlooked subject of Reconstruction.[1] At the same time, like with most global, transnational, and comparative works, we must be cautious and avoid making the United States the center around which Latin American changes revolve, or focusing too heavily on those leaders obsessed with the United States in Latin America. In this brief essay, I suggest an expansion of the already existing Euro-Atlantic world literature to include the entire Atlantic.

We should not forget secessionism when exploring comparisons with Latin America. Around the mid-nineteenth century, states were fragile entities and ill-defined. There was much conflict about the political organization of states, their constitutional framework, questions of who belong to the nation, the uncertainty regarding the power balance between states/provinces and central authority, and between executive and legislative branches of government. While in the United States, we are familiar with how these fragilities and questions eventually escalated the relationship between the United States and South Carolina, I want to suggest that South Carolina was not an isolated case in the Americas. By understanding that dissatisfaction and rebellion were common place as states evolved and matured, we gain a better understanding of the challenges state builders in the Americas faced during the nineteenth century. Secessionism in Peru and Argentina reveal how the United States was part of the American state experiment and not separate from it.

Peru and specifically the southern province of Arequipa illustrate the contested process of state and nation building during the nineteenth century with Arequipa proudly holding on to its separate identity. Created initially by the region’s indigenous people, the Spanish conquerors eventually took over the town of Arequipa. During the wars of independence, the province and city of Arequipa remained largely uninvolved and Spanish occupied until Peruvian independence in 1824. Ironically, it was Arequipa that became the rebellious province during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Historian Thomas Love observed that “Arequipeños’ [have an] inflated, exceptionalist sense of themselves.”[2]Something we could easily say about South Carolinians, Alabamians, or Texans in the antebellum United States.

While the social differences—slavery—between Arequipa and South Carolina are significant, there was much that united the two provinces. Like white South Carolinians, Arequipeños had a reputation of being quarrelsome. Arequipa was at the forefront of the political upheavals that plagued Peru during the 1850s and 1860s. When Domingo Elías challenged the national government of José Rufino Echenique, it was the rebellion in Arequipa province that turned the tide against Echenique. Elías had taken issue with Echenique’s financial policies. He viewed  the payment of War of Independence damages and debts as a form of government corruption. Offering even more possibilities for comparative analysis, Arequipa suffered its own internal civil war during the Liberal Revolution of 1854 with factions loyal to Castilla fighting Echenique’s troops.[3] However, loyalties to one leader or the other could be brief as Arequipeños looked after their interests first.

Final Attack on Arequipa on March 7, 1858. Sala Castilla, Museo Nacional de Historia, Lima.

As the victorious Ramón Castilla settled into the Peruvian presidency, his local opponent Manuel Ignacio de Vivanco return from exile in Chile in 1856. Popularly supported by the population in Arequipa, Vivanco pushed the province into open rebellion against Castilla. Arequipeños’ anger centered on Castilla seemingly having forgotten his heritage now that he was in power and working on the centralization of Peru with the political, economic, and national elite in Lima. After nine months of siege operations, Castilla’s men attacked the capital of Arequipa and emerged victorious. Vivanco again departed into exile, but locals remained loyal to him.[4] Local identities mattered especially when provincial interests clashed with centralization attempts. These events parallel similar struggles in the United States during the 1850s.

Arequipa remained a problem for Peru. In 1865, the province once more rebelled over the peace agreement with Spain following the two years of hostilities between Spain and Peru/Chile. Ironically, Vivanco, Arequipa’s favorite, helped to craft the peace treaty. The rebellion forced the Peruvian government into renegotiations. Two years later, in 1867, the province was once more in rebellion over reforms to bring secularization to Peru.[5] As Peru struggled with questions of centralization, political reform, and defining the national identity of the country, Arequipa resisted changes by violent means, a common occurrence in Latin America and similar to what South Carolinians had done between 1830 and 1870.

In contrast to Peru, Argentina faced a significantly different situation, but one akin to the United States from Independence to the Civil War. Both countries suffered from the ill-defined relationship between states/provinces and the central authorities. For decades after its independence, the country suffered from military conflict as the provinces of Buenos Aires resisted any integration efforts into the Argentinian Confederation. The conflict between Federales (federalists) and Unitarios (centralists) did not end with the new Constitution of 1853 which formally created the Argentinian Confederation.[6]

Just like the U.S. Constitution, after which the Argentinian one was modeled, the new Confederation faced immediate problems and secession. Buenos Aires refused to accept the new constitution and an almost decade long conflict followed. While South Carolina seceded because of the issue of slavery, Buenos Aires’s secession centered on the new constitution’s free trade and free navigation clauses that would have dramatically impacted the commercial elites of Buenos Aires. New Argentinian Confederation President Justo José de Urquiza established his government in Paraná and worked to integrate Buenos Aires. Lacking the financial prosperity of Buenos Aires, the Confederation struggled during its ten-year existence. Conflict between the Confederation and Buenos Aires was continuous but there were also frequent revolutions in the various provinces of the Confederation adding to political instability.[7]

The assassination of the San Juan caudillo (military strong man) Nazario Benavídez in 1859, instigated by Buenos Aires, caused civil war. The Confederation Congress asked Urquiza to return and bring stability. In the meantime, Buenos Aires’ military leader Bartolomé Mitre went on his own campaign and after two years of fighting the two met in battle at Pavón, on September 17, 1861. The victory opened the door for Buenos Aires to dominate the new centralizing republic of Argentina as the Confederation government collapsed—here the rebellious and separatist provinces had won.[8]

Guardia Nacional de Buenos Aires leaving the city for the Battle of Pavón by León Pallière published in Crónica Argentina.

These two brief sketches hardly do justice to the complicated environments faced in both countries. However, Arequipa and Buenos Aires were not isolated. Cauca, Panama, Cartagena, Northern Mexico, and many other provinces in the Americas rebelled in similar fashion as states across the continent experiment with new constitutions and national identities. Where South Carolinians rebelled against what they viewed as an intrusive imperial power ruled by a sectional president, people in provinces across the Americas could relate to these fears. While we could quarrel if the American Civil War was truly a civil war, some of these conflicts in the America, such as the one between Buenos Aires and Argentina were civil wars with the winning side taking over the government of the state. At the same time, conflict over centralization, political power, and national identity were common and there are many fruitful comparisons to explore that promise to illustrate that South Carolina’s or even the U.S. South’s experience in general were not unique occurrences in the Americas during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

[1] Evan C. Rothera, Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States Mexico and Argentina, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022); James E. Sanders, “Hemispheric Reconstructions: Post-Emancipation Social Movements and Capitalist Reaction in Colombia and the United States,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 22 (2023), 41–62.

[2] Thomas F. Love, The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 2-3.

[3] Thomas F. Love, The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 92-93.

[4] Thomas F. Love, The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 93-94.

[5] Thomas F. Love, The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 94-95.

[6] Evan C. Rothera, Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States Mexico and Argentina, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022), 7.

[7] Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 214-249

[8] Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 214-249

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.

Interview with Bryan LaPointe

Interview with Bryan LaPointe

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Today we share an interview with Bryan LaPointe, the 2021 winner the 2021 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. His article appearedin the March 2023 JCWE, titled “A Right to Speak: Formerly Enslaved People and the Political Antislavery Movement in Antebellum America.” LaPointe is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University. His research connects runaway enslaved people’s activism and the growth an antislavery politics. He reframes antebellum political history around the experiences and political sensibilities of the enslaved Americans.

What interested you in the topic?

I’ve always been generally interested in the intersection of slavery and nineteenth century American politics. The recent upsurge in studies on abolitionism and antislavery politics in particular has also deeply shaped my understanding of that relationship. Early on in graduate school, I kept coming across passing references to various runaway and formerly enslaved people campaigning for antislavery political parties. Intrigued, I decided to dig deeper to see what these figures were doing and saying as they engaged with political abolitionism. I found that numerous former and fugitive slaves were using their past experiences of slavery to highlight the importance of antislavery politics. More than that, their political activism, I argue in both this article and my larger dissertation project, proved central in growing the antislavery political movement and even in redefining politics itself during the antebellum period.

I appreciate how you discuss both formerly enslaved men and women escapees and their influence in the growth of antislavery politics. As you conducted your research, was there an interesting source, person, and/or development that shaped your conclusions?

One of the most important runaway enslaved political figures was Henry Bibb, who campaigned heavily across the northern states for the Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the 1840s. He figures prominently in the article because of the powerful ways he connected his enslavement, and that of the millions of other American enslaved people, to the need for a political movement to combat slavery. During my research, I came across a small collection of Seymour Treadwell letters at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. He was one of the white antislavery political activists with whom Bibb often lectured in the mid-1840s. While none of the letters are by Bibb himself, they reveal his intricate scheduling details and the importance white activists placed on Bibb’s political role. He as a fugitive slave was one of the Liberty Party’s “great magnets,” one letter indicated. This source and Bibb’s ardent political activism showed how significant and almost indispensable runaway enslaved people were to the antislavery political cause.

What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain for either their own teaching or future research?

We know a great deal about how formerly and runaway enslaved people served as significant figures in abolitionism generally, because of their ability to testify personally to slavery’s violence. But those who became involved in formal antislavery politics did that and more. They shared their personal stories of slavery’s horrors to underscore the political nature of enslavement, connecting their experiences to northern politics in order to sway white Northerners to vote and support antislavery political coalitions. They made their personal struggles, and those of other enslaved people, potent political rallying cries to bring an intimate and visceral understanding of slavery to antislavery politics. I hope readers come away with an appreciation for how some former and runaway slaves were central political activists. We cannot fully understand the rise of antislavery politics, and thus the transformations of northern politics and the coming of the Civil War, without accounting for formerly enslaved people’s political activism.

After this interesting article, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project?

I’m currently finalizing my dissertation, after which I’ll begin the process of turning it into a book manuscript. But my tentative second project involves the political and social histories of runaway enslaved people from the United States who settled in British Canada during the nineteenth century. Many fugitive and formerly enslaved African Americans found refuge in Ontario in this period (including Henry Bibb), especially after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. They built activist communities in Windsor, Buxton, Chatham, and St. Catherines, all while contributing to the international fight against slavery and its influence. Building on previous work by scholars like Robin Winks and Afua Cooper, this project will explore the activist individuals and families of those smaller communities, and how their political impact influenced the larger hemispheric struggle for abolition and equality.

Thank for these responses! We can’t wait to read more of your scholarship!

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Interview with Elizabeth Varon

Interview with Elizabeth Varon

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Today we share an interview with Elizabeth Varon, who published an article in the March 2023 JCWE, titled “The “Bull-Dog” in Istanbul: James Longstreet’s Revealing Tour as US Minister to Turkey, 1880–81.” Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. As a historian of the Civil War era, she is finalizing a critical biography of James Longstreet.

********

I appreciate how you examine how you explore James Longstreet’s post-Civil War career and his role as a U.S. Minister to Turkey.  What interested you in the topic? 

This is the question I am most excited about answering, as it allows me to share something most of the readers of my work don’t know about me.  My father Bension Varon, who passed away a few years ago, was Turkish, a Sephardic Jew from Istanbul (whose family fled Spain in the 15th century and settled in the Ottoman empire; Varon is a Spanish name). He was an avid amateur historian who, after concluding his career as an economist at the World Bank, published extensively on his own heritage and on Ottoman history.  The fact that Longstreet’s already unlikely postwar career had an Ottoman chapter is part of what attracted me to his story, as it allowed me to delve a little into Turkish history, to get a new perspective on places in that country that I had visited many times, and to connect my academic pursuits to my father’s.

I was also drawn to this story by an interest in the global turn in Civil War studies, and a desire to get up-to-speed on that literature, and by curiosity about diplomatic history.  My husband and UVA colleague Will Hitchcock is a historian of foreign relations and I’ve heard a lot over the years about how fascinating diplomatic dispatches and the like are, so it was exciting to use some of those sources myself.

As you conducted your research, readers will appreciate how you deepen our understanding of Longstreet’s enduring efforts to sustain Republicanism during Reconstruction. Was there an interesting source and/or development that shaped your conclusions?

My forthcoming book argues that Longstreet’s extensive postwar oeuvre—his memoir, articles, speeches, dispatches, congressional testimony, militia reports, published letters, and many, many extensive interviews with the press–constitute a sustained intervention in American public life.  In these and other sources, Longstreet ruminated at length on the issues of loyalty and treason, victory and defeat, progress, and reaction—and his distinct voice can help us understand both the transformative changes and the entrenched inequities of the postwar period.

So it was less a particular document or moment that shaped my conclusions than a desire to analyze the full spectrum of his public commentary and trace the shifts therein.

What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain for either their own teaching or future research? 

First of all, that it can be productive to take a new look, using new analytical and technological tools (like digital databases), at a familiar figure or topic.  Longstreet has been studied extensively but there are essential parts of his story that have not been told.  His tour as minister to Turkey is one, but the major focus and contribution of my book will be to use his life as a window in race relations, and to explore the broad range of his interactions with African Americans.

A second takeaway is that biography as a genre is an effective way to reach a broad readership, and that biographies can make arguments and intervene in debates.  My Longstreet book will make a series of arguments, about the achievements of but also the fault lines within the Republican coalition in the South during Reconstruction, and about the extent and limits of reconciliation not only between the North and South, but also among Southerners.

After this interesting article, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project? 

My Longstreet biography will be published by Simon & Schuster this coming November. I find that it is salutary to start tinkering with a new project as one is wrapping up the current one—it helps you let go and move on!  So I am starting to tinker with the idea of writing a biography of the amazing Clara Barton.  Her life, and the records she left behind, are monumental—frankly, I am a little intimidated by the prospect of taking this on.  But a Barton biography would allow me to return to women’s and gender history as research focus, and to delve more deeply into the topic of Civil War medicine.

I am also interested in returning to the subject of the secession crisis and am contemplating writing an article that historicizes the “slavery vs. states’ rights” framing of the debate over Civil War causality; that very dichotomous framing, I think, has not only distorted our view of the past but also had political purposes and consequences.

Thank for these responses! We are eagerly awaiting your forthcoming biography on Longstreet!

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Author Interview: Camille Suárez

Author Interview: Camille Suárez

By | | Comments 2 comments

Today we share an interview with Camille Suárez, who published an article in the March 2023 JCWE, titled “A Legal Confiscation: The 1851 Land Act and the Transformation of Californios into Colonized Colonizers.” Camille Suárez is an assistant professor of history at CalState LA. As a historian of the US West, she focuses on the history of California, the Mexican American experience, and the environment. At present, she is finalizing her first book manuscript.

Thanks for participating in this interview, Camille. What interested you in the topic? 

When I began working on nineteenth century California, I was struck by the absence of Californios from the narrative and the lack of scholarship that explored their complex role and motivations in California politics. I wanted to understand the political motivations behind Californios’ political decisions. For example, what can we learn when we investigate Andrés Pico’s support of state division in 1859 independent from pro-slavery Southern supporters’ motives? With Mexican land grants, in particular, I wanted to understand how Californios attempted to negotiate an extralegal land seizure that violated their treaty rights. As I looked at Californio sources, it became clear to me that there was a larger story to write about state making and the encounter between two cultures that, I would argue, shapes present-day racial logics in California and the United States.

I appreciate how you examine Anglo-American and Californio settlers’ efforts to establish legitimate landholding practices according to their culturally specific racial logic.  As you conducted your research, was there an interesting source, person, and/or development that shaped your conclusions? 

A portrait of elite Californios Pablo de la Guerra, Salvador Vallejo, and Andres Pico taken in 1865. Courtesy of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library.

The life and archival record left by Pablo de la Guerra has been integral to my conclusions, that is why he is a central actor of the article! De la Guerra’s remarks at the 1849 California Constitutional Convention helped me understand why Californios would ally with Anglo-American settlers immediately after a war conquest. When the delegates discussed citizenship rights, Anglo-American delegates attempted to exclude Californios on the basis of whiteness; and as a delegate, de la Guerra questioned the American definition of whiteness because he saw Californios as included in the category, even if Anglo-Americans didn’t. Rather that push back against this definition of whiteness, de le Guerra attempted to perform his whiteness or superiority by making clear that he also believed that people of African descent ought not to be considered full citizens. As a settler class, Californios attempted to perform their superiority by upholding settler and racial regimes. I think understanding this strategy has allowed me to uncover de la Guerra’s and other Californios’ rationale and goals in their dealings with Anglo-American settlers and other racialized groups.

 

What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain for either their own teaching or future research? 

When teaching the late-nineteenth century, I hope after reading the article one feels ready to highlight the role Californios performed in California becoming a US state. I also hope other scholars pursue work that recovers the Mexican national and Indigenous voices that shaped the politics and social worlds of the region after the US-Mexico War, and well into the Reconstruction Era. With my research, I hope to highlight the political power that a variety of people wielded to abet or challenge the settler state.

After this interesting article, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project? 

At the moment, I am finishing up my book manuscript, tentatively titled Colonial State Making: The Conflict Over Race, Land, and Citizenship in California, 1846 – 1879. Colonial State Making is a history of multiracial state-making in California that considers state makers beyond white settlers. In the manuscript, I center Californios, as an elite settler class, and demonstrate their central role in cementing US authority in the region and the making of a racial hierarchy that privileged whiteness. In addition to centering Californios, I make efforts to highlight the varied efforts, such as that of Black American communities, to reject the imposition of a racial hierarchy in a free state.

I am also working on an article about Reconstruction Era California, that I think would be of great interest to JCWE readers. In this article, I parse through Californio actions, mostly that of Los Angeles-based Californio, Antonio Coronel, to aid the state Democrat Party during Reconstruction. I wanted to better understand why the California State Legislature refused to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the roots of the state’s anti-immigrant policies. In Los Angeles and Santa Barbara County, the Californio electorate played a crucial role in Democrat electoral victories. Elite Californios, like Coronel, made speeches on behalf of the Democrat Party and explicitly rejected the multiracial project of Reconstruction. By looking at Spanish-language sources, I think we get a better sense of how and why California rejected Reconstruction and embraced white supremacist polices in the late nineteenth century.

Thank for these responses!

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Researching Northern Black Families’s Civil War: An Interview With Michelle Marsden

Researching Northern Black Families’s Civil War: An Interview With Michelle Marsden

By | | Comments 6 comments

When I began examining the lived experiences of northern United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiers, I thought it was critical to emphasize their lives and familial dynamics beyond their time in the U.S. Army.  My book-The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and The Fight for Racial Justice-details northern freeborn families battling for racial and gender equality before and after the existence of the USCT regiments.[1] Taking this long chronological approach provides an essential historical intervention to both public and academic discourse by illuminating the lives of people that are usually portrayed as the audience member hearing Frederick Douglass’ speech of the “Eagle on the Button” as essential to providing African American manhood and citizenship claims while seeking to destroy slavery simultaneously.[2] It is long overdue to center on those African Americans to acknowledge how they were significant agents of social change. More specifically, these working-class freeborn northern African Americans were responsible for saving the U.S., defeating the Confederacy, ending slavery, and seeking a more equitable society.

After a presentation at a Philadelphian-based institution, these points became more critical when I received an email from an individual researching their family. The email writer was Michelle Marsden (who has studied her family’s history for thirty-years)[3] She is also a descendant of the Rothwell family (including Elizabeth and Alfred) that my monograph examines. Through that and numerous other conversations, I have a deeper appreciation of how studying history can empower African American families to know that their families were important historical figures. To that end, I have the privilege of interviewing Michelle on why it is vital to center on African American families, like the Rothwells, to fully understand the complexity of U.S. and Civil War Era history.

 

********

HP: Scholars have often relied on well-documented and famous Black people, like Frederick Douglass, to understand the Civil War era. But why do you think examining people, like your kin, would add even more depth and complexity to understanding Black people throughout the Civil War era?

MM: Leaders in the community of free people of color are essential to our understanding of the Civil War era. While we know that Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth stood at the forefront of the abolitionist movement and worked tirelessly to eradicate slavery, there is also a need to explore the experiences of other northern free people of color. Records indicate that my family, the Rothwells, moved from Delaware to Pennsylvania in 1851 as my fourth great-grandfather, Isaac Rothwell, Sr., worked as a free man of color in the fishing industry. Even though he was already a free person of color, Delaware was still a state that endorsed slavery. His move slightly northward from New Castle, Delaware to Chester, Pennsylvania a year after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, tells a story that deserves scholarly attention.

By researching and sharing histories like his, we gain a more nuanced view of the Black family’s experience. There is a good chance that location and proximity to slavery affected their decision-making. Many northern free Blacks, like my family, had to create a delicate balance between employment, and resistance to a system that could have risked their family’s safety. As boatwrights, our family worked on ships that sailed between slave states and northern free states. There is an oral history of the Rothwells using their knowledge of the ships that they worked on to help hide Black people seeking freedom. Research on Harriet Tubman and how she used Black sailors for this very purpose has been documented. By examining the life of average citizens like Isaac Rothwell, Sr., who may have assisted the abolitionist movement in personal ways, we learn much more about the experiences of Black America and the African American family.

HP: In your opinion, what is the potential harm of primarily focusing on the experiences of freedpeople while simultaneously minimizing the historical significance of working-class freeborn northern African Americans?

MM: If one is to study the self-liberated and freeborn Black community in the North but only focus on the journey of those that were fortunate enough to become prosperous with a public voice and platform, then the disadvantage is that we see the African American experience from a very myopic point of view. Clearly, everyone’s journey northward or generational history in the North would have been different. By expanding into the lives of those from various socio-economic backgrounds, we gain the ability to learn about the myriad of hardships they endured and the successes they accomplished in spite of the racial and gender discrimination prevalent in the Civil War era.

A scholarly investigation such as this would also work to eliminate stereotypes and expand the perception of northern free people of color. Prior to doing my genealogical research, for example, I assumed that freedom itself issued African American access to a public school education. I naively thought that simply living in the North meant schools were prevalent and readily available to all northern Black communities. What I have found is that this was not necessarily the case. Some of my Rothwell ancestors were sent to the Soldier’s Orphan School at Bridgewater, located in Bucks County, PA. While it was publically self-proclaimed as a safe haven for those that became fatherless as a result of the Civil War, this particular school for Black children was documented as one that existed under dilapidated conditions. The Black children suffered from the lack of maintenance to the physical building as well as the lack of consistent, adequate staffing. This is just one example of how an in-depth study of northern Black communities would give us detailed information about the lives of those that lived in this era. We could benefit from learning how they used grit, culture, tradition, family, and faith to survive.

HP: How do you, on a personal level, process seeing important aspects of American history (such as Black military service) knowing that your relatives’ firsthand experience?

MM: Conducting genealogical research for the past thirty years has allowed me to see my family’s journey within the complexities of the larger story of America. I see them as part of the evolution of this country. Their fortitude and willingness to fight to end the institution of slavery inspires me. Two of my great-great-great-grandfathers, Isaac D. Rothwell and Geroge Potts, in addition to two of my great-uncles, Alfred and Samuel Rothwell were all free men of color. Each one enlisted in the U.S. Army for the Civil War between July 4 and July 20, 1863.  The Bureau of Colored Troops was formed at the end of May and only started their Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, recruitment in June. If the oral history is true about my fourth great grandfather Isaac Rothwell Sr using his sailing expertise to help hide Blacks seeking freedom, then this means that he was part of the underground railroad. Having that value system and perhaps sharing it with his family, would help to explain why his sons Isaac D. Rothwell, Alfred Rothwell, Samuel Rothwell, and their neighbor George Potts enlisted into the U.S.C.T. so quickly. All of the men became members of the 3rd United States Colored Troops and served in various companies.  According to the enlistment papers, Isaac D. joined Company G at age 19, Samuel, whose name was misspelled as Rothville, Ruthville, and Rathwill in his military files, joined company H at age 19, and George Potts joined Company G at age 16.

Uncle Alfred, who served in Company D, enlisted at age 26 and was the oldest of the four men.  He was the first one to volunteer even though he knew he would be leaving behind a wife, and three children. Unfortunately, he also has the misfortune of being the only one of my ancestors to die in the Civil War. As the regiment served at Fort Wagner in South Carolina, Alfred Rothwell was shot during his garrison duty. In his pension file, there is a copy of the letter that was to be delivered to his wife in the event of his passing. Other records in his pension file show how his widow Elizabeth and children James, Isaac, and Hannah suffered greatly after his death. The men in the 3rd USCT saw action at Fort Gregg on Morris Island, South Carolina, Marion County, Florida, and mustered out in Jacksonville, Florida. I am grateful for all of their sacrifices and look for ways to honor their legacies.

When I look at American history I also feel a personal connection to this era because I have also studied how these four men helped to free those that were enslaved on the other side of my family tree. Without knowing each other, my great-grandfather Peter Vaughters was a direct beneficiary of the acts of the USCT regiments and the end of the Civil War.  He was unfortunately born into the institution of slavery in Carnesville, Franklin County, Georgia in 1852. By the time the war ended, he was a thirteen-year-old young man working on the Vaughters plantation with two other young, forced laborers. His mother, Clary, was sold away from him when he was three. Hiram Vaughters died intestate and the family sold Clary to balance the debts that they owed. Fortunately my great grandfather Peter and my 2nd great grandmother Clary were given the chance to reunite and share the same home as mother and son at least once again before her passing. According to the 1880 Franklin County census of that year, Peter brought his mother to live with him, his wife and three sons. Over the years they continued to live near the old plantation in Franklin County, Georgia. When I encounter American history in an academic, or even in a public cinematic platform, these are the people and moments that I think about. I place the stories of my ancestors’ lives into the narrative of what I learn about America.

HP: Why should a Community Care perspective be something that scholars need to consider when conducting their research?

MM: Looking at the community is essential to form any depth of understanding of a historical era. Genealogists often look at the neighbors, places of worship, local events, and  possible support systems that an ancestor would have had in order to gain a broader view of their life. Knowing the time period, and the location of the family on a farm, or in a city or town can help reveal their story. How close or far away they lived to historical happenings can speak to the stress, anxiety, or tensions of a community. In order to move beyond the single narrative, everything matters when we look back in time.

HP: What advice would you give to others who might be interested in researching their own family history? 

MM: My advice for anyone who wants to learn about their past is to start with your oldest living relative and ask questions. Listen and document everything they have to say. If possible, use today’s technology to help you record their life story. In addition to the elders, I would talk to aunts, uncles, parents, and cousins. Anyone who is willing to share should have their history documented.

Then, I would build a family tree. This can be on paper or on a digital platform. As you add names and dates, try to find the relatives in public archives. This can range from U.S. or state census records to tax digests and old newspapers, town histories and records for local places of worship. Next, I would tell them to learn about the historical significance of the various time periods. Re-examine American history, but specifically from the lens of their ancestors. Learning local, and national context adds to our ability to build empathy, and appreciation of the past.

Finally, I would tell them to share what they’ve learned with their family members. Use family reunions, newsletters, or even online platforms to help all of the descendants understand how the path of their ancestors led them to who they are today.

********

As this interview has shown, studying history is ever-changing and can also be very personal to the descendants of the people we learn and discuss. USCT regiments must remain critical historical figures that fundamentally reshaped U.S. history in numerous ways. As historians (including Kelly D. Mezurek and William Seraile) demonstrate, northern free African Americans lived complex lives that need to be the center of scholarly analyses.[4] Moreover, it is time to stop over-emphasizing enlistment rhetoric to understand USCT soldiering and instead focus on enlisted men and their kin (in and outside their military service). Doing so will (hopefully) illustrate to USCT descendants, like Michelle Marsden, that we remain grateful for their families’ sacrifices and profound impact on our society.

[1] Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr., The Families Civil War: Black Soldiers and The Fight for Racial Justice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022), 1-12. For more insight on northern USCT familial studies see: James G. Mendez, A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); Douglas R. Egerton, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

[2] Frederick Douglass, “Another Word to Black Men,” Weekly Anglo-African, March 17, 1863.

[3] Michelle Marsden, “My Trip to Uncover a Family Mystery from 1852,” Ancestry.com, February 14, 2020, https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/my-trip-to-uncover-a-family-mystery-from-1852/, Accessed on 3/1/2023; Michelle Marsden, “Discovering African American Heroes in My Family Tree,” Ancestry.com, February 23, 2023, https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/my-family-history-journey-discovering-the-african-american-heroes-in-my-family-tree/, Accessed on 3/1/2023.

[4] Kelly D. Mezurek, For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016); William Seraile, New York’s Black Regiments During the Civil War (New York: Routledge, 2001).

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. He received his bachelor’s degree (2008) from the University of Central Florida. Later, he earned his master’s degree (2010) and doctoral degree (2017) from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. His monograph, The Families’ Civil War, is forthcoming June 2022 with the University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series.  You can find him on Twitter at @PHUsct.

Editors’ Note for March 2023 JCWE

Editors’ Note for March 2023 JCWE

By | | Comments 1 comment

Welcome to the first issue of the 2023 volume of the Journal of the Civil War Era. The issue features three research essays and a review essay that highlight the journal’s broad geographical, chronological, and topical coverage. We present articles that take us from the antebellum North to California to Indian Country and to the Ottoman Empire, and that tackle antislavery politics, dynamics of race and status in overlapping empires, and patronage politics and international diplomacy.

Bryan LaPointe’s article, “A Right to Speak: Formerly Enslaved People and the Political Antislavery Movement in Antebellum America,” is the winner of the 2021 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. LaPointe demonstrates that on the lecture stump, formerly enslaved men often drew on their own experiences to incite moral outrage among Northern largely white audiences. While freed women were rarely political speakers, they shaped politics through their interactions with white male politicians, who often spoke of their plight to elicit audiences’ sympathies. LaPointe’s piece contributes to our growing understanding of how, through channels other than voting, Black Americans influenced politics in the antebellum north.

Antebellum California is the subject of Camille Suárez’s essay, “A Legal Confiscation: The 1851 Land Act and the Transformation of Californios into Colonized Colonizers.” Suárez examines the way elite Californios—who were of Spanish and sometimes Native origin and owned land in California before the US-Mexico War—tried to forge alliances with Anglo-Americans in the early days of statehood. Portraying themselves as gente de razón who were entitled to land and political rights based on their Christianity and “civilized” modes of behavior, elite Californios were disappointed to discover how many Anglos saw them as their inferiors. Adopting an innovative turn of phrase, Suárez argues that the Californios thus became “colonized colonizers,” in an article that examines struggles over land claims in the state courts.

In “The ‘Bull-Dog’ in Istanbul: James Longstreet’s Revealing Tour as US Minister to Turkey, 1880–81,” Elizabeth R. Varon takes us to the post–Civil War period, when former Confederate general James Longstreet served as US minister to the Ottoman Empire. Joining other recent investigations into American foreign policy during Reconstruction, Varon uses Longstreet’s tour as minister to shed light on the complicated career of this unusual Confederate-turned-Republican. As minister, Longstreet engaged with complex questions of US-Ottoman diplomacy, including US efforts  to protect missionaries. Longstreet’s tenure in Istanbul and his return to Georgia to become a US marshal suggest both the power of his commitment to postwar Republicanism and the relative powerlessness of the Republican Party to project its force onto the South or the world.

In a review essay, “Black Slaves and Indian Owners: The Continuous Rediscovery of Indian Territory,” Alaina E. Roberts charts historians’ approaches to the history of Native peoples of the US South over the last century. Scholars have become increasingly interested in Native people’s ownership of slaves and in the perspectives of the people of African descent who were enslaved by Native groups and later became free in Indian Territory. Providing a helpful resource for readers looking to deepen their understanding of the field, Roberts also links the past with the present by reminding readers of continuing conflicts about the tribal membership of descendants of freedpeople in Indian country.

We are pleased to publish the usual complement of book reviews that range across many areas embraced in the Civil War Era. We are, as always, grateful to the associate editors and to the article authors, book reviewers, and peer reviewers who keep the journal in working order. We also thank Penn State PhD candidate Ed Green, who in the summer of 2022 completed his term as graduate assistant to the journal, and we wish him well with his dissertation. We’re delighted to welcome Heather Walser as the new graduate assistant, and we congratulate managing editor Matt Isham on the new addition to his family. 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Civil War Historians and Terminology: Diplomatic History

Civil War Historians and Terminology: Diplomatic History

By | | Comments 4 comments

As historians of the Civil War era, we are all extremely familiar with the growing desire of using appropriate terminology in our scholarship and the pushback that such terminological changes have brought. We saw this when the Army University Press abandoned the term “Union” in its publications.[1] Slavery scholars had similar conversations regarding the use of enslaved versus slave, and other words surrounding the institution of slavery.[2] Or even more profoundly, there has been a growing conversation of what to call this conflict. We continue to use the term American Civil War, but as Steve Hahn and others have suggested contemporaries favored the more accurate description War of the Rebellion since the rebels had no intention of taking over the entire country but wanted to establish their own nation-state.[3] These debates are about using the most proper, accurate, and appropriate terms that communicate a more precise sense of past events and people. A debate worthwhile having.

However, one topic has not seen similar discussions but all too often creeps into the scholarly, even specialist literature, of the international relations of the Civil War era. Historians frequently use the modern terminology of ambassador when talking about foreign representatives in Washington, D.C. during the 1860s. While we certainly want to be cautious about using the terminology of the period when it comes to African American or Native American representatives, we need to acknowledge that the modern term ambassador is incorrect for mid-nineteenth century Atlantic relations. The modern usage of ambassador that people are familiar with dates to a 1957 conference streamlining international relations. We should strive to use the best, most accurate, and proper language in all areas of Civil War era scholarship.

Over the past ten years, I have heard conference presentations and commented on manuscripts that have used the term ambassador to talk about the foreign representative in the United States or from the United States during the 1860s. Joseph Fry, for example, identifies the British and French representatives in Washington, Lord Lyons and Henri Mercier respectively, as ambassadors.[4] Similarly, Don Doyle in his acclaimed The Cause of All Nations incorrectly upgrades the British, French, Spanish, and even Mexican representatives in Washington to full ambassadorial statues.[5] Maybe both scholars were thinking about a future Lord Lyons as he would be the ambassador of Great Britain to France for twenty years from 1867 to 1887. However, nobody in Washington held the title ambassador. While it may help modern, popular audiences, the terminology is incorrect and presents a false level of relationship.

When we talk about nineteenth century diplomatic relations and terminology there is actually a well-developed and treaty-enshrined system and language. These terms are not imaginary creations or were used interchangeably, these were actual titles and representatives were insistent on them. The Treaty of Vienna of 1815, which ended the European wars and territorial changes that had started with the French Revolution and escalated during the reign of Napoleon I, had established a four-tier hierarchy among diplomatic representative.[6]

At the very top sat the ambassador, who was classified as the personal representatives of their respective sovereign. The physical space that housed an ambassador was an embassy. These appointments were reserved for the European monarchies amongst each other. For example, France had an ambassador in London, Berlin, and Vienna. However, some of the smaller European monarchies, such as the German states, did not accredit full ambassadors.

The second tier occupied the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary (often simply minister or occasionally envoy for short). These representatives physically occupied a legation, not an embassy, as their home and place of business interaction. These officials were government representative and often had special negotiating powers to make bilateral agreements. Less common was the ministers resident. Smaller states usually used this title for their diplomatic representatives. The implication is that the government sent a minister, sometimes with a special mission, and he took up residence in that town or state. And finally, there was the Chargés d’affaires, or Chargé for short, who served as aid to ambassadors and ministers with the same powers those two ranks include. Chargé are usually left in charge when their direct superior leaves for short or extended periods of time. All these four titles were enshrined and formally employed signaling the relationship statues between two countries.

Group of men dressed in suits and hats in front of a waterfall.
W. J. Baker, Secretary of State William Seward and a delegation of diplomats at Trenton Falls, New York, 1863. [Utica, New York: W. J. Baker] Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009633603/.

When the Lincoln Administration took office in March 1861, the vast majority of foreign representatives in Washington were ministers, second tier representatives. There were of course Lord Lyons from Great Britain, Henri Mercier from France, Eduard Andreevich Stoeckl from Russia, Friedrich Freiherr von Gerolt from Prussia, and Georg Ritter von Hülsemann from Austria. Other European powers too had ministers: Roest van Limburg from the Netherlands, Don Gabriel Garcia y Tassara from Spain, Joaquim C. de Figaniere è Morào from Portugal, Giuseppe Bertinatti from Italy, and Edouard Blondeel von Cuelebrouk from Belgium. From South America, there were A. J. de Yrisarri from Guatemala and San Salvador, Luis Molina from Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and Miguel Maria Lisboa from Brazil. The only Ministers Resident was Rudolph Schleiden representing the Hanseatic City of Bremen. In addition, there were four Chargé W. de Rasloff from Denmark, Matías Romero from Mexico, Rafael Pembo from New Granada, and F. S. Asta from Chile. During the war, Lyons, Gerolt, Schleiden, and others took brief vacations at home, their respective Chargé took care of business during the minister’s absence.[7]

The United States was not considered a first-tier state during the mid-nineteenth century. Foreign relations were not on the ambassadorial level until the country grew and considered imperial projects. Before 1893, all foreign officials of the United States were ministers. In 1893, the newly inaugurated Grover Cleveland administration decided to upgrade the relationships with Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy to the ambassadorial level. It is also worth noting that the U.S. relationship with, for example, the Netherlands remained on the envoy level until 1942.[8] After the Second World War, all foreign relations were uniformly ranked on the ambassadorial level to avoid this tiered power relations, at least in theory.

Therefore, as we work on a better terminology for the Civil War era, we should also remember that some terms have very specific meaning. While a modern reader of a popular history book may struggle with the concept of a minister, it is the correct term, and we need to use it. To call Charles Francis Adams, Sr. an Ambassador of the United States gives modern audience a sense of his role; but it also presents an incorrect level of relationship between the United States and Great Britain. It would have created a major consternation in the relationship between the two countries. We need to talk about terminology and search for the most accurate words in our writing. There are some instances where bending to modern demands distorts, however. Let’s avoid the word ambassador in our Civil War era writing.

[1] “Publisher’s Note on the use of Civil War Terms,” Army University Press, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/publishers-note-on-use-of-civil-war-terms.pdf

[2] Graeme Wood, “Just Say ‘Slavery’: Involuntary relocation and enslaved person are misguided euphemisms,” The Atlantic (July 11, 2022), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/slavery-involuntary-relocation-texas-schools/670470/; P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al., “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help,” crowdsourced document,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic.

[3] Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (New York: Viking, 2016), 4-6; Gaines M. Foster, “What the Name ‘Civil War’ tells us,” Journal of the Civil War Era Muster Blog, September 11, 2018, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/09/what-the-name-civil-war-tells-us-and-why-it-matters/

[4] Joseph A. Fry, Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019).

[5] Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

[6] Report of the International Law Commission covering the work of its ninth session, 23 April—28 June 1957, https://legal.un.org/ilc/documentation/english/reports/a_cn4_110.pdf

[7] “The United States Government,” The American Register and International Journal 1 (July 1861), 45.

[8] “Ambassadors vs. Ministers,” https://historyatstate.tumblr.com/post/88960580988/ambassadors-vs-ministers

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.

2023 Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award: Call for Submissions

2023 Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award: Call for Submissions

By | | Comments 0 Comment

The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Journal of the Civil War Era invite submissions of unpublished essays from early career scholars (doctoral candidates at the writing stage and PhDs not more than two years removed from having earned their degree) for the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. Essays on any topic concerning the history of the Civil War era, broadly defined, will be considered. The winning essay will earn the author a $1,000 prize and an additional $500 travel stipend to the Society of Civil War Historians conference where the award will be presented.  Authors must be willing to attend the conference in order to be eligible for the award. The winning essay will be eligible for publication in the Journal of the Civil War Era.

The submission deadline is June 1, 2023. Submissions should be sent to the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center (RichardsCenter@psu.edu) with the subject line “Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award.” Submissions should be double-spaced and not exceed 11,000 words, including notes. Submissions must include a cv. The award committee prefers submissions written according to The Chicago Manual of Style. The winning essay will be selected by a three-person panel chosen by the JCWE editor.

For more information and to see past award winners, visit the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award page. 

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Imperfect Justice in the Imperfect Archive: Uncovering Extrajudicial Black Resistance in Richmond’s Civil War Court Records

Imperfect Justice in the Imperfect Archive: Uncovering Extrajudicial Black Resistance in Richmond’s Civil War Court Records

By | | Comments 1 comment

As the guest editors and article authors of the December 2022 JCWE special issue, “Archives and Nineteenth-Century African American History” demonstrate, there is no perfect archive.  Historians must therefore read every imperfect archive with a particular perspicacity, to uncover the histories so many archives were meant to suppress or erase.[1]  Interrogating the proximity of seemingly unrelated items preserved within an imperfect archive can allow us to hypothesize about subversive strategies developed and deployed by African Americans in the nineteenth century, strategies that might otherwise be invisible to us today.

While reading through an artificial collection at the Library of Virginia containing extant (and frustratingly incomplete) court records from Civil War-era Richmond, I happened upon several sets of documents related to very different crimes that occurred in the same neighborhood, a few months apart.[2]  These documents reflect a familiar truth about race and justice:  the judicial system that subjected free and enslaved Black Richmonders to harsh sentences simultaneously treated white criminality with astonishing leniency – at least when the victims of white criminality were Black.  Read together, however, the surviving documents from these ostensibly discrete cases also suggest a more complicated and intriguing possibility:  Black Richmonders, well aware of the white supremacy inherent in Richmond’s legal system, may have pursued extrajudicial efforts to enact punishment for white crimes against African Americans.

One of the cases involved Curtis and Jacob, two enslaved men, and Richard Drew, a free Black man.  All three were arrested on October 15, 1864, accused by a white shopkeeper of breaking into his store the previous night and stealing foodstuffs, cloth and clothing, and other commercial goods totaling $3230 in value.  On October 19, the white mayor ordered the accused held in jail until the trial date, which he set for the following month.  When the case was heard on November 14, the shopkeeper and two of the arresting police officers recounted finding the stolen goods hidden in and around the stable where the Black men worked.  Based on this testimony, Curtis and Richard Drew were convicted.  Curtis was transported out of state for sale (with his owner to be compensated $4000). Richard Drew was sold into slavery. Jacob, the other enslaved man, was deemed not to have participated in the burglary and discharged from the court system.[3]  As devastating as enslavement must have been for Richard Drew and forced removal from the community must have been for Curtis, such harsh sentences might not strike historians as exceptional, given the decades and centuries of legal subordination of free and enslaved Black Richmonders.[4]  White property rights were consistently privileged over Black personhood, with the former so subsuming the latter that even free Blacks were routinely reduced by the courts to becoming white property.

The other case documents revealed a far more horrific series of crimes, in which the victim was Black and the perpetrators were white.  These crimes were so sadistically violent that the archived documents detailing the charges and testimony are disturbing to read, even for those of us whose research regularly exposes the brutality of slavery.  For several months, a three-year-old girl was continually abused by the white couple that enslaved her.  These white adults subjected the child to physical torments that included “very frequently” stripping her naked and “whipping [her]… with a heavy leather strap”; “tak[ing] a brick and strik[ing] the child”; “very frequently … beat[ing] the child [with both the strap and the brick] until it was almost lifeless”; and “often” drenching the naked girl in cold water before leaving her outside in frigid weather.  Both the leather strap and the brickbat were used “upon the naked back, sides, shoulders, belly, loins, chest, and body of her the said female child slave.”  Much of this abuse occurred outdoors, observed by those working on or visiting neighboring properties, some of whom would eventually testify about the violence in court.  But they did so only after the months of torture culminated in a final, fatal beating on August 15, 1864, from which the child “did languish” in pain for another day before dying of her injuries.[5]

The August 19, 1864 document recording Jacob Hoeflick’s release on bail twice referred to the murdered child as “Josephine,” although the name was then crossed out (subsequent documents related to the crime refer to her only as “name is unknown”). While this expunction may have been made to correct an error in an official court document, the pen-strokes also underscore the negation of this child’s full personhood, the erasure of her specific identity, and the obliteration of her young life. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

On August 19, one of the perpetrators, Jacob Hoeflick, the white male enslaver who was head of the household, was charged with “feloniously and of Malice aforethought Kill[ing] and Murder[ing] a certain negro Child Slave … by then and there and on divers other days before that day unlawfully and feloniously, cruelly and inhumanely and brutally assaulting, beating, and otherwise abusing and injuring the person of the said infant negro child.”  The white mayor released Jacob Hoeflick on bail the same day, and he remained at liberty as the legal proceedings against him stretched into the following year.[6]  Despite detailed testimony from multiple white witnesses regarding his role in the abuse and murder, on January 18, 1865, Jacob Hoeflick was acquitted of all charges.[7]

Abigail Hoeflick, Jacob’s wife, was indicted on the same charges on November 21, 1864.  According to the witnesses’ testimony, she had committed an equal and perhaps greater share of the violent and ultimately fatal abuse.  Yet, Abigail Hoeflick was never tried for her crimes.  She allegedly fled the Confederacy sometime after the child’s death. She possibly returned to her birth state of New Jersey or to Pennsylvania, where she and Jacob had married and resided in the late 1840s prior to moving to Richmond.  In the final document related to the case, dated December 23, 1865, the charges against Abigail Hoeflick were dismissed.[8]

The extant court documents related to these cases are preserved within an artificial collection created by archivists at the Library of Virginia in 2013 to assist researchers seeking to learn about criminal cases “involving African Americans (slave and free) … that were heard by the Hustings Court and Judge’s Court (also referred to as Mayor’s Court) held in the city of Richmond.”[9]  Entries in this physical collection are arranged chronologically, beginning with 1843 court documents and extending through cases from 1866.  I read through this collection as part of my research for a book in which I am examining the strategies for survival and resistance developed by Black Virginians during the antebellum period, and exploring how African Americans extended those strategies during the Civil War to undermine the Confederacy.  Neither the legal proceedings that left the abusive and murderous white couple unpunished, nor the conviction and harsh sentencing of an enslaved man and a free Black man for larceny, might have seemed relevant to my topic, except for one striking detail.  The white storekeeper who accused the Black men of burglarizing his property in October 1864 was Jacob Hoeflick, the same man who had been arrested yet remained at liberty on bail (and whose wife had fled Richmond) after murdering a three-year-old Black girl two months earlier.  This detail led me to reread the extant materials, probing for what official court documents and archived materials obscured.  Could Jacob Hoeflick’s status as both unpunished perpetrator and self-identified victim of two such disparate crimes be more than a coincidence?  Might it suggest a new way to understand perspectives and motivations that are otherwise absent in the archive?

The crimes took place on Tenth Street between Cary and Main Streets, part of the busy commercial district portrayed in this drawing by the British artist Eyre Crow, published by the Illustrated London News on July 26, 1862, under the title “The Civil War in America: High-Street, Richmond, Virginia.” Digitized newspaper accessed via Google Books.

Consider how the Black men would have experienced both sets of crimes, not as discrete events but as purposefully interconnected ones.  For years, Richard Drew and Curtis had labored at a stable on a busy block of Tenth Street, near the property where the Hoeflicks resided, ran their store, and over the course of several months in 1864 tortured a child to death.  For everyone working at or visiting the stable, “It was an every day occurrence to see the child thus cruelly treated,” as one white witness testified in the proceedings against Jacob Hoeflick.[10]     In addition to their daytime labors, Richard Drew “ha[d] charge of the stable at night,” and Curtis slept there as well, further exposing them to the sounds and sights of this three-year-old Black girl being tormented.[11]  The legal system denied African Americans any means to disrupt, deter, or ameliorate the abuse during the child’s brief life, nor did it allow them a role in the official justice system’s (ultimately inadequate) effort to hold the Hoeflicks accountable after the murder.

Richard Drew, Curtis, and other enslaved and free Blacks who worked and lived in this area knew what horrific things the Hoeflicks did.  They knew these crimes were openly committed on a busy commercial corner just blocks from the edifices of white power that dominated Capitol Square.   They saw Jacob Hoeflick continue to go at liberty even after his arrest, his business thriving as he retained a respected place in the white community (for example, Hoeflick’s testimony against the Black men reveals that he continued to serve as a member of Richmond’s fire brigade).  Perhaps the only punishment this wealthy white enslaver might undergo was one the Black men could enact themselves:  depriving him of some of the property and profit he valued far more highly than he did the life of an African American child.

A red arrow indicates the block of Tenth Street where the crimes took place, revealing that the Hoeflicks’ extended abuse of the child occurred in close proximity to a range of government buildings, religious institutions, and businesses owned and frequented by white elites, none of whom intervened to save the girl. Detail (arrow added) from the United States Coast Survey, Map of the City of Richmond, Virginia. Courtesy the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/99448334/

Crossing into criminality would not have come easily to these Black men.  During their trial, Robert Crow, Ben Green, and Joseph Hix – three white men who had known and employed them for years – testified to the African American men’s long-standing honesty and good character.  (Crow and Hix each made a point of declaring that the Black men’s accuser, Jacob Hoeflick, lacked honesty, trustworthiness, and good character.  Crow also served as a witness in the separate court proceedings against the Hoeflicks for the abuse and murder of the enslaved girl, breaking ranks with the greater preponderance of elite white men who continued to approve of Jacob Hoeflick, most notably the twenty-four grand jurors who found Hoeflick not guilty.)  Like all Black Richmonders, Richard Drew and Curtis were accustomed to having their lives surveilled, curtailed, and disciplined by white supremacist laws, ordinances, and systems.  They would have calculated the enormous risk involved in enacting revenge upon Jacob Hoeflick, even if they felt justified in their actions.  And, as the archive evidences, unlike the white perpetrators, these men suffered dearly as a result of their arrest and conviction.  Moreover, they and other Black Richmonders would continue to bear the trauma of witnessing a young child slowly tortured and killed, and the horror of knowing the perpetrators remained at large.  Yet these details make this interpretation of their actions all the more poignant and significant.

Excavating episodes like these from imperfect archives is crucial for understanding not just what people did in the past, but why they did it.  Historians can strengthen our interpretive approaches to archival holdings by adopting the practices long honed by African American feminist literary critics, “to read the silences, read the gaps, be attentive to the ellipses.”[12]  Proceeding with curiosity and informed conjecture in this way yields insights far beyond what the original creators of the items in the archives intended to preserve.  Such elucidation is especially significant for understanding the experiences of individuals and groups whose history has been decentered, distorted, or denied by most archives.

[1] Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry, “Researching Nineteenth-Century African American History,” https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2022/11/guest-editors-jcwe-december-2023-note-researching-nineteenth-century-african-american-history/; Thomas A. Foster, “‘No Perfect Archive’: Recovering Histories of Enslaved People at Abingdon Plantation”; Kimberly Welch, “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans”; Jasmine Nichole Cobb, “Partial Portraits: African Americans in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine“; and Brandi C. Brimmer, “Tracing the Intimate Histories of Poor Black Women in the Late-Nineteenth-Century US South,” JCWE 12, No. 4, (December 2022).

[2] As noted in the Society of American Archivists’ Dictionary of Archives Terminology, “Artificial collections, as distinguished from organic collections, typically do not grow out of a single, specific function, and are often arranged for the convenience of description or retrieval rather than in an order originally established by the creator.” https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/artificial-collection.html

[3] Richard Drew, Commonwealth Cause, 1864, held in Richmond (Va.) Ended Causes, 1843-1866, Local government records collection, Richmond (City) Court Records, Library of Virginia.  This Cause also contains the court documents related to Jacob and Curtis.

[4] For an extended discussion of how structural racism within Richmond’s legal system affected enslaved people, free Blacks, and whites, see James M. Campbell, Slavery on Trial:  Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia, (Gainesville:  University Press of Florida, 2007).

[5] Jacob N. Hoeflick, Commonwealth Cause, 1864; and Jacob N. Hoeflick, Commonwealth Cause, 1865; both held in Richmond (Va.) Ended Causes, 1843-1866, Local government records collection, Richmond (City) Court Records,Library of Virginia.  Here and elsewhere, the surname was sometimes recorded as Hoeflich.

[6] Jacob N. Hoeflick, Commonwealth Cause, 1864.

[7] Jacob N. Hoeflick, Commonwealth Cause, 1865.

[8] Abby G. Hoeflick, Commonwealth Cause, 1865, held in Richmond (Va.) Ended Causes, 1843-1866, Local government records collection, Richmond (City) Court Records, Library of Virginia.  “Local Matters,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 30, 1864.  “Pennsylvania, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Marriage Records, 1512-1989”, database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6CYF-NR7X : 13 January 2021), Jacob N Holflick, 1848.  Seventh Census of the United States, 1850; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls); Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, D.C.  For an extended discussion of white women enslavers’ active participation in brutalizing enslaved African Americans, see Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property:  White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2019), especially 78-80.

[9] A Guide to the Richmond (Va.) Ended Causes, 1843-1866 (bulk 1860-1866), https://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=lva/vi04318.xml.  I am grateful to Gregory Crawford and Lydia Neuroth at the Library of Virginia for their dedication in making these materials available to researchers.  This physical collection has been scanned, transcribed, and indexed, and can now be searched and accessed online as part of Virginia Untold:  The African American Narrative, a larger digital collection that includes a great variety of materials from counties and cities across Virginia involving African Americans residing in Virginia from the 1600s through 1865.  https://lva.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=01LVA_INST:VU  As valuable as this digital resource is, particularly to researchers working remotely, Virginia Untold works best when one is seeking information about a particular individual or family.  Searching more generally by keyword or record type or locality often yields an unwieldy number of results, and the interface for delving into those results is cumbersome.

[10] Jacob N. Hoeflick, Commonwealth Cause, 1864.

[11] Richard Drew, Commonwealth Cause, 1864.

[12] Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Farah Jasmine Griffin,” Callaloo 22 (Autumn 1999), 872-892.

Lois Leveen

Dr. Lois Leveen earned degrees in history and literature from Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. Her writing has appeared in scholarly journals, academic collections, and in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and similar outlets. Having turned a footnote from her dissertation into the novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser (HarperCollins 2012), it is now her pleasure and her penance to be researching the first scholarly biography of Mary Richards Denman, the real figure behind the Mary Bowser myth. She is a 2020-21 Virginia Humanities Fellow at the Library of Virginia and a Mellon Research Fellow at the Virginia Historical Society.

For the Cause of Freedom: William Still and Abolitionist Data Collection

For the Cause of Freedom: William Still and Abolitionist Data Collection

By | | Comments 1 comment

Emeline Chapman faced a difficult choice in the summer of 1856. As an enslaved woman in Washington, D.C., Chapman and her husband John Henry were raising a young family while enduring the daily struggles of enslavement. Chapman’s enslaver, Emily Thompson, profited by regularly hiring her out to different White residents in the DC area. By summer 1856, however, Thompson decided that she was ready to send Chapman to the auction block and made threats implying as much. Seeing that a sale would lead to permanent separation from her two children (Margaret, age 2, and John Henry, eight months old), Chapman took matters into her own hands. Moving west by foot, Chapman and her children became freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad on August 30.

Thompson failed to locate Chapman and her children for more than three weeks after their departure. Looking for help from other enslavers and their supporters around Maryland, she posted an advertisement offering a $300 reward on September 23 in the Baltimore Sun, a proslavery newspaper that regularly posted notices about enslaved runaways in its pages.[1] Thankfully, it appears that Emeline Chapman and her children were never captured or re-enslaved. What Thompson failed to discover was that Chapman had sought freedom with the abolitionist William Still and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS) in Philadelphia.

Printed newspaper ad for the return of a self-liberating African American woman.
Emily Thompson, an enslaver in Washington, D.C., paid to have this advertisement of Emeline Chapman’s disappearance printed in the Baltimore Sun on September 23, 1856.

Chapman and her children were among nearly 1,000 freedom seekers who sought refuge with William Still during the 1850s and early 1860s. While much Underground Railroad activity around the country was shrouded in secrecy and word-of-mouth communication between the enslaved and an abolitionist community of “conductors,” Still bucked this trend by taking detailed notes about the freedom seekers who sought refuge with him. Writing down names, ages, dates of escape, transportation modes, hometowns, and more, Still remarked that he compiled this data “to show what efforts were made and what success was gained for Freedom under difficulties.” In other words, Still leveraged the power of data to demonstrate how freedom seekers like Emeline Chapman proactively worked to escape slavery. Seven years after the legal end of slavery in the United States, Still’s notes were published in The Underground Railroad, a comprehensive recollection of the people whom Still assisted in Philadelphia.[2]

In recent years, the emergence of the digital humanities as a form of scholarly inquiry has created opportunities to study the history of slavery with computational methods. Using spreadsheets, text mining, GIS mapping technology, and data visualizations, scholars now have tools for thinking anew about slavery, abolition, and emancipation in the nineteenth century. Robert Nowatski highlighted some of these projects in a 2020 article for The American Archivist, but also demonstrated how digital humanities scholars have largely ignored the study of slavery or Black history more broadly. In an analysis of 1,256 articles published with Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and 367 articles with Digital Humanities Quarterly since 1986, Nowatski found that only eight articles mentioned Black history and culture, less than one percent of all articles published in these journals.[3] It may come as no surprise, then, to discover that no comprehensive dataset of William Still’s notes was freely available online until recently.

Portrait of a Black man sitting looking at the camera.
William Still (1821-1902), a conductor on the Underground Railroad who helped nearly 800 enslaved African Americans to freedom.

Although I was previously aware of William Still’s abolitionist data, I became interested in mining the data further when I was hired to teach an Introduction to Digital Humanities course for the spring 2023 semester at IUPUI (Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis). Struggling to figure out a good final project for the course, I decided to see what I could do with the Still data.

One crucial study I came across was William C. Kashatus’s 2021 book, William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia.[4] While the book is really more about PASS as an abolitionist organization rather than Still’s own life experiences, Kashatus and the late scholar James McGowan meticulously researched The Underground Railroad and created an appendix with Still’s data on 995 enslaved individuals.[5] All scholars of slavery should be grateful for this scholarly contribution, which took many years to complete. However, Still’s data in print form is, for a lack of a better term, not flexible. Scholars couldn’t create a visualization, graph, or map of the Still data from the appendix unless they spent countless hours converting the printed text to computer software.

I set out to change this situation by making the Still data freely available online. Throughout fall 2022, I converted Kashatus and McGowan’s research into an Excel spreadsheet. I also studied The Underground Railroad in an effort to correct a limited number of typos, mistakes, and missing information not included in the original print appendix of William Still. I didn’t invent the wheel, so to speak, but I undertook this work to make it more efficient and accessible. Thankfully, I managed to complete the dataset in time to include it in the syllabus of my upcoming course.

While the future online home of this dataset remains to be determined, I am hosting it on my Google Drive for the time being and you can download it for yourself by clicking this hyperlink.

Unfortunately, the digital humanities course I was scheduled to teach this spring was cancelled shortly before I began writing this essay. However, I am hopeful that I’ll get the chance to teach William Still’s remarkable story and dataset to students in the future. More importantly, I hope other scholars can use this data in their classrooms and for their own research purposes. Students can benefit from Still’s life story as they consider the ways historians use data to make arguments about the past. For example, I had planned assignments in which students would create maps highlighting the hometowns of enslaved freedom seekers, graphic representations of age, runaway date, and modes of transportation used to seek freedom, and a final project that challenged students to create a website highlighting the dataset.

By making this spreadsheet freely available, I hope others find creative ways to help students understand the relationship between data and the study of slavery. Additionally, scholars can use this dataset to provide new insights into the life experiences of individual freedom seekers such as Emeline Chapman who came to Philadelphia dreaming of liberation. The possibilities are endless, and I look forward to seeing what can be accomplished with William Still’s data moving forward.

[1] “Reward: $300,” Baltimore Sun, September 23, 1856.

[2] William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record (Philadelphia: Henry B. Ashmead, 1872), 6. See also Julia W. Bernier, “’The Times Requires this Testimony’: William Still’s The Underground Railroad, Black Perspectives, December 5, 2022. https://www.aaihs.org/the-times-requires-this-testimony-william-stills-the-underground-railroad/.

[3] Robert Nowatzki, “From Datum to Databases: Digital Humanities, Slavery, and Archival Reparations,” The American Archivist 83, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020), 430.

[4] William C. Kashatus, William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021); see also Andrew K. Diemer, Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (New York: Knopf, 2022).

[5] The appendix can be seen in Kashatus, William Still, 221-278.

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.

Recent Muster Posts

Read the Journal Online at Project Muse

Access the journal on Project Muse

Follow us on Twitter