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Prelude to an Unholy Union: A Muster Roundtable

Prelude to an Unholy Union: A Muster Roundtable

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The roundtable ahead features three posts that gather Southern and Western history in a continental conversation, from Khal Schneider, Alexandra Stern, and Kevin Adams, respectively. I write to offer background and context for those pieces, all of which build toward October 2024, when the Western History Association and Southern Historical Association will hold concurrent conferences in Kansas City, Missouri, the first such for two of the largest historical organizations focused on regional history in North America.

Group of soldiers standing in a row.
15th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, c. 1861-1865, tintype.

I came to know of these plans in the autumn of 2017, when, as the William S. Vaughn fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt, I learned of the initiative from Anne Hyde, editor of the Western Historical Quarterly. I shared the irony that the manuscript upon which I was working at the Center, an exploration of the unruly cultural stratigraphy of several counties in the southern Colorado borderlands, had unexpectedly developed a strong “Southern” strain—a post-Civil War (1869-70) migration of white “refugees” from Congressional Reconstruction from north Georgia to Huerfano County.  Their descendants, even today, identify as “the Georgia colony.”  Anne explained that discussions were underway between the WHQ and The Journal of the Civil War Era toward joint or special issues of that would preview the conference, and invited me to serve as convener of topic sessions at WHA meetings and to guest-edit the special issues.  Thus, in this Call for Proposals, was born The Unholy Union.

“The editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era and the Western Historical Quarterly seek contributions toward joint programing at the WHA in the years ahead, and two special joint issues of the journals in 2020/21. James F. Brooks of the University of California, Santa Barbara will serve as guest editor on this shared project. We hope to inspire comparative insights and unearth hidden connections between history in the “South” and the “West”, however far flung those might prove.”

2021 saw two special issues appear that  confirmed our sense that a serious new scholarly school of thought was emerging.  In March, The Journal of the Civil War Era featured four articles:

Andrew Shaler’s exploration of the Cherokee and Wyandot Companies offered a new cut on distinctions between “settled” Indians and “unsettled” overland emigrants inspired by the California gold finds.  Departing from their recently assigned “homelands” in Indian Territory and Kansas, respectively, these overlanders offered non-Indians who joined their caravan expertise in gold prospecting as well as skill in westering through Indian Country.  Shaler argues that “Cherokee and Wyandot emigrant companies effectively navigated a liminal space between the ‘indigenous’ and ‘settler,’ ‘Indian’ and ‘emigrant,” and actively maintained complex relations with both communities.”  Their dispossession and forced removal from homelands east of the Mississippi came strangely coupled with heightened perception of Cherokee and Wyandot progress toward civilization in many white eyes. Their Companies drew praise from new members, who also benefited from the gold prospecting and panning experience Cherokees could offer once they arrived in California. While some emigrant Indians remained in California, (most prominent, John Rollin Ridge, grandson of Treaty Party leader Major Ridge), most returned after their sojourn. Among those were a contingent who camped on the banks of Cherry Creek in Colorado, and noticed some flakes of float gold, and which news would travel back to the east via those who traveled the Cherokee Trail.

Max Flomen drew us into a world of movement as well, as the “renegades” produced by Indian dispossession and expanding slavery sought shelter and the faint promise of independence and freedom in the borderlands of Mexican Tejas, and later the Republic. Maroons, runaways, emigrant dispossessed Indians, renegades, and weapons smugglers all sought, for their particular ends, emancipation from the bonds of American imperialism, while aspiring planters looked to be in the vanguard of an expanding cotton kingdom. The weakness of Mexican control in the borderlands held promise for contending groups who, ironically, tended to reinforce each other’s strengths. The renegade factions flourished in the frailty of Mexican authority, while emigrant planters from the Old South found themselves welcomed by the same weak state for the role they played in frontier defense. As experiments in “alternative emancipations” mounted, Mexicans and Texicans maintained tactical alliances to quash those campaigns. Yet by 1836, of course, Texicans had become Anglo-Texans, and “committed to ‘whitening’ the Greater Southwest” (the failed annexation of New Mexico in 1841 aside). Rebellions and outbreaks of the enslaved held by Creek, Cherokee, and Texan planters in 1842 and 1845 illustrated the potential for Mexico to destabilize even after surrendering territory, which would stimulate Texas’ annexation.

In “War Waits,” Lance Blythe entered debates around the relevancy of the Civil War to other, contemporaneous, conflicts in the West.  Treating the complex array of violent exchanges among Native peoples, between Natives and New Mexicans, and between US Army forces and both Natives and New Mexicans, he offers a powerful argument that fore-fronting the causative role of the Civil War “tends to efface, if not erase, local, deep, and long histories in favor of the relatively recent US history, a phenomenon that can be seen in recent historiography of the Civil War in the West.”  Emphasizing the local over the national, he employed two cases, the Battle of Apache Pass in July 1862, and the Massacre at Fort Fauntleroy at Ojo de Oso in 1861, to make a granular, spirited case that we attend to causal conditions in the canyons, mesas, sheep husbandry, and protagonists’ personal histories for our meanings, well below the vantage of “the nation state.”  We come away convinced that “the United States was not a full participant in the local borderland wars…and US officials and soldiers in the Civil War era ultimately played a marginal role in the true wars of the Southwest.”  Kit Carson, the local, laid pillage to Canyon de Chelly for reasons his commander, James Carlton, little understood.

Angela Pulley Hudson chased a glancing reference to a deployment of western Indian Scouts in support the Freedmen’s Bureau in the post-War South to an unexpectedly fruitful exploration of “western” Indians in the Old Southwest–including the 1887-1894 incarceration of Geronimo’s Chiricahua Apaches at Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama. Her work not only reverses the predominant “westering” directionality of our narratives, by bringing Apaches eastward to Alabama, but also provides for discovery of a resident Indian people, the MOWA Choctaws, who became neighbors and informal kinsfolk to the Apaches.  Hudson plays provocatively with the notion that Indian “removals” might have trended eastward, and that the “removals” of the 1830s in the Old Southwest were less complete than popularly imagined.  Two “Native Souths” entail here, and neither fully what we might expect. As if anticipating my own Georgia Colony story, Hudson suggests “rather than tending to follow the westward path of U.S. expansion, what if we follow people and stories where they lead, even if that lands us in unfamiliar historiographical waters?”  Venturing that Apaches and Choctaws employed each other’s presence to enhance their own sense of indigeneity, she asks us to wonder if the imprisoned Apaches rescued their Muskogee cousins from becoming “vanishing Indians.”  She later expanded on this essay with a Muster post.

The special issue of the Western Historical Quarterly appeared in the summer of 2021 and featured another four articles under the Unholy Union rubric.

 In “Reimagining ‘Defeat’ in the Transnational West” Matthew Hulbert brought South and the (South)west into conversation in a wry examination of how some former Confederates, rather than surrender their futures to the victorious Union, sought a new location where the “social and cultures features of the Confederate experiment” might be kept alive, under the protection of Mexican Emperor Maximillian.  Crossing the Rio Grande at Las Piedras, some imagined a return of the halcyon days of the Old South, while others, particularly those whom Hulbert details, imagined a new white supremacist landscape that would contain many of the socioracial features of what we come to be known at the New South.  Placing Confederado thinkers John Newman Edwards, Henry W. Allen and Alexander W. Terrell as representatives of specific imagined futures for the post-Civil War South.  Although they may never have seen realization, understanding their visions, and the strategies by which they sought to bring them to realization, “is paramount to our broadest understanding of how Confederates conceived of defeat and coped with it culturally, both at home and abroad.” One comes away from the essay wondering at Confederado naivete, yet recognizing that the “Old South” did, indeed, survive in deed and word:  several emigrant colonies in Brazil, for instance, and more robustly in the many echoes of Edward Pollard’s The Lost Cause today.

In “’No Country Will Rise Above its Home, and No Home Above its Mother:’ Gender, Memory and Colonial Violence in Nineteenth Century Central Texas,” Patrick Troester tackled another enduring myth of westering–the victimization of innocent women and children as justification for white men’s violence–while situating its origins in the Old Southwest.  By bringing a gender focus to literary representations, especially memoirs, of colonization (seldom used term) in the “settling” of Texas, he argued that “Anglo women served as active colonial agents through their work making homes, raising children, and building social ties—labor which bound them firmly to more overt forms of colonial violence by men and the emerging state.” Mary Maverick, daughter of Northport, Alabama attorney William Adams, misremembered her father as appointed by Andrew Jackson as Indian Agent for Choctaws and Cherokees.  Her husband to be, Samuel Maverick, disliked the hands-on daily work of managing enslaved workers on his father’s Tennessee plantation, and sought more bountiful returns in side-ranging land speculation.  Although the family prospered, “Mary faced the same bitter frustrations as other slaveholding women in the American South coupled with a quintessentially western sense of frontier isolation, “a slave of slaves.”

In “Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction Era Federal Indian Policy Lead to the Indians Wars,”  Boyd Cothran brought us farther west (and east) than any in our series across the two journals. His essay arced from the lava-beds stronghold of the Modocs to Washington, DC, and Ulysses S. Grant’s halting formulation of a “Peace Policy” that would seek, finally, to end the Indian Wars and bring Indians into the new body politic of the reunited states. That the Peace Policy would fail is attributable to an inability to grasp the “entrenched realities of life on the ground throughout the American West.”  Focusing on a single year, 1873, the messy realities of the West could unravel high-minded political reforms and kneecap Gilded Age avarice.  Francis Amasa Walker, the leading architect of the Peace Policy, a gifted intellectual and theorist, failed to craft a nationwide response to the knotty social realities of Indian-Settler relations in the West, and the Modoc War served as the “precipitating event” that would lead to a resumption of the Indian Wars as a final solution.

Steve Kantrowitz closed out our special issue with “Jurisdiction, Civilization, and the Ends of Native American Citizenship: the view from 1866” asked to place the imagined futures of Freedmen and Indians in conversation with one another to clarify the hidden contradictions that the 1866 Civil Rights Bill held for American Indians. Birthright citizenship, which seemed so straightforward in the case of newly freed women and men, became vexingly complicated once Senators contemplated embracing the “wild and savage” as fellow members of the body politic. The fact that Indians “bore a very different relationship” to the newly freed became obvious during debate.  Where “rights and equality” lay at the core of freedmen’s citizenship debates, Senators were undecided on issues of Native “jurisdiction.” Were Indians bound first by their tribal affiliation and therefore “foreign,” or were (some, at least) cloven from tribal passions and in the continuum of dependent subjects of the United States, hence “domestic”? If the latter, how might individual Indians be place on the spectrum of savagery to civilization?  How could “birthright” citizenship also allow for “enculturation” citizenship? Kantrowitz uses these questions to argue that in our “settler’s empire, republican constitutional principles could not be allowed to hamstring the fundamental sovereignty of settlers and their governments.”

*****

In the Fall of 2021, I had the pleasure of serving as discussant for another WHA session, one continuing the themes that yielded the special issues, “South Meets West: Examining Federal Power and Policies After the Civil War.”  I found those papers exciting in their own right, and so strongly aligned with our ongoing work that I suggested to Khal Schneider, Alexandra Stern, and Kevin Adams they submit them to Muster, so that their insights might be included in our conversations before Kansas City. The various pieces will appear in a special roundtable over the next two weeks.

James Brooks

James F. Brooks is the Gable Chair in early American history at the University of Georgia and is research professor in history and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Introducing “Detailed: A Semi-Occasional Series within the Muster Blog”

Introducing “Detailed: A Semi-Occasional Series within the Muster Blog”

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On August 26, 1861, soldiers of the Seventh Iowa Volunteers announced that Lauman’s Own would be “published Semi-occasionally” for “the benefit of the Regiment.” Similarly, the men of Morgan’s Brigade launched The Vidette to be “published semi-occasionally” in Springfield, Tennessee in late 1862, a member of the Twenty-First Mississippi promised that The Grape Shot would be  printed semi-occasionally in Virginia in 1864, and the Campaign Hornet introduced itself in March 1862 as “a Semi-Occasional Journal” by Arkansas soldiers that would be “devoted to the war, agricultures, commerce and the development of the resources of  the Southern Confederacy.” In each of these “semi-occasional” publications, voices from the trenches brought unique perspectives to the Civil War, offering a slightly different view from the one offered by an individual’s letters or a single person’s diary. These quirky newspapers do not tell us everything about the Civil War, but they sometimes shift the framing and reveal familiar aspects of the war in fresh, new ways.[i]

Alfred Waud, “Soldiers Wells,” 1862, Library of Congress ppmsca-21300-21319

In like fashion, we introduce this new semi-occasional series within the Muster blog, in which new perspectives from scholars in disciplines outside of history cast new light on the Civil War era. In response to growing political attention to the security and legitimacy of elections, voting rights, racial inequality, police brutality, and health disparities, scholars in the social and biological sciences have turned their attention to this pivotal time in U.S. history. We envision political scientists, sociologists, biologists, economists, and others using this space to share and discuss their research on the Civil War era with interested historians.

Readers of the Muster blog will benefit from this proposed series by gaining familiarity with both new evidence and new perspectives.

In terms of evidence, social and natural scientists create and analyze data about the Civil War era using tools and techniques that are uncommon in history. Thus, some of the conclusions these scholars reach may be opaque and inaccessible to historians unfamiliar with methodological debates or practices in those fields. Conversely, social and natural scientists often work with a thin or narrow grasp of the history of the Civil War era. We see these blog posts as an opportunity to overcome this divide and foster greater interdisciplinary dialogue to mutual benefit.

Lauman’s Own images from personal collection of Chandra Manning

Introducing and explaining novel evidence, much of it statistical, to historians of the long Civil War era may bring new traction in long-standing debates, generate new questions for historical research, or lead to reinterpretation and reappraisal of historical evidence. At the same time, historians may use their deep knowledge of the political, economic, and social contexts of the Civil War era to interrogate, sharpen, or sometimes even challenge the assumptions and conclusions that social and natural scientists make in their analyses.

African American Laborers, Northern Virginia 1862 or 1863, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-10400.

Engaging with the work of scholars in other disciplines provides an opportunity to see “our” era from new perspectives. This intervention may prove very helpful in breaking up some of the field’s stubborn impasses because the broader questions that motivate scholars in other disciplines to investigate the United States during this era differ from those that have preoccupied the historiography of war and emancipation.

For example, in political science, much of the research on the Civil War and Reconstruction examines the United States from a comparative perspective in order to illuminate processes of democratization, the political economy of land reform, state formation, and the dynamics of civil conflict. Dendrochronologists, botanists, and climatologists are more invested in fluctuations in water levels and air temperature than in arguments about territorial expansion or popular sovereignty. The questions that practitioners of other disciplines ask, therefore, have the potential to break historians’ scholarly conversations free from some of the well-worn grooves in our debates. At the same time, historians are well situated to inject humans—with all their messy and contradictory motivations—and contingency back into the theories of social scientists.

Not all scholarly work looks the same, and neither will all entries in this series. We can envision at least two broad formats that posts in the series might take. Some pieces might be single-authored pieces in which scholars explain their research and how their findings might interest historians of the Civil War era.

Political scientist Michael Weaver’s piece, for example, documents the evidence he has collected on enlistment and Reconstruction voting patterns that shows that wartime service turned Union veteran voters into a critical part of the coalition that enacted civil rights legislation and passed the 14th and 15th Amendments.

In other instances, posts may take the form of a dialogue between a scholar and a historian who work on a related topic, in which they discuss their own approaches to the material, as well as what they see anew thanks to the interdisciplinary conversation.

We hope that readers of the Muster blog will share this new semi-occasional series with their colleagues in other disciplines and encourage them to submit work for consideration, or will suggest scholars who might be invited to post. Potential authors can pitch a post idea to either Chandra Manning or directly to Hilary Green, the current JCWE Digital Media Editor.

Camp of 31st Pennsylvania Infantry near Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, cph 3g07983 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g07983

The Campaign Hornet pledged itself to “endeavoring to speak the truth” unburdened by the compulsion to “court popularity from any clique or faction” and promised that its tone would remain “courteous though firm and decided, independent in all things, neutral in nothing.”[ii] We share those aspirations and hope that this new, semi-occasional series will become a dynamic forum that stretches our minds, enlivens our work, and benefits all who are soldiering away in the study of the long Civil War era.

[i] Lauman’s Own, 7th Iowa Volunteers, Aug. 21, 1861, Ironton, MO, Chicago Historical Society; The Vidette, Morgan’s Confederate Brigade, Nov. 2, 1862, Springfield, TN, Tennessee State Library and Archives; The Grape Shot, 21st Mississippi Volunteers, May 1864, VA, Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library Museum of the Confederacy; Campaign Hornet, 2nd Arkansas Mounted Rifles, March 1862, Jonathan Callaway Civil War Letters and papers, University of Arkansas.

[ii] Campaign Hornet, March 1862, p. 1.

Chandra Manning

Chandra Manning teaches U.S. history, chiefly of the 19th century, including classes on the Civil War, slavery and emancipation, Lincoln, citizenship, the American Revolution, and the History of Baseball (not necessarily in that order). Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Knopf, 2007) won the Avery O. Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians, earned Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Her second book, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (Knopf, 2016), about Civil War refugee camps where former slaves allied with the Union Army and altered the course of the war and of emancipation, won the Jefferson Davis Prize awarded by the American Civil War Museum for best book on the Civil War. A former National Park Service Ranger, she has also advised historical sites, museums, and historical societies, as well as community groups in search of historical perspective.

“Let our ballots secure what our bullets have won”: Union Veterans and the Making of Radical Reconstruction?

“Let our ballots secure what our bullets have won”: Union Veterans and the Making of Radical Reconstruction?

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of the Detailed: A Semi-Occasional series within Muster. Read the introductory post here. 

The passage and enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments is one of the most remarkable expansions of political rights in world history. Political scientists studying the expansion and contraction of political rights treat Reconstruction as a classic example that illustrates how these changes are driven by the strategic interests of political elites. They argue that electoral competition between rival elites or political parties drives them to expand suffrage when they expect new voters will give them decisive support.[1] From this perspective, recognizing that restored representation to white Southerners would empower the Democrats, the Republican party strategically extended suffrage rights and other protections to African Americans to win elections in the South and retain control of the federal government.[2] Thus, Republican commitments to equal civil and political rights were only as deep as the electoral value of African American ballots.

While true in part, this isn’t the whole story. Rather than rush to give and protect rights for African Americans, Republicans pursued expansions of civil and political rights fitfully, and were deeply concerned that “Radical” Reconstruction policies would alienate Northern voters.[3] Where did popular support for this revolutionary agenda come from? In newly published research, I show that the war turned Union veterans into a pivotal constituency that voted and mobilized for Republicans and their Radical reforms in the critical elections that shaped Reconstruction.

Scholars have underappreciated the important role of veterans in shaping post-war politics .[4] Returning Union veterans comprised at least 20% of the post-war Northern electorate. Veterans’ organizations, including the Grand Army of the Republic, were active participants in political conventions and campaigning—particularly for Republicans—in 1866 and 1868 elections. And the intense experiences of military service may have primed soldiers for political change. Through their sacrifices to defeat the Confederacy and their experiences with slavery and African Americans, Union soldiers may have developed commitments about the meaning of the war, what had been achieved, and how victory should be preserved: what Barbara Gannon calls “The Won Cause.”

Yet, figuring out whether Union soldiers’ views on slavery and racial equality were changed by the war and what the political consequences of that were is bedeviled by two thorny problems:

  1. Measurement: What counts as evidence of soldiers’ political views, as a whole? The diaries and letters of individual soldiers, the commonly used sources, have had differing interpretations. And, since we can’t collect these for all soldiers, it is reasonable to ask: whose diaries and letters are we reading? How representative are they of the Union Army?
  2. Causality: How did Union veterans acquire their political commitments? Even if we accept evidence that soldiers disproportionately supported Republicans (such as, the soldiers’ votes in the 1864 Presidential Election), one might reasonably ask: did veterans already possess these views when they enlisted, or were they transformed in the crucible of war?

I bring some quantitative tools of social science to bear against both of these problems. First, I work to clearly and systematically measure the post-war political support veterans gave to Republicans and Reconstruction policies in elections. Second, I employ rigorous statistical analyses that, with transparent and plausible assumptions, enable us to evaluate whether military service caused a change in soldiers’ political commitments.

Union Veterans Increase Post-War Republican Votes

Casting the widest net, I examine whether higher levels of Union enlistment caused counties to experience greater support for Republicans in elections after the war. I calculate the fraction of votes cast for Republicans using county election returns for federal elections collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. I link data compiled by the American Civil War Research Database on the military records of virtually all Union Soldiers with the 1860 US Census to calculate the enlistment rate among military-aged males for counties in eight states where soldiers’ residence was recorded.[5]

A skeptical reader might raise the objection that counties with higher enlistment may have had more votes for Republicans even before the war, and that enlistment did not cause any changes. To address this concern and provide evidence of the causal impact of wartime enlistment, I employ a method called differences-in-differences. In essence, this method compares changes in Republican voting from before to after the war in counties within the same states with higher versus lower enlistment.

After the war, counties with greater enlistment saw much larger increases: compared to 1860, counties in the top 25% of enlistment saw Republicans gain 10 percentage points in 1866, while counties in the bottom 25% gained only 2.

By looking at changes within counties, it cannot be that unchanging attributes of counties (e.g., a history of abolitionist mobilization or pre-war support for Republicans) explain this pattern. To interpret these results as the causal effect of enlistment rates on Republican voting, we need only assume that counties with different levels of enlistment would have had similar trends in Republican votes, had the war not happened. While this is impossible to know, we can see in the provided figure that, prior to the war, counties with different enlistment rates had the same trends in Republican voting. Thus, we can plausibly say that wartime enlistment caused substantial gains for Republicans in key post-war elections.

Yet, we cannot say for sure that these aggregate effects are the result of soldiers themselves changing their votes; it could be that non-veterans in places with greater enlistment became more supportive of Republicans, through, say, the canvassing efforts of veterans.

Union Veterans’ Combat Experiences Affected their Partisanship

To find out whether the war changed veterans, I restrict my focus to soldiers and examine whether different wartime experiences affected their political views after the war: did increased exposure to combat casualties make men more Republican? A simple comparison might lead us astray: Republican and Democratic soldiers may have chosen to join different units and at different times, and Army commanders may have taken unit partisanship into account when issuing battle orders.

To isolate the effect of combat casualties on partisanship, I take advantage of a “natural experiment”: men joining the same regiment enlisted, moved, and fought together during the war. Yet, in battle, different companies were arrayed at different points along a short line, and as a result of the contingencies of battle, some arbitrarily experienced more casualties than others. If we believe these differences were effectively random, like the assignment to treatment and control in a clinical trial, we can attribute differences in partisanship to the causal impact of company casualties.

Biographical directories compiled in nine Indiana counties in 1874 record the partisanship for nearly thirty thousand people. Digitizing and linking this data to the military records of soldiers from those counties, I find that within the same regiments, soldiers serving in companies with more combat deaths become more likely to label themselves as Republican versus Democrat. And consistent with the effectively “random” exposure to casualties, there were no such differences in pre-war demographic traits. This is compelling evidence that one key feature of military service, combat, turned individual soldiers into Republicans.

Union Veterans Backed Radical Policies

Did veterans merely support Republicans without actually backing Radical policies? To answer this, I combine data on enlistment with town-level returns in referenda over Black suffrage in Iowa and Wisconsin.[6] Importantly, these states held referenda beforeand after the war.  Looking at changes in support for suffrage after the war, towns with higher enlistment saw greater increases in support for Black suffrage.

These are aggregate patterns but mathematically it must be that, after the war, support for suffrage increased more among veterans than among those who stayed home. This is another difference-in-differences analysis: if we believe that, absent the war, soldiers and non-soldiers would have had similar trends in support for Black suffrage, this is compelling evidence that military service caused substantial increases in support for suffrage.

Critically, the Wisconsin referendum took place in November 1865. It occurred well before national Republican leaders publicly embraced any of the key policies of Radical Reconstruction. Thus, these results suggest that returning soldiers may have pushed the party toward these positions from below.  This would turn the electoral competition argument on its head: it was veterans and their Radical allies who, as pivotal voters for the Republican party, pushed party leaders to embrace a stronger Reconstruction agenda.

Conclusions

In Congressional elections of 1866, Republicans won a supermajority that empowered them to legislate Radical Reconstruction. They benefited from increased support in places with more enlistment: a ten point increase in enlistment was enough to secure the seats needed to override Johnson’s veto. I show that these effects were the result of war experiences changing both soldiers’ partisanship and their direct support for Black suffrage.

My conclusions about the role of veterans in the Republican party during Reconstruction parallels recent work in political science showing that it was the local-level incorporation of African American voters and mobilization by labor unions that pushed Northern Democrats to embrace civil rights in the 20th century.[7]  More work remains to be done to understand the nature of veterans’ support for Reconstruction and its consequences.  Nevertheless, we can draw important lessons from these cases. Rather than exemplify the strategic logic of elite-led rights expansions, Reconstruction shows that expanding and protecting political rights depends on buy-in from broad grassroots coalitions among those already enfranchised.

[1] Ben Ansell and David Samuels, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach. (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015); Humberto Llavador and Robert Oxoby, 2005. “Partisan Competition, Growth, and the Franchise.’’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(3):1155–1189;  Dawn Teele, 2018. “How the West Was Won: Competition, Mobilization, and Women’s Enfranchisement in the United States.’’ Journal of Politics 80(2):442–461; Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt, 2010. “The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond.’’ Comparative Political Studies 43(8–9):931–968.

[2] Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[3] Xi Wang, Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

[4] Though, Cf. Mary Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952); Brian Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014)

[5] Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

[6] Data from Iowa referenda are available from https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/4284. Data from the Wisconsin referenda were provided by Michael McManus.

[7] Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Michael Weaver

Michael Weaver is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at The University of British Columbia. He studies race and American political development, the politics of discursive struggles over the legitimacy of violence, and causes and consequences of ethnic and racial violence, more broadly.

The American Civil War and the Case for a “Long” Age of Revolution

The American Civil War and the Case for a “Long” Age of Revolution

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The term “age of Revolution,” since it was used by Eric Hobsbawm in his trilogy of books on the “long” nineteenth-century in the 1960s, is normally used to describe the period between the American Revolution in the 1770s and the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in the late 1840s. Yet, the interpretation of the American Civil War of 1861-65 as a Second American Revolution suggests that the “age of Revolution” did not die on the barricades in 1848-1849.Historians, consciously or unconsciously, but all too often, consider “revolution” through the lens of Marxist interpretation. Events that have the appearance of being driven by bourgeois or proletarian forces attempting to overthrow the power structures above them are called revolutions, even if they fail. But if we consider a revolution to be something that achieves profound and fundamental change, then the Civil War should be seen as a revolution that was far more successful than any other in its age.

Elder men in suits posed in a group shot with a Black man holding a flag.
Civil War veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic, Cazenovia, New York, circa 1900.

On the face of it, the American Civil War was a rebellion (arguably a failed revolution) of several southern states who seceded, joined the Confederate States of America and waged war against the United States. But it catalysed a more significant northern-driven revolution against the injustices enshrined in the nation’s founding documents. Like other revolutions, it picked up momentum, becoming more radical over time. By the end of the war, its goals had shifted from simply preserving the Union to abolishing slavery and granting the full rights of citizenship to Black Americans throughout the United States. The restored nation was fundamentally different from the one that existed before the war, even if the full ramifications of the change took decades to set in.

Abraham Lincoln was an unlikely revolutionary. Through war as a Commander in Chief, however, Lincoln drove a change that was more radical and profound than any other of the world revolutions that are remembered by that name between the death of Bolivar in 1830 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Civil War’s most revolutionary moment was the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1863, in which Lincoln announced that enslaved people in the states in rebellion would henceforward be free. Prior to this Lincoln had quashed his own generals’ attempts to emancipate slaves in confederate areas under Union control. The Proclamation did not abolish slavery in the border states that did not secede or in southern areas occupied by the Union army. Far more sweeping was Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in 1865, which ended slavery throughout the United States, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified soon after Lincoln’s assassination, in which Blacks gained equality before the law in all parts of the United States.[1]

People saw and understood the Civil War as a revolution at the time and in subsequent generations. The Massachusetts intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1863 that the nation was “in the midst of a great revolution” overthrowing the “old remainders of barbarism” for the advance of “Christianity and humanity.”[2] The historian Andre Fleche has argued that Americans at the time used the term “revolution” to describe what was happening in their country as often as the terms “civil war” or “rebellion.” Many of the “Forty-Eighter” immigrants from Germany to the North (hundreds of whom served in the Civil War) viewed the struggle against slavery as a revolution against aristocracy and tyranny in the United States, with strong parallels to what the European revolutionaries of 1848 had tried to achieve.[3]

In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, historians including Charles and Mary Beard, James McPherson, Eric Foner, Bruce Levine and others continued to advance the interpretation of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery as a “Second American Revolution.”[4] If we take revolution in its broader meaning as a major and fundamental change in the way a country is governed, the move from a system in which well over half of the population (in some states) were legally enslaved to one in which the same were given full and equal rights of citizenship, including voting rights, is arguably as revolutionary a change as was effected anywhere in the nineteenth century.

While those rights were systematically stripped away from Black citizens after the Reconstruction era ended, they still remained enshrined in federal law and in the constitution. They were invoked during the post-World War II Civil Rights era to dismantle the system of Jim Crow and official segregation in the South, and to challenge segregation which existed – less “officially” but just as certainly – in many parts of the North. America is still a long way from overcoming the legacy of slavery and racism, and that is a valid counterargument to the idea that what Lincoln and the Radical Republicans achieved was a fully completed “revolution.”  I would suggest, however, that the change to the nation’s constitution was more dramatic and more permanent than was the case in any of the other world revolutions between 1830 and 1917.

The Revolutions that rocked Europe in 1830 and 1848 were, for the most part, dismal failures. Where they did achieve change, it was (in most cases) illusory, temporary, or both. The July Revolution of 1830 in France did lead to a regime change, of sorts, but it simply replaced one King for another, albeit one who was more accountable to the people. The Revolutions of 1848 were much bigger, bloodier, and more widespread. But most of the revolutions were crushed immediately or reversed within a short space of time. The ones that succeeded – notably in France and in the Kingdom of Piedmont, Italy – managed to bring about new constitutions. In France’s case a Second Republic was declared in 1848. Enslaved people in France’s overseas colonies were freed. But by 1852, the Republic was dissolved, and Napoleon III subsequently reigned as Emperor. Piedmont’s reformed constitutional monarchy was perhaps the one lasting success, in that the constitution survived and later became the basis upon which the Kingdom of Italy was governed after unification.[5]

More consequential as “revolutions,” though they are not generally known by that name, were the events that coincided with, or took place in the five or six after the American Civil War. The Emancipation of Russia’s Serfs in 1861 was arguably a far larger-scale change than the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. It certainly “freed” a much larger number of people, roughly 23 million, compared to just under 4 million slaves in the United States. It was accompanied by the establishment of the first democratically elected bodies in Russia at a local level, the zemstva. It was perhaps less deserving of the distinction of a revolution that the Civil War though as it did not change the nature of Russian government at a national, or rather imperial, level. Russia was an autocracy before and after the emancipation. Furthermore, Russian serfs weren’t slaves, exactly, before 1861 and neither did they get the full range of rights that the slaves were granted in America in the aftermath of the Civil War.[6]

The Unifications of Italy in the 1860s and of Germany in 1871 were dramatic changes that resulted in millions of Europeans living – many for the first time – under constitutional monarchies, some with newly-gained voting rights. But both were far less democratic in structure than the United States. Later events that appear to fit the revolutionary model more readily, such as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the violence – or failed revolutions – of 1905-7 in Russia were frighteningly radical but achieved relatively little. However, all these events are – like the American Civil War – inextricably linked to the same ideas that drove earlier revolutions dating back to 1776, most of all the desire for a new nation in which all people could live under the rule of law and free from arbitrary or tyrannical authority.

The revolutionary nature of the Civil War suggests that the “age of Revolution” extended well beyond 1848. When Hobsbawm applied the name to that era, he was already extending a shorter period that R.R. Palmer had labelled the “Age of Democratic Revolution” which linked the American and French Revolutions up to 1800. Perhaps the parameters should be widened again, to 1865, or 1871. Or maybe, the age of revolution hasn’t ended at all. Hobsbawm called the period after the “age of Revolution” the “age of capital,” and that has certainly not played itself out yet either. If a century can be “long” then an “age” can be even longer. And until the dream of the revolutionaries of a world free of the worst forms of tyranny has been realized, the idealist may hope that age will continue.

[1] James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 352-8. W.E.B. DuBois made a similar argument in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935), 55-83.

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fortune of the Republic,” (1863) in Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds., Emerson’s Antislavery Writings(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 146.

[3] Andre Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 5; Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 8, 149-51, 168-70, 217-8, 260-3.

[4] Levine covers this branch of historiography in The Spirit of 1848, 8. Also see idem., “The Second American Revolution,” Jacobin, August 17, 2015; Kevin Gannon, “The Civil War as a Settler-Colonial Revolution,” Age of Revolutions, January 18, 2016.

[5] Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson, 2002), 87-99; R.J.W. Evans and Harmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[6] J.N. Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History, 1812-2001, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 72-6, 80-1; Amanda Bellow, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Daniel Koch

Daniel Koch is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe: Class, Race and Revolution in the Making of an American Thinker (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). His next book, Land of the Oneidas, is forthcoming with SUNY Press. He completed a D.Phil. in History at the University of Oxford and is the incoming Headmaster of Loughborough Grammar School.

Previewing the June 2022 JCWE Issue

Previewing the June 2022 JCWE Issue

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This issue exhibits historians’ continuing efforts to grapple with the complexities of the Civil War Era, emphasizing how our collective understanding of the period has been produced, which topics have been neglected or marginalized, and why.

Ryan Hall’s article, “Chaos and Conquest: The Civil War and Indigenous Crisis on the Upper Missouri, 1861–1864,” extends the geography of the Civil War Era to the Upper Missouri River and expands the actors affected by it to include the Native groups who lived along the river’s banks. Drawing our attention to civilian rather than military matters—to federal agents, political patronage, and economic relationships—Hall makes a compelling case that the Civil War had a significant impact on Indigenous people in the northwestern United States because of the corruption and incompetence of the Republican appointees sent there. Seeing the Civil War Era not just from Indian Country but from a lesser-studied vantage helps capture the wide-ranging and significant implications of the war.

In “Rereading the High Private: Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch,” Patrick Lewis analyzes a Confederate memoir that was made famous in the twentieth century by historian Bell I. Wiley and filmmaker Ken Burns and that eventually became a staple in public history interpretations of the Civil War, particularly in Tennessee. Lewis shows the ways the memoir’s author, Samuel Rush Watkins, constructed a narrative in the early 1880s that obscured his own elite status (and that of many in his regiment), the significance of slavery and enslaved people, and the white supremacist violence that characterized Middle Tennessee after the war. This piece should change how historians use the famous Watkins quotations, both in teaching and public history settings.

Christina Adkins too explores the production of Civil War memory in the 1880s, taking a close look at Mary Chesnut’s changing descriptions of disease, as both metaphor and historical reality. Combining medical and literary history in “Mary Chesnut’s War Fever: Disease in the Civil War Narrative of a Lost Cause Dissenter,” Adkins examines Chesnut’s revisions of her own work based on changing ideas about illness and contagion, and the relationship between her 1880s vision of a diseased Confederacy and many white Southerners’ growing consolidation of the Lost Cause myth.

Mark Boonshoft’s review essay explores the history of schools and education from the antebellum period to the end of the nineteenth century, representing the Civil War as an “inflection point” in an important, but often overlooked field. Boonshoft demonstrates that the history of schooling and education is not only important in its own right but also offers a revealing window into debates about citizenship, democracy, and the state. The piece makes a strong case that the history of education should occupy a central place in our scholarship and teaching of the era.

Our book review section reflects some of the breadth and diversity of the field, as well as the commitment of our editors and reviewers to historical engagement in an extraordinarily challenging time. We are immensely grateful to the associate editors—Hilary Green, Luke Harlow, and Katy Shively—for their steadfast efforts on behalf of the journal, to the book reviewers and peer reviewers who also make the journal possible, and to you, our readers. 

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.

Sarah

Sarah

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The known facts about Sarah’s life begin with one handwritten line in the 1860 U.S. Census. Even this brief individualization represented an anomaly. More than 99 percent of African Americans in Sumter County, Georgia, appeared without names in this simple government spreadsheet that apportioned power in the form of congressional representatives and electoral votes. Sarah was one of only 48 African Americans in the county named in this document by the local farmer and slaveowner who served as the census enumerator that year.[i]

Sarah’s name harkened back to the wife of Abraham in the Book of Genesis and the start of important genealogies for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Born in Georgia about 1835, Sarah may have worked in a house or a kitchen or the cotton fields. The census worker listed her as unmarried; however, this marital status reveals little about her personal life because Georgia did not recognize enslaved unions. Sarah was pregnant though at the beginning of 1860. While the exact circumstances of her pregnancy went unrecorded, it can be inferred that Sarah did not want to bring a child — or perhaps an additional child if she was already a mother — into this world.[ii]

1860 U.S. Census, Mortality Schedule, Sumter County, Georgia.

Sarah lived in southwest Georgia, a remote place with important links to broader histories. In 1864 and 1865, it became infamous for “Camp Sumter,” more commonly known as Andersonville, where 13,000 U.S. soldiers perished for want of shelter, wholesome food, and clean water. In the twentieth century, an interracial Christian commune launched a partnership housing program that became Habitat for Humanity. Jimmy Carter, born in Sumter County, became the first president born in a hospital and the first president from the deep South since before the Civil War. In 1860, though, Sumter County exemplified the “Black Belt” or what W.E.B. Du Bois later called “the shadow of a dream of slave empire” as he narrated his passage through the region. Slavery was more common than freedom here. The county’s enslaved population grew from 29 percent of the total population in 1840 to 52 percent in 1860. The 1840s and 1850s also saw an increase in large plantations. John B. Lamar, the brother-in-law of Howell Cobb who had large plantations across the state, kept 193 enslaved people in Sumter County alone on the eve of the Civil War.[iii]

The number in each county represents the proportion of people who were enslaved. Detail of Edwin Hergesheimer, “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860,” Library of Congress.

Sarah had few choices and these options reflected an important day-to-day fault line under slavery. Slaveowners wanted enslaved women to produce children. Historian Sharla Fett writes that “soundness,” from the perspective of slaveowners, meant “an enslaved person’s overall state of health and, by extension, his or her worth in the marketplace.”[iv] Soundness equated to strength, a clean medical history, a good outward disposition, and for women it included the likelihood of having children. In January 1850, an overseer on John B. Lamar’s plantation in eastern Sumter County, settled his account with Polly Taylor, a local midwife. He paid her $16.50 “for midwife services to Antoinette, Harriet, Marry Ann, Viniy, Nancy Florida, and Fanny.”[v]

Yet try as they might, slaveholders could never turn human beings into the extensions of their will. Contraception and abortion were methods of asserting control over one’s own body even if that body was legally owned by someone else. It could also mean resisting the dehumanization of slavery, including the threat of sexual violence posed by owners and overseers.[vi]

Contraception and abortion became more visible in nineteenth-century America until the Comstock Law of 1873 forbade “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material in the mail and more and more state legislatures criminalized abortion. Yet before the Comstock Law, physicians specializing in abortions and merchants specializing in abortifacient pills made the practice readily available for women with money. By one estimate, and the trustworthiness of these estimates are debatable, there was one abortion for every five or six live births by the 1840s and 1850s.[vii]

The patent medicines advertised in newspapers to produce abortions would have been difficult for Sarah to procure. She and other women relied on medicine practiced by enslaved midwives, root doctors, and herbalists. Enslaved women used cotton root on plantations before apothecaries began selling it as an abortifacient. In 1860, southern white physicians discussed herbal ways that enslaved women were believed to end pregnancies. The plants included tansy and rue as well as the “roots and seeds of the cotton plant, pennyroyal, cedar berries, and camphor.”[viii]

Patterns of miscarriages caught the attention of slaveowners. In 1855, rumors abounded in eastern Sumter County that the cruelty of overseer Stancil Barwick had resulted in enslaved women losing pregnancies in the field. When John B. Lamar asked his overseer for an explanation, Barwick described two recent miscarriages. A woman named Treaty lost a child, but Barwick said he knew nothing about it. He admitted that Louisine, about five-months pregnant, worked in the cotton fields that July, but he asserted “she was workt as she please[d].” In Barwick’s telling, Louisine came to him and told him she was sick. “I told her to go home,” he said. “She started an[d] on the way she miscarried.” Barwick believed enslaved men had spread these rumors to injure his reputation. He gave no outward indication the women intentionally ended their pregnancies, and the ambiguity of miscarriage provided cover for individual decision making.[ix]

1860 U.S. Census, Mortality Schedule, Sumter County, Georgia.

All methods of ending pregnancy — from physical operations to patent medicines and local plants — came with physical dangers that paralleled the risks of carrying a child to term in the nineteenth century. While we do not know how Sarah decided to end her pregnancy, we do know the outcome. According to information her enslaver gave to the U.S. census worker, Sarah died during an abortion in February 1860.

******

As a teacher of public history, I tell students every year about the power of individualizing and localizing “big” history while at the same time contextualizing the lives of everyday people in the past. Sarah was one of 74 deaths reported in Sumter County in the year ending on June 1, 1860. It was far from the only tragedy or the only death that raised more questions than answers. Moreover, like most of the people on the mortality schedule, Sarah has no known, preserved gravestone.

The greatest challenge in writing about Sarah is not how little is known about her. After all, even a name in the 1860 U.S. census set her apart from the vast majority of enslaved people. The challenge is reconstructing the necessary local, regional, and national context without losing—or worse, obscuring—Sarah’s individuality in the process. The risk, though, is worth it because the knowns and unknowns of Sarah’s life and death offer a portal into difficult pasts that resonate far beyond southwest Georgia today.

[i]. 1860 U.S. Census, Sumter County, Georgia, Mortality Schedules, Sarah, pg. 616; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed May 3, 2022); citing NARA microfilm publication T655, roll 224. In addition to the names of 46 enslaved people, Benjamin Tharp recorded the names of two free people of color, Lucy Wilkinson and Jepthah Sheets, 1860 U.S. Census, 17th and 26th Districts, Sumter County, Georgia, dwellings 49 and 63, families 50 and 64, Lucy Wilkinson and Jepthat Sheets, digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed 16 July 2019); citing NARA microfilm publication 653, roll 136.

[ii]. 1860 U.S. Census, Sumter County, Georgia, Mortality Schedules, Sarah, pg. 616; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed May 3, 2022); citing NARA microfilm publication T655, roll 224. In marking the religious symbolism in her name, I am drawing from Marcus Rediker’s similar observation in The Slave Ship, A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), 19–20.

[iii]. Edwin Hergesheimer, “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860,” (Washington, D.C.: Henry S. Graham, 1861), Library of Congress; W. E. Burghardt Du Bois “The Negro as He Really Is: A Definite study of One Locality in Georgia Showing the Exact Conditions of Every Negro Family—Their Economic Status—Their Ownership of Land—Their Morals—Their Family Life—The Houses They Live in and the Results of the Mortgage System,” The World’s Work 2 (May-October 1901), 852; U.S. Federal Census, 1840, 1850, 1860, Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; Michael R. Haines. Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2000; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 22-25.

[iv]. Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations(Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 20.

[v]. Plantation Book, Box 1, John B. Lamar Papers, MS 131, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries, Athens.

[vi]. There is extensive literature on enslaved women and everyday resistance. See, for starters, the classics Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985) and Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

[vii]. Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in 19th Century America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 50. Estimates vary in number and in quality, in part, because of the way they became used as evidence of moral crisis needed greater government regulation in the nineteenth century.

[viii]. Dorothy Sterling, ed., We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton and Norton, 1997), 40.

[ix]. Stancil Barwick to John B. Lamar, July 15, 1855, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed. Plantation and Frontier Documents: 1649–1863, Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial & Ante-Bellum South (3 volumes; Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1909), Vol. 2: 312.

Evan Kutzler

Evan Kutzler is an Associate Professor of U.S. and Public History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and co-author of In Plain Sight: African Americans at Andersonville National Historic Site, A Special History Study (National Park Service, 2020). He worked as a seasonal park ranger at Andersonville in 2015.

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

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As a public historian working in St. Louis, Missouri, I am sometimes asked whether enslaved people living here before the Civil War ran away more frequently than enslaved people in the Deep South. Enslaved St. Louisians had the free state of Illinois across the Mississippi River, after all. While an exact response would be hard to quantify, I am fond of highlighting the story of Mattie J. Jackson as a part of my answer. Born and raised in St. Louis, Jackson wrote about her experiences with slavery in a short autobiography at the age of twenty in 1866. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson is unique in that it documents a traumatic, failed attempt by her family to seek freedom in Illinois. Jackson’s narrative highlights the intimate relationship between anti-slavery and anti-Black sentiment in the North and documents the very real dangers enslaved runaways experienced while traveling through free states (or what historian Dwight Pitcaithley more accurately describes as “non-slave states”).[1] For someone in Jackson’s position, the powerful symbolism of the North Star did not represent a path to freedom.

Title page of slave narrative
Figure 1: Front Cover of The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Photo Courtesy of Documenting the South

Slavery’s defenders in St. Louis faced unique challenges that undermined the security of its peculiar institution. The city was home to roughly 1,500 free Black residents leading up to the Civil War, a group that included a small financially elite network that styled themselves “the Colored Aristocracy.” An informal communications system between free and enslaved Blacks also existed to pass along information and promote education. For example, Mary and John Berry Meachum, leaders within St. Louis’s free Black community, operated schools for both free and enslaved people at First African Baptist Church. St. Louis was also a central destination for enslaved people looking to sue for their freedom. Early in Missouri’s statehood, state law established the concept of “once free, always free,” opening a door for African Americans to use the courts to pursue claims of unlawful enslavement. According to historian Kelly Kennington, 287 freedom suits were filed in the St. Louis County Courthouse (today the Old Courthouse at Gateway Arch National Park) between 1810 and 1860. 110 enslaved people (38 percent) earned their freedom through a successful lawsuit during this time. The city also experienced a major demographic change among its white population. By 1860, a surge of northern- and foreign-born residents in St. Louis led to increasing hostility to slavery’s presence within the city. Only two percent of the city’s population was enslaved by the start of the Civil War.[2]

And yet, slavery remained an important component of St. Louis’s economic life and a form of social control enforced through harsh legislation. After pressure from St. Louis slaveholders, the Missouri General Assembly passed a law banning anyone from teaching an African American—whether free or slave—how to read and write in 1847. Enslaved people in Missouri were banned from getting married, riding public transit without permission, and smoking in public. Other “Black Codes” were enforced in St. Louis that prevented all blacks from making “seditions speeches” or meeting in church without a white observer present. Additionally, all African Americans needed to possess passes while moving in public as well.[3] It was with full sincerity that the famous abolitionist and formerly enslaved St. Louisian William Wells Brown recalled that “though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri . . . no part of our slave-holding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis.”[4]

This was the harsh world that Mattie Jackson’s family hoped to escape. Jackson’s father, Westly Jackson, successfully ran away from St. Louis around 1850 and worked as a preacher in Chicago, but left his wife and two children in the city on a temporary basis. “Two years after my father’s departure, my mother . . . attempted to make her escape” from slavery alongside her children, Jackson recalled. While traveling through Illinois over several days, “we slept in the woods at night. I believe my mother had food to supply us fasted herself.”[5] Trouble loomed in the distance, however.

Jackson noted that the St. Louis newspapers were read by many residents in western Illinois. In publications like the Missouri Republican, advertisements with monetary rewards for capturing enslaved runaways were published on a daily basis. For white Illinoisans who had little regard for African Americans and a desire for cash, the opportunity to serve as a vigilante slave patrol for St. Louis slaveholders was appealing. “The advertisement had reached there before us,” Jackson recalled, “and loafers were already in search of us, and as soon as we were discovered on the brink of the river of the spies made enquiries respecting [our] suspicious appearance.” After their capture, “we were taken back to St. Louis and committed to prison . . . after which they put us in [Bernard] Lynch’s trader’s yard . . . we were then sold to William Lewis.”[6]

Sepia photo of slave pen with men standing outside.
Figure 2: After Jackson and her family were captured in Illinois, they were returned to St. Louis and sold at Bernard Lynch’s “trader’s yard,” which is pictured here during the American Civil War. Ironically, Lynch abandoned St. Louis at the start of the war and his building became a prisoner of war camp for captured Confederates during the war. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society.

The maintenance of slavery in eastern Missouri was highly dependent on not just a tolerance of slavery among Illinois residents, but active involvement through the capture of enslaved runaways. The state government, with strong support from political leaders in western and southern Illinois, went a step further by banning the settlement of free Blacks within the state’s boundaries in 1853. State legislator and future Civil War general John A. Logan was a leading force in getting this legislation passed. During debates he remarked that opponents of the bill were White “abolitionists” anxious to promote racial equality. “I [cannot] understand how it is that men can become so fanatical in their notions as to forget that they are white . . . it has almost become an offense to be a white man,” Logan remarked without a hint of irony.[7] Such attitudes among White Illinoisans were known among Missouri’s enslaved population and would have undoubtedly prevented many of them from taking the same path Jackson’s mother attempted to follow in running away from St. Louis.

Jackson remained in slavery through much of the Civil War, but went on to recall a remarkable irony following the Camp Jackson Affair within the city limits on May 10, 1861. Facing continued abuse from Lewis and recognizing that the she might be able to seek refuge from an increased presence of U.S. troops in the city, Jackson sought protection at the St. Louis Arsenal. She remained at a boarding house for three weeks, but when Lewis tried to sell Jackson and her mother at Lynch’s trader yard, he was promptly detained by the Army and given “one hundred lashes with the cow-hide, so that [the Army] might identify him by a scarred back, as well as his slaves.” While the beginning of the war were considered “days of sadness” for the Lewis family, Jackson fondly recalled them as “days of joy for us. We shouted and laughed to the top of our voices.” Several years later Jackson, with help from sympathetic Army officers, successfully made her way to Indianapolis to enjoy a new life in freedom.[8]

The publication of Jackson’s book in 1866 represents a final insight into her autobiography. In promoting her narrative after the Civil War’s conclusion and the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson served to remind readers of the horrors of slavery at a time when many Americans were anxious to move on from the past. In appealing to readers for donations to help fund her education, Jackson showed that while freedom had been achieved, the path to prosperity during Reconstruction—literacy, education, capital, land, and rights—still lay far in the future despite the recent ratification of the 13th Amendment. Jackson’s unique and courageous story demonstrates how freedom-seeking was a dangerous process that could break up families and ultimately lead to violent punishment and continued enslavement, even when freedom appeared to be staring across the Mississippi River.

 

 

[1] Mattie J. Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Her Parentage—Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery—Incidents During the War—Her Escape from Slavery. A True Story (Lawrence: Sentinel Office, 1866), available online at https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jacksonm/jackson.html; Dwight T. Pitcaithley, The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018).

[2] Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antono F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, Revised Edition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 25-74; Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 198.

[3] “An Act Respecting Slaves, Free Negroes and Mulattoes,” 1847, accessed February 8, 2022. https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/MDH/AnActRespectingSlaves,1847.pdf; Missouri State Archives, “Laws Concerning Slavery in Missouri, Territorial to 1850s,” Missouri State Archives, 2022, accessed February 7, 2022. https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/education/aahi/earlyslavelaws/slavelaws.

[4] William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 27.

[5] Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 4-7.

[6] Ibid, 7.

[7] James Pickett Jones, Black Jack: John A. Logan and Southern Illinois in the Civil War Era, reprint edition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 14-19.

[8] Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 8-11.

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.

Previewing March 2022 JCWE

Previewing March 2022 JCWE

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This issue of the Journal of the Civil War contains three research articles and an historiographic review essay that reflect the field’s increasing geographic and topical breadth. Together they indicate that calls to envision an expansive Civil War Era are being answered in increasingly rich and complex ways, and they suggest that we might turn to analyzing the different ways the Civil War Era is being expanded and the varying implications of those expansions.

Peter Guardino’s “The Constant Recurrence of Such Atrocities: Guerrilla Warfare and Counterinsurgency during the Mexican-American War” analyzes US military responses to guerrilla warfare over the course of the US-Mexico War. Guardino traces how wars against Native Americans shaped early US military actions in northern Mexico and then examines how US commanders made it official policy to attack Mexican civilians as the war moved into central Mexico. This story, important in its own right, also provides a backstory and partial contrast to anti-guerilla campaigns in the US Civil War.

Vanya Eftimova Bellinger looks east to expand our sense of how mid-nineteenth-century Americans understood and changed the laws of war. She argues that the Prussian immigrant Francis Lieber was influenced by Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, first published in the 1830s, but also that Lieber’s time in the United States shaped his thinking about modern war and democracy. What emerged from this mix of European theory and US reality, Bellinger claims, were new and distinctive theories that are best understood when placed in their own historical context.

Heading west, Jonathan Wells’s “Printed Communities: Race, Respectability, and Black Newspapers in the Civil War West,” examines Black editors and journalists in the US West between 1860s and 1880s as they attempted to create a distinct set of western identities for African Americans there, to engage with the complex racial politics of the West, and to construct new models of respectability to fit new spaces.

Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman’s review essay, “Digital History and the Civil War Era,” assesses the ways that transformations in computational methods, tools, and platforms have reshaped representations and analysis of the Civil War Era. Blevins and Hyman show that scholars have made extraordinary use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping and of less-heralded digital systems, and they encourage us all to think more expansively and critically about digital technologies as they reshape historical practices.

This essay’s book reviews once again demonstrate book review editor Kathryn Shively’s extraordinary commitment under unusually challenging publishing circumstances, and also the professionalism and dedication of our colleagues, as scholars continued to produce sharp, informative reviews during the pandemic. 

 

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.

Challenging Exceptionalism: The 1876 Presidential Election, Potter Committee, and European Perceptions

Challenging Exceptionalism: The 1876 Presidential Election, Potter Committee, and European Perceptions

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In May 1878, the House of Representatives appointed Representative Clarkson N. Potter (NY-12) to investigate claims of fraud during the 1876 election. The commission, as Adam Fairclough untangles in his new book, uncovered massive wrongdoing on both sides, including so-called bulldozing by Louisiana Democrats, Republican election theft, and attempts to buy off the individuals in charge of the vote count. Designed to embarrass President Rutherford B. Hayes, Democrats’ efforts backfired as neither side emerged unscathed in the final report.[1] However, this was not the first or the last time elections in the United States were fraught with violence, corruption, and bribery.[2]

Europeans were well-aware of how “democracy” worked in the North American republic. Many, even those who favored electoral reforms, were often torn about using the United States as an example because of that well-known stigma. Nevertheless, and despite its transnational turn, the Civil War has retained an exceptionalist character, even among scholars who wish to internationalize the conflict. The notion that the war, in some form, was to safeguard republicanism continues. As one recent scholar terms it: “Were southern secession to succeed, slavery would be preserved, the republican experiment discredited.”[3] As I have shown elsewhere, Europeans were wary invoking the U.S. experiment when calling for electoral reforms at home.[4] The coverage of the 1876 election and Potter Committee investigation certainly did not aid the standing of the republican experiment’s cause among Europeans. Europeans’ views of the contested Election of 1876 and the Potter Committee further challenge the exceptionalism myth of the United States and the American Civil War as safeguarding republicanism.

Henry Ogden, “Washington, D.C. – The Potter Investigation Committee in Session in the Basement of the Old Capitol,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 22, 1878.

European newspapers always paid close attention to the events in North America, especially U.S. presidential elections. With the transatlantic cable in place, news arrived fast. On November 16, 1876, the Neue Freie Presse, an Austrian newspaper, briefly reported that the election was called in favor of President Hayes, but that both parties had sent influential members to Louisiana to check on the vote counting.[5] Die Presse voiced a similar concern and questioned whether additional scrutiny would reveal serious electoral trickery. Reporting some of the initial issues with the vote, the editors worried of a new civil conflict.[6]

As more detailed news of the elections in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina arrived, the newspapers added their editorial spins. By December, Die Presse expressed its disbelief over the lack of a clear winner. The paper highlighted that the election board in Louisiana had thrown out the democratic election results in eight parishes. Die Presse editors blamed the corruption of the outgoing Grant administration for causing some of the fraudulent activities in Louisiana. The newspaper editors worried that the situation was so tense that any misstep could bring about a dramatic escalation.[7]What message about democratic government did such news send to Austrian readers?

Meanwhile, Das Vaterland ran a lengthy article on the contested election in mid-January. The newspaper also worried that the election could easily result in another civil conflict as the U.S. Constitution offered little guidance for resolving a tie in the electoral college. Explaining the complicated presidential electoral system and the issues of 1876 to its readers, Das Vaterland wondered if the two major political parties could find an agreement as to whose electors would be counted. While remaining hopeful that a peaceful transfer of power was possible, there was an undertone in the article that alluded to the unexpected disaster of the 1860 election.[8] The Austrian media expressed disbelief at what transpired in Louisiana.

The French press did not cover the presidential election in great detail but observed pointedly that the election of 1876 in Louisiana involved, in the words of Le Figaro, “gigantic fraud.” The news coverage also highlighted that the election had involved intimidation and other irregularities.[9]

Among the Austrian and French press, the Potter Committee did not receive extensive coverage, but a few brief mentions did occur. The Wiener Zeitung briefly noted the creation of the Potter Committee and its initial focus on John Sherman and other Republicans associated with Hayes and the election in Louisiana and Florida.[10] The committee was likely to find issues as the Neue Freie Presse reported because recently witnesses had stepped forward who had taken part in the manipulations of the votes. The editors assumed Democrats had reopened the question to benefit their political chances in the upcoming mid-term elections.[11] Austrian readers could read into these brief reports what they wished, but the indication of a fundamental flaw in the U.S. election system was obvious.

The British Press also reported on the Potter Committee and the voting fraud of 1876. The testimony of James E. Anderson drew great interest as he illustrated how much fraud and corruption were part of the Louisiana election and how many influential politicians were involved in the efforts to make Hayes president.[12] However, all these reports were minor in their open criticism of the United States to what the Pall Mall Gazette said.

On September 6, 1880, the Pall Mall Gazette fired a devastating broadside against the U.S. electoral system. (Note that this is after the change of ownership at the Gazette and its new editorial policy aligning closer to the Liberal Party.) In the lead up to the election of 1880, the paper revisited the previous presidential contest and observed that Hayes was the “legally elected” president, but that his election was made possible by fraud. The paper dismissed some reports detailing the intimidation and violence directed at Black voters. At the same time, the editors reminded their readers that both sides in the political contest engaged in significant voter fraud and manipulation. The choice between armed military despotism and fraud was an easy one in the United States—fraud was more agreeable. At the same time, the editors contended that most people did not pay attention or care much about politics. Frequent elections were cited as a cause of the disinterest.

However, the paper offered the clearest indictment of the U.S. political and electoral system. Comparing the United States to Napoleon III’s France, the paper wondered how democratic the United States truly was. Worthy of quoting in full, the British newspaper concluded: “Thus there is the most singular toleration of acknowledged foul play by both the players; and this is all the more noteworthy because communities and Governments, far less scrupulous on the whole, have proved extremely intolerant of electoral fraud. If ever there was a Government which might be supposed capable of it, it was that of the Second French Empire. The Ministers and prefects of Napoleon III did not indeed neglect some American precedents; to use the American phrase, they often ‘gerrymandered’ the constituencies by grouping them so as to produce a favorable result; but they never ventured to tamper with the ballot-box.”[13] In other words, even the often vilified Emperor Napoleon III did not engage in activities done by U.S. politicians. Nor did he, as Louisiana politicians in 1876, outright manipulate the vote. How could the United States be an example for democratic elections if it did not respect the voice of the voters?

While some exceptionalist-minded scholars continue to view the victory of the United States and its political system in the American Civil War as one safeguarding democracy and republicanism, the reality was very different. For the surveyed European newspaper editors, the United States contributed to that reality. The many reports of fraud, violence, and corruption of antebellum elections had already made the United States a less than desirable example for those wishing to bring about democratic reforms. The coverage of the 1876 election and Potter Committee, even if limited, drove further home that very point. How much would anybody wish to mimic a system where violence, intimidation, corruption, and the political wishes of a few people could turn the ballot voice of voters around? And as the Pall Mall Gazette observes, if the villain of some U.S. scholarship, Napoleon III, did not even engage in such outright voter fraud as practiced in Louisiana, how much can we truly view the United States as the beacon of republicanism everybody looked up to, especially after the Civil War?

 

[1] Adam Fairclough, Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Election of 1876 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021).

[2] Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004).

[3] Joseph A. Fry, Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relation in the Civil War Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), 188.

[4] Niels Eichhorn, “Democracy: The Civil War and the Transnational Struggle for Electoral Reform,” American Nineteenth Century History 20 (2019): 293-313.

[5] Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), November 16, 1876.

[6] Die Presse (Vienna), November 20, 1876.

[7] Die Presse (Vienna), December 3, 1876.

[8] Das Vaterland (Vienna), January 17, 1877.

[9] Le Figaro (Paris), December 29, 1876.

[10] Wiener Zeitung (Vienna), May 14, 1878.

[11] Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), May 17, 1878.

[12] “The American Election Frauds,” The Freeman’s Journal, June 17, 1878; “The Election Frauds in America,” Birmingham Daily Post, June 11, 1878; “The Alleged Electoral Frauds in America,” Daily News, June 27, 1878. Special thanks to John Legg for helping me locate British newspaper sources for this project.

[13] The Pall Mall Gazette (London), September 6, 1880.

 

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.

Hollywood Has Yet to Capture the Relationship that Developed between African Americans and Lincoln

Hollywood Has Yet to Capture the Relationship that Developed between African Americans and Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln has been featured in movies since the dawn of cinema, but it’s only been in recent years that his connection with African Americans has gained significant attention. Released in 2012, two films highlighted the role of Black men and women in the Lincoln White House. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter included a childhood friend named William Johnson (played by Curtis Harris) who was sold into slavery, escaped, and grew up to serve as one of Lincoln’s closest presidential advisors. Although wholly fictionalized in the film, William H. Johnson was a real figure in Lincoln’s adult life—a valet and barber who served Lincoln in both Springfield, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.

Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning Lincoln also featured two important Black figures—William Slade (played by Stephen Henderson) and Elizabeth Keckley (played by Gloria Reuben). As the president’s usher and valet, Slade had great responsibility in the Executive Mansion. He managed the other servants and attended to the president’s needs. (Slade also had the unenviable task of preparing Lincoln’s body to be placed in the coffin in April 1865.) According to Slade’s daughter, the president regularly discussed his speeches and political decisions with Slade. She even claimed that by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was released her father “already knew every word of it.” Slade also had important public roles in wartime Washington. He was active in several Black social and political organizations, was an elder at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and was a leader in the African American community in Washington when it came to military recruitment.[1]

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Keckley, the most famous African American woman in the Lincoln White House, served as Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and modiste. Born to an enslaved mother and a white planter in Virginia in 1818, Keckley’s life in bondage was one of grit, suffering, and endurance. As a teenager she was sent to North Carolina, where she was severely beaten. For four years she was raped by “a white man” who had “base designs upon me” and “persecuted me . . . and I—I—became a mother.”[2] (Her son would later die as a soldier in the Union army.) Eventually, in 1855, she was able to purchase her own freedom.

Keckley moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a dressmaker for prominent women of the city, including Varina Davis. In 1861 Mary Lincoln hired her and the two developed a close friendship. In fact, Keckley was present for some of the most painful and moving scenes in the Executive Mansion, including the death of Willie Lincoln in February 1862. She was also active in raising funds for former slaves who had been displaced by the friction and abrasion of the war. In the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, Keckley remained a close confidant of the widow. Abolitionist Julia Wilbur wrote in her diary, “Mrs. Slade & Mrs. Keckley have been with Mrs. Lincoln nearly all the time since the murder, not as servants but as friends. Both colored women; & Mrs. Lincoln said she chose them because her husband was appreciated by the colored race; they (the colored people) understood him.”[3] In 1868 Keckly published a now-celebrated memoir, Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. The revelatory nature of the book infuriated Mary Lincoln and created a permanent schism between the two women.

In the Spielberg film, Keckly and Slade make several appearances. In Slade’s most poignant scene, young Tad Lincoln looks at a photograph of a slave who has been beaten severely. Tad asks his father, “Why do some slaves cost more than others?” Tad’s older brother Robert replies that a slave’s value is related to his or her age and health, or whether a woman can conceive. Lincoln tells Tad to put the images back into the box. Tad then turns to Slade and asks innocently, “When you were a slave, Mr. Slade, did they beat you?” Slade replies with a smile, “I was born a free man. Nobody beat me except I beat them right back.” Keckly then enters the room and Slade says to Tad, “Mrs. Keckly was a slave. Ask her if she was beaten.” “Were you?” Tad asks, as his father shakes his head. “I was beaten with a fire shovel when I was younger than you,” she replies.

Title page of Behind The Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley.

In another pivotal scene, Keckley thanks Lincoln for all he is doing to get the 13th Amendment passed in the House of Representatives. “Thank you for your concern over this,” she says. “And I want you to know they’ll approve it. God will see to it.” Lincoln replies with wry humor: “I don’t envy him his task.”

After a few more words pass between them, Lincoln asks the seamstress, “Are you afraid of what lies ahead for your people? If we succeed?”

Keckley replies, “White people don’t want us here.” (This is an allusion to colonization, a scheme supported by many whites—including Lincoln until 1863 or 1864—to send freedpeople to Africa or other parts of the world.)

“Many don’t,” Lincoln concedes.

“What about you?” she asks.

Lincoln pauses. “I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley. Any of you. You’re familiar to me, as all people are. Unaccommodated, poor, bare, forked creatures such as we all are. You have a right to expect what I expect, and likely our expectations are not incomprehensible to each other. I assume I’ll get used to you.” Lincoln then continues, “What you are to the nation—what will become of you once slavery’s day is done, I don’t know.”

With dignity in her voice, Keckley replies: “What my people are to be I can’t say. I never heard any ask what freedom would bring. Freedom’s first. As for me, my son died fighting for the Union. Wearing the Union blue. For freedom he died. And I am his mother. That’s what I am to the nation, Mr. Lincoln. What else must I be?”

Spielberg’s inclusion of Keckley and Slade in Lincoln was essential for capturing the White House as it was in Lincoln’s day. But they were far from the only African Americans to enter the White House during the period covered in the film.[4] Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin R. Delany visited the White House during the period covered by the film. So did a number of other African Americans whose names have since been lost to history.

In fact, African Americans visited the White House in significant numbers between 1862 and 1865. The filmmakers’ decisions to focus only on White House staff missed a much bigger story. And the line that Spielberg’s Lincoln says to Keckley—“I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley. Any of you.”—ignores the relationship that developed between the sixteenth president and African Americans during the Civil War.

During the Lincoln Administration, hundreds of African Americans boldly walked through the White House doors for private meetings and public receptions—claiming “the People’s House” as their house, and the president as their president. This was a significant shift in American race relations. Prior to the Civil War, African Americans were more likely to be bought and sold by a sitting president than to be welcomed as his guests. But wartime Washington experienced a shock to the norm.

Black men and women came to the White House for a variety of reasons. Some merely wished to see the president, or to thank him. A few even brought him gifts. But others had larger objects in mind. In 1862, for example, Robert Smalls pushed Lincoln to enlist black men into the Union army. In 1863, Frederick Douglass strongly encouraged the president to ensure that U.S. Colored Troops received the same treatment as white soldiers. And in 1864, at least three delegations of Black southerners urged Lincoln to support Black male suffrage. One of these visitors, Rev. Richard H. Parker of Norfolk, Virginia, later recalled: “I knew [as] soon as I heard that man speak, and saw his kind face, that he would be a good friend to my people; and I’ve never had cause to change my mind.” Parker then said that he went “home contented, with a full heart.”[5]

Personal interactions with African Americans changed Lincoln’s views on several important policy matters. Shortly after meeting with Robert Smalls, for example, Lincoln came to support the enlistment of African American soldiers. The southern delegations’ push for voting rights also helped shape Lincoln’s thinking on that matter. Lincoln’s many personal interactions with African Americans in wartime Washington have been largely forgotten, but they are stories that should be better known—and that could be told in compelling ways on the big screen. For three years African Americans and Abraham Lincoln worked together to make strides for equality, to quote First Lady Michelle Obama, “in a house that was built by slaves.”

[1] John E. Washington, They Knew Lincoln (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1942), 105-117; Natalie Sweet, “A Representative ‘of Our People’: The Agency of William Slade, Leader in the African American Community and Usher to Abraham Lincoln,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 34 (Summer 2013): 21-41.

[2] Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1868), 36-39.

[3]Julia Wilbur, diary entry for April 20, 1865, Haverford College, Quaker and Special Collections (transcriptions by Alexandria Archaeology).

[4] Gary L. Flowers, executive director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, also made this point in “‘Lincoln’: What’s Missing from this Movie?” Philadelphia Tribune, November 30, 2012.

[5] H. C. Percy, “Father Parker,” American Missionary 12 (August 1868): 169-72.

Jonathan W. White

Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and author or editor of 13 books, including A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022) and To Address You As My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln (2021). Follow him on Twitter at @CivilWarJon.

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