Earlier this summer, after a decades-long fight that gained traction over the past four years, the city of Charlottesville finally removed its infamous statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. In doing so, Charlottesville joined the ranks of cities like New Orleans, Baltimore, and Richmond, southern cities that have removed their Confederate monuments in the last decade.[1] When his city began its monument removal, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney noted that statues of Confederate soldiers and leaders create a false history of the Civil War and its aftermath by honoring men who committed treason: “It’s the fake news of their time.”[2] Fake news has been inherent to the Lost Cause narrative since its inception, employed to justify the construction of Confederate statues and the deification of Confederates across the country. It has also played a key role in the history of another, often overlooked, variety of Confederate monument: captured Confederate flags.
Removal of Richmond’s Robert E. Lee Statue, September 2021 (NPR)
During the Civil War, Federal regiments captured and brought home hundreds of Confederate battle flags. Some are maintained by Northern states to this day, which has made them a unique type of monument. Minnesota, for example, famously refuses to return a flag captured from the 28th Virginia Infantry at Gettysburg, creating a strange situation in which a northern state owns, and has occasionally displayed, a Confederate banner. In the immediate aftermath of the war, little attention was paid to these trophies. Indeed, some captured flags vanish from the historical record almost immediately after their capture. By the 1880s, however, as the nation emerged from Reconstruction, some legislators began to understand the symbolic significance of flag returns and, by the end of the decade, it was a controversy making headlines across the country. The heart of the conflict was a 1887 Executive Order issued by President Grover Cleveland that mandated battle flags held in federal custody be returned to the states from which they originated. In theory, returning captured flags would strike a reconciliatory tone, signaling to both sides that wartime was over. In practice, it was met with near-universal disdain. Northerners saw it as a cowardly concession to a South they had not yet forgiven; ex-Confederates considered it an insult, a political misstep, or simply an empty gesture.[3]
Then, as now, high tempers led to reckless journalism. Both Southerners who wanted their flags back and Northerners who vehemently opposed the idea claimed the endorsement of a particularly polarizing figure: Jefferson Davis. Soon after the original order was issued by the Cleveland administration, the New York Sun reported on a letter allegedly sent by Davis in which he argued that “the order of the War Department to return the captured flags to the late Confederate states was a violation of all known military precedents,” and went on to say that the flags should be returned to the states that captured them.[4] This was a fairly radical stance for an ex-Confederate to take; even most conservative Southern newspapers had admitted to wanting the flags back if they could get them. For Davis to come forward with the notion that the captured flags belonged to the victors was news indeed. There was only one problem: the letter was fake news.
From the beginning, there was some doubt as to its authenticity. One Minnesota newspaper ran the letter with a note stating, “it may be that the above letter is not authentic.”[5] Soon, the public caught on to the fabrication, and Southerners were, predictably, outraged. The Staunton Spectator wrote that “such conduct is unpardonable,” and, a few days later, published a Davis letter of its own.[6] In that letter—which was also carried by the Sun—Davis wrote that “to retain as a point of pride a flag captured in battle by either the Union or Confederate soldiers would be equivalent to renewed exultation of triumph by one or the other, and surely not a step toward the restoration of peace.”[7] Davis, echoing other Southern papers, noted that the South had not requested the return of the flags, but still saw the gesture as one of goodwill and reconciliation, a potential recognition of the “nobility” of the Confederate cause.
The fact that both factions sought to claim Davis’ endorsement displays the extent to which he still held political and cultural power, twenty years after the end of his administration. If the first letter was the truth—if Davis did believe that the flags should remain with their captors—then Northern claims were vindicated. If even the president of the Confederacy admitted that the North had a legitimate right to the flags, then Northern claims of virtue gained considerable momentum. It would be a ratification of Northern nobility from the heart of the Confederacy, an endorsement of what Robert Penn Warren dubbed the “Treasury of Virtue,” the North’s self-imposed sense of righteousness that made them the guardians of national morality.[8] On the other hand, if Davis believed the flags should be returned, then the reconciliation gained ground. According to their very own Jefferson Davis, the ex-Confederates were loyal Americans, and the Northerners were standing on a soapbox condescending to them rather than getting on with rebuilding a nation.
The two sides of the Jefferson Davis incident are the same two sides that exist in contemporary monument debates. On one hand are certain, mostly white, Southerners who want their flags flown and their statues erected as monuments to their heritage. On the other side are those who feel that monuments to such people represent a deification of the values for which they fought. This is still the great underlying truth of Confederate flag debates: Neoconfederates see Northerners as patronizing, hypocritical outsiders who don’t respect their heritage, and many Northerners see the pro-flag faction as backwards, ignorant, and racist —in large part because the flag stood for, and still stands for, treason and white supremacy. Each side feels misunderstood, misheard, and mistreated, contributing to the cyclical nature of these conflicts. For the most part, neither side is particularly interested in exploring the fundamental racial aspects of the conflict; instead, it is purported to be entirely a question of heritage and memory. Our contemporary debates about Confederate monuments, whether they are statues in Charlottesville or flags tucked away in a Minnesota archive, are not, ultimately, very different from the debates of over a century ago.
First Minnesota Volunteers (Minnesota Historical Society)
Every few years, the state of Virginia asks the state of Minnesota to please return that Confederate flag, the one that the Minnesotans captured at Gettysburg in 1863. Minnesota, so far, has never shown any interest in doing so.[9] The flag was captured on the third day of the battle by the Minnesota First, a regiment that had, the day before, suffered extreme casualties in a near-suicidal charge to hold the Union line. According to some accounts, the regiment saved the battle, and the Union.[10] Today, the flag is imbued with a new mythology, one of Union heroism and Minnesotan sacrifice, and the state is determined to hold on to its trophy. In 2000, responding to a request to return the flag, Governor Jesse Ventura summed up the state’s policy quite succinctly: “Absolutely not. Why? I mean, we won.”[11]
[1] David Mistich, “After Removing Two Confederate Statues, Charlottesville Officials Vote to Take Down a Third,” NPR (July 10, 2021).
[2]“The History and Future of Confederate Monuments,” CBS News (July 12, 2020).
[3] Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 225.
[4] “A Letter From Jeff Davis,” The Sun (June 24, 1887). Library of Congress.
[5] “Jefferson Davis: An Alleged Letter From the Ex-Confederate Chief,” St. Paul Daily Globe (June 24, 1887). Library of Congress.
[6] “A Forged Letter Purporting to be Written By Jefferson Davis,” The Staunton Spectator (June 29, 1887). Library of Congress.
[7] “Mr. Davis on the Flags,” The Staunton Spectator (July 6, 1887). Library of Congress.
[8] Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1960), 59.
[9] Kathy Sawyer, “Capture the Flag,” The Washington Post (April 23, 2000).
[10] Richard Moe, The Last Full Measure (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc, 1993), 29.
[11]“Ventura Won’t Give Flag Back to Virginia,” Chicago Tribune (Feb. 29, 2000).
Maria DiStefano is a student of American history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is particularly interested in the intersection of history, memory, and education systems.
On September 19, 2021, Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Paul Ratje published vivid images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback forcefully corralling Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas. When the images spread on social and news media, with commentators spotlighting the swinging leather strap in one agent’s hand, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas promised his office would respond with “tremendous speed and tremendous force.” President Joe Biden offered his own public condemnation: “It’s outrageous. I promise you those people will pay. They will be investigated. There will be consequences.”[1]
Historians have been quick to highlight the striking similarities between the images captured by the AFP photographer and those vividly painted in the testimonies of Black people enslaved in the 19th-century United States. For some, the images conjured up the mounted, whip-wielding “patter rollers,” who struck fear into the hearts of the enslaved, especially those who grew old enough to share their personal narratives to New Deal program journalists during the mid-to-late 1930s.[2] Of all the memories that endured the test of time, those of slave patroller violence – usually forged during childhood – remained poignant. As Green Cumby remembered, “If de patter rolls cotch you without de pass…, you better wish you dead, ‘cause you would have yourself some trouble.”[3]
Photo of Sam Jones Washington, 1937. Washington was another former slave who highlighted the terror of slave patrollers in his testimony to a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Del Rio images do more, however, than provoke the mid-19th-century terrorism of enslavers and enslaver-proxies in their quest to immobilize and subordinate enslaved Black communities across the U.S. South. Perhaps more directly, the photographs remind us of the long, varied history of Black border crossing to and from Texas. The Haitian migrants are by no means the first Black refugees to seek solace beyond the border, and their crossings certainly were not the first to unsettle government officials. Since at least the 18th-century, Black border traversing in Texas has confounded state-building efforts, exposing both the ongoing violence of colonial (and postcolonial) communities and the inevitable porosity of imperial and national boundaries.[4]
Some of the earliest instances of Black border crossing likely occurred during the middle part of the 18th century, as far back as 1751, when Spanish officials contemplated the policy of liberating Black fugitives who escaped to Texas from French Louisiana.[5] At the time, Spanish Texas was more a place of imperial instability than an obvious refuge for escapees, as both ambiguous colonial policy and the pronounced influence of Indigenous communities mitigated coordinated slave catching or extradition. Within this context, fugitive esclavos were resourceful and adept. Whether they sought sanctuary among the Texas missionaries or banded together on their own in the woods, their efforts drove yet another wedge into Spanish-French relations. Their border traversing stalled bureaucrats, frustrated colonial governors, and offered them at least a measure of relief from direct enslaver violence.[6]
In the decades that followed, after France ceded their Louisiana possessions to Spain, the imperial borders between the territories blurred. This may have streamlined extradition processes for Spanish officials and enslavers, but Black fugitivity persisted nonetheless.[7] When Louisiana switched colonial monikers yet again – from Spanish to French and finally to American – at the start of the 19th century, the imaginary borders of empires and nation-states became as untenable as ever. Populations rapidly increased. Communities moved and consolidated. Production accelerated. Goods flowed as never before. Inter- and intra-community violence abounded. And enslaved Black people took advantage.[8] Even when Black freedom became as tenuous and uncertain as it had ever been in the borderlands – amid the mid-1830s Anglo-American slaveholder-led rebellion against Mexico – Black fugitives found ways to disrupt the prerogatives of their enslavers, enslaver-proxies, and sympathetic Mexican officials alike.[9]
By the mid-19th century, Black fugitivity and border traversing had become a scourge to Anglo-American Texas, the obvious limits of enslaver authority.[10] “All we had to do was walk,… and we’d be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande,” Felix Haywood explained during the 1930s. “In Mexico you could be free.”[11] Contemporaries claimed that the number of Black escapees to Mexico from the United States reached into the several thousand.[12] The fact that some Black fugitives collaborated with displaced Mexican peones – border interlopers in their own right – only heightened the danger they posed to an ordered, White supremacist society.[13] Naturally, enslavers and their allies responded by violating the supposed “sanctity” of the U.S.-Mexico border to re-enslave their runaway property. In one of the more infamous border-traversing incidents of the era, James Calhoun Callahan marched across the Río Grande with over 100 men to attack a well-known Black settlement, fought back a defensive force of 200 Mexican servicemen and their Native allies, and occupied the town of Piedras Negras, another home to Black escapees. Although Callahan and his men were largely unsuccessful in their slave-hunting operations, before returning to Texas they set Piedras Negras ablaze, devastating the prominent Black refuge. The 1855 Callahan expedition, conducted without official sanction, was ostensibly a retaliatory mission against resistant Lipan-Apaches – who were border traversers themselves – but the implications and message of his invasion and other slave-hunting activities were clear: only certain kinds of border crossings, by specific kinds of people, were permissible and righteous.[14] By the 1860s, the inability of U.S. federal forces to halt the flow of Black bodies beyond their frontiers was yet another reason the (slave) State of Texas rejected the Union.[15]
C.E. Bonwill, “Our Mexican frontier – cotton press at Piedras Negras, on the Rio Grande, the centre of the rebel trade,” 1864. Piedras Negras was a key node in the Black freedom network in Mexico during the first half of the 19th century. During the U.S. Civil War, Confederates used the town to traffic cotton across the border to maintain the lucrative, slavery-based trade, despite the Union naval blockade. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Today, the impetus for Haitian border crossing lies more in structural disparities, globally instituted neoliberal policies, and persistent anti-Black racism rather than immediate escape from the personal violence and exploitation of White supremacist enslavers.[16] Haiti’s existence, of course, stands as a monument, albeit an imperfect one, to slave resistance, and it would be grossly disingenuous to suggest that the struggles the Haitian people face in the 21st century, in Haiti itself or at the U.S.-Mexico border, have nothing to do with Haiti’s 300-year history of anti-Black slavery. But there’s no need to elaborate those connections here. U.S. Border Patrol agent responses to Haitian border traversing draw as much from a long internal history as from a foreign one. State borders, whether they be national or colonial, exist not as static demarcations of territorial boundaries but as articulations of power. The terms of border crossing – who can cross, when, and how – are historical; they reflect the changing imperatives of those in power, as well as the challenges they face to maintain it. Sometimes, those challenges are a necessary path to an elusive freedom.
[3] Testimony of Green Cumby, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Typewritten Records Prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, Assembled by the Library of Congress Project Work Projects Administration for the District of Columbia Sponsored by the Library of Congress (Washington, 1941), “Texas Narratives,” Volume XVI, Part 1, 260. For all of the published narratives, see https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/.
[4] On the porosity of borders, see, for example, Jorge Bustamante, “Demystifying the United States-Mexico Border,” Journal of American History, Vol 79 (1992): 485-90.
[5] Ultimately, a Spanish war council argued that the policy, advocated by the Texas governor in 1751, was not “advisable, honest, or decorous… as this would serve to incite the anger of the French and to provoke… war.” Proceedings of the Junta de Guerra y Hacienda, January 21 and 22, 1754, Bexar Archives Online, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, https://briscoecenter.org/projects/bexar-archives-online/.
[6] The Spanish Royal Decree of September 24, 1750, for instance, promised liberation of fugitives from Protestant empires, but local officials still felt bound to established extradition law, especially when the “offender” moved from Catholic empire to Catholic empire. Opinion of the Marqués de Aranda, April 5, 1758, Bexar Archives Online; Bram Hoonhout and Thomas Mareite, “Freedom at the Fringes? Slave Flight and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Spanish Borderlands of Essequibo-Venezuela and Louisiana-Texas,” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2019): 62, 71; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 148.
[7] See, for instance, Luis de Blanc to Manuel Múñoz, April 26, 1793, Bexar Archives Online. For an astute discussion of Black fugitivity and “the unpredictable movement of Black bodies,” see Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 108-24.
[8] On the economic and demographic changes of the period, see Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51, 70-73, 93-123; Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformations of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 28, 35-36; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 144-51; John Craig Hammon, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 2012): 175-206. On the violence of the era, see Folsom, Arredondo, 69-76, 87-94; Donald E. Chipman and Harriett Denise Joseph, Spanish Texas: 1519-1821, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 246-52;Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706-1875 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 155-58.For examples of Black fugitivity in the early 19th century, see: Nemesio Salcedo to José de Yturrigaray, January 23, 1805, Bexar Archives Online; Dionisio Valle to Juan Bautista de Elguézabal, September 19, 1805, Nemesio Salcedo to Manuel Antonio Cordero, November 4, 1805, August 14, 1806, and July 6, 1807, Francisco Viana to Manuel Antonio Cordero, July 29, August 12, September 10, and October 11, 1807, and May 1, 1808, Testimonies of fugitive negros Juan Luis, Margarita, Luis, Narciso, Ambrosio, Luis, and Perri, January 21, 1808, all in Bexar Archives Manuscripts, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Hoonhout and Mareite, “Freedom at the Fringes?,” 73-77; James David Nichols, The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-Mexico Border (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 58-67.
[9] Max Floman, “The Long War for Texas: Maroons, Renegades, Warriors, and Alternative Emancipations in the Southwest Borderlands, 1835-1845,” The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Mar. 2021): 40-42.
[10] Alice L. Baumgartner (South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War [New York: Basic Books, 2020]) even argues that Black border crossing in Texas contributed to the sectionalism that led to the U.S. Civil War. Also see Nichols, The Limits of Liberty, 118-22, 134-43, 155-61; Sean M. Kelley, “‘Mexico in His Head’: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring, 2004): 709-23.
[11] Testimony of Felix Haywood, FWP “Texas Narratives,” Part 2, 132.
[12] Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier: With a Statistical Appendix (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857), 323-25; The Texas State Times (Austin), June 2, 1855.
[13]Texas State Gazette (Austin), September 2, 9, 23, and October 14, 1854, and December 12, 1857; Standard (Clarksville), September 9, and October 21, 1854; Nichols, The Limits of Liberty, 162; Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham: Duke University, 2013), 185
[14] Ronnie C. Tyler, “The Callahan Expedition of 1855: Indians or Negroes?,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Apr., 1967): 574-85; Nichols, The Limits of Liberty, 170-88, 196-201; Baumgartner, South to Freedom,212-13. For other (including Hispanic) slave-hunting efforts along the border, see Jerry Thompson, Tejano Tiger: José de los Santos Benavides and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891 (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2017), 74-75.
[15] This was articulated at the 1861 Texas Secession Convention. William Winkler, ed., Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861 (Austin: Austin Printing Company, 1912) 34, 62-64. After the war, many defeated White Southerners believed their sanctuary lay south of the border. See Todd Wahlstrom, The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).
Paul Barba is an assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2016. His first book project, tentatively titled Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands, tracks and analyzes the multiple forms of slaving violence that emerged, dominated, and intersected throughout Texas from the early eighteenth century into the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is currently under contract with the University of Nebraska Press. Prior to Bucknell, Dr. Barba served as a managing editor at the Journal of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos.
Today’s political discourse includes frequent talk of “fake news” (a term which seems to only occasionally mean actual trickery rather than simply unfavorable reporting). Meanwhile, partisan political concerns sometimes seem thick with racial hostility, appealing to voters’ irrational fears. None of this is new. During the Civil War a handful of efforts turned “fake news” into an art form and many partisan combatants proved shameless in appealing to white racism.
Near the close of 1863, as the two major parties were gearing up for the presidential election the following year, two journalists for the Democratic New York World concocted a bizarre and creative scheme. Shortly after the start of the new year, David Croly and George Wakeman anonymously published an ambitious 71-page pamphlet, entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White man and Negro. Pretending to be a complex scientific treatise, Miscegenation described an idealized future where Blacks and Whites would intermingle without limitations, including unrestrained sexual relations across racial lines.[1]
The clever journalists – who even coined the word “miscegenation” for posterity – played a complex game. They hoped to convince White readers that abolitionist Republicans supported the pamphlet’s notions, even adding an Appendix with quotations from actual abolitionists, implying that those leaders had endorsed miscegenation. Binding their words directly to the upcoming election, Croly and Wakeman concluded that “whereas, the result of the last Presidential election [1860] has given the colored race on this continent its freedom, the next Presidential election should secure to every black man and woman the rest of their social and political rights.” Thus, a vote for Abraham Lincoln would be a vote for pure racial equality and enfettered racial intermingling.[2] This rather brilliant piece of “fake news” attracted some attention in the national press and scored a huge victory for the forces of fraud when Ohio Democrat Sunset Cox – taken in by the fakery – delivered a speech before the House of Representatives denouncing the pamphlet.
Miscegenation constituted pure political trickery, engineered around an assumption about northern voters. Whatever northerners felt about the institution of slavery, Croly and Wakeman gambled that readers would recoil at the notion that Republicans envisioned a world of unrestricted racial integration.
G.W. Bromley & Co, and Kimmel & Forster. Political caricature. No. 4, The miscegenation ball. New York City New York, 1864. Photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2008661682/.
That September, with the election around the corner, New York’s Republicans gathered for a gala ball at the Lincoln Central Campaign Club. Immediately thereafter, the World – New York’s loudest opposition newspaper – published and distributed a large lithograph called “The Miscegenation Ball.” That image portrayed a sea of well-dressed dancing couples at the September 22nd event, with a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln overlooking the proceedings. A banner declaring, “Universal Freedom / One Constitution / Our Destiny/ Abraham Lincoln, Prest” filled an upper corner of the image. But the frolicking dancers crowding the dance floor dominated the lithograph. All the men were White, and all their happy partners were Black women. A lengthy (thoroughly dishonest) caption explained that this was an accurate portrayal of the September 22 Republican event. Both the World and the New York’s Journal of Commerce regaled their readers with fake tales of the bawdy interracial ball; Democratic newspapers across the nation reprinted versions of these stories, sometimes referring to the lithograph.[3]
Both examples of “fake news” in the run-up to the 1864 election played on northerners’ fears of the inclusion of Black women and men into their homogenous societies. Neither the lithograph or the pamphlet described real Republican ideas or actual events. But the gamble by these political operatives was that they could stoke irrational fears about race in white voters even while presenting complete illusions.
[1] David G. Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton & co., 1864).
[3] Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 71-3, citing New York World, September 23, 26, 27, 28; New York Weekly Day Book, October 1, 8, 1864; Albany Atlas and Argus, October 1, 1864; Columbus Ohio Statesman, September 28, 1864, Wheeling (WV) Daily Register. September 29, 1864.
Now that a brigade of Confederate commanders has been hauled down from their pedestals, there’s scant consensus about what should take their place.
In Richmond, Virginia, monumentalizing social justice activists is all the talk. Kentucky leans toward a rotating cast of deserving figures from across the spectrum.[1]
But in my adopted home of New Orleans, the tide has been running strong in favor of memorializing local worthies in the fields of music and cuisine. They unite instead rather than divide us. In these toxic times that’s all to the good. A similar spirit seems at work elsewhere.
But in our haste to retire symbolic tributes to the Lost Cause are we running the risk of silencing the Civil War? It would be a travesty if such was the case. The Civil War is the American Iliad, as essential as the Revolution to an understanding of how the country became itself. It was when the United States experienced a new birth of freedom, when the frontiers of citizenship were expanded, and the country finally made up its mind that it was a unum rather than a pluribus.
Moreover, as David Blight has reminded us, before the subject of slavery and emancipation got sacrificed on the altar of sectional reconciliation in the waning years of the nineteenth century, the Civil War was chiefly remembered as an emancipationist narrative, not a paean to the Lost Cause. So, we should be leaning into this memory rather than shying from it—now more than ever.[2]
It is not the place of historians to dictate who deserves memorialization in the public square. That’s a decision best left to the democratic process where communities and elected officials make such determinations. All we can do is suggest deserving candidates. They are not hard to locate, not even in the old Confederacy.
But, for my money, André Cailloux, a Black captain of infantry in the U. S. Army, belongs at the head of the class. He was killed on May 27, 1863, leading a foredoomed assault against impregnable Confederate works at Port Hudson, Louisiana, just upriver from Baton Rouge.
There was a time when Cailloux was nationally hailed and locally canonized. His New Orleans funeral had the feel of a massive civil rights protest, perhaps the largest the country had ever seen to that point in time, according to his biographer Stephen J. Ochs. For more than a mile, on a sweltering day in late July 1863, Black New Orleanians thronged Esplanade Avenue under a cloudless sky to witness the funeral cortege carrying Cailloux’s remains to the Bienville Street cemetery. Over thirty Black mutual aid societies joined the procession.[3]
“Funeral of the Late Captain Cailloux, First Louisiana Volunteers (Colored),” Harper’s Weekly, August 29, 1863, 549.
In the words of Ochs, it was a heartfelt tribute to the “first black warrior-hero in the Civil War.” Cailloux could lay claim to other important firsts: in September 1862, his commission as one of the first Black officers in the history of the United States Army. But it was his outsize role in the first significant battle in which Black soldiers went on the offensive that truly sets him apart. It is what makes him not just a Black hero, but an American hero, indeed, a saved-the-country hero and thus worthy of the highest honor accorded members of the armed forces, then and now.
In a year filled with momentous tipping points—a federal victory at Gettysburg; the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson and the opening of the Mississippi to Union control—Cailloux’s valor, and that of the Black troops he led in battle, electrified northern opinion and gave federal race policy a strong jolt.
Before Port Hudson, Black soldiers were recruited grudgingly and routinely sidelined digging trenches and latrines. It was said that they weren’t manly, that they would cut and run when the fighting got hot. It was a lie. On numerous occasions they repelled Confederate surprise attacks. But that was while fighting for their lives on defense, so the libel lived on. What happened that May morning on one of the Mississippi’s signature hairpin turns vanquished the slander. The mobilization of Black soldiers shifted into a different gear. They weren’t universally sidelined guarding railroad spurs any longer. Growing numbers saw front line combat.[4]
This turn in federal policy had huge consequences. Frederick Douglass, a tireless advocate of the recruitment of Black soldiers, saw them more clearly than anyone: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”[5]
In this great drama—which witnessed nothing less than the transformation of a War for Union into a War for Freedom—the significance of Captain André Cailloux’s last full measure would be hard to overstate.
******
He was born enslaved in 1825 in the downriver parish of Plaquemines, gaining his freedom in Orleans parish in 1846 (probably through self-purchase). The following year Cailloux married another ex-slave in a German Catholic church, then bought his mother out of slavery the year after that. Within New Orleans’s tightly knit community of French-speaking free people of color (gens de couleur libres), he quickly made a name for himself. Most had been born free. Four-fifths were of mixed-racial ancestry and lightly complected. Cailloux was neither. He boasted of being “the blackest man in New Orleans.” He entered one of the three artisan trades in which the city’s free men of color were dominant—cigarmaking. Cailloux was athletic, sat a horse well, could hold his own in the ring. He had a reputation for boldness and daring. Before the war his peers elected him an officer in one of New Orleans’s numerous mutual aid and burial societies, the Friends of Order.[6]
Then the Civil War came and we find him in the vanguard of the free black community’s drive to revive a tradition of military service dating as far back as the early years of French colonialism. In 1861, Black militiamen even became part of the local home guard under the aegis of Louisiana’s Confederate state government. But it was not until September 27, 1862—five months after a Union flotilla’s arrival at the New Orleans levee, and five days following Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—that a black militia force numbering more than 1,000 men was mustered into the United States Army for a term of three years. Called the 1st Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards, it was the earliest officially sanctioned Black unit in the history of United States Army.[7]
Cailloux recruited and organized Company E. He filled it with neighbors and members of his fraternal order. Predictably, they elected him lieutenant. Shortly afterwards, two additional regiments of the Native Guards were mustered into the US military. All three regiments were singular in that their line officers—the captains and lieutenants who actually led men on the battlefield—were of African descent. The field officers, the majors and colonels who issued commands from the rear, by contrast were mostly White. The sole exception at this time was the wealthy free Black planter Francis E. Dumas. When Union forces arrived at New Orleans levee in the spring, he freed his enslaved labor force. When the Native Guards were mustered in, Major Dumas extended them the liberty to enlist.[8]
It’s no secret these early Black regiments were welcomed with less than open arms. Local Whites slathered them with slurs and spittle. Union soldiers could be just as abusive. Refusing to salute Black officers they met on the street, they swore they wouldn’t take orders from them, either. But Cailloux was preternaturally different. One Union officer later recalled seeing him at the headquarters of the commanding general, Benjamin Butler, “in company with at least fifteen of our prominent military officers; and he was a marked personage among them all.” [9]
Still, Black officers were a novelty in the country’s armed forces. When Nathaniel P. Banks, another political general from Massachusetts, replaced Butler in December 1862, one of his first acts was to return them to the ranks or even get rid of them altogether. But because he failed to decommission them outright, several Black officers in the Native Guards regiments ignored his invitation to resign their commissions. Lieutenant Cailloux, soon to be promoted to captain, was among them.[10]
******
In late May 1863, Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant were maneuvering to place Vicksburg, Mississippi, under siege. In a coordinated effort some 200 nautical miles downriver at Port Hudson, an army under the command of Nathaniel P. Banks was getting into position to assault another Confederate stronghold. Six weeks would pass before those citadels fell, opening the corridor that had blocked Union passage on Mississippi and hindering the two halves of the Confederacy from coming to each other’s aid.
The 1st and 3rd regiments of the Louisiana Native Guards were on fatigue duty downriver in Baton Rouge when orders arrived to join Banks’s army at Port Hudson. Two days later, following a twenty-five-mile march, they fetched up against the extreme left of the Confederate line. Like every other brigade in Bank’s army, their backs were to the river. Straight ahead loomed a network of artillery batteries and rifle pits dug in along a four-and-a-half-mile semicircle of high bluffs. The terrain in between was laced with canebrakes and marshes, woods and ravines. Confederates, improving on nature’s obstacles, re-engineered a creek into a moat and planted abatis of sharpened tree branches. But “by far the strongest part of the rebel works,” according to one Union officer, was the sector where the Native Guards were positioned: in front of Confederate promontory reaching heights of 80 feet. Lining the sawtooth crest were emplacements of heavy guns. Just below the brow stretched a terrace of rifle pits.[11]
At the last minute the Native Guards were assigned a new brigade commander. Brigadier General William Dwight, a thirty-one-year-old scion of an ancient Massachusetts family, was an abolitionist at heart. He wanted “to test the negro question,” he wrote his mother. “I have had the negro Regts longest in the service assigned to me, and I am going to storm a detached work with them. You may look for hard fighting, or a complete runaway.” That was the good news.
There was bad news. Dwight was a military incompetent and a spiteful martinet. Just shy of graduating from West Point, he had been tossed from the academy for drunkenness and other conduct unbecoming an officer. He was also ignorant of the basic principle that commanders should at least reconnoiter their battlefields before going on the offensive. When two of his colonels asked if he thought a frontal assault was feasible, he insisted, without ever having seen the ground for himself, that it was “the easiest way into Port Hudson.” On Sunday, May 27, the morning dawned bright and clear. Dwight was in the rear, where he would remain for the duration. By 7:00 a.m., when White units of Banks’s army launched the first of a series of futile attacks proceeding from the far right of the Confederate breastworks to the far left, General Dwight was already drunk.[12]
Cailloux’s unit, Company E of the 1st Regiment, was the color company, the unit tasked with carrying the regimental standards into battle. Standard bearers, usually sergeants, practically wore targets on their tunics. They were in the forefront of the assault, and their banners became the point around which broken ranks rallied during the fog of battle. It was those soldiers who drew the heaviest fire. But so did the company commander who led the charge. At Port Hudson that would be Captain Cailloux. He was the obvious choice to wear this mantle. The military code of “sublime courage”—the duty of line officers to rally their troops by displaying valor—came naturally to him. Ernest Hemingway called it grace under pressure. Cailloux seems to have possessed it to an unusual degree.[13]
The morning of the battle, Cailloux inspected the ranks, exchanging pleasantries. As his men clawed their way through woods choked with wisteria, he yelled words of encouragement. Cailloux must have been stunned when they reached the clearing. To the left lay a thick tangle of sharpened branches, to the right a swamp of cottonwoods and willows, and dead ahead those heavily fortified steep bluffs. To make it to the makeshift pontoon bridge thrown across the swollen creek the night before by Union engineers, the 1st and 3rd regiments would have to traverse 400 yards of nearly impassable terrain, then brave another 200 yards merely to reach the bluffs.
What went through Cailloux’s mind at this moment we can only speculate. It was probably not how to stall for time, weigh his options, consult with immediate superiors over alternative strategies. By this stage of the war, veteran officers had seen enough to appreciate how improvements in infantry firepower had rendered frontal assaults relics of the eighteenth century. No less than their men, they were starting to balk at senseless orders to charge headlong into sheets of lead. Instinctively, they advanced under the cover of the terrain, not in ranked orders. Cailloux’s immediate superiors, the white colonels who questioned General Dwight about reaching Port Hudson by attacking these bluffs over open ground, were clearly harboring doubts. Cailloux’s concerns would have met with sympathetic ears.
Cailloux never expressed any reservations. They surely crossed his mind. But what was the use of airing them if the result ended up being an I-told-you-so stereotype? This much seems likely: Cailloux wished for a long life, evinced scant interest in becoming a martyr for the sake of martyrdom, while wanting nothing so much as to vindicate the honor of Black soldiers. The libel that they were deficient in courage offended him deeply. Dispelling it was one reason Cailloux joined the Union army. It was why he and men like him seized the reins of their destiny.
At 10:00 a.m. six companies from the 1st Regiment and nine from the 3rd, formed a long battle line two ranks deep, one regiment behind the other. They had been promised artillery support. But two federal howitzers, after lofting a few cannon shots, fled the field upon receiving withering return fire. Company E left the forest in quick time, then doubled the pace. Two hundred yards across that stubbled plain, they received fire from a smaller bluff on their left flank, followed by blasts of canister and grape shot and lead from the heavy guns and rifles to their front. The men dove behind trees and into gullies. Cailloux’s left arm, hit by a shell above the elbow, was left dangling like a broken branch in the wind. A raised sword in his right arm, he barked orders and curses in two languages. “Allons, mes enfants!” “Follow me!” Many did, including the standard bearer, hollering and screaming. Nearing the pontoon bridge, they stopped to take aim at the rifle pits and artillery emplacements dead ahead, then released a volley.
That was when “all hell broke loose,” and a sheet of Minie balls and “pieces of railroad iron twelve to eighteen inches long” tore through the ranks with devastating force. The regimental standard bearer, a sergeant named Anselmas Planciancois, fell instantly when a shell took off half his head, tore the flag in two, spattering blood and brain fragments on nearby comrades. Two enlisted men, one of them an ex-slave who took a bullet in his left hand, caught the standards before they touched the ground, and wrestled for the honor to carry them. Cailloux was approaching the pontoon bridge when a shell struck him in the head, putting him down for good. Over killing fields shrouded in smoke and strewn with the dead and wounded, survivors made for a nearby willow grove. It was pandemonium. “Accounts differ,” writes Stephen Ochs, “as to how many times the men reformed, charged, broke, and reformed again.” Some say once. Others put the number between three and six times. It couldn’t have exceeded three advances. The actual fighting lasted in the neighborhood of an hour, if that. This was no ordinary assault. It was a suicide mission.
But the fighting was not over. For hours on end, enemy artillery shelled the grove where the 1st regiment had reformed. “Our shots tore the fragile willows into fragments,” wrote one Confederate soldier, “and the splinters were probably as dangerous as our fire.” The brigade’s besotted commander, still cowering in the rear, insisted his regiments continue their attacks. The colonels who received these insane orders quietly ignored them.
In every sector where Banks’s army stormed Port Hudson’s bluffs, the carnage was the same: hundreds killed, thousand wounded. But the place where Cailloux and his men had fallen, the aftereffects were appalling. The next afternoon, under a flag of truce, Union medics hastened to retrieve the wounded and bury the dead. For some reason, the temporary truce didn’t cover this battlefield. Confederate sharpshooters took advantage of the oversight to drive away Black soldiers who ventured out to gather their dead and wounded. When the stench became unbearable, the Confederate brass pled for a truce, that the putrefying bodies might be removed. General Banks insisted there were no Union dead on that ground. The corpses of the fallen, including Cailloux’s, continued rotting for another month under a scorching sun.[14]
“Statistics alone belied the punishment these men had suffered,” observes the late James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., in his indispensable history of the Native Guards. He quotes a captain in a New Hampshire regiment that had marched past Native Guards’ encampments the evening of the battle. “They suffered severe losses,” he wrote, “and as we moved back at night to our quarters, we passed a little house on the road where a temporary hospital had been established for them, and at the back door of this house we saw a pile of considerable size of legs and arms which had been amputated from these poor fellows.”[15]
After the Port Hudson campaign petered out into a six-week siege, the 1st and 3rd regiments spent most of that time sheltering behind cotton bales while constructing breastworks. Not until after the fall of Vicksburg on July 4th and Port Hudson’s capitulation five days later were Cailloux’s remains recovered. The only identifying mark was a ring on a skeletal knuckle signifying membership in the “Friends of Order,” the black self-help society of which he had become an officer. His body was carried to New Orleans for a burial befitting a native son and military hero.[16]
As for the sequel, it was as consequential as the battle itself. The first to break the story was The New York Times. Its reporter couldn’t get over the “skill and nerve” of raw Black troops, and the “hideous carnage” they bore up against. Very few white solders would have had “nerve enough to encounter [such perils], even if ordered to.” Above all, he singled out “Captain CAILLOUX of the First Louisiana … [who] died the death of a hero, leading on his men in the thickest of the fight.”[17]
It was an inflection point, one of those moments when history skips a beat. Radical Republicans turned up the volume of their demands that the Lincoln administration throw more Black soldiers into battle. As the wires thrummed with reports of Cailloux’s heroism and the battlefield valor of Louisiana’s Native Guards, some of them widely exaggerated, Northern opinion shifted dramatically. The first time Lincoln and Frederick Douglass met in person at the White House, according to David Blight, the president looked him “in the eye and said, ‘remember that Millikens’s Bend, Port Hudson and Fort Wagner are recent events; and that these were necessary to prepare the way for this very [emancipation] proclamation of mine.’” But of the three, Port Hudson registered the loudest and made the biggest dent on national policy.[18]
One could go on. Cailloux’s gallantry galvanized the National Negro Convention that convened in Syracuse in October 1864, for example. Frederick Douglass himself was the presiding officer. Delegates had gathered there to gin up support for the 13th amendment and for the right of Black men to vote. When James Ingraham, who had assumed command of Company E, stepped onto the floor carrying the 1st regiment’s tattered colors “stained with the blood of the brave Cailloux,” the hall exploded in loud cheers and applause. This was the convention that begat the enormously important Equal Rights League. The Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments have several antecedents. The formation of this Black pressure group was one of them.[19]
Congress has set an exceedingly high bar for receiving a Medal of Honor, and justifiably so. The standard is conduct beyond the call of duty. Commanding officers are supposed to take the lead when advancing against enemy fire. But when they continue advancing in the face of a meteorite belt, in spite of clear evidence a prudent retreat was not just advisable but defensible, the case seems almost cut and dry. Then there is the consideration that his sacrifice had a hand in altering the war’s trajectory. Anything less than awarding André Cailloux’s a posthumous Medal of Honor somehow seems inadequate.
The timing couldn’t be better. In four years of bloody conflict, Confederate forces never got closer than six miles of the US Capitol. The recent spectacle of flag-waving neo-Confederates turning the Congress into a crime scene should serve as a reminder that bad history too often makes for bad politics. The country has been saved before. It wasn’t under the banner of the Stars and Bars, but the regimental standards of Captain André Cailloux and his color bearer.[20]
[1] Madeleine Carlisle, “Confederate Monuments and Other Disputed Memorials Have Come Down in Cities Across America. What Should Take Their Place?” Time, July 28, 2020. https://time.com/5869866/replace-confederate-statues/.
[2] David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 1-6.
[4] Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (Longman, Green and Co.: New York, London, Toronto, 1956), 132-3.
[5] Quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 564.
[6] Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 9-66, 80.
[7] James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 1-21.
[8] Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 68-72, 81.
[9] Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards, 29-32. The quotation appears in Marcus Christian, “Captain Andre Caillous—the Rock,” in the Marcus B. Christian Collection, Earl K. Long Library, The University of New Orleans (with thanks to Mary N. Mitchell for retrieving this article).
[10] Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 122-25.
[11] Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 128-39; Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards, 48-53.
[12] Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards, 52-3 (for the quotations); Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest,140-41.
[13] Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 141-44.
[14] The best accounts of the doomed charge are Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 144-49; and Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards, 53-7.
[15] Quoted in Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards, 58.
[16] Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 152.
[17] “Important from Louisiana,” The New York Times, June 13, 1863. See also Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 149-50.
[18] Quoted in Blight, Race and Reunion, 17. See also Cornish, Sable Arm, 142-3.
[19] Stephen Ochs, “The Rock of New Orleans.” Also, Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest, 223-5.
[20] For their advice and counsel, he wishes to thank Jason Berry, Steve Goodell, Steven Hahn, Howard Hunter, Patrick Maney, Stephen Ochs , Rebecca Scott, Randy Sparks, and Michael Wayne.
An emeritus professor of history at Tulane, where he taught for nearly forty years, Lawrence N. Powell has published books and articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction and the Holocaust. His most recent book is The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
In 1906, Oscar Nelson, a local African American living in Tennessee, provided testimony on the extraordinary life of Jasper Gray, a United States Colored Troops (USCT) veteran, of the Thirty-First United Colored Infantry (USCI). Gray was a man whose entire life—in bondage and freedom—was one of constant physical movements and changes. In numerous instances, each step Gray took allowed him to redefine how he self-identified. By traversing spaces that spanned the Southern and Western hemispheres, Gray announced that he was there—as an African American man—demanding the recognition of his dignity, humanity, and his cultural citizenship on a global scale. His physical declarations occurred during periods that often frame African Americans as victims of systemic racial oppression rather than seeing them as agents of change fighting, in a multitude of ways, for equality.[1]
The lives of many enslaved people (and later freedpeople) were usually marked by continual change, often with physical movements being a key component of their experience. Numerous scholars, including Chandra Manning, denote how enslaved people frequently circumvented the oppressive structures through their physical movements (both temporarily and permanently) to claim agency over their lives, humanity, and personal bonds to others.[2] In the postwar, scholars, including Heather A. Williams, denote how freedpeople seized upon their freedom to move throughout the South seeking to reconnect with dislocated kin that slavery stole from them.[3] Their collective scholarship highlights how African Americans were never complacent as many whites created and maintained an evolving system of racial discrimination that sought to dehumanize and destroy African American bodies, lives, and families.
Jasper Gray was a unique example of an African American man whose travels and declarations, throughout his life, illustrate his enactment of the General Strike, through his self-liberation and then enlistment into the Thirty-First USCI. After the Civil War, Gray’s understand of the revolutionary moment empowered him in ways that have been obscured by focusing on white oppressors.[4] To be clear, Jasper Gray is not a representative case. Still, his life is another example of how African Americans, like others, did not have a singular experience. Instead, Gray illustrates the multiple forms that agency manifested. Ultimately, Jasper Gray reveals that the Civil War provided a sense of freedom that stretched far beyond the limits many people, including scholars, envision.
Before the Civil War, Jasper Gray spent his entire life in bondage. During that time, he shifted locations throughout Tennessee, including his birthplace in Knox County, as three different slaveowners claimed Gray as their property. By the fall of 1863, the Civil War enveloped Tennessee (which initially claimed neutrality) as Confederate and U.S. armies battled in Chattanooga, much to the dismay of slaveowners. It was in this moment that Gray’s life forever changed. As historians Amy Murrell Taylor and Joseph P. Reidy note, enslaved African Americans, such as Gray, defined freedom and citizenship in the middle of a war zone. Moreover, that emancipation process involved large swath of space.[5]
Courtesy of Camp Nelson National Monument NPS.
Through his own volition, Gray self-emancipated (in a state where the Emancipation Proclamation had no authority). He traveled nearly two hundred eighty-four miles to Camp Nelson in Nicholasville, Kentucky.[6] His actions, along with many others, illustrate his participation in a labor strike that allowed enslaved people to demand the recognition of their humanity and cultural citizenship (or cultural belonging). After signing a labor contract with the U.S. Army, Gray claimed agency to work as a freeman and wage-earning laborer. By signing a contract, men such as Gray had their humanity acknowledged by the U.S. Army, giving them the ability to enter a legally binding contract, as people, who paid them regulated wages for their labor, which aligns with the work of historian Chandra Manning.[7]
Rather than remain in Camp Nelson and enlist in a Kentucky USCT regiment, as many freedmen in the area did, he left the military base after three months and continued northward. Gray never revealed his motivation(s) for leaving Camp Nelson. However, his decision to go illustrates that he wanted to define freedom, on his terms, as he avoided enlisting in Kentucky. It is also possible that he chose to leave Camp Nelson where some military officials listened to white Kentucky slaveowners. Ultimately, he traveled over 773 miles to Long Island, New York, where he enlisted in the Thirty-First USCI on April 14, 1864. To enlist, he passed through two other states, where USCT recruitment was well underway, to join in a New York regiment. As scholars note, his enlistment reinforced his demands for cultural citizenship, in addition to demonstrating citizenship duties as soldiers.[8]
Gray stated that his birthplace was New York City, New York, to claim agency over his identity further. Perhaps Gray falsified his origin to receive an enlistment bounty that only freemen were eligible to get. Alternatively, maybe he did it as a declaration that Jasper Gray was a new man. Expanding on historian Adam Domby’s argument of lies as an analysis, Gray recreated historical narrative that gave him agency.[9] Thus, whatever Gray’s motivations for changing his birthplace, the result is that he took control over his identity, and his movements made it possible.
During his eighteen months in service, Gray traversed the Confederacy armed as a purveyor of freedom for enslaved people.[10] His movements were physical articulations that he and the world around him fundamentally changed. Moreover, Gray was an active participant in ending the Civil War. For instance, his regiment was a part of a contingent that chased Robert E. Lee’s forces to Appomattox Court House, where Gray witnessed Lee surrender.[11]Participating in this pivotal moment reveals how Gray’s movements, as part of the regiment, were crucial in ending slavery and forcing Lee to admit defeat, even though imagery and conversations often ignore the involvement of USCT regiments.
When Gray’s military service ended in November of 1865, his thirst for travel persisted. As a USCT veteran and freeman, Gray continued to seize upon opportunities to move and travel in ways that defied white societal attempts to keep Black people (especially freedpeople) tied to southern land, via vagrancy laws.[12] Furthermore, Gray’s actions where demands of his American citizenship and humanity and not his former status as an enslaved man.[13] His wanderlust, a quality sometimes attributed to white veterans, influenced his continued exploration of the world as a free man, this time making way westward to California.[14] However, rather than look towards the Pacific Ocean as the end of his journey, Gray boarded a ship and first headed to the independent state of Hawaii and later reached Australia. Unfortunately, Gray never discussed his time in Hawaii. Still, by visiting the independent nation, a freeman symbolically declared his independence as he visited Hawaii. Gray resided in the Land Down Under for two years while working as a sheepherder. Eventually, Gray returned to the U.S., making his way back to Tennessee in 1869.
The life of Jasper Gray is unique from most USCT veterans, and arguably many African Americans in general, at the time. Nevertheless, he is a compelling case study of a man who, using physical movements, refashioned himself across multiple states and nations on his terms. On land and sea, Gray made people witness his demands and demonstrations of citizenship—in and outside of the military. He was not a politician, skilled orator, or an entrepreneur. However, he was a freedman with a level of mobility that gave him agency over his life, even as racial discrimination continually attempted to stop him.
[1] 1906 Deposition of Oscar Nelson, in Jasper Gray’s pension file. Thirty-First USCI. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (hereafter pension file.)
[2] See Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling For Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2017).
[3] See Heather A. Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016
[4] This piece heavily leans on the collective scholarship of historians W.E.B. Du Bois, Manisha Sinha, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Steven Hahn to argue that Jasper Gray’s political emancipation from bondage and postbellum racial hierarchies becomes clearer. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1999); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1996); and Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[5] Joseph P. Reidy, Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twillight of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
[6] 1895 Deposition of R.F. Boyd, in Jasper Gray’s pension file.
[8] See Paul D. Quigley, The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018).
[9] Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020).
[10] After the Thirty-First USCI departed New York, the regiment stayed in the Eastern Theater, mainly in Virginia, until May 1865. From May 1864 to May 1865, the regiment took part in the Battle of Cold Harbor; siege operations at Petersburg and Richmond; military operations at Fort Sedgewick, Hatcher’s Run, and Weldon Railroad; and the pursuit of Confederate General Robert E. Lee to Appomattox Court House. Afterward, the regiment remained in Texas until November of 1865.
[11] 1895 Deposition of Jasper Gray, in Jasper Gray’s pension file.
[12] See Elizabeth Stoudeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of Chapel Hill Press, 2016).
[13] See Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[14] See Paul A. Cimbala, Veterans North and South: The Transition from Soldier to Civilian after the Civil War (Santa Barbara: Prager, 2015).
Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. He received his bachelor’s degree (2008) from the University of Central Florida. Later, he earned his master’s degree (2010) and doctoral degree (2017) from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. His monograph, The Families’ Civil War, is forthcoming June 2022 with the University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series. You can find him on Twitter at @PHUsct.
We are delighted to publish three essays on women’s history of the Civil War Era by three leading scholars in the field. This roundtable draws on a lively session at last summer’s Society of Civil War Historians conference. Together these pieces provide a wide-ranging assessment of the field as a scholarly endeavor and its translation into teaching, both through textbooks and in K-12 classrooms.
Our Women and the War, from Harper’s Weekly, September 6, 1862
Nina Silber’s essay, “Introductory Remarks: The Study of Gender and the Civil War,” asks what has changed in the field since the indispensable book she co-edited with Catherine Clinton, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992). Silber describes important developments, particularly in scholarship on African American women, and identifies some intriguing questions that remain understudied.
Judith Giesberg anchors her piece, “Why We Should Forget the Civil War,” with a quotation from a 2002 essay by Thavolia Glymph: “From any perspective, women’s history remains the least studied and analytically sophisticated aspect of the Civil War and Reconstruction. For a period that witnessed the most voluminous outpouring of writing by and about women of any in American history. . . this seems on the surface an odd result.”[1] Giesberg proceeds to describe the growing body of scholarship in the field, including books that have been widely lauded and won multiple awards. Nevertheless, she points out, recent surveys of the Civil War Era, many of them designed for teaching, still largely ignore women and their history. Why is this so, and what can be done about it?
In “The Gendered Consequences of Legislation Targeting Critical Race Theory,” Fay A. Yarbrough reminds us that teaching the history of women and gender remains intensely political. Taking us to Texas, where she teaches, she reveals how a new state law barring the teaching of certain “concepts” focuses not just on race, but on sex as well. Her piece concludes the roundtable with the urgent reminder that women’s history itself is under attack in many places and that “we do not and should not write only for other academics.”
[1] Thavolia Glymph, “The Civil War Era,” in ed. Nancy A. Hewitt, A Companion to American Women’s History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005).
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.
When Professor Silber asked us to reflect on what it means to study women and gender in the Civil War era, the news in the state of Texas, but also in other states, centered on efforts in the legislature to restrict what we teach in American history and the theoretical lenses we use to do so. So, my comments take a bit of a turn, because of where I live and our present political moment. I want to focus on the fact that thinking seriously about women and gender in Civil War history, and in history more broadly, is a political act, perhaps more explicitly now than ever.
Recently, a host of state legislatures have passed laws to ban the inclusion of critical race theory in discussions of American history. Critical race theory–the recognition that there are racial inequalities built into many of the institutions in society, that these inequalities have historical roots, and that people’s identities are intersectional–has been around for a few decades, but it is clear that the award-winning 1619 Project spearheaded by journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones has touched a particular nerve. Many politicians, it turns out, do not appreciate the 1619 Project’s goal to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
In fact, in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill, which became law on Sept. 1, 2021, creating “The 1836 Project,” which invokes the year Texas seceded from Mexico and is intended to “promote patriotic education.” This law creates a committee to disseminate educational materials centering “Texas values” at state landmarks and in schools.[1]Another new Texas law related to “civics instruction” includes curriculum standards requiring students to understand documents including the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. The law directs Texas students to learn about the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution; and the relationship between Texas and Mexico.[2] It also demands that teachers must explore current events from multiple positions without giving “deference to any one perspective.” During the legislative process, the Senate attempted to remove from the House of Representatives’ bill more than two dozen requirements to study the writings or stories of multiple women and people of color.[3]
The gendered element of these laws has attracted much less attention than the laws’ implications for teaching about race. According to Texas lawmakers, these bills were intended to prevent students from being taught that one race or gender is superior to another.[4]
I think it’s worth reading in full the exact text of one of clauses of the new law:
No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: 1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; 2) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; 3) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; 4) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; 5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; 6) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race or sex; 7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or 8) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race.
Seven of these eight restrictions call out perspectives that consider sex as unacceptable. This language is vague, so one wonders what would happen if a teacher assigned Professor Thavolia Glymph’s new book or some of the texts I found so formative (Theda Perdue’s Cherokee Women or Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society or Tiya Miles’ Ties that Bind or The House on Diamond Hill or Martha Hodes’ work on illicit sex).[5] Does the proposed legislation outlaw the teaching of whole sub-disciplines in history? Would this panel be permissible under this legislation?
The Texas bills link the study of gender and race in ways that were perhaps less true 50 years ago. One critique of the study of women and gender in the past, for instance, has been that women of color have been left out. Here I am thinking of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave or This Bridge Called My Back.[6] We (historians, academics, feminists) often talk about our work, merely by including women and more sophisticated thinking about gender, as political and subversive, as dangerous and having the ability to upend power structures. I think the present moment tells us how true that is.
And this moment reminds us that we have a public audience: we do not and should not write only for other academics.
[1] The text for this bill can be found here: https://www.billtrack50.com/BillDetail/1334141.
[3] The text of the Senate bill can be found here: https://www.billtrack50.com/BillDetail/1357834. Journalist Kate McGee discusses the changes here: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/22/texas-critical-race-theory-legislature/.
[4] The text of the law explicitly makes this claim, as do Texas politicians such as Lt. Governor Dan Patrick: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/05/texas-critical-race-theory-schools-legislature/.
[5] Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: the Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: the Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
[6] Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982) and Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983).
Nearly twenty years ago, now, in a 2002 review essay on women in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph concluded that “the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the most racially gendered and regionally segregated historiographical space in US history.” Surveying the first wave of literature on the period that had followed Maris Vinovskis’ call to social historians to remember the war, Glymph concluded that, after twenty years, “the ‘woman’s war’ as traditionally written and understood was the history of white women, and more particularly, the history of middle and upper class white women.” “From any perspective, women’s history remains the least studied and analytically sophisticated aspect of the Civil War and Reconstruction. For a period that witnessed the most voluminous outpouring of writing by and about women of any in American history…this seems on the surface an odd result.”[1]
It seems appropriate, twenty years later, to see where we are. What has changed and what has not.
In regard to Glymph’s last point, that’s easy. Women’s history of the Civil War is undergoing rigorous study and that work is analytically sophisticated. One has only to look at the work of the members of this panel. Fay Yarbrough’s work shows how Cherokee women sought to assert their rights as citizens and as women within the nation’s restrictive postwar marriage laws. Stephanie Jones-Rogers reminds us how very invested white women were in slave ownership and how, in it, white women found their freedom. Stephanie McCurry shows how the patriarchal family served as an elemental form of governance and how, despite Union war policy written by Francis Lieber, Henry Halleck, and others, patriarchy survived the Civil War. Not on this panel but whose hard work is evident everywhere in this conference–Amy Taylor’s Embattled Freedom, reflects the analytical sophistication of women’s history in its sensitive treatment of female refugees. Thavolia Glymph’s Women’s Fight stakes out a lot of important new ground, and it makes the point that Black women’s labor—overlooked, coerced, dangerous, and often unremunerated—was central to the U.S. Army’s success in the field.[2]
These works have received well-deserved critical acclaim and made clean sweeps of the book awards. By my count, these books have won 26 major prizes—including the Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Avery O. Craven, Darlene Clark Hine, John Nau, and the Tom Watson Brown Prize of this society.
Women’s Civil War history is no longer exclusively “the history of white women,” and to the extent that it is, white women’s motivations are not as pure and “virginal,” as Glymph put it, as they once were. Women’s Fight should force a far-reaching reconsideration of elite white women’s war work, in how it links their work on such efforts like the Sanitary Commission to their families’ investments in slavery and exposes the shocking “plantation fantasies” of freedmen’s teachers. For that matter, Tom Brown’s damning assessment of the late effort to commemorate middle class northern white women through statuary should stop all of us who have bemoaned the absence of such statues fast in our tracks.[3] Is anyone disappointed that there are so few statues of white women being torn down now?
The experiences of indigenous, enslaved, freedom-seeking, and free Black women are central to much of the scholarship. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for scholars operating in the field to defend the remnants of “racial gendering” that still remain—no one would dare assume, for example, that the experiences of a Mary Chesnut or a Louisa May Alcott was “representative.” Regional segregation lives on, to some extent. In general, though, one happy result of having brought the motivations of northern middle-class white women decidedly into question, is that the moral high ground on which this regional segregation once stood is cracking.
So, on that front, too, we can report considerable progress in the past twenty years.
With all this, though, I do wonder if it isn’t time to ask how this work has mattered to the field? One would expect that these highly regarded studies would have gone a long way toward rewriting the war’s master narrative. But this seems to not be the case. Recent narratives or syntheses show more inclusion but little in the way of a substantive rewriting of the narrative. Elizabeth Varon’s 2019 Armies of Deliverance is rich with stories of individual women—Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Van Lew, Charlotte Forten, Susie King Taylor, and many others—but, with the exception of Tubman, they are not part of the delivering army. Women’s wartime conflicts with various authorities—Ben Butler, for instance, but also Union male medical authorities—is about accountability and authority, but not politics.[4] Louis Masur’s ambitious but slim 2011 narrative of the war shows how the war “wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations,” but NONE of this seemed to concern women or gender.[5] In The American War, Gary Gallagher and Joan Waugh dedicate a robust chapter to women’s wartime experiences. Focusing primarily on middle class and elite white women, northern and southern, who experienced the war “in a domestic setting,” though, these women are not centrally connected to the narrative that focuses on reestablishing the centrality of the Union Cause over the competing Lost and Emancipationist Cause interpretations of the war that continue to today.[6] The same is true in Paul Anderson’s 2019 narrative where a few women are named—including Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Mary Todd Lincoln & Julia Ward Howe—but their experiences do not matter in Anderson’s portrait of “an experience in shared pain, suffering, struggle, and division…that fulfilled America.”[7]
So, what gives? For at least forty years, scholars have painted a rich and textured history of women’s wartime experiences; how their loyalty, disloyalty, dissent, and work mattered to the war’s outcome. This work has undergone ambitious revision and expansion in response to critique. In fact, I would argue, this scholarship is now among the most “analytically sophisticated aspect(s) of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” Yet the larger narrative of the war has remained largely and stubbornly immune to intervention. Women’s and gender historians have not forgotten the Civil War, but the question I pose for this plenary, is rather, when it comes to rewriting the war narrative, why have so many talented scholars continued to find this work forgettable?
Civil War Book Awards List
Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom
2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
2019 Tom Watson Brown Book Award, Society of Civil War Historians
2019 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia
2019 Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians
2019 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians
2019Choice Outstanding Academic Title
2019 Governor’s Book Award, Kentucky Historical Society and the Office of the Governor
2019 Theodore A. Hallam Book Award, University of Kentucky Department of History
2019 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award (shortlisted)
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property
2020 Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery
2020 Best Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
2020 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians
2020 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women’s Historians (co-winner)
2020 Charles S. Sydnor Award, Southern Historical Association (co-winner)
2020 Frederick Douglass Prize (finalist)
2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize (finalist)
2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History
2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History
2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Thavolia Glymph, Women’s Fight
2021 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, Organization of American Historians
2021 Darlene Clark Hine Award, Organization of American Historians
2021 Mary Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians
2021 Tom Watson Brown Book Award, Society of Civil War Historians
2021 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia
2021 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize (finalist)
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning
2011 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
2011 Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians
2011 Willie Lee Rose Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians
2011 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians (co-winner)
2011 Pulitzer Prize for History (finalist)
[1] Thavolia Glymph, “The Civil War Era,” in ed. Nancy A. Hewitt, A Companion to American Women’s History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2005).
[2] Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Stephanie McCurry, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
[3] Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
[4] Elizabeth R. Varon, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 127.
[5] Louis P. Masur, The Civil War: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xii.
[6] Gary W. Gallagher and Joan Waugh, The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (Flip Learning, 2015), 146.
[7] Paul Christopher Anderson, A Short History of the American Civil War (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 243.
Judith Giesberg holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities and is Professor of History at Villanova University. Giesberg directs a digital project, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, that is collecting, digitizing, and transcribing information wanted ads taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for family members lost to the domestic slave trade.
When we began planning for the SCWH 2020 conference, one critical component of our planning entailed a special plenary that would survey the field of gender and Civil War history. This is a field of long-standing interest for me, going back to the publication of the co-edited collection I did with Catherine Clinton, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. Published in 1992, this path-breaking (for its time) volume brought together the work of eighteen different scholars, including many younger scholars just entering the Civil War field, and offered one of the first wide-ranging looks at the different ways gender shaped the war and the war shaped gender.[1] Since that time, a veritable revolution has transpired in this field of scholarship; numerous prize-winning and influential books and essays have appeared examining the experience of enslaved women and the push for emancipation; free Black women and the anti-slavery struggle in the North; and both yeomen and slaveholding white women in the South. Although the coronavirus pandemic forced a postponement of the 2020 conference, we were able to reconvene the conference, along with that special plenary, in a virtual format in June 2021. This online forum draws from that plenary session.
As the chair and moderator of the session, I asked the panelists to think about how this field has changed in the last thirty years – using the publication of Divided Houses as a kind of benchmark – and to consider the kinds of questions and challenges scholars continued to confront in this work. As I saw it, many things had changed radically in the field. Perhaps most important was the way scholars had centered Black women’s experiences in the larger narrative: as participants and leaders in wartime rebellions; as enslaved women working against the oppressive demands of the slave plantation system on a daily basis; as free women who initiated campaigns in northern states that would give support to the abolitionist and civil rights struggles.
It’s clear, too, that the new scholarship has also greatly complicated our understanding of patriarchy in this era. Increasingly, a picture was emerging not of undifferentiated women’s oppression at the hands of men, but a system of oppression and exploitation that often made white women the beneficiaries and practitioners of social and economic power. White slaveholding women, we have learned, had a strong economic stake in the slave system and were often ruthless perpetrators of plantation exploitation. Even white northern women who came South to aid the freed people, in the immediate postwar era, had been shaped by a system of racial power which strongly affected their interactions with Black women. In her remarks, Judy Giesberg observed how the “moral high ground” which northern white middle-class women once occupied has started to crack. As Thavolia Glymph put it, long-standing assumptions about gender solidarity, the “bonds of womanhood” that some saw extending across lines of race and class, can also no longer withstand scholarly scrutiny.
My initial question for this panel – to consider the changes in the field over the past 30 years – was meant as a prompt, encouraging us to think broadly about the field in terms of chronology, in terms of region, and in terms of historical actors and to think, too, about the kinds of challenges we still encounter in this field. The panel elicited some deeply insightful reflections from the panelists as well as an exciting and lively exchange with the audience. Judy Giesberg asked one of the most provocative questions when she wondered why all the new and exciting scholarship on gender and the Civil War had failed, thus far, to change the general narratives about the war. Fay Yarbrough brought the discussion into the present day, observing how the study of women and gender in the Civil War era has become a highly-charged political act, an act that is currently under attack as state legislatures across the US have begun enacting laws to promote “patriotic education”. Indeed, listening to Fay’s presentation, I was surprised to learn how this reactionary legislation has not just voiced opposition to “critical race theory”, but also to work that considers the structural basis of sexism. Scholars working in this field face a particularly difficult confluence of events: a tendency among Civil War scholars to overlook scholarship on women and gender as well as a political climate that actually tries to outlaw classroom discussions that focus on sex and gender.
Still, this is a field that continues to draw a host of scholars, including many junior academics and graduate students, and the work here remains exciting and dynamic. With more attention shifting to the study of the reconstruction era, scholars would do well to learn more about how gender, and women’s experiences, shaped this critical historical moment: how, for example, did formerly enslaved women find new opportunities, perhaps in terms of property ownership, professional work, or education? What challenges did women (and men) face as they tackled the work of reconstituting formerly enslaved families? What can we learn about nonslaveholding white women in this postwar era, including their own dislocations in the shift away from the slave economy? An obvious blind spot exists – one that was highlighted during the plenary discussion – regarding our knowledge of same-sex relations and a larger array of queer gender experiences, among both men and women in this era. Likewise, to echo a point Judy Giesberg made in the discussion, our understanding of working-class women occupies a distinct void in our picture of the Civil War era: how, for example, did the labor and racial upheaval of the Civil War era shape the political identities of Northern white working women? And while we know quite a bit about elite southern white women in the post-war resurgence of white supremacy, it might be useful to ask how northern white women may have also contributed to that resurgence since the ascension of racist power was hardly limited to the states below the Mason Dixon line. I look forward to reading work on these subjects, and more, in the years to come.
[1] Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Nina Silber is the Jon Westling Professor of History at Boston University and recently served as the President of the Society of Civil War Historians. Her most recent book is This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (Chapel Hill, 2019). She’s currently at work on a history/memoir about her father, a central figure in the mid-twentieth century folk revival.
In April 2021, Governor Ralph Northam announced that Virginia would add five new markers focused on African American history to its state historical marker program. Playfully referred to as “history-on-a-stick,” historical markers are intended to inform passersby about a significant person, place, or event. As useful as they might be for promoting public history, such markers also reveal how easily history can be misrepresented and misunderstood, even when the intention is to make commemorations of the past more inclusive.
1994 historical marker commemorating “Mary Elizabeth Bowser.” Photograph courtesy of Lois Leveen.
According to the official press release, one of the new markers will honor Mary Richards Bowser. [1] But if you stroll along East Grace Street in Richmond, you will find there is already a marker, erected in 1994, that reads, “Mary Elizabeth Bower: Freed slave of the Van Lew family and indispensable partner to Elizabeth Van Lew in her pro-Union espionage work, she worked at the Confederate White House gathering and passing on military intelligence to the Union through Van Lew to General Grant.” Just a few feet away, you will encounter another marker, put up in 2005, that reads in part: “During the Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew led a Union espionage operation. African Americans, such as Van Lew’s associate Mary Jane Richards (whose story closely parallels that of legendary spy Mary Elizabeth Bowser), served in Richmond’s Unionist underground.” Taken together, these markers provide a cautionary tale: well-meaning efforts to celebrate previously overlooked historical figures can obscure rather than improve our understanding of the past.
2005 historical marker commemorating the Adams-Van Lew House. Photograph courtesy of Lois Leveen.
History-on-a-stick typically reinscribes America’s beloved trope of a lone hero, usually someone who succeeds against all odds. In its earliest manifestations, that hero was almost always a white male. But simply expanding who occupies the role of “lone hero” by gender or race/ethnicity can make us think we are being more accurate when we are actually erasing the contributions of everyone but that “lone hero.” And, as the example of these particular markers reveals, if we rush to add more diversity to our pantheon of heroes without diligently documenting and accurately interpreting history, we can repeat erroneous information and even produce audacious new falsehoods.Circulating everywhere from history-on-a-stick to social media posts, newspaper articles, and purportedly nonfiction books, such inaccuracies reflect an impulse to celebrate diversity that presumes women’s history and Black history do not deserve meticulous research and assiduous evaluation of sources. In response, public history projects like the newly proposed marker – and broader efforts like #MoreHistory2021 – need to demonstrate the care historians must take to center African American women’s history.
In 1911, William Beymer, a white writer, published a series of articles about Civil War spies in Harper’s Magazine. Taking a somewhat expansive approach, Beymer included an article about a civilian woman, Elizabeth Van Lew. This white Virginian’s wartime efforts to aid the Federal government remind us that not everyone who lived in the South supported secession. But the Southerners who had the greatest stake in defeating the Confederacy were the millions of enslaved and free African Americans residing within the states in rebellion. They thwarted Confederates and supported the Federal military efforts in many ways. Yet in Beymer’s sixteen-page article, the wartime experiences of Black Virginians are reduced to one paragraph about one African American, invoked only to “add color” to the story of Van Lew: a woman Beymer identified as “Mary Elizabeth Bowser.” The name and scant details the article offered about her were drawn from a single conversation with Van Lew’s niece. The 1911 article failed to note that the niece, having been a child during the Civil War, admitted she was never privy to details of either woman’s espionage. Nearly fifty years later, what little she recalled was inaccurate – even the name “Mary Elizabeth Bowser.” But Beymer relied unquestioningly on the niece’s account, embellishing it with his own rhetorical flourishes, which emphasized Van Lew’s brilliance and benevolence, framing the Black “girl” (who had actually been in her 20s) as her passive servant.[2] The inaccuracies in Beymer’s account were taken up as historical fact and repeated even in works intended to foreground African American women’s experiences.[3] Decades later, to promote growing public interest in women’s history, the Virginia Business and Professional Women’s Foundation created a “Women of Virginia Historic Trail,” which included “Mary Elizabeth Bowser”; Beymer’s tale of Van Lew’s Black spy in the Confederate White House became the basis of their 1994 marker.
In 2003, nearly a century after Beymer’s article, Civil War historian Elizabeth Varon published a meticulously researched biography of Elizabeth Van Lew. This was hardly a tale of a lone hero. Piecing together wartime and postbellum government records, published memoirs, personal diaries, and newspaper accounts, Varon documented the network of free African Americans, enslaved Black people, European immigrants, white working-class laborers and yeoman farmers, and wealthy white Richmonders who participated in the underground ring that operated in and around the Confederate capital. From the earliest months of the war, this interracial network aided US soldiers held prisoner in the city by bringing them food and medicine, exchanging information, and abetting their escapes to federally held territory. By 1864, the underground was smuggling military and political intelligence to the US army. The ring’s collective contributions were lauded by Generals Ulysses Grant, Benjamin Butler, and George Sharpe, with the preponderance of their praise going to Van Lew for coordinating and financing much of the group’s activities.[4]
So what did Varon discover about “Mary Elizabeth Bowser”? Very little – yet also quite a bit. The only nineteenth-century source she could find pointing to a Mary Bowser came from St. John’s Church, the wealthy white congregation of which the Van Lews were members. According to the church annals, on April 16, 1861 – the day before the passage of the Virginia Ordinance of Secession – a man named Wilson Bowser and a woman named Mary, both described as “Colored” and as “servants to E. L. Van Lew” were married. As important as this single record is, it does not illuminate what today we might most want to know: what were the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of a young Black adult, entering an enslaver’s church to be married just at the moment when politically powerful white men elsewhere in the city were debating whether to secede from the United States in order to preserve the institution of slavery?
Although Varon could find nothing else about Mary Bowser, she discovered enough to sketch out the life of Mary Jane Richards. The same church annals document the 1846 baptism of “Mary Jane, a colored child belonging to Mrs. Van Lew” (Elizabeth Van Lew’s widowed mother). A few years later, the Van Lew women arranged for Mary Jane to be educated in New Jersey, and in 1855, at their behest, a fourteen-year-old “Mary J. Richards” was sent to Liberia. Like many expatriated African Americans, she was unhappy there, expressing her displeasure so fervently that Elizabeth Van Lew eventually agreed to pay for her 1860 return to America. Varon was able to substantiate that Mary Jane Richards was among the Richmonders who participated in the pro-Federal network during the war, later teaching the newly emancipated in schools in Virginia, Florida, and Georgia. By 1867, she seemed to disappear from the historical record.
Having pieced together all the evidence she could find, Varon surmised that perhaps Richards was the woman who married Wilson Bowser. (If so, the marriage must have been short lived: throughout the war, she used several other surnames, and Wilson Bowser remained in Richmond long after Mary Jane Richards left the city.) But when the biography of Van Lew was published in 2003, Varon did not know for sure. Varon’s research shapes what appears on the 2005 marker erected by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, which introduces passersby to the name Mary Jane Richards, even as it acknowledges they may already know the legend of Mary Elizabeth Bowser.
Alas, once a legend has circulated as fact, it is very hard to snuff out. Since Varon’s biography of Van Lew was published, other books, articles, podcasts, and online posts have continued to repeat details Varon definitely disproved. Moreover, some subsequent accounts have added outlandish new (and sometimes quite demeaning) claims about Mary Bowser. Created in response to increasing public interest in women’s history and particularly African American history, these accounts nevertheless distort the past, revealing how ill-equipped members of the public – and even editors at major publishing houses and respected newspapers – are to evaluate historical claims or to understand the process by which historians gather and interpret evidence about the past. One recently fabricated claim is that Bowser, having been planted by Van Lew in the Confederate White House early in the war, sewed secret dispatches filled with military intelligence into Varina Davis’s dresses, then brought the dresses to a seamstress who removed the messages and shared them with Van Lew. This preposterous assertion strains credulity by presuming an enslaved person – or someone posing as a slave – would have the time, materials, and liberty to handsew secret missives into garments regularly over a period of years without being detected by the person who wore those garments or other members of the household. It presumes that the enslaved would have the power to decide when garments would be removed from the enslaver’s house and taken to a seamstress whose services the enslaver would have to engage and pay for. It also directly contradicts details both Van Lew and Richards recorded about their wartime endeavors. But this whopper now circulates as historical fact online and in print, likely because it appeals to Hollywood-inspired notions of what constitutes espionage. Another newly invented assertion involves an especially debasing twist on the white savior trope: when Confederates finally became suspicious of Bowser, Van Lew rescued the black woman by loading her into a wagon, covering her with manure, and having her spirited off to Philadelphia. This invented scatological episode promotes a particularly disturbing message: black activists must endure the “shittiest” of treatment, even from their closest white allies.[5] These examples provide an important caution for efforts like #MoreHistory2021. As historians, we must undertake our work with the awareness that members of the public, reporters, and publishers may also want more history, including more diverse and inclusive history; nevertheless, a dearth of historical understanding and an inability to assess historical claims can leave well-intentioned Americans enthusiastically accepting and recirculating blatant falsehoods as historical fact.
Building on Varon’s foundation, I am now researching and writing the first scholarly nonfiction book about this historically significant yet elusive African American woman. The project involves a painstaking process of uncovering sources in disparate archives that more fully represent her point of view, and centering African American women’s history when analyzing the emerging evidence. Although my research is still in progress, I have already confirmed Varon’s hypothesis that Richards married Wilson Bowser. I also uncovered details about two other subsequent marriages, as well as more information about her early life and her substantial postbellum activism for racial justice and women’s rights. In interpreting this evidence, it is important draw on the work of many other historians who are foregrounding the efforts of nineteenth-century Black activists.[6] Rather than reinscribing a “lone hero” version of history, or emphasizing her exceptionalism in ways that erase the contributions of countless other African Americans, this biography will explore how she participated in Black and interracial networks throughout her life. Allying herself with Black intellectual, political, and religious leaders as well as white allies, she strategically challenged powerful whites to secure full citizenship for African Americans and equal rights for women, even after the war ended.
Even as I conduct this research, the inaccurate and outlandish claims continue to circulate. So when I learned of Virginia’s plans for yet another history-on-a-stick tribute, I contacted Jennifer Loux, who oversees the marker program for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Loux holds a Ph.D. with a specialty in African American history and thus understands the importance and challenges of accurately commemorating Black women’s contributions – in no more than 700 characters, including spaces. Our back-and-forth discussion illuminates the care it takes to get history, especially history-on-a-stick, right.
The first challenge involved what name should appear on the marker. Although the press release referred to “Mary Richards Bowser,” my research reveals that from childhood on, she used at least half a dozen different surnames. For much of her adult life, she chose to use “Denman,” her third husband’s surname, even long after their marriage ended. By contrast, I have as yet found no documents in which she chose to self-identify using the surname Bowser. In response to my concern that identifying her as “Mary Richards Bowser” would reinscribe Beymer’s misrepresentation, Loux suggested “Mary Richards Bowser Denman.” In the realm of history-on-a-stick, she asserted there was value in including the surname Bowser; otherwise, “the public will think this marker is about someone other than the ‘Mary Bowser’ they’ve heard so much about, and we will end up generating confusion rather than correcting the historical record. Since Mary did marry Wilson Bowser, albeit briefly, this name is not technically incorrect, and I think using it on the marker—where we don’t have the luxury of footnotes or long explanations—will do more good than harm.” She suggested the marker frame this issue by explicitly explaining this historical figure “used various aliases throughout her life.”[7] But the word “alias” implies an attempt to disguise one’s identity; I understand this woman’s complicated, ongoing process of self-renaming as a way she asserted her identity – a practice many formerly enslaved people adopted upon gaining freedom, to proclaim their personhood and to underscore the relationships of import to them. For the final marker text, “Bowser” remained but “alias” was replaced.
Loux and I agreed the marker should emphasize that many people participated in the interracial underground, rather than aggrandizing either Mary Richards Bowser Denman or Elizabeth Van Lew. Although I have found evidence that, as Beymer and others claimed, Denman infiltrated the Confederate White House, her own accounts describe that foray as only one part of her multifaceted wartime work on behalf of the U.S., and so the marker does not call it out. The marker also contextualizes her espionage with details about her life before and after the war. Most importantly, it emphasizes how her activism continued during Reconstruction, challenging feel-good accounts of American history that culminate in a happy-ending of emancipation. Denman’s postbellum efforts underscore the larger, continuing struggle to ensure full citizenship for all Americans, regardless of race or gender.
In collaborating on the marker text, I wanted to correct previous inaccuracies, and also to recognize that new information will continue to emerge, both from my research and from other historians who may build on my project in the future. Knowing how much currently remains unknown about this figure, it was challenging to craft text for the new marker that (hopefully!) will not end up being as outdated and inaccurate as so many earlier accounts now seem. For example, Varon’s biography of Van Lew described Mary Jane Richards as having been sent to Liberia “to serve as a missionary,” a conclusion I previously repeated in my own publications and talks. But as I piece together what her life in Liberia entailed, my research indicates it was unlikely she could have been a missionary. Thus, Loux and I decided the marker will simply communicate that she was sent to Liberia at Van Lew’s behest, leaving the complicated dynamics of the colonization movement and her specific experience in Monrovia to be explained elsewhere.
Rather than being sited on Grace Street, at the Church Hill address where her enslavers lived, the new marker will be located on Broad Street adjacent to Capitol Square, locating her commemoration in proximity to the seats of Confederate and Virginia power she worked to defeat.[8] The marker’s propinquity to twenty-first-century government offices, tourist attractions, and a major hospital means a multitude of residents and visitors will have the opportunity to read and learn from it. The final text for the new marker reads:
Mary Richards Bowser Denman
Mary Richards Bowser Denman was born enslaved in Virginia ca. 1840. Given de facto freedom by Elizabeth Van Lew, whose family enslaved her, she was educated in New Jersey and sent to live in Liberia before returning to Richmond in 1860. During the Civil War, she participated in a secret network of free and enslaved African Americans and pro-Union whites, including Van Lew, who assisted federal prisoners of war and passed intelligence to the U.S. Army. Denman, who used various names throughout her life, later taught in schools for the formerly enslaved in Virginia, Florida, and Georgia, gave lectures in the North, and was an activist for equal rights and full citizenship for black Americans.
I hope it will long serve as both a fitting tribute to this figure and an example of history-on-a-stick at its best, allowing the public to understand the many ways in which countless African Americans challenged manifold manifestations of white supremacy, before, during, and after the Civil War.
[1] “Governor Northam Announces Five New State Historical Highway Markers Addressing Black History in Virginia,” April 20, 2021 press release from the Office of the Governor, available online at https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/all-releases/2021/april/headline-894520-en.html.
[2] William Gilmore Beymer, “Miss Van Lew,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, June 1911, 86-99. The interview with Elizabeth Van Lew’s niece Annie Randolph Hall is described in John P. Reynolds to William G. Beymer, December 9, 1910, William Gilmore Beymer Papers, Box 2K394, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
[3] See for example, Ella Forbes, African American Women During the Civil War (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 52, 59; and Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 133-34.
[4] Elizabeth Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[5] The invented details about the handsewn message and the cartload of manure both initially appeared in Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 2014) by Karen Abbott. Marketed as nonfiction despite its use of invented dialogue, scenes, and plot, Abbott’s book focuses on four white women, once again invoking “Mary Bowser” in a subservient role to “add color.” Her descriptions of Bowser sewing messages into Varina Davis’s garments seems to be an intentional distortion, as it contradicts Varon’s meticulously documented account of the espionage ring, as well as Van Lew’s own description in her journal of how the women shared the intelligence they gathered, both of which are included in the bibliography of Abbott’s book. By contrast, the sole source Abbott cites in her endnotes for the seamstressy, the cartload of manure, and other dubious details are emails from the great-grandson of Bet’s niece Annie Randolph Hall. Although such citations imply they come from treasured and trustworthy family lore, Abbott’s bibliography also includes the interview from a century earlier in which Hall herself declared that she did not know any specifics related to the espionage activities. For examples of how these dubious claims are now cited as historical fact, see Michael S. Rosenwald, “A Freed Slave Became a Spy. Then She Took Down the Confederate White House,” The Washington Post, March 24, 2019; and Chenjerai Kumanyika and Khadijah Costley White, “The Ring,” Uncivil, November 9, 2018, podcast produced by Gimlet Media, available online at https://gimletmedia.com/shows/uncivil/39hw6e/the-ring. The latter dwells on the fabricated episode involving the manure in particularly disturbing ways: one of the hosts laughs as she badgers an African American woman erroneously identified as the “great, great, great, great niece of Mary Elizabeth Bowser” into describing the black woman being covered in manure. The exchange would be gratuitously traumatizing even if the story were true. It is all the more so because it never happened. For a larger discussion of who benefits from this circulation of ever more inaccurate and demeaning depictions of this figure, see Lois Leveen, “When Black History Becomes Multicultural Clickbait, Manure Happens,” presented at the AskHistorians 2020 Digital Conference Business As Unusual: Histories of Rupture, Chaos, Revolution, and Change, September 16, 2020, available online at https://www.askhistorians.com/sinners-saints-spies.
[6] My project benefits from the insights of scholars focusing on a wide range of areas of African American history, such as Thavolia Glymph’s numerous publications on Black women and the Civil War; studies by Christopher Bonner, Martha S. Jones, and Kate Masur of African Americans’ antebellum quest for full citizenship; Elsa Barkley Brown’s and Kidada Williams’s careful delineations of the many ways African American women and men asserted themselves as political actors in the wake of emancipation; and biographies like Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, and Caleb McDaniel’s Sweet Taste of Liberty, which serve as models for excavating the lives of nineteenth-century Black women, including those who have long been inaccurately mythologized and those who have been overlooked entirely. While hardly an exhaustive list of the historians whose work informs my study of this figure, these varied sources represent the breadth of integral work being done by many scholars to center African American women’s experiences.
[7] Quotations and summaries regarding the crafting of the marker text are taken from email correspondence between Jennifer Loux and Lois Leveen, April 2021 through June 2021.
Dr. Lois Leveen earned degrees in history and literature from Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. Her writing has appeared in scholarly journals, academic collections, and in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and similar outlets. Having turned a footnote from her dissertation into the novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser (HarperCollins 2012), it is now her pleasure and her penance to be researching the first scholarly biography of Mary Richards Denman, the real figure behind the Mary Bowser myth. She is a 2020-21 Virginia Humanities Fellow at the Library of Virginia and a Mellon Research Fellow at the Virginia Historical Society.
