Category: Muster
Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

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In today’s Muster, Associate Editor Robert Bland discusses the JCWE’s June special issue on material culture with guest editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts. Dr. Cashin is a professor of history at Ohio State University and author of War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018) and editor of War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era (2018). Dr. Roberts is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021).

Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Thank you both for making time for this interview. In the introduction for the special issue, you remark that “the Civil War, like all wars, only intensified the relationship between people and material things.”

I wonder if you could speak about these intensified relationships people of the Civil War era had with the material world and how examining this material world provides a new lens on the war?

Joan Cashin: Wars always involve ferocious struggles over material resources, such as food, timber, housing. Wars also generate powerful symbols, which have often been materialized. Flags, for example. This is kind of obvious, but there’s a tremendous struggle during the war to keep the enemy from getting a flag, or to capture the enemy’s flag. I found references to men in both armies who will do almost anything to keep their flag in their hands. And, on the other side, of course, soldiers who will do almost anything to wrest it away.

These material objects have tremendous symbolic power. After the war, of course, there’s a brisk traffic in material objects that are war artifacts. Some of them are rather ordinary objects, and some of them are associated with famous people. Some of them are connected with ordinary men and women such as civilians, soldiers, Blacks, whites, the enslaved, free people.

Robert Bland: But it seems like this is a powerful human impulse. To hold on to and preserve objects that memorialize an embodied history. It seems like the material culture questions are often adjacent to the way we now inquire into the silences in the production of the past and the ways scholars seek to “trouble the archive.”

Alaina Roberts:  Well going off that idea, of silences in the past, when I talk to my students about, you know, if you’re thinking of something that’s not an archival document, but rather something material about the Civil War era, which I teach about a lot, they’re often going to think of a uniform. And that uniform, in their minds, is usually worn by a white person, a white soldier. So I was really happy and appreciative that we were able to bring out the way material culture is important to people of color in this issue, like African Americans and Native folks, today and historically. Because as historians, we know everyday people are engaging in the use of objects and in that memorialization process.

But it’s still taking time to reach the everyday folks, that idea that it’s more than, for example, just a uniform. That it’s about people’s everyday lives and the way symbols take on more meaning for everyone.

Robert Bland:  Along those lines, I wonder if you could speak about the authors and the pieces that they have written. The special issue includes articles about Civil War-era trunks and their relationship to legal culture, school buildings and the materiality of freedom that those buildings embodied, and the process of collecting objects in the public history of the Cherokee nation.

What do the stories of objects like trunks, schoolhouses, and museums tell us about the current state of Civil War-era material culture?

Joan Cashin: I’m really proud of the two articles that we published, one by Laura Edwards and one by Amy Murrell Taylor. Both of them are discussing objects that appear to be rather ordinary, but they both make the strong case that these objects mean a lot to people in the past. Laura Edwards talks about how owning a trunk and filling it with objects is one way that non-elite people can preserve valuable material objects. And it’s a way to also exercise some small measure of privacy. What’s in the trunk belongs to them and nobody else.

Amy also delves into what might seem like a rather ordinary wooden building in the countryside. But she shows how that schoolhouse meant a great deal to the Black community. It is a symbol of their emancipation, the fact they can now build their own institutions. The building also serves as a church and as a post office.

There’s also a struggle around the different parties on how the building was designed and debates about how it should be used.

Alaina Roberts: I really appreciated that Amy’s article allows us to get a different perspective on something I think is very commonly discussed in African American historiography, which is education. It’s always, you know, African Americans after the Civil War, the first thing they want to do is get their children education and also get themselves the ability to read and write because they viewed it as the key to upward mobility.

I think Amy’s article is really great because it allows us to ask of this schoolhouse, what are the actual building elements of the foundation? What are the issues of contestation with the land that this place is built on? How are the white school teachers having conversations with Black students and parents? Or, what’s going on with the white woman who’s interested in kind of taking over this space for her own purposes? There are all these different competing parties in the essay.

Joan Cashin: To that point, I hope we can persuade archivists to preserve material objects that often come in with the manuscripts. I’ve seen this off and on throughout my career. There’ll be boxes and boxes of manuscripts, but sometimes there are a couple of boxes of personal possessions. Sometimes, however, they are thrown away. I was doing research in Virginia years ago and there was this was a big manuscript collection. There were some personal objects that were owned by the women in the family—white and black women—objects that pertained to white women before the Civil War, and black women during and after. And an archivist threw them away.

I also think that there are all kinds of objects out there in private hands. They sometimes show up for sale on the market—there’s a huge market in Civil War artifacts, and they’re not all about uniforms, bayonets and bullets. There are also objects pertaining to the civilian experience and to emancipation. And I hope that museums will consider buying some of those objects.

Robert Bland: Along those lines, there is an ongoing debate over the politics of museums and the uneven history of power embedded in the collection acquisition process. Alaina, pivoting to your roundtable, I would be interested to hear you say a little bit about the discussion around the We Are Cherokee exhibit. You framed the discussion around the exhibit as an “act of reconciliation.” I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you understand curatorial work and public history as part of a longer process of reconciling historical trauma.

Alaina Roberts: Well, my first book dealt with getting historians and non-historians to see what’s happening in Indian territory with Native Americans who are enslaving Black people as part of our broader narrative about the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. I see the roundtable as part of that, but then also part of trying to make folks understand that it’s also connected to the discussions that we’re currently having— less now than a few years ago—about racial reconciliation in this country.

And so, there are conversations that have been had in the museum studies world and in the academic world about telling, for example, the American story as something that involves people of multiple races. But that hasn’t happened in the world of Native American public history and Native-focused museum studies in the same way. There are people like Amy Lonetree who have published on museum studies and examining how Native Americans have been setting up their tribal museums and cultural centers. But those have been primarily looking at tribes that did not own slaves. And, as I have traveled throughout Oklahoma for the past decade, I have seen that most of these museums [of former slaveholding tribes] totally ignore that history.  They’re doing the same whitewashing that American museums were doing, you know, decades and decades before.

And so, the roundtable was really meant to celebrate that there finally was an exhibit and a tribal nation that was looking to actually acknowledge this history; not just acknowledge, but show how influential Black people were in the Cherokee Nation, the discrimination that they faced because of the actions of the government, and what steps need to continue to be taken to really incorporate people of African descent in the nation today.

Robert Bland: In closing, I want to ask you to describe the current state of Civil War-era material culture history. What do scholars in other subfields of Civil War history miss by not more carefully grounding questions of material culture in their examinations of the nineteenth century America?

Joan Cashin: I think they’re missing a lot of the human experience. It’s clear when you do manuscript research that the material world matters a lot to people in the past. And there may not be a material artifact in the collection, but you’ll find it in the written evidence, detailed descriptions of objects that people have, or want to have, or they have lost. They are trying to preserve things because of their connection to their lives. This is another way to get at historical experience.

Alaina Roberts: I appreciate that material culture and the way we study, engage, house, and display material culture can be representative of our modern moment, and that it changes depending on how we’re thinking about history.

In terms of museums, I am hoping that they will be reflective of changes related to inclusion in the United States and in tribal nations.

Joan Cashin: I’ve thought a good deal about Alaina’s points on museum professionals and how they look at all these issues. And I think some of them are receptive. Some of them are interested in these new ideas. Not all of them. Occasionally, I talk to someone who doesn’t understand why the lives of ordinary people are important—they’re still focused on the powerful few.  But I don’t deal with people like that too much and I’m hoping that the situation is changing.  I’m hoping that they’re going to move in step with historians on all these issues.

 

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Andrew Donnelly, Confederate Sympathies, and the History of Same-Sex Romance during the Civil War Era

Andrew Donnelly, Confederate Sympathies, and the History of Same-Sex Romance during the Civil War Era

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In today’s Muster, associate editor Robert Bland is joined by Andrew Donnelly to discuss his new book Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era. Professor Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Professor Donnelly, thank you for joining us today. I wonder if you could begin maybe talking about the origins of your book. It’s a really fascinating project. I’d like to begin by asking you to describe how you found your way to this particular book and the Civil War era.

Andrew Donnelly: Thanks for having me and for letting me talk a bit about the book today. I would say there are two big questions that I was after with this project. The first is one that Muster readers know well, which is a story of Civil War memory and the retreat from Reconstruction: the story from Nina Silber’s Romance of Reunion and David Blight’s Race and Reunion that narrates how a national reunion occurs in the United States at the expense of Black citizens and an emancipationist memory of the war. Silber made gender a crucial part of this story, and I wanted to explore added depths to the gendered aspects of this monumental episode.

The other question that I was after relates to another monumental story of the 19th century, one that gets the shorthand of ‘the birth of sexuality,’ or the transformation in epistemologies of sexuality, a reconceptualization of sexual behaviors not as something one did but who one was.   The rise of sexual science and racial science are essential to this development, which leads to a world of both heterosexual identity and homosexual identity.

So those are two really big stories of the 19th century that, to me, are often understood separately. One motivating impulse for this book project was to try to understand these two stories in relation to each other and ask about the story of the post-Civil War world, what does that have to do with the story of sexuality?

RB: That leads me to my next question. Nina Silber’s influence and framing of sectional reconciliation appears to be a large influence on your work. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you think through Silber’s work. Here, I would be interested to hear some of your thinking about gender in both the postbellum period, which is the traditional domain of scholars of Civil War-era memory, as well as your own thinking of antebellum works of fiction, which your books spends a lot of time with and very thoughtfully engages.

AD: Silber’s argument, I think, for historians and for literary scholars, is such a touchstone that it’s hard to remember the moment when you first encountered these ideas. This project started for me originally as a dissertation project. I got the advice from my dissertation advisor to try to read across large sets of novels, to read both the canonical novels that have proved worthy of close-reading and rereading, as well as to read across larger sets of much lesser known novels and to keep track of the notable plots that are comparable across a defined set of novels. When you do that in Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Civil War memory literature, Silber’s story of cross-sectional romance keeps reemerging. She put her finger on something that’s really there beyond the specific novels she cites. It is the case across postbellum and even antebellum stories, that writers use heterosexual marriage as a way to think about national questions. That’s one of the central things that these novels do with their narratives.

At the same time, I also noticed this parallel set of stories of romantic friendship and the dissolution of romantic friendship between men. These stories are about two young men who are described as being deeply in love: they’re often college classmates, and they’re described as inseparable, intimate friends having a love for one another like Jonathan and David or other Classical or Biblical allusions. And the novels adhere to a similar plot where generally the two men end up on opposite sides of the Civil War. One dies and one survives.

And so that pattern, once it emerged for me across a set of several novels as a pattern, began to resemble, in some ways, Silber’s pattern of a romance of reunion, though with key differences. When we think about the romance-of-reunion plot, I think one of the things that it’s doing is leveraging heterosexuality or tropes about cross-gender romance to make a political argument. Ultimately that political argument is that the timeless love between men and women can transcend sectional differences and can transcend the violent differences that led us to the Civil War.

In these stories of same-sex romance, there’s a different political valence, and one of the things that I noticed across stories of same-sex romance across is the absence of that appeal to timeless, transcendent love. Instead, these love-plots are very much situated within a historical moment and referential to the past. These stories, rather than a forward-looking story of marriage and the formation of a new family, tend to be stories of a backward look at the romance that used to be possible in our youth, from which the men, and the nation, had to mature.

RB: Let’s pivot to how your book engages the state of discipline of Civil War history in the late nineteenth century. You spend a lot time thinking through the rise of the Dunning school, which you read alongside the rise of modern sexual science in the United States. And you’d have a really interesting vignette where you emphasize that the New York where Dunning and his students inhabited was also the New York that George Chauncey examines in Gay New York. I wonder if you could say a little bit the connection you see between the Dunning school and the rise of modern sexual science?

AD: I would say, first, Dunning to me exemplifies an interpretation that maps well onto that lost romance story I just described because so much of Dunning’s interpretation is about nation building, using the language of maturation, the framework of a crucible out of which develops national maturation. So, there’s a way that Dunning’s interpretation aligns with these narratives of individual male development.

Dunning’s students, on the other hand, much more than him, focused on a sense of antebellum nostalgia, the distinction between a postbellum modernity and antebellum past, which captures more of the story of sexuality’s development. For example, James W. Garner is at the intersection of both of these worlds. He is a Dunning-School Reconstruction historian who writes Reconstruction in Mississippi. He’s also the editor of the American Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, which is a journal that’s doing the kind of cutting-edge social science of identifying criminal types, especially of sexualized and racialized types. So, what I wanted to do in that chapter or that part of the chapter is to try to situate that historiography in a world in which these ideas in social science of sexual of sexology and sexual science are understood alongside history writing about the Civil War’s social change.

I think the broader historiographic argument is that historians in their history writing are bringing to bear ideas about sexuality as part of both their interpretation of the archive they’re examining and as part of their writing itself.

RB: What sort of broad myths do you think students might come into an undergraduate course on the Civil War regarding sex and sexuality? For example, around the debates of Lincoln’s sexuality or more broadly the homoerotic valence of male friendships during the nineteenth century.

AD: I think it’s to our benefit to always push students to think in more complicated ways about the pat questions that appear settled. We could go back in time see many seemingly settled questions, you know, that have been dug up and re-opened. I think it is the case right now that students can come into the classroom sometimes with a sort of shrug of the shoulders at a claim they’ve heard elsewhere about Lincoln’s homosexuality. And I mean, there’s nothing about Lincoln we should probably shrug our shoulders about, but certainly think more deeply about what historical meaning has been made through such suggestiveness with respect to Lincoln.

I think that we should, on the one hand, embrace what many undergraduates see today as the normal aspects of queer sexuality in society as being in some ways similar to 19th-century life, where elements of homoeroticism may have been more deeply entwined with mainstream cultural forces and mainstream society than they were in the 20th century, especially in the late 20th century. On the other hand, the crucial thing about teaching and studying sexuality is that there are nearly always these boundary lines being drawn between the normative and the anti-normative. Where those boundary lines fall is changing throughout history in subtle and drastic ways. Those boundary lines also appear to be changing very much in the world today making the examination of the construction of these boundary lines endlessly fascinating questions to try to destabilize in the past and present.

RB: In closing, I’d like to ask you about how Civil War-era historians have engaged with questions of sexuality? What are models that you would herald? What are the questions you think historians should be asking? Where do you think the field is broadly with interpreting themes of sexuality?

AD: On the scholarly side of things, my hope is that this book introduces some new ways of thinking about sexuality and homoeroticism in the past. One of the interventions I’m trying to make is to show how homoeroticism can be ingrained with normativity in the past. Part of my argument here is in showing how homoerotic narratives get deployed in cultivating sympathy for slavery, sympathy for the Confederacy, and sympathy for the Lost Cause. It makes a great deal of sense coming out of the 20th century and into the 21st, that we’re looking into the past for queer stories that are emancipatory because they advance LGBTQ liberation at a moment when the status of these identities was such an open question. I think right now we’re in a moment where we’re seeing some fracture of these coalitions, and alignments between LGBT identity and progressive politics, so one lesson is to see in the past the instability of coalitions and to see homoeroticism as more politically pliable than we might think.

Another aim of the book is not to treat the story of same-sex eroticism as particular to the experience of a same-sex desiring minority. By that I don’t mean to make this claim of universal homosexuality in the past, but that same-sex eroticism and same-sex desire is a phenomenon shaping aspects of culture broadly, shaping the contours of political discourse broadly. Therefore, our understanding of political history, broadly, requires understanding how sexuality and same-sex desire operate and are conceptualized.

RB: I appreciate your kind of willingness to share some time and share some of your thoughts on your important and insightful book.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Interview with Michael Allen on a Career in Public History

Interview with Michael Allen on a Career in Public History

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Today’s Muster features an interview with Michael Allen, a retired National Park Service official. Over the course of his nearly four decade career, Allen has played a pivotal role in how several Civil War Era sites have reshaped their interpretative vision of the past. More recently, he has played a critical role in the creation of the Reconstruction-era NPS site in Beaufort, as well as the International African American Museum in Charleston. Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Michael, it is a pleasure to get a chance to sit down with you today. I wonder if we could begin today’s conversation by introducing yourself and saying a little bit about the beginning of your career with the National Park Service.

Michael Allen: I am Michael Allen and I am retired from the National Park Service. And, as you indicated, I was blessed and fortunate enough to be able to do 37 and a half years with that agency. I would say, in a nutshell, my time and energy and effort there was dealing with history, culture, preservation, and more specifically, African American history and Gullah culture. And I would say my journey was addressing what had been hidden in plain view.

RB: I wonder if you could say a little bit more there about what you mean by things have been “hidden in plain view”? In what ways did the National Park Service’s interpretative approach change over the course  of your career?

MA:  I began my journey with the National Park Service while I was attending an HBCU, South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina. I was a history major. And I grew up here in South Carolina, in a small town called Kingstree, which is incorporated in the Gullah region of South Carolina. Africanisms, Gullah culture, history, tradition were all around me, in terms of what I ate, in terms of my language, in terms of what I may have said, things that I may have done, things I saw, experienced from an educational perspective, from a social perspective, from a community perspective, from a religious perspective, all those Africanisms and things were around me.

But unfortunately, from an educational perspective, these things were not presented to me. Or just simply put, taught to me. In history classes, whether it’s in elementary, middle, high school. These things really was not presented. I had them, but they were not made aware to me.

And it wasn’t until the fall of 1978 in my freshman history class that I was fortunate enough to, you know, to have a great history teacher, Dr. Bill Hines. And he introduced me, really, to colonial life and early talking about history through a good book that I would encourage folks to take advantage of called Black Majority. By Dr. Peter Wood. And as I went through the book, I then began to see myself. Things I may have done, things I may have said, just how I managed myself was made very clear. I felt, to be truthful, somewhat betrayed that all this good history and information that I’m gathering now as a freshman in college, was not presented to me. But I realized, the dynamics of growing up in the South, teaching African history and culture back in the 1970s and 80s may have been challenging to some people. So, in many respects, that experience in the from 1978 really galvanized my thought process of wanting to deal with what was uncovered—what was in plain view.

And so, I just use that as a pretext to when I began working for the Park Service in 1982, to really work to uncover what had been hidden in plain view and to be about the task of really being out front, saying that this story needs to be told.

RB: I wonder if you could say a little bit about the politics of that earlier public history moment. Your career runs along the rise of the new social history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Works like Slaves No More and other histories from this time period provided big turning point in the larger story of the Civil War. We went from a traditional accounting of emancipation that emphasized how “Lincoln freed the slaves,” to our current understanding of Black freedom that now emphasizes more bottom-up stories. Now we have more stories of people fleeing to union lines, stories of contraband camps. I wonder what that story looks like on the ground in a place like Charleston in the 1980s and 1990s,

MA: I call it the hoop skirt experience—”states’ rights, not slavery.” The reality is that when I visited places or drove down certain streets in and around Charleston, I knew the history. I mean, thousands of people come to Charleston on a yearly basis. Lots of people go down to The Battery. That’s a very famous historic place in the city of Charleston.

But it was in February of 1865 that African American soldiers stepped foot on the battery to begin the process of liberating the city of Charleston. From being under the bondage of enslavement, and so we may go and drive and look at The Battery.

But we cannot leave that part of the story of The Battery. So, when I was working at Sullivan’s Island. And then again, do Black majority and other research books. I realize that Sullivan’s Island was almost an entry point for enslaved Africans coming into the New World and coming into North America and coming into the colony of South Carolina. In the early eighteenth century, the colonial government basically declared that any vessel bringing cargo Africans into the Port of Charleston would have to quarantine them on Sullivan’s Island. That site is no longer existing. But the fort is less than a mile from where that site once stood.

RB: I want to ask you a broader public history question. We’re in a moment where we are thinking a lot about plantations right now. We have seen some public debate sparked by the burning of the Nottaway, plantation, which has led us back to some longstanding questions about their place in southern history. Should they be called forced labor camps? But also, how should sites be interpreted and contextualized now?

MA: In 1990, the National Park Service acquired a site outside of Charleston, Mount Pleasant. that was a former plantation called Snee Farm. It was once owned by Charles Pinckney. One of the signers and drafters of the United States Constitution. And a number of individuals banded together, purchased that property. So, it would not be turned into a subdivision. It was then donated to the National Park Service in the early 1990s. I came in in 1992 as a staff member. As a part of the team that led to development and eventually opening.

And so, now the question is: How do we interpret this new place? And how do we do it in a way that could be comprehensive? We’re fortunate enough for the legislation that created the site. Congress said that you will interpret the life and legacy and contributions of Charles Pinckney, the man; that you will look at the United States as a transitioning from a colony into a young nation; and the third, and probably the most important point for me, it said that you will interpret all of the lives of individuals who lived at that plantation. Whether you were white, black. Free, slave, Gullah-Geechee. That’s in black and white. That’s what Congress said. So, I think having those specific things in the legislation which created it. It gave us enough, at least for me, gave us an opportunity to address what had been hidden in plain view.

RB: I want to close on thinking more broadly about the Lowcountry.  We’re in a moment where it seems like the Lowcountry’s at the vanguard of public history. We have the recent opening of the International African American Museum. The relatively new National Park Site for Reconstruction in Beaufort. Charleston is at the vanguard for thinking about southern foodways histories. How do you see these developments in the region’s public history?

MA: think in my journey with the National Park Service, I was fortunate enough to be involved with everything you just mentioned. I’m original board member of the International African American Museum. We met for the very first time in November 2000 and that meeting would lead to the institution that we call the International African American Museum today. If you back up to the summer of 1999, on Sullivan’s Island today, there’s a historic marker that talks about Sullivan’s Island in the context of their arrival, highlighting the fusion in the history and culture of Africans and African Americans.

Our concurrent resolution was passed stating that something should be placed on Sullivan’s Island to address this history. Which now means that we could not evade the history of Sullivan’s Island in the context of the African American experience. That you can’t hide it anymore. That you gotta deal with this. Whether it’s the Slave Mart Museum, whether it’s the International African American Museum, whether it’s eventually the foundation and the creation of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Even now to Reconstruction-era Park Site.

RB: Michael, I appreciate your time today. Do you have any closing thoughts on the changing public history landscape?

MA:  In closing. I want to encourage your followers. Even in a time that we find ourselves in. Our voices are needed. Our knowledge of history is important. Our tools that we possess are even more critical. So don’t allow the times that we find ourselves in to discourage you or to get you down or depressed. This is the time that we have to press forward even more.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Alternative Histories: Integrating Drafted Men into the Military Narrative

Alternative Histories: Integrating Drafted Men into the Military Narrative

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“How I hate the whole thing,” wrote a decidedly unhappy new recruit to the Sixth Wisconsin late in 1864, “from beginning to end.”[1] That was Joshua B. Ingalls, a Richfield County blacksmith in his late thirties with a wife and six children. He had managed to avoid earlier drafts, but his name was finally called in fall 1864. Also drafted into the Sixth at about the same time were three German immigrant brothers from Sheboygan: Gottlieg, Wilhelm, and Gottfried Torke. Gottlieb was about thirty with a farm, a wife, and several children.[2]

There is no reason to think that Ingalls and Torke ever met—they served in different companies—but they both provide rare, if quite different, accounts of the last few months of the Civil War through conscripts’ eyes.

The Sixth was part of the famous Iron Brigade, which had fought in almost all of the major battles in the eastern theater. But by late 1864 both the brigade and the regiment were shells of their former selves. Indeed, only a few dozen original members were still with the regiment. As I argue in The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment, heavy casualties and sickness had caused a constant turnover of officers and men, meaning that there wasn’t a single “Sixth Wisconsin,” but an ever-changing roster of men with different motivations and experiences.

Ingalls and Torke, along with over 470 other draftees, comprised the bulk of the version of the Sixth Wisconsin that actually finished the war. Their experiences and reflections are necessarily very different from the more familiar narratives created by men who had volunteered earlier in the war and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. They help us appreciate the evolving nature of Civil War regiments and the wildly varying attitudes of the men who joined them. While Ingalls poured out his disgust and sorrow in bitter diary entries, Torke described his experiences in letters to his wife filled with pious encouragement, expressions of affection, homely advice about turnips and cattle, and an innocent, wide-eyed response to combat.

Ingalls began his diary upon arriving at Camp Randall, the state’s mustering grounds in Madison. He complained particularly about his fellow draftees, many of whom were German immigrants. “I tell you this is a hard place, lots of dutchmen—Jabber, jabber all the time,” he sighed. “I look around me” and ask, “can I stand it a year[?] O my heart almost fails me.”[3] An uncomfortable three weeks in camp was followed by even more uncomfortable week of train travel to Virginia. Ingalls resented the casual cruelty and lack of consideration for the comfort or feelings of the new soldiers. They were under guard from the time they left Camp Randall—even when “tend[ing] to the calls of nature. How mean it makes one feel.” By December 11 they were at Fortress Monroe, where, crowded into a “bull pen,” they were exposed to the cold and rain, and ignored except for the guards that still watched their every move. When one of the draftees got too close to a pen of Confederate prisoners, a rebel stabbed him.[4]

Ingalls was appalled by the squalid conditions in camp. At one point two thousand men waited in line for meager rations—next to the latrines. “You cannot imagine the stench that is there & all on an empty stomach.” Finally, after a short train trip and a long march through vast fields of tents and ruined homes, they reached the Sixth in late December.[5]

Predictably, none of the officers had any interest in granting Ingalls’ request to be assigned to a non-combat role. Indeed, when he met with the regimental adjutant and another officer, they “called me everything that they could turn their toung to & swore that if they could. . . they would hang me.”[6]

Ingalls gave up and began learning how to be a soldier. The newcomers were punished for such violations as blowing their nose on dress parade. One of the draftees tried to get a medical discharge by pressing a brass button into a wound to keep it from healing, but he “got catched at it” and was “made to stand on a board for half a day” with “a paper pinned on his back stating his crime.” Ingalls’ last surviving entry ended in disgust: “I have to get me a hat with a bugle 6 & E & a feather.” That would have shocked the original men of the Sixth, for whom that black hat and feather were symbols of courage and respect.[7]

Betraying none of the bitterness of Ingalls’s diary entries, Gottlieb Torke’s letters to his wife Elizabeth were loving and plain, even as they revealed a certain bewilderment with his surroundings. He reported on the long days and plain food, hard drilling and daily camp chores, the unfamiliar weather and sandy soil. He gave homely instructions for managing the farm, including advising his wife to “keep yourself away from the sheep that they don’t butt you.” He imagined his young children asleep in bed as he walked the midnight shift on guard duty. He hated missing Christmas, prayed for peace, and worried that Elizabeth might be working too hard. In mid-January he reported that the regiment was training “very hard now. . . As soon as something happens here at Petersburg, then we will have to go off to the war.”[8]

They did, indeed, go “off to the war” when the Army of the Potomac began the climactic campaign in February 1865. Torke described the movements and battles through what must have been a terrifying haze. His first thoughts as he went into the fight on the Boydton Plank Road were of Elizabeth and of God: “I could think of you only a little. I directed my thoughts to the heavenly father above, to whom many thousand prayers were rising.” When the shooting finally started, “we all looked at the world through tears, and I had given myself over completely to dear God.” Clearly unfamiliar with military terminology Gottlieb captured a blur of fearful images and disorienting sounds:

It was a hard day for us, we were quite wet and freezing. We had to fight the                      Southerners . . . and had driven them back. . . . There we made a good trench                    where the bullets would always fly over our heads, and then when we had                          finished making the trench, we went out again against the Southerners [who]                  stayed in their trenches, and we stood in the woods. Then we lay down on the                  ground and fired at them. We had been firing a half-hour, then we sprang up                    again and ran back again in our trenches, as we wanted to draw the Southerners              out of their trenches so that they would come near our trenches. And so we tried              to decoy them but they wouldn’t come, so then we went out again toward them.              They were firing very much at us with cannons.

Torke received a wound to his head that, while minor, would eventually earn him a discharge. “Dear God had surely placed his almighty arm on my head and so the bullet couldn’t go any farther.”[9]

Both men survived the war and lived into the twentieth century. Neither in life nor in death did they celebrate their military service. It seems to have been a wrenching and terrifying experience, better forgotten than memorialized. We do not know whether they were proud of having helped to save the Union; they don’t seem to have participated in post-war veterans’ activities. Unlike the volunteers of 1861, they saw their service as an imposition, a frightening and disruptive event in their lives in which they apparently took little pride.

Yet the nature of that service is no less important to examine if we are to understand Civil War soldiers’ motivations and experiences.

[1] January 14, 1865, Diary of J. B. Ingalls, Library and Research Center, Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, PA.

[2] James Marten, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 151, 159.

[3] November 30, and December 7, 1864, Ingalls Diary.

[4] December 10, 13 and 14, 1864, Ibid.

[5] December 15, 1864, Ibid.

[6] December 17, 1865, Ibid.

[7] January 15, 1865, Ibid.

[8] Gottlieb Torke to Elizabeth Torke, December 20, 1864, and January 12, 1865, transcription translated by Leona Torke Kane, Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.

[9] Gottlieb to Elizabeth, February 9, 1865, Ibid.

James Marten

James Marten is professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and a former president of the Society of Civil War Historians. He is author or editor of nearly two dozen books, including his most recent, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

Interview with Melissa DeVelvis on Gendering Secession

Interview with Melissa DeVelvis on Gendering Secession

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In today’s Muster, JCWE associate editor Robert Bland interviews Melissa DeVelvis, author of Gendering Secession: White Women in the Politics of South Carolina, 1859 to 1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Gender Secession explores the lives and politics of South Carolina’s elite white women during the end of the antebellum period and the months leading up to the sectional crisis. The political drama that unfolded during the secession crisis of 1860 has long captured our attention, but scant regard has been paid to the secessionist women themselves. These women were astute political observers and analysts who filtered their “improper” political ideas through avenues gendered as feminine and therefore socially acceptable. In recreating the rhythms of the year 1860, Melissa DeVelvis spotlights the moments when women realized that national events were too overwhelming to dismiss.

Dr. DeVelvis is an assistant professor of history at Augusta University and specializes in nineteenth-century US history, history of the American South, and the history of gender in the United States.

Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

==============================================

Robert D. Bland: Dr. DeVelvis, I appreciate you making time for us to talk today. And I’d like to begin maybe talking a little bit about the origins of your project. How did you arrive at this particular topic? What are some of the questions that led to this topic? How did you arrive at your book?

Melissa DeVelvis: Thank you for having me. This project originated from the dissertation as a quite a few early career scholars’ projects did, but it actually started before that when I was a very precocious undergrad who wanted to do an honors thesis. And I was given these letters by my professor at the time who had already transcribed everything, which was super convenient for me, who I don’t know what my cursive reading skills were when I was all of twenty years old.

But either way, there are these two sisters in St. Simon’s Island. And their reactions to secession were completely different. And so, I was immediately kind of wondering, how did women’s personalities shape this new event. That project was the paper that got me into grad school and then just being at University of South Carolina in Columbia and having access to the Caroliniana Library, which South Carolina, I just had the best gig where I’m living and where I’m researching.

It always started with emotions. It started as an emotions’ historian and then slowly it became at story of women’s politics. It is kind of hard-to-find documents about secession by women because so many women in other states write they write after it happens. They’re like, oh, something happened, and we need to write about it. Well, what about before?

I think that is the traditional origin story, but also, they’re all a little bit different in different ways and I think the I think historians who are working through projects, especially graduate students and early-stage faculty, are always interested to hear about

RDB: How has the project changed as it moved from being dissertation to book. A lot of those questions. I’d like to talk a little bit about the central theme of your project. And how does the story of South Carolina’s road to secession change when we center gender? And what ways does gender change the story about the road to secession.

MD: in some ways, it really shapes when the public who are not these secessionist politicians, who some of them have been pushing since in 1850, they try to secede, you’ve got some that vaguely remember nullification.

It’s one thing to just hear it from the politicians and it’s another to hear it women who don’t necessarily need to be pushing a certain secessionist agenda on someone. And I’m not saying that these women aren’t politically informed because they certainly are. And that’s one of the things that I argue. But you get more of an authenticity to what are the people who are not just the leading politicians of the period um saying about secession. Is it going to happen? You can tell from the frequency of the correspondence that women are writing when do they realize that this is something big and something different: is secession going to actually happen? Is a war going to actually happen? You can see the moment where people who are not supposed to, quotation marks, talk about politics or at least electoral politics and national politics in this way, in a way that it’s still improper for Southern women.

It’s a really interesting examination of timing. When you look at people who are trying to not bring this into their everyday life. And at what point they can’t stop and can’t help themselves. But at the same time a lot of the sentiments These women are very secessionist. Sometimes we like to think that, oh, well. Well, at least I get this for my students who think that everyone was in favor of women’s individuality, but you think like, oh, well, they just kind of they had to go along with what the man said. And I’m like, well when you read this, they are part and parcel of this enslaving master class. And they very much liked their lives. And they were, a lot of them, gung-ho secessionists.

In some ways, it’s an echoing of the same elite enslaver ideology that you get from their menfolk, I suppose but in other ways Even if they share the sentiments to what extent can these sentiments permeate their diaries and their letters because even when they are writing about this, these women are still, even if it’s just a formality, they’re still apologizing or making an excuse for why they’re talking politics. So yeah, it’s similar political beliefs you can trace when things are happening and what really worries them because this is a population that is trying not to talk about it constantly in a way that men are politicking and have been making speeches about it for a couple of years, depending on who you’re talking to or about.

RDB: I want to know who these women were. What are the institutions that they lead? What type of ideas and ideologies did they hold? You talk about “improper ideas.” What are some of those improper ideas that they’re wrestling with? What sort of world are they trying to preserve? What are their relationships to other women in South Carolina? How do you see these elite white women in relationship to other women in South Carolina?

MD: When I was looking at letters and diaries, it did end up kind of bringing me to the elites. And you do see them, it’s really interesting, even in people like authors like William Freeling, who has written those giant books about session and the road to succession. These women and their diaries are used in earlier works but just kind of as like commentators. There’s no attention page that says “hey, women are saying these things.”

A lot of these names might be familiar to people, especially to scholars of South Carolina, these are the big names. I have so much by the Alston family. And then, of course, Pickens comes in. And he’s one of the wealthiest enslavers in the state. His wife, Adele writes all of the time his daughter, also named Adele, who writes all of the time. Or, sometimes some people don’t even write until Sumter. And then they realize “oh, this might be worth recording.” I’m more interested in how people’s lives changed on the road to it and when they realized their lives were going to change.

And so it’s these elite white women who are covered. And they have been covered before. Whether they’re covered by Elizabeth Fox Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household or they get the remix version of these same women with Stephanie Jones Rogers’ book, They Were Their Property. Or, you’re looking at these same women for Drew Faust’s Mothers of Invention, but the secession period is either just kind of a close to the antebellum book or it’s a prologue to the Civil War book. And Faust has a couple of pages about secession, which is pretty good, but I’m more interested in bridging that gap. These women are familiar to a lot of people and they’re very much at the top of this cultural hegemony.

RDB: Along those lines. I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about periodization, how you understand kind of change and continuity. In what ways does the emotional language of these white women either change or stay the same between the antebellum and the postbellum period, right? And in many ways, you are examining a short time period, but obviously like this is a kind of moment where a lot changes in a short time period. In this view, your provocative chapter titles, like “The Last Antebellum Year” capture something poignant. I wonder if you can say a little about kind of how those women experience change and how you thought about kind of framing that change over time.

MD: This is a time period where, as a quick rundown for my non-women and gender historians, what we understand to be political, these women were absolutely being political. But if we define politics as they define politics, which is giving speeches, they did attend a lot of these meetings.

But talking about electoral politics is really not something that happens To the extent that in their letters they have to say, “well, one should wonder why I’m so warm a secessionist, but South Carolina is like a mother to me and I am its daughter.” And so, they’re using this language of motherhood so they’re using these ways to justify themselves. But before secession, I looked at a couple other elections. You don’t see this extent of political talk from these women.

And what I wanted to see was when do they discuss it? When do they find that they can no longer stop writing about it. And so, I looked at people who had long-term diaries and I looked at people who had a lot of collected letters. Of course, methodology wise, you have to make sure that Is this just a spotty collection? Like, did they just lose all of the letters from March? You do have to keep that in mind.

In one example, Ella Gertrude Clinton Thomas is from Augusta, so she’s in Georgia, but barely. And she has this like multi-volume collection The only one missing covers the session. Like, of course that would happen to me. There are a lot of gaps, surprisingly. But if you can find enough of these sources, you can kind of make these generalizations and see kind of what the rhythms of their lives were based on the letters these elites Over the summer they kind of leave the plantations and either go to the city or they’ll go up to the hot springs or they’ll even go up to New York to shop because there’s quite the southern stronghold in New York City even, if you know where to look. And they do this every summer for the planting season. Their lives really follow a rhythm if you get down and dirty into what they’re writing about.

I was also curious, like what events that we mark as like the road to disunion are they writing about in their diaries or their letters and so when I went trying to look as far back, I’d start in like 1855, you really don’t see a lot until John Brown. And then they feel fully justified in talking about John Brown. But then you get to the Democratic National Convention that’s in Charleston. And you’d think, okay, now is when women are going to start worrying, but really mostly that they just worry about housing in Charleston. And they do mention what went on. They mention the walkout. They were part of the booing and the hissing of the people who refused to walk out of the Democratic National Convention. But then it quiets down. And they just go off for the summer. Some of them go north for the summer, so clearly, they weren’t thinking that like the country is going to divorce in a couple of months.

And so I’m really just finding the daily pattern of their lives, finding when it changed, tracing the frequency of these political mentionings. This is something Stephen Stowe looks at as well in his book of Civil War diarists, which is how do they try and then fold the war into the everyday lives and like make it as normal as they can? So, someone will start a diary like ranting about John Brown and then visited Mrs. Smith yesterday and it just like becomes part of the laundry list of things so I let their letters and their rhythms kind of inform when I should start this thing.

RDB: Thank you. I mean, this has been an incredibly rich discussion. Again, the book is Gendering Secession, Women in the Politics of South Carolina, 1859 to 1861. Dr. DeVelvis, thank you for making time for us today. Look forward to engaging with your work in the future.

MD: Thank you so much. This is so great to talk about. It’s been a long time coming, the book, not the interview.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Teaching the Civil War: Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery

Teaching the Civil War: Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery

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Today’s Muster continues our series Teaching the Civil War. Each post in the series has examined a different method that college and K-12 teachers have used to make the Civil War era come alive in the classroom. The following post by University of Tennessee Chattanooga professors Mark Johnson and Michael Thompson explores how place-based learning at a local Confederate cemetery has helped students wrestle with questions of historical memory. 

 

Every day on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s campus, students walk by the final resting place for Confederate soldiers. Despite its proximity to the campus bookstore, the main parking garage, and many academic buildings, most students claim to have never noticed it. As students engage with course readings, class discussions, and the cemetery itself, they come to see, as historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote, that communities “exert the cultural authority, express the collective solidarity, and achieve a measure of the permanence that they often crave” through the control of public spaces.[1] With this new understanding, students become increasingly curious: how many other spaces, which may generally go unnoticed, remain, therefore, unquestioned and permanent parts of their city’s landscape?

 

History and Overview

After the Battle of Stones River, Confederates transported their wounded eastward to Chattanooga and initially interred nearly 900 casualties along the banks of the Tennessee River. After devastating flooding in 1867 a committee purchased the current cemetery site on higher ground where the deceased were relocated, including 141 buried in mass graves after their original markers had been washed away. After the battles for Chickamauga and Chattanooga, more casualties joined them. Long after the war ended, many Confederate veterans and their families chose this cemetery as their final resting place.[2] Two American soldiers also are buried on the grounds, along with a freedman named Shaderick Searcy and at least two other unnamed people of color – a “Negro Man” and a “Hospital Matron.” 

 

The grave of an unnamed Black man, most likely enslaved and claimed as Confederate by etching “CSA” on his tombstone. This photo was taken moments after Thompson removed a small Confederate flag inserted next to the grave. (photo taken by the authors)

 

Chattanooga was contested space both during and after the Civil War. Held by the Confederate and Union armies, the city and its environs are awash with reminders of the conflict and its combatants. But aside from the Chickamauga battlefield ten miles to the south in Georgia, the greatest local assemblage of Confederate memorialization and Lost Cause mythology can be found in Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery. For generations, a Confederate Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked to develop the cemetery and mold local memories and understandings of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. As burials swelled to as many as 2,500, these groups erected an obelisk, gazebo, stone wall, wrought iron Confederate flag gate, plaques, and other memorials.[3] 

Students in Dr. Michael Thompson’s American South to 1865 class tour the Confederate Cemetery Thursday, May 23, 2018.(photo credit: Angela Foster)

Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery has proven a captivating and versatile teaching space in part due to its evolution over time and the ways it still resonates with many issues both past and present. Experiential learning and community engagement are pedagogical and institutional focal points at UTC. The authors and their history department colleagues regularly teach beyond the traditional classroom, providing students with opportunities to learn by doing, explore local histories, and bridge academic and public dialogues. In this post, the authors explain how we have utilized the cemetery as an archive of primary sources to enrich historical understanding for an array of learners, ranging from local high schoolers and First Gen Mocs to first-year history majors and students studying historical methods, enslavement, the Civil War and its memory, and the Jim Crow era.

 

University High and Teaching Historical Methods

Since Fall 2023, UTC has welcomed to campus Hamilton County Schools students enrolled in University High, an alternative program for public high school juniors and seniors. On “Focus Fridays,” UH students have actively engaged with campus life and various academic disciplines. Thompson has guided groups of UH students through a session called “Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery: Memorialization, Memory, and Myth,” which includes introductions to what historians do and what it means to think historically.

 

The students, who have pre-read a Slate interview with historian Kevin Levin about his book Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, are oriented to the cemetery’s history and most noteworthy sites before exploring the space in small groups.[4] The participants then critically interrogate the cemetery as a site of contested historical memory, and record their observations and questions in preparation for a closing discussion. On the whole, these diverse groups of high schoolers have articulated mixed reactions, ranging from fascination and curiosity to surprise and outrage. But most have appreciated the opportunity to learn about their community and its fraught history.

 

Both authors have regularly taught the department’s introductory “Research and Writing in History,” a required methodology course for all history majors and minors at UTC as well as those training to become high school history teachers. Although most of these students come from Tennessee, only a third hail from Hamilton County and have some familiarity with local sites and histories.

 

The main focus of this course is teaching the conventions of historical thinking, researching, and writing; but we have also taken students on walking tours, to local museums, and to the Confederate Cemetery. These cemetery sessions have entailed similar learning objectives as those for UH, but have additionally asked these college students to formulate historical questions about the space, scour the cemetery for evidence, critically assess the source and reliability of that evidence, and devise research strategies to answer their queries. We have found that the cemetery’s dual nature, as not merely a repository of names and dates but also a site of symbolism and discourse that changes with the times, challenges these students to think beyond orthodox sources and methodologies.

Students in Dr. Michael Thompson’s American South to 1865 class tour the Confederate Cemetery Thursday, May 23, 2018.(photo credit: Angela Foster)

 

Civil War Memory in the Cemetery

In Johnson’s upper-level course “The Civil War in American Memory,” students have acquainted themselves with the scholarship about public spaces, memorialization, cemeteries, and the memory and politics of the dead. Ultimately, students learn to analyze the ways in which, according to historian David Thelen, “people reshape their recollections of the past to fit their present needs,” such as, in the words of anthropologist Paul Connerton, to “legitimate a present social order,” political viewpoint, and collective identity.[5]

 

When visiting the cemetery, students have generally wanted to discuss the cemetery’s gazebo, an unidentified American soldier, the entrance gate, and the plaques. The students have found the normalness of these things to be part of their power. They note that the gazebo, in particular, seems innocent because it provides a place for mundane activities. They have added, however, that its Confederate imagery and gush, therefore, tells certain people that they do not belong.

 

Similarly, the entrance gate subtly displays the Confederate battle flag. While students have usually overlooked it prior to their study of the cemetery, they have said that they cannot help but notice it afterward. They have wondered: what other Confederate symbols surround them and have become unquestioned parts of the landscape?

 

In Fall 2024, students spent more time than usual on the soldier identified only as an “American.” In July 1999, the National Park Service found the remains on Missionary Ridge and memorialized him as an “American Soldier” from the conflict. The students consistently thought about this marker alongside Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic because the “American” identification seems like the type of reconciliation occurring, at least among white Americans, in the book. Similarly, they connect it to the reconciliation occurring in Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary. In Horwitz, Burns, and the cemetery, the 1990s come across as a decade with little conflict between white Americans. They all seem on the same side. This type of memory, students have increasingly pointed out, intentionally passes over the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1994 Murder Trial of O. J. Simpson that put race front and center in the national conversation.[6]

 

Teaching Shaderick Searcy

The Civil War in American Memory students also have visited the cemetery in conjunction with their readings on faithful slaves and Black Confederates, so Shaderick Searcy has become the focal point of the class.

Amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cemetery offered a space for outdoor class instruction. In this image, Johnson converses with Civil War in American Memory students about the SCV and their claiming of Shaderick Searcy as a Black Confederate. (photo credit: Angela Foster)

 

In 2016, cemetery caretakers unearthed Searcy’s lost grave marker. That original gravestone clearly portrays him (spelled Shaderick Searcy) as an enslaved person who “served under masters J. D. and W. K. Searcy.” After 2016 the SCV erected a second and new marker, which gives no indication of race or enslaved status. Instead, Searcy (spelled Shadrick) has the same marker as any other private in the Confederate Army. Students have argued that the SCV effectively turned Searcy from a slave into a soldier.[7]

 

Before class, students have read excerpts from Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates, Micki McElya’s Clinging to Mammy, and a piece on African Americans who manipulated the “faithful slave” role in public performances to gain measures of economic and political power. In addition to these readings, they have studied primary sources, which include a letter from Robert Church, Jr. of Memphis to the United Confederate Veterans, a newspaper column by UCV Commander in Chief John B. Gordon about the so-called friendliness in the South between the races, and a newspaper article about Clinton Rodgers, who supposedly fought in the war as an enslaved man, supposedly went by the name “Jeff Davis,” and supposedly attended all the UCV reunions.[8]

 

Students have recognized that Searcy, who died at 91, lived through Jim Crow and the Great Depression. Amid these difficult times, he had a stake in good relations with Chattanooga’s white population. According to news coverage of the original grave’s discovery, Searcy received a Confederate pension for his service. The students have balked at the reporter’s use of the term “soldier.”[9] In more recent iterations of the class, students have expressed that they like to think that journalists would approach this term with more care and sensitivity in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans routinely place Confederate flags on the graves at the cemetery. By doing so, they continue to claim Shaderick Searcy, who was born enslaved, as a Confederate soldier. They also put Confederate flags on the other graves to Black Americans, including the Negro Man and the Hospital Matron. (photo taken by the authors)

 

The Cemetery Amid Black Lives Matter and Unite the Right

In 2017, after the white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Chattanooga’s mayor Andy Burke terminated the city’s trusteeship of the cemetery grounds. Burke explained, “Our action today makes it clear that the city of Chattanooga condemns white supremacy in every way, shape and form. While we honor our dead, we do not honor the principle for which they fought.”[10] The city left stewardship of the cemetery exclusively to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Nathan Bedford Forrest Camp #3. Nonetheless, Chattanooga city streets and public spaces continue to bear the names of Confederates, like Samuel Josiah Abner Frazier, and Unionists, like Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain. Unlike the cemetery, however, Frazier Avenue, Chamberlain Avenue, and Chamberlain Field do not have Civil War imagery. By turning over the cemetery, Chattanooga ended its relationship with its most-overt medium for permanent display of Lost Cause propaganda.

 

In 2020, amid the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the cemetery became a new battleground for racist and anti-racist messaging. Thompson and his students discovered a banana peel discarded on Searcy’s grave, eliciting profound shock and disgust as the instructor removed the dehumanizing refuse and explained the bigotry of this anonymous act. Around the same time, and amid the vandalization of Confederate monuments and other symbols in cities like Charleston, Richmond, New Orleans, and Chapel Hill, “BLM” was found emblazoned on the stones for the “Negro Man” and Black hospital matron (who, like Searcy, adherents of the Lost Cause had claimed by etching “CSA” on their tombstones), and the words “Confederate,” “The Stars & Bars,” and “N.B. Forrest” were blotted out on a memorial to “Our Confederate Dead.”

The 1997 memorial to “Our Confederate Dead” blotted in protest amid the Black Lives Matter movement. (photo taken by the authors)

 

For students, it’s remarkable that the site, a cemetery filled with stone markers supposedly designed to inter people and last – presumably unchanged – forever, has its own history as it changes with new discoveries, new norms and values, and new developments in the politics of race and white supremacy in the United States.

 

Mark A. Johnson is an assistant professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932. Currently, he’s working on his forthcoming book, American Bacon: A History of a Food Phenomenon.

 

Michael Thompson is an associate professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. His current scholarly projects include a history of enslavement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Tennessee.

 

[1] W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2008), 2-3, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.utc.edu/10.4159/9780674028982-003.

[2] Zella Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Vol. 1 (The Lookout Publishing Company, 1931), 254-6, 493-512.

[3] Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County, 254-6, 493-512.

[4] Rebecca Onion, “Dismantling the Myth of the ‘Black Confederate,’ Slate Aug. 30, 2019, https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/08/black-confederate-myth-history-book.html.

[5] David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” The Journal of American History 75, 4 (Mar. 1989): 1121, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1908632; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.

[6] Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998); Ken Burns, Ric Burns, and WETA-TV, The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns (WETA, 2002).

[7]  “True Grave of First African-American Soldier Buried At Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery Found,” Chattanoogan.com Mar. 23, 2016, https://www.chattanoogan.com/2016/3/23/320653/True-Grave-Of-First-African-American.aspx

[8] Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2007); Mark A. Johnson, Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles (University Press of Mississippi, 2021).

[9] “True Grave of First African-American Soldier Buried At Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery Found,” Chattanoogan.com Mar. 23, 2016, https://www.chattanoogan.com/2016/3/23/320653/True-Grave-Of-First-African-American.aspx

[10] Daniel Jackson, “Chattanooga Backs Away from Confederate Past,” Feb. 21, 2018, https://www.courthousenews.com/chattanooga-backs-away-from-confederate-past/

Mark Johnson Michael Thompson

Mark A. Johnson is an assistant professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932. Currently, he’s working on his forthcoming book, American Bacon: A History of a Food Phenomenon. Michael Thompson is an associate professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. His current scholarly projects include a history of enslavement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Tennessee.

Previewing the March 2025 JCWE

Previewing the March 2025 JCWE

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We’re excited to deliver another journal issue full of wide-ranging, creative, and historiographically engaged scholarship, which we feel especially honored to publish in light of the after-effects of COVID and university rollbacks. The issue includes a roundtable, two research articles, a historiographical review essay, and the normal run of sterling book reviews; it also gives us a chance to note some turnover in the masthead.

In the opening roundtable, organizer Lorien Foote brings together Civil War–era historians and military historians of related fields to reopen questions about the state of military history today. Representing the breadth of comparative questions at the vibrant meetings of the Society for Military History, Foote and her collaborators discuss ways to break out of tired debates about what counts as military history. They apply broad, comparatively informed frameworks as they aim to see the Civil War anew, and they draw on practices of scholars in other fields to reveal tools available for US historians. The roundtable illuminates the vibrancy of the broader field of military history and suggests how much US Civil War historians can learn by looking beyond the field and how much good work lies ahead for military historians of the Civil War era.

In the first of this issue’s two research articles, Lindsey R. Peterson examines Civil War commemorations in the US West to illuminate what was distinctive about the memorials to the war in that region. Peterson, whose article won the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award, isolates the regional effort to connect the Civil War seamlessly to the settlement of the US West and the colonization of Native peoples. The tie that bound these commemorations together was their gendered dimensions; more so than other regions, she argues, commemorations in the West built on the idea of a continuous struggle to defend and extend free, single-family households against threats posted by planters and southern politicians, by the westward movement itself, and by Native traditions.

In our second research article, Anders Bo Rasmussen takes us both to the US West and much farther afield to Denmark. Rasmussen examines the life of Louis Pio, the founder of the Danish Social Democratic Party, who lived in exile in the United States starting in 1877. Rasmussen explores how Pio was influenced not only by socialist ideals of universal working-class solidarity but also by Danish ideas about race and colonialism, and how all those ideas shaped his activities in the United States. Engaging in utopian and working-class movements, Pio never questioned white people’s entitlement to the lands of North America and ultimately even promoted oil baron Henry Flagler’s establishment of a whites-only residential colony in Florida. As Rasmussen suggests, Pio’s life story shows a bleak commonality, a transatlantic blind spot (or worse) on race that carried through social democratic movements.

In this issue’s review essay, Andrew Slap examines the long historiography of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to examine changing views of race, Reconstruction, and the presidency. Slap isolates four central groups of scholars who have interpreted largely consistent groups of sources: traditionalists, hagiographers, revisionists, and conservative revisionists. Slap suggests that we are now entering a new period of reinterpretation of Johnson’s impeachment, inspired by the impeachments of President Donald Trump and the racial reckonings of the past decade.

It is a pleasure in these notes to celebrate the hard work of the many people who keep the journal going and whom we rely on. This issue offers us an opportunity to announce some major transitions that occurred in 2024. We were sad to say goodbye to Hilary Green after her service as associate editor for digital projects, overseeing Muster. Hilary has been a close collaborator throughout our time on the journal and was a crucial force in the #morehistory effort to bring the best scholarship from the page to National Park Service sites and local memorials. She is also a leading scholar of memorialization and memory and helped organize our roundtable on campus-based efforts to memorialize slavery. We appreciate her service, are sad to see her go, but are cheered by the hope she’ll continue to contribute to the journal.

This takes us to the happy side of transitions, as we welcomed a new colleague. Robert Bland, an assistant professor at University of Tennessee, has joined us as the associate editor for digital projects. Rob is completing what promises to be a major interpretation of race and memory in the post-Reconstruction South Carolina Lowcountry and will bring his own wide-ranging curiosity and insight to Muster. We can’t wait to see where he takes it. And we hope many of our readers will write for him.

In addition, we bid farewell to managing editor Matt Isham, who was a stalwart of the journal from its inception in 2011 and has moved on to a position as a full-time high school teacher. As managing editor, Matt helped steward the journal through several major transitions with consistent patience, tact, and intelligence. He was a font of wisdom and institutional knowledge who always made himself available to us and incalculably smoothed our transition into the role of editors. We extend our deepest thanks to him for all he did for us, and we wish him the very best as he embarks on this new stage of his career.

Our interim managing editor is Ed Green, a PhD candidate at Penn State. And with Ed’s move out of the role of graduate assistant, Moyra Williams Eaton has moved in. We are grateful for Ed and Moyra’s ongoing work and for the Richards Center, which makes the JCWE possible. 

 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

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

Conversation with Giuliana Perrone

Conversation with Giuliana Perrone

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In today’s Muster post, JCWE Book Review editor Megan Bever has a conversation with Dr. Giuliana Perrone. Dr. Perrone is an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the author of Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Call for Proposals: Civil War Era Article Workshop

Call for Proposals: Civil War Era Article Workshop

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The Richards Center at Penn State and the Journal of the Civil War Era (JCWE) are excited to announce a journal article workshop for advanced graduate students, recent Phds, assistant professors, and independent scholars. The deadline for applying is April 1, 2025. Completed applications should be emailed to RichardsCenter@psu.edu . See the image and link below for more information.

richardscenter.la.psu.edu/news/call-for-proposals

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Book Interview with Bennett Parten

Book Interview with Bennett Parten

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Today’s Muster features an interview with Dr. Bennett Parten, author of the recently released Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. Dr. Parton is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University. A native of Royston, Georgia, Parton’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo, Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor. Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

Robert Bland: I’d like to begin and just kind of get a sense of how you encountered Sherman’s March before embarking on this project, both historiographically and through public memory? How did you kind of think about and conceptualize Sherman’s March before beginning this book?

Bennett Parten: There are really two stories to how I got started on this project. One is a longer answer, maybe a longer story. It has everything to do with the fact that I grew up in Royston, Georgia, which is right outside of Athens. And every year my family would make trips down to the coast, to Jekyll Island, Savannah, to Port Royal, Hilton Head, Beaufort, and others. And for all of that trip, except for maybe the first 30 minutes, you are on the path of Sherman’s March. And so this is all very much lived history and then now coincidentally that I live in Savannah is the same route that I take to go visit my parents. And I follow Sherman’s right wing when I go visit my in-laws who live in Atlanta.

Both of those are essentially all along the route of Sherman’s March. And then when we would visit the coast when I was a kid, as much as I love to sit on the beach and fish, what I really love to do more than anything was to drive around and explore the low country. Go to all the different small towns, the different beaches. And so I think there’s a part of this book that really begins just with my own kind of background living in Georgia and visiting the coast and There’s a part of me I think that always relished the idea of writing a history that was really about two places that meant so much to me and still mean a lot to

But then the shorter answer has to do with me reading a work of fiction. I’m sure several readers might be familiar with E.L. Doctorow’s book, The March. Doctorow is great historical fiction writer. He’s probably best known for ragtime. But he also took on Sherman’s March in a book he called Simply The March. And in that book, as was Doctorow’s style, he wrote with a wide range of different characters. There’s a German-born US Army surgeon. There’s a Southern debutante. There are two Confederate prisoners of war. Even Sherman himself is a character.

But he also included a freed woman by the name of Wilma Jones is one of his characters. Wilma Jones was someone who dropped everything to run to the army and then follow Sherman’s army to the coast. And this book really started, I think, with me realizing that Jones was not a singular character, but a composite character. There were likely many hundreds, if not thousands of Wilma Joneses. And the book really began with the question of whether or not we could tell Jones’s experience as a matter of history and not just historical fiction. And so I really came at this project both from having my own biography being one that’s rooted here in Georgia, but also just reading Doctorow fictional take on the march.

RB:  I want to talk a little bit about history and historiography and would be interested to hear you say a little bit about kind of how this interpretation, this reorientation of the march fits into the historical literature. Obviously, the story of emancipation, which you kind of spend a lot of time thinking about, but also right the story of wartime Reconstruction and of how might we kind of reorient the way we have these big kind of ongoing discussions about emancipation and wartime reconstruction. How did your telling of Sherman’s March kind of reframe those stories.

BP: I think first and foremost this book falls into or at least contributes to a growing body of literature on emancipation that sees it as a refugee experience. This has been something that’s become much more common in recent years, both with historians recognizing that the experience of emancipation for all intents and purposes likely looked and felt like a real refugee experience. It was one of deep insecurity, instability, immense complexity. It was one in which what freedom actually meant was always being defined in the moment. It was a time before any notions of asylum, really, or citizenship And so this book, I think, sort of fits in with that move in the scholarship.

And I should say too that many historians are writing about emancipation as a refugee experience, in part because in recent years there’s been excellent research done on the existence of refugee camps that attach themselves to the army, whether it be in Louisiana, near New Orleans, the Mississippi Valley, or the Virginia coast. The fact is on this wide landscape of the Civil War, wherever the army went, there were usually camps of formerly enslaved people that had attached themselves to the army and inhabited what were essentially refugee camps. And so I think there’s very good reasons for why historians have begun to reinterpret the story of emancipation as being one that looks and feels, and for all intents and purposes was a refugee experience.

Another thing that I’ve tried to do in the book is to modernize the story of Sherman’s March. I mean, I think for the longest time, the way historians have understood the march itself has been geared towards this question of total war. Whether or not Sherman’s tactics in Georgia was an example of total war, whether it birthed total war. This, along with the prevalence of white Southerners focusing on their own grievances for what Sherman’s army may or may not have done here in Georgia, I think has always kept the march as being in a kind of terrain of military history. And I think there’s good reason for that. But what I really tried to do was to blend this classic military history with some of the excellent historical work on emancipation, on slave resistance, the work of folks like Thavolia Glymph and Steve Hahn and others that really show and shine a light on the agency of enslaved people, the resistance that enslaved people used to free themselves of plantations and run to the army.

So that’s another thing that I really tried to do here in the book. And then to your point about Reconstruction, one of the things that I tried to accomplish as well is just pinpoint how important this movement of refugees was to the beginnings of Reconstruction. The fact is the movement behind Sherman’s army was so large, they would go on to have immense consequences for what the early phases of Reconstruction would look like.

On the coast around Savannah. And the whole point in doing so is to point out that the refugees people who have since been faceless, nameless to history, but who nonetheless, in the power of their collective movement went on to really force the US government’s hand into thinking about what reconstruction might look like and who, through their own movements really shaped the early history of Reconstruction.

RB: I’d like to ask you to speak a little bit about the kind of subheading of your book, right? It’s a really kind of powerful and kind of provocative claim, right? The story of America’s largest emancipation. When does that fact and framing kind become important and apparent? When does it become clear that this is not only a story of emancipation but also the story of the largest emancipation?

BP: One of the big questions was, well, exactly how many refugees might have followed Sherman’s army? This was always a kind of moving number and as one reviewer of mine pointed out. There are no census. The Army’s not taking a census as this is happening. And so drilling down on any specific numbers was always a real question for me.

But nonetheless, when Sherman arrives in Savannah, he speculates that there are as many as 20,000 refugees that are following his army. And when I first read this, I recognized this would be a large number, but I don’t think it really clicked with me how big of a movement this was until I realized that Savannah itself only had a population of 22,000.And then Atlanta, which now is the great metropolis, you can call it that of Georgia, only had a population of 10,000. And so only when I began to realize some of these numbers did I recognize just how large of a movement this was.

And we should recognize that this 20,000 number doesn’t take into account folks who might have run to the army and then turned back on their own volition or were turned back from the army, which absolutely happened. It doesn’t take into account the folks who might have run to the army and then decided not to make the march. It doesn’t take into account the folks who experience freedom as a consequence of this movement.

And so my argument is that taking all this combined, what you have is, yes, a military event by definition, but also an extraordinarily large liberation event and the largest emancipation event in American history.

RB: Along those lines, I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you periodize your story, where you talk about the marches taking place in phases, right, to kind of On the one hand, this is not a large amount of time, especially kind of your history department, you talk to your colleagues in other fields of history who study the early modern or ancient world and they think in terms of centuries. Here, we’re talking about a couple months. As Civil War historians know, in the time of war, months can feel like years. I wonder if you could say a little bit about kind of how you think about the kind of phases of the march and kind of kind of how we might think about these months as kind of a pivotal turning point in the broader war.

BP: That’s really well said. And you can imagine it made research really difficult in that I was looking for specific stories from just a month and a half in very specific places right when I was combing through the archives. And so that was always a real challenge that I had to kind of grapple with in doing some of this work.

The March the Sea has always been the Savannah campaign from Atlanta to Savannah. But one of the things that I’ve really tried to do in this book is situated in a much larger story. And while the Savannah campaign is my focus, I do reach back into Atlanta to show how what happened on the march to Atlanta and around Atlanta set the stage for what would happen in Georgia. And then especially in the coast, where most stories I think would follow the army back through the Carolinas, I really wanted to be very intentional about showing how Sherman’s March affected the islands around Savannah and South Carolina and others. And really how this story bled into, as I’ve said before, and as you mentioned, the early history of reconstruction. So one of the things that I try to do is just be really intentional about keeping the focus on the refugees for as long as possible. And when you do that, you recognize that the march, though it ends in Savannah, at least as a military campaign, the story on the islands goes on for another year, year and a half. And again, as I said, it really bleeds into reconstruction.

In terms of periodizing it, one of the things that I really tried to do was to move away from our traditional stories or understanding of the march as just the Savannah campaign.

RB: This is also a story about the land, right? One of the major things that scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction think a lot about are the stories coming out of Sherman’s Field Order 15 and the ways that landownership was promised, achieved, delayed, and denied. And I wonder kind of how you think about the story of land ownership coming out of the march.

BP: It’s hugely important. And I should say when I went into it, I didn’t really, I think, recognize how intertwined these two stories were. I mean, I knew of the story of Field Order 15. I Knew of the story of Port Royal. I also knew of the story of Sherman’s March. And I think as I was writing this and working on it, as I began to sort of work through this, I began to recognize how intertwined they were. But when I started, I don’t think I quite realized just how closely connected these two movements or at least two stories really are.

And no, I think it’s hugely important. I think it’s a very important story. It’s one that is tragic and it leaves this story as one that ends in a very ambiguous place. One of the difficult things about writing this is that the story of the march itself is a story that features instances of liberation, of triumphalism, of excitement, of optimism, of hope.

This is always underpinned by the real dangers of what it was like to be a refugee on the march. Some of the actions that Sherman’s men took in regards to the refugees. But then once the story transitions here to the coast and land reform becomes a question and then ultimately fails, it turns this moment that is tinged with a sense of optimism and triumphalism into one that is anything but fulfilled, completely ambiguous, and one that is sort of left searching for meaning.

And so it was always an interesting and dispiriting and disappointing place to end the story. But I nevertheless end there because it’s true. It’s what happened, right? And so it’s a… tragic and… as I said, ambiguous place to end the story on.

RB: Sometimes history has reckon with the hard truths of the past.  You mentioned before that you’re part of cohort of scholars including think Amy Murrell Taylor, Chandra Manning, and Abigail Cooper who are all thinking about wartime emancipation as much as a moment of crisis as a moment of liberation.

How do you think about the march as both this moment of jubilee— thinking about emancipation as this kind of real kind of turning point—and as maybe just a piece of long emancipation that spanned the 19th century?

BP: That’s a great question. And this is one that a reviewer recently has pointed out, and it’s kind of drawn on this distinction of, as you said, some historians seeing this sort of troubled emancipation story that is ambiguous and ill-defined. And then others who trace this longer story and see this as such a critical moment and as a moment that truly meant something and matter, right? And was a real turning point in this long history emancipation and the death of slavery.

And to be honest with you, I think fall into that later camp personally. I mean, I think this is a moment that truly does matter and that it does have real consequence and meaning. And we should recognize it as a turning point. But I also think we can be of two minds and recognize that is as such as a lived experience at least. It was one that was, for all intents and purposes, one that mimicked the experience of being a refugee, that in the moment, at least, what was freedom was ill-defined and constantly trying to be defined and was ambiguous.

RB: Well, you’ve added a rich contribution to the ongoing conversation about Sherman’s March and more importantly, provided a story that takes seriously the broad and complicated story of this particular moment of emancipation. The stories are told from above and below. You get a sense of a kind of real human drama. The tragedy, but also, the ways that this story tells us something about what emancipation really meant. I want to again thank you to Dr. Parton for joining us today to discuss your new book.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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