Category: Muster

JCWE Editors’ Note, June 2021 issue

JCWE Editors’ Note, June 2021 issue

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This issue, like many since the journal’s inception, reflects the chronological and thematic breadth of the field of the Civil War Era. It includes three original research articles, the Tom Watson Brown Award essay, a review essay, and the usual complement of incisive book reviews.

The Tom Watson Book Award honors the finest book on the “causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War” and is presented by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the Society of Civil War Historians. In 2020, the award went to Thomas J. Brown for his excellent study Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (2019). At a virtual gathering, to replace the in-person banquet at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, Brown delivered an intriguing analysis, titled “Iconoclasm and the Monumental Presence of the Civil War.” Brown’s essay places the debates about memorialization (up to November 2020) within a longer trajectory of critique and iconoclasm. Brown adroitly analyzes works by artists and writers An-My Lê, Kehinde Wiley, Natasha Trethewey, and Krzysztof Wodiczko and concludes with a stirring examination of the community takeover of the Robert E. Lee Monument on Memorial Avenue in Richmond. The essay is a terrific example of how historians can help contextualize and clarify the terms of contemporary public debate.

The issue’s three research articles are just as stimulating and wide ranging. In “‘Sustaining the Truth of the Bible’: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy,” Joel Iliff examines James W. C. Pennington’s effort to combine orthodox Bible scholarship and abolitionism, against abolitionists who advanced more heterodox biblical interpretation and against slaveowners and European theologians who insisted that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Grounding Pennington in a transatlantic world of biblical scholarship and debate, Iliff offers a fascinating intellectual and religious history and also significantly expands the conversation about the relationship between religion and black abolitionism.

Lesley J. Gordon likewise combines biography, intellectual discourse, and political practice in her “‘Novices in Warfare’: Elmer E. Ellsworth and Militia Reform on the Eve of Civil War.” Gordon shows that Elmer Ellsworth was more than just the dynamic leader of the Zouave movement and a prominent early casualty of the war. He was, in addition, an ambitious and serious participant in 1850s debates about militia reform and the future of the “citizen soldier.” The demands of war itself ultimately outmatched Ellsworth’s vision, but his ideas offer an intriguing window into longstanding debates on how best to make soldiers of citizens.

Marcy S. Sacks examines the roles of pets and other domesticated animals in “‘They Are Truly Marvelous Cats’: The Importance of Companion Animals to Union Soldiers during the Civil War.” Focusing on soldiers’ drawings and letters, Sacks explores how northern soldiers observed, nurtured, and described domesticated animals, and she analyzes the meanings of those relationships. Cats, dogs, mice, pigs, and other animals, she argues, helped soften the experience of wartime and, just as crucially, enabled soldiers to communicate through discourses of sympathy and sentimentalism, thus projecting their own humanity. Through their representations of animals, particularly in letters to women and children, soldiers showed that they remained capable of experiencing emotions and thus of returning safely home at war’s end.

In an expansive review essay, noted transnational scholar Enrico Dal Lago examines the role of the Civil War Era in the discipline’s global turn. In “Writing the US Civil War Era into Nineteenth-Century World History,” Dal Lago analyzes works of scholarship that have attempted to embed Civil War Era history into world history and the relationship between a once-domestic-facing field and an increasingly globally focused discipline.

As always, this volume includes excellent, informative reviews of books that address the Civil War Era. Book Review Editor Kathryn Shively works assiduously to broaden the coverage and participants in these reviews. In the process, she and we depend on the professionalism of our writers, on view in this issue. We also depend on publishers to provide the books that we review, an increasing challenge during the pandemic. Shively and our book review authors continue to offer heroic and largely selfless service in sustaining this crucial aspect of our professional life.

“A Grand Thing”: The Rebirth of Milwaukee’s Soldiers’ Home

“A Grand Thing”: The Rebirth of Milwaukee’s Soldiers’ Home

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When the U. S. government lived up to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural promise to “care for him who shall have borne the battle,” it chose Milwaukee as one of the sites for the three original branches of the National Asylum (later Home) for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS). The first men moved into a few farm buildings on a hill west of the city in 1867; in 1869, an impressive, several-stories high structure was completed. Over the next two decades, massive wings were added to the main building and a couple of dozen other structures—including a theater, a chapel, and a library—were built.  By 1900, 2,000 Civil War veterans lived there. They were mostly white—although a few African American veterans were admitted—and mostly single. Many were immigrants.  And they came from all over the United States.

At about that time, Orlando Burnett, a writer for a western Wisconsin newspaper, visited Milwaukee to report on the Home. His article began with a section called “Memories Round a Bedside.” A proud staff member told him of the convenience of having a card containing the patient’s medical and personal information attached to the foot of his bed in the hospital ward.  “When he dies,” he noted, “we have here all his record.” Burnett noticed that “[t]he man in the bed stirred uneasily.”  The oblivious guide went on to talk about the man as though he wasn’t lying a few feet away. But Burnett could not shake the image of the old soldier. “The man on the bed must have been somebody once. . . . Women had once admired his fine-lined face and kissed it.”  Now, however, it had assumed “the pallor that the angel Death paints us with when nature reports that the machinery is worn out.” Years ago the man had been “young and full of fire. He had marched from home with cheers in his ears, and he had seen the foe.  He had thought great thoughts on picket duty under the stars, and he had done a man’s work in the world.” But now he was so weary that he could not close his mouth, and he cared little about what people thought when they looked at him. “He was rather a tired child—this big, old man, who once marched with Gibbon and Bragg [Generals John Gibbon and Edward Bragg, commanders of the famed Iron Brigade]. And as he lay on his pillow, the white bed clothes wrapped about the thin, gaunt frame, he brought no explanations or beseechings. He seemed to want nothing of God but a chance to sleep for ten million years.” Before going on to describe the home’s 1400-seat theater, the well-stocked library, the spotless kitchen, the anti-drinking Keeley club, and the ways in which the men who could work were occupied and the men who could not were disciplined, Burnett admitted, “It knocks a man’s theological systems into little pieces to see an old man who fought for a nation on his death bed.”[1]

The iconic main building of the Northwestern Branch of the NHDVS in Milwaukee, from a nineteenth-century postcard.

The melancholy tone continued as he broadened his gaze. A fifth of the men in the home were kept in the hospital, where they were treated for old wounds and new maladies, from cancer to injuries caused by accidents to cuts and bruises suffered in fights. Although many received pensions, most were quite poor, and could probably not support themselves outside the home. “Many of them are thus saved from the poor house.”   The men were largely “out of touch with home and women, who gladden life and smooth the pathway to the grave. Death and separation have done their work and the old fellows, stoical, serene, free from cares, await their end.” The administrators who showed Burnett around the Home were no doubt hoping for a cheery account of the good work being done on behalf of the old soldiers—and the article did provide a positive report.  But the tone of the piece was bittersweet, at best, and deeply ambiguous.[2]

Although exaggerated—Burnett was clearly working through some of his own anxieties about aging and mortality—the condition and status of the men living in the home, particularly the poor, speechless, slack-jawed veteran of the Iron Brigade, represented in many ways the odd position of Civil War veterans in late nineteenth century Wisconsin and the United States, where they were both honored and neglected.

A century later, and sixty years after the last Civil War veteran had died, the buildings in which those veterans lived had fallen into a similar kind of dignified neglect.  Like all NHDVS facilities, the Veterans Administration had taken over the Northwestern Branch in the 1930s. A few decades later, a new VA hospital was built down the hill from the old Home. The Veterans Administration repurposed some of the old buildings for offices, employee housing, storage, and other mundane purposes—the old library and bowling alley were still in use, for instance, and the regional veterans’ benefits office and the massive Wood National Cemetery were also administered from offices located in the historic complex.  But most of the roughly two dozen buildings that had survived from the first two or three decades of the Home’s existence fell into a state of elegant, even romantic disrepair. Treasured by those who admired their architecture and historical importance, the structures were twice been honored by preservationists: the state of Wisconsin created the National Soldiers’ Home Historic District in 1994 and the federal government created the Milwaukee Soldiers Home National Historic Landmark District in 2011.

And yet the Home’s main landmark, the old main building that could be seen for miles around, ending up laying empty for a number of years, as forgotten, it seemed, as the old soldiers who had lived there a century before. Indeed, as I wrote in my 2017 essay for Gary Gallagher’s and Matt Gallman’s Civil War Places, “In a way, the old buildings are now stand-ins for the old soldiers,” shunted aside and forgotten. “Some of the buildings are in appalling condition, with construction fences blocking entrances, roofs sagging raggedly, and paint faded and chipped.  The clumsily executed stained glass window of a mounted Gen. U. S. Grant, presented to the home by the [Grand Army of the Republic] in the 1880s, has been removed from the old Ward Theater because the building is untenable.” As someone who often drove or walked or rode my bike on the Hank Aaron Trail that runs through the grounds, I was intimately familiar with the tragic deterioration of many of the buildings, and in 2011 the historic district was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s List of Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places. As I wrote, the Home “represents the best intentions of Americans seeking to honor and protect the heroes of the Union at the same time it reflects the inability of Americans to adequately understand those veterans.  My Soldiers’ Home reminds us of a time when the men who had fought and won the Civil War came to be seen as charity cases dependent on the public’s good will, rather than as heroes deserving of the country’s gratitude.”[3]

Even as the buildings continued their decline, the organization “Save the Soldiers’ Home,” leading a coalition of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Milwaukee Preservation Alliance, tried to raise money and ideas through public education.  I was actually involved for a time with one of its committees. But an initial effort to get bids for preserving and redeveloping the old buildings failed, and it seemed the buildings would continue their slow, inevitable decline.  

But the project gradually gained momentum behind a shrewd redevelopment plan, earning buy-in from local veterans organizations, the Veterans Administration, and the city government. After over two years of construction, in March 2021, the old main building and several other of the smaller nineteenth century buildings (the headquarters and a few duplexes built for officers of the NHDVS) opened as housing for homeless veterans! Altogether, the $44 million project created 101 housing units, with a mix of single bedrooms with shared living spaces to one to three and even four-bedroom apartments. Women veterans have their own wing, and all residents have access to fitness facilities and a business center. The VA will also provide on-site support services, including counseling, sobriety maintenance, and employment assistance.  The housing is meant to be permanent, not transitional or temporary; residents will pay no more than 30 per cent or their income in rent.[4]

Over 120 years ago that forgotten newspaper writer wrote this of the veterans he met in Milwaukee and the last home most would occupy: “It is a grand thing that these refuges are provided; and we honor the men who wrecked their futures in many cases to hold the republic together.” He meant it ironically, in a way, but it is a worthy ending to this Memorial Day story about new beginnings: both for a place that deserves to be remembered productively, and for the men and women who have borne our country’s more recent battles.[5]

[1] Lancaster (Wisconsin) Teller, August 11, 1898. The Iron Brigade was the only fully “western” brigade in the Army of the Potomac. Made up of the Second, Sixth, and Seventh Wisconsin, Nineteenth Indiana, and the Twenty-fourth Michigan, it fought at Antietam and Gettysburg and lost more men than any other brigade in the Union army.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “My Soldiers’ Home,” Gary Gallagher and Matt Gallman, eds., Civil War Places: Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of Its Leading Historians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 168, 169; “America’s Most Endangered Historic Places—Past Listings,” https://savingplaces.org/11most-past-listings#.WZA7I2eWzVM, accessed, August 13, 2017.

[4] David Walter, “Renovated Soldiers Home Almost ready for homeless Vets,” VAntage Point: Official Blog of the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs, February 13, 2021, https://blogs.va.gov/VAntage/84463/renovated-soldiers-home-almost-ready-homeless-vets/, accessed April 4, 2021.

[5] Lancaster (Wisconsin) Teller, August 11, 1898.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Marten

James Marten is professor of history at Marquette University and a past president of the Society of Civil War Historians. The author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books, including Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America, Co-edited, with Caroline E. Janney (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021); America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), and Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s George and Ann Richards Prize!

Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s George and Ann Richards Prize!

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Catherine A. Jones has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2020. The article, “The Trials of Mary Booth and the Post-Civil War Incarceration of African American Children,” appeared in the September 2020 issue.

Drawn from a fragmentary archival record, Jones’s essay examines the wrongful 1882 murder conviction of Mary Booth, a fourteen-year-old African American girl in Virginia. It shows how African American children were transformed into carceral subjects following emancipation and how, in response, Black Virginians fought for greater access to the justice system and for juvenile justice reform.

In the words of the prize committee, “Professor Catherine A. Jones overcame the fragmentary documentary record to write a compelling narrative about a black girl caught in an unpredictable, often brutal, legal system. The author handled the complex legal maneuvers with skill, without ever losing sight of the human dimension of the story. The essay gives us new ways to think about freedom and unfreedom in the postwar South, and it illuminates new aspects of the history of childhood, African Americans, and women.”

Dr. Jones is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (2015). She is currently working on a book about the history of child incarceration in the post–Civil War era. The prize committee consisted of Sarah E. Gardner, Mercer University; Joan E. Cashin, The Ohio State University; and Brandon R. Byrd, Vanderbilt University.

Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era.

For more information, visit  https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/.

 

We’ve Always Been Here: Rediscovering African American Families in the U.S. Census

We’ve Always Been Here: Rediscovering African American Families in the U.S. Census

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When I initially began examining United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiers, I primarily focused on Civil War pension records. As previously noted, these rich primary sources can illuminate the forgotten lives of African Americans in many ways but do not (nor does any single historical record) tell the whole story of the lives of USCT soldiers and their kin. Since hundreds of thousands of people (for various reasons) never applied for a pension, other records fill in the archival silences. As a result, I turned to the U.S. Census to explore the complex living situations of USCT soldiers.

The U.S. Census is an excellent primary source that one can use to investigate the families of USCT soldiers before and long after their military service ended. Since many African Americans did not apply for pensions, the U.S. allows one to examine many people, regardless of their pensioner status. Another benefit to the source is that, due to the quantitative data collection of domiciles, it is possible to uncover a more nuanced understanding of household dynamics for people every decade. Thus, it becomes possible to locate numerous people, even across multiple generations, that do not always make appearances in other historical records. For instance, using the U.S. is plausible to trace fluid familial construction for William Butler (a Philadelphian-born Sixth the United States Colored Infantry soldier) before and decades after the Civil War. Thus, studying African American families has always been an available and accessible primary source.

Unidentified African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Throughout the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century, each iteration of the U.S. census asked for specific data on the nation’s inhabitants. Census enumerators asked for a multitude of information on each occupant that included (but was not limited to) an individual’s age, race, birthplace, marital status, full-time wage-earning occupational status, ownership of real or personal estate, literacy, the birthplace, and names of the individual’s parents, and some issues of mental illness. This quantitative information is exceedingly valuable in denoting how African American families fought against and continually adapted their living situations to protect and empower each other in their lifelong battle against racial discrimination.

Even with all the valuable data that the U.S. Census yields, it is important to recognize that there are significant issues in the historical record when attempting to study the families of USCT soldiers.[1] One of the most glaring problems with the source is how historically devalued the unpaid of women, regardless of their race. In many cases, census enumerators (sometimes conducting quick surveys) categorized women as either “keeping house” or holding no occupation at all. Such assessments ignored the important contributions that women made to their families, including but not limited to cooking, cleaning, gathering raw materials to create and sell goods in local markets, washing clothes, watching other people’s children, and bearing and raising their children. Additionally, some women successfully found seasonal and temporary wage-earning employment critical in keeping their families economically stable.[2] It is important to use critical analysis respectfully and accurately acknowledge how women contributed to their household in differing ways. Thus, a blank space in the U.S. Census often does not reflect how their families valued women. It is also critical to recognize that households sometimes included fictive kin—individuals that families treated as “kin” even if there were no adoptive, biological, or marital ties—for their household’s survival.[3] Even if the historical record or families explicitly state it, the continual opening of residences to non-blood-relative individuals says otherwise.  Collectively, these examples highlight that using the U.S. Census requires a careful eye to acknowledge the complexity of African American households beyond the limited interpretation of a federal government record.

A brief examination of William Butler reveals how invaluable the U.S. Census to studying USCT veterans and their families. As his pension records denote, Butler enlisted in the Sixth United States Colored Infantry on August 8, 1863.[4] Unfortunately, on September 29, 1864, he was severely injured in the right thigh during the Battle at Chapin’s Farm in Virginia. After the conflict, a surgeon decided to amputate Butler’s right thigh. After receiving a medical discharge on May 29, 1865, Butler applied for and received an invalid pension of eight dollars per month. By 1866, Butler’s monthly pension payout increased to fifteen dollars after the pension agent categorized Butler as “totally disable,” implying that he would be unable to resume physically demanding, wage-earning work as a civilian. The Bureau of Pensions’ higher pension grading, at least, in this case, highlights that it realized that visible wartime wounds could hinder, if not eradicate, a veteran’s postwar employability.[5]

The U.S. Census thankfully fills in some gaps in his life. In 1850, Butler (along with Henry Anderson and Henry Johnson) lived as fictive kin in the Gilbert household. Robert and Gracy Gilbert undoubtedly appreciated the three men’s additional wages (working as a laborer, porter, and farm laborer, respectively) since the couple had two adolescent children. Gracy’s unpaid work and Richard’s wage-earning employment as a laborer made their financial stability difficult for the young family.[6] The bonds that these seven African Americans created reveal that familial definitions transcended blood and marriage. All three fictive were critical to keeping their household together, for themselves and each other.

1870 Census of William Butler. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

Twenty years later, Butler was fictive kin in an interracial household with Alexander and Jane Elligood and Maggie Reagan. Alexander worked as a laborer. Both James and William were domestic servants, while Maggie (categorized as “unemployed”) found various ways to contribute to their residence. William’s occupation provides a unique avenue to examine gender since he performed a job that some people considered “women’s work.” Maybe he cared more about earning a wage than the gendered perception that some people may have had about working as a domestic servant.[7] At the same time, his employment reveals that even though a pension agent labeled Butler “totally disabled,” he performed physically demanding work, which brought him two forms of income when many African Americans struggled to establish one. Finally, this household was unique as Maggie, a white woman, cohabitated with African Americans when Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had a well-established record of large and small-scale racial violence.[8]This household was aware, at some level, of the longstanding local racial tensions. Nevertheless, they instead focused on surviving and supporting each other.

While William Butler is not a representative case, but more an example of how to examine one’s life across multiple sources to uncover the pre-service and postwar life of a USCT soldier. The accessibility of the U.S. Census and the fact that many veterans and kin did not apply for a pension make it a valuable resource. Furthermore, in instances where there are pensions, it would behoove one to cross-reference with the U.S. Census to find more information about how African Americans constructed their lives in their unending battle against racial discrimination. In short, this federal government record offers another opportunity to understand and discuss who USCT soldiers were far beyond their time in the U.S. Army.

 

[1] Judith Giesberg, “ ‘A Muster-Roll of the American People”: The 1870 Census, Voting Rights, and the Postwar South,” Journal of Southern History 87, No. 1 (February, 2021), 38-41, 50-51; Margo Anderson, “The Missouri Debates, Slavery, and Statistics of Race: Demography in Service of Politics,” Annales de démographie historique, No. 1 (2003),  29-34.

[2] Nancy Folbre and Marjorie Abel, “Women’s Work and Women’s Households: Gender Bias in the U.S. Census,” Social Research 56 No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), 547-549.

[3] Edward Norbeck and Harumi Befu, “Informal Fictive Kinship in Japan,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 60, No. 1 (February, 1958), 102-117; Linda M. Chatters, Robert Joseph Taylor, and Rukmalie Jayakody, “Fictive Kinship Relations in black extended families,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), 297-312.

[4] Undated Pension Slip, in William Butler, Sixth USCI, pension file. National Archives Records and Administration, Washington, D.C.

[5] Kelly D. Mezurek, For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016), 226; James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 49.

[6] Seventh Census of the United States, 1850;(National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls); Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

[7] U.S Census Bureau, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, M593 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1870).

[8] Please refer to the following studies on nineteenth-century racial discrimination (including violence) against African Americans in Philadelphia, Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880—1910 (Durham: Duke University, 2006); Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

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

UVA Unionists: A Digital Project Studying University of Virginia Alumni Who Stayed Loyal to the Union

UVA Unionists: A Digital Project Studying University of Virginia Alumni Who Stayed Loyal to the Union

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Note: “UVA Unionists” is one of two digital projects at the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History that shed light on the area’s untold Unionist stories. The other project, “Black Virginians in Blue” [link to Will Kurtz’s Muster blog post], launched in April. See Will Kurtz’s recent Muster post on this project.

 

In October 1913, the Staunton Daily News called attention to a “grave oversight on the part of our Virginian schools and colleges.” The University of Virginia and other institutions had kept careful records of their Confederate alumni and celebrated them with reunions, banquets, and monuments. But they had “almost entirely overlooked their sons who were in the Federal forces.” The writer praised these “neglected alumni,” insisting that their wartime achievements—if properly recognized—would bring honor and fame to Virginia’s colleges. As Virginians “rejoice in a re-united land,” he observed, they could “surely remember with pride their sons who saw the path of duty differently.” Later that month, UVA’s Alumni News reprinted the article and confessed that “no complete list has been made of the University alumni who saw service in the Union army.”[1]

Now, more than a century later, the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History has answered that call. We transcribed antebellum student catalogues and systematically searched databases on Ancestry.com, Fold3.com, and Newspapers.com. We examined pension and service records at the National Archives and manuscript collections across the country. After four years of research, we have identified 68 UVA students, alumni, and faculty members who served in the Union military. We have also found dozens more who supported the Union cause as civilians, including Congressman Henry Winter Davis and Maryland Governor Thomas Swann. Our “UVA Unionist” project, which officially launches on May 4, tells these men’s stories.

Portrait of Henry Winter Davis
Congressman Henry Winter Davis (National Archives and Records Administration)

In April 1861, these UVA Unionists ranged in age from 14 to 57, with a median age of 26.5. The Staunton Daily News editor assumed they “must have been northern boys…who stuck to their people and their native land.” In reality, two-thirds were born in the South: in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina. Nearly half came from slaveholding households, and several belonged to prominent political families. Stephen Kennedy and Charles Ewing were the sons of United States Senators, and army surgeon John Fox Hammond was the brother of South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond.[2]

Before the war, most UVA Unionists were doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, or students. Forty-eight (71 percent) served as officers during the war, and seven ultimately became generals. Only about thirty, however, served on the front lines. The others spent the war as prison guards, paymasters, recruiters, medical personnel, or home guards. Two UVA Unionists died during the war: James Gilliss, superintendent at the Naval Observatory, died of a stroke in February 1865, and his colleague Alexander Pendleton died of an unknown disease later that month. Many others, however, suffered from illness or injury, and at least six became prisoners of war. Most served the Union cause faithfully, and only one man deserted from the army.[3]

After the war, as UVA’s faculty and alumni embraced the Lost Cause, they largely erased these men from the university’s history. The Alumni Bulletin valorized UVA’s Confederate veterans, and an 1878 catalogue noted the Confederate service of more than 2,000 alumni. UVA hosted a Confederate reunion in 1912, and President Edwin Alderman asked alumni to donate their wartime relics—“anything Confederate”—to the university. These publications, however, mentioned only a small handful of UVA Unionists, and the university’s ceremonies and monuments excluded them entirely. One alumnus insisted “there was no Union feeling in the state,” and another agreed that secession brought “all, almost without exception, to the same mind.”[4]

To be sure, the overwhelming majority of UVA alumni supported secession and sided with the Confederacy. Our research suggests that half of all antebellum alumni served in the Confederate military, including 89 percent of the men who attended UVA in 1860-61. Only about 1 percent of UVA’s students, alumni, and faculty served in the Union military. Our project does not attempt to equate these figures. It does, however, shed light on the deep divisions within the nineteenth-century South. Roughly 300,000 White southerners and 150,000 former slaves served in the Union military, and UVA’s Unionists are part of this larger story.[5]

Most were political moderates who fought not to abolish slavery but rather to preserve the Union. Eight men were already serving in the United States military when the war began, and ten more enlisted by May 1861. As James Winslow, a Unionist who attended UVA in 1861, explained, loyal Americans would “maintain the integrity of the Union…if it cost every drop of blood & every dollar in the country.” New York merchant Robert Shannon agreed, recruiting men to “sustain the government” and fight the “holiest war in which patriots ever engaged.” Arkansas editor William Fishback declared the Union the “best government on earth”—a beacon of hope in a world ruled by despotism and heresy.[6]

Image of newspaper page
The Unconditional Union, which William Fishback began publishing in 1864 to champion the Union cause in Arkansas (Microfilm, University of Arkansas)

Despite their moderation, many UVA Unionists ultimately accepted emancipation as a military necessity. Missouri lawyer James Overton Broadhead, for example, began the war as a proslavery Unionist. He served in Missouri’s 1861 constitutional convention, where he forcefully defended both slavery and Union. During the war, however, his convictions slowly evolved. In 1862, as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, he upheld the First Confiscation Act and instructed army officials to liberate Confederate owners’ slaves. The following year, he urged Missourians to adopt gradual emancipation. Although the plan would keep many African Americans in apprenticeships for decades, Broadhead explained, it would establish the “great leading distinction between slavery and freedom…the negro would no longer be a thing, but a person.”[7]

Missouri lawyer James Overton Broadhead (Library of Congress)

After the war, most UVA Unionists hoped to quickly reunite the country, and they largely opposed the “radicalism” of Reconstruction. Broadhead, for instance, severed ties with Republicans and became a leader in Missouri’s Conservative Party. He argued that Congressional Reconstruction “deprived our people of both religious and civil liberty” and denied them a “republican form of government.” He denounced Republicans’ experiment in biracial democracy and championed reconciliation with former Confederates. The country, he claimed, “needs repose and order,” and he could “never justify the acts of reconstruction, or the plunder of the Southern people.”[8]

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin Dowell
Oregon editor Benjamin Franklin Dowell (Oregon Historical Society).

A handful of UVA Unionists, however, became champions of freedom. Robert Shannon served as a federal commissioner in Louisiana, where he vigorously enforced the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He imprisoned White Louisianians for terrorizing former slaves, arrested election officials for keeping freedmen from voting, and arraigned state judges for failing to defend African Americans’ rights. Oregon editor Benjamin Franklin Dowell defended African-American suffrage and civil rights, insisting the right to vote made former slaves “not only free in name but in fact.”  Most famously, Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis became an architect of Congressional Reconstruction. He co-authored the Wade-Davis Bill, helped pass the Thirteenth Amendment, and fought for legal and political equality for all men.[9]

Despite their small numbers, these UVA Unionists remind us of the ideological power of the Union, which enshrined political liberty and economic opportunity for all White men. Benjamin Dowell, for instance, championed the “republican principles” of self-government and vowed to live under “the stars and stripes, as long as life shall last.” These men’s stories remind us of the conservatism of most loyal Americans and help explain the failures of Reconstruction. But they also speak to the Civil War’s contested and transformative potential and reveal the ways that southern intransigence both hardened northern resolve and embedded the ideals of biracial democracy in the Constitution. Their devotion to the Union belies the Lost Cause myth of southern unity and reveals the deep and enduring divisions in the nineteenth-century South.[10]

 

[1] The Staunton Daily News, 14 October 1913; University of Virginia Alumni News 2, no. 4 (29 October 1913), 37.

[2] The Staunton Daily News, 14 October 1913.

[3] See Brian Neumann, “UVA Unionists: The University of Virginia’s ‘Neglected Alumni,’” Magazine of Albemarle Charlottesville History 78 (2020), 73-108.

[4] Albert T. Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor, or Was Secession a Constitutional Right (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866), v; James M. Garnett, “Personal Recollections of the University of Virginia at the Outbreak of the War of 1861-65,” Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia, 3rd ser., vol. 5, no. 3 (July 1912), 338; William W. Old, “The Student Volunteers of 1861,” Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia, n.s., vol. 5, no. 5 (March 1906), 292-295; Students of the University of Virginia: A Semi-Centennial Catalogue with Brief Biographical Sketches (Baltimore: Charles Harvey, 1878).

[5] William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xiii.

[6] James A. Winslow to John B. Minor, 21 May 1861, Papers of John B. Minor, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; New York Daily Herald, 21 May 1861; Unconditional Union (Little Rock, AR), 23 January 1864.

[7] Fremont (OH) Weekly Journal, 19 October 1860; Journal of the Missouri State Convention Held at Jefferson City and St. Louis, March 1861 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1861), 114-233; James O. Broadhead to Bernard G. Farrar, 2 February 1862, in Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Destruction of Slavery, 1st ser., vol. 1, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 425-426; Journal of the Missouri State Convention Held in Jefferson City, June 1863 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1863), 297.

[8] Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 22 August 1866; Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI), 24 September 1874; St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, 26 September 1882.

[9] The Daily True Delta (New Orleans, LA), 11 February 1864; The New Orleans (LA) Republican, 5 January 1868, 3 May 1868, and 6 June 1868; The Natchez (MS) Democrat, 25 July 1868; The Oregon Sentinel (Jacksonville, OR), 5 December 1868; Bernard C. Steiner, Life of Henry Winter Davis (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1916); Gerald S. Henig, Henry Winter Davis: Antebellum and Civil War Congressman from Maryland (New York: Twayne, 1973).

[10] Weekly Oregon Statesman (Salem, OR), 28 April 1862; The Oregon Sentinel (Jacksonville, OR), 26 November 1864.

 

 

 

 

Brian Neumann

Brian Neumann received his PhD from the University of Virginia and serves as editorial assistant for the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. He is the author of Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis (forthcoming from LSU Press) and “UVA Unionists: The University of Virginia’s ‘Neglected Alumni,’” Magazine of Albemarle Charlottesville History 78 (Albemarle County Historical Society, 2020).

Disney and Battlefields: A Tale of Two Continents

Disney and Battlefields: A Tale of Two Continents

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In the United States, significant portions of land have been set aside for battlefield parks to commemorate the actions of past generations and interpreted these spaces with regard to how they have shaped the present. In turn, as Edward Linenthal has argued, they became sacred ground.[1] As a result, some historians and members of the public have viewed infringements on those battlefields as a violation of that sacred ground.

In the 1990s, the Disney Corporation twice invaded such sacred places, first in France’s Marne-la-Vallee and second in Northern Virginia. The results could not have been more different. In France attention focused on the damage done to French culture by a U.S. conglomerate and in Virginia the outcry was over Disney doing “to American history what they have already done to the animal kingdom—sentimentalize it out of recognition,” to use Shelby Foote’s words.[2] By studying the two episodes, the different cultures of battlefield preservation and war remembrance in Europe and the United States illustrate that not preserving a battlefield does not mean forgetting nor does it mean ignoring the sacrifices of soldiers in the past.

On December 19, 1985, Michael Eisner, the CEO of the Disney Corporation stepped in front of the camera to announce that Disney had decided to build a new theme park and resort area just to the east of Paris. Eisner stated: “We are hopeful that our current negotiations will result in a definitive agreement to bring Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney to France and the European Community . . . Walt Disney would certainly feel at home here because European literature inspired so many of his fantasies and characters.” The article indicates that the selected location near Marne-la-Vallee, was located on the western edge of a World War I battlefield.[3] This was one of the very few mentions of the proposed park’s proximity to a battlefield.

Seven years after Eisner’s Paris press conference, on April 12, 1992, Euro Disney Resort opened its gates. Only two years later, on September 28, 1994, the Disney Corporation announced the abandoning of a very different theme park project in the vicinity of another battlefield of a different war, Disney’s America in northern Virginia near Manassas/Bull Run. While it was the uncontrollably spiraling costs of, what had by then become, Disneyland Paris that brought down Disney’s America, some in the historical community assumed they had tamed the mouse with their protests.

The locations of these planned theme park projects near battlefields of great national importance are surprisingly similar. In the course of the First Battle of the Marne in 1914, the 9th German Cavalry Division advanced as far as the village of Crecy along the Grand Morin.[4] This placed the troops just north of the British Army and within 10km (a little over 6 miles) of modern day Disneyland Paris. In contrast, the distance between Disney’s America and the Manassas National Battlefield Park was about 8 miles. Therefore, both parks were located in similar close vicinity to the opening engagements of their respective wars. Paris and Washington, D.C. also have an extensive cultural scene of museums and on their own accord attract a vast number of tourists. Disney even had plans to offer packages that would include day-trips into Washington.

The close proximity of the new theme park in France to the early battlefields of the Great War was a topic of discussion, but never a prominent one. The New York Times reported that “Mickey and Pluto will frolic near the edge of history” when the talks between Disney and the French government came to a successful conclusion.[5] References to World War I or the Great War, dissipated quickly, but so did Eisner’s smile.

When Eisner visited the Paris Bourse for the stock launch in 1989 eggs literally flew in his face. Chants of “Mickey, Go Home!” were not even the worst word choice as French movie director Ariane Mnouchkine suggested that the arrival of Disney in France represented “a cultural Chernobyl.”[6] The notion of a cultural conflict was widespread as even Le Figaro noted decades later, “Deux cultures, deux imaginaires s’affrontent.”[7] France has historically jealously guarded against any form of anglicization of its language and made efforts to promote French culture. At the same time, the battlefield near the new park did not hold the same gruesome reminders as those farther afield at Verdun or along the Somme. It was the arrival of a cultural icon from the United States and its possible impact on French culture that drew attention not the proximity to Great War battlefields.

Hoping for a better reception, on November 11, 1993, Eisner made another trip in front of the press to announce yet another theme park. Located in Virginia, the proposed park centered on history, telling aspects of the history of the United States until 1945, but also near history with its close proximity to the Bull Run/Manassas Battlefield. The 1,200-acre park would in the words of Peter Rummell, president of Disney Design and Development Co., “make this [history] real but also make it fun. An intelligent story, properly told, shouldn’t offend anybody. . . . But we won’t worry about being politically correct.” The Los Angeles Times wondered if making historical events such as slavery, the Depression, and the Civil War “fun and exciting for the whole family” was an invitation for problems.[8] As expected the eggs, this time figuratively, quickly started flying in Disney’s direction as the Disney Corporation had miscalculated the public opposition.

Haymarket, Virginia, where the park was supposed to rise, was “in an uproar. Neighbors are lining up against neighbors. Families are split. For the history-soaked region 40 miles from the nation’s capital, the fight is shaping up as a second Civil War: for or against Disney.”[9] The proximity to Manassas National Battlefield Park brought opposition from individuals who had already successfully derailed plans for a shopping center near the park in the late 1980s and did not want commercialization near these sacred grounds. With regard to the Civil War, concerns centered on how a Fort Sumter-like replica and a naval engagement between Monitor and Virginia would tell the complicated story of the rebellion. In the words of Democratic Representative Robert G. Torricelli (N.J.), “Americans should learn about the Civil War from historians, . . . ‘not Minnie and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.’”[10] David McCullough was far more outspoke when he called the plans, “This is the creation of a new city, a new edge city, sprawl at its worst. And this is the panzer division of developers moving in.”[11] Ironically, even the French did not seem to have used such harsh language to oppose their park.

Two years after his enthusiastic statements and promises of resilience in the face of “political correctness,” Rummell beat retreat. He explained the cancelation of the park: “We recognize that there are those who have been concerned about the possible impact of our park on historic sites in this unique area, and we have always tried to be sensitive to the issue.”[12]While money was a significant factor in the cancelation, historians and community leaders celebrate what they perceived as their success.[13]

Beyond the failure and success of building theme parks near battlefields, these Disney projects illustrate the very different attitudes taken towards these areas of death and destruction. Both the Great War, in which France lost around 1.7 million soldiers and civilians, and the American Civil War, were defining as well as traumatic moments in each country’s past. In the United States, national cemeteries and battlefield parks dot the landscape. In France, massive cemeteries and battlefield monuments are a reminder of the carnage. There are still trenches and bunkers all around the northern parts of the country; yet, there is no massive battlefield park. Arguably it would be impractical to create a park that stretches from Channel to Switzerland, eliminating millions of acres of farm land. However, the French have created small parks, like at Verdun.[14] A vastly different memorial landscape from that which exist in the United States, where it is increasingly popular to preserve entire battlefield park, at least try to, and to treat these field as sacred beyond development.

In the end, France and the United States remember their pasts in very different ways. The United States is somewhat unique in that it created massive battlefield parks, something impracticable in most of Europe. With the parks anchored so deeply in the public memory of the American Civil War, a theme park infringing on such a sacred space was unthinkable as was the cultural impact Disney would have on the telling of history. The French worried about the impact of Disney and U.S. culture on France; however, the proximity of the park to the early battlefields of the Great War was not a major topic of disagreement. Maybe, there is something the United States can learn from France’s attitude that not all battlefields need to be preserved to remember those who fought and died in major wars of the past.

[1] Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

[2] Charles Krauthammer, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Mouse?” Time, June 6, 1994. Available at http://wesclark.com/jw/krauthmr.html.

[3] New York Times, December 19, 1985.

[4] “Battle of the Marne, and Advance to the Aisne, http://www.lightbobs.com/1914-battle-of-the-marne.html

[5] Frank J. Prial, “The Talk of Paris,“ New York Times, August 13, 1985.

[6] Jeff Chu, “Happily Ever After?” Time Europe Magazine, March 18, 2002.

[7] Camille Lestienne, “Disneyland Paris: L’Inquiétude des Riverains en 1989 face à la ‘Bétonisation,’” Le Figaro (Paris), February, 24, 2017. Special thanks to Andrew Houck for helping me with some French newspaper research.

[8] Jube Shiver, Jr, “With Liberty and Justice for Mickey,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1993.

[9] Deborah Sharp, “Disney Plans worry Locals / Rural Virginia again is a Battlefield,” USA Today, December 7, 1993.

[10] Stephen C. Fehr and Michael D. Shear, “For Disney, Fight Takes New Twist,” Washington Post, June 17, 1994.

[11] “Historians Oppose Disney America in Virginia,” CNN NEWS 8:10 pm ET, May 11, 1994.

[12] “Disney Cancels N. Va. History Park,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 29, 1994.

[13] Michael Wiebner, “The Battle of Bull Run: How Insurgent Grassroots Lobbying Defeated Disney’s Proposed Virginia, Theme Park,” Campaigns and Elections (December 1994 / January 1995).

[14] Thank you to Chip Fulcher, Craig Bruce Smith, Jen Murray, Brooks Simpson, Caitlin G. DeAngelis for their helpful comments on Twitter and Sabrina Mittermeier (Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks Middle Class Kingdoms (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020)) who kindly visited one of my classes to talk about her book.

 

 

 

 

 

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

Teaching the Layered Histories of the Mount Vernon Barracks

Teaching the Layered Histories of the Mount Vernon Barracks

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During its 180-odd years of operation, Mount Vernon Barracks in south Alabama was home to thousands of people, including white soldiers, Apache prisoners, and Black psychiatric patients. It was an arsenal, a Confederate base, a U.S. Army outpost, a detention site for yellow fever victims, and a psychiatric facility. Shuttered and hastily abandoned on Halloween in 2012, its buildings are now crumbling, its edifices succumbing to vegetation, and the voices of its inhabitants largely silenced and forgotten. Yet the stories of the men, women, and children who lived and died at this place shed light on some of the most important historical phenomena of the late 19th and early 20th-century United States—many of which we don’t usually consider together: federal Indian policy, public health crises, and Jim Crow segregation. It is a place layered with meanings and resonances. Peeling back those layers can illuminate how deeply enmeshed our histories—and subfields—truly are. And it could be a phenomenal site from which to teach and learn. As philosopher Edward Casey noted, “Just as there are no places without the bodies that sustain and vivify them, so there are no lived bodies without the places they inhabit and traverse.”[1]

View of the guard tower at Mount Vernon Barracks, 1892. Courtesy of Alabama Department of Archives and History.

In 1886, the U.S. Army imprisoned nearly 400 Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache men, women, and children, following more than two decades of resistance to the invasion of their western homelands. Congress passed legislation preventing the Apaches’ relocation to any region west of the Mississippi River and logic dictated that they be interned at a military installation, preferably in an area devoid of other Indian people who might be corrupted by their influence.[2] An Army base in Alabama, a place presumably (but not actually) emptied of Native Americans since Indian removal, emerged as a reasonable location to imprison and reform the Apaches. The prisoners of war—as they were uniformly labelled—were sent by train to the U.S. South. More prisoners, including Geronimo, joined them the following year just north of Mobile at Mount Vernon Barracks, originally constructed in the 1830s. They would be prisoners of war for twenty-seven years.

While the incarcerated families struggled to acclimate to the humidity and mosquitos of lower Alabama, Army officials sent three dozen of the Apache children to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. In the 1880s, federal Indian policies were shifting away from armed conflict and towards aggressive assimilationist reforms, including the institutionalization of Indian children. Although a school was later established on site at Mount Vernon, reformers strongly advocated detaching Indian children from their parents and sending them to residential boarding schools. Carlisle was a former military base turned boarding school run by Captain Richard H. Pratt, who had formerly overseen Native prisoners of war in Florida. Pratt believed that incarcerated Indians could and should be “rehabilitated” through education and military-like discipline and he brought those techniques to the project of detribalizing Native youth. As historian Margaret Jacobs notes, “indigenous child removal” became a central part of the settler colonial project and was seen as essential to finally severing Indian ties (and claims) to their lands.[3] These policies were emotionally eviscerating. Mount Vernon post surgeon Walter Reed (yes, that Walter Reed) observed of the Apache parents: “Their grief over this compulsory separation has been genuine and unabating.”[4]

View of the guard tower at Searcy Hospital today. Photograph taken by the author, January 2020

The deportation, incarceration, and forced separation the Apaches experienced was made worse by unhealthy conditions at Mount Vernon Barracks, which were in turn exacerbated by meager rations and malnutrition. Some of the prisoners, along with many of the white soldiers stationed at the base, sought relief from their suffering in the bootlegged liquor that flowed through the piney woods surrounding the barracks. Jim Crow policies that curtailed employment opportunities for African Americans ensured that at least some of the liquor purveyors supplying Mount Vernon were Black Alabamians. Others were descendants of local Indians who had escaped removal during the 1830s and lived in the vicinity.[5] The community known today as the MOWA Choctaws was largely invisible to local whites during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in part because of the intersection of federal Indian policy and Jim Crow segregation. Unrecognized by the federal government as Indians, ancestors of today’s MOWAs struggled to articulate their indigeneity to outsiders. The Black-white racial binary, presumptions that all the real Indians had been removed to or were from the West (like the Apache prisoners nearby), and abject poverty meant that the Choctaws of southwest Alabama lived on several margins at once.[6]

The cemetery at Searcy Hospital/Mount Vernon Barracks. Photograph taken by the author, January 2020.

When the Apache prisoners of war were forced from Mount Vernon to their new prison at Fort Sill in 1894, the fate of the Alabama site was unclear. State politicians debated making it a full-fledged penitentiary, an orphanage, or a reform school, institutions that bore marked similarity to one another as part of what might be called a penal-pedagogic complex.[7] Ultimately, the site became the “Mount Vernon Insane Hospital” for Blacks; the walls, guard tower, and barred gates of the former barracks remained. Like other psychiatric facilities of the era, the hospital functioned much like a prison and often much worse. The twin plagues of disease and malnutrition that had deepened the Apache sorrow during their detention also afflicted Black patients at the newly established facility. In fact, the institution (renamed Searcy Hospital in 1919) played an important role in the identification of pellagra then rampant among African Americans and poor whites across the South.[8]

After Searcy was integrated in 1969, conditions improved but it remained a locus of controversy and a site of hardship and heartache for the people who lived there. Like other mental hospitals in Alabama, it was functionally a “warehouse” for patients who received little care and lots of medication.[9] Chronically underfunded and understaffed, Searcy Hospital was a place where many were involuntarily committed through “noncriminal proceedings,” often detained on dubious pretense, denied constitutional protections, and incarcerated indefinitely. Many, many people lived until they died at Searcy. Hidden away in one heavily wooded corner of the site is a sprawl of gravesites with small stone or metal markers, engraved only with numbers, no names. No records linking the numbers of the buried to their names or identities have yet been located.

A gravesite in the cemetery at Searcy Hospital/Mount Vernon Barracks. Photograph taken by the author, January 2020.

Mount Vernon Barracks is a place so densely laden with human experience that it fairly sags under its own historical weight. The spread of the federal military apparatus, Indian dispossession and assimilation, the growth of the carceral nation-state, disease and public health, Jim Crow segregation, race and mental illness, post-Civil Rights southern politics… all of these topics can be explored by inhabiting and traversing this site, even if only in our minds. It has inspired me to think of other such sites and how they might reanimate my teaching. Some of these, like Castillo San Marcos/Fort Marion and Alcatraz Island, share aspects of Mount Vernon’s history but are better preserved and protected. Others, like the Columbian Harmony Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground once located in Washington, D.C. and now scattered along the Potomac riverside in Virginia and Maryland, are only now resurfacing in our historical consciousness.[10] As Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday once wrote with characteristic grace, “The events of one’s life take place, take place.”[11] Where can those places take us?

 

 

 

[1] Edward S. Casey, “How to get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1996), 24.

[2] John Anthony Turcheneske, Jr., The Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War: Fort Sill 1894-1914 (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 8-13.

[3] Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 4, 25-28. Jacobs calculates that Pratt alone “institutionalized” 4,903 Indian children at Carlisle. Nearly 500 more were taken to Hampton Institute in Virginia.

[4] Walter Reed, “Geronimo and His Warriors in Captivity,” The Illustrated American, Vol. III, No. 26, August 16, 1890 (New York: George Kirchner & Co, 1890), 235.

[5] [Letter] William Sinclair, Mount Vernon Barracks, Ala. August 8, 1887 [to] Assist. Adjutant General, Governors Island, N.Y., 69. NARA, RG 393, Pt. 3, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821-1920, Records of Posts, Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama; Jacqueline Matte, They Say the Wind is Red, 77, 112; Jerry Davis notes that some prominent local whites were also involved in bootlegging and stemming the supply of liquor to the barracks (for prisoners and soldiers alike) was a major preoccupation of post commanders. Davis, “Apache Prisoners of War,” 256-257. See also Laurence, Daughter of the Regiment, 108, 172 n.1.

[6] Malinda Maynor Lowery’s study of the Lumbee experience in North Carolina during Jim Crow shows that in at least some instances, southern Indian groups strategically adopted their policies of segregation to maintain the integrity of their Native identity, adopting and adapting ideologies of white supremacy in so doing. See Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

[7] Anne Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politices of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88:3 (December 2001): 850.

[8] Harry Marks, “Epidemiologists Explain Pellagra: Gender, Race, and Political Economy in the Work of Edgar Sydenstricker,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58:1 (JANUARY 2003): 38.

[9] Charles S. Prigmore and Paul R. Davis, “Wyatt v. Stickney: Rights of the Committed,” Social Work 18:4 (JULY 1973): 11.

[10] Gregory S. Schneider, “A Virginia state senator found headstones on his property. It brought to light a historic injustice in D.C.,” Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2020. Accessed online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/headstones-black-cemetery-potomac-river/2020/10/25/3586f0d4-0d7a-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html

[11] N. Scott Momaday, The Names: A Memoir (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976), 142.

Angela Pulley Hudson

Angela Pulley Hudson is professor of history at Texas A&M University. Her most recent book is Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (2015).

Insurrections Old and New: Teaching Perspective on the Events of January 6, 2021

Insurrections Old and New: Teaching Perspective on the Events of January 6, 2021

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On January 6, 2021 a mob stormed the American Capital in Washington, D.C. to overturn Donald J. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. Rioters pushed their way inside the Capital, vandalized the building and threatened to harm government officials, including the Vice President. In total, five people died.

In the following days the public struggled to make sense of what had happened and why. Social Media evidence showed that Donald J. Trump, himself, had urged his followers to protest. Those supporters who had not been at the riot argued that the insurrectionists were not representative of Republican supporters or their values. Some spread a rumor that the left wing anti-fascist group Antifa had instigated the violence to discredit Trump. Critics of the President struggled to understand why the rioters were not immediately condemned by all Americans. Social activists argued the faction responsible for storming the Capitol had been treated differently by police because they were white; African American protesters had been jailed and beaten for less. To complicate things further many of the self-proclaimed insurrectionists were known white supremacists.[1]

I too was conflicted over the events of January 6. My emotions went from fear to anger.  I wondered how, as a historian and educator, I could approach this topic with my students without offending, agitating, or encouraging the presentism that I warn them to avoid?  In this moment the past and present appeared to have blurred.  And following an already historic year, how would I validate students’ feelings without turning class into a therapy session? How would I explain to these young adults that they were now observers of a major historical event, similar to those they read about in textbooks?  Would they realize that their emails, social media accounts, and personal journals might later be used by historians as primary sources?

Figure 1: Black & Batchelder, Black, James Wallace, and Martin M Lawrence, photographer. John Brown. , ca. 1859. December 12. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009633569/.

Social media reiterated my concerns as my own family members bickered with one another over who was to blame for the recent insurrection.  The conversation seemed familiar, but from a different time.  And then I realized that was because I had read commentary like this before.  When I was researching my master’s thesis on the Civil War home front, I had included a section about the northern and southern reactions to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.  How will I explain a deeply polarized and racially divided country to my students? I will look to historical sources and one of the most controversial events in American History, John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry.[2]

John Brown was a staunchly religious man who believed God had tasked him with ending slavery. On Oct. 16, 1859 he led a group of men to the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, where they planned to seize enough weaponry to arm southern slaves and emancipate them, forcefully if necessary. Unfortunately for Brown, the raid was a failure, and he was tried for murder, inciting slaves to rebel, and treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. John Brown was found guilty on all counts and hanged.

Brown has become one of the most contentious figures of the Civil War Era. Was he a madman or a prophet? The recent miniseries on Showtime, The Good Lord Bird (based on James McBride’s 2013 novel of the same name), makes arguments for both, although the show’s creators acknowledge that this depiction of Brown is fictionalized.  Brown, himself, argued that he had not intended to revolt against the United States Government. He simply wanted to free the enslaved. He was also one of the few people of this era to believe in racial equality. In his final speech before being executed, Brown asserted that he “never did intend murder, or treason, of the destruction of property, or to excite or incite Slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.”[3] Yet Brown was not against the idea that it would take violence to end slavery.  On his way to the gallows, he slipped his jailor a note that read “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood.”[4] His prediction would become true less than 2 years later when the Civil War began.

Brown’s prediction made him a legend. During the Civil War the song “John Brown’s Body” became a marching tune for the Union Army.[5]  In his 2005 cultural biography of Brown, David S. Reynolds notes that he was admired by twentieth-century black activists W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X.[6] Yet for those living in the United States in 1859, it was not that simple. Abolitionists viewed Brown as a martyr. Abolitionist and women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child condemned Brown’s actions, but nonetheless expressed her sympathy toward his cause.[7]  Less than a month after Brown’s execution, residents of Concord, Massachusetts held a meeting entitled “Martyrdom of John Brown.”[8] Even decades after his death, Brown was still revered by former abolitionists as a hero. In 1881 Frederick Douglass, who had distanced himself from Brown when he learned of the plans to attack the Federal Arsenal, described Brown’s arrest as the “victory of his life.”[9] These viewpoints were not, however, universal.[10]

Figure 2: Harper’s Ferry insurrection – the battle ground – Captain Alberts’ party attacking the insurgents – view of the railroad bridge, the engine-house, and the village / from a sketch by our special artist. Harpers Ferry West Virginia, 1859. Nov. 5. Photograph. http://www/loc/gov/item/95522021/.

Many people viewed Brown as dangerous and celebrated his arrest. A Kansas woman, whose husband and two sons were killed at the 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre – during which John Brown and a band of followers murdered pro-slavery men– wrote to Brown that her remaining son hoped to attend the execution and might “adjust the rope around your neck.”[11] For others, Brown was one part of a larger northern threat to slavery. A man named Robert Scott wrote that Harper’s Ferry was a betrayal of southerners at the hands of northerners. The Winchester Republican published in Winchester, Virginia called Brown’s Raid “the wickedest outrage against the sovereignty of Virginia.”[12] Similarly, an article published in the Democratic newspaper the Chicago Press Tribune argued that Brown’s raid demonstrated the threat of allowing Republicans to express their “fanatical” views.”[13] The Republican Party did not, however, claim Brown. In his 1860 Cooper Union Speech Abraham Lincoln condemned the spread of slavery to western territories but denied any connection between John Brown and Republicans. Lincoln challenged the audience to prove that politicians had supported the insurrection.  Today the public as well as certain U.S. Senators also fear that politicians were behind the January 6 riot.[14]

It is impossible to make a direct comparison between John Brown’s 1859 raid and the 2021 MAGA Riots.  First, the rationale behind each insurrection were completely different. Secondly, the modern Republican Party is not the same faction as the party of Lincoln. Yet a comparison reveals that in both eras the country was polarized over politics and race. For students struggling to grapple with these events and their meaning, a political analysis of the responses to Harper’s Ferry may provide context to the ways in which the media and the public respond to violence.  A comparison the two events also reveals important facts about the trajectory of race relations in this country. By focusing on the significance of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry as an expression of antebellum politics, students may be able contextualize current political debates.

[1] Hilary N. Green, “Civil War Scholars Respond to January 6, 2021 Events and Aftermath,” Muster, January 12, 2021, Accessed February 3, 2021, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2021/01/civil-war-era-scholars-respond-to-january-6-2021-events-and-aftermath/.

[2] Laura J. Ping, “Life in an Occupied City: Women in Winchester, Virginia During the Civil War, MA Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2007, 21-23; The majority of primary sources consulted are from the collection of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/.

[3] John Brown, “John Brown’s Final Speech,” 1859, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Accessed January 26, 2021, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/john-brown%E2%80%99s-final-speech-1859.

[4] John Brown, “Last Written Words of John Brown,” December 1859, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Accessed January 26, 2021, http://www.americanhistory.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/SearchDetails/GLC04463.08.01.

[5] Historian Chandra Manning notes that the John Brown originally mentioned in the song was not the abolitionist, but a man by the same name.  Soldiers confused the two, however, and throughout the war “John Brown’s Body” was a homage to the abolitionist. See Chandra Manning, “‘John Brown’s Body’: Analyzing the Song,”: Teachinghistory.org., Accessed January 26, 2021, https://teachinghistory.org/best-practices/examples-of-historical-thinking/25095.

[6] David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 12.

[7] Lydia Maria Child, Henry A. Wise, Maria Jefferson Carr Randolph Mason, American Anti-Slavery Society, and Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection. Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia . (Boston: Published by The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860, PDF, Accessed, January 26, 2021, http://www.loc.gov/item/07016677/.

[8] “A Program for a Commemorative Town Hall Meeting Held in Concord, Massachusetts following John Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859,” Digital Public Library of America, Accessed January 26, 2021, https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/john-brown-s-raid-on-harper-s-ferry/sources/1724.

[9] David Blight, “Admiration and Ambivalence: Frederick Douglass and John Brown,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Accessed January 26, 2021, http://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/failure-compromise/essays/admiration-and-ambivalence-frederick-douglass-and-john-brow.

[10] For a more detailed discussion of the diverse memory of John Brown see R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality and Change (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

[11] “Mahala Doyle to John Brown regarding his death penalty,” November 20, 1859, Gilder Lehrman Collection of American History, Accessed January 26, 2021, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/glc07590.

[12] Winchester Republican, Oct. 21, 1859, Stewart Bell Jr. Archives Room, Winchester-Frederick Historical Society, Winchester, VA.

[13] “The Cloud in the Distance No Bigger than a Man’s Hand – The First Battle of the ‘Irrepressible Conflict,’” Chicago Press and Tribune, October 20, 1859. American Experience, Accessed January 26, 2021, http://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lincolns/filmmore/ps_brown.html.

[14] Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, et. al. to Senate Committee on Ethics, “Investigating Request for Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, January 21, 2021, Accessed February 3, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/1.21.21%20Ethics%20Complaint%20Against%20Cruz%20and%20Hawley%20Final.pdf; Dan Barry and Sheera Frenkel, “’Be There. Will Be Wild!’: Trump All But Circled the Date,” The New York Times, January 6, 2021, Accessed February 3, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/capitol-mob-trump-supporters.html.

Laura Ping

Laura J. Ping is an adjunct assistant professor with the Pace University-Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History MA Program in American History and at Queens College, City University of New York. Ping is the author of “‘He May Sneer at the Course We are Pursuing to Gain Justice': Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl and Corresponding about Women's Suffrage,” (New York History Journal 2017) as well as the coauthor of the forthcoming book Catharine Beecher: The Paradoxes of Gender in the Nineteenth Century. Ping is also completing a monograph on the cultural and political impact of the dress reform movement on the nineteenth-century woman’s movement in the United States.

Editors’ Note for March 2021 JCWE

Editors’ Note for March 2021 JCWE

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It is fitting that James Brooks will introduce this special issue and its contents, since this and the parallel volume in the Western Historical Quarterly represent his hands-on editing and his wide-ranging view of intertwined histories. We thank him, WHQ editor Anne Hyde, former JCWE editor Judith Giesberg, and former JCWE associate editor Stacey Smith for bringing the two journals—and more importantly the two fields—together.

It is also fitting that we mark an important anniversary for this publication. Ten years ago, in March 2011, the Journal of the Civil War Era appeared for the first time. In the introductory note, founding editor William A. Blair noted the propitious timing for the journal’s launch as the 150th anniversary commemorations of the Civil War coincided with a resurgence in creative scholarship on the era. “It is a delight to consider how much we have to discover,” Blair wrote. “It is a good time to be a newborn.”

Ten years later, the Journal of the Civil War Era is no longer a newborn but is now a valued and respected and (we hope) eagerly awaited part of our scholarly landscape, with roughly 120 research articles, dozens of review essays, and many hundreds of book reviews behind it. In its decade of existence, the journal has fulfilled much of its original mandate to offer a “fresh perspective to the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while tying the struggles that defined the period to the broader course of American history and to a wider world” and to provide a place where scholars from many nineteenth-century subfields “can engage with each other.”

The journal’s survival through its infancy and its growth through its early years is attributable to a group of dedicated historians and staff. First, of course, Blair as founding editor provided guidance, direction, inspiration, and counsel for the journal’s first five years, aided by associate editors Judith Giesberg, Anthony Kaye, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean and later ourselves.

Starting in March 2016, Judith Giesberg succeeded Blair as the journal’s editor, and she expanded the journal’s reach with special issues on the West, Reconstruction, the continental history of the era, abolition, and veterans, while continuing to publish pathbreaking research articles, broad-ranging review essays, and fair-minded and thoughtful book reviews. During her tenure, Giesberg, along with her graduate students, launched the journal’s blog, Muster. She then recruited Kristen Epps to be the digital  editor, joining new review essays editors Stacey Smith and Luke Harlow, and book review editor Rachel Shelden.

Beginning with the September 2019 issue, Shelden, Smith, and Harlow shepherded the journal through a shared interim editorship while continuing in their respective associate editor positions and—in Smith’s case—playing a crucial role in bringing this special issue to fruition. With the September 2020 issue, we succeeded them as coeditors, and we have been delighted to welcome Hilary Green as the new digital editor and Kathryn Shively as the new book review editor.

Throughout the last decade, the journal has benefitted from institutional support from the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, now directed by Rachel Shelden, and from its affiliation with the Society of Civil War Historians. The journal has also depended on extraordinary work by professional staff, especially the indispensable managing editor Matthew Isham and a series of fine assistants: William Bryan, William Cossen, Tyler Sperrazza, Cecily Zander, and Megan Hildebrand. At the University of North Carolina Press, David Perry, editor, supported the journal from the beginning, and since his retirement, Mark Simpson-Vos has been a crucial sounding board and advocate. Among the many dedicated press employees who have ensured that the journal sees the light of day is Suzi Waters, the press’s journals manager, who retired last fall.

Since becoming editors, we’ve come to see with new clarity the tremendous work peer reviewers perform. Whatever may be said on social media about “Reviewer #2,” we observe in our reviewers an extraordinary commitment to their fields, to professionalism, and to the value of balancing support and encouragement with thoughtful critique as they evaluate articles. Individual peer reviewers are ephemeral parts of this enterprise, but as a collective, they make the journal possible, and we owe them—and many of them are also you, our readers—our deep gratitude.

We congratulate the Journal of the Civil War Era—and all who have helped to make it—on a successful first decade and feel fortunate that we are here to help launch it into its teen years. We believe the journal has a crucial role to play in a moment of deep public engagement with the nation’s history of slavery and emancipation and Civil War. We’re delighted by how much we have yet to discover, and we look forward to continuing its work in this productive and vital field.

The Necessity of National Unity:  Defeated Confederates’ International Appeals to Unity

The Necessity of National Unity:  Defeated Confederates’ International Appeals to Unity

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Citizens were divided. Violence threatened the stability of the nation. After the violence ended, calls rose for unity. This pattern played out recently with calls to move past and forgive insurrectionists in the name of national unity following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Such a pattern is not unique to the Capitol riot, however, nor new in history. Similar patterns of division, violence, and calls for unity played out in the wake of the American Civil War. In particular, former Confederates, perhaps unexpectedly, demanded national unity in the months and years following their defeat. In making their case for national unity, former Confederates argued that they, too, were not the first to seek national unity in the wake of national violence. Drawing on the rich contemporary nineteenth century history of largely defeated nationalist movements in Europe, Confederates used comparisons between the defeated Confederacy and defeated nations in Europe to push for national unity – and, more specifically, for their own particular vision of national unity – in the aftermath of Confederate defeat.

Unity, of course, had been at the heart of the Civil War itself, as white southerners had rejected unity with the North and pursued independent nationhood instead, while the United States had fought to preserve national unity. Now, in the wake of four years of violence, bloodshed, and warfare, as former Confederates suddenly faced the consequences of their actions, even former Confederates found appeal in the idea of unity. They, however, held a very different vision of unity than did the Union during the war, or the Republicans during Reconstruction. For former Confederates, embracing unity was not an admission of culpability for the destruction of secession and the Civil War, nor an indication of true desire to unite with the North in reconstructing the postwar nation. Instead, for defeated Confederates, calling for unity was a means of forcing the Reconstruction to occur on their terms. They demanded that the nation could only be reconstructed through full forgiveness and restoration of power for former Confederates, with no punishment, accountability, or even alterations to the social, economic, and political system of white supremacy.

International comparisons proved particularly useful for former Confederates seeking to claim that unity could only come through forgiveness. In particular, defeated Confederates used international comparisons to argue that unity could only be achieved through pacification. These international examples taught that the only way to move forward was to forgo punishment or consequences, and instead restore full power to the same defeated Confederates who initiated the war in the first place.

Macon Telegraph published “A Lesson from Italy,” declaring that the king of the new nation of Italy provided an example of virtue and democracy in the wake of war that the world, especially the US, would be wise to follow, and contrasted this approach with the US’s supposed course of using the excuse of war to limit white southerners’ democratic rights.[1] Turning to the enemy of aspiring nations in Europe, the New Orleans Picayune asserted that “the Radical [Republican] policy, indeed, rejecting as it does the most approved lessons of history… would seem to… copy from Russia, nothing but the harsh outlines of a gigantic, unreasoning, unforgiving, pitiless despotism.”[2] The Richmond Whig concurred as it praised President Andrew Johnson, infamous for his leniency toward former Confederates, for enabling unity by “appeal[ing] to [former Confederates’] highest and noblest impulses.” Johnson’s policies, according to the Whig, allowed the nation to “bury the past and to look only to the future.” In contrast, the writer for the Whig declared, Radical Republicans sought “mistrust, military domination, and physical power,” and advanced policies that would “make of the South a province in which shall be smothered the condensed malignity and passionate hatred of Poland, Ireland, and Venetia.”[3] To former Confederates, any policy other than forgiveness would destroy hopes for national unity by recreating the oppression found in tyrannical European empires.

Hungary, which had risen up and demanded national independence from the Austrian Empire in 1848, only to be defeated, featured heavily in such international comparisons of the necessity of pacification for national unity. The Houston Telegraph, for example, wrote in July of 1865 that the model of Hungary and Austria instructed that national reconciliation could only be achieved by granting full political equality to defeated secessionists. To this journalist, former Confederates had already conceded “their cherished hope of a Southern Confederacy,” had “submitted to… emancipation,” and had “made up their minds to take the oath of allegiance.” To require more would constitute “private malice or revenge,” and would result in similar protracted difficulties as Austria faced by denying Hungarians not only independence, but legislative reform.[4] Similarly, the Richmond Whig declared that Radical Republican policy was “that subjugation and conquest had worked the forfeiture of the constitutional rights of the South,” a policy “more exacting and implacable” than Austrian treatment of Hungary.[5] In Hungary, former Confederates saw a fellow defeated nation. They did not hesitate to use the perception of continued oppression of Hungarians to call for their own appeasement and political power in the name of national unity.

As the emphasis on restoration of former Confederates’ political rights indicates, former Confederates found international comparisons particularly useful in seeking to avoid punishment or even consequences for their actions. Restriction of former Confederates’ rights, however temporary, was one such consequence that former Confederates used international comparisons to declare contrary to national unity, as had the writer in the Richmond Whig comparing Republican policies to those of Austria toward Hungary. Expansion of political rights to freedmen was another action that former Confederates interpreted as punishment, and therefore equated with tyrannical actions abroad. The Macon Telegraph declared, for example, that it had tried to demonstrate former Confederates’ willingness to unite with the North, but that Radicals rejected such peace offerings by insisting on racial equality. In the process, Republicans supposedly recreated Russia’s much-maligned oppression of Poland on American soil.[6] Explicit punishment was even more beyond the bounds of acceptable national reconciliation, according to former Confederates. John Mitchel, an exiled Irish nationalist and Confederate supporter, explained that the prosecution of Jefferson Davis “is not a new idea… it has been tried in Poland, in Ireland, in Venetia and elsewhere,” but he reasoned that it failed as a “method of reconciling the bleeding, disaffected communities with the dominant ones.”[7]

To former Confederates, defeat must be followed by appeasement, and any punishment or even consequences would destroy any possibility of national unity. International comparisons, drawing on examples of defeated and oppressed nations – and therefore of failure of national unity – abroad, aided former Confederates in making their case. Indeed, by developing international comparisons, former Confederates sought to draw boundaries of acceptable action on the part of the victorious North, beyond which defeated Confederates would refuse to accede to national unity and reunion. Former Confederates’ cries for unity, then, were not good faith calls for actual national unity. Rather, as their international comparisons show, former Confederates’ calls for unity were an attempt to escape accountability, and to retain full political power and dominance, despite their defeat.[8]

The nation’s subsequent decision to acquiesce to former Confederates’ vision of unity had tragic consequences. It allowed former Confederates to reclaim full and exclusive control of southern politics and to maintain white supremacy through violence and through restriction of political rights to freedmen. As Reconstruction fell, and, with it, rights and hopes for equality for freedpeople, former Confederates achieved their vision of national unity, at the cost of true equality for black southerners, and true democracy for the nation.

[1] “A Lesson from Italy,” Macon Telegraph, Jun 4, 1866.

[2] “Moral Difficulties of Restoration,” New Orleans Picayune, Oct 19, 1866.

[3] “How to Conquer,” Richmond Whig, Sep 29, 1865.

[4] Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph, Jul 21, 1865.

[5] “The People of Hungary – The People of the Southern States,” Richmond Whig, Mar 27, 1866.

[6] “Can’t Go It,” Macon Telegraph, Jun 14, 1867.

[7] “John Mitchel’s Opinion,” Augusta Daily Constitutionalist, Jun 21, 1866.

[8] For more analysis of former Confederates’ use of international comparisons to shape a pro-Confederate Reconstruction, please see my chapter “To ‘Heal the Wounded Spirit’:  Former Confederates’ International Perspective on Reconstruction and Reconciliation,” in Reconciliation after Civil Wars:  Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and James Hawdon (Routledge Press, 2018).

Ann Tucker

Ann L. Tucker is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Georgia. She earned her PhD at the University of South Carolina, and is the author of Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy (UVa Press, 2020). She studies the US South and Civil War Era through a transnational perspective. You can find her at her website, annltucker.com, or on twitter @annltucker.

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