Category: Muster

Fear of a Black Planet (Part 2)

Fear of a Black Planet (Part 2)

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See more here: Civil War History: A Call to Action.

Thirty years ago, Public Enemy released what was arguably its best album, Fear of a Black Planet, which included the iconic track “Fight the Power.” I suspect many of you reading this have at least heard of the song (if you haven’t, watch the video.) And I’d venture that even though many of you may not identify with the Black and urban experience that PE was speaking out of and into, the title resonates with you. If it does—if you have been and want to keep fighting the power—you have yet another opportunity to do so September 26th.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote, “Long before average citizens read the historians who set the standards of the day for colleague and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays, and primary school books.”[1] We—myself, Hilary Green, Kate Masur, and Greg Downs–are calling on you, therefore, to join in a national, simultaneous, activist  demonstration of history on September 26th that can reach the “average citizen” who encounters history before they read anything we write. We are calling on you to connect with people in your communities, go to Confederate monuments at National Park battlefields, state park battlefields, state parks, or any public space in your communities where these monuments continue to hide the history of slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction and the long reign of White supremacy, and to tell a more complete story. Sign up here.  To register for a September 9 webinar with Scott, Greg, and Kate about the day of action, please click here.

In most respects, this call is nothing new. Black artists, among many other African Americans, have been doing this for a long time. Public Enemy is just one of many examples of Black artists who engage histories specific to their communities and connect those stories to a larger national story of race and injustice. Black artists across the spectrum have understood on personal, community and national levels what Danez Smith says: “history is what it is. It knows what it did.”[2] Public Enemy reminded us of something similar in “Contract on the World Love Jam,” telling us that “The race that controls the past, controls the living present / And therefore, the future.”[3]

For over a century, far too many White Americans wrote slavery, race, blackness and Black people out of the history of the American Civil War. This segment of White Americans has controlled far too much of the past, with devasting effects on African Americans and the country as a whole. This erasure of our national past helped justify lethally violent racial terrorism for a century and the disenfranchisement of the race that the Civil War had freed and made citizens. Today we are seeing disenfranchisement aimed largely at Black and Brown voters once again underway, frequently supported by people who trot out the same tired, factually incorrect, revisionist erasures of history in their alleged ‘protection’ of Confederate monuments and symbols.

African Americans knew right away what the cost of erasing history would be. And they knew what Confederates would be up to. Black newspapers consistently called attention to the fact that Confederates would make every effort to resurrect themselves in some form, and reminded readers what the war was really all about. The New Orleans Tribune, just a few days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox, warned of a “New Rebel Scheme” by leaders who “were divided amongst themselves—not as to the aim to be attained, which was an independent slave-holding Confederacy.” The division was about how to best continue Black subjugation: by “open revolt” or by working for it from within the Union. Since the former was failing, they judged that “a keen policy may yet repair their disasters” and “would suffice to protect the ‘peculiar institution’…against the intrusion of the monster called Freedom.”[4]

Portrait of Francis CardozoTwo months later, The Tribune wrote, “The slave holding interest has received a fatal blow and will never forget and forgive it. History shows that a return to wiser and more sensible sentiments cannot be expected.” Later that summer the Tribune, taking Andrew Johnson to task for his endorsement of Confederates who threatened Black civil rights and opposed suffrage, declared that “the cause of the war was slavery and in that war the North conquered.” In 1868, Francis Cardozo – a Black legislator in South Carolina’s majority Black state convention who argued in favor of legislation to redistribute some of the wealthier slaveowners’ land to Black families – said “this system of large plantations, of no service to the owner or anybody else, should be abolished.” Otherwise “the stronghold of slavery” would be maintained. And that stronghold’s “common cause” was to “maintain a war waged for the purpose of perpetually enslaving a people.”[5] In 1875, The Weekly Louisianan’s column, “The Same Old Spirit,” gave a concise history of the country’s long complicity with slavery from its founding and stated that “the victors in this last contest” were once again sacrificing Black people, and “on their prostrate forms the Confederacy is building its hopes of a final triumph over the Union.”[6]

In sum, African Americans in positions to speak publicly in the years after the war understood what Public Enemy stated in 1990 about controlling the historical narrative. African Americans knew that Confederate efforts to reshape the war’s meaning had tangible, immediate consequences for Black freedom and opportunity. Black Southerners understood that, as Barbara Gannon has written, “civil war memory was crucial to Southerners’ battle to ensure Northern acquiescence to their answer to the race question—black oppression.” [7] And Black Southerners combined their warnings with a more accurate, fuller history of why the war was fought: to keep them as slaves. They knew that resisting new forms of Black subjugation to White Supremacy required a pointed and vigorous response, which included getting the history right.

One hundred and fifty years later, we know that those warnings were not heeded, and that White Northerners for the most part did indeed acquiesce to White Southerners’ control of history.

Historians: we have an obligation to respond. We want more history, not less. Whatever your political leanings, we are calling on you to respond to help correct a narrative, accepted and promulgated by far too many historians at every level of education for over a century, that has glorified the Confederacy through monuments that at a minimum ignore the Confederacy’s desire to maintain slavery, and that often insist the Confederacy was primarily about the honor and valor of soldiers who sacrificed for the ultimate good of national unity. We don’t know everything, but we do know that there’s much, much more to the story.

So let’s be proactive in telling the stories that have too often been erased from the narrative, and do what African Americans have done since before the war even ended: remind people what the war was about. Let’s emancipate battlefields and other public spaces from the control of Confederate monuments that silence, obscure, and twist the past. Let’s free those spaces not with violence, not with threats, not only with calls for removal, but with more history.

We are calling on you to respond to Public Enemy’s call: “History shouldn’t be a mystery / Our stories real history.”[8]

In the weeks ahead, Muster will publish written and video resources about to help you think about developing your historical evidence, designing your presentation of history, working within guidelines at the park or public site you select, ensuring your safety and the safety of others, and connecting with other historians interested in this call to action. The place you pick is up to you. But the time to act is now, by committing to the date and selecting the place where you will make your stand for better, more complete history in the nation’s public spaces.

To express interest and get more information, use this Google form. To register for a September 9 webinar with Scott, Greg, and Kate about the day of action, please click here.

 

[1] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 2015), 20.

[2] Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), “summer, somewhere.”

[3] Public Enemy, “Contract on the World Love Jam” by Keith Shocklee, Eric Sadler and Carl Eidenhour, track 1 on Fear of a Black Planet, April 10, 1990.

[4] New Orleans Tribune April 6 1865.

[5] New Orleans Tribune, June 14 1865, July 26 1865; Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina (New York, 1968), 113-17.

[6] New Orleans Tribune, June 14 1865, July 26 1865; Weekly Louisianian, May 29, 1875.

[7] Barbara A. Gannon, “Sites of Memory, Sites of Glory: African American Grand Army of the Republic Posts in Pennsylvania” in Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War (State College, PA, 2001), 166.

[8] Public Enemy, “Brothers gonna work it out” by Keith Shocklee, Eric Sadler and Carl Eidenhour, track 2 on Fear of a Black Planet, April 10, 1990.

Scott Hancock

Scott Hancock, associate professor of History and Africana Studies, came to Gettysburg College in 2001. He received his B.A. from Bryan College in 1984, spent fourteen years working in group homes with teenagers at risk, and received his history PhD from the University of New Hampshire in 1999. His scholarly interests have focused on Black northerners’ engagement with the law, from small disputes to escaping via the Underground Railroad, during the Early Republic and Civil War eras. He has more recently begun exploring how whiteness has been manifested on post-Civil War memorializations of battlefields. His work has appeared in anthologies and Civil War History, and he has published essays on CityLab, Medium, and The Huffington Post. He can be contacted at shancock@gettysburg.edu or on Twitter @scotthancockOT.

The Politics of Faith: How Contests within Sacred Space Shaped Post-Emancipation Society

The Politics of Faith: How Contests within Sacred Space Shaped Post-Emancipation Society

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In this roundtable, three historians present short excerpts from papers they would have presented at the 2020 meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians, which was cancelled due to Covid-19. The authors featured here explore how the wartime destruction of slavery shaped politics and power within Black churches, between Black and white church organizations, and in a progressive white-led congregation.

Group of African Americans in front of Church Building
First African Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1865. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Caitlin Verboon examines the challenges Black church organizations faced in separating from white organizations, and why it was so important for them to do so. Investigating an explosive controversy within Washington, DC’s First Congregational Church, Peter Porsche shows how Black Oberlin graduate John Hartwell Cook pushed Freedmen’s Bureau Commissioner O. O. Howard to take a stand for racial equality within the church. Nicole Myers Turner previews many of the arguments in her 2020 book, Soul Liberty, by showing how, after emancipation, Black churches became venues for discussion of gender roles and foundations for political action. (Turner discussed her work with us in July.)

These three essays, all fragments of larger projects, reveal how much we may continue to learn from deep research into “the politics of faith” after the Civil War. Historians have shown that this was period of tremendous growth of independent Black denominations and that by establishing independent churches, African Americans created spaces in which they could not only worship as they chose but also nurture community ties and mobilize for politics on their own turf. These studies add nuance to our understanding, revealing new kinds of primary sources and new approaches that promise to yield exciting discoveries.

“‘Irregular Secession’: The Political Nature of Religious Space in the Reconstruction-era South

“‘Irregular Secession’: The Political Nature of Religious Space in the Reconstruction-era South

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In the early summer of 1865, just a few months after Confederates in Raleigh, North Carolina, officially surrendered, Black Baptists found themselves faced with a choice: submit to white leadership and be permitted to use the roomy sanctuary of the city’s main Baptist church, or refuse and be relegated to the vestry room – a space so small it would require them to turn away would-be worshippers. According to the white trustees of the church, Black members “must not have so good a room” as the sanctuary if they insisted on retaining a Black minister.[1]

Portrait of Henry McNeal Turner
Portrait of Henry McNeal Turner

Raleigh’s African American Baptists, like many of their counterparts around the South, refused to acquiesce to white demands for control and opted for the inferior, inadequate space. An American Missionary Association (AMA) teacher supported them: “I saw that it would be as it always had been,” he observed. “The black man could say nothing and accomplish nothing as he wished to.”[2] That conflict eventually led to what AMA officials despaired of as an “irregular secession” of the African American congregants from the white Baptist church.[3] The schism was part of a wave of church separations across the South. Henry McNeal Turner, a prominent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister, highlighted the importance of these new Black churches. By seceding from white congregations, African Americans threw off the “slave-yoke of Southern Methodism,” he declared, and stood “in the full vigor of their God-given rights.”[4] Establishing their own, independent churches was an important way that southern Black Christians made freedom meaningful in their everyday lives.

At the end of the Civil War, most Black churchgoers attended white churches. Sometimes they worshipped in the back of sanctuaries or in balconies, but often, as was the case in Raleigh, they worshipped in separate services where they might have exercised a large degree of day-to-day autonomy. Still, they lacked the true independence of a separate church. They were required to have white ministers, excluded from Sabbath schools, and denied any role in church governance. White church leaders thus retained control over the Black congregation’s leadership, which meant they also controlled the religious message Black churchgoers heard and the kinds of events they could host. Importantly, white churches also usually retained ownership of Black members’ building, even if it had been built or purchased with Black people’s labor and money.[5]

That trusteeship system meant that Black church members faced a constant threat of eviction. In 1865, for example, white Presbyterians in Augusta, Georgia, locked their Black counterparts out of the building they had been using. An AMA teacher had recently begun holding Sabbath School classes there, and white Presbyterians expelled the teacher, the minister, and the entire congregation. The white church-goers had tolerated Black religious services but refused to provide a venue for Black education. Teachers scrambled to find alternate locations to no avail. An AME church in town was not available either. “The other church belongs to the colored people (Methodists), but the chief difficulty was on account of the insurance, the policy taking exceptions to a store and making no provision for a school,” the AMA superintendent explained.[6] By requiring a different kind of insurance to use a building for a school than for a religious service, a white-owned insurance company could effectively control the ways Black people could use even the church buildings they owned.

In Raleigh, a month after their “irregular secession,” Black Baptists still struggled to disentangle themselves from whites’ control. It is not clear where the Black Baptists were now worshipping, but they may have been renting space in a white-owned building. A white newspaper warned them, “It is proper to suggest that the white people are extending to colored worshippers the most liberal privileges.”[7] The writer conveyed a number of ideas in this short sentence. First, he characterized African Americans’ occupation of church space as a tenuous privilege rather than a right. Black church-goers were in the building only with white permission. Second, in complimenting white residents on allowing their black neighbors any access at all, he revealed a belief that white people defined freedom and citizenship for everyone and could dole it out as they saw fit. And finally, he grammatically replicated Black and white relationships under slavery: white people were the subjects and actors, while Black people were merely the objects of white subjects’ actions. The editor went on to criticize worshippers’ behavior in the church, and the unspoken threat of legal retaliation was clear: “We remind freedmen, that even religious exercises, in their practice, may reach a point of illegality, and for their own benefit advise them to come down several octaves in their hours.”[8]

Even in the face of such opposition from their white neighbors, Black Christians continued to establish independent congregations during Reconstruction. In doing so, they claimed permanent spaces and worked to insulate themselves from white threats of eviction, control, and both legal and extralegal policing. “Their places of worship at present are but temporary,” Turner wrote about those new churches. “They are preparing, however, to erect themselves a permanent edifice to worship God in.”[9] Building and occupying independent churches was itself an implicit political act, but those Black churches also explicitly embraced electoral politics, providing institutional support and a space for local mobilization. State Republican Party organizations originated in their sanctuaries and used church buildings for political conventions, celebrations of Emancipation Day, and other public performances. Church buildings became a kind of alternative public sphere as Black people prepared for their future as free Americans.[10] As they fought for their independence, Black southerners imbued the buildings with political significance.

 

[1] George Greene, letter to W. E. Whiting, June 29, 1865, American Missionary (AMA) Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.

[2] George Greene, letter to W. E. Whiting, June 22, 1865, AMA Papers.

[3] Eliphalet Whittlesey, letter to the Secretary of the AMA, Aug. 2, 1865, AMA Papers.

[4] Henry McNeal Turner, letter published in The Christian Recorder, Jan. 20, 1866.

[5] Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005), 120; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 2nd ed. (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), 88-89.

[6] Dewitt C. Jencks, letter to Samuel Hunt, Dec. 21, 1865, AMA Papers.

[7] “Hymnology,” Daily Progress [Raleigh, NC], Sept. 12, 1865.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Henry McNeal Turner, letter published in The Christian Recorder, Jan. 20, 1866.

[10] Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” in The Black Public Sphere, ed. By The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 110-50.

Caitlin Verboon

Caitlin Verboon is an independent scholar.

Strategic Alliance: John Hartwell Cook, O. O. Howard, and the Postwar Fight for Equality at First Congregational Church

Strategic Alliance: John Hartwell Cook, O. O. Howard, and the Postwar Fight for Equality at First Congregational Church

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In February 1867, John Hartwell Cook, a freedman from Virginia and graduate of Oberlin College, arrived in Washington, DC, with his wife, Isabel “Belle” Lewis, to take up a new position with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau. Prior to his arrival, he had spent roughly two years teaching among freedpeople under the auspices of the Bureau in Louisville, Kentucky. At his new post in the capital, Cook quickly caught the attention of Bureau Commissioner Oliver Otis Howard,  who promoted him to the office of chief clerkship, a position that involved the management of Howard’s official correspondence and even his personal finances. Out of this working relationship, a close friendship developed, one that proved immensely important in late 1867 when Cook initiated a struggle for racial equality at Washington’s First Congregational Church.[1]

Portrait of O. O. Howard
Portrait of Oliver Otis Howard,

The establishment of First Congregational, on the corner of Tenth and G Streets, was part of a larger transformation of Washington during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Upon Abraham Lincoln’s election and the subsequent secession of the Confederate states, southern congressmen had fled the district. Their departure, along with an influx of Republican-aligned officials, marked a shift in the capital from a pro-slavery to pro-Union stance. During the war, the capital experienced further transformation due to the arrival of thousands of refugees and escaping slaves from neighboring Maryland and Virginia. In 1865, several men with ties to Congregational churches in New England decided the time was right for their staunchly anti-slavery denomination to plant a church in the nation’s principle city, a place they had previously never been welcome. The small assembly, which initially met in the hall of the House of Representatives, attracted the attention of Howard. Not only did Howard have personal ties to Congregationalism, but as Bureau commissioner, he wanted to attend a church that embraced progressive racial views. Ultimately, Howard and his wife, Elizabeth, along with their friends, John and Myrtilla Alvord, became members. Howard later wrote, “Being engaged in a struggle for what I have called the manhood of the black man . . . I naturally carried the same efforts with me into the church, with which I was connected.”[2]

Several months after the Howards joined, Baltimore’s Rev. Edwin Johnson delivered the keynote address at the church’s groundbreaking ceremony. He emphasized that this new church, founded on the premise of liberty, fraternity, and equality, intended to serve as an example to the nation. Yet neither Johnson nor Howard could have envisioned how quickly the church would find itself at the center of a historic battle for racial equality that reverberated across the country. The crisis that emerged exposed the hypocrisy of the majority of white congregants, including the church’s first minister, Charles B. Boynton, who despite professions of belief in racial equality, anticipated and preferred a primarily white congregation.[3]

In October 1867 when John Hartwell Cook presented himself for membership at First Congregational, he set off a chain of events that culminated in a church split and the resignation of Rev. Boynton. Shortly after interviewing Cook, Rev. Boynton preached a sermon targeting Cook and other educated African Americans by stating that they could best serve their race in “institutions of their own.” Boynton’s sermon went viral as newspapers across the country noted the obvious discrepancy between the church’s stated belief in equality and the minister’s call for racial separation. A dismayed Cook turned to Howard for support, imploring his friend on behalf of himself and other Black congregants: “Because of your long and tiring and consistent course as the practical Christian advocate of the rights of all humanity and especially the negro may we not still hope and expect much from you . . . ?” Cook observed that in this new era, there “is a grand opportunity to begin right . . . . Here shall we have a Church composed of members whose lives will be molded by their religion and not their religion by their lives.” He believed the church’s refusal to accept him and other Black people as equals would have repercussions across the country as “the public mind gladly seizes anything looking towards a sanction of the old state of things.”[4]

Howard, appalled and deeply grieved by the situation, agreed. In the face of increased public scrutiny and with disregard for any political ramifications, Howard initiated and led the minority resistance to Rev. Boynton over the next seventeen months. His efforts included drafting and disseminating a public protest against the pastor’s position signed by fifty other members, employing the voice of the Congregational Church, the Congregationalist and Boston Recorder, to publicize his views, and ultimately forcing both an ex parte council and general church council, in November 1868 and January 1869 respectively, to settle the matter. Howard’s actions drew the ire of Rev. Boynton’s son, Henry, a local correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette, who used the paper to support his father’s position, an effort that generated headlines as far away as Vermont, Louisiana, and California. A year and a half later, however, Rev. Boynton and his supporters admitted defeat and left the church while Cook and more than thirty other African Americans became members, integrating this traditionally white space as equals and victors over the church’s segregationist wing.[5]

The episode at First Congregational reveals how Black activists made strategic use of alliances to facilitate change during Reconstruction. Whites’ widespread fear of societal upheaval in a postslavery world guaranteed that such efforts would meet organized resistance that was both widely publicized and increasingly politicized. Despite facing perhaps the most incendiary accusations possible during the period—that of supporting amalgamation and social equality—Cook and Howard succeeded. Not only did Cook achieve membership in First Congregational, his fight resulted in the broader Congregational Church publicly affirming racial equality and denouncing racial separation. In addition, Cook provided Commissioner Howard with a platform to align himself with freedpeople in direct contrast to the virulent racist President Andrew Johnson who hamstrung the Bureau throughout its most critical years. The victory sheds light on an underappreciated aspect of Reconstruction, namely the tenacious and creative ways African Americans pushed influential white allies to directly challenge white supremacy in predominantly white institutions.

[1] Records of the field offices for the state of Kentucky, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (BRFAL), Monthly school reports, Apr.-June 1866, Sept. 1866-Nov. 1868, M1904 roll 119; “John H. Cook Esq.,” and “John H. Cook,” Alumni Records of Oberlin College for Quinquennial Reunion in 1875, Oberlin College Archives.

[2] Oliver Otis Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, 2 vols. (New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, 1907), 1:119, 2:425-26; Walter L. Clift, “History of the First Congregational Church,” in Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the First Congregational Church (Washington, 1915), 92-93.

[3] A. T. DeGroot and General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches of the United States, “Records: Year Book, 1854-1960,” Quarterly Newsletter, January 1867.

[4] Charles Brandon Boynton, “The duty which the colored people owe to themselves: a sermon delivered at Metzerott Hall, Washington, D.C.” [Washington, D.C.: Printed at the Office of the Great Republic, 1867], Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ca25001511/; John H. Cook to Oliver Otis Howard, December 1, 1867, Oliver Otis Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine. John W. Alvord, also a friend of Cook’s, was a Sunday School teacher at First Congregational and fellow Oberlinite who served in the Freedmen’s Bureau as general superintendent of schools. Clift, “History of the First Congregational Church,” 93; Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College from its Foundation through the Civil War, 2 vols. (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1943) 2:913.

[5] Howard, Autobiography, 2:432-35; Everett O. Alldredge, Centennial History of First Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, D.C., 1865–1965 (Baltimore: Port City Press, 1965), 25-27; Clift, “History of the First Congregational Church,” 95-96; “Proceeding of an Ex Parte Council Held at the First Congregational Church November 1, 1868,” O. O. Howard Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington DC; “The Boynton and Howard Unpleasantness,” New Orleans Crescent Sun, November 29, 1868; “A Christian Quarrel,” BurlingtonTimes (Burlington, Vermont), December 5, 1868; “Try It,” San Francisco Examiner, February 8, 1869.

Peter Porsche

Peter Porsche is a Ph.D. Candidate at Texas Christian University.

Beyond Speeches and Leaders: The Role of Black Churches in the Reconstruction of the United States

Beyond Speeches and Leaders: The Role of Black Churches in the Reconstruction of the United States

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Black churches were at the center of remaking the United States’ post-Civil War political system into one that incorporated formerly enslaved black men into the body politic and revised the legal code to provide civil rights to these new citizens.  Black Baptist and Episcopal Churches of Virginia provide insight into how black people began to access the levers of political change. These black Christians recrafted their communities in alignment with the extant practice around who could be included in the body politic (men), while determining on what terms (some form of racial and political or civic equality) and by what means (on the basis of networks and political representation). In this way the black Baptist and Episcopal Churches played an important role in advancing biracial democracy.

Upon emancipation, the civil and political rights and responsibilities of black men and women had yet to be defined.  And while participants in the freedmen conventions relatively easily identified voting rights as a goal, black churches immediately became sites in which church members worked out the terms of internal and external political participation in ways that reinforced the larger political transformation of emancipation.[1]  The exclusion of women from the decision-making, officeholding, and visible leadership posts in church meetings and conventions was an area where the overlap in the internal politics of churches and the external politics of the state became evident.  While some women, through their roles as teachers, were able to exercise authority “without visibly disrupting male leadership,” other women were simply excluded from positions of authority altogether.[2]  This happened in the Gilfield Baptist Church when women, who in 1868 were permitted to bring men to be disciplined in cases of unwed pregnancy, were in 1870 denied the right to do so on the basis that the practice was unscriptural and damaging to the community.[3]   In an effort to establish respectability and biblical fidelity, this church adopted practices that excluded women from leadership and decision-making roles.  The practice overlapped with and was reinforced by the federal government’s policies, other social organizations, and black communities’ own practices of protecting black women from violence by keeping them at home or in school.[4]  Above all, it coincided with the seemingly inexorable push to secure voting rights for Black men.

Portrait of George Freeman Bragg
George Freeman Bragg, 1883. Courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.

While church practices reinforced gendered political outcomes, churches also fostered a collaboration across racial lines that provided social and intellectual foundations that allowed biracial coalitions to emerge.  In some sense being members of predominantly white churches like the Episcopal Church allowed black men and women to develop a framework for working in hostile territory. Reverend George Freeman Bragg, a Black Episcopal priest, suggested as much when he noted how racial independence had made the AME Church the root of independent black political action, while black members of the Episcopal Church had argued the case for equality within the church by “bearing witness to the ‘Fatherland of God and the Brotherhood of All Men.’” [5]  After being dismissed from school on the basis of the racist claim that he “was not humble enough,” Bragg joined the Readjuster movement in which he witnessed the political recognition of black humanity and proof of black political possibility.[6]He learned about making coalitions across racial lines that did not call for a denial of blackness or black rights both from the Readjuster Movement and from being in the Episcopal Church. Bragg’s life suggests that we might envision the political foundation of biracial democracy in the intersections of churches, politics and race.

Regional and state associations of black churches were also central to the emergence of a racial consciousness. As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham wrote, “Race consciousness reached its apogee with the creation of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A. in 1895.”[7]  In cultivating church associations, black Christians created networks that overlapped party politics.  The recordkeeping practices of Baptist regional and statewide associations stimulated in black voters a sense of their power as voting  blocs.  The associations kept record of their membership  as testimony to the growth of the faith.  In the 1880s, Rev. Henry Williams, statistician of a handful of Virginia’s regional associations and the Virginia Baptist State Convention, noted where the numbers of black Baptists were growing.  In 1886, he lamented, “it is sad to see so many blanks in the American Baptist yearbook” and that “a full and accurate statistic cannot be given of the colored Baptist.”[8]  Even when the records were not forthcoming, he could see that the faith was expanding on the local landscape.  The copious logs of local church names, locations, numbers of members, pastor’s names and post office addresses provided a much more complete view. Statewide conventions also helped to form broader geographies of belonging that transcended local lines and approached regional state and eventually national scope.  This larger conceptualization of community paralleled the political transformation of patronage politics in the Readjuster Party.

Black participation in biracial coalitions had deep underpinnings in black religious communities. Black Baptists and Episcopalians participated in coalitions, not out of ignorance, but out of a sense of the power of their networks.  In and through their church communities, they engaged in some of the fundamental political processes that transformed the nation after the emancipation.  Churches were political spaces where church members established power, belonging and accountability.  Black churches did more than create atoms of organizational influence or singular leaders; they intersected with and reinforced some of the political currents of the moment.  Black Baptist and Episcopal Churches fostered developments of gendered and racial political practices that pointed toward a reconstruction that not only was based on male suffrage, but also pointed toward a biracial democracy inclusive of black independence and political engagement.

[1] Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), chapter 3.

[2] Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 36.

[3] Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty: The evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[4] Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and transforming the public sphere: African American political life in the transition from slavery to freedom,” in The Black public sphere: a public culture book, ed. Jr. Baker, Houston, Black Literature and Culture (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127; Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: women and the politics of white supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Angela Davis, Reflection on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves, The Black Scholar 3 (December 1971).

[5] George F. Bragg, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones (Baltimore: Church Advocate Press, 1916).

[6] George F. Bragg, The Colored harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese (Baltomore: s.n., 1901), 18; George F. Bragg et al., “Additional Information and Correction in Reconstruction Records,” The Journal of Negro History 5, no. 2 (April 1920): 243, 242.

[7] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6; James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986), 139.

[8] “Minutes of the sixth annual session of the Bethany Baptist Association (Colored) of Virginia held September 22-24, A.D. 1886,”  (1886) 7, 8.

Nicole Turner

Nicole Myers Turner is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (UNC Press, 2020).

On Riots and Resistance: Freedpeople’s Struggle against Police Brutality during Reconstruction

On Riots and Resistance: Freedpeople’s Struggle against Police Brutality during Reconstruction

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On May 9, 1867, a festive contest took place in Richmond, Virginia between the local fire department and a visiting fire company from Wilmington, Delaware. A biracial crowd of Richmonders spent the afternoon cheering for their local firehouse and jeering the visiting group. When a white firefighter took offense to a Black Richmonder for laughing at his squadron’s defeat and threw a punch. The ensuing scuffle between the freedpeople and the fire fighters lead to an arrest of the Black man who was struck by the firefighter. Contesting the legitimacy of this arrest, a crowd emerged near Broad Street with the intent of liberating the arrested man. Armed with bricks and sticks, the crowd fought against the police through the evening, each side calling for reinforcements over the course of the evening. Outmatched and overwhelmed, the crowd of freedpeople forced the police to release the prisoner as white citizens looked on with horror. The city’s mayor ultimately called the Eleventh United States infantry to bring calm to the situation.[1]

Three days later, “another negro riot” occurred in “lower section” of Richmond. Attempting to arrest a drunken Black man for disorderly conduct, a crowd once again stood against what they saw as unjust efforts on the police. Quickly, freedpeople gathered to the scene of the arrest and, reportedly, shouted phrases like “Freedmen to the rescue!” and “this is our country!” Four policemen were badly beaten and one severely injured; eighteen Black men were arrested.  The next day, soldiers patrolled the streets with the city’s police force and squads of police were placed at all the black churches in the city. Within a week, six other riots had occurred in other cities across the region. “The South to be made into Hayti,” forewarned one northern paper.[2]

The resistance efforts on the part of Black Richmonders were just one chapter in a larger struggle between freedpeople and police. Across the postbellum South, violent encounters between freedpeople and the police occurred with a relatively high frequency. Like the widespread twentieth century journalistic euphemism “race riot,” the nineteenth century press rushed to produce bombastic accounts of the “negro riots” were perceived as an existential threat to the social order. While scholars should be careful not to reproduce the racism contained in nineteenth-century periodicals, the press’ obsession with the specter of Black criminality and confrontations with the police in the nation’s postbellum cities offers a lens into an otherwise hidden world of resistance and allows historians to explore how freedpeople questioned the authority and legitimacy of the forces who policed their communities.

In the midst of the massive uprisings around the country in response to the recent killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rashard Brooks, Tony McDade, at the hands of the police, citizens of the United States have once again been asked to reflect on the long history of anti-Black violence in this country. Indeed, with the larger carceral turn in the field of U.S. history, scholars of the African American past have produced a number of power and innovative monographs that have demonstrated the various ways that blackness was criminalized over space and time. Scholars of the postbellum United States have been especially attentive to the ways that freedpeople encountered the carceral state with the rise of the Black Codes immediately after the Civil War and, later, the system of convict-lease system, which was instrumental in both enshrining white supremacy, criminalizing Black men and women, and building the infrastructure of the modern South.[3]

Metropolitan Police attacking New Orleans residents, 1874

Less has been said, however, of the specific ways that African Americans encountered and resisted police brutality in the immediate postbellum period.[4] As the destruction of slavery shattered the antebellum racial order, white southerners invested tremendous amounts of time and energy policing Black freedom. High profile confrontations with white police forces in Memphis and New Orleans stand out in the story of Reconstruction, as do the broader continuum of extralegal white policing in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and paramilitary rifle clubs. Contesting both narrow and expansive ideas of policing, freedpeople responded to law enforcement by forming their own self-defense organizations, appealing to the Freedmen’s Bureau, appealing to nearby Union forces, and using the Republican Party to disseminate their stories in the press and the national party. Here, historians have only begun to explore the ways that Black southerners viewed policing within the broader context of postbellum freedom.

To this end, I want to suggest three areas of further study in the history race and policing in the Civil War era: the geography of legal violence, the shape of collective defense against police brutality, and the rise and fall of Black police officers in southern cities. By exploring patterns of where and how police deployed violence, how African Americans chose to contest this violence, and to what extent Black Americans understood  the institution of policing as a potential vehicle for civil rights, we might better understand how the Reconstruction era, like our current moment, reflected deep divisions over the scope and legitimacy of the police power in Black life.

With many recent works on the Civil War era exploring questions of race, space, and power, scholars postbellum policing might also benefit from embracing the tools of cultural geography. Following the lead of Elsa Barkley Brown, Gregory Downs, and Nicole Myers Turner, scholars interested in mapping the terrain of freedom could visualize where incidents of police brutality took place and how these topographies of violence changed over time.[5] From there, patterns could be determined about how policing changed with freedpeople’s migration from the countryside, proximity to sites of Union occupation, or the racialization of vice districts. Borrowing from Jim Crow era scholars, Civil War and Reconstruction historians could also potentially explore the various “theaters of resistance” that emerged in the postbellum public sphere and how freedpeople encountered police on streetcars, public parks, business districts, and other community gatherings.[6]

While a great deal of work exists on postbellum Black resistance, relatively little has been written on the actions freedpeople took to contest racist police practices. It appears clear that a pivotal moment in the events the precipitated the 1866 Memphis Massacre was when Charles Nelson, a Black Union Army veteran, recognized that one of the white police officers seeking to break up a raucous but peaceful gathering of Black soldiers had attacked and beat him just a day earlier.[7] Were Civil War veterans more likely to challenge the legitimacy of the police’s monopoly on violence? Also, how did gender shape ideas of resistance? In her account of Gertrude Burke’s armed defense of her son from the police following the 1881 washerwoman strikes in Atlanta, Tera Hunter has demonstrated that Black women often lead collective defenses efforts.[8]  Finally, scholars should pay close attention to class tensions within Black southern communities. Did religious leaders and Republican politicians chastise working-class people for using violence? When and where did the politics of respectability inform the struggle against police brutality and potentially question the legitimacy of the crowd’s vision of communal justice?

Third, scholars should pay attention to the rise and fall of Black police officers in the postbellum South. At least twelve southern cities hired black police officers during Reconstruction and the presence of a black police officer served as one of the most hypervisible transformations of the postbellum order. Voters in majority-Black areas elected African American men to positions like Justice of the Peace and Sheriff and demanded that municipal governments hire Black police officers. In New Orleans, for example, Black men served in the integrated “Metropolitans” from 1868-1877. During Redemption, a key element of white supremacy’s triumph was the removal of Black law enforcement officers. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, a white paramilitary organization demanded that Peter Crosby, a Black sheriff, be removed from office; when he refused to leave his office, they attempted to assassinate him.[9]

A symbol of racial uplift and “negro supremacy,” Black law enforcement officials came to embody an idealized—and deeply gendered—vision of postbellum Black progress. Similar to Carole Emberton’s cautionary reconsideration of martial manhood that became linked to soldiers and veterans, scholars should also think critically about the limits of integrating municipal police departments and electing county sheriffs.[10] How often did Black police officers use brutal tactics against Black people? Did Republican-controlled cities provide more accountability over integrated police forces? To what extent were Black police officers called upon to police other non-white racial groups? In what ways did freedpeople challenge the state altogether and instead prefer a vision of community defense offered through organizations like the Union League?

Other directions not explored in this essay may also serve as fruitful avenues of further inquiry. In their calls to dramatically expand the number of violent actions that could constitute a lynching, both Kidada Williams and Michael Trotti have argued that historians have underexplored, and thus, likely undercounted, the number of incidents of police brutality that resulted in death.[11] As more studies explore the life of black northerners during Reconstruction, it would be valuable to see how African Americans experienced police violence in the growing cities in the postbellum North—especially as these growing municipal police forces provided European immigrants access to a modern white identity.

As current activists and policy makers debate whether the police can be reformed, defunded, or abolished, historians of the Civil War era should begin to interrogate how Black Americans understand the relationship between emancipation and policing. A broader and more complicated idea than previously realized, Black freedom was not solely forged in the crucible of the Civil War nor respectfully achieved in dignified settings of colored men’s conventions or the pages of the Black press. In eyes of many observers, the actions in the streets was ragged, inchoate, and dangerously democratic. However, These actions in the streets of the postbellum city also reflected the ongoing struggle to define the terrain of Black freedom and offer a glimpse into how freedpeople understood the world that emerged after emancipation.

[1] “Richmond. Collision between the Negros and Police,” New York Herald, May 10 1873.

[2] “The Negro Riots. Effects of the Radical Crusade,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 16, 1867.

[3] On the criminalization of blackness during the late nineteenth century, see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010); Talithia Leflouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

[4] On recent histories of policing in the postbellum South, see Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2019); Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring, eds.,Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, edited by (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019). On the relationship between policing and Black America more broadly, see the Simon Balto, Occupied Territory, Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

[5] Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History 21 (March 1995), 296-346; Gregory P. Downs and Scott Nesbit, Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom, and the Army in Reconstruction, http://mappingoccupation.org, published March 2015, accessed June 25, 2020;  Nicole Myers Turner, Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[6] On “theaters of resistance,” see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (June 1993):75-112.

[7] Majority Report, Memphis Riots and Massacres: The Reports of the Committees of the House of Representatives made during the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress, 1865-1866 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 7.

[8] Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), 121-23.

[9] Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration(Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2003), 297-98.

[10] Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era2 (September 2012): 369-93.

[11] Kidada Williams, “Resolving the Paradox of Our Lynching Fixation: Reconsidering Racialized Violence in the American South after Slavery,” American Nineteenth Century History 6 (September 2005), 323-50; Michael Ayers Trotti, “What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South,” Journal of American History 100 (September 2013), 375-400.

Robert Bland

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

The Lost Cause in the Children’s Room: Toys and Memory

The Lost Cause in the Children’s Room: Toys and Memory

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My first conscious exposure to the American Civil War came sometime in the seventh grade when Kabel 1 showed Gettysburg on May Day. As a child, whose parents had watched many Western movies, this film created a fascination with the conflict in North America. In the following week, I tried to recreate Gettysburg battle scenes with LEGO minifigures and forgot my earlier play sessions with Playmobil Confederate and Revell Union Artillery sets stored in another box. During the 1990s, toy companies produced a significant number of Civil War era toy sets. While many of these have disappeared from the shelves, the second-hand market is buzzing with these items. Toy enthusiasts continue to perpetuate some of the outdated and even Lost Cause assumptions about the Civil War. As Trae Welborn and Patrick Lewis start to solicit essays for a book on Civil War era related video games, we might also want to think about toys and their impact on children and adults[1]. As historians, we constantly craft narratives of the past. Perhaps, we should also consider crafting in other mediums, for example, interlocking plastic bricks or plaster. Combining our narrative and artistic creations, we can reach a younger audience and work against the perpetuation of Lost Cause narratives.

By the early 1990s, children and collectors could find a wide array of Civil War-era related toys. I certainly had a few of these without understanding the meaning or even most basic narrative of the conflict in question. For children, toys are primarily about fun and play. However, these toys also become avenues for inquiry and learning about what the toy represents, be that a knight, pirate, or Civil War soldier. In those formative moments, children may encounter the many falsified narratives of the Civil War and embrace them as truth. Toymakers have used the Civil War for inspiration to make a wide variety of different toys.

In 1995, Revell, producer of plastic scale models and model kits both in the United States and Germany, produced the following figure sets: Union Infantry, Union Artillery, Confederate Infantry, Confederate Engineers. Collectors had to do some assembly but for the most part their work was limited to painting the figures.

One year earlier, Playmobil, a German toy company, released four play sets: two mounted rebel soldiers, a single rebel infantryman, a three-figure artillery piece, and finally the three-figure covered wagon of the “Virginian Mountain Boys,” transporting weapons and gold bags. These four sets remained in the lineup until the early 2000s. The sets were part of the Western series, which also included U.S. soldiers, a stereotypical movie-influenced U.S. fort, Western town sets, and even Native American figures.[2]

LEGO Soldiers and ArtilleryLEGO, a Danish company, marketed a similar but much shorter-lived and less extensive Western theme in 1996. The otherwise pacifist company’s unusual foray into the violent West included gun-wearing bandits, Native villages, a few town structures, and finally U.S. military sets.[3] The LEGO series neither included Confederates nor did its brief follow-up set promoting the Lone Ranger movie. However, considering the massive adult fan community, third party sellers are today selling Confederate soldiers and even Gatling guns, among other items.[4] These items are available directly on the producers’ websites, such as brickarms.com, brickwarriors.com, or brickmania.com, eBay, and even Amazon.com.

The adult fan community has used the wide variety and availability of toys to produce stop motion videos and displays recreating historic moments to encourage children’s fantasy, creativity, and learning.[5] With a viewership far exceeding many of the documentaries available, this is not just about toys, but also about learning history in fun and creative ways. However, many of these videos present an outdated, oversimplified, or even falsified interpretation of the Civil War. Historians should deeply care about the narratives presented in these recreations.

The Playmobil community is relatively small, but has nevertheless produced some interesting Civil War-era history videos. For example, Timpo Toys Land uploaded a six-minute battle stop motion film that clearly was influenced by Gettysburg. Using the soundtrack of John Buford’s scenes in Gettysburg, the video opens with the Playmobil western fort where U.S. forces prepare for a battle the following morning. Set on a green plain with two fence lines, the battle pitches rebel and U.S. forces against each other. The battle ends with a U.S. victory, derogatorily referring to U.S. forces as Yankees.[6]

Similarly, AciesFilms attempted a full battle of Gettysburg stop motion film. Inspired by Gettysburg, the first forty seconds feel very much like the narrated section at the start of the movie. AciesFilms never completed the entire battle, leaving viewer with only the first day’s fighting. While entertaining, the film is clearly designed to teach history as there are explanations and even a map of the battlefield for reference.[7]

The few Playmobil Confederates on YouTube does not speak to the popularity of the toy or the success of Playmobil’s Western theme but reflects in large part to the popularity among adult fan community. There are no large conventions bringing together Playmobil fans, especially not in the United States. In contrast, LEGO has a massive adult fanbase, websites devoted to the resale of LEGO pieces and sets, websites focused on MOC displays (LEGO fan jargon for My Own Creation), and officially supported LUGs (LEGO User Groups). Ironically, LEGO never produced Confederate soldiers, but there are a large number of LEGO Civil War era creations and fan films often designed to teach history.

For example, at BrickFair Alabama 2020, a father-son duo, Bob and Boston Sharp, presented an elaborate slice of the Battle of Fredericksburg in front of Marye’s Heights. Within the first minute of the interview, they mention that their inspiration came from Gods and Generals, an epic pro-Confederate Lost Cause biopic of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. In addition, regarding the sources used, the builders mention a map in a heritage book. That supposedly was their entire research.[8]

The builders incorporated a number of Lost Cause-influenced film scenes, such as a slave protected her master’s home in Fredericksburg from looting U.S. soldiers. Even more, they also explained correctly that the 69th New York constituted the Irish Brigade and incorrectly that the 24th Georgia constituted the Confederate Irish Brigade. The clash of Irish Brigades has been eloquently refuted by historians but remains alive in Lost Cause narratives.[9]

Despite the lack of official LEGO Confederates, there are a number of figures visible throughout the video that look like the CSA equivalent of the official LEGO U.S. soldiers from the Western theme, likely a homemade print or one of the purchasable custom figures. In the interview, Bob Sharp claims to have a history degree, to be a historian, history teacher, and owner of a vast library. His son also lauded Gods in General as a great depiction of the battle. Such a vast display of the Battle of Fredericksburg will create awe for a young viewer who might then hear these problematic stories from individuals who claim historical authority and accept what they saw and heard as accurate history.

Another clear example of a Lost Cause influenced LEGO display comes in an interview with Gary Brooks. Brooks had cooperated on a display of the Battle of the Wilderness for BrickFair Virginia 2014.[10] On his Flickr page, Brooks includes what looks like a cropped map from the American Battlefield Trust to outline the size and location of his Wilderness diorama.[11] Brooks explains his choice of location based on the importance of the first meeting between U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant and rebel leader Robert E. Lee. Considering the limitations of building with LEGO, Brooks acknowledges that the display is lacking in tree cover and thus not perfectly accurate. However, Brooks claims that there were fewer soldiers burning to death on the southern end of the battlefield and thus it was less terrible. While the display has many fascinating vignettes to offer the viewer, there are problems.

Brooks in the interview explains that the goal of his displays is to teach people about the Civil War. While starting off positively, he claims that one cannot understand the modern United States without understanding the Civil War. Instead of slavery or race, Brooks focuses on how the war turned the United States from “are” to “is,” and created an unified country. Worse, he points to Lee as a person for whom state identity came first and, embracing Lost Cause arguments, that Lee “did not like slavery at all.”[12] To illustrate the impact of his work, Brooks mentions a conversation about the Civil War with a child at another convention and how he communicated more in twenty minutes than public school supposedly had done. He does raise a point about giving children and even teenagers the opportunity to like and learn history by playing and building with LEGO toys.

Thankfully, Confederate toys are a rarity these days, at least when it comes to major toy companies. However, as historians, we should worry where our future students might get their first exposure to history. Imagine a young impressionable mind being told Civil War history by a seemingly knowledgeable adult at a LEGO convention in front of a massive and impressive looking Civil War-era battle scene, and that adult telling them that Lee was a benevolent slaveholder. It will leave a lasting impression.

As Civil War historians, we are constantly fighting battles about historic reality on social media, in public presentation, in print media, and of course in the books we write. However, for many of us, once students arrive in class, they have already formed opinions about the basic stories of the Civil War and it is difficult to unteach certain key tenants. Maybe toys are another way to counteract the Lost Cause.  We should consider to collaboratively build a Civil War-era LEGO display to take to conventions or make videos with which to present a counter narrative.

 

[1] Patrick A. Lewis, James Welborn, eds., Playing at War: Identity & Memory in American Civil War Era Video Games (Under Contract, Louisiana State University Press); Nick Sacco, “Interpreting Slavery Though Video Games: The Story of Freedom!” Muster (blog), The Journal of the Civil War Era, May 12, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/05/interpreting-slavery-through-video-games-the-story-of-freedom/.

[2] www.klickypedia.com An inquiry to Playmobil about the series and its discontinuation went unanswered.

[3] www.brickset.com

[4] https://www.brickwarriors.com/civil-war/

[5] http://www.bricktothepast.com/

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfLgrnbuRUw

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jLvkwUp6Wk&t=204s

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obhyXu11gDM&t=740s

[9] David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY22gmMurXY

[11] https://www.flickr.com/photos/80813941@N08/14422147835/

[12] Adam Serwer, “The Myth of the Kindly General Lee: The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed,” The Atlantic (June 4, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/.

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.

A White Man’s Empire: The United Stated Emigrant Escort Service and Settler Colonialism during the Civil War

A White Man’s Empire: The United Stated Emigrant Escort Service and Settler Colonialism during the Civil War

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It is hard to deny that immigration is one of the most contentious political issues of our time. In the years since the 2016 presidential election, the use of xenophobic and nationalist language to support restricting immigration has become increasingly common, even coming directly from the Oval Office. Critics have accused the current administration of racist immigration policies, ranging from the so-called “Muslim Ban” in 2017 to the continued incarceration of thousands of migrants along the U.S. border, the increasing restrictions on asylum status, and cuts to refugee resettlement quotas. Although the United States has not always been hostile towards immigration, its migration policies have long been xenophobic. Even the historical instances in which the U.S. government has encouraged immigration and migration reveal precedents to modern xenophobia and nationalism. While in 2020 nationalist rhetoric drives policies that limit immigration, Civil War era nationalism fueled support for migration to the American West and fulfilled a desire to ensure white settlement in areas under the control of American Indians.

During the Civil War, the United States actively encouraged the immigration and migration of white people as part of its empire-building mission in the American West. As Alison Clark Efford’s recent review essay on empire and immigration in the Journal of the Civil War Era demonstrates, historians are increasingly analyzing the Civil War era with an imperial framework.[1] This trend is reflected in recent posts on this blog contending that the Civil War was a war for settler colonialism, which “requires the removal of Indigenous people in order for settlers to permanently occupy the land.”[2] Migration policies were an important part of the settler colonial effort. The federal government’s concern about migration, even as the nation descended into civil war, is evident in the number of influential policies promoting westward migration established between 1861 and 1865. While the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railroads Act, both passed in 1862, are the most well-known examples of wartime legislation encouraging westward migration, another lesser known federal government initiative, the United States Emigrant Escort Service, played a valuable role in sustaining migration to the West as battles began to rage in the East.

Old photograph of a group of men sitting.
Captain Medorem Crawford (farthest to the left) is pictured here with his brother, LeRoy, who he employed as his assistant on the Emigrant Escort Service expeditions in 1862-4. The other men in the photograph are unidentified, but since the photo was taken circa 1864, it is possible that the other men were also involved with the Emigrant Escort Service.

An act of Congress in March 1861 established the United States Emigrant Escort Service “for the protection of emigrants on the overland routes between the Atlantic Slope and the California and Oregon and Washington frontier.”[3]Many congressmen supported the Emigrant Escort Service following the Utter-Van Ornum emigrant train massacre in September 1860, which left 29 of 44 emigrants murdered, and several captured by the American Indians who allegedly perpetrated the attack. The act afforded emigrants with a military escort providing “protection not only against hostile Indians, but against all dangers, including starvation, losses, accidents, and the like.”[4] It was passed the same day as numerous other bills designed to facilitate white settlement in the West, including bills to create the Territory of Dakota and survey its land, to organize the Territory of Nevada, and to complete geological surveys in Oregon and Washington Territory.

Medorem Crawford, an emigrant to Oregon in 1842, accepted an appointment as Captain of the Emigrant Escort Service in April of 1861. Since westward migration routes were so varied, Crawford and his soldiers would guide emigrants west from Omaha, where many believed the route became more dangerous. Crawford guided the emigrants along the California-Oregon Trail until the trails split, after which point numerous soldiers with the agency would guide smaller groups as they split up along the various trails to California, Washington, and Oregon. In 1862 Crawford reported that “no emigrants have at any time been troubled by Indians while in the vicinity of my company,” although he felt many likely would have run into trouble along the route “had it not been for the protection afforded them by the Government.”[5] The United States Emigrant Escort Service escorted over 10,000 white emigrants west in the fall of 1862 alone.[6]

As more and more emigrants traveled west under military escort, tensions with numerous Indigenous nations intensified, especially those with lands along emigrant routes. Tensions were especially high with the Northern Paiute, Bannock, and Western Shoshone bands, referred to by whites as “Snake Indians” after the Snake River that runs through their lands. White migrants repeatedly accused Snakes of perpetrating violence along emigrant roads, though numerous captains in the Emigrant Escort Service emphasized that only those who strayed too far from the main train escort met violence from Indigenous peoples or other white emigrants.

Portrait of William Pickering
William Pickering pictured as Governor of Washington Territory during the Civil War, when he was a strong advocate of the United States Emigrant Escort Service and settler colonialism in the American West.

William Pickering, Governor of Washington Territory, demanded the punishment of American Indians accused of violent confrontations with white emigrants, lamenting the “terrible human butchery of our own white American population of men, women, and children” as they attempted to travel West.[7] Pickering believed crimes against white emigrants needed to be avenged, and urged the Army to conduct retaliatory expeditions against the Snakes in 1863, led by captains from the Emigrant Escort Service, Medorem Crawford and Reuben L. Maury. Pickering also encouraged increasing federal government protection of emigrant routes until it completely deterred “any black hearted redskin or whiteskin devils in human shape from injuring or jeopardizing either the life or limb or property of any one man, woman, or child who may desire to travel across any part of the soil of the United States between the Missouri and the Columbia Rivers.”[8] As Pickering’s nationalist vision indicates, he believed that white emigrants had the right to travel and settle where they pleased, without regard to or interference from the people on whose land they were settling. The Emigrant Escort Service played a key role in this vision by providing military protection to westward migrants, and although it diverted soldiers that could have been used to fight the Confederacy, the service was a fundamental component of nationalist migration policies that promoted permanent white settlement in the American West during the Civil War. The service led expeditions again in 1863 and 1864, demonstrating how these nationalist policies continued, even in spite of the Civil War, for the sake of settler colonialism.

The United States Emigrant Escort Service operated from 1861 to at least 1865. Major General Grenville M. Dodge reported that in the summer of 1865, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, nearly 12,000 emigrants passed through Nebraska headed out West. Nonetheless, the end of hostilities in 1865 brought renewed focus on the settler colonial project in the West, and the necessity for a traveling escort system would soon be largely replaced by the scores of garrisons and forts built throughout the West. By the end of the decade, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad made an escort detail nearly obsolete.

Although the United States Emigrant Escort Service was a short-lived initiative, it had lasting effects. In late 1865 General Dodge wrote that the protection of emigrant roads during the Civil War had produced an “immense yearly emigration which is forming a mighty empire now nearly in its infancy.”[9] The Emigrant Escort Service, especially alongside other initiatives like the Homestead Act, reflects the larger objectives of the war as a war for settler colonialism, and represents the implementation of migration policies designed to create an empire for the benefit of white emigrants. Like language surrounding efforts to encourage immigration and migration westward during the Civil War era, the increased restriction of immigration under the current administration is largely discussed in nationalist and xenophobic terms. Although different times and different circumstances may have prompted different measures, United States migration policies remain influenced by nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, like that which led to the formation of the Emigrant Escort Service over 150 years ago

[1] Alison Clark Efford, “Civil War-Era Immigration and the Imperial United States,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 2 (June 2020): 233-253.

[2]Michelle Cassidy, “The Contours of Settler Colonialism in Civil War Pension Files,” Muster: The Blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, published June 28, 2019, accessed April 21, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2019/06/the-contours-of-settler-colonialism-in-civil-war-pension-files/. See also Paul Barba, “A War for Settler Colonialism,” Muster: The Blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, published March 3, 2020, accessed April 21, 2020, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2020/03/a-war-for-settler-colonialism/. For more on settler colonialism see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-93.

[3] The final Army Appropriations Bill for 1862 (H.R. No. 899) had an amendment attached which provided $50,000 for the United States Emigrant Escort Service. For the debate on the Emigrant Escort Service amendment see 36th Cong, 2nd session, Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, Also, of the Special Session of the Senate (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Printing Office, 1862), 1212-3, 1219, and 1249-51. See also Secretary of War Simon Cameron to Captain Henry E. Maynadier, April 4, 1861, in The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 50, ed. United States War Department (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), 460 (henceforth OR series: volume).

[4] Secretary of War Simon Cameron to Captain Henry E. Maynadier, April 4, 1861, OR I:50, 460.

[5] Medorem Crawford, “Report on the Emigrant Road Expedition from Omaha, Nebr. Ter., to Portland, Oreg., June 16-October 30, 1862,” OR I:50, 155.

[6] Crawford, “Report on the Emigrant Road Expedition.”

[7] William Pickering to General George Wright, October 21, 1862, OR I:50, 189.

[8] William Pickering to General Benjamin Alvord, October 18, 1862, OR I:50, 182.

[9] Major General G. M. Dodge to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph McBell, November 1, 1865, OR I:48, 343.

Stefanie Greenhill

Stefanie Greenhill is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky. She is completing a dissertation on refugees who fled from the Confederacy under duress during the Civil War, entitled, “Escaped from Dixie:” Civil War Refugees and the Creation of a Confederate Diaspora.

Labor, Democracy, Law, and International Reconstruction

Labor, Democracy, Law, and International Reconstruction

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The three essays posted here relate to a session planned for the June, 2020 meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians.  The authors’ abbreviated comments, to be expanded at the rescheduled meeting in 2021, convey tantalizing glimpses of the global scope of America’s post-war Reconstruction.

In “Free Labor, Emancipation & Reconstruction’s Global Lens,” Erik Mathisen frames the humanitarian efforts of an Egyptian-based consul in relation to the world-wide systems of coerced and dependent labor. Brooks Swett, in “A World ‘Transfixed’: The International Resonance of American Political Crises during Reconstruction and at Present,” singles out the presidential election of 1868 for special attention, observing how ballots cast by former slaves became a reference point for Britons experiencing their own “Leap in the Dark” towards their own expanded electorate.   James Shinn, in “Reconstruction at Sea: The American Campaign to Reform International Neutrality, 1865-1871,” sketches a campaign to make a bitter Anglo-American diplomatic dispute over the Alabama an opportunity to reform basic norms of great power statecraft.

We witness across these three vivid and fresh accounts a world shrunk by steam transportation and by the 1866 launching of regular trans-Atlantic telegraphy. We see engagement of Americans with cosmopolitan discourses of ascendant free labor, democracy, and codified international law, three particularly intriguing realms of global reform across the last third of the nineteenth century.

Most of all, we see figures from the Republican Party building on the nationalist – and revolutionary – vanquishing of the Confederate slaveocracy.[1]  With military victory by force of arms largely completed, Lincoln’s injunction to “act anew” and “think anew” opened opportunities to use comparatively peaceful means of sustaining and expanding international influence.  In 1864, Karl Marx had termed the Union’s “rescue of an enchained race” as “an earnest of the epoch to come.” Admittedly, the Republicans featured in these posts did not serve as a revolutionary vanguard of Marx’s “social reconstruction of the world.” Yet to offer that observation neither undermines the reality of Republicans’ ambitious global vision nor the consequential results of the party’s endeavors beyond U.S. borders.[2]

 

[1] Gregory P. Downs, The Civil War Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

[2] Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011), 48.

Robert E. Bonner

Robert Bonner is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College. He is now completing a biographical study of Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens titled Master of Lost Causes and launching a book-length account of Confederate commerce raiding, privateering, and slave trading, titled Slaveocrats At Sea: The Global Menace of a Maritime Southern Confederacy.

A World “Transfixed”: The International Resonance of American Political Crises during Reconstruction and at Present

A World “Transfixed”: The International Resonance of American Political Crises during Reconstruction and at Present

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The conditions of the global pandemic have made us keenly aware, once again, of the interconnectedness of the world we share. Recent protest movements against systemic racism have radiated from the United States to distant places. Reporting the reactions of people around the world to American events, The New York Times has described many as “transfixed by the unrest in the United States over police brutality, racism and President Trump’s response.”[1] Even before this spring, in the past few years the dynamics and content of political movements around the world have suggested intertwined experiences. Many people have attempted to explain parallels among so-called populist uprisings and centrifugal forces gripping nations geographically far removed from one another. Rapid travel and social media have certainly bound our world more closely, but do they fully account for the political convergences we have witnessed?

The era of Reconstruction, though an age of telegraphs and steam rather than Twitter and Snapchat, presents analogous puzzles for historians. As scholars have pointed out, the reunification of the United States coincided with the consolidation of other powers, including Italy, Germany, and Japan.[2] To what degree did advances in technology and communication contribute to patterns of nation-state formation in the mid- to late nineteenth century? To what extent were the developments in disparate places related? In particular, how should we understand the emancipation of four million people within the United States in relation to abolition in other societies? Historians have made forays into answering these questions. Emerging work builds on W. E. B. Du Bois’s insistence in Black Reconstruction that Americans awaken to the “worldwide implications” of Reconstruction and the resounding impact of its curtailment.[3] New scholarship also expands on earlier comparative studies. Initial results are evident in an assortment of conferences and edited volumes.[4]

As we reflect on Reconstruction and its international resonance, we might recall a specific moment – the election of 1868. In November of that year, the United States held the first national election in which African American men in the former Confederacy could vote, introducing a new and potentially powerful force in electoral politics. The election came on the heels of a momentous few years. The Republican Congress had wrested control of Reconstruction from President Andrew Johnson. The Reconstruction Acts of March 1867 had set in motion the expansion of suffrage in the South and prescribed the process for adopting new state constitutions. In the spring preceding the presidential election, an impeachment trial narrowly resulted in Johnson’s acquittal. In the South as election day approached, the Ku Klux Klan (founded in 1866) waged a campaign of terror, targeting African Americans and white Republicans.[5]

International observers, particularly within the British government, were riveted by these events and the prospect of a tumultuous election. British officials’ own domestic, imperial, and diplomatic preoccupations drove their profound interest in American politics. At the time of Radical Reconstruction, British politicians and intellectuals were in the throes of reassessing British institutions and debating the organization and representation of the colonies. At home, the Reform Act of 1867 had almost doubled the British electorate. Although hailed as the “Leap in the Dark,” this legislation retained significant restrictions on the franchise and was far more limited than the changes underway in American governance.[6]Looking to the United States as a laboratory in which to watch political experiments unfold, British officials speculated about where the expansion of American democracy might lead and how it would alter the nation’s role in the international sphere. Marveling at the rapidity and unpredictability of developments in the United States, they worried about how these changes might disrupt the British Atlantic. One prominent British cabinet member observed, “On the whole the American Revolution (for the practical change in their government amounts to nothing less) is watched with more interest than any other event of the moment.” He added, “It is hard to see how a majority of Congress, with the president in opposition, is to govern a conquered country half the size of Europe yet this they must do or fail.” British leaders’ calculations about a shifting international order drew on their interpretation of changes in the relationship between the federal government of the United States and the American electorate and public.[7]

Now, looking back on the election of 1868 and the contests of U.S. Reconstruction reminds us how protracted the struggle for equality, voting rights, and basic safety for African Americans has been. If we also consider the international interest the election inspired, we can better appreciate the stakes of that election for both voters and witnesses at the time. Awareness of the international ramifications and responses might enhance our understanding of the acute historical significance of both 1868 and 2020. A similar insight animated Du Bois’s work in 1935 and promises to sharpen our analysis of Reconstruction and its striking relevance to our own times.

[1] Rick Gladstone, “Dear America: We Watch Your Convulsions with Horror and Hope,” The New York Times, June 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/world/americas/global-protests-george-floyd.html.

[2] See Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Charles Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24, 579.

[4] These include the David Prior, ed., Reconstruction in a Globalizing World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018) and a 2018 conference on “Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reinterpreting Reconstruction in the Atlantic World,” held at the College of Charleston.

[5] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), chapters 6 and 7.

[6] Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For the basic provisions of the Reform Act of 1867, see “Second Reform Act,” Living Heritage: The Reform Acts and representative democracy, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/houseofcommons/reformacts/overview/furtherreformacts/.

[7] Brooks Swett, “Fashioning a New Democracy and Empire: Reconstruction of the American Union in the Shadow of Britain, 1865-1885,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, manuscript, chapter 3.

Brooks Swett

Brooks Swett is a doctoral student in nineteenth-century U.S. history with a focus on Anglo-American exchanges and relations at Columbia University.

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