The CSS Alabama sank off the coast of France in June 1864. For two years, the Confederate commerce raiderhad prowled the world’s oceans, capturing and burning dozens of Union merchant vessels. Yet when the Alabama met its end, it left behind more than a devastated U.S. merchant fleet; it also left behind a complex international legal dispute: the “Alabama Claims.” In the years that followed, American jurists and policymakers would seize on the Alabama Claims case as an opportunity to “reconstruct” the laws of international neutrality. Thus, at the very same time that Republicans were building a new political and legal order at home, they were also trying to create a new political and legal order for the world. These parallel post-war projects had more in common than we might assume.
The controversy over the Alabama hinged on the ship’s origins. Since the Confederacy lacked proper shipbuilding facilities, the Alabama was constructed in Great Britain. It was also outfitted with British armaments and manned by a largely British crew. While British neutrality rules should have prevented such overt help for a foreign combatant, Confederates were able to skirt the law thanks to loopholes and lax enforcement.[1]
The British government’s negligence sparked outrage in the United States. “As news arrived of the plunder and the burning by the Alabama of one ship after another,” one observer later recalled, “there was not a soldier at the front . . . whose wrath was not kindled against the English Government.”[2] Nor did American anger die down when the Civil War ended. Spurred on by northern commercial interests, the U.S. government pressed Britain to pay tens of millions of dollars in compensation for lost ships and cargo. In response, British officials offered only minor concessions. A diplomatic stalemate ensued, and only in 1872 was the dispute finally, peacefully resolved.
For one group of legal thinkers and policymakers, the Alabama Claims dispute presented an opportunity to overhaul the laws and norms that governed how neutral states should conduct themselves in foreign wars. Charles Sumner, Francis Lieber, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, George Bemis, and other leading American jurists had long complained that existing national laws regulating neutrality were inadequate. In their view, what was needed were new international rules capable of restraining neutrals and preventing future Alabama-like schemes. Since treaty-making was the principal way in which international law was enacted in the nineteenth century, a treaty with Britain represented the most promising vehicle for introducing such rules.
To this end, American jurists proposed a spate of new, more stringent neutrality rules that they hoped would form part of any agreement with Britain. Much of their energy went toward closing the loopholes in British law that had allowed for the construction and deployment of the Alabama. But some jurists went further, arguing (for example) that neutral states should no longer be allowed to sell arms to foreign combatants, and that permanent courts of arbitration should be created for the purpose of settling neutrality disputes. Ultimately, several of these ideas were incorporated into a pivotal 1871 treaty between the United States and Britain.
Some jurists also attempted to lay down new rules about when states should declare neutrality, particularly in cases of foreign civil war. Britain had issued its proclamation of neutrality for the U.S. Civil War in May 1861, two months before large-scale fighting broke out. To American jurists, this “hasty” proclamation seemed in retrospect to have been a critical boost for the Confederacy, setting the fledgling nation on its feet and “warming [it] into life.”[3] In the future, they argued, foreign states should declare neutrality toward intra-state wars only after fighting had begun, and then only if the insurgent party met certain criteria. In this way, American jurists hoped to create a new international order less hospitable to rebels, and more hospitable to established states—an international order, in short, that supported and reaffirmed the Westphalian principle of national sovereignty.
It is in this sense that American jurists’ campaign for international neutrality reform complemented the more familiar process of Reconstruction inside U.S. borders. Political theorists describe sovereignty as having two sides or “faces”: an internal one, concerning a state’s authority over its own territory, and an external one, concerning a state’s authority to act independently on the world stage.[4] During Reconstruction, the United States consolidated its internal sovereignty by suppressing many of the “counter-sovereignties” that had previously served as rival centers of power and authority.[5] The campaign for international neutrality reform that accompanied the Alabama Claims dispute with Britain represented a parallel consolidation of external sovereignty. By placing limits on other states’ ability to interfere in U.S. domestic affairs, it shored up national sovereignty abroad, at the same time that Reconstruction was shoring up national sovereignty at home.
Ultimately, this “Reconstruction at Sea” was partial and incomplete; many of its most ambitious proposals went unrealized (at least at the time). Yet the campaign for neutrality reform reminds us that the problems that confronted post-Civil War policymakers were not merely domestic in scope. What Charles Sumner had observed in the midst of the Civil War—that “Foreign Relations have been hardly less absorbing than Domestic Relations”—remained just as true in the Reconstruction Era.[6]
[1] Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1872 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).
[2] Frank Warren Hackett, The Geneva Tribunal of Arbitration 1872. The Alabama Claims (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911), 45.
[3] George Bemis, Hasty Recognition of Belligerency and Our Right to Complain of It (Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1865), iii.
[4] Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
[5] Steven Hahn, “Slave Emancipation, Indian Peoples, and the Projects of a New American Nation-State,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (September 2013): 307-330. The term “counter-sovereignties” is from Hahn, “What Sort of World Did the Civil War Make?” in eds. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 341.
[6] Charles Sumner, Our Foreign Relations… Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, before the Citizens of New York, at the Cooper Institute, Sept. 10, 1863 (New York: Young Men’s Republican Union, 1863), 5.
When Charles Hale arrived in Cairo in October 1864, he brought the Civil War with him. The new Consul-General of the United States in Egypt, Hale had made his name as a journalist, and as a politician, having served in the Massachusetts state legislature. A Boston brahmin who came of age in the 1840s and 50s, Hale saw the world through the prism of a titanic global struggle between slavery and freedom. So when a case crossed his desk only a few months after the end of the Civil War, it is perhaps not surprising that Charles Hale saw an opportunity to carry on that struggle, even if thousands of miles from home.[1]
A Danish explorer, Alexandrine Tinné, had prevailed upon Hale in the autumn of 1865 to protect a number of African servants who had travelled with her on her explorations of the White Nile. To shield them from potential enslavement, she had paid to place them as students in the American Mission School. To add to their protection, Tinné wanted Hale to make them protégés of the American consulate—that is, foreign persons protected by the United States, short of enjoying rights as citizens. She didn’t have to work hard to convince him. Slavery, argued Hale in a letter to his superiors, was alive and well in Egypt, and given “the superb position which our country at this moment occupies in the face of the world, with reference to slavery and the negro race,” it was incumbent on the State Department to extend protection abroad to persons under threat of enslavement, just as African Americans and their allies were struggling to protect freedpeople from re-enslavement at home. To up the ante, Hale recounted how British authorities in Egypt had undertaken much the same action. The “same principles which lead Great Britain to object to forced labor on the Suez Canal,” argued Hale, “and to involuntary domestic servitude in Egypt,” ought to apply in the application of American power abroad as well. Ultimately, Hale was unsuccessful. Yet, both his attempt and his failure is instructive. All but daring the State Department to flex its muscles, Charles Hale saw Egypt as a new front in a global conflict: a conflict in which free labor was anything but ascendant.[2]
By the middle of the 1860s, free labor had never seemed more pervasive, or more fragile. In the nineteenth century, driven largely by an age of emancipation that brought about the slow, halting collapse of the transatlantic slave trade and, later, slavery itself, free labor emerged as a force in its own right. This was particularly true in the United States, where free labor served as the ideological bedrock of the Republican Party.[3] But what had seemed like the answer to solving the “slavery question” looked threadbare, even by the beginning of the Civil War. By then, emancipatory projects in the Caribbean had demolished the idea that free labor would bring about the flowering of former slave colonies, as political economists had claimed it would.[4] Formerly enslaved people threw innumerable wrenches in the works as well, demonstrating that would-be free laborers wanted more than just a wage. And while wage laborers in Northern Europe and the United States grew in number, their wages and living conditions remained poor, in spite of widespread labor organization that sought to reverse the trend.[5] Free labor may have been on the march in parts of the American South by the later stages of the Civil War, but for roughly three decades, the movement of hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from India and China to the Americas had showed at least by the 1840s, that coercion could come in many forms.[6] Though American advocates deemed free labor a grand experiment, many parts of the Atlantic World had already tried it. The results had been checkered at best.[7]
Not all U.S. consuls were like Hale, burning with conviction about role of the United States as a global leader in the march of free labor. Most were men on the make—fortune seekers on the ragged edges of a globalizing capitalist economy, with diplomatic passports in their pockets and their ears tuned to insider information on the docks. But though self-interested, American consuls faced big questions all the same: about the place of the United States in the world, the role that the republic might play in an increasingly dominant capitalist economy and, for men like Hale, the limits of the United States’ devotion to the principles of free labor.
What Charles Hale’s adventures in Egypt suggest to us is that there are some powerfully important stories to be told about the history of free labor that place Reconstruction in a broader, global frame. While he might have seen the victory of free labor over slavery in the United States as a triumph, Hale’s experience suggests just one facet of a larger story of emancipation: as a long, halting process that continued on through the Civil War, and remains a shadow cast over our own moment in the present day. Reckoning with the history of slavery and capitalism by focusing not only on the moment when these two forces came to form a seamless whole, but instead on what happened when coerced labor began to change its shape, offers opportunities to check the historical victories we all-too easily declare in broader national narratives. Systems of coercion not only withstood the age of emancipation, but became ever more difficult to disentangle, as capitalism entered into an age of consolidation, and searched an imperial globe for cheap labor, at a distance from consumers. This was the world Charles Hale looked out on.
[1] For a biography of Hale, see Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner, 1928-58), 8: 96-97.
[2] Charles Hale to William Seward, 9 September 1865 and 27 October 1865 (roll 4), Despatches from United States Consuls in Alexandria, Egypt, 1835-1873 (T45), Department of State (RG 59), National Archives, Washington DC.
[3] For the backdrop to this history, see Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the political valences of free labor in the American context, the classic remains Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[4] Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[5] David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967).
[6] On British indentured labor from India, beginning in the 1830s and 40s, see, for example, Brian Connolly, “Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838-1860,” Past & Present 238 (2018): 85-119. For Chinese indentured labor, see, for example, Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) but also Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
[7] On the question of free labor’s blindspots, one of the best works remains Amy Dru Stanley’s From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Erik Mathisen is a lecturer in U.S. History at the University of Kent. He is a historian of the United States, with broader interests in the history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World, the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and the global clash between labor and capitalism over the ‘long nineteenth century.
After the gathering of armed militia at Gettysburg National Military Park on July 4, 2020, JCWE editors asked four historians to respond, three of whom have especially intimate connections with the park, one of whom had expressed his outrage to us. Their responses are below in this special Muster post in response to the many events occurring during the Summer of 2020.
Scott Hancock, Gettysburg College, connects his own BLM demonstrations and reactions by often armed militia at the Gettysburg National Military Park with the lyrics of the Public Enemy’s 1990 title track in a post entitled “Fear of a Black Planet (Part I).”
Peter S. Carmichael, the Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, offers some personal reflections of as a witness to the events and as a Civil War era scholar with intimate connections to the site in “Gettysburg National Military Park and July 4, 2020: Personal Reflections.”
Jennifer M. Murray, Oklahoma State University, sheds light on the history of white supremacist gatherings at Gettysburg National Battlefield and contextualizes the July 4, 2020 armed militia event in “Ground Zero: The Gettysburg National Military Park, July 4, 2020.”
Mark Grimsley, The Ohio State University, reflects on the Black Lives Matter movement and its current disruption of the white privilege embedded in the American cultural landscape in his essay titled “All the Stars Aflame.”
To be surrounded by men and women in festive patriotic attire and jungle fatigues, and holding a range of rifled weaponry was not how I expected my protest to end on July 4th. For much of the day my conversations with members of the Alt Right were uninteresting and largely forgettable. I was with my colleague Scott Hancock and a few other individuals in what can best be described as a teach-in at Gettysburg National Military Park. We came with signs that stressed the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy and posters that acknowledged the role of the enslaved on the battlefield. Nothing in my nearly 35 years of doing interpretation at Civil War sites, where I have encountered zealous defenders of the Confederacy, prepared me for the crowd of right-wing extremists who descended upon Gettysburg. They were not the Lost Cause disciples of your parent’s generation.
As many have seen on You Tube, Scott had had an intense experience earlier in the morning at the Virginia monument, where the self-deputized defenders of Gettysburg were angry and aggressive. Scott handled the situation with bravery and integrity while always being respectful of the other side. It was a masterful performance and should be required viewing for all public historians.
Around mid-afternoon, Scott and I reached our designated area. Things were slow, and I ventured to the National Cemetery, the epicenter of the Alt-Right rally. What an amalgamation of people that included militia groups, extreme libertarians, anti-government folks who identified with the colonials of the American Revolution, neo Confederates, bikers, and Klansmen sans the white hoods. Noone occupied the rostrum, no one used a megaphone, and no one emerged from the crowd as a spokesperson. Chants of U.S.A and All Lives Matter erupted from time to time without provocation or purpose.
It was immediately apparent that law enforcement officials had lost control of the event. At one point a squadron of bikers raced through the gates of the National Cemetery–so much for respecting the memory of the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg. Because Pennsylvania is an open carry state, brandishing firearms in public, including semi-automatic weapons, is perfectly legal. God forbid, though, that someone carry a beer in public as that would violate the state’s sacred open-container law.
For some members of the Alt-Right, the battlefield was merely a stage to act out their gun-toting fantasies of protecting Americans from radical forces. Others came to Adams County energized by what they had seen along Richmond’s Monument Avenue, believing that Gettysburg’s monuments would be targeted next. The uniformed militia groups, from what I witnessed, saw themselves as backup for the NPS police and Homeland Security. They seemed disconnected from the “civilians” screaming all lives. The militia, usually in dark green uniforms, and black helmets, marched across the battlefield with the precision of a reenacting unit filled with middle-aged men. It was bizarre to see a Twilight Zone episode unfolding on the battlefield.
At the end of the day, I was chatting with a fellow who, in a very heartfelt way, was explaining why he found the Black Lives Matter movement so divisive. I listened, and then listened some more, and in the meantime, I got separated from the rest of the group as we all headed back to our cars. When I reached the Taneytown Road, I was accosted by a man who ordered me to “take my fucking sign and get across the fucking road.” I decided to interpret his lack of civility as an invitation to stay. Ten to fifteen of his friends encircled me, and I have no doubt that they were waiting for me to come their way the entire time. They were incensed by my poster, which read “10,000 slaves in Lee’s Army” with “#Black Lives Matter” at the bottom of the sign. To lift up the experience of African Americans was bad history in their opinion, when poor whites, especially the Irish, also got shot at Gettysburg. Why was I not telling the full story? When I tried to explain that I was carrying a poster and not a billboard, and that I couldn’t possibly address all the historical actors at Gettysburg, they just screamed obscenities at me. Two women repeatedly told me that I didn’t know anything about history and that I was a “fucking moron.” I am not such a moron, however, to have told them that I taught at Gettysburg College. Where was my knowledge lacking? They never specified. I expected a Lost Cause rant, but only one person played the loyal Confederate slave card. The folks in front of me didn’t know enough to be the intellectual heirs of Jubal Early.
Their verbal stoning of me was really over Black Lives Matter, because the movement, in their minds, was hypocritical and racist. They yelled about the media’s coverup of black people killing black people in Chicago and elsewhere. They also charged that black cops were guilty of police brutality, but that only white police officers were being blamed. And finally, they screamed at me about the funding for Black Lives Matters, insisting that donations go to Islamic extremists who will be led into race war by President Barrack Obama.
The people who surrounded me were delusional, to be sure, not especially bright or well-informed, driven by rage, apoplectically racist, politically paranoid, financially insecure, and convinced that their grievances against society are being ignored by all elites. One might wonder why I bothered to engage them in the first place? I didn’t think it was right to abandon my ground when I had every right to stand there, but I didn’t do this out of spite. As an historian, I feel an obligation to try to understand all classes of people, especially when their perspective is vastly different from my own. I wished I knew more about the economic and social status of the small mob, but from all appearances, they are not living the American Dream. I found them to be loathsome, but even so, their lives matter, and they are deserving of serious study if we are to fully understand why the working poor are drawn to reactionary ideologies. To conclude that the cause of white supremacy alone explains the Alt-Right gathering at Gettysburg, and that the disease of racism reveals itself as something handed down from one white generation to the next, is to ignore how the unique social conditions of today have produced and sanctioned a vile and brutal form of institutional classism and racism.
It is pleasant and sunny on this Ohio morning in mid-July 2020. The temperature is still in the low 70s: a good time for my 8-year old daughter Chloe and me to weed the flower beds in our backyard. “Tell me a story,” she says, as she often does.
“About what?”
“Our family.” She means our forebears. Of late we’ve been tracing our family tree on Ancestry.com.
“The people on my mom’s side of the family,” I say, “enslaved other people in South Carolina.” I would not long ago have said “owned slaves,” and it still sounds odd to my ears to express it the new, disquieting, but more accurate way. “They grew mostly cotton. What do you suppose is involved with growing cotton?”
She guesses that it involves planting, harvesting, and processing the cotton.
“It also involves weeding. A lot of it. That is what slaves mainly did: weed the rows of cotton.”
Like most of us, Chloe dislikes weeding, and the idea that people could be forced to spend their entire lives at this chore makes an impression. She asks how our ancestors thought it was okay to make people do this.
The actual answer to this is complicated but I just say, “The Bible. Slaveholders would point to Bible verses, like Leviticus 25, verse 44: ‘Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.’” “Heathen” are people who don’t believe in God. Europeans saw Africans that way, and when they enslaved them they also made them Christians, and taught them Bible verses like that to make them think that slavery was okay.
Chloe does not miss the contradiction that people who were now converted to Christianity could still be heathens. Our ancestors did not miss it, either. “They told themselves that they were civilizing Africans, that their lives as slaves in America were better than their lives in Africa. Of course, once the slaves knew about the Bible they also knew about the Exodus. When they worked in the fields they would sing songs, and one of them was . . .”—I start to sing:
“Go down, Moses
’Way down in Egypt land.
Tell ol’ Pharaoh
Let my people go.”
They were singing about oppression and freedom and there wasn’t anything their masters could do about it. “People find ways to resist,” I tell Chloe.
Chloe knows something about that. We have a “Black Lives Matter” sign in our yard and have marched together in a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
Later we take our 2012 Honda Civic to a shop to have the muffler assembly replaced. We enter the shop wearing masks. None of the three men inside is wearing one; I can read on the face of the man behind the cash register that he isn’t too happy we are. Wearing a mask, or not wearing one, in the United States in the midst of a global pandemic is a political statement.
One of the men leaves to drive our Civic onto a hydraulic lift to have a look at the muffler. I shoot the breeze with the other two. I happen to mention that Dan Snyder is changing the name of the Washington Redskins.
I might as well have picked my nose and eaten the booger. The man behind the desk grimaces in disgust. “I’m just sick of it,” he says. Everybody is offended by everything, he says—oblivious to the fact that he himself is offended that Snyder is changing the name of the Redskins. What’s next? The Atlanta Braves? The Cleveland Indians?
“The Pittsburgh Steelers,” offers the other man. “Because it offends thieves.”
I don’t challenge them because it would be pointless. You can’t change anyone’s mind without first taking time to get to know them and as for “speaking truth to power”—well, how much power have these guys really got?
Very little, I think. Like me, they possess white skins, and for centuries that has in itself conferred power. But those centuries are behind us and the curtain is at last closing upon the era of white dominance. That is what the man is really sick of.
I can understand: I was born in North Carolina in the waning years of legal segregation. One of the first things I learned was that white people were better than other people. It is a hard thing to unlearn. Part of me will never unlearn it.
The repair shop is within walking distance of our house, so Chloe and I leave the car and head home on foot. We talk some about what the man said and what he really meant.
Back in the 1960s, I tell her, a Black man named James Baldwin wrote a letter to his young nephew on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, telling him in a way that was eloquent and heart-breaking that he must love the whites who would insist he was worthless. I had to paraphrase much of what Baldwin said for Chloe but I have his words before me and can tell them to you directly.
“Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. . . . Well, the black man”—and he could just as well have said the Native American, the Hispanic, or the Asian—“has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”
Seven score and seventeen years after the roar of Union artillery and Confederate rifle fire fell silent on the Gettysburg battlegrounds, Adams County endured another invasion.
This one, on July 4, 2020, brought a Civil War-sized company of right-wing extremists, some heavily armed, onto the nation’s most hallowed ground in response to rumors that Antifa intended to burn an American flag in the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.
Although the Antifa threat proved false (again), the day’s incidents forced the Civil War community to take notice. If we are angered or dismayed at these demonstrations, we should not be surprised. Gettysburg has long been a landscape at the epicenter of debates over the war’s legacies and interpretations. The fiasco of July 4 is best understood as yet another layer in the history of a landscape that has been perpetually used, misused, defiled, and promoted.
Photographs and videos of the demonstrations quickly emerged on social media. One photograph captured a vehicle parked along Seminary Ridge displaying a Ku Klux Klan flag. If this seems shocking, we must recognize that the battlefield has long hosted KKK rallies, many paralleling the rise of the Second Klan. Likely the largest Klan gathering occurred in September 1925. Thousands poured into Gettysburg, gathered on Oak Ridge, and enjoyed two days of festivities. In the winter of 1926, local children roaming the battlefield with sleds in tow would find the town’s Klansmen “safeguarding” sledding paths on Seminary Ridge and Baltimore Street.[1]
The battlefield remained a platform for racist discourse through the 20th century. In 1963, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace visited Gettysburg and promised to stand for defense of the Constitution. A tangible manifestation of white supremacy appeared in 1967 when a cross was burned on Steven’s Knoll. As the new century dawned, Klansmen continued to rally at Gettysburg. I spent nine summers working for the NPS as a seasonal interpretive ranger and remember walking by various KKK “1st Amendment” rallies. Klansmen planned a rally at Gettysburg in the fall of 2013, only to be canceled because of the government shut down. During the battle anniversary in 2017, a similar incident occurred when armed vigilantes and Klansmen descended upon the town reacting to another supposed Antifa threat. The event passed with relatively little notice, although a man from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, one of the “militia men,” accidently shot himself in the leg.[2]
We must ask ourselves why the nation’s most infamous white supremacist group gathered on a landscape where Abraham Lincoln envisioned a “new birth of freedom” for the nation?
No man had done more to craft Gettysburg’s place in our nation’s collective consciousness than John Bachelder, the battle’s first historian. His creation of the “High Water Mark” thesis defines Gettysburg, and specifically Pickett’s Charge, as the moment when the Army of the Potomac stood against the rising tide of the powerful Confederate army. Paul Philippoteaux’s “The Battle of Gettysburg” Cyclorama opened to critical acclaim from northern viewers in Chicago in 1883, but in time the Gettysburg Cyclorama came to be interwoven with Lost Cause ideology and a pro-Virginia version of the battle. In 1897, the Confederate Veteran applauded the Cyclorama’s painting of “brave Pickett and the gray-coated heroes.” The “out-numbering enemy” repulsed the charge, but the Cyclorama captured “a tale of heroism unequaled in history.”[3] The agency acquired this painting in 1942 and made it central to the battlefield’s interpretation. Yet the “High Water Mark” narrative does more than fashion a story that honors the deeds and sacrifices of both Union and Confederate soldiers. It offers a specific moment in time when the Confederacy lost their best hope for independence. That moment in time, William Faulkner later romanticized, occurred “for every southern boy fourteen years old.”[4]
In 1913, aging Union and Confederate veterans stood at the “High Water Mark” and clasped hands across the stone wall in a staged exercise of fraternal reconciliation. Typical of the era’s reconciliationist sentiment, Virginia’s Governor William Hodges Mann extolled, “We are not here to discuss the Genesis of the War…but to talk over the events of the battle.”[5]
And so it would be for many generations.
Yet July 4, 2020, was hardly the first time that the right mobilized to protect their heritage and the sanctification of Gettysburg. Responding to a 2000 Congressional directive to include a discussion of slavery at national Civil War sites, Gettysburg’s interpretive theme changed from the long-standing “High Water Mark” focus to “A New Birth of Freedom.”[6]
Gettysburg became ground-zero for a renewed national discourse about the Civil War and its implications. Letters and emails poured into the park’s administrative office, many with refrains accusing the agency of “erasing history,” promoting a “liberal agenda,” and buckling to “historical revisionism.” The Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Heritage Committee unleashed a vigorous writing campaign to the Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt declaring that Gettysburg intended to “alter” the Civil War narrative. One resident of Bishop, Georgia, complained to his congressman that discussing slavery at Civil War sites was “not only a misrepresentation of history,” but was “irrelevant to the purpose in preserving the battlefields.” Writing on Confederate flag letterhead, a resident of Missouri declared that the Confederacy had not been established to preserve slavery, but to execute a second American Revolution. A North Carolina resident viewed a discussion of slavery as a “declaration of war,” threatening “we will respond” because “southerners are tired of these bigoted unhistorical attacks.”[7]
Such voices have long been a part of the history of the Gettysburg battlefield. On July 4, 2020, we saw the faces associated with these voices. And they came armed.
Generations of Americans have struggled for control of the Gettysburg narrative and the battlefield—and will continue to do so. Only in understanding the landscape’s complicated history can we better grapple with what happened on the nation’s most “hallowed ground” on July 4, 2020. Those demonstrations stand in direct contradiction to the very memory of the soldiers who stood in defense of the United States of America and for the notion that “all men are created equal.” We, as a nation, must recognize and admit the complexity of our past, and in particular of our nation’s most decisive epoch—the American Civil War. Anything less is a disservice to the memory of the 700,000 Americans who died in the conflict “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
[1] “Two-Day Celebration of Ku Klux Klan Officially Opens This Morning With Thousands of Members Here For Affair,” Gettysburg Times, September 19, 1925; “Klan To Safeguard 3 Coasting Hill,” Gettysburg Times, February 15, 1926.
[2] “Armed “Patriot” Accidently Shoots Self in Leg at Gettysburg Battlefield,” PennLive, July 1, 2017. The “militia man,” Benjamin Hornberger, is now running for the 9th Congressional District seat in Pennsylvania.
[3] “The Battle of Gettysburg,” Confederate Veteran, June 1897, 307. For the most comprehensive reading of the Gettysburg Cyclorama see: Sue Boardman and Kathryn Porch, The Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama: A History and Guide (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 2008).
[4] Roy Appleman to Regional Director, November 4, 1946, Folder 833, Box 46, Subject Files 1937-1957, NARA Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
[5] Governor William Hodges Mann, July 3, 1913, in Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg: Report of the Pennsylvania Commission(Harrisburg, PA: 1913), 143-146.
[6] Superintendent John Latschar, “Gettysburg: The Next 100 Years,” presented at the 4th Annual Gettysburg Seminar, March 4, 1995; For a discussion of how the 2000 directive was implemented at Gettysburg see: Jennifer M. Murray, “On A Great Battlefield”: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 156-158.
[7] Scott Williams to Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, undated; Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Heritage Committee Comment Card to Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, Folder 6, Box 5; G. Elliott Cummings, Commander, Maryland Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, to Alan Hoeweler, President, FNPG, September 28, 1995, Folder 5, Box 5 (Unprocessed Central Files, 1987-present), Gettysburg National Military Park Archives, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; A Johnson to Congressman, September 5, 2000, Folder 7, Box 50; Timothy Manning, Folder 7, Box 50 (Unprocessed Central Files, 1987-present), Gettysburg National Military Park Archives, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Jennifer M. Murray is a military historian, with a specialization in the American Civil War, in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. In addition to delivering hundreds of Civil War battlefield tours, Murray has led World War I and World War II study abroad trips to Europe. Murray’s most recent publication is On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014. Murray is also the author of The Civil War Begins, published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in 2012. She is currently working on a full-length biography of George Gordon Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War. Murray is a veteran faculty member at Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute and a coveted speaker at Civil War symposiums and roundtables. In addition, Murray worked as a seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010).
In 2017, the Confederacy pledged allegiance to their flag on the Union side of the battlefield.
In 2019, like each November, the Confederacy marched through the streets of Gettysburg.
In 2020, the Confederacy won. Again.
In 2013, for the sesquicentennial, Gettysburg National Military Park invited visitors either to stand at the Union side of the battlefield’s Highwater Mark, or to gather on West Confederate Avenue, home of the Confederate state monuments, and walk the mile across the fields where Pickett gave the Confederacy’s last Gettysburg gasp (we thought) in that battle. As I recall, the numbers of participants far surpassed GNMP officials’ expectations. About three-quarters of visitors chose the Confederate side. And walked across the battlefield with many, many Confederate battle flags. Seeing images of that in USA Today and other national publications was when I wrote my first article about the Confederacy at Gettysburg and got the first threatening anonymous emails.
In 2015, returning from a trip two weeks after Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Rev. Daniel Simmons, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Susan Jackson, Ethel Lance, and Rev. Myra Thompson were assassinated at Emanuel AME church in Charleston, I drove through the Gettysburg town square on a rainy July Fourth. There were ten or so people, one who looked to be maybe 16 years old, in the middle of the square, several with Confederate flags reflecting on the wet pavement.
Three houses adjacent to our block put out new Confederate battle flags on their front porches. David Seitz, one of my neighbors and a communications professor at Penn State Mont Alto, mentioned to me that Confederate flags and monuments are a form of discourse, and it was all one-way in Gettysburg because nobody was speaking back. So for the next week, Bike Week, anticipating that there would be another display for the Confederacy, I asked my wife and daughter-in-law to employ their creative genius (because I have very little) to make a sign that speaks back. With a nauseous, clenching stomach, I biked up to the square from my house. Sure enough, several people, decked out in period gear, were waving large Confederate flags. I took my sign and occupied one small corner of the square, accompanied at various points by my son, my daughter and her husband, and my wife.
During the biker parade, I’d say the majority expressed support for the Confederate flags. A significant minority did likewise for us—the most memorable being the group of all-black bikers who cursed out the Confederate flaggers and gave us thumbs up as they roared by. Several people talked with us; most of them disagreed, but with civility.
In 2016, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans reinvigorated March’s CSA Flag day at the Peace Light, I applied for a permit to stand there with my family and my sign. Other folks, most of whom live in Gettysburg and a few from nearby areas, heard about it. About 80 of us turned out to speak back to the almost 200 SCV supporters.
In 2017, in response to a nonsensical rumor that Antifa was coming to desecrate non-existent Confederate gravestones at Gettysburg and burn flags, armed militia and their armed sympathizers took over the battlefield. I applied for a permit, set up a chair, water and my sign, and heard the gunshot later in the afternoon when one man accidently shot himself in the leg about a hundred yards away. People were often dismissive, but not threatening. Some even debated at length; for a few months afterward, I exchanged emails with one debater.
In 2019, David Seitz and I, he with his homemade sign and me with mine, marched alongside the Confederate reenactors and their flags during the Remembrance Day parade in November. We wanted people to remember what this cruel war was all about. We got separated at some point. Some people quietly expressed agreement with me. More people cursed, told me to read a book; one shop owner stormed out of his store and yelled that I was wrong and did not know history; another organizer of the parade screamed at me from across the street to “take that sign down!” He and I, and several others, ended up having a long, polite conversation, and found a few points of agreement among many more points of disagreement.
In 2020 an armed woman said she would kill anyone she saw burning a flag. People with what appeared to be AR-15s spread out around us in flanking maneuvers. At the Virginia monument, people yelled at me and my friend Clotaire Celius, who is clearly much darker-skinned than me and my, as Caroline Randall Williams might call it, rape-colored skin, to go back to Africa, and to go get our welfare checks, and of course they employed the N-word. People told Jimmy Schambach and his father Jim, and Gavin Foster, my three white friends who came out to help, that white people like them made them sick. My friend Shawn Palmer, a black retired state trooper and more accustomed to always scanning his surroundings, observed one man at the Mississippi monument as he slowly walked up behind me and put his hand on the gun in his belt. People took pictures of our license plates. The bikers refused to drive by us, waiting until we finally pulled out, and then followed us for two and a half miles, riding nearly right onto Shawn’s bumper. A few hours later, one of them followed Shawn again. Soon after that, in the National Cemetery, about a half hour after armed men and their sympathizers forced out a white local pastor wearing a BLM shirt, Clotaire and I walked in. We were unaware of the pastor’s experience. An older white man holding an American flag lectured us about how we black people had a lot of problems and needed to fix ourselves. When I asked him if white Americans should do likewise among themselves, he—no doubt emboldened by the one hundred or so white people around the only two black men in the cemetery—said no. We walked off mid-lecture. As Clotaire then astutely observed, “Why are they so afraid of two black men? They have guns. We have phones.”
Public Enemy is still right. “All I got is genes and chromosomes” along with five friends outfitted in shorts, flip flops, water bottles, cell phones, a few 4” paper BLM flags from my ancient printer at home taped to 1/8” dowel rods, and two 28” x 22” signs in front of a forty-one foot concrete and bronze monument. With their AR-15s and assorted other guns, a few dozen people, “living in fear of my shade” plus truth and history, met us with anger and threats, unlike any other year the Confederacy has come back to Gettysburg. Fellow historians of every shade, we must respond.
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.
Over the hubbub of presidential campaigning glided the specter of disease. “A short time since there was an excitement about the election,” reflected a resident of New Orleans in November 1832, “but now we hear nothing but sickness and death.”[1] As modern-day Americans anticipate voting amid a pandemic, some have looked to history for parallels. The 1918 midterm elections offer one precedent, but another can be found in 1832, when Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Wirt vied for the presidency during the nation’s first major cholera outbreak.
As cholera spread swiftly through the United States, newspaper editors published regular updates like this one to chart the startling surge in new cases and deaths.
Cholera, which remains a dangerous killer in parts of the modern world, is a terrifying disease. Observers in 1832 regularly saw healthy people suddenly struck down by horrific symptoms, including agonizing muscle cramps and profuse, watery diarrhea. Some died within hours. Cholera’s spread through contaminated food and water was not yet understood. Many Americans doubted that it was contagious. Instead, they attributed it to such dissolute habits as alcohol abuse, gluttony, and slovenliness, and regarded the sickness as a moral scourge rather than a biological menace. And as the malady spread from northeastern cities across the continent in the summer and fall of 1832, it became entangled with presidential politics in a variety of ways.[2]
A few pundits insisted that politics had become unimportant. Cholera, opined a Massachusetts writer in late spring, “will soon deaden or swallow up all interest on topics of minor consequence,” including all the leading political issues. Tariffs, Jackson’s clash with the Second Bank of the United States, and even the presidential contest “diminish in importance, when compared with the ravages of a devastating pestilence.”[3] Newspaper editors certainly followed cholera closely, printing endless columns that seem strikingly familiar: daily updates on new cases and deaths, suggestions for home therapies (everything from ginger tea to generous doses of cold water, applied internally and externally), and warnings against complacency.[4]
Even as they crowded their columns with cholera news, however, few journalists ignored politics. Instead, the stories intermingled as cholera entered the political idiom as a shared reference point and a readily recognizable metaphor. Some partisans wielded cholera as a rhetorical weapon. The leading Jacksonian newspaper, the Washington Globe, accused the Bank of the United States—whose recharter bill Jackson had recently vetoed—for interfering in the election by financing opposition campaigners. The Bank was “showering its loans, its gold and bribes, with all the malignant devastation of the Asiatic Cholera.”[5] Such rhetoric, especially when it alluded to victims of the devastating disease, could easily become distasteful. Certainly, the Bostonian who likened the struggles of Jackson supporters to “the spasms of a cholera patient” could have crafted a different metaphor to mock his political foes.[6]
Henry Clay made his second presidential run in 1832. His reputation for card-playing and carousing notwithstanding, Clay appealed directly to evangelical Christian voters.
Cholera assumed even greater political significance when it became entangled with religion. As the disease ravaged New York City, the Dutch Reformed Synod urged civil authorities, including President Jackson, to proclaim a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer. As historian Adam Jortner has shown, Jackson’s refusal—grounded in constitutional scruples about church and state—afforded his rivals a fresh line of attack. Kentucky senator and presidential candidate Henry Clay courted pious voters by introducing his own fast day resolution in Congress, a move which helped recruit evangelicals into the anti-Jackson coalition that would later become the Whig Party.[7]
Cholera also disrupted electioneering efforts. Presidential candidates were expected not to canvass for themselves, but their armies of supporters had to navigate the disease-ridden campaign trail. After a group of Virginia Jacksonians scattered to avoid cholera’s sweep through Charlottesville, many of them sat out a local convention held to endorse Martin Van Buren as Jackson’s running mate. The sparsely attended meeting drew ridicule from critics who denied that it reflected the popular will.[8]
The election’s approach prompted fears that voting-day activities might cause a spike in cholera cases—but not always for the reasons we might assume. New Orleans papers warned voters against “crowding around the polls at the election,” but did not name a specific hazard.[9] From North Carolina came a clearer rationale: antebellum elections, famous for drinking, feasting, and carousing, featured many of the behaviors widely associated with cholera’s curse. Bacchanalia, not bacteria, was the danger, and the North Carolina editor cautioned that election day “indulgences” could be “speedily followed by the breaking out of the Cholera.”[10]
Despite these anxieties, there was little speculation about cholera’s potential impact on the election results. But after Jackson prevailed by a large margin, retrospective analysis did suggest that the disease had some effect. Indeed, even before the presidential contest, cholera-related economic disruption had already shaped local elections. The “stagnation in trade,” opined one analyst of Philadelphia’s city elections, had induced some tradesmen and shopkeepers to vote against Jacksonian candidates. “A community in a state of alarm for their [financial] support,” he noted, “readily change their political opinions,” in this case by becoming more favorable to the Bank of the United States.[11]
Temperance campaigns gained traction in the 1830s, as did crusades for diet reform, such as the one promoted by Sylvester Graham. Both flourished after the 1832 cholera epidemic, which was widely blamed on intemperate dietary and drinking habits.
When contemporaries studied cholera’s influence on the presidential election, most analysts focused on slumping voter turnout. Clay supporters in Madison County, Indiana, attributed their disappointing showing to low turnout in the county seat, where Clay had many supporters, and blamed cholera for keeping town-dwellers from the polls.[12] More dramatic was the impact in Louisiana, where cholera struck just before election day. Fears of the disease reduced voter participation in New Orleans from around 1500 in 1828 to only 919 in 1832.[13] No returns came at all from nearby St. Bernard Parish, where cholera alarm had closed the polls entirely.[14] Cholera did not change the election outcome, but its disruptive impact struck certain locales with particular force.
Jackson’s tumultuous second term, particularly his “war” on the Bank of the United States, soon overshadowed the cholera epidemic, which has received little attention from political historians. But nineteenth-century Americans could not forget about the horrid disease, even if they wanted to. Cholera returned periodically for several more decades, ravaging cities, scourging the Oregon Trail, and, in 1849, killing ex-president James K. Polk, the Jackson protégé who bore the nickname “Young Hickory.”
[1] Letter dated November 2, 1832, in Salem Gazette, reprinted in the Portsmouth (NH) Journal and Rockingham Gazette, November 24, 1832.
[2] For an overview of the epidemic, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 ([1962] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13-100.
[3] “The Cholera,” Salem (MA) Gazette, June 19, 1832.
[4] See, respectively: “The Pestilence,” (Charles Town, VA) Free Press, August 30, 1832; “Caution against Cholera,” (Charles Town, VA) Free Press, October 18, 1832; “Novel Cure for the Cholera,” (Alexandria, VA) Phenix Gazette, August 30, 1832; (Tallahassee) Floridian, November 6, 1832.
[5] “The Bank Against Jackson,” Washington Globe, October 16, 1832.
[6] “Political Prospects,” Boston Daily Advertiser, reprinted in the Portsmouth (NH) Journal and Rockingham Gazette, September 28, 1832.
[7] Adam Jortner, “Cholera, Christ, and Jackson: The Epidemic of 1832 and the Origins of Christian Politics in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 233-264.
[8] “The Charlottesville ‘Junta,’” Richmond Enquirer, October 30, 1832.
[9] “Dreadful Mortality at New Orleans,” Richmond Enquirer, November 23, 1832.
Michael E. Woods is Associate Professor of History at University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) and Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, 2014), which received the 2015 James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association. His most recent book is entitled Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (North Carolina, 2020).
On Memorial Day, three million people watched the first part of a three-episode documentary on the life of General and President Ulysses S. Grant. Three weeks later—on the much-publicized Juneteenth holiday, no less—a statue of Grant in San Francisco was vandalized and toppled. What gives?
The motivations for this act are still unknown as of this writing, but two things are clear. Despite the largely positive interpretation offered by the History Channel, this event might suggest that the debate over Grant’s legacy is far from settled. Equally important, the debate over commemorative monuments and statues is, for better or worse, moving beyond icons celebrating the Confederacy towards people and events celebrating United States history. There are no easy answers for what the nation’s commemorative landscape will look like moving forward, but re-examining Grant’s record on civil rights might provide some insights as to why his statue specifically may have been targeted.
Figure 1: Ulysses S. Grant during his presidency (1869-1877). Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia
Early speculation about the statue’s removal on Twitter and popular media revolved around Grant’s ownership of an enslaved man before the Civil War.[1] It is true that Grant acquired William Jones from his father-in-law, “Colonel” Frederick Dent, while living in St. Louis. For five years (1854-1859) Grant worked as a farmer at White Haven, an 850-acre plantation owned by his father-in-law and worked by upwards of thirty enslaved African Americans. On the one hand, defenders have claimed that Grant only owned Jones for one year. Allegedly concerned about his role in slavery, Grant proceeded to free Jones by signing a manumission paper at the St. Louis Courthouse on March 29, 1859. This manumission paper is the lone document tying Grant to the ownership of an enslaved person.[2] There is more to Grant’s relationship with slavery, however.
For one, the manumission paper Grant signed does not indicate when he acquired Jones. He could have owned Jones for five years or five days, and in any case the length of time does not diminish the fact that Grant owned human property at some point in his life. Moreover, the few existing letters from Grant’s time in St. Louis do not indicate his feelings towards slavery one way or the other. It is impossible to determine why he acquired Jones in the first place or why he chose to free him. Further complicating matters is that after Grant freed Jones in 1859, four enslaved people informally gifted from Colonel Dent to Grant’s wife Julia—Dan, Eliza, John, and Julia—continued to live with the Grants and serve their needs until the family chose to leave St. Louis for a new life in Galena, Illinois, in early 1860.[3]
Grant’s relationship with slavery while in St. Louis took other forms. When a neighbor died in 1854, Grant served as an appraiser for the family estate. This process included the appraisal of three enslaved people (Bill, Augustus, and Amanda), two of whom were later sold at the St. Louis Courthouse. Grant also hired out enslaved laborers to assist with his farming ventures. For example, recently discovered documentation indicates that one of the enslaved men Grant hired out in 1858 was George, a 21-year-old who had been the property of Frances Sublette, wife of a wealthy St. Louis fur trader.[4] Politically, Grant had never voted in an election while a member of the U.S. Army. He recalled in his Personal Memoirs, however, that while he had been “a Whig by education and a great admirer of Mr. [Henry] Clay,” he chose to vote for Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 presidential election. “The Republican Party was regarded in the South and the Border States not only as opposed to the extension of slavery, but as favoring the compulsory abolition of the institution . . . sensible persons appeared to believe that emancipation meant social equality,” Grant recalled. Seeing Buchanan as the most nationally appealing candidate who could prevent Southern secession, “I therefore voted for James Buchanan for President.” Although he had not lived long enough in Illinois to vote in the 1860 election, Grant also acknowledged that he would have voted for Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas had he been eligible to do so.[5]
My recent article for The Journal of the Civil War Era provides an in-depth review of Grant’s relationship with slavery while living in St. Louis and can be downloaded here.
Despite these connections to slavery, it is fair to ask whether Grant’s prewar experiences define the entirety of his character and legacy. Grant’s remarkable political evolution during the Civil War and Reconstruction must be recognized. While originally opposed to a war against slavery and fearing the further alienation of white Southerners, Grant came to understand that emancipation was necessary as a war measure by 1863. He understood that African Americans were anxious to provide aid and intelligence to the U.S. military. He welcomed their entrance into the ranks of the Union Army. During the Vicksburg campaign, Grant worked with Chaplain John Eaton to establish refugee camps and education for African Americans in the surrounding area. He also took a principled stand by ending prisoner-of-war exchanges with the Confederacy after it was discovered that Black soldiers were considered “fugitive slaves” by the Confederate government and sold back into slavery (or in some cases outright executed).[6]
During Reconstruction, Grant gradually transitioned to the Republican Party. He originally opposed Black male voting rights, believing that “a time of probation, in which the ex-slaves could prepare themselves for the privileges of citizenship” was necessary, but came to believe by 1868 that African Americans were the most loyal Unionists in the South and that military service had established a right to vote for Black men. When the 15th Amendment banning racial discrimination at the ballot box was ratified in March 1870, Grant declared it to be “the greatest civil change[,] and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life.” As such, he implored his fellow white Americans to “withhold no privilege of advancement to the new citizen” and to treat Black Americans with dignity and respect. Ultimately, few white men had a larger role in promoting civil and political rights during Reconstruction than Grant. Civil rights leader Frederick Douglass later recalled that Grant had been not just a military leader, but a moral leader for the country through his advocacy for Black rights. Grant overcame “popular prejudice” and successfully adjusted himself “to new conditions, and adopt[ed] the lessons taught by the events of the hour,” argued Douglass.[7]
Seen in this light, one might view the Grant statue toppling on Juneteenth as a crucial mistake in the larger effort to promote racial justice in today’s United States. Defenders of Confederate statues now have an excuse to say “I told you so” and dismiss the larger goals of the movement to end systemic racism against Black Americans.
Grant’s legacy via commemoration has been challenged in the past, however. Although not a form of outright protest, the mausoleum in New York City where Ulysses and Julia Grant rest was regularly vandalized in the mid-1900s through neglect and inaction both by the city and the National Park Service. And few readers may remember that three years ago a small movement called for the destruction of Grant’s Tomb because of General Orders No. 11, which banned Jewish residents from Grant’s military lines in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi in December 1862. Although Grant later apologized for the order, the fury in 2017 was large enough that historian Jonathan Sarna wrote a passionate op-ed against the tomb’s destruction.[8]
We must also deal with the realities of Grant’s treatment of the various Indian nations who endured the pain of violated treaties, forced removal to poorly-run reservations, assimilationist policies that destroyed their traditional ways of living, and in some cases outright massacres of Indigenous populations at the hands of the U.S. Army during his presidency. The Reconstruction era was not just about the re-admittance of former Confederate states into the Union or the promotion of Black civil rights. It was also about the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny and the removal of all Indian nations as a political threat in the West. As NPS Cultural Affairs Manager Reed Robinson described in a recent interview, “Reconstruction was a process of Deconstruction for Indian Country.” The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Enforcement Acts used to shut down the KKK, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 live in coexistence with the Camp Grant Massacre, the Modoc War, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and the Ponca Trail of Tears.[9]
Figure 2: “Robinson Crusoe Making a Man of His Friday” was a political cartoon by artist Thomas Nast that neatly summarized the assimilationist goals of Ulysses S. Grant’s Indian Policy. Cartoon Courtesy of Princeton University Library.
Grant genuinely sought a peaceful solution. He believed that Indians had been “put upon” by whites and that fraud and corruption were widespread in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Grant appointed his friend and Seneca Indian Ely S. Parker (Donehogawa) to head the BIA at the beginning of his presidency, established a Board of Indian Commissioners to oversee the BIA’s operations, and was praised by the chiefs of the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw nations for his proposed policies. But Grant and the Republican Party’s vision of mass settlement, free labor farming, and a vast railroad infrastructure in the West was predicated on the belief that this land was theirs for the taking in the first place. Any Indian nations opposed to the Grant administration’s assimilation policies—including removal to reservations, a transition to farming, Christianization, and eventual “civilization” and U.S. citizenship—faced the prospect of military conflict and potential war. A recent article defending Grant may be correct in asserting that “perhaps there was a better way than Grant’s, but nobody ever found one,” but those words probably ring hollow to the Indian nations negatively affected by Grant’s policies.[10]
Seen in this light, we must remember that civil rights are not the exclusive purview of African Americans alone, but something that has meaning to everyone. Reconstruction was decidedly not a civil rights movement for the country’s indigenous population.
The transition from Confederate monuments as targets for removal to Columbus statues and now historic figures such as Washington, Lincoln, and Grant suggests that the debate is shifting. Concerns about celebrating slavery and secession in public commemorations are now being accompanied with concerns about settler colonialism, Manifest Destiny, Indian removal, and genocide. As a friend of mine recently stated, expanding the discussion to mistreatment of Indigenous populations blurs the distinction between right and wrong. “With a colonial nation, everybody’s hands are dirty to some degree. Who sets the bar? What will be the metric?” she asked. Indeed, one could make the case that someone like John Brown—as committed to social justice as anyone in the nineteenth century—nevertheless engaged in settler colonialism by fighting to make Kansas a free state. Frederick Douglass denigrated the Indian nations of the West by arguing that while Blacks achieved the “character of a civilized man,” backwards-looking Indians were not prepared for “civilization” and viewed “your cities . . . your steamboats, and your canals and railways and electric wires . . . with aversion.”[11]
Figure 3: “Historical Geography” by John F. Smith (1888) summarized the dreams of Reconstruction: A reunited country without slavery and the fulfilment of Manifest Destiny. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Finally, a word about public monuments in general is warranted. While the seemingly indiscriminate vandalizing of monuments (which now includes the 54th Massachusetts Memorial, abolitionist Hans Heg, and even guitar legend Stevie Ray Vaughn) raises important questions about the ways Americans choose to remember their past, it might be fair to ask whether erecting new monuments is an appropriate course moving forward. President John Quincy Adams once stated that “Democracy has no monuments. It strikes no medals; it bears the head of no man upon its coin; its very essence is iconoclastic.” Monuments, in Adams’ view, were undemocratic, coercive tools of monarchy. These troublesome icons demanded unquestioned fealty and promoted a version of history as simple hero-worship.[12] Are there better ways to utilize these public spaces in the future?
In public history, practitioners regularly preach the importance of highlighting multiple historical perspectives, “sharing authority” with communities in telling diverse stories, and thinking critically about the past. Most monuments fail to achieve these lofty goals. Regardless of how one might personally view Ulysses S. Grant’s legacy, most of the monuments erected in his honor probably do a poor job of telling the full story. While it is more than fair to be concerned about the future of public monuments, discussions about who, how, and why we honor certain historical figures must continue. Local communities should be empowered to make decisions for themselves about who they choose to honor. And perhaps most importantly, these conversations must be accompanied with calls for increased funding to promote the teaching of history in public education, historical sites, and museums around the United States.
[2] The text of the manumission document can be found in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 1: 1837-1861 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 347.
[3] On Dan, Eliza, John, and Julia, see Julia Dent Grant, The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 82-83.
[4] Nicholas W. Sacco, “I Never Was An Abolitionist: Ulysses S. Grant and Slavery, 1854-1863” The Journal of the Civil War Era 9, number 3 (September 2019), 410-437.
[5] Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Volume 1 (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885), 212-216.
[6] Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822-1865 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), 162-163, 375.
[9] “Ranger Chat with Reed Robinson,” National Park Service, 22:31, May 15, 2020, accessed June 30, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=0A2D0554-0ABB-8E2B-2AFC516ED68734E2; see also Philip Weeks, “Farewell, My Nation”: American Indians in the United States in the Nineteenth Century (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson Publishing, 1990).
[10] See Mary Stockwell, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), 2018; C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Stephen Kantrowitz, “’Not Quite Constitutionalized’: The Meanings of ‘Civilization’ and the Limits of Native American Citizenship” in Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 75-105; Dan McLaughlin, “In Defense of Ulysses S. Grant,” National Review, June 23, 2020, accessed June 25, 2020. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/in-defense-of-ulysses-s-grant/?fbclid=IwAR16JuU1M81WdR4tleNBu83RZ45T2rbwRZ_hxQ1FLMsU4BifUt1IBJIToDI
[11] Douglass quoted in David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 486.
[12] Adams quoted in Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., The National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 1.
NICK SACCO is a public historian and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in History with a concentration in Public History from IUPUI (2014). In the past he has worked for the National Council on Public History, the Indiana State House, the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and as a teaching assistant in both middle and high school settings. Nick recently had a journal article about Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with slavery published in the September 2019 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He has written several other journal articles, digital essays, and book reviews for a range of publications, including the Indiana Magazine of History, The Confluence, The Civil War Monitor, Emerging Civil War, History@Work, AASLH, and Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He also blogs regularly about history at his personal website, Exploring the Past. You can contact Nick at PastExplore@gmail.com.
On June 19, 1865, not long after forcing the surrender of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith at Galveston, Texas, General Gordon Granger issued General Orders No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free.’” For the approximately 275,000 enslaved Black people living in Texas at the time, Granger’s declaration was momentous. Two long months after General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House, official word of emancipation had finally made its way to the western reaches of the Confederacy.[1] As Green Cumby recalled during an interview with a Federal Writers’ Project journalist in the late 1930s, when news of emancipation reached him, “I felt like it be Heaven here on earth.”[2]
Green Cumby, Abilene, Texas, 1937. Cumby was born into slavery in Henderson, Texas, around 1851. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
The date of June 19, or Juneteenth, quickly would be enshrined in Black celebrations of Jubilee Day, first in Texas and then across the United States. By the 1930s, tens of thousands of African Americans would assemble in mass gatherings to celebrate the holiday in Texas alone. Although the popularity of Juneteenth ebbed and flowed throughout the 1900s, by the turn of the twentieth century, Shennette Garrett-Scott writes, “people of all races, ethnicities, and nationalities in the United States and in parts of the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe celebrated Juneteenth.”[3] Amidst this present moment of transnational Black Lives Matter protest, Juneteenth has only grown in renown.
Despite the holiday’s significance in the longer struggle for Black freedom, the history of Juneteenth–archived in the Federal Writers’ Project testimonies of formerly enslaved people–is also a clear reminder of the fundamental limits of the U.S. federal government’s wartime emancipation program and White America’s commitment to anti-Blackness.[4]Occurring several weeks after Appomattox, General Orders No. 3 demonstrated the enduring power (and violence) of White enslaver society, even in the face of defeat. To some extent, Texas had become the final stronghold of Confederate influence, as thousands upon thousands of Whites “refugeed” their slave property “way over in Texas,” especially after 1862. Relocating some 50,000 or more enslaved Black people, these enslavers effectively prolonged and enhanced slavery along the western frontier of the Confederacy, distant from even the bloodshed of the Civil War’s “western theater” along the Mississippi River. “Dey say we’d never be free iffen dey could git to Texas wid us,” explained Elvira Boles.[5] In this context, there were too few Union troops for mass movement against slavery, nothing quite like the “general strike” that swept across the rest of the Confederacy. Instead, the struggle for Black freedom in Texas persisted in more personal ways, through community building, fugitivity, and other forms of resistance and survival.[6] As Martin Jackson recollected, “I spent most of my time planning and thinking of running away.”[7]
With the arrival of General Granger and his 1,800 or so Union troops at Galveston in June 1865, Black freedom was momentarily buoyed by the power of the U.S. federal government, and General Orders No. 3 put to paper this new dynamic. Yet, the limits of emancipation also were built into this very instrument. Although Granger’s message declared “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” his General Orders No. 3 simultaneously curtailed Black liberty. Not only were the newly freedpeople “advised to remain quietly at their present homes,” immobilized in the presence of their recent violent enslavers; Granger also sought to redefine the slave-enslaver relationship as now one “between employer and hired labor.” As Granger explained, “They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Freedom, therefore, was to fit the White Northern mold of “free labor.”[8]
Anderson and Minerva Edwards, Marshall, Texas, 1937. Anderson Edwards remembered that his enslaver “didn’t tell us we’s free till a whole year after we was.” Courtesy of Library of Congress.
Federal projections notwithstanding, ex-enslavers and their co-conspirators worked tirelessly to undermine emancipation, even after Union military occupation. Many forced or manipulated freedpeople into oppressive labor arrangements.[9] Others reimagined state powers to control and exploit Black bodies.[10] Still others resorted to White enslaver traditions of information suppression, violence, and intimidation, in some cases whipping freedpeople “after the war jist like [they] did ‘fore.”[11] In fact, waves of violence swept over Texas starting in the fall of 1865, as former enslavers, the Ku Klux Klan, and other White supremacists terrorized Black communities. “You could see lots of [Black bodies] hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom,” Susan Merritt remembered.[12] With institution of the convict leasing system in the years that followed, Black people in Texas faced bondage through criminalization. By the twentieth century, this state-run apparatus, which leased out criminalized Black people as farm, mining, railroad, and construction laborers, appeared to social scientist Charles S. Potts as “nothing more nor less than a form of human slavery.”[13] The 1930s accounts of formerly enslaved people–ostensibly about life under slavery–also make evident the enduring violence and oppression of a White supremacist Texas society. According to Eli Coleman, since emancipation “it been Hell.” The Black man, he continued “has advance some ways, but he’s still a servant and will be, long as Gawd’s curse still stay on the Negro race.”[14]
Juneteenth marks a watershed moment in the history of Black freedom in the United States, the day “We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves.”[15] But Juneteenth’s history also teaches us that the foundations of anti-Black slavery–violence, exploitation, fungibility, and extinguishability–hardly died with U.S. federal intervention in the summer of 1865.[16] If a federally led emancipation held the promise of a new epoch, the new order could not–or would not–disentangle itself from centuries of capturing, owning, using, and looting Black bodies. Even the dynamic of formerly enslaved people speaking to White interviewers (sometimes the relations of their former enslavers) during the heyday of Jim Crow could not obscure or erase that reality. Juneteenth thus reveals the paths of Black freedom as ongoing struggle. And as the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of a century and a half later declare, the fight lives on.
[1] For discussion of the contested process of surrender in Texas, see David Silkenat, Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 258-66.
[2] Testimony of Green Cumby, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, Typewritten Records Prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, Assembled by the Library of Congress Project Work Projects Administration for the District of Columbia Sponsored by the Library of Congress (Washington, 1941), “Texas Narratives,” Volume XVI, Part 1, 262. For all of the published narratives, see https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/.
[4] Of course, the testimonies must be read with a critical eye, as White journalists typically conducted the interviews and transcribed the testimonies. The significance of these testimonies was not lost on Wes Brady, who frankly stated: “Some white folks might want to put me back in slavery if I tells how we was used in slavery times.” Testimony of Wes Brady, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 134. Also see Sharon Ann Musher, “Contesting ‘The Way the Almighty Wants It’: Crafting Memories of Ex-Slaves in the Slave Narrative Collection,” American Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 1 (March 2001): 1-31.
[5] Testimony of Virginia Bell, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 64 (“way over in Texas”); Dale Baum, “Slaves Taken to Texas for Safekeeping during the Civil War,” in Charles D. Grear, ed., The Fate of Texas: The Civil War and the Lone Star State (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 208), 83-103; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865, 245; Testimony of Elvira Boles, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 107.
[6] Alwyn Barr, Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528-1995, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 36-37; W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935); Testimony of Jacob Branch, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 142.
[7] Testimony of Martin Jackson, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 2, 189.
[8] For White Northern attempts to impose a wage labor system onto the defeated South, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
[9] Testimony of Eli Coleman, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 239; Testimony of Clinto Lewis, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 3, 2-3; Carl Moneyhon, Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction (Texas A& M University Press, 2004), 23.
[10] Testimony of William Green, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 2, 96; Moneyhon, Texas after the Civil War, 55-61.
[11] Testimony of Anderson and Minerva Edwards, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 2, 8; Testimony of John Crawford, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 258; Testimony of Issabella Boyd, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 115; Testimony of Katie Darling, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 279-80 (“after the war”).
[12] Testimony of William Hamilton, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 2, 106-7; Testimony of Susan Merritt, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 3, 78; Moneyhon, Texas after the Civil War, 34-36, 80-84; Crouch, 80-81, 95-110.
[13] Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 92; David M. Oshinsky, “Convict Labor in the Post-Civil War South: Involuntary Servitude After the Thirteenth Amendment,” in Alexander Tsesis, ed., The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 104; Charles S. Potts, “The Convict Labor System of Texas,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol 21 (May 1903): 88.
[14] Testimony of Eli Coleman, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 1, 239.
[15] Testimony of Felix Haywood, FWP, “Texas Narratives,” Part 2, 132.
[16] See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19-25.
Paul Barba is an assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2016. His first book project, tentatively titled Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands, tracks and analyzes the multiple forms of slaving violence that emerged, dominated, and intersected throughout Texas from the early eighteenth century into the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is currently under contract with the University of Nebraska Press. Prior to Bucknell, Dr. Barba served as a managing editor at the Journal of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos.
Scott Hancock, Gettysburg College, connects his own BLM demonstrations and reactions by often armed militia at the Gettysburg National Military Park with the lyrics of the Public Enemy’s 1990 title track in a post entitled “
As the new century dawned, Klansmen continued to rally at Gettysburg. I spent nine summers working for the NPS as a seasonal interpretive ranger and remember walking by various KKK “1st Amendment” rallies. Klansmen planned a rally at Gettysburg in the fall of 2013, only to be canceled because of the government shut down. During the battle anniversary in 2017, a similar incident occurred when armed vigilantes and Klansmen descended upon the town reacting to another supposed Antifa threat. The event passed with relatively little notice, although a man from Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, one of the “militia men,” accidently shot himself in the leg.
