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.
Uprisings prompted by recent police killings of Black people, like all incidents of racist violence and anti-racist protest, must be understood in the context of their present moment. People also rightly turn to history to understand how we arrived here. The Civil War Era was a critical moment in the long struggle for racial justice. As a small gesture toward making that history more visible, the JCWE editors, with support from UNC Press and Project MUSE, have made available via open access a selected set of articles from the Journal of the Civil War Era. The articles, drawn from the journal’s nearly ten years of publishing, emphasize the intertwined histories of African Americans, race, and white supremacy.
We also draw readers’ attention to our freely available online forum from 2017, The Future of Reconstruction Studies. The forum includes essays by Fitzhugh Brundage, Gary Gerstle, Thomas C. Holt, Martha S. Jones, Mark A. Noll, Adrienne Petty, Lisa Tetrault, Elliott West, and Kidada E. Williams, as well as a roundtable on public history moderated by David M. Prior.
In addition to offering these articles, which will remain open through August 2020, we aim to make the journal’s blog, Muster, a venue for reflections on our current moment and its connections to the Civil War Era.
The editors wish to amplify the many strong statements of support for activists seeking to challenge the country’s longstanding commitment to white supremacy in policing, as in many parts of U.S. life, including statements by the AHA (endorsed by the Society of Civil War Historians), the OAH, ASALH, NAISA, and LAWCHA.
On Sunday, May 31, 2020 protestors gathered at a Black Lives Matter protest around the so-called Athens Monument, a monument to the Confederate dead that has been a flashpoint in Athens, Georgia for decades. The protest was organized by city commissioner Mariah Parker, and the protest included the Athens Anti-Discrimination Movement, Athens for Everyone and other local organizations. Among the issues raised were continued police violence in the city. They pointed out that six people in Athens had been shot by police in 2019.
At around midnight that Sunday, shortly after National Guardsmen left the scene, the Athens city police used teargas to disperse the crowd, then fired rubber bullets at protesters who were standing near the canisters, allegedly to prevent them from throwing them back. Graffiti later scratched on the monument–including ACAB, short for All Cops Are Bastards–suggest that the monument was part of the problem.
What is this monument? Finished and dedicated in June of 1872, the Athens monument was one of the first monuments to the Confederate dead, but it was much more than that. Knowa Johnson of the Athens Anti Discrimination movement had asked me to attend a radio show in 2017 to discuss the monument. Doing my due diligence I read some background material about the monument. Then I read some more. Because the Athens Monument was not just a monument to the Confederate dead, it was also a monument to the Klan. It was commissioned during Congressional Reconstruction, when the South was divided into military districts. The US Congress required that African-Americans be allowed to vote in state elections, a move that former Confederates Benjamin Hill and Howell Cobb attacked.
In a series of public speeches in July of 1868 called the Bush arbor speeches, Benjamin Hill and Howell Cobb forcefully criticized the newly-written Georgia constitution which required that black people be allowed to vote. These fiery speeches used the language of blood and soil, much like those we heard in Charlottesville in 2017. Hill and Cobb argued that Georgia’s Assembly was a “band of foreigners” and that men should take up arms against black voters. More to the point, these Bush arbor speeches marked the first public appearance of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan. In Athens, Atlanta, and throughout the upcountry it led to secret orders being formed that harassed and intimidated black voters. Klansmen declared that they were the ghosts of the Confederate dead, who still wore the burial shrouds of fallen soldiers – that’s the reason for the white robes. The Klan said they were, quoting Hebrews 12:23, “the spirits of just men made perfect.” They killed Black politicians and scared away white ones. Klansmen argued that Black men and women would be so frightened to see these ghosts of the Confederacy that they would not push to either vote in elections or try to attend classes at the University of Georgia in Athens, which, according to contemporary newspaper reports, Black men and women apparently tried to do in the same year.[1]
In the same year, in 1868, Benjamin Hill, Howell Cobb, and Cobb’s sister Margaret Rutherford gathered to organize a memorial to the Confederate dead in downtown Athens. Margaret Rutherford became the front person for this effort through an organization she called the Ladies Memorial Association. The monument would use the same language as Cobb, Hill and other originators of the Klan in Georgia. One can read from the monument “these heroes, ours in the unity of blood…struggled for the rights of states.” On the other side it says “Bright angels come and guard our sleeping heroes.” Who were the angels come to guard these sleeping heroes?: The Klan, whose leaders Ben Hill and Howell Cobb were the principal supporters of the Athens monument.
Confederate Veteran Alexander S. Erwin made the connection between Klan and monument clear in a speech he gave when the monument was finished in July of 1872. He urged that his contemporaries should take the ghosts of the Confederacy seriously. “It is said by some that spirits of the dead come back to the earth” Erwin joked at the beginning of the dedication, and he was, he continued, “not prepared to deny” this. He made it clear that the monument had a political message against black voting, saying, “no defeat, no misfortune, no tyrant, no President, no Congress, no fanatical party, no mad majority…can ever dim the luster of their names.” Further he argued that the South would rise again “in spite of oppression the most tyrannical and malignant; in spite of robbery the most flagrant and atrocious…in spite of the treachery and betrayal of once trusted friends and cherished children” [a reference to the previously enslaved] “they [former slave masters] have exhibited a recuperative energy and power unparalleled in history…true to the memories of their dead heroes.”[2]
I learned all this in 2017 when Knowah Johnson asked me to talk about the history of the monument. He then asked me to tell the Athens city council about it, and I did so at the time allotted for public comment. Mostly the city council ignored me, as they did the many other citizens there who raised questions about the monument. Local newspapers covered the meeting however, and circulated some of the observations I and others made in 2017. Not much happened until students at UGA made a movie about the monument and asked me and others to describe the monument’s ugly place in the history of the city of Athens.[3]
The Athens monument, just like the Nazi monuments in Berlin that were taken down in the 1950s and the Soviet monuments in Eastern Europe taken down in the 2000s were supposedly monuments to the dead but were in fact monuments to politics, to who rules now and who must bow down before those in power. By July of 1872 white Athenians of the planter class had driven black voters away by fraud and intimidation. Reconstruction was over, the Klan was disbanded, the monument was up. And it has stayed up ever since.
By 1872, when the monument was finished, it was designed as a beacon to recognize the Confederacy but also a gathering post for Klansmen, the self-proclaimed angels and ghosts of the Confederacy, who had restored power to the planter class in Georgia. The second Klan, when it emerged in the 1920s, used this beacon as a gathering point before they went off to attack and murder black men and women. In the 1960s it was also a beacon and gathering point for attacks on black men and women who argued for voting rights and public accommodations and access to the University of Georgia campus.
The film that UGA students made did make a difference after the protests started. The city council (I have heard) watched the film shortly after the shooting event in Athens and decided to remove the monument to Oconee Cemetery, though a week after the protest it has yet to be moved.
Should the town’s monument to white supremacy remain in the city center or be moved to Oconee Cemetery where it will be safe from vandalism? Right now it stands as an insult to Athens’ real heroes, the Black and white men who fought for the Union against the rebellion to protect slavery, the Black men and women who tried to join the class of 1868 on the grounds of UGA, only to be driven away by police and dogs. The monument also insults the heroes, Black and white, men and women, who fought against the Klan as the Klan gathered under its shadow in the their first, second, and third incarnations. Perhaps now it can go away.
[1] Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1999).
Since May 25th, when we lost George Floyd, a whole lot of white folk have been apologizing and asking for forgiveness for the systemic racial injustice that has existed for at least four hundred years. I know a few white allies well. I know they sincerely grieve with us and are genuinely humble when asking forgiveness and expressing repentance. I know as best they can from their position in American society, they get it. I also know they are not representative of most white Americans through our long, tortured history. I am fairly certain they are not representative of a large segment, if not the majority, of white Americans today. Regardless of what proportion of white folk they represent, sincere apology, while important, is not sufficient.
African Americans, since well before the Civil War, have echoed the sentiments expressed by Martin Delany: “I forgive those misguided, deluded brethren with all my heart.”[1] Public forgiveness flowed from both Christianity’s influence and tactical pragmatism. But most African Americans also knew that apologies, repentance and forgiveness would never be enough to move white society to make substantive changes. It was not enough then and it will not be enough now.
A friend of mine worked twenty-five years as a state trooper. He recently retired in part because enduring twenty-five years as one of few black state troopers in Pennsylvania trying to work for change “from within” proved too much (nonetheless I still say do not hate the police because, hey, I have a police friend.) As someone who has seen a lot of wrong from all sides, he likes to remind people that a real apology connotes restitution; it implies you are going to do something to make the wrong right.
African Americans have historically tried to push white Americans beyond apology and their public statements about making what has been wrong at least a little bit better. We have not had much lasting success. Even in the rare instances when black leaders had a little more political power than their white counterparts, tangible rectification was limited or short-lived. The subverted radical potential of South Carolina’s 1868 Constitutional Convention is just one example. On the second day, white Convention president Albert Mackey’s first specific statement of policy erected the first wall on the foundation of white supremacy that was centuries deep when he declared: “I am opposed to all confiscations of property, because the confiscation of all the lands of rebel owners in the State can have no effect in promoting the welfare of the state.” He was likely familiar with Thaddeus Stevens’ March 1867 HR 29 bill calling for the confiscation and redistribution of the land of wealthier slaveholders. Although Mackey’s racism differed from President Andrew Johnson’s virulent racism in significant ways, he also paralleled Johnson in some respects. He was likely familiar with Johnson’s response to Congress, just a month before Mackey addressed the Convention, that “already the negroes are influenced by promises of confiscation and plunder.” [2] On the convention’s fourth day, Governor James Orr’s blatantly racist speech included a recommendation that the financial well-being of formerly wealthy white slaveowners be secured by the majority-black, all male delegates recusing their debt and protecting their land. Francis Cardozo and many of the black delegates—though not all—pushed for more far-reaching changes. They tried to deliver, but ultimately were thwarted, what black women and men working in the fields wanted: land as restitution for generations of their labor that made that land rich. These were the workers who “answered with a flat refusal to make any contract at all” with former slaveholders and expected the governments of South Carolina and the United States to distribute land to their families.[3]This was the best kind of revenge.
Cardozo knew in 1868 what Kiese Laymon understood in 1992 as a seventeen-year old. After the Los Angeles uprising in the wake of the acquittal of the thugs who beat Rodney King, Laymon “knew there was no way to not lose unless we took back every bit of what had been stolen from us. I wanted all the money, the safety, the education, the healthy choices, and the second chances they stole. If we were to ever get back what we were owed, I knew we had to take it all back without getting caught.”[4] They both knew people needed more in order to do more than just survive. Black power and black voices enable some of us to survive. But like Laymon goes on to say, “I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn’t survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.” Black power and black voices matter. But that wasn’t enough to do more than keep bending in 1868, 1992, and that won’t be enough in 2020.[5]
A brief segue: when I interviewed for the job I still have, I was asked how I felt about being jointly appointed in History and African American Studies (now Africana Studies). I recognized (or thought I did) the potential problems of a joint appointment; however, I said something like “I want that—because I’m strongly attracted to how African American Studies, as a field, makes very clear that they have an explicit social agenda.” This is a field committed to being useful, in tangible ways, to making a positive difference politically, economically, culturally and legally in the lives of people of African descent. We do not pretend to have some kind of scholarly, academic distance. We are committed to work thoroughly grounded in rigorous research and the highest standards of peer-review while simultaneously being personally, emotionally, intellectually and publicly committed to Black advocacy and activism. We can, of course, always do this better. But that is the noble dream for this field.
Is it for the discipline of History? Danez Smith says “history is what it is. It knows what it did.”[6] In my estimation, our discipline has yet to be explicitly, publicly, prominently anti-racist. But we can be. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Only the historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”[7]
The enemy has been and still is white supremacy. The breaking that Laymon thought inevitable may not be—black people might be able to bend for another four hundred years. If academia is genuinely committed to not living off those bent backs, we—as in everybody—need every historical journal and every history department, which have a significant number of white editors, chairs and senior scholars, to articulate clear and prominently visible social, political, economic and legal agendas to end the enemy’s protection and maintenance of whiteness within and without the academy. And this means more than issuing an apology or a statement opposed to racism. It means developing an agenda: an articulation of how this discipline, in whatever organization it’s manifested, is doing the anti-racist work to end white supremacy. I am ashamed that I have not done this yet as the (we think) first African American to chair a department in Gettysburg College’s 188-year history. But I will be pushing it this week. We need History to completely lose the pretense of that noble dream of an objective, dispassionate distance. We can be rigorous, thorough scholars who check and challenge the strengths of one another’s work while still clearly being activists in and out of the classroom. We can do this without bullying students into our own points of view. We can do this and still treat with dignity anyone who disagrees while systematically dismantling unfounded, misleading positions that simply prop up the white supremacy Mackey, Johnson, Orr and thousands of others have continued to so vociferously protect. We do this on the written page, on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, and in committee meetings and on the streets. We do this pointedly, unapologetically and right now.
[1]Frederick Douglass’s Paper, November 17 1848, 2.
[2]Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina v. 1 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 17. For Steven’s bill, see “H.R. 29 Relative to Damages Done to Loyal Men, and for other Purposes,” Congressional Globe, 40th Congress, 1st Session, 203 (March 19, 1867). For Johnson’s address, see Journal of the House of Representatives, 40th Congress, 2d Session (December 3, 1867), 19.
[3]Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina, 111-112.
[4] Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 107.
[6] Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), “summer, somewhere”, Kindle
[7] Walter Benjamin quoted in Charlotte Odilla Bohn, “Historiography and Remembrance: On Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Eingedenken” Religions 10, no. 1: 40 (January 2019) https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010040.
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.
Today we share an interview with Alaina E. Roberts, who published an article in the June 2020 issue, titled “A Different Forty Acres: Land, Kin, and Migration in the Late Nineteenth-Century West.” Alaina is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her forthcoming book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, Spring 2021), uses archival research and family history to upend the traditional narrative of Reconstruction, connecting debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. Her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Western Historical Quarterly, and Al Jazeera.
Thanks for participating in this interview, Alaina. Many of our readers have read your article in the June 2020 issue, but could you briefly summarize the focus and argument of your article?
“In “A Different Forty Acres,” I argue that nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) allows us to see that, for some people of African descent, the acquisition of land was more important than the realization of political rights. Black women and men enslaved by Chickasaw Indians had a unique quandary: they could opt to receive 40 acres of land (as a consequence of post-Civil War negotiations between the Chickasaw Nation and the U.S. government) or they could leave the Chickasaw Nation (where they had no rights as citizens) and live in the United States, where they could share in the citizenship and political rights African Americans had just won. Surprisingly (to me, anyway!), a very large number chose to stay in the Chickasaw Nation as a people without any clear civic status. I believe this is a great case study in the diversity of Black historical actors’ definitions of freedom and belonging.”
One of the things I appreciate most about this article is how you demonstrate the value of reading the Dawes Roll testimonies for recovery of black and mixed-race Chickasaw freedpeople’s voices. Can you talk a little about your process and any scholars guiding your reading practices?
“Two of the primary issues scholars who write about marginalized people face are a lack of sources written by the people they study and the fact that the majority of the archives we have were created to tell the stories of those with power, influence, and wealth. Following the lead of scholars like Tiya Miles and Marisa Fuentes, I read against the grain and used multiple sources to “fill in the blanks” when I could not locate any information on a specific person I wanted to write about. In this article (and in my forthcoming book, from which this article is derived), I take an archive (the Dawes Commission records) that was created to delegitimize and classify people of African descent and I use it to closely examine what Chickasaw freedpeople were trying to tell their listener about themselves, their families, and their communities.”
I really appreciated being introduced to Josie Jackson. What drew you to her testimony? What does her experience reveal about the gendered definition of land, space and belonging in the Chickasaw Nation? By extending the gaze beyond southern states, what does her experience reveal about the diversity of freedpeople’s experiences during Reconstruction?
“I decided not to make it the focus of this article, but much of my work revolves around the histories of my own family members. Josie is my great-great-grandmother. When I began looking into my own genealogy, hers were some of the first words I ever read from someone I descended from. It was amazing to read about her courageous nineteenth-century journey in her own words, but also to realize, as I looked through the Dawes sources, that she was one of a number of Black and mixed-race women in the Chickasaw Nation (and other Indian nations) who, as heads of their households, made choices about mobility that impacted their families socially, politically, and economically. Black western history offers a wealth of narratives like Josie’s that have much to teach us about the intersection of race, gender, labor, and migration.”
On pp. 221, you state that only 73 out of 1,523 freedpeople who testified had “temporarily left the Chickasaw Nation.” I fully understand that few individuals might have the means to participate in postwar migration. Based on their testimonies, what are some of the reasons/factors causing them to remain?
“Not to promote my book too much, but its title, “I’ve Been Here All the While,” is actually taken from the Dawes testimonies I read. Approximately 76 people used the phrase “all the while” or something similar to denote the fact that they had lived in the Chickasaw Nation their entire lives or much of their lives. Proving their residence was essential for claiming a land allotment. But perhaps more importantly for them, the space of the Chickasaw Nation represented their kinship connections and the coerced labor they and their families had endured. For these people to never venture out of the nation or, if they did, to quickly or regularly return, meant that they were committed to remaining in a place they saw as their well-deserved home, despite the violence and hardship they faced there.”
Thank you again, Alaina, for participating in this interview! Your work is a wonderful example of how Civil War era historians can—and should—consider stories that are outside the traditional geographical scope and explore the rich diversity of freedpeople’s experiences during Reconstruction.
You can read the article on Project Muse, and if you have questions for Alaina, she is happy to chat on Twitter@allthewhile1 or drop her a line in the comments below!
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.
