June has been a period of transitions. With the postponement of SCWH conference until next year, Muster, too, has undergone a major editorial transition—the first of its kind—the departure of Kristen Epps. As I step into this role, I am forever grateful for her guidance throughout the process. In today’s Muster post, Kate Masur and Greg Downs, current JCWE editors offer some reflections on her foundational role in developing this digital space.
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Kristen Epps became the journal’s founding digital editor in 2016. Understanding the importance of an online presence for the journal and the benefit of a platform that is nimbler and more accessible than the journal itself, Kristen worked with editor Judith Giesberg to bring Muster into existence. During her time as digital editor, Kristen made Muster a vibrant place for commentary about the Civil War Era and news from the journal. Drawing on the talents of our field correspondents, she has published articles that represent the breath of coverage that the JCWE journal aspires to. She has also been a stalwart advocate for the print journal, taking to social media to publicize new issues, interview authors, and solicit articles on teaching. We have especially appreciated her strong advocacy for women and people of color in this field. She has sought out authors who might not have seen this journal as a place to publish — and topics that have been traditionally but unfortunately marginal to the “Civil War Era” — and featured them on the site. We are so grateful for Kristen’s work and for her leadership, and we wish her well in her new position at Kansas State, as history faculty and editor of the journal Kansas History. We’re also delighted that Kristen leaves Muster in the skillful and energetic hands of Hilary Green, whom we welcomed last month as the new digital editor.
Caroline E. Janney has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2019. The article, “Free to Go Where We Liked: The Army of Northern Virginia After Appomattox,” appeared in the March issue.
Janney’s essay examines the period immediately following the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. It shows that the actions of these soldiers while being disbanded presaged the violent opposition to the social and political changes wrought by emancipation in the postwar South.
In the words of the prize committee, Janney’s “systematic interpretation of the disbanding of the Army of Northern Virginia reveals at once the dynamism of military history to explain broader social and cultural issues.” Furthermore, “her measured nuance helps the reader to understand that ‘surrender’ at Appomattox and general emancipation were not just a ‘finish’ or a ‘start,’ but rather both a panoply of contested beginnings, endings, and turning points in regional, national and racial identities. To that end, Janney encourages readers to center contingency and context when investigating the past.”
Janney is the John L. Nau III Professor of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (UNC Press, 2008) and Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (UNC Press, 2013). She co-edited with Gary W. Gallagher Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign (UNC Press, 2015) and edited Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (UNC Press, 2018). She serves as a co-editor of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America Series and is the past president of the Society of Civil War Historians.
Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era.
This essay is offered as an effort in presenting my thoughts about navigating the current pandemic and what it means for me as a historian and as SCWH President. Although these are largely personal reflections, I hope that they find some resonance with other scholars and students of Civil War history.
Like so many of you, I am doing my best to work through the uncertainties and the anxieties of this moment. I have been on sabbatical this spring so I have not had to face the challenges of Zoom teaching. My heart goes out to all of you who have. Instead, I have been facing the trials of focusing on a research project at a time when my mind often feels clogged by the layers of crises surrounding us. It is definitely hard to take yourself out of our current, tumultuous, moment and get yourself settled into the past. I am sorry, too, that I have had to postpone trips to the archives. Lately, I have been feeling like I am trying to forge ahead with a project that is filled with blind spots, far more than the usual blind spots we historians usually encounter. I have renewed appreciation for the archivists out there and cannot wait to see you again! I feel fortunate, of course, to have a job, with tenure, but I am very aware of the toll this crisis has taken on many colleagues and many graduate students and former graduate students, including some of my own, who are facing lost jobs, diminished funding opportunities, and a damaged job market.
As a historian, I have been thinking a lot, too, about the historical perspective on all of this. I have been reading books and articles about past public health crises (shout out here to my old grad school buddy, Nancy Bristow, and her book American Pandemic about the so-called “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-1919). I have been fascinated by the many social, political, and emotional similarities between that moment and ours. It is also hard not to be struck by the way crises like this–and the Civil War surely counts as another one–compound and exacerbate the social and economic inequalities of our society, making basic survival for some an overwhelming ordeal. It has made me think about the many stories we probably still do not know about how various vulnerable populations in the mid-nineteenth century faced added trauma during the Civil War.
In my attempt to practice history in the era of the coronavirus, I also, perhaps like some of you, started keeping a journal. I try to write in it regularly, not with particularly deep insights, but mostly as a way to observe the many ways our world has shifted: the different ways we relate to people; the new patterns that emerge; the way our thinking starts to change about everything from wearing face masks to what we expect from our political leaders. I am particularly interested in the way we manage, often seamlessly, to shift into new patterns of behavior and new ways of thinking. As I do all this, I cannot help but think about the many diaries and journals I’ve read for my own research. I try to pay attention to details, thinking about what a future historian might want to know. I also try to keep my penmanship neat.
From my SCWH perspective, I am, of course, deeply saddened about our cancelled conference. I just took another look at the program we had planned, and it made me sad all over. One of our goals for this conference had been to convey the wide and extremely rich variety of topics scholars are pursuing about the Civil War era. This included, for example, the new directions being taken in environmental history; the material culture of the Civil War; the international dimensions of the Civil War; and the Civil War West. Additionally, our program featured a number of panels focused on topics that have always been fundamental to Civil War scholarship–like military units and regimental histories, the archival records so many scholars have relied on, and medical practices–but how we’re approaching those topics with new questions in mind.
I was also particularly excited about the two special plenaries we had planned. The Friday plenary, on women and gender in the Civil War era, was planned as a gathering of several scholars who have been taking this field in new and exciting directions: Judy Giesberg, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Stephanie McCurry, and Fay Yarbrough. The panel presented a great opportunity for taking stock of a field–one that has shaped my own career for the last thirty years–and to see the remarkable ways it has developed, perhaps most notably from a field that often, by default, thought of Civil War women as white to a field that more fully acknowledges how much women’s antebellum and Civil War experience was shaped by race. I was also very much looking forward to the opening plenary on “The Civil War in Poetry and History” with former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. Having recently taught Trethewey’s extremely moving Civil War poems in my own class, I saw how poetry could both acknowledge and illuminate certain silences we encounter in the history books, especially regarding our inability to know the inner lives of so many enslaved and freed people during this period. Trethewey, I thought, seemed to be taking up something Ta-Nehisi Coates had written about so effectively in his essay, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War.” She was using her poems to write the black experience into Civil War history and even, like Coates, reclaiming the idea of what it might mean to become a “Civil War buff.” Her poems also made me feel anew the indignities associated with Confederate memorialization. In her attention to Civil War memory, she spotlights the insidious nature of the “Lost Cause,” the way it has seeped into so much of our culture and how it has built up something holy and glorious while covering over silences about those without the resources to get their stories into the history books. I urge you to look at some of her poems, especially those in her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, Native Guard, a book that combines Trethewey’s personal reflections about growing up in a biracial family in Mississippi with historical reflections on the black soldiers from Mississippi who served the Union. You can read one of the poems from that collection here.
Finally, in planning for this conference, our program committee was particularly attentive to highlighting the work of graduate students in our field. Several panels showcased their research. We also had plans for a first-ever “lightning round” comprised of ten short presentations of several projects: it seemed like a valuable way to get grad students to hone their “elevator pitch” and to generate good discussion between faculty and PhD students. I know this current crisis has been particularly taxing on our students so I hope all of us can find ways, going forward, to support their work.
All of this makes me hopeful that we will, indeed, be able to recreate this conference, or at least a significant portion of it, in June 2021. The program committee did an amazing job and I hope we will be able to honor their efforts a year from now. Keep your eye out, too, for future posts on Muster: the editors will be working with scholars scheduled to present at the conference to provide an outlet where they can share their work.
I look forward to seeing you in June 2021, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Nina Silber is the Jon Westling Professor of History at Boston University and recently served as the President of the Society of Civil War Historians. Her most recent book is This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (Chapel Hill, 2019). She’s currently at work on a history/memoir about her father, a central figure in the mid-twentieth century folk revival.
3: What are the key similarities and differences between the Esquimaux Dog (C. familiaris, Desm.) and the Hare-Indian Dog (C. familiaris lagopus)?
These questions are drawn from references made in one of nineteenth-century America’s most infamous books: Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854). Regularly cited as a crucial contribution to American proslavery ideology, Types of Mankind promoted the doctrine of polygenism, which held that people of different races are descended from separately created original pairs, and thus belong to different species.[1] Although rightly remembered as an insidious blend of pseudoscience and proslavery propaganda, Types of Mankind is dense and often dull. It sprawls across some seven hundred pages. It brims with specialized scientific and archaeological jargon. It cost five dollars at a time when laborers might earn one dollar per day. Perhaps Nott and Gliddon’s book was more important as an intellectual milestone than as a direct influencer of popular culture and mass politics. If so, we have much to learn about precisely how the era’s increasingly rigid racist doctrines spread from academic halls and affluent parlors into humbler homes.
Figure 107 from Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches… (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), 171. Much of the book’s argument rested on selective analysis of Egyptological sources, including images of human figures rendered in ancient carvings and paintings such as these.
To trace this process, we need to shift our focus away from the inventors of these perfidious doctrines and toward the popular writers and publishers who promulgated them. Among the latter, arguably none was more widely influential than John H. Van Evrie. Born in Canada, educated as a physician, and active for a quarter century in America’s publishing capital, New York City, Van Evrie turned scientific racism and proslavery politics into a highly marketable product that he peddled to white Americans of all regions and classes. As the author of two books and a pile of pamphlets, the editor of a widely read newspaper, and the publisher of dozens of racist treatises, Van Evrie repackaged scientific racism for popular consumption.
Title page of J.H. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro “Slavery;” The First, an Inferior Race—The Latter, Its Normal Condition. Introductory Number: Causes of Popular Delusion on the Subject (New York: Day Book Office, 1853). Van Evrie’s innovations lay not in his ideas, but in how he marketed and distributed them, including by packaging them in cheap pamphlets such as this, his first.
Van Evrie’s first publication, a pamphlet entitled Negroes and Negro “Slavery,” reveals his approach to the work of the propagandist. Published in 1853 and reprinted widely for the next several years, Negroes and Negro “Slavery” offered few new ideas to the country’s escalating debate over slavery. Its two-part thesis is simple: first, polygenism proved that nature intended whites to be masters and African Americans to be slaves. “The negro,” insisted Van Evrie, was “a DIFFERENT AND INFERIOR SPECIES OF MAN,” created by God for servitude. Second, he warned that abolitionism was a British plot concocted to divide and destroy the United States.[2]
By 1853, these ideas were old hat. Van Evrie’s arguments about polygenism copied the work of previous authors like Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott, who had been pontificating about separate creations for more than a decade. His Anglophobic anti-abolitionism echoed politicians like John C. Calhoun. His references to contented slaves and beneficent masters rehashed standard tropes of proslavery literature. Yet Van Evrie’s significance was not as an original thinker, but as a marketer and popularizer. Like the rest of his work, his first pamphlet mattered less for what he said, than for how he said it—and to whom.
Van Evrie used several strategies to amplify his hateful message. Note, for instance, how he burnished his credentials. The “M.D.” placed conspicuously after his name asserted intellectual authority. This was reinforced by the endorsements printed on the pamphlet’s inside covers: enthusiastic blurbs from slave-state politicians provided a southern stamp of approval, while one from a New York senator added regional balance and another from proslavery physician Samuel Cartwright affirmed Van Evrie’s scientific rigor. Together, these marketing techniques promised that Van Evrie would provide a scholarly and objective appraisal of a controversial topic.[3]
Van Evrie also aimed his words at an audience far broader than the comparatively affluent customers who provided much of the market for books. He carefully limited his page count, condensing his message into a widely marketable pamphlet. Heeding the advice of friends who cautioned against immediately publishing a book-length polygenist text, Van Evrie issued his work in monthly installments, a strategy ironically reminiscent of the recent serial publication of the antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thus, he offered Negroes and Negro “Slavery” as a concise, accessible introduction to a larger projected work that was eventually completed in 1861. He also used simple, jargon-free prose. Although not written in the crude, demagogic style of his later newspaper editorials, the pamphlet did not require the scientific vocabulary and prior knowledge demanded by Nott and Gliddon’s work. Finally, Van Evrie offered the pamphlet at the rock-bottom price of twenty-five cents—and in some cases apparently gave it away. According to one account, Van Evrie’s supporters raised a subscription fund to finance the pamphlet’s free distribution.[4] Van Evrie discounted his publications for the rest of his career, marketing his newspaper as the “World’s Cheapest” and selling his polygenist book for just one dollar.[5]
W. G. Jackman, Portrait of John H. Van Evrie, c. 1860-1869. Emblazoned with Van Evrie’s signature and the slogan “The White Republic against the World,” this lithograph was distributed as part of a marketing campaign for Van Evrie’s numerous publications. William G. Jackman was a prolific engraver who produced lithographic portraits of many prominent Civil War-era figures, including Nathan B. Forrest, Fernando Wood, Stephen A. Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Amid the mountains of cheap texts that circulated in the mid-1850s, Van Evrie’s managed to stand out, attracting the attention—and provoking the controversy—on which his career would thrive. Sympathizers quickly identified him as a rising star. Samuel Morse, famous for his pioneering work in telegraphy but also a strident proslavery ideologue, exulted that Van Evrie’s arguments were “founded on God’s truth” and ordered copies of the pamphlet directly from the publisher.[6] Critics, meanwhile, provided additional publicity for Van Evrie’s ideas, even as they debunked them. Frederick Douglass devoted several columns to refuting Van Evrie’s “shallow” reasoning and mocking his “pompous” style.[7] Yet he and other abolitionists worried that Van Evrie was winning converts, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places. One correspondent reported that even in the abolitionist hotbed of western New York, Van Evrie’s pamphlet had “circulated considerably” and persuaded some readers to “believe its sophistries.”[8]Negroes and Negro “Slavery” laid the foundation for a career that lasted until 1879.
Historians of proslavery and racist ideologies have paid comparatively little attention to Van Evrie because of his lack of originality. But racism has a political history, a communications history, and a business history as well as an intellectual history, and in these realms, Van Evrie’s labors are instructive: he took the nefarious doctrine of polygenism and sold it to a wide audience, exposing thousands of lay readers to popularized versions of sometimes rather arcane theories. His career is a reminder that new communications technologies are only as enlightening as the content they carry and the people who use them.
Quiz Answers:
1: Formed by parts of the zygomatic bone (commonly called the cheekbone) and the temporal bone, the zygomatic arch connects the cheekbone to the upper jawbone and is an important base for muscles used in chewing.
2: Eventually called Akhenaten, Amunoph (or Amenhotep, in the more common modern spelling) IV was an Egyptian pharaoh, the tenth ruler of the eighteenth dynasty. He is best known for introducing Atenism, the worship of Aten, the disc of the sun.
3: According to the naturalists cited in Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (p. 383), the Esquimaux Dog closely resembles the gray wolf in both color and size, while the Hare-Indian dog more closely resembles the prairie wolf, or coyote. The two animals are closely related but the coyote is smaller, has taller and more pointed ears, and has a narrower snout.
[1] Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches… (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854).
[2] J.H. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro “Slavery;” The First, an Inferior Race—The Latter, Its Normal Condition. Introductory Number: Causes of Popular Delusion on the Subject (New York: Day Book Office, 1853), 2.
[3] Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro “Slavery,” title page and inside front and back covers.
[4] “Pillicoddle,” “Correspondence of the Boston Post,” Boston Post, December 20, 1853.
[5] See the large advertisement for the book in American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette 7, no. 5 (February 2, 1861), 54.
[6] Samuel F.B. Morse to N.R. Stimson, October 6, 1855, in Rushmore G. Horton Papers, New York Public Library.
[7] “Is the Negro a White Man?—Dr. Van Evrie and the New York Day-Book,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 14, 1855.
[8] “W,” “Notes by the Way,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 28, 1854.
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).
Themes of movement and mobility unite the essays in this issue. We begin with Amy Murrell Taylor’s 2019 Watson Brown Award acceptance speech for her book Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. The speech encapsulates a central contention of Taylor’s book—that movement was critical to the lived experience of emancipation. Historians are already familiar with the broad strokes of this story: refugees from slavery escaped plantations and followed Union armies or sought shelter behind Union lines. In the process, they drove American generals and politicians to enact emancipation. Taylor uncovers a lesser-known, bottom-up politics of freedom that emerged as mobile refugees built and rebuilt communities with the ebb and flow of war, traveled in search of new economic opportunities or spiritual fulfillment, and struggled for access to resources. Following novelist Tayari Jones’s advice to “write about people and their problems, not problems and their people,” Taylor emphasizes the importance of listening to individual refugees’ voices to understand how they built the foundations of freedom in their day-to-day struggles for survival.
Marco Basile’s essay continues on the theme of mobility by examining how the movement of enslaved Africans and American bureaucrats presented opportunities for US empire-building during the 1860s. Abraham Lincoln sent two commissioners to Sierra Leone to sit on a “mixed court” of British and American officials charged with suppressing the international slave trade. Although from an antislavery viewpoint the court was a failure—Lincoln’s commissioners never prosecuted a single slave trader— the movement of federal bureaucrats to West Africa laid the groundwork for American imperial interests in the region. Basile’s research reveals an ambitious vision for American expansionism in Africa inspired by the conquest of North American indigenous people. The commissioners wrote home to ask for treaty-making power that could extend American “protection” over indigenous communities in Sierra Leone, as well as to request shipments of agricultural tools that could be distributed to native Africans with an eye toward “civilizing” them. The history of American intervention in Sierra Leone pushes the chronology of antislavery imperialism into the 1860s and moves the story of American empire beyond the terrestrial boundaries of North America.
Jonathan Jones’s essay deals with the movement of ideas, specifically the circulation of popular discourses and medical knowledge about opiate addiction. Veterans across the North and the South developed opiate dependency as they struggled to cope with pain from wartime injuries or chronic illness. Nineteenth-century popular discourse about addiction portrayed opium eating as a character flaw stemming from an individual man’s lack of masculine fortitude to bear pain or from a moral weakness that left him “enslaved” to the vice. Meanwhile, trained physicians repeated these assertions and circulated scholarship that characterized severe opiate addiction as a type of insanity. Civil War veterans suffered not only the debilitating effects of opium dependence but also social ostracism, exclusion from soldiers’ pensions, and incarceration in asylums.
Movement is central to Alaina Roberts’s new take on two well-known postwar stories, the Native American struggle for territorial sovereignty and African American freedpeople’s quest for citizenship rights. Allotment, the process of breaking up indigenous communal lands into individually owned parcels, posed a massive challenge to the self-governance of slaveholding Native nations in Indian Territory. At the same time, allotment proved one of the only successful programs of land redistribution to former slaves. Black freedpeople in the Chickasaw Nation did not have citizenship in the tribe or many of the civil rights that African Americans enjoyed in the postwar United States. Despite these restrictions, Chickasaw freedpeople who left for the United States deliberately maintained connections with the nation for decades through repeated return migrations and the creation of extended kin networks. These connections ultimately enabled Chickasaw freedpeople to claim land allotments from the US government thirty or forty years after emancipation. Shifting focus to Indian Territory reorients the story of the African American freedom struggle around access to land rather than access to citizenship rights.
Finally, Alison Clark Efford’s review essay on immigration history considers how policing the movement of people was critical to the construction of an “imperial” American state during the second half of the nineteenth century. As scholars have shifted focus away from the social history of immigrant communities and toward immigrants’ relationship with the American state, a new picture of US nation-building comes into focus. The United States did not absorb newcomers with a promise of eventual assimilation and equal citizenship; rather, it acted more like an empire, maintaining racial and economic hierarchies as it conquered new territories or admitted new immigrants on decidedly unequal terms. Efford finally advocates returning to local community studies, with a particular focus on the role of the federal government in shaping immigrants’ daily lives, as a method for mapping the uneven and capricious power of the American imperial state.
Stacey L. Smith is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University. She is the author of Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (UNC Press, 2013) which won the inaugural David Montgomery Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association. Her newest book project, An Empire for Freedom, explores African Americans' migrations to the Pacific Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century and their struggle for equality in the U.S.'s expanding continental empire.
The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that, starting in June, Dr. Hilary Green will step in as our new Digital Media Editor. Dr. Green is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003 and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016). She is currently developing a book manuscript tentatively titled Lest We Forget. The project explores the diverse ways in which everyday African Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War from its wartime origins to the present. In addition, she has developed and gives regularly an alternative campus tour on the history of race, slavery, and memory at the University of Alabama. We look forward to her insight and expertise, and we know she will be an asset to Muster and our other digital initiatives!
Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.
As a child of the 1990s, some of my earliest memories revolve around playing PC video games. Whether connecting to the dial-up modem to play a racing game with my grandfather or walking with my classmates to the school computer lab, video games sparked my curiosity and provided countless hours of entertainment. Today, as the world faces the uncertainties of a terrible global pandemic and the realities of stay home orders and quarantines, I have passed some of my free time playing classic video games from my childhood on MyAbandonware, a website with more than 15,000 games available for free download.[1] (I am not the only person thinking this way; a disclaimer on the website currently says “we are under [a] heavy load of retrogamers wanting to travel back to those old and safe times.”)
I did not grow up with an interest in the Civil War era, nor did I play Civil War video games. But I am now learning about and playing some of the classics from the 1990s: Sid Meier’s Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, and Grant, Lee, Sherman: Civil War Generals 2, just to name a few. Like other military video games then and now, these titles combine decision-making, strategy, narrative, and compelling graphics to draw gamers into these imaginary worlds. Sid Meier’s Gettysburg in particular became an award-winning hit with more than 200,000 copies sold after its 1997 release.[2]
One thing sticks out to me about these Civil War video games, however. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these games did little to provide a larger context for the causes, context, and consequences of the war. Gamers could play as either the Confederacy or United States militaries and had to develop tactics and strategies for defeating the enemy, but what these militaries were fighting about was left unanswered. I then wondered if anyone had ever thought about creating a video game about slavery. To my surprise I discovered that the answer was “yes,” after reading about Kamau Sebabu Kambui in a recent, brilliant feature in the New Yorker by the journalist Julian Lucas.
This screenshot from Freedom! shows the introductory screen in which players learn more about their character’s attributes and shortcomings. Courtesy of the author.
Kamau Kambui was an esoteric black nationalist in Minnesota who became a leader in developing experiential-learning activities about slavery. According to Lucas, Kambui created a living history program called the “Underground Railroad Reenactment” in 1987, one of the first of its kind and a precursor to contemporary living history programs about slavery like “Follow the North Star” at Conner Prairie. He was also approached by Disney at one point to serve as a consultant for a ride (which was never completed) that would have recreated the experience of a fugitive slave running for freedom. “You can read in a book what [slavery] feels like. You can see it on a video. But tonight you have the opportunity to feel the Underground Railroad,” Kambui would say at the beginning of his Underground Railroad programs.[3]
Kambui’s interest in experiential learning also led him to a major role in creating Freedom!, the first computer game about slavery in the United States. Released in 1992, Freedom! was created by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), the same software company that created The Oregon Trail. Kambui served as an advisor to the five white programmers who developed the game’s feel and aesthetic. According to Lucas, Kambui stressed the importance of nature (swamps, prairies, and forests are prominent in the game) and was adamant that the enslaved characters in the game use period dialect and have “a distinctly ‘African’ look.”[4]
This screenshot shows a typical scene from Freedom! Note that the lettering on the sign appears unreadable because the enslaved character is illiterate. Courtesy of the author.
Freedom! starts in the states of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware in 1830. The gamer plays the role of an enslaved African American boy or girl (player’s choice) trying to run away to freedom. Players must converse with other enslaved laborers, navigate any potential warning signs (such as slave catchers with dogs, hostile free whites, and wrong directions) and maintain adequate levels of nourishment, stamina, food, and health during their journey. The developers also included a disclaimer at the beginning of the game, stating that Freedom! intended to teach students how to collect and interpret data, determine directions from observation, and predict relationships between possible friends and adversaries. In choosing to run away, the player must determine whether or not to seek advice from family members before leaving, “ask the master for a pass,” or to simply go it alone without help. In each simulation, the chosen enslaved person has different talents and challenges. For example, when I played the game the first time, my character was able to swim but unable to read or write. In the end, the game was very difficult and each time I played the simulation I was unable to get to freedom. Each time I faced the struggle of finding enough food and was eventually captured by slave patrollers with dogs.
Freedom! was distributed to one third of all public-school districts around the United States in the fall of 1992. It did not take long for controversy and legal troubles to emerge around the game. In Arizona, parents of an eleven-year-old African American student filed a lawsuit against the Tempe School District alleging that their son was “humiliated by classmates while playing the game . . . and that his civil rights were violated.” The mother, Sonia Campbell-Vinson, argued that her son “was hurt that people were making fun of the characters in the game. It was very condescending to [my son] as a black. He woke up crying at night. He was upset that he was being thought of as a slave.”[5]
Meanwhile, a parents’ group in Merrillville, Indiana, spoke with Kambui, MECC, and a representative of the NAACP in January 1993. The parents noted that the game was offered in the school’s computer lab, but that no curriculum accompanied it. Since the game was played during students’ free time, those who struggled “were not receiving healthy feedback or positive reinforcement” from teachers. A spokesperson for the group, Paulette Davis, argued that Freedom! trivialized and “Nintendoized” slavery. She asserted that “African American history doesn’t begin with slavery, but in the kingdoms of Africa,” a larger fault within the entire historical curricula of the school district. Following this meeting and facing mounting legal costs, MECC instructed all schools to return or destroy their copies of the game.[6] Kambui later passed away in 1998 from cancer.
The use of period dialect and stereotypical portrayals of enslaved African Americans throughout Freedom! generated much controversy from parents whose children played the game in school. Courtesy of the author.
The quick rise and fall of Freedom! can be attributed to numerous factors. For one, the game required additional historical context and curriculum materials that many teachers were unable or unwilling to utilize. The history of slavery did not have a central place in history education in many districts around the country during the 1990s. Equally important, while the game reinforced enslaved people’s agency by demonstrating their own role in ending slavery in the United States, some black children at majority white schools clearly felt isolated and stereotyped by their white peers. It appears that all too often students who were not black saw the game as a joke rather than a serious history lesson.
Freedom! nevertheless raises some interesting questions about the role of video games and experiential learning in teaching students about the history of slavery. How can this history be told in way that is meaningful, accurate, and respectful? Is Kambui’s vision of a history that is not just read but felt even possible? Are there certain historical topics that simply can’t be taught through experience? Can video games about war go beyond military tactics to also incorporate political decision making? What role can historians—from K-12 teachers to public and academic historians—play in using video games and visual mediums as educational tools?
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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.
The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the importance of digital humanities (DH) projects and accessible digital tools for those locked out of traditional archival repositories. The recent and expanding democratization of archival materials, moreover, has introduced new possibilities for researching African American reunification efforts as an embodied application of Civil War memory. Both the Lost Friends and Last Seen DH projects, for instance, showcase the advertisements placed by African Americans seeking to reunite with families separated by slavery and the Civil War and amplified the conclusions of Heather A. Williams’s Help Me to Find My People (2012).[1] When combined with other digital collections and non-digital scholarship, these projects have expanded the possibilities for scholars and descendants to answer old, as well as new, questions. For instance, how do race, gender, class, and place influence black mothers’ use of memory in their efforts to reunite with loved ones taken during wartime campaigns at the Pennsylvania-Maryland border?
During an October 1862 slaving raid, several African American men were taken from Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, and eventually returned after white community leaders secured their release. “Negroes Driven South by the Rebel Officers,” Harper’s Weekly, November 8, 1862. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
DH projects can reveal one Franklin County, Pennsylvania mother’s deployment of Civil War memory in her reunification efforts. Using resources commonly associated with newly emancipated southern African Americans, Priscilla Marshall made claims of citizenship by seeking justice for the wartime enslavement of her children in Virginia. In effect, Marshall’s application of Civil War memory transcended physical boundaries, gender expectations, and notions of belonging. Digital tools illuminate her efforts.
Following Confederate defeat, black Pennsylvanians attempted to reunite with their family members enslaved during several Confederate Army raids. Some turned to state officials for assistance but to no avail. A state commission would only accept claims for property either damaged or lost (i.e. livestock, crops, business expenses, and household goods).[2] Excluded from state resources, black Pennsylvanian women relied on federal resources for southern freedpeople, the black press, and postwar communal networks. In so doing, they directly applied Civil War memory in their struggle for reunification and rebuffed state officials’ demands to forget the civilian trauma endured. Some women placed the newspaper advertisements now contained in the Last Seen and Lost Friends DH projects. They firmly understood that their efforts might be “rarely fulfilled but the possibility kept them hoping, and intermittent stories of success kept them encouraged.”[3] Yet, hope, memory of loved ones, and the possibility of reunification served as the greatest motivator for their efforts.
Instead of placing advertisements, Priscilla Marshall used the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in Virginia (the Freedmen’s Bureau). The Pennsylvanian mother, like countless southern black women, “chose to use the apparatus of the Union Army and the strategy of claiming national inclusion to maneuver for a better life and to construct a civic existence.”[4] The Freedmen’s Bureau courts, local agent offices, and even state headquarters served as a venue for justice and restitution where the Pennsylvania Claims Office could not.
Marshall found success. Actively remembering their wartime enslavement, she appealed for her three children–Rosa, Sallie, and Jack–taken during the Gettysburg Campaign.[5] Initially encountering unsympathetic Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Marshall fiercely resisted. She escalated her claim to General Orlando Brown, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia. She also secured and presented witness statements to General Brown in April 1866.[6] As a result, she reconnected with two of her three children who had been enslaved in the Shenandoah Valley. Her digitally accessible letters also reveal how much the mother fought with the agency for reunification. According to two March 1866 letters, Marshall refused to accept any transportation assistance from the federal agency. Instead, she secured her own travel arrangements for her children with a black woman whom she trusted. She also expressed hope that her children could assist in locating Rosa. While failing in this effort, the 1870 federal census revealed that her restored family remained intact. Throughout her struggles, the Pennsylvanian mother redefined postwar citizenship according to her gendered notions of freedom and successfully applied Civil War memory in the reunification of her family. Her success continued to encourage other black Pennsylvanian mothers to not give up hope. Previously outside of the collective consciousness, the combination of older and new DH tools has made visible the archival traces of one mother’s love and application of Civil War memory for scholars, educators, and descendant communities alike.[7]
Priscilla Marshall’s reunification efforts, therefore, demonstrates the promise of DH projects and accessible digital tools for asking new questions and creating new insights on the post-emancipation experience. While not perfect, interesting and potentially exciting opportunities for deepening our understanding race, gender, and Civil War memory abound. Whose experience might be rediscovered when DH projects are actively used during and beyond this current crisis? Beyond their teaching utility, how might DH projects influence future Civil War era scholarship?
[1] Williams Research Center, Lost Friends: Advertisements from the Southwestern Christian Advocate, The Historic New Orleans Collection, https://www.hnoc.org/database/lost-friends/index.html; Villanova University, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, 2017, https://informationwanted.org/; Heather A. Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012). [2] While Priscilla Marshall did not file a claim, other Franklin County residents did. Successful applicants received restitution for real property only. None of the few claims of personhood received restitution. For all claims, see Damage Claim Applications for Cumberland and Franklin Counties, 1871-1879, Records of the Department of the Auditor General, RG-2, roll 6161, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. [3] “Information wanted of Rose Jackson,” The Christian Recorder, August 14, 1869, Last Seen, accessed April 26, 2020, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/342; Williams, 168. [4] Sharon Romeo, Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 3. [5] “Albert Ordway to Orlando Brown, February 1, 1866,” Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, accessed April 26, 2020, https://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B1243 and “Priscilla Marshall to Orlando Brown, April 4, 1866,” Valley of the Shadow, accessed April 26, 2020, https://valley.lib.virginia.edu/papers/B1226. Her son’s name is inconsistently noted as Jack in some records and Zack in other records. Despite this inconsistency, his parentage, age, enslavement, and postwar return is accurately documented. [6] “Priscilla Marshall to Orlando Brown, April 4, 1866.” [7] “Priscilla Marshall to H. S. Merrill, March 18, 1866” and “Ann Gibbons to H. S. Merrill, March 18, 1866,” Registers of Letters Received, vol. 1, Virginia, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, 1865-1872, FamilySearch, http://FamilySearch.org; “Marshall, Priscilla,” in Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, Population Schedules, Ancestry.com; Romeo, 81-84.
Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).
Today we share an interview with Evelyn Atkinson, who published an article in our special issue on the Fourteenth Amendment in March 2020, titled “Slaves, Coolies, and Shareholders: Corporations Claim the Fourteenth Amendment.” Evelyn is a doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Chicago. She received her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College. Evelyn’s work focuses on the history of corporate personhood in the nineteenth century, particularly the relationship between popular claims for corporate accountability and the development of the legal doctrine of corporate constitutional personhood. Her scholarly publications have appeared in Law & Social Inquiry, Law and History Review, Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, and Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. She is the recipient of the Fishel-Calhoun Article Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as the Law & Social Inquiry Graduate Student Paper Competition Prize, for her article, “Creating the Reasonable Child: Risk, Responsibility, and the Attractive Nuisance Doctrine.”
Thank you so much, Evelyn, for participating in this exciting special issue and for speaking with us about your research. How did you initially come across this court case that forms the centerpiece of your article?
I discovered the case, In re Tiburcio Parrott, really as part of an educated guess. I noticed that in corporate constitutional rights cases of this time there seemed to be a number of references to cases involving Chinese litigants, and I got curious. So I traced the citations back and discovered that they all seemed to be rooted in this particular case. And I wondered how could this be, that the court is making this very explicit comparison between Chinese laborers and wealthy corporations. I had read a bit about Chinese labor on the West Coast in this period and wondered if there wasn’t some sort of connection in the public mind that helped the court draw this analogy. So I started down this rabbit hole and sure enough, I uncovered the In re Tiburcio Parrott case.
Since many of our readers are not legal historians, before we go much further, can you quickly explain what the “In re” in In re Tiburcio Parrott means? What kind of court case was this?
In this instance, “In re” designates a habeas corpus case. Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that allows prisoners to challenge their imprisonment in front of a judicial tribunal. Importantly, the writ was used to protect African Americans during Reconstruction with the Judiciary Act of 1867, which gave federal courts the power to hear habeas cases from people who had been detained under state law. So there’s an incongruity here in the Parrott case – a right that very recently had been expanded in order to protect freed people from discriminatory state laws is now being used by the director of a wealthy corporation.
Thank you! That explanation is helpful. As you dug into your research, what questions guided your investigation, and what do you ultimately argue in the article?
The question that I’m most interested in involves the relationship between public discourse and the law. I ask how the way conflicts are framed in popular culture, such as via newspapers and cartoons, as well as in political forums like state legislative debates and constitutional convention records, plays into the way the lawyers present their arguments in court and the way the judges ultimately write their opinions. This connection between Chinese immigrants and corporations started out as a hunch, and as I researched I found more and more evidence that indeed, the popular and political conversations around Chinese immigrants and corporations were in fact deeply intertwined. The Parrott case turned out to be the one where they came together explicitly.
My central argument is that cases involving the 14th Amendment claims of Chinese laborers and corporations, like Parrott, were instrumental in establishing the expansive interpretation of the equal protection clause that the Supreme Court endorsed in the late nineteenth century. So in sum, the equal protection clause jurisprudence that provided the gateway for twentieth century constitutional protections of African-Americans, women, LGBT persons, etc. was based on this initial litigation involving Chinese immigrants and corporations. There is an irony here, obviously, that corporate persons obtained robust equal protection rights before freed people. And yet, I would even go so far as to argue that the corporate litigation involving equal protection is ultimately what made robust civil rights protections in the twentieth century possible (though that’s a subject for a future article!).
One of the themes that stood out to me is the tension in American society and jurisprudence between free labor and unfree labor, and how those terms had meanings that were grounded in a local context. In the West, for instance, the reference point was not so much the enslavement of African Americans as it was systems like Mexican peonage or coolie labor. What were the implications of the Parrott case for other groups who continued to experience labor exploitation?
This is a really important and complicated question. In 1870s-1880s California, popular and political discourse presents Chinese “coolies” as essentially slaves. The putatively unfree labor of Chinese workers drags down the wages of free white men, the Workingmen claim, which threatens to reduce them to slaves and undermine an American democratic system built on the idea of individual freedom. Yet in the Parrott case, the federal court doesn’t examine the realities of Chinese labor but holds that Chinese laborers have the constitutional right to contract their labor as they see fit and that state law can’t impinge on that right. The court also ignores the economic power of the large corporations over actual working conditions, and holds that corporations have the same right to use their property – here, to contract for labor to maximize the value of their property – as individual persons. This is very similar reasoning to what you see later in the Progressive Era in cases involving minimum wage and maximum hour regulation, that even people who in reality are subject to oppressive working conditions outside their control are deemed to be “free” laborers capable of contracting on an equal footing with their employers regardless of discrepancies in economic power. So there’s a stark dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labor in law that ignores the gradations of labor freedom and the realities of inequality in a capitalist labor economy.
On pp. 55 and 56, you frame this story as part of the “Greater Reconstruction.” I think that’s really important. Can you explain how this story about 1880s California helps Civil War historians broaden our understanding of this period? And our understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment more specifically?
It’s striking how rarely historical scholarship on Reconstruction and its aftermath includes the role of corporations – particularly the connections between corporate rights and key questions involving race, personhood, and citizenship in this period. The corporate and Chinese 14th Amendment cases in 1880s California highlight these connections. As I show, the 14th Amendment opened the door to robust corporate claims of constitutional rights, which in turn influenced how the Amendment was applied to racial and other minorities. The conference that Scott Heerman and Michael Bernath put together on “The Many Fourteenth Amendments” – out of which this special volume of the journal emerged – gave me the chance to argue for the importance of including corporations in the history of the Greater Reconstruction. I think they were convinced and I hope your readers will be as well.
Thank you again, Evelyn, for participating in this interview! Your work is an excellent example of how Civil War historians can—and should—consider stories that are outside the period between 1861 and 1865. We hope readers will read your entire article.
Thank you! I am glad for the journal’s interest in my work and look forward to many future conversations.
Readers, we hope you’ve enjoyed this interview, and if you have questions for Evelyn, please drop her a line in the comments below! You can access her article by subscribing to the journal or visiting Project Muse.
We are pleased to announce the addition of a new correspondent to our Muster team, P. Gabrielle Foreman. Gabrielle recently moved to Penn State from the University of Delaware where she was the founding faculty director of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project. At Penn State, she’ll launch and direct the Center for Black Digital Research. That Center, also called #DigBlk, will house the Colored Conventions Project as well as Douglass Day and the new Black Women’s Organizing Archive. Gabrielle is a poet’s daughter turned literary historian. She is finishing a monograph called The Art of DisMemory: Historicizing Slavery in Poetry, Print and Material Culture as well as an edited collection called Praise Songs for Dave the Potter: Art and Poetry for David Drake about the enslaved master poet and potter whose work appears in museums across North America. The volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, the first collection on this early Civil Rights movement that spanned seven decades, is forthcoming with UNC Press. For Muster, she’ll be writing about digital and distributed archive building, nineteenth-century Black organizing, Black memory and the arts, and Black history’s continued hold on the present. Gabrielle holds an endowed chair in Liberal Arts and is Professor of English, African American Studies and History as well as affiliate faculty at the Penn State University Library. She’ll be the Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society in 2021-2022.
Today we share an interview with Evelyn Atkinson, who published an article in our special issue on the Fourteenth Amendment in March 2020, titled 
We are pleased to announce the addition of a new correspondent to our Muster team, P. Gabrielle Foreman. Gabrielle recently moved to Penn State from the University of Delaware where she was the founding faculty director of the award-winning 