Category: Muster

Author Interview: Tian Xu

Author Interview: Tian Xu

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Today we share an interview with Tian Xu, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California.” Tian Xu is a postdoctoral fellow at SUNY Buffalo’s Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. His work has been published in Journal of American Ethnic History and The New Rambler.

What interested you in contributing to this special forum on the transpacific connections to the Civil War era?

During the Civil War era, transpacific communities started to take roots in the American West. These communities of course became enmeshed in the American sociolegal debates over slavery and freedom, but they were also active participants in the country’s everyday search for meanings of enslavement and emancipation. This encounter fascinates me. I have chosen the lens of legal mobilization to understand how transpacific subalterns, in this case, Chinese women migrants, navigated the Civil War era legal devices to further their own life plans.

What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain from your article on Chinese women’s use of the law for demanding rights and justice in California?

I hope this article could decenter terms like rights and justice and attract readers’ attention to alternate concepts like survival strategy and agency. The Chinese women in this article migrated under the shadow of a transpacific marketplace of human trafficking. The dearth of primary sources makes it hard to ascertain the actual degrees of freedom they managed to enjoy through legal action. For them, California’s courts and their openness to nonwhite population’s use of habeas corpus writs offered an imperfect but nonetheless useful legal space to voice their preferences in life. Nonetheless, these preferences were constrained by patriarchal expectations within and without the courtroom. Not unlike Barbara Fields’ Black Marylanders, what Chinese women demanded (and what they could get) was “no fixed condition but a constantly moving target.”[1]

The women’s actions were met with at least two competing imperial approaches of governance carried out by American authorities. The first approach sought to regularize the sociolegal status of Chinese women and fit them into the emancipationist, patriarchal civic ideals of the Civil War era. The question of how this approach panned out is covered by the article’s discussion over domestic habeas corpus cases in the antebellum and Civil War decades. The second approach gave up on inclusion and sought to expel Chinese women as unworthy immigrants at America’s gates. The immigration cases after the Civil War, especially the legal battles that led to the famous Chy Lung case, reflect the preponderance of this approach’s persuasion. My article identifies the 1870s as a key decade when the exclusionist strategy overshadowed the emancipationist one. But this does not mean that the latter ceased to function. In practice, the tensions and overlaps between the two continued to create room for Chinese women’s legal action. I would be grateful if readers see the contested nature of this historical development.

After this forum, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project?

I am currently working on two projects that speak to each other. The first is a book project about the Pacific genesis of immigration lawyering in America. Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans played a central role in this history. I am making the case that the durability of anti-Asian laws since the 1870s put lawyers at the center of a transpacific “migration industry” and gave rise to the first modern immigration bar in the United States. The second is a project that compares immigration lawyering for the Chinese with military pension lawyering for Black Union families after the Civil War. The comparison explicates the role of race in the expansion of the US administrative state, which created immigration and welfare barriers for minority groups but also gave rise to meaningful, racially specific legal service markets. Instead of characterizing such lawyering as civil rights action, I am interested in how these lawyers’ work served to legitimate unjust laws and/or unjust law enforcement while facilitating resistance.

Thanks!

[1] Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 193.

Hilary N. Green

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).

Author Interview: Beth Lew-Williams

Author Interview: Beth Lew-Williams

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Today we share an interview with Beth Lew-Williams, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “Chinese Naturalization, Voting, and Other Impossible Acts.” Beth Lew-Williams is an associate professor of history at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American History.

What interested you in contributing to this special forum on the transpacific connections to the Civil War era? 

Rarely have I identified as a historian of the Civil War era, despite my focus on the mid-nineteenth century. I come to the Civil War era field via Asian American history and the Pacific West. These fields have been treated as peripheral for a long time. But JCWE is taking a new, broader approach to the field and I’ve been inspired by their work. So when Hidetaka Hirota came to me with the idea of this special issue, I saw it as an important challenge for both the authors and the readers.

What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain from your article on Chinese naturalization and voting rights? 

In the nineteenth-century, US naturalization law said that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.  Historians have assumed that the law described reality. But in fact, I found that thousands of Chinese immigrants naturalized before 1900. This raises a host of new questions: How did the Chinese manage to naturalize and why did they do so? What does this say about the nature of US citizenship and alienage? If the Chinese found ways to naturalize, did they also find ways to vote?

What I’ve uncovered is a quiet story of resistance which I think deserves attention from scholars teaching the Civil War era. Rather than presuppose that Chinese were easily excluded from citizenship and voting, we should pay attention to their struggle for rights, their wins as well as their losses, and the overlap with more familiar stories of Black citizenship and disenfranchisement.

After this forum, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project? 

I’m nearing completion of my second book, currently titled John Doe China Man (forthcoming, Harvard University Press). It examines hundreds of state and local laws regulating Chinese migrants in California, Oregon, and Washington during the late nineteenth century.

When it comes to the history of Chinese in America, the border has caught our eyes and held them. Chinese migrants’ attempts to cross the border, and America’s attempts to stop them, is the story we have told and retold. But long before Chinese faced the first exclusion laws, they endured a racial regime within America, and long afterwards as well. My next book is the history of that racial regime and the lives it touched.

Thanks!

Hilary N. Green

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).

Author Interview: Stacey Smith

Author Interview: Stacey Smith

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Today we share an interview with Stacey L. Smith, who published an article in the December 2023 JCWE, titled “The Colored American Asiatic Traveler”: Peter K. L. Cole and American Empire in Japan.” 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 (2013). At present, she is currently writing a book on African Americans on the Pacific Coast of North America.

What interested you in contributing to this special forum on the transpacific connections to the Civil War era? 

My main research interest has always been to bridge the fields of Civil War era history and the history of the American West. I have long argued that US territories along the Pacific have played important, but largely unexplored, roles in the histories of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. I am especially interested in unearthing how the transformation of racialized notions of citizenship, one of the major outcomes of the Civil War and Reconstruction, was the product of events occurring in the West as well as in the North and in the South.  People from Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Latin America who migrated to and across the North American West via the Pacific Ocean were critical actors in reshaping US immigration and naturalization laws, labor policies, and international relations in this period. Laws targeting these immigrants, including the 1870 Naturalization Act, the 1875 Page Law, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, significantly redefined who was eligible for US citizenship, who was a “free laborer,” and even who could live in the United States without facing constant harassment. Looking at the fight over Pacific citizenship alongside the struggle for African American citizenship rights in the South brings to light the complex, interwoven histories of North, South, and West.

What are the key takeaways that you hope that readers might gain from your article on Peter Cole’s travels to Japan?

Peter Cole was a free African American man who traveled around the world and learned half a dozen languages, including Cantonese and Japanese. He lived in China in Japan for almost two decades between the 1850s and 1870s, with his longest residence being in the treaty port of Yokohama, Japan, between 1866 and 1873. He also worked for US consuls and foreign ministers in both places while running his own merchant business and writing for English-language newspapers in Yokohama and San Francisco.

Cole’s unique life serves as a vehicle for understanding African Americans’ fraught relationship with US imperialism and settler colonialism. Cole very much understood himself as an agent of US empire in the Pacific. He envisioned himself working alongside his white compatriots to open Japanese markets to American commerce, and to “civilize” and Christianize Japanese people. His writings frequently elided notions of racial difference between Black and white people while widening African Americans’ distance from Japanese nationals. He often identified himself and his fellow Black Yokohamans simply as “Americans,” “foreigners,” or even “Europeans,” who were diametrically opposed to Japanese “natives” in terms of religion, education, modernity, and civilization.

My central argument is that despite Cole’s participation in American imperial projects, and some initial acceptance of Black Yokohamans into the white community in Japan, white supremacist settler colonial logics ultimately excluded him from benefiting from the spoils of empire. Once back in the United States, Cole tried for years to get a position in the diplomatic corps of the US State Department. He was repeatedly overlooked for any positions, he said, because of his color. Despite his high level of literacy, his cosmopolitan experiences, and his multilingualism, he was eventually reduced to working as a manual laborer, steamship steward, and boardinghouse keeper. Cole’s life ultimately gives us new insights into Black Americans’ complex relationship with settler colonialism. They could be both agents of empire and denied belonging in an American settler state built fundamentally on notions of white domination over non-white others.

After this forum, what’s next? Can you provide our readers with a preview of your current research project? 

My current book project is about African American civil rights activists in California from the Gold Rush of 1848 through the end of Reconstruction. I look at how African Americans fought for access to public education, testimony rights, suffrage, and eventually the desegregation of all public facilities. California is an unusual setting to study the nineteenth-century Black freedom struggle because African Americans were the smallest racial minority there behind Chinese nationals, Mexicans, and Native Americans. Whenever they challenged race-based exclusion, California African Americans had to maneuver carefully around anti-Chinese, anti-Indian, and anti-Mexican racism to make a special claim to citizenship based on their own American birth, civilization, and Christianity. They weren’t often successful in this endeavor. California refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and outright rejected the Fifteenth Amendment, mostly on the grounds that these pieces of legislation would enfranchise Chinese people in addition to African Americans. My goal is to explore African Americans’ distinctive tactics, obstacles, arguments, and politics for combatting anti-Black racism in the most racially diverse place in nineteenth-century America.

My work on Peter Cole emerged from this project. As I studied African Americans on the Pacific Coast, I became increasingly intrigued by the presence of so many Black world travelers in places such as San Francisco, Portland (Oregon), and Victoria (British Columbia). My next book project beyond my current one will explore African American migration to and across the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth-century. Using biographies of Black transpacific migrants such as Peter Cole, it will analyze African Americans’ relationship to US and British imperial projects in Asia, North America, and Polynesia.

 Thank for these responses!

Hilary N. Green

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).

Preview of December JCWE and the Transpacific Connections Forum

Preview of December JCWE and the Transpacific Connections Forum

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In the late nineteenth century, opponents of Asian immigration on the West Coast claimed slavery was being resurrected in the United States. The escalation of industrial capitalism in the postbellum years had already established the perception among American workers that capitalists were attempting to enslave them as exploitable labor. As one labor leader put it in 1887, a capitalist was “a traitor worse than was Jefferson Davis in 1861.”[1] On the West Coast, the growing numbers of Japanese laborers, whom white Americans viewed as servile and degraded, reinforced the anticapitalism discourse on the rebirth of slavery. One California newspaper claimed “Japan’s pauper” laborers would introduce a new form of slavery in the state, “a system far worse than existed in the sunny South in slavery days.”[2] The association between Japanese immigration and slavery was especially intense because many Japanese laborers migrated from Hawai’i, where Americans in the continental United States believed a labor arrangement similar to slavery existed. The sugar industry in Hawai’i had long relied on the labor of foreign contract workers. Although the physical punishment of servants and laborers had been prohibited since 1850, abuse and whipping remained unchecked in practice. Americans keenly observed the conditions of contract labor in the islands, characterizing it as a form of slavery. A newspaper in San Francisco, for instance, pointed to “the existence of virtual chattel slavery” on the sugar plantations in Hawai’i.[3] Planters maintained that the existing labor relations were necessary for the survival of the sugar industry, but Americans dismissed this argument as identical to the one “used before our civil war in America, by the Southern planters, in order to justify slavery.”[4] Californians argued that the Japanese working under slavery in Hawai’i would bring the institution to the United States. As the United States increasingly engaged with Asia and the Pacific through immigration, restrictionists on the West Coast invoked slavery and the Civil War to justify the exclusion of Asians.[5]

Japanese immigration in the late nineteenth century, however, was hardly the first instance where the United States’ transpacific connections intersected with the issues and legacies of the Civil War. Throughout the Civil War era, US contacts with Asia and the Pacific directly affected the course of American history, stimulating the nation’s commercial and territorial ambitions, contributing to the development of American capitalism through the labor of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and adding new layers to national debates over immigration and citizenship in the age of emancipation. Historians have examined the racist perceptions of Chinese immigrants as servile coolies equivalent to slaves in the antebellum period—a precursor of later anti-Japanese prejudice—and the importation of Chinese workers into plantations in the post-emancipation South. As Moon-Ho Jung, Stacey L. Smith, Mae Ngai, and Kevin Kenny have demonstrated, the prejudiced identification of Chinese workers as slaves justified the restriction of Chinese immigration as an antislavery measure.[6] Beyond these subjects, however, scholarship on the Civil War era in its international context has concentrated on the relationship between the United States and the Atlantic World, overlooking events unfolding in Asia and the Pacific. The “Atlantic framework,” as Steven Hahn observes in his synthetic history of the long-nineteenth-century United States, “greatly underestimates the importance of the Pacific as an increasingly powerful field of force.”[7]

This forum examines how US interaction with Asia and the Pacific shaped race relations, gender ideology, diplomacy, and legal rights in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. The authors specialize in the history of the American West, African American history, Asian American history, the history of the US empire, immigration history, and legal history. By examining the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States, the experience of Black migrants in Japan, Chinese women’s habeas corpus litigations, and the naturalized citizenship of Chinese Americans, the forum integrates Asia and the Pacific into Civil War–era scholarship. By doing so, it also calls for more research on the nineteenth century in Asian American historiography, which pays disproportionate attention to the twentieth century.[8]

Three strands of historiography inform this forum. The first is the international history of the Civil War era. Historians have long examined slavery and emancipation in comparative perspectives, the transatlantic dimensions of abolitionism, and Union and Confederate diplomacy during the Civil War.[9] The “transnational turn” in US historiography over the last two decades has significantly accelerated the trend of interpreting social, political, and ideological developments in the United States during the Civil War era in broader contexts. Some of the most intensively studied subjects include diplomacy, perceptions of the Civil War outside the United States, intersections between Confederate and European assertions of nationalism and self-determination, parallels in the process of nation building among the United States, Canada, and Europe, and the transatlantic and hemispheric history of abolitionism and emancipation.[10] The field is also developing new interests in Latin America, especially Mexico, as a destination for fugitive slaves and former Confederate emigrants.[11] All of these studies have substantially deepened our understanding of abolitionism, wartime nationalism, and the origins, meanings, and consequences of emancipation in the United States. Nevertheless, this scholarship has predominantly focused on Europe and the Americas, mostly overlooking Asia and the Pacific, except for occasional references to the Taiping Rebellion in China as another (and even bloodier) civil war in midcentury and the Meiji Restoration of 1868 in Japan as a case of nation building coterminous with the Reconstruction of the United States.[12]

This forum’s examination of the transpacific aspects of Civil War–era history is also guided by a second vibrant strand of the field: the American West during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The West has long been overlooked or reduced to relative insignificance in Civil War–era scholarship, with the exceptions of such key moments as the Compromise of 1850. As historians seek to stretch the geographical scope of their analysis beyond North and South, however, they increasingly put the West into the narrative of the Civil War era, interpreting events happening in or arising from the region as part of a wider social, political, and legal story at the national level. Western historian Elliott West, for example, proposed the concept of “Greater Reconstruction,” which views the Civil War and Reconstruction as a “continental process” shaped by the experiences of not only white and Black Americans but also indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Chinese immigrants.[13] In light of this approach, the Thirteenth Amendment’s application to southwestern peonage, federal exclusion laws that denied naturalized citizenship to the Chinese, and federal policy for breaking up indigenous lands and granting US citizenship to Native Americans can all be understood as parts of the national government’s attempt to establish the United States’ territorial sovereignty in the postbellum period.[14]

Scholarship on the West has significantly broadened our perspectives on the Civil War era, but some aspects remain underexplored. In her recent review essay of the field, Stacey L. Smith, one of the authors in this forum, points out that while this scholarship has extensively explored US wars against indigenous peoples in the West, it often fails to fully investigate the ways racial diversity in the West shaped citizenship and state power in the Civil War era, an analysis that would require historians to pay more attention to the experiences of Chinese immigrants, Mexicans, and African Americans who migrated to the West from other parts of the country. “Civil War West” scholarship also places a strong emphasis on the Great Plains and the Southwest, but, like international Civil War scholarship, it tends to overlook the Pacific Coast.[15] To better understand the federal government’s imperial ambitions to expand commercial opportunities outside North America, and the kind of polity it sought to consolidate in the United States in the postbellum period, historians of the Civil War era need to investigate more substantively the politics of Chinese immigration and the experiences of the Chinese in the American West. This forum takes up this task.[16]

Pacific history provides the third main context of this forum. One of the major emphases in historical scholarship over the last two decades is on social, cultural, economic, and political integrations through exploration, migration, trade, diplomacy, and conquest in the Pacific World—a region that embraced East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the Pacific Islands, and North and South America. Pacific history examines diasporic movements and interactions of peoples from and within these regions, including migrant workers, voyagers, missionaries, and explorers; maritime traffic systems; circulations of culture, capital, and ideas; Asian, European, and American commercial ventures across the Pacific; and local, regional, and global forces that promoted these developments. Like its Atlantic counterpart, Pacific history has different spatial framings depending on its practitioners. Some historians focus on specific locations, such as the Pacific Rim and the Pacific Islands, while others highlight networks across the Pacific. Regardless of the place of analytical focus, Pacific history necessarily links Asian history, US history, and Asian American history, and it is these connections that inspire the present forum.[17]

The Civil War era in US history corresponds with a critical juncture in Pacific history. Adam McKeown has called the 1850s “the apex of Pacific integration.” The California gold rush, along with other gold rushes in North America and Australia, was one of the events that contributed to a “global boom in trade and mobility” in this period, stimulating international migration from multiple parts of the world and the transpacific dissemination of the goods produced by migrants. Chinese immigration to the American West was a major part and consequence of this process.[18] As Gregory Rosenthal has recently shown, midcentury Pacific integration was also characterized by the diasporic movement of Hawaiian migrant workers, who left Hawai’i in search of employment and opportunities in equatorial Pacific Islands, Alaska, and North America, including gold rush California. With their labor and the commodities they extracted and circulated across the Pacific Ocean, these indigenous workers helped facilitate “transoceanic capitalist integration.” Rosenthal thus argues that “nineteenth-century California was an integral part of the Hawaiian Pacific World.”[19]

The US government also participated in Pacific integration when it “opened” Japan by pressuring the Tokugawa Bakufu to end its isolation policy. Charged by the federal government with a mission to secure agreements from Japan for fair treatment of American shipwrecked sailors and provision of fuel and supplies to US ships operating in the Pacific, Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan with his fleet in 1853. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Peace and Amity in 1854, which recognized US demands for the protection of American sailors, the supply of coal and provisions, the establishment of a US consulate, and most-favored nation status. By the end of the decade, the United States had also obtained a trade agreement with Japan, establishing American commercial and strategic presence in East Asia and the Pacific.[20]20 While ultimately helping trigger the collapse of Tokugawa rule, the opening of Japan contributed significantly to the transpacific movement of people, including laborers, diplomats, sailors, and merchants.

This forum examines transpacific connections in the Civil War era by pursuing two central themes. The first half investigates the emergence during the 1860s and 1870s of new discourses that challenged dominant gender and racial ideologies in the nineteenth-century United States, as a result of diplomatic exchanges with Japan and Black Americans’ transpacific migration to the country. The second half analyzes the experiences of Chinese immigrants to explore a second theme: the rights of Asians in the United States in the Civil War era. These two themes are by no means exhaustive. The forum might have brought Oceania into the scope of analysis, for example, by including work on the migration of Pacific Islanders.[21] Focusing only on the Japanese and Chinese contexts, with strong attention to the Pacific rim, the four articles collected here represent a particular thread of Pacific history, a small sample among many possibilities in the study of transpacific connections in the Civil War era.

The first two articles analyze the impact of transpacific connections on nineteenth-century American gender and racial ideologies. Ikuko Asaka’s piece examines a diplomatic visit by Japanese samurai to the United States in 1860 to exchange treaties ratified between the two countries. Investigating how the Japanese delegation was treated by white Americans and described in newspapers and magazines, Asaka argues that the Japanese men’s visit disrupted the normative gender dualism of men and women in antebellum American society, which attached privilege and power to maleness, especially that of white people. Reflecting white men’s racist and orientalist view of Asians, newspapers and magazines presented the Japanese diplomats as female figures, based on their dress and demeanor, and underscored the femininity of their sensibilities. The press also condemned white women who appeared at reception sites to greet the Japanese emissaries for intruding into formal diplomatic areas. Yet, despite these assertions of white men’s racial and gender superiority, the Japanese were welcomed at decidedly male public spaces, such as the State Department and the White House, which implied recognition of the Japanese men’s masculine political authority in American society. Asaka analyzes journals of the Japanese delegates to demonstrate that they also upset the normative denial of public roles to women by interacting with white women on the streets and in other urban spaces, allowing them to help foster friendship between the United States and Japan, a subtle but significant form of diplomatic activity. Illuminating the coexistence of the orientalist feminization of the Japanese men and the confirmation of their maleness as public officials, Asaka argues that the Japanese diplomatic mission created a new configuration of gender and sexuality that defied the existing structure of political power and privilege in late antebellum America. Pacific diplomacy thus provided crucial moments when the predominant assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality collapsed.

In the second article, Stacey L. Smith examines a group of Black Americans living in Japan during the 1860s and 1870s, focusing on the experience of Peter K. L. Cole, who resided in the treaty port of Yokohama between 1866 and 1873 as a merchant, diplomatic aide, and reporter for the Elevator, a Black San Francisco newspaper. Witnessing the modernization and westernization efforts of Japan, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and overseas  expansion of the United States, Cole developed distinctive ideas about race and Black Americans’ place in the US empire. He envisioned Black Americans as equal partners with white Americans in expanding American commercial interests in East Asia and the Pacific. Cole elaborated on this idea in ways that countered the stigmatization of Black Americans in the United States. Adopting a Western sense of cultural and moral superiority over Asians, he presented Black Americans as full-fledged members of the civilized United States. He often referred to Black Americans in Japan as “foreigners” or “Americans,” not by any racial designation, so that they could be aligned with other Europeans and white Americans as a single group of modernized people, as opposed to the backward Japanese. Cole also applied ideas of settler colonialism to the Japanese, who he thought should be assimilated into modernity, just like Native Americans in the United States. Ultimately, Cole’s claims to interracial supremacy were silenced as a system of class segregation developed by wealthy white British merchants alienated Black residents in Yokohama, the majority of whom were in trades, such as clerical workers and shopkeepers, scorned by the elite. Nevertheless, Cole’s negotiation of the cultural map of Japan shows that some Black Americans took part in the consolidation of US presence in East Asia and the Pacific. Historians of Reconstruction have produced a robust body of scholarship on Black Americans’ claims to equality and belonging to the United States after the Civil War on the basis of their birth on American soil, military service during the war, and contributions to the cultivation of land through their labor. The United States’ transpacific expansion allowed Black Americans to make these claims in different ways by asserting their roles as agents of US empire abroad.

Chinese immigration to the United States was one of the most important consequences of Pacific integration in the mid-nineteenth century. The last two articles of the forum uncover little-known aspects of the debates over Chinese immigrants’ freedom and legal rights in the Civil War era related to habeas corpus and naturalization, with particular attention to the transpacific contexts of this history. Tian Xu’s article examines connections between Chinese habeas corpus petitions against sexual commerce and the detention of Chinese immigrant women in California from the 1850s to the 1880s. Habeas corpus petitions allowed Chinese immigrants to challenge Chinese exclusion law and secure entry to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Xu sheds light on the less familiar aspects of the Chinese habeas petitions by revealing how they provided Chinese women in California with a legal device for freedom from Chinese brothel owners and human traffickers, who participated in transpacific networks of sexual commerce. Habeas corpus, however, could also work against the interests of Chinese women, in the case of immigrant detention. When the interests of California government officials, Chinese merchant leaders, and Christian missionaries in restricting the importation of Chinese prostitutes converged, the habeas hearing became a site where the moral character of Chinese women was tested, leading to the detention and exclusion of those deemed “lewd and debauched.” Xu’s article thus highlights the diverse forms of legal encounters between transpacific systems of human trafficking and the regulation of morality in the American West. Building on recent scholarship’s recognition that freedom was contested over multiple groups of people, including Black Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, women, and the poor, across the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the article puts Chinese women in California into the broader landscape of struggles for freedom in the period.

In the final article, Beth Lew-Williams reconsiders Chinese immigrants’ relationship with US naturalization law. Historians have viewed the inability to naturalize as a defining characteristic of the Chinese experience in the nineteenth-century United States. The conventional narrative is that Radical Republicans’ proposal to make naturalization law colorblind during Reconstruction failed due to California politicians’ fear of extending US citizenship to the Chinese, leaving them as permanent aliens. As Lew-Williams reveals, however, despite the legal bar, a significant number of Chinese immigrants across the United States managed to naturalize to the extent that nearly 7 percent of the Chinese-born population in the country obtained US citizenship by 1900. In light of this fact, Lew-Williams urges historians to examine how the Chinese were able to naturalize and the historical implications of this accomplishment, rather than uncritically taking Chinese migrants’ alien status for granted. Many Chinese naturalized at courthouses within the contiguous United States, but America’s territorial expansion into the Pacific also opened a new route to US citizenship for the Chinese. The Hawaiian Organic Act of 1900 naturalized former citizens of the Republic of Hawai’i, turning its citizens of Chinese descent into US citizens. US citizenship also made a transpacific life possible for Chinese Americans by allowing them to leave and reenter the United States, a kind of movement denied to most Chinese immigrants under the exclusion laws. At the same time, Lew-Williams recognizes the fundamental fragility of the naturalized citizenship of Chinese Americans, who were subjected to constant threats of denaturalization, which could happen through collaboration between US diplomats in China and the secretary of state in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, the story of Chinese naturalization enriches the political and legal historiography of Reconstruction by demonstrating that Chinese alienage was not as absolute as historians tend to think. Together, the articles by Xu and Lew-Williams show that transpacific connections provided an important context in which Asian immigrants pursued their rights in postbellum America.

As a whole, this forum invites historians to consider Asia and the Pacific as they study the United States in the Civil War era. Migration and diplomacy are organizing concepts in this volume. Future research could pursue those themes, or it could take other approaches and focus on other subjects. For instance, much remains to be investigated concerning how ideas and practices of unfree labor traveled across the Pacific world.[22] And much more could be done to explore links between Hawai’i as the producer of sugar and California as the processing center in explorations of commercial and imperial visions in the post–Civil War Pacific.[23] The rich field of the Civil War era, in short, could be even richer with more perspectives from Asia and the Pacific.

[1] Thomas A. Klug, “The Detroit Labor Movement and the United States–Canada Border, 1885–1930,” Mid-America 80 (Fall 1998): 222.

[2] San Francisco Call, June 12, 1892.

[3] Salt Lake Semi-Weekly, July 6, 1897; Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985), 40–57.

[4] House of Representatives, Ex. Doc. 176, 48th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 2, 835 (1884).

[5] For a recent study of immigration in the Civil War era, see the forum on the subject in the September 2021 issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Katherine Carper and Kevin Kenny, “Introduction: Immigration in the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11 (September 2021): 311–16, and following articles by Michael A. Schoeppner, Katherine Carper, Kevin Kenny, and Lucy E. Salyer.

[6] Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021); Kevin Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States(New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

[7] Steven Hahn, A Nation without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Viking, 2016), 3.

[8] There are exceptions to the trend of Asian American historiography’s focus on the twentieth century. Most recent ones include Sue Fawn Chung, Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Kazuhiro Oharazeki, Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887–1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018); Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019); Ngai, Chinese Question; Mark T. Johnson, The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

[9] Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Richard Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[10] For studies on these subjects, see Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006); Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Don H. Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); David Armitage et al., “Interchange: Nationalism and Internationalism in the Era of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 98 (September 2011): 455–89; Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Andrew M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Robert E. May, Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Future of Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, eds., The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014); Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States(Boston: Beacon, 2018); David Prior, ed., Reconstruction in a Globalizing World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Enrico Dal Lago, Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Gregory P. Downs, The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Ann L. Tucker, Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020); Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers, eds., Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformations in the 1860s (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020); David Prior, ed., Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022); Evan C. Rothera, Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022).

[11] Todd W. Wahlstrom, The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War(New York: Basic Books, 2020); Alan P. Marcus, Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

[12] Bender, Nation among Nations; Armitage et al., “Interchange”; Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[13] Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (December 2016): 572–74; Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” in The Essential West: Collected Essays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 100–126.

[14] Smith, “Beyond North and South,” 567. Representative studies of the West in the Civil War era include Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007); Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Smith, Freedom’s Frontier; Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); William S. Kiser, Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle Over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (New York: Scribner, 2020); Kevin Waite, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); William S. Kiser, Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

[15] Smith, “Beyond North and South,” 584–85.

[16] Some scholars’ works must be noted as important exceptions to the neglect of Chinese immigration in Civil War–era scholarship. See Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Edlie L. Wong, Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Lucy E. Salyer, “Reconstructing the Immigrant: The Naturalization Act of 1870 in Global Perspective,” Journal of the Civil War Era 11 (September 2021): 382–405; Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic, 145–56, 179–202, 208–13.

[17] Matt K. Matsuda, “The Pacific,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 758–80; Gary Y. Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Armitage and Alison Bashford, eds., Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds., Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014); Gary Y. Okihiro, American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Paul A. Kramer, “A Complex of Seas: Passages between Pacific Histories,” Amerasia Journal 42, no. 3 (2016): 32–41; Lon Kurashige, ed., Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017); David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds., Oceanic Histories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Matt K. Matsuda, A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories: Ten Design Principles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Henry Knight Lozano, California and Hawai’i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848–1959 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021); Jinah Kim and Nitasha Tamar Sharma, “Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies,” Critical Ethnic Studies 7, no. 2 (2021), https://doi-org.proxy048.nclive.org/10.5749/CES.0702.01.

[18] Adam McKeown, “Movement,” in Armitage and Bashford, Pacific Histories, 150; Ngai, Chinese Question.

[19] Gregory Rosenthal, Beyond Hawai’i: Native Labor in the Pacific World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 1, 14. On Pacific Islanders, see also Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); David A. Chang, “Borderlands in a World at Sea: Concow Indians, Native Hawaiians, and South Chinese in Indigenous, Global, and National Spaces,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 384–403; Bronwen Douglas, Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); David A. Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographics of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Juliann Anesi et al., “(Re)centering Pacific Islanders in Trans-Pacific Studies: Transdisciplinary Dialogue, Critique, and Reflections from the Diaspora,” Critical Ethnic Studies 7, no 2 (2021), https://doi-org.proxy048.nclive.org/10.5749/CES.0702.12.

[20] Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, 233–38.

[21] Anesi et al., “(Re)centering Pacific Islanders in Trans-Pacific Studies.”

[22] For instance, in a recent journal article, Christopher Florio examined attempts by overseers on southern plantations to export the practices of American slavery to British India in the 1840s. Christopher M. Florio, “From Poverty to Slavery: Abolitionists, Overseers, and the Global Struggle for Labor in India,” Journal of American History 102, no. 4 (2016): 1005–24.

[23] Lozano, California and Hawai’i Bound, 80.

Hidetaka Hirota

Hidetaka Hirota is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (2017).

Congratulations to the 2023 Anne Braden Prize Winner

Congratulations to the 2023 Anne Braden Prize Winner

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Formal headshot portrait of woman in black top. The Southern Historical Association is delighted to announce the winner of the Anne Braden Prize: Kimberly Welch, “The Stability of Fortunes: A Free Black Woman, Her Legacy, and the Legal Archive in Antebellum New Orleans,” JOURNAL OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA 12 (December 2022): 473-502. This prize, which was first awarded in 2022, recognizes the best article on a topic in Southern women’s history. This year’s selection committee was composed of Professors Joan Cashin (chair), Brandi Brimmer, and Lori Glover.

The prize citation is as follows: Professor Welch tells a compelling story about Eulalie Mandeville, a free black woman who navigated through the white-controlled legal system in antebellum Louisiana to protect her rights.  An inheritance dispute broke out in 1846, when Mandeville’s white partner, Eugene Macarty, died.  She used a brilliant strategy, making savvy use of the documentary record, to fend off Macarty’s white relatives and safeguard her children’s future.  She prevailed in court and was able to keep her assets.  Professor Welch explored over three hundred and fifty pages of testimony, and she presents her argument in clear, graceful prose.  Her well-crafted article casts new light on issues of gender, race, and the workings of the court system in the Old South. 

Congratulations!

Hilary N. Green

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).

USCT Kin’s Generational Battle for Equality

USCT Kin’s Generational Battle for Equality

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Even before the Civil War began, African Americans were fighting for racial and social equality. Often, historians focus on the lived experiences of African Americans residing in southern states to understand how African Americans fought to reframe society to become more inclusive. It is vital that we also acknowledge the complexities and experiences of northern African Americans as well. Anti-Blackness was never isolated to one region. Even in states where slavery was eventually abolished, racism continued evolving.

Pennsylvania was an example of a northern state that sought to normalize and codify white supremacy. Antebellum state policies, laws, and racial attitudes demonstrates the difference between being opposed to slavery and being for racial equality.  African Americans had faced attempts to restrict them—even if not enslaved—for decades. One such family was the Rothwell family, who lived in Chester, Pennsylvania, who navigated life (including anti-Blackness) in a free state.

1838 was a significant year in African American experience in Pennsylvania. In May 1838, when Philadelphian anti-abolitionists burned down Pennsylvania Hall, a newly opened “Temple of Free Discussion” where a diverse collection of abolitionists and women’s rights advocates congregated.[1] Anti-abolitionists then burned African American homes, religious institutions, schools, and businesses as they violently expressed their racist views. To be clear, this was neither the first nor the last white-led race riot in Philadelphia. That same year the state legislature revised the definition of “freemen” to be exclusively white and male, and explicitly both racialized and gendered voting rights which continued until the passage of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. By the fall, voters (who were primarily white men) approved the new state constitution.[2] Thus, it was evident that many white Pennsylvanians did not believe in racial equality.

For the Rothwell family who were African Americans living about nineteen miles south of Philadelphia, 1838 was a memorable year due to the birth of Alfred (a future Civil War soldier in the Third United States Colored Infantry (USCI)). Due to actions beyond their control, including birth, Alfred lived in a state that demonstrated hostility (sometimes violently) towards African Americans. He would spend his life battling racism while trying to live on a day-to-day basis.

Life for the Rothwells and Black Pennsylvanians dramatically changed after the state legislature decided (for various reasons) to formally ban slavery in 1847. African Americans undoubtedly celebrated the new policy, primarily as it provided more opportunities for human rights activism. For Isaac Rothwell, Sr. (Alfred’s father), the humanitarian and grassroots social activism connected to, according to a descendant, “using his sailing expertise to help hide Blacks seeking freedom.”[3] Perhaps Alfred continued down the path while working as a fisherman (before he enlisted).

It is also essential to recognize that employment on northern waterways was an anomaly for many Pennsylvanian African Americans. Philadelphia, for instance, was a city where many African Americans found it extremely difficult to find in any occupation beyond unskilled labor. Historian W.E.B. Du Bois stated that “Everyone knows that in a city like Philadelphia[,] a Negro does not have [the] same chance to exercise his ability or secure work according to his talents as a white man.”[4]  Looking northward toward New York City, white—employers and customers—used numerous methods to limit employment opportunities for African Americans. Thus, northern African Americans working semi-skilled or skilled occupations resisted occupational racial discrimination daily.

Life for northern African Americans, including the Rothwell family, fundamentally changed after U.S. Congressmen (in both free and slave states) negotiated terms to protect the “rights” of enslavers nationwide which fundamentally threatened the life and liberty of all African Americans. Efforts to protect African Americans who fled from their enslavers dramatically increased after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The revised federal law simultaneously protected the rights of enslavers to their “human property” while making any African Americans (sometimes with baseless claims or kidnapping) a potential victim, who was rarely (if ever) allowed to testify on their behalf. Additionally, the federal policy strengthened its punishments for those found in violation of not enforcing the law, including exorbitant fines and lengthy jail sentences. Thus, the Rothwell family’s activism was critical in saving lives while directly opposing the racist federal law because they were in direct violation of a federal law that prioritized white enslavers “property” ownership over the humanity of African Americans.

Despite this racial climate, Alfred still created a meaningful life. He married Elizabeth Harris in 1857. Between 1858 to 1862, the couple had three children—James, Isaac, and Hannah. Life for the growing family was difficult for numerous reasons as they tried to survive and combat racism. Little did their family know that their lives would forever change when the Civil War began.

In the years leading up to the mobilization of USCT regiments, many white people (including numerous northerners) questioned if African Americans would make good soldiers saying they lacked the courage. Their flawed assertion ignored that African Americans demonstrated bravery in their battles against white supremacy Any person questioning the willingness of African American men to serve in the U.S. military ignored the fact that Black men served in the U.S. Navy throughout the war’s entirety.

USCT recruits were a diverse group with a legion of reasons to become U.S. Army soldiers. For some African American men, soldiering allowed them to simultaneously refute denigrations of their manhood while making public demands for full and equal national citizenship. Other men desired to engage in armed combat to destroy slavery. Some men needed the one-time cash injections that some enlisted men could amass during the enlistment process. Unfortunately, enlistment records rarely reveal what motivated young men, such as the Rothwells—Alfred, Isaac, Jr., and Samuel—and George Potts, all to enlist in the Third USCI in July of 1863. Regardless of their motivations, their actions had the potential to impact the men’s kin as well, for the Rothwells and Potts they were families that now had personal connections to Pennsylvania’s first (of eleven) USCT regiments.

Families, and the larger community, were critical supporters of the war effort, and numerous war propagandists agreed. African American women, more specifically, received frequent public praise from a racially diverse group of northerners for their prominent role in getting able-bodied men to enlist. For instance, Pennsylvanian Congressman William D. Kelley proclaimed that African American mothers, such as Elizabeth Powell and Sarah Potts, and wives, such as Elizabeth Rothwell, were vital to the war effort.[5] The Weekly Anglo-African (published in New York City) printed similar statements in widely circulated newspaper articles.

For Alfred’s young family, however, his enlistment disrupted their already destabilized family economy since he was his family’s only documented full-time wage earner. His July 4, 1863 enlistment immediately ended his civilian wages. He also never received his $100 enlistment bounty due for his service. Additionally, throughout his military career, he received seven dollars monthly due to U.S. War Department policies. At the same time, white soldiers (of the same rank, in the same army, and doing the same work) made thirteen dollars per month. Not only was his life cheapened, but it also directly impacted Alfred’s wife and three young children, who would rely on his soldier’s income to survive. Incorporating the material realities of northern African American families when discussing the consequences of soldiering ultimately provides more depth and better uncovers the complexities of familial life (in and outside of the military).

The training process was complex, and for many enlisted men and their kin, the forced familial separation did not cease them from seeking to remain connected to each other. For northern African American women, like Emilie Davis, visiting and supporting USCT soldiers was a priority, but not solely for the spectacle of seeing African American men in U.S. Army uniform.[6] In many instances, African Americans used various forms of public transit, placing themselves in volatile (and sometimes life-threatening) situations as they tried to support men who trained. Northern African American women made U.S. Army camp visits routine occurrences.  Mary Leighton (the wife of Benjamin Davis) brought their infant son, Jerome to Camp William Penn to spend time together. Little did the young family know it would be the last time they would all be together, as Benjamin would die as a prisoner of war later that year. Perhaps Elizabeth Rothwell also brought her children to camp. However, raising multiple children alone may have limited her ability to see Alfred, highlighting how familial dynamics became even more chaotic during the war.

The Rothwell family forever changed on August 26, 1863. As part of the Third USCI’s siege on Fort Wagner at Morris Island, South Carolina, Alfred was killed while digging a trench. Thomas R. Rockhold, a first sergeant in the Third USCI, spoke to Alfred as he said his last words. According to Rockhold, Alfred proclaimed, “Goodbye dear wife. Please don’t grieve for (me), for I died in a good cause.”[7] Assuming that Alfred’s last words were actual, then it meant that he wanted to assure his kin that he had what some historians refer to as the “Good Death.” In short, dying servicemembers expressed their adoration for their relatives or partner before dying. It is important to note that the “Good Death,” at its core, was meant to provide some solace to grieving individuals who could theoretically take pride in the symbolic and meaningful sacrifices.[8] While it is certainly understandable why people on the home front might want, even need, the knowledge of their kin thinking of them at the end, the fact remains that they were still dead. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, she was now a widow raising three young children.

Immediately following the tragic news, Elizabeth successfully received a widow’s pension of eight dollars per month. The money was undoubtedly a welcomed addition to her household, but it would never replace the loss of Alfred. Like countless Civil War widow pensioners, Elizabeth, receiving the money also meant that she, per Congressional laws, stipulated that she must remain celibate (and void acting in “a manner unbecoming of a woman”) for the remainder of her life. Otherwise, she could lose her pension and possibly face jail time for pension fraud. In short, widow’s pensions (through federal policies and oversight) sought to control women’s private and intimate lives. She did not apply for the children to receive minors’ pensions in 1863 for unknown reasons.

Even though politicians and federal government agencies attempted to control Elizabeth’s life, she made decisions that gave her agency over her family. In 1868, she wed Robert Anderson, demonstrating that she lived on her terms.[9] It also meant that, after getting married, she lost her widow’s pension, as stipulated through pension laws. Perhaps in response to the changes to their family size and finances motivated the Rothwell children (under Elizabeth’s guidance) to apply for minors’ pensions, which all three children had approved. Each pension (of eight dollars monthly) continued until each child turned sixteen, with Hannah’s being the last one to end in 1878).

Their collective minor’s pensions illustrate that Elizabeth remained committed, to the best of her abilities, to ensuring some financial stability for her family. Even in the face of unending racial discrimination, she ensured that her children graduated from the Soldiers’ Orphan School in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania. Isaac and James Rothwell were so proud of their scholastic endeavors that they shared their diplomas with the Bureau of Pensions, in 1916.

In 1919, Elizabeth passed away. She left behind a legacy of fighting racial and gender discrimination. Her life was so inspiring that one of her descendants, Michelle Marsden, conducted years’ worth of self-funded familial research that took them to numerous archives as they sought to discover more about their ancestors. Conducting this personal research was difficult and time-consuming, but their commitment to reclaiming the histories of their kin kept them going. It is important that scholars not only illuminate Marsden’s efforts, similar to other USCT descendants, but also recognize that our work as scholars have the potential to either empower or do harm to the kin and communities of USCT soldiers, even today.[10]

[1] History of Pennsylvania Hall, which was Destroyed by a Mob, On the 17th of May, 1838 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838), 12, 70—72, 122.

[2] Nicholas Wood, “ ‘A Sacrifice on the Altar of Slavery’: Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837—1838,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 2011), 75, 77, 79, 81, 84, 87.

[3] R.J.N. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 42-55.

[4] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (reprint edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 98.

[5] Address at a Meeting for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: n.p., 1863), 4.

[6] Notes from a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis, ed. Karsonya Wise Whitehead (Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 44.

[7] Letter from Thomas R. Rockhold, on August 27, 1863, in Alfred Rothwell, Third USCI pension file.

[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 17.

[9] 1917 Pension Bureau document, in John Poulson, Third USCI pension file.

[10] https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2023/03/understanding-northern-black-familiess-civil-war-an-interview-with-michelle-marsden/, Accessed on 8/24/2023.

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

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

Preview of the September 2023 JCWE

Preview of the September 2023 JCWE

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In this issue, the burgeoning fields of legal history and memory take center stage in our examination of the history of the Civil War Era.

Sarah Barringer Gordon’s “Staying in Place: Southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Postwar Battles for Control of Church Property” draws on both legal history and church history to examine struggles over property and power in Methodist churches in the post–Civil War south. Gordon traces the history of the founding of the then-named Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) in 1870, finding its legal roots in an 1868 Kentucky Supreme Court case that pitted a Black congregation against the white-controlled southern Methodist church that had previously underwritten and controlled its space. As AME and AME Zion pastors recruited Black Methodists from the southern Methodist church, white trustees—and some Black pastors—struggled for legal control of congregations and properties, eventually creating the CME as a distinct, enduring Black Methodist denomination. Gordon ably intertwines the sacred and the profane as she emphasizes the importance of law for the study of religion.

In “‘She Is a very Smart Woman and a Great Trader’: Enslaved and Free Black Women’s Property Claims and Entrepreneurship in the Antebellum South,” Nicole Viglini turns to the tools of legal history to explore how Black women, both free and enslaved, claimed property in the pre-emancipation south. Viglini creatively reads applications for compensation from the Southern Claims Commission to trace antebellum Black women’s networks of credit, deepening our understanding of Black women’s involvement in the southern economy and the relationship between that economy and personal relationships of trust. Through establishing credit, Viglini shows, antebellum Black women became entrepreneurs and established an enduring role in the southern economy despite limitations imposed by law and culture.

In our second roundtable of the year, Adam Domby and Karen L. Cox moderate a lively discussion about “Monuments and Memory: Civil War Statuary, Public Facing Scholarship, and the Future of Memory Studies.” Over the past decade, and especially since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, scholars have been asked to take public roles in debates over Confederate memory. In this roundtable, eight scholars and history practitioners discuss northern monuments, African American commemorations of the war, the white male commemorative landscape, the impact of protests, contemporary Civil War memories, the role of historians in public debates, the issue of “presentism” in history, and the future of Civil War memory studies.

In this issue’s review essay, Jennifer Oast examines the evolving scholarship on slavery’s impact on universities. In “Forgotten No Longer: Universities and Slavery in Twenty-First Century Scholarship and Memory,” Oast traces the explosion of interest in this topic over the past two decades, as universities have examined their roots in slave trading and profits derived from enslaved people’s work. She highlights scholarly studies of universities’ economic ties to slavery, roles in promoting slavery, and employment of enslaved people without compensation, and she explores contemporary demands for apologies, memorialization, and reparations.

This issue also includes fourteen fine book reviews, covering both broad synthetic volumes and new monographs, on topics ranging from China to Yellowstone. The reviews—and the happily increasing flow of submissions—are tribute to the persistence of scholars and our editorial staff during these trying years. 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

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.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s Landmark: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Turns 15

Drew Gilpin Faust’s Landmark: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Turns 15

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In 1866, while surveying former Confederate landscapes, Edmund Whitman observed that the “entire country over which the war has extended, . . . composes one vast charnel house of the dead.”[1] Although southerners were mostly the denizens living inside that veritable “house of the dead,” Drew Gilpin Faust has produced an intellectual history of Civil War death that focuses chiefly on New Englanders. In so doing, Faust breaks with decades of her previous scholarly attentiveness towards the white South. Dr. Faust’s professional background sheds light on this latter-day concentration. Faust researched and wrote the book during her tenure as dean of the Radcliffe Institute, and became Harvard’s 28th president six months prior to its publication. Beginning on the second page of Faust’s preface, Civil War-era Harvard graduates, dropouts, and professors appear, with figures that include Henry L. Abbott, Robert Gould Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Francis Channing Barlow, Edmund Whitman, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Henry Bowditch, poet James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others.[2]This crowd of Bostonian soldiers, intellectuals, and reformers, (in a monograph about killing in the American South), reveals the purpose of the book. This Republic of Suffering is a study of the reactions, reflections, and reforms provoked by the carnage of the American Civil War – what Faust calls “the work of death.”[3] The book’s title divulges Faust’s converging approaches. While observing dead and dying Union soldiers in the South, Frederick Law Olmstead reflected that such carnage had created a “republic of suffering.”[4] Across the 271-page narrative, Faust uncovers how the “work of death” fundamentally reshaped Victorian grief customs among men and women, yielded a literary harvest of fiction and poetry, and altered the Federal government’s obligations to the dead and their families. In total, Faust’s Republic  emerges as a monumental contribution to the intellectual history of the era.

The book opens with the reactions of an American people, government, and military bureaucracy that were wholly unprepared for the killing that would ultimately claim at least 620,000 combatants.[5] In lieu of the “Good Death” defined in the medieval ars moriendi, Civil War soldiers met inglorious ends at the hands of disease, accidents, suicide, executions, and the weapons of the Industrial Revolution. Soldiers were suddenly brutalized and desensitized by the nature and scale of Civil War killing. The constant conundrum of how to respectfully (or even physically) dispose of so many human bodies is an undertow that runs throughout the book. “At war’s outset,” Faust writes, “the coffin [was] the basic marker of the ‘decency’ that distinguished human from animal interment.”[6] With so many to bury, however, the coffin was the first norm to disappear as soldiers “shoveled corpses into pits . . . dehumanizing both the living and the dead through their disregard.”[7] As one Union soldier wrote after Shiloh, he and his colleagues would “dig holes, . . . pile them in like dead cattle and have teams to draw them together like picking up pumpkins.”[8]After Antietam, fifty-eight dead Confederates were thrown into a well.[9] Additionally, bodies were robbed of jewelry, wallets and clothing. Amidst such conditions, a Union surgeon found that “all signs of emotion . . . or ordinary feelings of tenderness and sympathy” disappeared.[10] The “unforgettable scenes of battlefield carnage,” Faust reasons, “made soldiers question both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation.”[11]

As with all wars, notions of violence and manhood became inextricably intertangled. W.E.B. DuBois later thought it “extraordinary . . . that in the minds of most people . . . only murder makes men.” DuBois mocked this marque of masculinity, saying “The slave . . . was humble . . . and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!”[12] Through connecting emancipation to killing, however, Faust notes that the war gave enslaved males “an opportunity to become the agent rather than the victim of violence. Killing for black soldiers . . . was an act of personal empowerment and the vehicle of racial emancipation. To kill and to be . . . permitted to kill was ironically to claim a human right.”[13] But with killing also came retribution. The concept of vengeance against both the living and the dead constitutes the most searing sections of the book. Pushing against “the oft-repeated trope” of the “brothers” war, Faust exposes an “emerging delight in killing,” and a deepening sense that “vengeance came to play an ever more important role, joining principles of duty and self-defense in legitimating violence.”[14] Faust persuasively illustrates that the appetite for revenge did not end at Appomattox. “The hundreds of thousands of Union bodies in their midst,” Faust argues, “provided an irresistible target for southern rage as well as a means to express the refusal to accept Confederate defeat. It had proved impossible to overcome a live Union army, but bitter Confederates could still wage war against a dead one.”[15] This vengeance against poorly buried Union corpses, highlights the practicality of a formalized national cemetery program.

Norms disappeared, but so did individuals.  Soldiers’ bodies were literally “vaporized by the firepower of this first modern war.” According to Faust, civilians “found this outcome incomprehensible, but soldiers who had witnessed the destructiveness of battle understood all too well the reality of men instantly transformed into nothing.”[16] With thousands listed as “missing” on casualty roles, families hired “paid agents” engaged in detective work to find the graves of the disappeared.[17] Sutlers sold name badges to help identify bodies. Both Union and Confederate governments were slow to adequately address the crisis of missing soldiers and “Unknown” graves, but in July 1864, newly organized “registration units” managed to identify “every Union body” and record “every grave” at the Fort Stevens battlefield.[18] This success at “naming” Civil War dead, however, was unmatched before Fort Stevens and never replicated after.

For Faust, the work of reflecting upon the losses and disappearances is mostly left to northern poets, authors, and intellectuals. Faust probes the literary meditations of army nurse Walt Whitman, combat survivor Ambrose Bierce and New Englanders like Herman Melville, professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (the latter three of which never wrote within one-hundred miles of a battlefield). [19] Within this rich harvest of Civil War literature, the “Good Death” itself is missing. Bierce, for example, focused on the ignoble, often “sudden” deaths of suicides, executions, and the thrashing about of battlefield casualties in their final moments.[20] Although Faust mentions Confederate poets Henry Timrod and Abram Ryan, the South’s literary musings are noticeably absent.[21]

Leaving the literary realm, Faust returns to her principal theme of reform. To compensate for government deficiencies, private organizations, and common citizens stepped-up to push for and provide needed improvements designed to limit casualties, as well as collect, preserve, memorialize, and account for dead and missing soldiers. Although previous historians regard surgeon Jonathan Letterman as progenitor of the Union Army Ambulance Corps, Faust lauds an obscure father. When Bostonian Henry Bowditch’s wounded son, Nat, died following days of neglect on a battlefield, Bowditch turned a need for an army ambulance service into a “cause célèbre.”[22] “The state, he insisted . . . had an obligation to its soldiers.”[23] Bowditch’s goal, buttressed by what Faust calls his “moral influence,”[24] (as a grieving father), “was achieved in the last year of the war.”[25] With this accomplishment, Faust reckons, “Bowditch transformed Nat’s suffering into the salvation of others.”[26] Beyond individuals like Bowditch, Faust surveys newly founded and privately run improvement associations like the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the New England Soldiers Relief Association, the Christian Commission, the Pennsylvania State Agency, Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office, the Central Association of South Carolina, the Louisiana Soldiers Relief Association, and the South Carolina Relief Depot.[27] These organizations engendered reform, far beyond anything within the antebellum military imagination and new directions in federal legislation (often ushered by soldiers’ families) led to pension and survivors’ benefits.[28]

With the September 1861 General Orders No. 33, government reforms toward burying the dead commenced.[29] That necessity did not stop until the central state stood “in loco parentis” toward those who had fallen in its defense.[30] In so doing, according to Faust, “the federal government assumed new responsibility for the war dead.”[31] “No longer simply the responsibility of their families,” Faust continues, “they, and their loss, now belonged to the nation.”[32] This increasing government stewardship, led directly to the genesis of the national cemetery system.[33]Beginning with emergency measures by generals in the field, followed by more organized directives from the War Department,[34] and ultimately with congressional legislation in April 1866 and again in February 1867, national cemeteries for Union dead eventually broke ground in every state that witnessed a major battle.[35] Here too, however, private citizens like David Wills of Gettysburg and reformers like Clara Barton were deeply involved, as were Union army officers like James Moore, Edmund Whitman, and Chaplain William Earnshaw. By 1871 the work was complete. 303,536 Union soldiers were reinterred at seventy-four newly established national cemeteries, at the cost of more than four million dollars.[36] The defeated Confederacy, led by local Ladies Memorial Associations, took years to catch-up and buried rebel dead in separate cemeteries. The number of graves marked “Unknown” in Union and Confederate cemeteries today, remains as a testament to the belatedness of measures to identify, collect, and account for the dead and missing.

Faust explains that the postwar work of death gave the United States its Memorial Day. Initiated by Charleston freedmen on May 1, 1865, “the first Decoration Day” occurred at a burial plot for Union prisoners of war. [37] In 1866 southerners set April 26 (and other dates) to honor their dead. Finally, in 1868, General John Logan fixed May 30 as the nation’s official Memorial Day. Although, as Faust notes, “Even today many southern states recognize Confederate Memorial Day on a different date from the nationwide holiday.”[38] In terms of chronology, this point is Faust’s final major distinction revealing the separateness of the Union and Confederate burials and customs.

Despite the “remarkable shift in attitudes and behaviors toward accounting for the dead”[39] begun by individuals, private agencies and government offices, Faust expertly addresses the fact that the number of noncombatant civilian Civil War deaths remains completely unknown. “[N]o one then or since has tried to make a systematic compilation or enumeration of such deaths,” Faust observes. “Their losses remain the stuff of anecdote and even legend.”[40] This “work of death in the American Civil War,” therefore, remains unfinished. In 2011, however, demographic historian J. David Hacker published exhaustive census analysis revising the century-long agreed upon combatant death count of 620,000 to a “preferred estimate” of 752,000.[41] Hacker’s 2011 findings, therefore, constitute the greatest post-Faust stride toward Civil War “accounting” to date.

Fifteen years after publication, This Republic of Suffering endures as a remarkable model of intellectual history, but much ground is still left unbroken. As stated earlier, those southerners living inside the veritable “house of the dead” during the war are given short shrift in Faust’s mostly New Englander narrative.[42] Scholar Angela Esco Elder’s recent Love and Duty offers trailblazing insight into white southern wartime widowhood.[43] Additionally, John Neff and Caroline Janney have written admirably about post-war reconciliation, commemoration, and Lost Cause traditions related to the South’s dead.[44] But until historians further explore the wartime experience of  black and white southerners watching their states, towns, counties, farms and yards turned into mass graves, the history of death and the American Civil War will remain profoundly incomplete.[45]

[1] Faust, 221-222. This quote is partially repeated on page 228.

[2] Other Harvard figures deliniated by Faust include Francis Palfrey, John Pierpont, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Freeman Clarke. Another Harvard individual that is found throughout Faust’s book, but never named, is Henry Whitney Bellows. As the architect and founding president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Bellows’ work ranks among the most discussed and lauded in Faust’s narrative.

[3] Faust, xiv, emphasis added by Jones.

[4] Frederick Law Olmsted, quoted by Faust, xiii. Especially in the arena of public health, Olmstead is considered a public intellectual.

[5] Faust cites the facile death toll of 620,000 Civil War combatants, even though she discusses J. David Hacker’s dissertation, wherein he argues that the combatant death count is underestimated. Since then, Hacker has published findings that raise the estimated Civil War combatant dead to some 750,000. Mention of Hacker’s conclusions are not listed in her text or endnotes, simply because his milestone essay “A Census Based Count of Civil War Dead,” Civil War History, 57, no. 4 (December 2011) was still three years from publication. See Faust, 273n(2)-274.

[6] Faust, 73.

[7] Faust, xvii.

[8] Faust, 71.

[9] Faust, 69.

[10] Faust, 59.

[11] Faust, 31.

[12] Faust, 48.

[13] Faust, 55.

[14] Faust, 32; 37; and 35.

[15] Faust, 224.

[16] Faust, 128.

[17] Faust, 117.

[18] Faust, 135; Faust does not offer an official designation for these groups, she notes them as simply, “a special graves registration unit” or “registration units,” without a formal title.

[19] Faust states that Emily Dickinson “has been portrayed as a recluse, closeted from the real world and its tribulations;” (Faust, 204).

[20] Faust, 198.

[21] Faust briefly mentions southern intellectuals James Henry Hammond and William Gilmore Simms, but does not quote from their writings. See Faust, 181.

[22] Faust, 170.

[23] Faust, 90.

[24] Faust, 90.

[25] Faust, 170.

[26] Faust, 170.

[27] Faust, 87-89, 107, 110-117.

[28] Faust, 255-256.

[29] Faust, 65.

[30] Edmund Whitman, quoted by Faust, 229.

[31] Faust, 99; emphasis added by Jones.

[32] Faust, 101.

[33] Faust, 135.

[34] Faust states that “Without any appropriation or formal policy with which to implement this legislative action, the War Department established cemeteries as emergency circumstances demanded. . . . Three of these cemeteries, Chattanooga, Stones River and Knoxville, were created by Union generals;” see Faust, 99.

[35] Faust, 223; 235; 238.

[36] Faust completely ignores the establishment of national cemeteries in the Carolinas, as well as the Trans-Mississippi West theater of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and modern-day Oklahoma.

[37] Faust, 228.

[38] Faust, 241.

[39] Faust, 135.

[40] Faust, 138.

[41] J. David Hacker, “A Census Based Count of Civil War Dead,” Civil War History, 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307-348.

[42] The imbalance toward Faust’s northern focus may surprise readers, considering her recognition that “Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War,” that “In the South . . . 18 percent of white males of military age perished in the war,” and that “In the North . . . the rate of death of men of military age was one-third that in the Confederacy,” (see Faust xi, 149 and 151 respectively). My use of the term “Yankee” is to again draw attention to the multitude of New England and New York voices employed in Faust’s narrative. Union soldiers and northern civilians from states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Iowa did not consider themselves “Yankees” and are not commonly quoted in Faust’s narrative. The Ohioan Ambrose Bierce and New Yorker Walt Whitman are the only major non-New England northern literary figures that Faust discusses within her book in any detail. Missourian Mark Twain is mentioned but one time.

[43] See Angela Esco Elder, Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

[44] See John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2005), and Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

[45] Given Faust’s long catalog of scholarship exploring southern intellectual history, it is shocking that similar research is not deployed in This Republic of Suffering. The real source of confusion here is the book’s broad subtitle “Death and the American Civil War.” I would venture that President Faust’s editors at Knopf changed her initial subtitle to appeal to a larger market. Perhaps Dr. Faust began with a subtitle which openly declared that the book was mostly about New England reactions, reflection and reforms related to Civil War death.

Evan Jones

Evan C. Jones completed his undergraduate work at the University of Virginia. He is co-editor of Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862-1863 (Louisiana State University Press, 2014).

The Past in Color: A Short History of Hand-Colored Photos During the Civil War Era

The Past in Color: A Short History of Hand-Colored Photos During the Civil War Era

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The American Civil War was one of the most photographed events of the nineteenth century. Powerful images of battlefield carnage, life in the camp, and studio portraits of soldiers in uniform stimulate an emotional response that reminds us of the human cost of war. Likewise, touching photos of grandparents, parents, siblings, and friends back home show another side of the war’s consequences. Previous conflicts like the American Revolution can only be visualized through the creative hands of artists using paint, oil, or slate to capture an imagined reality of warfare. Our memories of that war are shaped in large part by what those artists wanted us to see. With Civil War images, the photographer’s art likewise reflects what they wanted us to see, but this art form uncovers new layers of human complexity through wrinkles, bags under eyes, freckles, fingertips, unkempt hair, period clothing, and stoic expressions.

While my interest in Civil War photography goes back to seeing Mathew Brady’s images on the overhead projector as a student in the 1990s, I took a great interest in colorized images when I began seeing them online about ten years ago. I was particularly inspired by artists Marina Amaral and my friend and public historian Mark Loehrer, both of whom have creatively used colorizations to change my perceptions of the past. During the worst period of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to start teaching myself how to create colorized photos. Since then I have used GIMP, a free open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, to create around 100 colorizations of nineteenth century photos. I subsequently started an Instagram page to highlight these works and have been fortunate to see a few of my works already being used at museums and historic homes.[1]

Figure 1: An unidentified African American Woman in St. Louis during the 1850s colorized by the author. Original photo is from the Missouri Historical Society

It is easy to assume that all nineteenth century images are in black and white. However, many early photographers were acutely aware of the technological limits of their medium. They began experimenting with the use of color shortly after Louis Daguerre’s development of the first commercial form of photography in 1838. Part of this interest came from painters who were anxious to remain employed. Understanding that photography could threaten their bottom line, some painters partnered with photographers to add color to fully developed photos, while in other cases the photographer took on this work themselves. Originally, paint was directly applied to the photo with a brush, but the results were often splotchy and uneven. By the early 1840s, painter and photographer Johann Baptist Isenring developed a standard coloring method. Using a combination of paint pigment and heated gum arabic, artists would apply the combination to the photographic plate and cool it gently blowing until it stuck to the plate.[2]

Figure 2: An extensively tinted ambrotype of an unidentified woman, circa 1850s or 1860s. From the author’s collection.

Examples of tinted photographs can be seen in all forms of early nineteenth century photography, including daguerreotypes (silver plates with copper backing), ambrotypes (glass plates), tintypes (japanned metal plates), and carte-de-visites (paper). Tinted and painted tintypes became a particularly important form of portraiture in the 1860s and 1870s. For people who did not have the time or money to sit for a painted portrait, hand colored tintypes—which usually cost between 25 cents to $2.50—offered an affordable alternative. A new exhibit on colored tintypes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston argues that this form of photography represents “an important visual record of 19th century America and the strivings of everyday people to present themselves at their very best.”[3]

Civil War soldiers were also anxious to present themselves at their very best and often sent photos of themselves in uniform back to loved ones at home. Some of these photos, especially tintypes, were hand colored. One of my favorite examples of a color tinted soldier portrait is an unidentified African American soldier in the 103rd United States Colored Troops Infantry Regiment, Company B.[4] Housed at the Library of Congress, the man in this tintype photo stands proudly in his uniform, which has traces of gold flaking on his kepi, buttons, shoulder epaulettes, belt buckle, and decorative sword case. My favorite aspect, however, is the soldier’s pants, which are tinted blue to reflect the color seen on the pants of enlisted men in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. For me, the blue pants serve as a subtle but important signifier of this soldier’s military service. It makes clear that he was taking a side and fighting for the causes of union and emancipation.

Figure 3: An unidentified soldier with the 103rd United States Colored Troops Infantry Regiment, Company B, Library of Congress.

I have come to appreciate the idea that modern colorizations could be considered an extension of a long practiced tradition of coloring black and white images.[5]

Modern colorizations have provoked important ethical discussions about how history is represented through photography. These discussions have only intensified with the emergence of AI technologies that estimate color tones based on the gray tones of a black and white photo. AI makes it easier to colorize historic photos, but the final results are often poor and use colors that distort the subject’s skin color.

Figure 4: This AI colorization by a Twitter bot (@colorize_bot) demonstrates the shortcomings of AI. The WWI “Harlem Hellfighters” seen in this photo would have worn green uniforms and the hands of the soldier in the foreground are colored purple.

In 2021, an Irish artist colored photos of tortured prisoners in Cambodia during the 1970s. He then went a step further by using AI to add smiles to the prisoners, stripping the photos of their historical context and making light of a human tragedy.[6] While the colorizations themselves were not a point of controversy, the use of AI to change these prisoners’ facial expressions challenges artists to consider the degree to which historic photos can be manipulated in a respectful way, if at all. For those of us who study the Civil War era, who we choose to colorize and how we represent the past through these photos hold great ramifications for how we want people to empathize with history. Colorization artists sometimes frame their work as “bringing life” to a black and white image by generating dignity and a shared sense of humanity with historical subjects through the use of color. But as writer Roshaya Rodness points out, this argument implies that original black and white photos lack life and dignity. “For some, dignity is inherent to an original, for others, dignity is something you add.”[7]

For me, colorizations are sort of like a cover song. These images are creatively remixed tributes to great art that should ideally help viewers better appreciate the original work. I agree with Amaral, who argues that colorizations can help people relate to the past by reminding them that history didn’t happen in black and white. “Are you used to watching football matches in black and white or in color? What seems closer to your reality? What feels more familiar to you?,” Amaral asks.[8] The challenge, then, is to create something artistic, respectful, inspiring, and relatable in a colorization without discarding the context, intent, and dignity of the original photo.

I ultimately decided to start creating colorizations because I found it an interesting way to connect with history. Colorizations touch the margins of public history work depending on how much research the artist does on the photo and how they interpret the image’s meaning. However, since the colors of a subject’s clothing, skin tone, hair, and other factors are often unknown, I consider them more works of art than an extension of my history work. In any case, I took on this hobby not just because I found colored images fascinating, but because of my love of photography in general. If people are inspired to study and connect with history further because of a colorized image, then it seems like a worthwhile endeavor for me.

[1] For examples of my work, see Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, “Slavery in St. Louis,” National Park Service, 2023, accessed August 17, 2023. https://www.nps.gov/articles/series.htm?id=FC06B6BD-EEEA-067B-B56FD792A36DEDAD; Ulysses S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark, “A New Light on Old Flowers,” Ulysses S. Grant Cottage National Historic Landmark, August 4, 2023, accessed August 17, 2023. https://www.grantcottage.org/blog/2023/8/4/a-new-light-on-old-flowers?fbclid=IwAR0AbWycwUGsI1DKtjLBGQFO_DHifGnrpKFbhpuZLe1g8J5tYGltYMjzJyo_aem_AV9qtcKyxmCqqJgM63pPPEUJjiXgFK6yPevqC4jCfg0-PCsmz5pKF0tPbKJVgsQgHS0&mibextid=Zxz2cZ. I am also currently working with the Cape Girardeau [MO] History Center to develop an exhibit with one of my colorizations.

[2] Sean William Nolan, Fixed in Time: A Guide to Dating Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, & Tintypes by their Mats and Cases, for Historians, Genealogists, Collectors, and Antique Dealers (New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017), 22-23.

[3] MFA Boston, “Painted Tintypes: Photography for the People,” MFABoston, 2023, accessed August 17, 2023. https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/painted-tintypes-photography-for-the-people?fbclid=IwAR2P7hLxS5aOdCkzN4ptpIRxLrIqdQR07e2rvEinH-RdVDVXUAfjKDtSO4w; Library of Congress, “Ambrotypes and Tintypes,” Library of Congress, 2009, accessed August 16, 2023. https://www.loc.gov/collections/liljenquist-civil-war-photographs/articles-and-essays/ambrotypes-and-tintypes/#:~:text=The%20price%20of%20ambrotypes%20and,cost%20almost%20%246.00%20in%202009.

[4] The image can be viewed and downloaded at Library of Congress, “Unidentified African American Soldier in Union uniform and Company B, 103rd Regiment Forage Cap with Bayonet and Scabbard in Front of Painted Backdrop Showing Landscape with River,” Library of Congress, no date, accessed August 16, 2023. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010648879/.

[5] Marina Amaral, “Colorization Before the Digital Age,” The Colour of Time with Marina Amaral, April 9, 2022, accessed August 17, 2023. https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/colorization-before-the-digital-age?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.

[6] Prak Chan Thul and Kay Johnson, “After Outcry, VICE Removes Images Adding Smiles to Khmer Rouge Victims,” Reuters, April 11, 2021, accessed August 16, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/cambodia-condemns-vice-images-by-artist-who-added-smiles-khmer-rouge-victims-2021-04-11/; Marina Amaral, “What Should and What Shouldn’t Be Colorized?,” The Colour of Time with Marina Amaral, June 18, 2022, accessed August 14, 2023. https://marinaamaral.substack.com/p/what-should-and-what-shouldnt-be?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.

[7] Roshaya Rodness, “The Controversial History of Colorizing Black-and-White Photographs,” Fast Company, May 20, 2021, accessed August 15, 2023. https://www.fastcompany.com/90638388/the-controversial-history-of-colorizing-black-and-white-photographs.

[8] Amaral, “What Should and Shouldn’t be Colorized?”

Nick Sacco

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.

Announcing the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award

Announcing the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award

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The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. Lindsey Peterson has been selected as the recipient of the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award for 2023. Her winning essay is titled, “‘Homebuilders’: Gender and Union Commemoration in the Trans-Mississippi West.” The prize selection committee, consisting of Dr. Beth Lew-Williams (chair), Dr. Paul Barba, and Dr. Antwain Hunter, wrote: “In this fascinating essay, Peterson explores the history of Civil War commemoration in the trans-Mississippi West, drawing out powerful connections between memorialization of war and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. In addition to examining white Union veterans and their families, she spotlights the complicated role of Native peoples in this history, interrogating their incorporation into the pageantry (with or without their consent) in highly gendered, racialized, and exploitative ways. The result is an exemplary study of the Civil War’s legacies in the West.”

Dr. Peterson is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota. She earned her PhD in December 2022 from the University of Southern Mississippi, where she studied in the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society. She also is the co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (CWRGM), which has digitized and edited over 22,000 documents written to Mississippi Governors during the American Civil War and Reconstruction (late-1859–1878).

Congratulations Lindsey and thanks to the awards committee for their service!

Hilary N. Green

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).

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