Year: 2025
Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

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In today’s Muster, Associate Editor Robert Bland discusses the JCWE’s June special issue on material culture with guest editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts. Dr. Cashin is a professor of history at Ohio State University and author of War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018) and editor of War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era (2018). Dr. Roberts is an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021).

Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Thank you both for making time for this interview. In the introduction for the special issue, you remark that “the Civil War, like all wars, only intensified the relationship between people and material things.”

I wonder if you could speak about these intensified relationships people of the Civil War era had with the material world and how examining this material world provides a new lens on the war?

Joan Cashin: Wars always involve ferocious struggles over material resources, such as food, timber, housing. Wars also generate powerful symbols, which have often been materialized. Flags, for example. This is kind of obvious, but there’s a tremendous struggle during the war to keep the enemy from getting a flag, or to capture the enemy’s flag. I found references to men in both armies who will do almost anything to keep their flag in their hands. And, on the other side, of course, soldiers who will do almost anything to wrest it away.

These material objects have tremendous symbolic power. After the war, of course, there’s a brisk traffic in material objects that are war artifacts. Some of them are rather ordinary objects, and some of them are associated with famous people. Some of them are connected with ordinary men and women such as civilians, soldiers, Blacks, whites, the enslaved, free people.

Robert Bland: But it seems like this is a powerful human impulse. To hold on to and preserve objects that memorialize an embodied history. It seems like the material culture questions are often adjacent to the way we now inquire into the silences in the production of the past and the ways scholars seek to “trouble the archive.”

Alaina Roberts:  Well going off that idea, of silences in the past, when I talk to my students about, you know, if you’re thinking of something that’s not an archival document, but rather something material about the Civil War era, which I teach about a lot, they’re often going to think of a uniform. And that uniform, in their minds, is usually worn by a white person, a white soldier. So I was really happy and appreciative that we were able to bring out the way material culture is important to people of color in this issue, like African Americans and Native folks, today and historically. Because as historians, we know everyday people are engaging in the use of objects and in that memorialization process.

But it’s still taking time to reach the everyday folks, that idea that it’s more than, for example, just a uniform. That it’s about people’s everyday lives and the way symbols take on more meaning for everyone.

Robert Bland:  Along those lines, I wonder if you could speak about the authors and the pieces that they have written. The special issue includes articles about Civil War-era trunks and their relationship to legal culture, school buildings and the materiality of freedom that those buildings embodied, and the process of collecting objects in the public history of the Cherokee nation.

What do the stories of objects like trunks, schoolhouses, and museums tell us about the current state of Civil War-era material culture?

Joan Cashin: I’m really proud of the two articles that we published, one by Laura Edwards and one by Amy Murrell Taylor. Both of them are discussing objects that appear to be rather ordinary, but they both make the strong case that these objects mean a lot to people in the past. Laura Edwards talks about how owning a trunk and filling it with objects is one way that non-elite people can preserve valuable material objects. And it’s a way to also exercise some small measure of privacy. What’s in the trunk belongs to them and nobody else.

Amy also delves into what might seem like a rather ordinary wooden building in the countryside. But she shows how that schoolhouse meant a great deal to the Black community. It is a symbol of their emancipation, the fact they can now build their own institutions. The building also serves as a church and as a post office.

There’s also a struggle around the different parties on how the building was designed and debates about how it should be used.

Alaina Roberts: I really appreciated that Amy’s article allows us to get a different perspective on something I think is very commonly discussed in African American historiography, which is education. It’s always, you know, African Americans after the Civil War, the first thing they want to do is get their children education and also get themselves the ability to read and write because they viewed it as the key to upward mobility.

I think Amy’s article is really great because it allows us to ask of this schoolhouse, what are the actual building elements of the foundation? What are the issues of contestation with the land that this place is built on? How are the white school teachers having conversations with Black students and parents? Or, what’s going on with the white woman who’s interested in kind of taking over this space for her own purposes? There are all these different competing parties in the essay.

Joan Cashin: To that point, I hope we can persuade archivists to preserve material objects that often come in with the manuscripts. I’ve seen this off and on throughout my career. There’ll be boxes and boxes of manuscripts, but sometimes there are a couple of boxes of personal possessions. Sometimes, however, they are thrown away. I was doing research in Virginia years ago and there was this was a big manuscript collection. There were some personal objects that were owned by the women in the family—white and black women—objects that pertained to white women before the Civil War, and black women during and after. And an archivist threw them away.

I also think that there are all kinds of objects out there in private hands. They sometimes show up for sale on the market—there’s a huge market in Civil War artifacts, and they’re not all about uniforms, bayonets and bullets. There are also objects pertaining to the civilian experience and to emancipation. And I hope that museums will consider buying some of those objects.

Robert Bland: Along those lines, there is an ongoing debate over the politics of museums and the uneven history of power embedded in the collection acquisition process. Alaina, pivoting to your roundtable, I would be interested to hear you say a little bit about the discussion around the We Are Cherokee exhibit. You framed the discussion around the exhibit as an “act of reconciliation.” I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you understand curatorial work and public history as part of a longer process of reconciling historical trauma.

Alaina Roberts: Well, my first book dealt with getting historians and non-historians to see what’s happening in Indian territory with Native Americans who are enslaving Black people as part of our broader narrative about the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. I see the roundtable as part of that, but then also part of trying to make folks understand that it’s also connected to the discussions that we’re currently having— less now than a few years ago—about racial reconciliation in this country.

And so, there are conversations that have been had in the museum studies world and in the academic world about telling, for example, the American story as something that involves people of multiple races. But that hasn’t happened in the world of Native American public history and Native-focused museum studies in the same way. There are people like Amy Lonetree who have published on museum studies and examining how Native Americans have been setting up their tribal museums and cultural centers. But those have been primarily looking at tribes that did not own slaves. And, as I have traveled throughout Oklahoma for the past decade, I have seen that most of these museums [of former slaveholding tribes] totally ignore that history.  They’re doing the same whitewashing that American museums were doing, you know, decades and decades before.

And so, the roundtable was really meant to celebrate that there finally was an exhibit and a tribal nation that was looking to actually acknowledge this history; not just acknowledge, but show how influential Black people were in the Cherokee Nation, the discrimination that they faced because of the actions of the government, and what steps need to continue to be taken to really incorporate people of African descent in the nation today.

Robert Bland: In closing, I want to ask you to describe the current state of Civil War-era material culture history. What do scholars in other subfields of Civil War history miss by not more carefully grounding questions of material culture in their examinations of the nineteenth century America?

Joan Cashin: I think they’re missing a lot of the human experience. It’s clear when you do manuscript research that the material world matters a lot to people in the past. And there may not be a material artifact in the collection, but you’ll find it in the written evidence, detailed descriptions of objects that people have, or want to have, or they have lost. They are trying to preserve things because of their connection to their lives. This is another way to get at historical experience.

Alaina Roberts: I appreciate that material culture and the way we study, engage, house, and display material culture can be representative of our modern moment, and that it changes depending on how we’re thinking about history.

In terms of museums, I am hoping that they will be reflective of changes related to inclusion in the United States and in tribal nations.

Joan Cashin: I’ve thought a good deal about Alaina’s points on museum professionals and how they look at all these issues. And I think some of them are receptive. Some of them are interested in these new ideas. Not all of them. Occasionally, I talk to someone who doesn’t understand why the lives of ordinary people are important—they’re still focused on the powerful few.  But I don’t deal with people like that too much and I’m hoping that the situation is changing.  I’m hoping that they’re going to move in step with historians on all these issues.

 

Robert Bland

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

Andrew Donnelly, Confederate Sympathies, and the History of Same-Sex Romance during the Civil War Era

Andrew Donnelly, Confederate Sympathies, and the History of Same-Sex Romance during the Civil War Era

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In today’s Muster, associate editor Robert Bland is joined by Andrew Donnelly to discuss his new book Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era. Professor Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Professor Donnelly, thank you for joining us today. I wonder if you could begin maybe talking about the origins of your book. It’s a really fascinating project. I’d like to begin by asking you to describe how you found your way to this particular book and the Civil War era.

Andrew Donnelly: Thanks for having me and for letting me talk a bit about the book today. I would say there are two big questions that I was after with this project. The first is one that Muster readers know well, which is a story of Civil War memory and the retreat from Reconstruction: the story from Nina Silber’s Romance of Reunion and David Blight’s Race and Reunion that narrates how a national reunion occurs in the United States at the expense of Black citizens and an emancipationist memory of the war. Silber made gender a crucial part of this story, and I wanted to explore added depths to the gendered aspects of this monumental episode.

The other question that I was after relates to another monumental story of the 19th century, one that gets the shorthand of ‘the birth of sexuality,’ or the transformation in epistemologies of sexuality, a reconceptualization of sexual behaviors not as something one did but who one was.   The rise of sexual science and racial science are essential to this development, which leads to a world of both heterosexual identity and homosexual identity.

So those are two really big stories of the 19th century that, to me, are often understood separately. One motivating impulse for this book project was to try to understand these two stories in relation to each other and ask about the story of the post-Civil War world, what does that have to do with the story of sexuality?

RB: That leads me to my next question. Nina Silber’s influence and framing of sectional reconciliation appears to be a large influence on your work. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you think through Silber’s work. Here, I would be interested to hear some of your thinking about gender in both the postbellum period, which is the traditional domain of scholars of Civil War-era memory, as well as your own thinking of antebellum works of fiction, which your books spends a lot of time with and very thoughtfully engages.

AD: Silber’s argument, I think, for historians and for literary scholars, is such a touchstone that it’s hard to remember the moment when you first encountered these ideas. This project started for me originally as a dissertation project. I got the advice from my dissertation advisor to try to read across large sets of novels, to read both the canonical novels that have proved worthy of close-reading and rereading, as well as to read across larger sets of much lesser known novels and to keep track of the notable plots that are comparable across a defined set of novels. When you do that in Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Civil War memory literature, Silber’s story of cross-sectional romance keeps reemerging. She put her finger on something that’s really there beyond the specific novels she cites. It is the case across postbellum and even antebellum stories, that writers use heterosexual marriage as a way to think about national questions. That’s one of the central things that these novels do with their narratives.

At the same time, I also noticed this parallel set of stories of romantic friendship and the dissolution of romantic friendship between men. These stories are about two young men who are described as being deeply in love: they’re often college classmates, and they’re described as inseparable, intimate friends having a love for one another like Jonathan and David or other Classical or Biblical allusions. And the novels adhere to a similar plot where generally the two men end up on opposite sides of the Civil War. One dies and one survives.

And so that pattern, once it emerged for me across a set of several novels as a pattern, began to resemble, in some ways, Silber’s pattern of a romance of reunion, though with key differences. When we think about the romance-of-reunion plot, I think one of the things that it’s doing is leveraging heterosexuality or tropes about cross-gender romance to make a political argument. Ultimately that political argument is that the timeless love between men and women can transcend sectional differences and can transcend the violent differences that led us to the Civil War.

In these stories of same-sex romance, there’s a different political valence, and one of the things that I noticed across stories of same-sex romance across is the absence of that appeal to timeless, transcendent love. Instead, these love-plots are very much situated within a historical moment and referential to the past. These stories, rather than a forward-looking story of marriage and the formation of a new family, tend to be stories of a backward look at the romance that used to be possible in our youth, from which the men, and the nation, had to mature.

RB: Let’s pivot to how your book engages the state of discipline of Civil War history in the late nineteenth century. You spend a lot time thinking through the rise of the Dunning school, which you read alongside the rise of modern sexual science in the United States. And you’d have a really interesting vignette where you emphasize that the New York where Dunning and his students inhabited was also the New York that George Chauncey examines in Gay New York. I wonder if you could say a little bit the connection you see between the Dunning school and the rise of modern sexual science?

AD: I would say, first, Dunning to me exemplifies an interpretation that maps well onto that lost romance story I just described because so much of Dunning’s interpretation is about nation building, using the language of maturation, the framework of a crucible out of which develops national maturation. So, there’s a way that Dunning’s interpretation aligns with these narratives of individual male development.

Dunning’s students, on the other hand, much more than him, focused on a sense of antebellum nostalgia, the distinction between a postbellum modernity and antebellum past, which captures more of the story of sexuality’s development. For example, James W. Garner is at the intersection of both of these worlds. He is a Dunning-School Reconstruction historian who writes Reconstruction in Mississippi. He’s also the editor of the American Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, which is a journal that’s doing the kind of cutting-edge social science of identifying criminal types, especially of sexualized and racialized types. So, what I wanted to do in that chapter or that part of the chapter is to try to situate that historiography in a world in which these ideas in social science of sexual of sexology and sexual science are understood alongside history writing about the Civil War’s social change.

I think the broader historiographic argument is that historians in their history writing are bringing to bear ideas about sexuality as part of both their interpretation of the archive they’re examining and as part of their writing itself.

RB: What sort of broad myths do you think students might come into an undergraduate course on the Civil War regarding sex and sexuality? For example, around the debates of Lincoln’s sexuality or more broadly the homoerotic valence of male friendships during the nineteenth century.

AD: I think it’s to our benefit to always push students to think in more complicated ways about the pat questions that appear settled. We could go back in time see many seemingly settled questions, you know, that have been dug up and re-opened. I think it is the case right now that students can come into the classroom sometimes with a sort of shrug of the shoulders at a claim they’ve heard elsewhere about Lincoln’s homosexuality. And I mean, there’s nothing about Lincoln we should probably shrug our shoulders about, but certainly think more deeply about what historical meaning has been made through such suggestiveness with respect to Lincoln.

I think that we should, on the one hand, embrace what many undergraduates see today as the normal aspects of queer sexuality in society as being in some ways similar to 19th-century life, where elements of homoeroticism may have been more deeply entwined with mainstream cultural forces and mainstream society than they were in the 20th century, especially in the late 20th century. On the other hand, the crucial thing about teaching and studying sexuality is that there are nearly always these boundary lines being drawn between the normative and the anti-normative. Where those boundary lines fall is changing throughout history in subtle and drastic ways. Those boundary lines also appear to be changing very much in the world today making the examination of the construction of these boundary lines endlessly fascinating questions to try to destabilize in the past and present.

RB: In closing, I’d like to ask you about how Civil War-era historians have engaged with questions of sexuality? What are models that you would herald? What are the questions you think historians should be asking? Where do you think the field is broadly with interpreting themes of sexuality?

AD: On the scholarly side of things, my hope is that this book introduces some new ways of thinking about sexuality and homoeroticism in the past. One of the interventions I’m trying to make is to show how homoeroticism can be ingrained with normativity in the past. Part of my argument here is in showing how homoerotic narratives get deployed in cultivating sympathy for slavery, sympathy for the Confederacy, and sympathy for the Lost Cause. It makes a great deal of sense coming out of the 20th century and into the 21st, that we’re looking into the past for queer stories that are emancipatory because they advance LGBTQ liberation at a moment when the status of these identities was such an open question. I think right now we’re in a moment where we’re seeing some fracture of these coalitions, and alignments between LGBT identity and progressive politics, so one lesson is to see in the past the instability of coalitions and to see homoeroticism as more politically pliable than we might think.

Another aim of the book is not to treat the story of same-sex eroticism as particular to the experience of a same-sex desiring minority. By that I don’t mean to make this claim of universal homosexuality in the past, but that same-sex eroticism and same-sex desire is a phenomenon shaping aspects of culture broadly, shaping the contours of political discourse broadly. Therefore, our understanding of political history, broadly, requires understanding how sexuality and same-sex desire operate and are conceptualized.

RB: I appreciate your kind of willingness to share some time and share some of your thoughts on your important and insightful book.

Robert Bland

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

Interview with Michael Allen on a Career in Public History

Interview with Michael Allen on a Career in Public History

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Today’s Muster features an interview with Michael Allen, a retired National Park Service official. Over the course of his nearly four decade career, Allen has played a pivotal role in how several Civil War Era sites have reshaped their interpretative vision of the past. More recently, he has played a critical role in the creation of the Reconstruction-era NPS site in Beaufort, as well as the International African American Museum in Charleston. Portions of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

Robert Bland: Michael, it is a pleasure to get a chance to sit down with you today. I wonder if we could begin today’s conversation by introducing yourself and saying a little bit about the beginning of your career with the National Park Service.

Michael Allen: I am Michael Allen and I am retired from the National Park Service. And, as you indicated, I was blessed and fortunate enough to be able to do 37 and a half years with that agency. I would say, in a nutshell, my time and energy and effort there was dealing with history, culture, preservation, and more specifically, African American history and Gullah culture. And I would say my journey was addressing what had been hidden in plain view.

RB: I wonder if you could say a little bit more there about what you mean by things have been “hidden in plain view”? In what ways did the National Park Service’s interpretative approach change over the course  of your career?

MA:  I began my journey with the National Park Service while I was attending an HBCU, South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina. I was a history major. And I grew up here in South Carolina, in a small town called Kingstree, which is incorporated in the Gullah region of South Carolina. Africanisms, Gullah culture, history, tradition were all around me, in terms of what I ate, in terms of my language, in terms of what I may have said, things that I may have done, things I saw, experienced from an educational perspective, from a social perspective, from a community perspective, from a religious perspective, all those Africanisms and things were around me.

But unfortunately, from an educational perspective, these things were not presented to me. Or just simply put, taught to me. In history classes, whether it’s in elementary, middle, high school. These things really was not presented. I had them, but they were not made aware to me.

And it wasn’t until the fall of 1978 in my freshman history class that I was fortunate enough to, you know, to have a great history teacher, Dr. Bill Hines. And he introduced me, really, to colonial life and early talking about history through a good book that I would encourage folks to take advantage of called Black Majority. By Dr. Peter Wood. And as I went through the book, I then began to see myself. Things I may have done, things I may have said, just how I managed myself was made very clear. I felt, to be truthful, somewhat betrayed that all this good history and information that I’m gathering now as a freshman in college, was not presented to me. But I realized, the dynamics of growing up in the South, teaching African history and culture back in the 1970s and 80s may have been challenging to some people. So, in many respects, that experience in the from 1978 really galvanized my thought process of wanting to deal with what was uncovered—what was in plain view.

And so, I just use that as a pretext to when I began working for the Park Service in 1982, to really work to uncover what had been hidden in plain view and to be about the task of really being out front, saying that this story needs to be told.

RB: I wonder if you could say a little bit about the politics of that earlier public history moment. Your career runs along the rise of the new social history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Works like Slaves No More and other histories from this time period provided big turning point in the larger story of the Civil War. We went from a traditional accounting of emancipation that emphasized how “Lincoln freed the slaves,” to our current understanding of Black freedom that now emphasizes more bottom-up stories. Now we have more stories of people fleeing to union lines, stories of contraband camps. I wonder what that story looks like on the ground in a place like Charleston in the 1980s and 1990s,

MA: I call it the hoop skirt experience—”states’ rights, not slavery.” The reality is that when I visited places or drove down certain streets in and around Charleston, I knew the history. I mean, thousands of people come to Charleston on a yearly basis. Lots of people go down to The Battery. That’s a very famous historic place in the city of Charleston.

But it was in February of 1865 that African American soldiers stepped foot on the battery to begin the process of liberating the city of Charleston. From being under the bondage of enslavement, and so we may go and drive and look at The Battery.

But we cannot leave that part of the story of The Battery. So, when I was working at Sullivan’s Island. And then again, do Black majority and other research books. I realize that Sullivan’s Island was almost an entry point for enslaved Africans coming into the New World and coming into North America and coming into the colony of South Carolina. In the early eighteenth century, the colonial government basically declared that any vessel bringing cargo Africans into the Port of Charleston would have to quarantine them on Sullivan’s Island. That site is no longer existing. But the fort is less than a mile from where that site once stood.

RB: I want to ask you a broader public history question. We’re in a moment where we are thinking a lot about plantations right now. We have seen some public debate sparked by the burning of the Nottaway, plantation, which has led us back to some longstanding questions about their place in southern history. Should they be called forced labor camps? But also, how should sites be interpreted and contextualized now?

MA: In 1990, the National Park Service acquired a site outside of Charleston, Mount Pleasant. that was a former plantation called Snee Farm. It was once owned by Charles Pinckney. One of the signers and drafters of the United States Constitution. And a number of individuals banded together, purchased that property. So, it would not be turned into a subdivision. It was then donated to the National Park Service in the early 1990s. I came in in 1992 as a staff member. As a part of the team that led to development and eventually opening.

And so, now the question is: How do we interpret this new place? And how do we do it in a way that could be comprehensive? We’re fortunate enough for the legislation that created the site. Congress said that you will interpret the life and legacy and contributions of Charles Pinckney, the man; that you will look at the United States as a transitioning from a colony into a young nation; and the third, and probably the most important point for me, it said that you will interpret all of the lives of individuals who lived at that plantation. Whether you were white, black. Free, slave, Gullah-Geechee. That’s in black and white. That’s what Congress said. So, I think having those specific things in the legislation which created it. It gave us enough, at least for me, gave us an opportunity to address what had been hidden in plain view.

RB: I want to close on thinking more broadly about the Lowcountry.  We’re in a moment where it seems like the Lowcountry’s at the vanguard of public history. We have the recent opening of the International African American Museum. The relatively new National Park Site for Reconstruction in Beaufort. Charleston is at the vanguard for thinking about southern foodways histories. How do you see these developments in the region’s public history?

MA: think in my journey with the National Park Service, I was fortunate enough to be involved with everything you just mentioned. I’m original board member of the International African American Museum. We met for the very first time in November 2000 and that meeting would lead to the institution that we call the International African American Museum today. If you back up to the summer of 1999, on Sullivan’s Island today, there’s a historic marker that talks about Sullivan’s Island in the context of their arrival, highlighting the fusion in the history and culture of Africans and African Americans.

Our concurrent resolution was passed stating that something should be placed on Sullivan’s Island to address this history. Which now means that we could not evade the history of Sullivan’s Island in the context of the African American experience. That you can’t hide it anymore. That you gotta deal with this. Whether it’s the Slave Mart Museum, whether it’s the International African American Museum, whether it’s eventually the foundation and the creation of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Even now to Reconstruction-era Park Site.

RB: Michael, I appreciate your time today. Do you have any closing thoughts on the changing public history landscape?

MA:  In closing. I want to encourage your followers. Even in a time that we find ourselves in. Our voices are needed. Our knowledge of history is important. Our tools that we possess are even more critical. So don’t allow the times that we find ourselves in to discourage you or to get you down or depressed. This is the time that we have to press forward even more.

Robert Bland

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

2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

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The $50,000 Tom Watson Brown Book Award is presented annually by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the Society of Civil War Historians to the author or authors of the best book “on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War,” published in the preceding year.

Each year Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, presents the Tom Watson Brown Book Award at a special banquet during the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association.

Congratulations to Edda Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Edda Fields-Black is the recipient of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Sternhell earned the award for Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War which was published in 2024 by Yale University Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of Tom Watson Brown, a dedicated student of the Civil War.

In making its selection, the prize committee stated: “The scope of this book is simply dazzling.  From its marvelous recreation of Maryland’s eastern shore to its haunting evocation of the Sea Islands to its depiction of the South Carolina interior redolent with the light and shadow of the ponderous Combahee River, COMBEE brings to life different Black communities whose members transcended geographical, cultural, and linguistic differences to wrest their way out of bondage, turn the tide of a key Union military campaign, strike at Confederate war-making capacity, and establish the foundations of Gullah-Geechee culture. COMBEE deepens and enriches our understanding of the lived experience of emancipation as liberation and as humanitarian crisis all at once.

The Watson Brown Book Award jury consisted of Chandra Manning (chair), Edna Green-Medford, David Silkenat, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.

Dr. Fields-Black will be honored at the SCWH banquet in November during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

Combee also won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Winner Biography

Dr. Edda Fields-Black is professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University, 2008, 2014). She was a co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University, 2015; Chinese translation 2017). Dr. Fields-Black has also served as a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s permanent exhibit, “Rice Fields in the Low Country of South Carolina.” She is the executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a widely performed original contemporary classical work by celebrated composer John Wineglass.

Past Winners

2024– Yael Sternhell, War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023). Sternhell’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech will be available on Project Muse in the Fall 2025 JCWE

2023 – R. Isabella Morales,  Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022). Read Morales’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2022 – Sebastian Page, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Read Page’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2021 – Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (UNC Press, 2020). The Women’s Fight also won the Albert J. Beveridge Award and Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, both from the American Historical Association; the Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, and Mary Nickliss Prize, all from the Organization of American Historians; the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History, from the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia; and the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians. Read Glymph’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2020 – Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (UNC Press, 2019). Read Brown’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2019 – Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through The Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (UNC Press, 2018). Embattled Freedom also received the Avery O. Craven Award and the Merle Curti Award in social history, both from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was awarded the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War era history from the University of Virginia’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Read Taylor’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2018 – Andrew F. Lang, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (LSU Press, 2017). Read Lang’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2017 – Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (Oxford University Press, 2016). The Rivers Ran Backward also received the Midwestern History Association’s Jon Gjerde Prize and the Ohio Academy of History’s Distinguished Book Award. Read Phillips’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2016 – Earl J. Hess, Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (LSU Press, 2015). Read Hess’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2015 – Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (UNC Press, 2014). Learning from the Wounded also won the Wiley-Silver Prize from The Center for Civil War Research, University of Mississippi. Read Devine’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2014 – Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013). A Misplaced Massacre also received the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, both in 2014. It was awarded the Antoinette Foster Downing Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians in 2015. Read Kelman’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2013 – John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: the Laws of War in American History (Simon and Schuster, 2012). Lincoln’s Code also earned the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University and the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, both in 2013. It was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for history, as well. Read Witt’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2012 – Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011). The Union War also received the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies from the New York Military Affairs Symposium in 2011 and the Daniel M. and Marilyn W. Laney Prize from the Austin, Texas Civil War Round Table in 2012. Read Gallagher’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2011 – Mark Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865 (Yale University Press, 2010). Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War also received the Francis B. Simkins Prize from the Southern Historical Association and earned an Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize, awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, in 2011. Read Geiger’s Tom Watson Brown acceptance speech on Project Muse.

2010 – Daniel Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: the Decisive Role of Guerillas in the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2009). A Savage Conflict also earned the Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum in 2009 and the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History in 2010.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Conversation with Historian and Curator Jill Newmark

Conversation with Historian and Curator Jill Newmark

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In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever is joined by Jill L. Newmark, independent historian and former Curator and Exhibition Specialist at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Newmark is the author of Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons (Southern Illinois University Press, 2023), which is reviewed in the June 2025 issue of the journal.
Congratulations to Bianca Dang and Christina C. Davidson

Congratulations to Bianca Dang and Christina C. Davidson

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The Latin American Studies Association recently awarded both Bianca Dang and Christina C. Davidson with their 2025 Best Article Prize. Dr. Dang and Dr. Davidson  were honored for their respective contributions to the JCWE’s 2025 special issue on Black internationalism, which was edited by Brandon R. Byrd.

You may read Bianca Dang’s article, “‘I Don’t Know What Will Be My Lot’: Transnational Migration and Unfree Labor in Early America,” and Christina Davidson’s article, “In the Shadow of Haiti: US Black Internationalism in the Dominican Republic, 1860-1904” at the link below.

https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53788

 

Congratulations to Dr. Dang and Dr. Davidson!

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Lindsey Peterson Interview on “‘Home Builders’: Free Labor Households and Settler Colonialism in Western Union Civil War Commemorations”

Lindsey Peterson Interview on “‘Home Builders’: Free Labor Households and Settler Colonialism in Western Union Civil War Commemorations”

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In today’s Muster, associate editor Robert D. Bland speaks with Lindsey R. Peterson about her March 2025 JCWE article “‘Home-Builders’: Free Labor Households and Settler Colonialism in Western Union Civil War Commemorations.” This article, which won the 2023 Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award, examines the regional effort to connect the legacy of the Civil War to settlement of the US West and the colonization of Native peoples. Peterson’s article explores the gendered dimensions of trans-Mississippi Civil War memory and finds that western unionism was inextricably linked to the idea of the single-family household and its attendant politics of expansion and settlement.

Portions of the transcript from this interview have been edited for clarity.

Robert Bland: I want to begin by asking about the beginning of the article where you introduce us to the western Grand Army of the Republic through a Decoration Day celebration. For scholars of the Civil War era memory, especially Memorial Days and Decoration Days, play an important and ongoing role in the major works of the field. I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about kind of the scholars that you see yourself in conversation with kind of how you think about civil war memory and how you engage with the work of David Blight, Caroline Janney, Nina Silber, Barbara Gannon and others who are wrestling with some of the similar questions. How did you discover this question of western memory?

Lindsey R. Peterson: So, I came to the project in graduate school. I was working with my master’s advisor at the University of South Dakota, Kurt Hackemer, who had been doing some digging into western veterans, especially those veterans who moved out to spaces like Dakota Territory and Kansas and created veteran colonies, and he is the one who gave me some of the first Memorial Day addresses that I used. With Robert Pease’s Memorial Day address, for example, he was like “I’ve been transcribing this, and I think someone should do something with this.” And so, when I began working on my doctorate with Susannah J. Ural at the University of Southern Mississippi, I started looking at these Memorial Day and monument dedication addresses and seeing how aspects of the rhetoric in them did not align with what eastern veterans were saying. Aspects of their language was very different. Westward expansion loomed large, including this imagery of the western homestead. Union commemorations kept repeating phrases where they celebrated being home builders or being veterans who moved out to the West.

And so, I started looking into other Memorial Day addresses, looking at monuments all across the West, and looking for Grand Army of the Republic and Woman’s Relief Corps records, but sadly a lot of those materials are gone. I had very limited material to work with, but there’s enough that remains due to Grand Army of the Republic organizations and Woman’s Relief Corps’ efforts that I could start to see patterns in the public rhetoric that veterans were putting on the face of the war. So, I started digging into the states West of the Mississippi River, which is the boundary of my study.

Most Union veterans who moved to the West shied away from public activity. As Hackemer reveals, they experienced higher instances of wartime trauma, and they moved out to places in the West to kind of disappear—that was a little bit of the appeal of the West actually. I, however, examine the minority of veterans who did the opposite: moved out to the West and capitalized on their wartime experiences to land grab, get pensions, and create power and space for themselves using the memory of their military service.

In many ways, that work is also in conversation with Carrie Janney’s analysis on Civil War memory, and one of the things I’ve been grappling with is the conversation between her and David Blight over this question of reunion and reconciliation and racial memories of the war. I find myself aligning with Carrie Janney’s work in the sense that veterans were rejecting reconciliation in many ways, but on different grounds in the West. It’s less focused on legacies and memories of African American military service. Emancipation looms large in western conversations and memories of the war. I find that emancipation is one of the things that veterans emphasize and are unwilling to sacrifice in their memories of the war but because of its connection to settler colonialism. This idea of a nation-wide free-labor economy, it’s at odds with those kinds of Confederate legacies, and so in that setting, it’s more about the power struggles over land with Indigenous peoples in the West, and that legacy of emancipation is being used as a tool in this context.

There are some interesting things going on with republican motherhood in the memory of the West around the legacy of what it meant to be a white woman in western frontier spaces. I think in many ways you see that republican motherhood legacy being extended to the West, and in Civil War spaces among veterans, because their wives and daughters were fulfilling that type of imagery in the West. It’s there in women’s involvement in inspecting American Indian boarding schools and carrying out Memorial Day exercises as precursors to Americanization. I found Civil War veterans in the West engaging in Americanization earlier than in the eastern United States.

RDB: I’d be interested to see a little bit more about how you kind of see this kind of the role of gender and shaping kind of western Civil War memory. You have the Woman’s Relief Corps as an essential actor in this story, but you’re also interested in kind of how these western veterans are deploying new concepts of manhood and manliness, especially in the creation of separate public and private spheres in the postbellum West.

LRP: I see gender roles as central to those memories. They shored up race relations, defining how men and women were supposed to behave and comport themselves in the United States. I see gender being kind of a silent actor that’s doing a lot of work that people don’t really question because it’s gender, it’s inscribed. We don’t question gender roles in very concrete terms sometimes and just kind of accept that this is how men behave, and this is how women behave. I see Woman’s Relief Corps’ members performing a lot of those gender roles and then veterans celebrated them for it.

Those western celebrations and memories depended on gender roles for them to be successful. The gender roles of separate spheres ideology were tied up with what settler colonialism looked like because they reinscribed women to single household spaces, which then reinforced the free soil labor ideology that veterans fought for and achieved, which then worked to support their argument for private land ownership in the West and pushing indigenous people further and further onto reservations and eliminating their communal landholdings. Gender hid the violence of that process by depicting women as peaceful colonizers and men as manly actors who did their duty in a time of war and then moved out to the West.

I think gender served to hide the violence of that settler colonial process in ways that were meant to excuse it and keep it out of the conversation, at least amongst non-Native people who were talking about western expansion at this time. Gender was kind of a magic tool, or as Robert Pease described it, a “magic rod of development.” The symbol of the house represented the development of a free-soil West above all else. Manufacturing and mining were referenced, but the house was really the ultimate symbol of Union victory. And that house had within it, you know, the veteran husband married to a woman with several children, and they lived on a farm in the West and occupied that space, symbolizing what Union veterans fought for in the Civil War. The homestead became a powerful symbol of free-soil ideology being spread across the continent.

RDB: Along those lines, you have a poignant section in the in the article where you talked about kind of the relationship of the GAR and the WRC to American Indian schools. The story of indigenous dispossession is very important here. If you could just talk about the kind of relationship that these organizations have to the project of Indian schools and how these schools became sites of the larger settler colonial project.

LRP: I wish I had more resources on this question, so what I have found is limited, but basically when most state GAR and WRCs put out their annual encampment reports, the wealthier the state, the more likely they were to publish records. And the wealthier the state, the more extensive their annual reports were, so some of these records for western states are pretty scant. But you can see over and over again that representatives of these organizations were going into American Indian boarding schools and inspecting them. The details of what those inspections looked like are unclear. There’s nothing said on exactly what was happening, like how long they’re there, but I think it was a fairly common experience for elite white Americans to inspect different local and state institutions in the area. So, the WRC and the GAR started inspecting boarding schools all across the west, and as far as I can tell, in the east the only place I’ve seen this replicated was in Carlise, Pennsylvania.

In boarding schools, western GARs and WRCs conducted Americanization work, in some of the first precursors to arguing that that the United States embodied “one flag, one language.” Language became a key component of Native GAR and WRC members’ resistance to Americanization as well. In Wisconsin—where there’s a big emphasis by the state and national WRC to ensure that any non-English speaking WRC members do their rituals and hold their meetings in English—Menominee and Oneida women held meetings in their native languages despite promises that they would perform them to English.

Inspections were also key to identifying schools and captive groups of students that could then be incorporated into Memorial Day and public celebrations. Native children were being assembled by the Grand Army of the Republic and the Woman’s Relief Corps to march in Memorial Day parades as symbols of free-soil westward expansion. In one example, Native girls were dressed in all-white with young Native boys in their military school uniforms carrying guns behind them as a kind of symbol of separate spheres ideology, performing those gender roles as a symbol of Union victory and its expansion to the West. So, the GAR and WRC were playing a role in western Indian boarding schools, and they were actively invested in colonization in the West.

RDB: We’ll close here: I wonder if you could say a little bit about kind of the larger stakes of shifting our attention to the western GAR? How does our understanding of the legacy of the war change when we kind of center the kind of ideas and cultural labor of those invested in western unionism?

LRP: That’s a great question. I think it complicates everything as another reminder of how dependent different systems and modes of power were on one another. Gender and race were not siloed. Civil War commemorations that bolstered and defended settler colonialism in the West were dependent on the legacy of separate spheres ideology, free-labor ideology, and emancipation. Colonialism was dependent on the work that patriarchy did, and patriarchy was dependent on the work that colonialism was doing in that context as well. Together, they created an interwoven system that created entitlements for veterans, revealing a much more complicated picture of the Union’s legacy in the context of western commemoration.

As Karen Cook Bell and Ari Kelman have demonstrated, the Union legacy was used to empower different groups of people and disempower others. In the case of my work, Indigenous people. You can see some of the ways in which Union veterans and their wives were elevating themselves by claiming territory at the expense of Native people by relying on that imagery of the victorious Union. You reveal a much messier legacy of the Union cause, and you can see new ways in which Union soldiers were able to capitalize on their military service for their own kind of economic and social benefit in the West.

We love to celebrate Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator. We love to celebrate Union service, and all of the incredible things that emerged from emancipation: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments; a legacy that also includes the pension system, but those have different costs if you start to incorporate the western half of the nation into that analysis. It’s a very diverse region with a different focus on the relationship with Union veterans and the Union legacy in the West. It’s a legacy of colonialism.

Lindsey R. Peterson

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and the Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. Peterson has over twelve years of experience teaching U.S. history, developing curriculum, and facilitating continuing education workshops for history teachers.
Alternative Histories: Integrating Drafted Men into the Military Narrative

Alternative Histories: Integrating Drafted Men into the Military Narrative

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“How I hate the whole thing,” wrote a decidedly unhappy new recruit to the Sixth Wisconsin late in 1864, “from beginning to end.”[1] That was Joshua B. Ingalls, a Richfield County blacksmith in his late thirties with a wife and six children. He had managed to avoid earlier drafts, but his name was finally called in fall 1864. Also drafted into the Sixth at about the same time were three German immigrant brothers from Sheboygan: Gottlieg, Wilhelm, and Gottfried Torke. Gottlieb was about thirty with a farm, a wife, and several children.[2]

There is no reason to think that Ingalls and Torke ever met—they served in different companies—but they both provide rare, if quite different, accounts of the last few months of the Civil War through conscripts’ eyes.

The Sixth was part of the famous Iron Brigade, which had fought in almost all of the major battles in the eastern theater. But by late 1864 both the brigade and the regiment were shells of their former selves. Indeed, only a few dozen original members were still with the regiment. As I argue in The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment, heavy casualties and sickness had caused a constant turnover of officers and men, meaning that there wasn’t a single “Sixth Wisconsin,” but an ever-changing roster of men with different motivations and experiences.

Ingalls and Torke, along with over 470 other draftees, comprised the bulk of the version of the Sixth Wisconsin that actually finished the war. Their experiences and reflections are necessarily very different from the more familiar narratives created by men who had volunteered earlier in the war and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. They help us appreciate the evolving nature of Civil War regiments and the wildly varying attitudes of the men who joined them. While Ingalls poured out his disgust and sorrow in bitter diary entries, Torke described his experiences in letters to his wife filled with pious encouragement, expressions of affection, homely advice about turnips and cattle, and an innocent, wide-eyed response to combat.

Ingalls began his diary upon arriving at Camp Randall, the state’s mustering grounds in Madison. He complained particularly about his fellow draftees, many of whom were German immigrants. “I tell you this is a hard place, lots of dutchmen—Jabber, jabber all the time,” he sighed. “I look around me” and ask, “can I stand it a year[?] O my heart almost fails me.”[3] An uncomfortable three weeks in camp was followed by even more uncomfortable week of train travel to Virginia. Ingalls resented the casual cruelty and lack of consideration for the comfort or feelings of the new soldiers. They were under guard from the time they left Camp Randall—even when “tend[ing] to the calls of nature. How mean it makes one feel.” By December 11 they were at Fortress Monroe, where, crowded into a “bull pen,” they were exposed to the cold and rain, and ignored except for the guards that still watched their every move. When one of the draftees got too close to a pen of Confederate prisoners, a rebel stabbed him.[4]

Ingalls was appalled by the squalid conditions in camp. At one point two thousand men waited in line for meager rations—next to the latrines. “You cannot imagine the stench that is there & all on an empty stomach.” Finally, after a short train trip and a long march through vast fields of tents and ruined homes, they reached the Sixth in late December.[5]

Predictably, none of the officers had any interest in granting Ingalls’ request to be assigned to a non-combat role. Indeed, when he met with the regimental adjutant and another officer, they “called me everything that they could turn their toung to & swore that if they could. . . they would hang me.”[6]

Ingalls gave up and began learning how to be a soldier. The newcomers were punished for such violations as blowing their nose on dress parade. One of the draftees tried to get a medical discharge by pressing a brass button into a wound to keep it from healing, but he “got catched at it” and was “made to stand on a board for half a day” with “a paper pinned on his back stating his crime.” Ingalls’ last surviving entry ended in disgust: “I have to get me a hat with a bugle 6 & E & a feather.” That would have shocked the original men of the Sixth, for whom that black hat and feather were symbols of courage and respect.[7]

Betraying none of the bitterness of Ingalls’s diary entries, Gottlieb Torke’s letters to his wife Elizabeth were loving and plain, even as they revealed a certain bewilderment with his surroundings. He reported on the long days and plain food, hard drilling and daily camp chores, the unfamiliar weather and sandy soil. He gave homely instructions for managing the farm, including advising his wife to “keep yourself away from the sheep that they don’t butt you.” He imagined his young children asleep in bed as he walked the midnight shift on guard duty. He hated missing Christmas, prayed for peace, and worried that Elizabeth might be working too hard. In mid-January he reported that the regiment was training “very hard now. . . As soon as something happens here at Petersburg, then we will have to go off to the war.”[8]

They did, indeed, go “off to the war” when the Army of the Potomac began the climactic campaign in February 1865. Torke described the movements and battles through what must have been a terrifying haze. His first thoughts as he went into the fight on the Boydton Plank Road were of Elizabeth and of God: “I could think of you only a little. I directed my thoughts to the heavenly father above, to whom many thousand prayers were rising.” When the shooting finally started, “we all looked at the world through tears, and I had given myself over completely to dear God.” Clearly unfamiliar with military terminology Gottlieb captured a blur of fearful images and disorienting sounds:

It was a hard day for us, we were quite wet and freezing. We had to fight the                      Southerners . . . and had driven them back. . . . There we made a good trench                    where the bullets would always fly over our heads, and then when we had                          finished making the trench, we went out again against the Southerners [who]                  stayed in their trenches, and we stood in the woods. Then we lay down on the                  ground and fired at them. We had been firing a half-hour, then we sprang up                    again and ran back again in our trenches, as we wanted to draw the Southerners              out of their trenches so that they would come near our trenches. And so we tried              to decoy them but they wouldn’t come, so then we went out again toward them.              They were firing very much at us with cannons.

Torke received a wound to his head that, while minor, would eventually earn him a discharge. “Dear God had surely placed his almighty arm on my head and so the bullet couldn’t go any farther.”[9]

Both men survived the war and lived into the twentieth century. Neither in life nor in death did they celebrate their military service. It seems to have been a wrenching and terrifying experience, better forgotten than memorialized. We do not know whether they were proud of having helped to save the Union; they don’t seem to have participated in post-war veterans’ activities. Unlike the volunteers of 1861, they saw their service as an imposition, a frightening and disruptive event in their lives in which they apparently took little pride.

Yet the nature of that service is no less important to examine if we are to understand Civil War soldiers’ motivations and experiences.

[1] January 14, 1865, Diary of J. B. Ingalls, Library and Research Center, Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, PA.

[2] James Marten, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 151, 159.

[3] November 30, and December 7, 1864, Ingalls Diary.

[4] December 10, 13 and 14, 1864, Ibid.

[5] December 15, 1864, Ibid.

[6] December 17, 1865, Ibid.

[7] January 15, 1865, Ibid.

[8] Gottlieb Torke to Elizabeth Torke, December 20, 1864, and January 12, 1865, transcription translated by Leona Torke Kane, Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.

[9] Gottlieb to Elizabeth, February 9, 1865, Ibid.

James Marten

James Marten is professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and a former president of the Society of Civil War Historians. He is author or editor of nearly two dozen books, including his most recent, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

Interview with Melissa DeVelvis on Gendering Secession

Interview with Melissa DeVelvis on Gendering Secession

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In today’s Muster, JCWE associate editor Robert Bland interviews Melissa DeVelvis, author of Gendering Secession: White Women in the Politics of South Carolina, 1859 to 1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Gender Secession explores the lives and politics of South Carolina’s elite white women during the end of the antebellum period and the months leading up to the sectional crisis. The political drama that unfolded during the secession crisis of 1860 has long captured our attention, but scant regard has been paid to the secessionist women themselves. These women were astute political observers and analysts who filtered their “improper” political ideas through avenues gendered as feminine and therefore socially acceptable. In recreating the rhythms of the year 1860, Melissa DeVelvis spotlights the moments when women realized that national events were too overwhelming to dismiss.

Dr. DeVelvis is an assistant professor of history at Augusta University and specializes in nineteenth-century US history, history of the American South, and the history of gender in the United States.

Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

==============================================

Robert D. Bland: Dr. DeVelvis, I appreciate you making time for us to talk today. And I’d like to begin maybe talking a little bit about the origins of your project. How did you arrive at this particular topic? What are some of the questions that led to this topic? How did you arrive at your book?

Melissa DeVelvis: Thank you for having me. This project originated from the dissertation as a quite a few early career scholars’ projects did, but it actually started before that when I was a very precocious undergrad who wanted to do an honors thesis. And I was given these letters by my professor at the time who had already transcribed everything, which was super convenient for me, who I don’t know what my cursive reading skills were when I was all of twenty years old.

But either way, there are these two sisters in St. Simon’s Island. And their reactions to secession were completely different. And so, I was immediately kind of wondering, how did women’s personalities shape this new event. That project was the paper that got me into grad school and then just being at University of South Carolina in Columbia and having access to the Caroliniana Library, which South Carolina, I just had the best gig where I’m living and where I’m researching.

It always started with emotions. It started as an emotions’ historian and then slowly it became at story of women’s politics. It is kind of hard-to-find documents about secession by women because so many women in other states write they write after it happens. They’re like, oh, something happened, and we need to write about it. Well, what about before?

I think that is the traditional origin story, but also, they’re all a little bit different in different ways and I think the I think historians who are working through projects, especially graduate students and early-stage faculty, are always interested to hear about

RDB: How has the project changed as it moved from being dissertation to book. A lot of those questions. I’d like to talk a little bit about the central theme of your project. And how does the story of South Carolina’s road to secession change when we center gender? And what ways does gender change the story about the road to secession.

MD: in some ways, it really shapes when the public who are not these secessionist politicians, who some of them have been pushing since in 1850, they try to secede, you’ve got some that vaguely remember nullification.

It’s one thing to just hear it from the politicians and it’s another to hear it women who don’t necessarily need to be pushing a certain secessionist agenda on someone. And I’m not saying that these women aren’t politically informed because they certainly are. And that’s one of the things that I argue. But you get more of an authenticity to what are the people who are not just the leading politicians of the period um saying about secession. Is it going to happen? You can tell from the frequency of the correspondence that women are writing when do they realize that this is something big and something different: is secession going to actually happen? Is a war going to actually happen? You can see the moment where people who are not supposed to, quotation marks, talk about politics or at least electoral politics and national politics in this way, in a way that it’s still improper for Southern women.

It’s a really interesting examination of timing. When you look at people who are trying to not bring this into their everyday life. And at what point they can’t stop and can’t help themselves. But at the same time a lot of the sentiments These women are very secessionist. Sometimes we like to think that, oh, well. Well, at least I get this for my students who think that everyone was in favor of women’s individuality, but you think like, oh, well, they just kind of they had to go along with what the man said. And I’m like, well when you read this, they are part and parcel of this enslaving master class. And they very much liked their lives. And they were, a lot of them, gung-ho secessionists.

In some ways, it’s an echoing of the same elite enslaver ideology that you get from their menfolk, I suppose but in other ways Even if they share the sentiments to what extent can these sentiments permeate their diaries and their letters because even when they are writing about this, these women are still, even if it’s just a formality, they’re still apologizing or making an excuse for why they’re talking politics. So yeah, it’s similar political beliefs you can trace when things are happening and what really worries them because this is a population that is trying not to talk about it constantly in a way that men are politicking and have been making speeches about it for a couple of years, depending on who you’re talking to or about.

RDB: I want to know who these women were. What are the institutions that they lead? What type of ideas and ideologies did they hold? You talk about “improper ideas.” What are some of those improper ideas that they’re wrestling with? What sort of world are they trying to preserve? What are their relationships to other women in South Carolina? How do you see these elite white women in relationship to other women in South Carolina?

MD: When I was looking at letters and diaries, it did end up kind of bringing me to the elites. And you do see them, it’s really interesting, even in people like authors like William Freeling, who has written those giant books about session and the road to succession. These women and their diaries are used in earlier works but just kind of as like commentators. There’s no attention page that says “hey, women are saying these things.”

A lot of these names might be familiar to people, especially to scholars of South Carolina, these are the big names. I have so much by the Alston family. And then, of course, Pickens comes in. And he’s one of the wealthiest enslavers in the state. His wife, Adele writes all of the time his daughter, also named Adele, who writes all of the time. Or, sometimes some people don’t even write until Sumter. And then they realize “oh, this might be worth recording.” I’m more interested in how people’s lives changed on the road to it and when they realized their lives were going to change.

And so it’s these elite white women who are covered. And they have been covered before. Whether they’re covered by Elizabeth Fox Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household or they get the remix version of these same women with Stephanie Jones Rogers’ book, They Were Their Property. Or, you’re looking at these same women for Drew Faust’s Mothers of Invention, but the secession period is either just kind of a close to the antebellum book or it’s a prologue to the Civil War book. And Faust has a couple of pages about secession, which is pretty good, but I’m more interested in bridging that gap. These women are familiar to a lot of people and they’re very much at the top of this cultural hegemony.

RDB: Along those lines. I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about periodization, how you understand kind of change and continuity. In what ways does the emotional language of these white women either change or stay the same between the antebellum and the postbellum period, right? And in many ways, you are examining a short time period, but obviously like this is a kind of moment where a lot changes in a short time period. In this view, your provocative chapter titles, like “The Last Antebellum Year” capture something poignant. I wonder if you can say a little about kind of how those women experience change and how you thought about kind of framing that change over time.

MD: This is a time period where, as a quick rundown for my non-women and gender historians, what we understand to be political, these women were absolutely being political. But if we define politics as they define politics, which is giving speeches, they did attend a lot of these meetings.

But talking about electoral politics is really not something that happens To the extent that in their letters they have to say, “well, one should wonder why I’m so warm a secessionist, but South Carolina is like a mother to me and I am its daughter.” And so, they’re using this language of motherhood so they’re using these ways to justify themselves. But before secession, I looked at a couple other elections. You don’t see this extent of political talk from these women.

And what I wanted to see was when do they discuss it? When do they find that they can no longer stop writing about it. And so, I looked at people who had long-term diaries and I looked at people who had a lot of collected letters. Of course, methodology wise, you have to make sure that Is this just a spotty collection? Like, did they just lose all of the letters from March? You do have to keep that in mind.

In one example, Ella Gertrude Clinton Thomas is from Augusta, so she’s in Georgia, but barely. And she has this like multi-volume collection The only one missing covers the session. Like, of course that would happen to me. There are a lot of gaps, surprisingly. But if you can find enough of these sources, you can kind of make these generalizations and see kind of what the rhythms of their lives were based on the letters these elites Over the summer they kind of leave the plantations and either go to the city or they’ll go up to the hot springs or they’ll even go up to New York to shop because there’s quite the southern stronghold in New York City even, if you know where to look. And they do this every summer for the planting season. Their lives really follow a rhythm if you get down and dirty into what they’re writing about.

I was also curious, like what events that we mark as like the road to disunion are they writing about in their diaries or their letters and so when I went trying to look as far back, I’d start in like 1855, you really don’t see a lot until John Brown. And then they feel fully justified in talking about John Brown. But then you get to the Democratic National Convention that’s in Charleston. And you’d think, okay, now is when women are going to start worrying, but really mostly that they just worry about housing in Charleston. And they do mention what went on. They mention the walkout. They were part of the booing and the hissing of the people who refused to walk out of the Democratic National Convention. But then it quiets down. And they just go off for the summer. Some of them go north for the summer, so clearly, they weren’t thinking that like the country is going to divorce in a couple of months.

And so I’m really just finding the daily pattern of their lives, finding when it changed, tracing the frequency of these political mentionings. This is something Stephen Stowe looks at as well in his book of Civil War diarists, which is how do they try and then fold the war into the everyday lives and like make it as normal as they can? So, someone will start a diary like ranting about John Brown and then visited Mrs. Smith yesterday and it just like becomes part of the laundry list of things so I let their letters and their rhythms kind of inform when I should start this thing.

RDB: Thank you. I mean, this has been an incredibly rich discussion. Again, the book is Gendering Secession, Women in the Politics of South Carolina, 1859 to 1861. Dr. DeVelvis, thank you for making time for us today. Look forward to engaging with your work in the future.

MD: Thank you so much. This is so great to talk about. It’s been a long time coming, the book, not the interview.

Robert Bland

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

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

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 The Society of Civil War Historians and the Journal of the Civil War Era invite submissions from early career scholars (doctoral candidates at the writing stage and PhDs not more than two years removed from having earned their degree) for the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. Papers on any topic concerning the history of the Civil War era, broadly defined, will be considered.

 

The winning submission will earn the author a $1,000 award and an additional $500 travel stipend to the Society of Civil War Historians biennial conference in 2026 where the award will be presented. Authors must be willing to attend the conference in order to be eligible for the award. The winning essay also will be eligible for publication in the Journal of the Civil War Era. The Richards Center, SCWH, and UNC Press sponsor the award.

 

 

Submission information: The submission deadline is June 1, 2025. Submissions should be sent to the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center (RichardsCenter@psu.edu) with the subject line Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. Submissions should be double-spaced and not exceed 10,000 to 11,000 words, including notes. The award committee prefers submissions written according to The Chicago Manual of Style. The winning essay will be selected by a three-person panel chosen by the JCWE editors.

 

The award honors Anthony Kaye (1962-2017), an innovative scholar of slavery at Penn State University and the National Humanities Center. Tony was an active member of the Society of Civil War Historians and one of the founding editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era. This award honors his passion for putting scholars in disparate fields in conversation with each other to enrich our understanding of the past.

Robert Bland

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

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