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.
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 D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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, 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.
“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 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).
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.
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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 D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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 D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
CALL FOR PAPERS Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era Special Issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era
Guest Editors: Ariel Ron, Southern Methodist University, Nicolas Barreyre, EHESS, Noam Maggor, Queen Mary University of London, Sofia Valeonti, American University of Paris
Submission Deadline: April 25
The American Civil War Era was transformative for American capitalism. The destruction of slavery proved the occasion for an unprecedented mobilization of economic resources, dramatic changes in the nature and scale of federal taxation, financial experiments that included a wholesale revamping of the banking and monetary systems, struggles over corporate privileges and labor protections, a slew of expressly developmental policies ranging from railroad subsidies to agricultural research and education, and still more. That all this occurred in a time of governmental crisis, breakdown, and reconstruction underscores the connections between the economy and the state.
This special issue seeks original papers that explore the Civil War Era as a defining period in American economic development. We seek to publish original scholarship that will reenergize an ongoing conversation among historians about political economy, capitalism, and governance. Our goal is not only to uncover American state capacity – which has by now been revealed beyond any doubt – but to explore government’s concrete role in shaping the country’s economic trajectory during this formative period. We are particularly interested in studies that examine specific government actions and policies, on the federal, state, and municipal levels, that shaped important economic outcomes by reconfiguring markets in various ways. Contributions may address any aspect of economic statecraft, including finance, monetary management, legal doctrine, infrastructural projects, tariffs and trade policies, mobilization of labor, and acquisition and use of land. They may also look into political alignments, divisions, mobilizations, and conflicts around any of these issues. The proposals need not be limited to the war itself or its consequences. We finally seek to prioritize historical work that positions the US in a comparative light and engages themes and questions from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.
Submissions We welcome proposals in the form of a title, a short abstract of 500 words or less, and a one-page curriculum vitae. If selected, full-scale original scholarly articles of no more than 10,000 words (including notes) will be due in mid-February 2026. Participants in the special issue will convene for a workshop at Penn State in spring of 2026. Papers will undergo the Journal of the Civil War Era’s peer review process. Full submission guidelines and the editorial statement are available on the journal’s website at www.journalofthecivilwarera.org.
Send submissions to Ariel Ron (aron@smu.edu) with the subject heading: “Submission for JCWE political economy special issue.”
Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Today’s Muster continues our series Teaching the Civil War. Each post in the series has examined a different method that college and K-12 teachers have used to make the Civil War era come alive in the classroom. The following post by University of Tennessee Chattanooga professors Mark Johnson and Michael Thompson explores how place-based learning at a local Confederate cemetery has helped students wrestle with questions of historical memory.
Every day on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s campus, students walk by the final resting place for Confederate soldiers. Despite its proximity to the campus bookstore, the main parking garage, and many academic buildings, most students claim to have never noticed it. As students engage with course readings, class discussions, and the cemetery itself, they come to see, as historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote, that communities “exert the cultural authority, express the collective solidarity, and achieve a measure of the permanence that they often crave” through the control of public spaces.[1] With this new understanding, students become increasingly curious: how many other spaces, which may generally go unnoticed, remain, therefore, unquestioned and permanent parts of their city’s landscape?
History and Overview
After the Battle of Stones River, Confederates transported their wounded eastward to Chattanooga and initially interred nearly 900 casualties along the banks of the Tennessee River. After devastating flooding in 1867 a committee purchased the current cemetery site on higher ground where the deceased were relocated, including 141 buried in mass graves after their original markers had been washed away. After the battles for Chickamauga and Chattanooga, more casualties joined them. Long after the war ended, many Confederate veterans and their families chose this cemetery as their final resting place.[2] Two American soldiers also are buried on the grounds, along with a freedman named Shaderick Searcy and at least two other unnamed people of color – a “Negro Man” and a “Hospital Matron.”
The grave of an unnamed Black man, most likely enslaved and claimed as Confederate by etching “CSA” on his tombstone. This photo was taken moments after Thompson removed a small Confederate flag inserted next to the grave. (photo taken by the authors)
Chattanooga was contested space both during and after the Civil War. Held by the Confederate and Union armies, the city and its environs are awash with reminders of the conflict and its combatants. But aside from the Chickamauga battlefield ten miles to the south in Georgia, the greatest local assemblage of Confederate memorialization and Lost Cause mythology can be found in Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery. For generations, a Confederate Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked to develop the cemetery and mold local memories and understandings of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. As burials swelled to as many as 2,500, these groups erected an obelisk, gazebo, stone wall, wrought iron Confederate flag gate, plaques, and other memorials.[3]
Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery has proven a captivating and versatile teaching space in part due to its evolution over time and the ways it still resonates with many issues both past and present. Experiential learning and community engagement are pedagogical and institutional focal points at UTC. The authors and their history department colleagues regularly teach beyond the traditional classroom, providing students with opportunities to learn by doing, explore local histories, and bridge academic and public dialogues. In this post, the authors explain how we have utilized the cemetery as an archive of primary sources to enrich historical understanding for an array of learners, ranging from local high schoolers and First Gen Mocs to first-year history majors and students studying historical methods, enslavement, the Civil War and its memory, and the Jim Crow era.
University High and Teaching Historical Methods
Since Fall 2023, UTC has welcomed to campus Hamilton County Schools students enrolled in University High, an alternative program for public high school juniors and seniors. On “Focus Fridays,” UH students have actively engaged with campus life and various academic disciplines. Thompson has guided groups of UH students through a session called “Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery: Memorialization, Memory, and Myth,” which includes introductions to what historians do and what it means to think historically.
The students, who have pre-read a Slate interview with historian Kevin Levin about his book Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, are oriented to the cemetery’s history and most noteworthy sites before exploring the space in small groups.[4] The participants then critically interrogate the cemetery as a site of contested historical memory, and record their observations and questions in preparation for a closing discussion. On the whole, these diverse groups of high schoolers have articulated mixed reactions, ranging from fascination and curiosity to surprise and outrage. But most have appreciated the opportunity to learn about their community and its fraught history.
Both authors have regularly taught the department’s introductory “Research and Writing in History,” a required methodology course for all history majors and minors at UTC as well as those training to become high school history teachers. Although most of these students come from Tennessee, only a third hail from Hamilton County and have some familiarity with local sites and histories.
The main focus of this course is teaching the conventions of historical thinking, researching, and writing; but we have also taken students on walking tours, to local museums, and to the Confederate Cemetery. These cemetery sessions have entailed similar learning objectives as those for UH, but have additionally asked these college students to formulate historical questions about the space, scour the cemetery for evidence, critically assess the source and reliability of that evidence, and devise research strategies to answer their queries. We have found that the cemetery’s dual nature, as not merely a repository of names and dates but also a site of symbolism and discourse that changes with the times, challenges these students to think beyond orthodox sources and methodologies.
Civil War Memory in the Cemetery
In Johnson’s upper-level course “The Civil War in American Memory,” students have acquainted themselves with the scholarship about public spaces, memorialization, cemeteries, and the memory and politics of the dead. Ultimately, students learn to analyze the ways in which, according to historian David Thelen, “people reshape their recollections of the past to fit their present needs,” such as, in the words of anthropologist Paul Connerton, to “legitimate a present social order,” political viewpoint, and collective identity.[5]
When visiting the cemetery, students have generally wanted to discuss the cemetery’s gazebo, an unidentified American soldier, the entrance gate, and the plaques. The students have found the normalness of these things to be part of their power. They note that the gazebo, in particular, seems innocent because it provides a place for mundane activities. They have added, however, that its Confederate imagery and gush, therefore, tells certain people that they do not belong.
Similarly, the entrance gate subtly displays the Confederate battle flag. While students have usually overlooked it prior to their study of the cemetery, they have said that they cannot help but notice it afterward. They have wondered: what other Confederate symbols surround them and have become unquestioned parts of the landscape?
In Fall 2024, students spent more time than usual on the soldier identified only as an “American.” In July 1999, the National Park Service found the remains on Missionary Ridge and memorialized him as an “American Soldier” from the conflict. The students consistently thought about this marker alongside Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic because the “American” identification seems like the type of reconciliation occurring, at least among white Americans, in the book. Similarly, they connect it to the reconciliation occurring in Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary. In Horwitz, Burns, and the cemetery, the 1990s come across as a decade with little conflict between white Americans. They all seem on the same side. This type of memory, students have increasingly pointed out, intentionally passes over the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1994 Murder Trial of O. J. Simpson that put race front and center in the national conversation.[6]
Teaching Shaderick Searcy
The Civil War in American Memory students also have visited the cemetery in conjunction with their readings on faithful slaves and Black Confederates, so Shaderick Searcy has become the focal point of the class.
Amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cemetery offered a space for outdoor class instruction. In this image, Johnson converses with Civil War in American Memory students about the SCV and their claiming of Shaderick Searcy as a Black Confederate. (photo credit: Angela Foster)
In 2016, cemetery caretakers unearthed Searcy’s lost grave marker. That original gravestone clearly portrays him (spelled Shaderick Searcy) as an enslaved person who “served under masters J. D. and W. K. Searcy.” After 2016 the SCV erected a second and new marker, which gives no indication of race or enslaved status. Instead, Searcy (spelled Shadrick) has the same marker as any other private in the Confederate Army. Students have argued that the SCV effectively turned Searcy from a slave into a soldier.[7]
Before class, students have read excerpts from Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates, Micki McElya’s Clinging to Mammy, and a piece on African Americans who manipulated the “faithful slave” role in public performances to gain measures of economic and political power. In addition to these readings, they have studied primary sources, which include a letter from Robert Church, Jr. of Memphis to the United Confederate Veterans, a newspaper column by UCV Commander in Chief John B. Gordon about the so-called friendliness in the South between the races, and a newspaper article about Clinton Rodgers, who supposedly fought in the war as an enslaved man, supposedly went by the name “Jeff Davis,” and supposedly attended all the UCV reunions.[8]
Students have recognized that Searcy, who died at 91, lived through Jim Crow and the Great Depression. Amid these difficult times, he had a stake in good relations with Chattanooga’s white population. According to news coverage of the original grave’s discovery, Searcy received a Confederate pension for his service. The students have balked at the reporter’s use of the term “soldier.”[9] In more recent iterations of the class, students have expressed that they like to think that journalists would approach this term with more care and sensitivity in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans routinely place Confederate flags on the graves at the cemetery. By doing so, they continue to claim Shaderick Searcy, who was born enslaved, as a Confederate soldier. They also put Confederate flags on the other graves to Black Americans, including the Negro Man and the Hospital Matron. (photo taken by the authors)
The Cemetery Amid Black Lives Matter and Unite the Right
In 2017, after the white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville, Chattanooga’s mayor Andy Burke terminated the city’s trusteeship of the cemetery grounds. Burke explained, “Our action today makes it clear that the city of Chattanooga condemns white supremacy in every way, shape and form. While we honor our dead, we do not honor the principle for which they fought.”[10] The city left stewardship of the cemetery exclusively to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Nathan Bedford Forrest Camp #3. Nonetheless, Chattanooga city streets and public spaces continue to bear the names of Confederates, like Samuel Josiah Abner Frazier, and Unionists, like Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain. Unlike the cemetery, however, Frazier Avenue, Chamberlain Avenue, and Chamberlain Field do not have Civil War imagery. By turning over the cemetery, Chattanooga ended its relationship with its most-overt medium for permanent display of Lost Cause propaganda.
In 2020, amid the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the cemetery became a new battleground for racist and anti-racist messaging. Thompson and his students discovered a banana peel discarded on Searcy’s grave, eliciting profound shock and disgust as the instructor removed the dehumanizing refuse and explained the bigotry of this anonymous act. Around the same time, and amid the vandalization of Confederate monuments and other symbols in cities like Charleston, Richmond, New Orleans, and Chapel Hill, “BLM” was found emblazoned on the stones for the “Negro Man” and Black hospital matron (who, like Searcy, adherents of the Lost Cause had claimed by etching “CSA” on their tombstones), and the words “Confederate,” “The Stars & Bars,” and “N.B. Forrest” were blotted out on a memorial to “Our Confederate Dead.”
The 1997 memorial to “Our Confederate Dead” blotted in protest amid the Black Lives Matter movement. (photo taken by the authors)
For students, it’s remarkable that the site, a cemetery filled with stone markers supposedly designed to inter people and last – presumably unchanged – forever, has its own history as it changes with new discoveries, new norms and values, and new developments in the politics of race and white supremacy in the United States.
Mark A. Johnson is an assistant professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932. Currently, he’s working on his forthcoming book, American Bacon: A History of a Food Phenomenon.
Michael Thompson is an associate professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. His current scholarly projects include a history of enslavement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Tennessee.
[1] W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2008), 2-3, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.utc.edu/10.4159/9780674028982-003.
[2] Zella Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Vol. 1 (The Lookout Publishing Company, 1931), 254-6, 493-512.
[3] Armstrong, The History of Hamilton County, 254-6, 493-512.
[4] Rebecca Onion, “Dismantling the Myth of the ‘Black Confederate,’ Slate Aug. 30, 2019, https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/08/black-confederate-myth-history-book.html.
[5] David Thelen, “Memory and American History,” The Journal of American History 75, 4 (Mar. 1989): 1121, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1908632; Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.
[6] Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998); Ken Burns, Ric Burns, and WETA-TV, The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns (WETA, 2002).
[7] “True Grave of First African-American Soldier Buried At Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery Found,” Chattanoogan.com Mar. 23, 2016, https://www.chattanoogan.com/2016/3/23/320653/True-Grave-Of-First-African-American.aspx
[8] Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2007); Mark A. Johnson, Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles (University Press of Mississippi, 2021).
[9] “True Grave of First African-American Soldier Buried At Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery Found,” Chattanoogan.com Mar. 23, 2016, https://www.chattanoogan.com/2016/3/23/320653/True-Grave-Of-First-African-American.aspx
[10] Daniel Jackson, “Chattanooga Backs Away from Confederate Past,” Feb. 21, 2018, https://www.courthousenews.com/chattanooga-backs-away-from-confederate-past/
Mark A. Johnson is an assistant professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932. Currently, he’s working on his forthcoming book, American Bacon: A History of a Food Phenomenon.
Michael Thompson is an associate professor of history at UTC, and is the author of Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. His current scholarly projects include a history of enslavement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, Tennessee.
We’re excited to deliver another journal issue full of wide-ranging, creative, and historiographically engaged scholarship, which we feel especially honored to publish in light of the after-effects of COVID and university rollbacks. The issue includes a roundtable, two research articles, a historiographical review essay, and the normal run of sterling book reviews; it also gives us a chance to note some turnover in the masthead.
In the opening roundtable, organizer Lorien Foote brings together Civil War–era historians and military historians of related fields to reopen questions about the state of military history today. Representing the breadth of comparative questions at the vibrant meetings of the Society for Military History, Foote and her collaborators discuss ways to break out of tired debates about what counts as military history. They apply broad, comparatively informed frameworks as they aim to see the Civil War anew, and they draw on practices of scholars in other fields to reveal tools available for US historians. The roundtable illuminates the vibrancy of the broader field of military history and suggests how much US Civil War historians can learn by looking beyond the field and how much good work lies ahead for military historians of the Civil War era.
In the first of this issue’s two research articles, Lindsey R. Peterson examines Civil War commemorations in the US West to illuminate what was distinctive about the memorials to the war in that region. Peterson, whose article won the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award, isolates the regional effort to connect the Civil War seamlessly to the settlement of the US West and the colonization of Native peoples. The tie that bound these commemorations together was their gendered dimensions; more so than other regions, she argues, commemorations in the West built on the idea of a continuous struggle to defend and extend free, single-family households against threats posted by planters and southern politicians, by the westward movement itself, and by Native traditions.
In our second research article, Anders Bo Rasmussen takes us both to the US West and much farther afield to Denmark. Rasmussen examines the life of Louis Pio, the founder of the Danish Social Democratic Party, who lived in exile in the United States starting in 1877. Rasmussen explores how Pio was influenced not only by socialist ideals of universal working-class solidarity but also by Danish ideas about race and colonialism, and how all those ideas shaped his activities in the United States. Engaging in utopian and working-class movements, Pio never questioned white people’s entitlement to the lands of North America and ultimately even promoted oil baron Henry Flagler’s establishment of a whites-only residential colony in Florida. As Rasmussen suggests, Pio’s life story shows a bleak commonality, a transatlantic blind spot (or worse) on race that carried through social democratic movements.
In this issue’s review essay, Andrew Slap examines the long historiography of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to examine changing views of race, Reconstruction, and the presidency. Slap isolates four central groups of scholars who have interpreted largely consistent groups of sources: traditionalists, hagiographers, revisionists, and conservative revisionists. Slap suggests that we are now entering a new period of reinterpretation of Johnson’s impeachment, inspired by the impeachments of President Donald Trump and the racial reckonings of the past decade.
It is a pleasure in these notes to celebrate the hard work of the many people who keep the journal going and whom we rely on. This issue offers us an opportunity to announce some major transitions that occurred in 2024. We were sad to say goodbye to Hilary Green after her service as associate editor for digital projects, overseeing Muster. Hilary has been a close collaborator throughout our time on the journal and was a crucial force in the #morehistory effort to bring the best scholarship from the page to National Park Service sites and local memorials. She is also a leading scholar of memorialization and memory and helped organize our roundtable on campus-based efforts to memorialize slavery. We appreciate her service, are sad to see her go, but are cheered by the hope she’ll continue to contribute to the journal.
This takes us to the happy side of transitions, as we welcomed a new colleague. Robert Bland, an assistant professor at University of Tennessee, has joined us as the associate editor for digital projects. Rob is completing what promises to be a major interpretation of race and memory in the post-Reconstruction South Carolina Lowcountry and will bring his own wide-ranging curiosity and insight to Muster. We can’t wait to see where he takes it. And we hope many of our readers will write for him.
In addition, we bid farewell to managing editor Matt Isham, who was a stalwart of the journal from its inception in 2011 and has moved on to a position as a full-time high school teacher. As managing editor, Matt helped steward the journal through several major transitions with consistent patience, tact, and intelligence. He was a font of wisdom and institutional knowledge who always made himself available to us and incalculably smoothed our transition into the role of editors. We extend our deepest thanks to him for all he did for us, and we wish him the very best as he embarks on this new stage of his career.
Our interim managing editor is Ed Green, a PhD candidate at Penn State. And with Ed’s move out of the role of graduate assistant, Moyra Williams Eaton has moved in. We are grateful for Ed and Moyra’s ongoing work and for the Richards Center, which makes the JCWE possible.
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.
In today’s Muster post, JCWE Book Review editor Megan Bever has a conversation with Dr. Giuliana Perrone. Dr. Perrone is an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the author of Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
