Year: 2025

Call for Proposals: Civil War Era Article Workshop

Call for Proposals: Civil War Era Article Workshop

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The Richards Center at Penn State and the Journal of the Civil War Era (JCWE) are excited to announce a journal article workshop for advanced graduate students, recent Phds, assistant professors, and independent scholars. The deadline for applying is April 1, 2025. Completed applications should be emailed to RichardsCenter@psu.edu . See the image and link below for more information.

richardscenter.la.psu.edu/news/call-for-proposals

Robert Bland

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

Book Interview with Bennett Parten

Book Interview with Bennett Parten

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Today’s Muster features an interview with Dr. Bennett Parten, author of the recently released Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. Dr. Parton is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University. A native of Royston, Georgia, Parton’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo, Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor. Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

Robert Bland: I’d like to begin and just kind of get a sense of how you encountered Sherman’s March before embarking on this project, both historiographically and through public memory? How did you kind of think about and conceptualize Sherman’s March before beginning this book?

Bennett Parten: There are really two stories to how I got started on this project. One is a longer answer, maybe a longer story. It has everything to do with the fact that I grew up in Royston, Georgia, which is right outside of Athens. And every year my family would make trips down to the coast, to Jekyll Island, Savannah, to Port Royal, Hilton Head, Beaufort, and others. And for all of that trip, except for maybe the first 30 minutes, you are on the path of Sherman’s March. And so this is all very much lived history and then now coincidentally that I live in Savannah is the same route that I take to go visit my parents. And I follow Sherman’s right wing when I go visit my in-laws who live in Atlanta.

Both of those are essentially all along the route of Sherman’s March. And then when we would visit the coast when I was a kid, as much as I love to sit on the beach and fish, what I really love to do more than anything was to drive around and explore the low country. Go to all the different small towns, the different beaches. And so I think there’s a part of this book that really begins just with my own kind of background living in Georgia and visiting the coast and There’s a part of me I think that always relished the idea of writing a history that was really about two places that meant so much to me and still mean a lot to

But then the shorter answer has to do with me reading a work of fiction. I’m sure several readers might be familiar with E.L. Doctorow’s book, The March. Doctorow is great historical fiction writer. He’s probably best known for ragtime. But he also took on Sherman’s March in a book he called Simply The March. And in that book, as was Doctorow’s style, he wrote with a wide range of different characters. There’s a German-born US Army surgeon. There’s a Southern debutante. There are two Confederate prisoners of war. Even Sherman himself is a character.

But he also included a freed woman by the name of Wilma Jones is one of his characters. Wilma Jones was someone who dropped everything to run to the army and then follow Sherman’s army to the coast. And this book really started, I think, with me realizing that Jones was not a singular character, but a composite character. There were likely many hundreds, if not thousands of Wilma Joneses. And the book really began with the question of whether or not we could tell Jones’s experience as a matter of history and not just historical fiction. And so I really came at this project both from having my own biography being one that’s rooted here in Georgia, but also just reading Doctorow fictional take on the march.

RB:  I want to talk a little bit about history and historiography and would be interested to hear you say a little bit about kind of how this interpretation, this reorientation of the march fits into the historical literature. Obviously, the story of emancipation, which you kind of spend a lot of time thinking about, but also right the story of wartime Reconstruction and of how might we kind of reorient the way we have these big kind of ongoing discussions about emancipation and wartime reconstruction. How did your telling of Sherman’s March kind of reframe those stories.

BP: I think first and foremost this book falls into or at least contributes to a growing body of literature on emancipation that sees it as a refugee experience. This has been something that’s become much more common in recent years, both with historians recognizing that the experience of emancipation for all intents and purposes likely looked and felt like a real refugee experience. It was one of deep insecurity, instability, immense complexity. It was one in which what freedom actually meant was always being defined in the moment. It was a time before any notions of asylum, really, or citizenship And so this book, I think, sort of fits in with that move in the scholarship.

And I should say too that many historians are writing about emancipation as a refugee experience, in part because in recent years there’s been excellent research done on the existence of refugee camps that attach themselves to the army, whether it be in Louisiana, near New Orleans, the Mississippi Valley, or the Virginia coast. The fact is on this wide landscape of the Civil War, wherever the army went, there were usually camps of formerly enslaved people that had attached themselves to the army and inhabited what were essentially refugee camps. And so I think there’s very good reasons for why historians have begun to reinterpret the story of emancipation as being one that looks and feels, and for all intents and purposes was a refugee experience.

Another thing that I’ve tried to do in the book is to modernize the story of Sherman’s March. I mean, I think for the longest time, the way historians have understood the march itself has been geared towards this question of total war. Whether or not Sherman’s tactics in Georgia was an example of total war, whether it birthed total war. This, along with the prevalence of white Southerners focusing on their own grievances for what Sherman’s army may or may not have done here in Georgia, I think has always kept the march as being in a kind of terrain of military history. And I think there’s good reason for that. But what I really tried to do was to blend this classic military history with some of the excellent historical work on emancipation, on slave resistance, the work of folks like Thavolia Glymph and Steve Hahn and others that really show and shine a light on the agency of enslaved people, the resistance that enslaved people used to free themselves of plantations and run to the army.

So that’s another thing that I really tried to do here in the book. And then to your point about Reconstruction, one of the things that I tried to accomplish as well is just pinpoint how important this movement of refugees was to the beginnings of Reconstruction. The fact is the movement behind Sherman’s army was so large, they would go on to have immense consequences for what the early phases of Reconstruction would look like.

On the coast around Savannah. And the whole point in doing so is to point out that the refugees people who have since been faceless, nameless to history, but who nonetheless, in the power of their collective movement went on to really force the US government’s hand into thinking about what reconstruction might look like and who, through their own movements really shaped the early history of Reconstruction.

RB: I’d like to ask you to speak a little bit about the kind of subheading of your book, right? It’s a really kind of powerful and kind of provocative claim, right? The story of America’s largest emancipation. When does that fact and framing kind become important and apparent? When does it become clear that this is not only a story of emancipation but also the story of the largest emancipation?

BP: One of the big questions was, well, exactly how many refugees might have followed Sherman’s army? This was always a kind of moving number and as one reviewer of mine pointed out. There are no census. The Army’s not taking a census as this is happening. And so drilling down on any specific numbers was always a real question for me.

But nonetheless, when Sherman arrives in Savannah, he speculates that there are as many as 20,000 refugees that are following his army. And when I first read this, I recognized this would be a large number, but I don’t think it really clicked with me how big of a movement this was until I realized that Savannah itself only had a population of 22,000.And then Atlanta, which now is the great metropolis, you can call it that of Georgia, only had a population of 10,000. And so only when I began to realize some of these numbers did I recognize just how large of a movement this was.

And we should recognize that this 20,000 number doesn’t take into account folks who might have run to the army and then turned back on their own volition or were turned back from the army, which absolutely happened. It doesn’t take into account the folks who might have run to the army and then decided not to make the march. It doesn’t take into account the folks who experience freedom as a consequence of this movement.

And so my argument is that taking all this combined, what you have is, yes, a military event by definition, but also an extraordinarily large liberation event and the largest emancipation event in American history.

RB: Along those lines, I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you periodize your story, where you talk about the marches taking place in phases, right, to kind of On the one hand, this is not a large amount of time, especially kind of your history department, you talk to your colleagues in other fields of history who study the early modern or ancient world and they think in terms of centuries. Here, we’re talking about a couple months. As Civil War historians know, in the time of war, months can feel like years. I wonder if you could say a little bit about kind of how you think about the kind of phases of the march and kind of kind of how we might think about these months as kind of a pivotal turning point in the broader war.

BP: That’s really well said. And you can imagine it made research really difficult in that I was looking for specific stories from just a month and a half in very specific places right when I was combing through the archives. And so that was always a real challenge that I had to kind of grapple with in doing some of this work.

The March the Sea has always been the Savannah campaign from Atlanta to Savannah. But one of the things that I’ve really tried to do in this book is situated in a much larger story. And while the Savannah campaign is my focus, I do reach back into Atlanta to show how what happened on the march to Atlanta and around Atlanta set the stage for what would happen in Georgia. And then especially in the coast, where most stories I think would follow the army back through the Carolinas, I really wanted to be very intentional about showing how Sherman’s March affected the islands around Savannah and South Carolina and others. And really how this story bled into, as I’ve said before, and as you mentioned, the early history of reconstruction. So one of the things that I try to do is just be really intentional about keeping the focus on the refugees for as long as possible. And when you do that, you recognize that the march, though it ends in Savannah, at least as a military campaign, the story on the islands goes on for another year, year and a half. And again, as I said, it really bleeds into reconstruction.

In terms of periodizing it, one of the things that I really tried to do was to move away from our traditional stories or understanding of the march as just the Savannah campaign.

RB: This is also a story about the land, right? One of the major things that scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction think a lot about are the stories coming out of Sherman’s Field Order 15 and the ways that landownership was promised, achieved, delayed, and denied. And I wonder kind of how you think about the story of land ownership coming out of the march.

BP: It’s hugely important. And I should say when I went into it, I didn’t really, I think, recognize how intertwined these two stories were. I mean, I knew of the story of Field Order 15. I Knew of the story of Port Royal. I also knew of the story of Sherman’s March. And I think as I was writing this and working on it, as I began to sort of work through this, I began to recognize how intertwined they were. But when I started, I don’t think I quite realized just how closely connected these two movements or at least two stories really are.

And no, I think it’s hugely important. I think it’s a very important story. It’s one that is tragic and it leaves this story as one that ends in a very ambiguous place. One of the difficult things about writing this is that the story of the march itself is a story that features instances of liberation, of triumphalism, of excitement, of optimism, of hope.

This is always underpinned by the real dangers of what it was like to be a refugee on the march. Some of the actions that Sherman’s men took in regards to the refugees. But then once the story transitions here to the coast and land reform becomes a question and then ultimately fails, it turns this moment that is tinged with a sense of optimism and triumphalism into one that is anything but fulfilled, completely ambiguous, and one that is sort of left searching for meaning.

And so it was always an interesting and dispiriting and disappointing place to end the story. But I nevertheless end there because it’s true. It’s what happened, right? And so it’s a… tragic and… as I said, ambiguous place to end the story on.

RB: Sometimes history has reckon with the hard truths of the past.  You mentioned before that you’re part of cohort of scholars including think Amy Murrell Taylor, Chandra Manning, and Abigail Cooper who are all thinking about wartime emancipation as much as a moment of crisis as a moment of liberation.

How do you think about the march as both this moment of jubilee— thinking about emancipation as this kind of real kind of turning point—and as maybe just a piece of long emancipation that spanned the 19th century?

BP: That’s a great question. And this is one that a reviewer recently has pointed out, and it’s kind of drawn on this distinction of, as you said, some historians seeing this sort of troubled emancipation story that is ambiguous and ill-defined. And then others who trace this longer story and see this as such a critical moment and as a moment that truly meant something and matter, right? And was a real turning point in this long history emancipation and the death of slavery.

And to be honest with you, I think fall into that later camp personally. I mean, I think this is a moment that truly does matter and that it does have real consequence and meaning. And we should recognize it as a turning point. But I also think we can be of two minds and recognize that is as such as a lived experience at least. It was one that was, for all intents and purposes, one that mimicked the experience of being a refugee, that in the moment, at least, what was freedom was ill-defined and constantly trying to be defined and was ambiguous.

RB: Well, you’ve added a rich contribution to the ongoing conversation about Sherman’s March and more importantly, provided a story that takes seriously the broad and complicated story of this particular moment of emancipation. The stories are told from above and below. You get a sense of a kind of real human drama. The tragedy, but also, the ways that this story tells us something about what emancipation really meant. I want to again thank you to Dr. Parton for joining us today to discuss your new book.

Robert Bland

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

Photography, Visual Culture and Building a Black Civil War Memory Archive

Photography, Visual Culture and Building a Black Civil War Memory Archive

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I am a collector of early African American photography and visual culture. I began my collection after attending a NEH Summer Institute focused on the visual culture of the American Civil War. I initially applied to expand how I historicized the diverse African American experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras in my teaching. After this introduction, I became attuned to how photography and visual culture functioned as a form of individual and collective refusal to accept the myth of criminality, collective forgetting of their Civil War patriotism, and second-class citizenship. Whether through the tintype, carte-de-visite (cdv), cabinet photograph, or real photo postcard (RPPC), I was drawn to these subtle acts of Black resistance.

As I began researching and writing about African American Civil War memory, I curated my collection habits to expand the archive used. Due to previous anti-Black archival practices, much of African American evidence remains in the attics, basements, scrapbooks, and communal based archives and not in the traditional archival repositories accustomed by most historians. With every death of the family and communal historians, these collections find their way to the market. As a historian, I became intentional. I created an archive as an act of preservation but also in recovering these experiences in my own scholarship and teaching.

As a result, I drew on select items from my own constructed archive in the analysis and conclusions made in Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War. For instance, I did not include a cdv of Joseph B. Kiddoo, the commander of the Twenty-Second USCT regiment in which my Civil War ancestor served. Rather, I chose three collection items that demonstrated competing claims of Civil War memory in Virginia. Collectively, these images show how African American communities understood the power of technology as a form of both erasure and resistance in the ongoing Civil War culture wars.

Purchased at a private sale, the first photographic image offered a rare glimpse into the Lee monument unveiling in Richmond, Virginia. During the celebrations, Captain M. F. Wyckoff of Company D, Second Regiment, West Virginia National Guard documented his presence with studio photography. In his souvenir photograph, Wyckoff posed with a barefoot African American boy. As one of his first public events as a commissioned National Guard captain, Wyckoff noted the living prop in the personal inscription to his brother whom he gave a copy. He wrote: “I am Cap. of a Militia Co. This is my little n****r waiter. I weigh 214 lbs. in my shirt sleeves. I brought my Co. to the unveiling of Lee’s statue that was a great time.”[1] This rare, intimate photograph highlights the Lost Cause narrative scripted for the occasion and how its rising dominance in shaping the Civil War commemorative landscape in the city, state, and region.

Photograph of M. F. Wyckoff and unidentified African American boy taken during the Lee Monument unveiling in Richmond, Virginia in 1890. Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

Neither the Reconstruction-era gains nor Emancipationist collective memories meant anything to the white West Virginia National Guardsman. The Lee Monument unveiling allowed him to enact the Lost Cause fantasy of the faithful slave trope. Elderly African American men and women often served as props at Confederate monument unveilings. Some African Americans willingly played the part at these public events and even in their Confederate pension application. Financial considerations and fear often motivated these actors as discussed by historians.[2] This waiter, however, was too young to have served as a Civil War camp servant. Born after emancipation, the African American youth’s motivation is unclear, except possibly cash payment. Yet, Wyckoff perpetuated the lie to his brother who received the staged photograph. Both the photograph and the inscription demonstrate the emerging racial power dynamics and selective whitewashed remembrances being resisted by African Americans in the city, state, and region.[3]

Estate sales provided specific examples of how African Americans used photography and visual culture for countering Lost Cause narratives and lynching imagery circulating in the era. A souvenir photograph and a postcard from the Jamestown Ter-Centennial shows how Black Virginias challenged accepted Civil War narratives by embracing a post-emancipation progress narrative.

The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Jamestown by English colonists at the Norfolk, Virginia, fairgrounds. From April 26 to November 30, the segregated Negro Exhibit showcased the history and achievements of Black Virginians in the two-story Negro Building from their 1619 arrival as captured Africans through the Civil War and post-emancipation progress. From the exhibitions to the August third address by Booker T. Washington during “Negro Day,” African Americans flocked to the exposition in large numbers.[4] While the exposition failed to bring in the expected revenues, Black Virginians saw the Ter-centennial exposition as a major success for celebrating African American achievements and contributions to the state.[5]  In short, it became a significant Emancipationist event for the Black Virginians.

Official souvenir Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 showcasing the postcard of “Negro Building.” Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

As suggested by the two collection items, Black Virginians and out-of-state attendees purchased the souvenir postcard of the Negro Building that housed the dedicated post-emancipation progress narrative. Instead of mailing the commemorative postcard, some attendees, like the one in my collection, carefully preserved the memento in their scrapbooks as an act of counter-archival resistance. The discoloration caused by the photo corners on the postcard notes the preservation practice and the impulse to preserve the memory for future generations. Some, as the other item suggests, even posed for souvenir tintype photographs placed in a special commemorative cardboard sleeve. Unlike the living prop used in the Wyckoff souvenir photograph, presumed African American mother and daughter embraced the inexpensive technology for capturing their status as modern citizens and racial progress achieved since emancipation.

Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 souvenir photograph of an unidentified African American girl and woman. Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

These two items offered necessary texture to the moment not captured by the traditional archive of the Black newspaper coverage and post-exposition publications. The New York Age coverage, for instance, praised the Jamestown exposition for disarming anti-black proponents “who have made the wholesale accusation that the Negro race is incapable of achievements that require intelligent initiative, scientific skill, original methods, business acumen and unceasing application.”[6] Recognizing the historic 1619 arrival “in chains,” Thompson, commended the Negro Building exhibitions for serving as “a ‘star witness’ in support of the Negro’s claim to full-fledged American citizenship” while remaining critical of the “Jim Crowing” of their racial achievements as separate from the “main body of the Jamestown Exposition.”[7] Following this successful event, two exposition organizers published The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (1908). This volume embraced an essential tenet of the Emancipationist tradition–African American post-emancipation progress demonstrated a people on the rise from its dark slave past and post-Civil War emancipation.[8] For attendees, the souvenir photograph and postcard became additional evidence of an alternative Civil War understanding carefully preserved in their scrapbooks and communal archives. They rejected the Lost Cause photographic usage of Wyckoff and others and maintained their own traditions on their own terms of the what the Civil War and its aftermath meant to them and their respective communities.

In her award-winning book, Laura Helton explored African American collectors, librarians, and archivists of Black life, history, and thought over the late nineteenth and twentieth century.[9] In this sense, I am not different. By collecting and constructing new archives, I am seeing more of the archival abundance of Black Civil War memory that has yet to be captured in traditional archives and in turn within the gaze of most historians. By including these images in the book and this post, it is my hope that additional photographic and material cultural examples find their way within the scholarly gaze and that our collective understanding of Black Civil War memory might become more complete in the future.

[1] “M. F. Wyckoff and unidentified African American boy,” photograph, n.p., 1890, Author’s personal collection.

[2] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 284-289; Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5-13, 38-40; Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 97-99; Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 104-131.

[3]“M. F. Wyckoff and unidentified African American boy.”

[4] Brian de Ruiter, “Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907,” in Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Richmond, VA, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Jamestown_Ter-Centennial_Exposition_of_1907; “Negro Day at Jamestown,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), July 29, 1907, 2; “Negro’s Gala Day,” Washington Bee, August 10, 1907, 1.

[5] “No. 119, Negro Building, Jamestown Exposition of 1907,” official souvenir Jamestown Ter-Centennial postcard, 1907, accessed in author’s personal collection; “Unidentified African American girl and women,” Jamestown Ter-Centennial souvenir photograph, Norfolk, 1907, tintype in embossed paper mat, accessed in author’s personal collection; De Ruiter, “Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907.”

[6] R. W. Thompson, “A New Page of History on Hampton Roads,” New York Age, December 5, 1907, 1-2.

[7] Thompson, “A New Page of History on Hampton Roads,” 2.

[8] Giles B. Jackson and Daniel Webster Davis, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (Richmond: The Virginia Press, 1908), 53-137.

[9] See Laura E. Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Teaching the Civil War: A Place-Based Learning Approach to Civil War Memory

Teaching the Civil War: A Place-Based Learning Approach to Civil War Memory

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This post is the second in a new Muster series that will highlight innovative ways that classroom instructors have approached teaching the Civil War era. Today’s post is written by Professor Ian Delahanty and offers a creative approach for introducing students to Civil War-era history through a place-based learning experience in Boston

 

For most of the students who take my survey of the Civil War era at the regional Western Massachusetts college where I teach, the Civil War is and always has been “down South.”  Even though the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, where a majority of the Union army’s rifles were produced, is a mere 20-minute walk from campus, most of my students feel little or no tangible connection to the war.  By contrast, many can share memories of visiting a museum or historic site in southern New England that enabled them to feel how their communities were shaped by major events in Early American History, including King Philip’s War, Shays’ Rebellion, the Industrial Revolution, and especially the American Revolution.  Thus, when designing a culminating research project for my Civil War era survey, I thought long and hard about how to immerse students in some aspect of the period in a way that would make them grasp what the war meant to contemporaries who, while far removed from its battlefields, were nonetheless invested in its prosecution and outcome.  In what follows, I describe a research project organized around a walking tour of Civil War monuments in downtown Boston and research in contemporary newspaper coverage in the Boston Globe of the monuments’ planning and dedication ceremonies.  Along the way, I offer suggestions for how this project might be adapted to any number of locales while remaining grounded in a pedagogy of Place-Based Learning.

The objectives for this project are twofold.  First, I want students to be able to demonstrate their knowledge of the various strands of Civil War memory, an objective they meet in the final product by identifying a particular strand of memory (or in some cases, strands of memory) encapsulated in the monuments, dedication speeches, and newspaper editorials that comprise the evidence base for their research.  Second, beyond the ability to identify what strand of Civil War memory a given monument or dedication speech most closely aligns with, students should be able to evaluate Boston’s landscape of Civil War memory in its totality.  They do this in an essay that synthesizes their observations of the monuments from our field trip with their research in the Boston Globe’s coverage of the monuments’ planning and dedication ceremonies.  Ultimately, students are tasked with explaining how Bostonians in the last third of the nineteenth century remembered the Civil War.

The groundwork for this culminating project is laid early in the semester.  In the first week of class, students are introduced to the concept of historical memory through excerpts from the French historian Pierre Nora’s essay “Between Memory and History” and a short video produced by Brown University’s Choices Program that succinctly maps out forms of collective memory.[1]  They also read David Blight’s “In Memory’s Mirror,” a short article that surveys historical memory of the Civil War at its 50th, 100th, and 150th anniversaries.[2]  Thus, before the class delves into the narrative of the Civil War era, students gain familiarity with the concept of historical memory and the various, at times conflicting strands Civil War memory.  Over the next twelve weeks, as we proceed through the sequence of the antebellum period and Civil War, we periodically pause to reflect on an artifact or site of Civil War memory that is germane to a given lesson topic.  For instance, as part of a lesson on how Americans dealt with the unprecedented scale of death created by the war, the class visits a nearby cemetery that includes a Civil War soldiers’ burial plot centered around a “standing soldier” monument.[3]  That monument affords us the opportunity to revisit and reinforce the concept of historical memory and to practice interpreting a monument as a site of Civil War memory.

The culminating project begins in earnest about three-quarters of the way through the semester, by which time we’re transitioning into a focus on Reconstruction.  I teach the class in the spring semester, and in Massachusetts, this part of the schedule typically falls when it’s slightly less foolish to assume that a 1.5-hour bus trip to Boston won’t be cancelled due to snow.  Students begin the week by skipping ahead to the last chapter of our textbook, Gary Gallagher and Joan Waugh’s The American War, to read the authors’ explanation of the “four major interpretive traditions” of Civil War memory developed by the wartime generation: The Union Cause, the Emancipation Cause, the Lost Cause, and the Reconciliation Cause.[4]  Later in the week, we brave rush hour traffic on the Mass Pike and are dropped off in front of the Massachusetts State House.  There, we assemble beneath the equestrian statue of “Fighting” Joseph Hooker, which stands across the street from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ renowned monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.  From there, we embark on a roughly two-hour walking tour of historical monuments in downtown Boston dedicated to various individuals and groups who shaped the course of the Civil War era.  While my lesson is tailored to Boston’s monument landscape, this approach can be adapted to any place where there are numerous monuments to Civil War-era individuals, groups, or organizations within a reasonably close distance, whether on foot or by bus.  Combining Google Maps street view with a database of Civil War monuments could enable instructors to create a virtual tour of monuments in their vicinity; such a virtual tour might be necessary for differently abled students if the cityscape or landscape poses mobility challenges.[5]

The walking tour of Civil War monuments in downtown Boston is the first of two opportunities for students to conduct research in primary source evidence.  Grounded in a pedagogy of Place-Based Learning, the tour (and specifically, my line of questioning along the way) pushes students to connect the particularities of each monument with its geographical location and chronological context in the cityscape.[6]  Place-Based Learning immerses students in a space—a neighborhood pocket, a natural landscape, a museum, etc.—where they can observe and ideally interact with an issue or phenomenon they would otherwise learn about in a reading or class discussion.  In foregrounding space and place, it encourages students to see themselves as part of an environment whose terrain, resources, or narratives are shared and oftentimes contested.

Funded by a $55,000 grant from the state legislature and installed in 1903, the General Hooker Statue stands just outside the main public entrance to the Massachusetts State House.

 

My walking tour of downtown Boston’s Civil War monuments fosters a Place-Based Learning approach from the jump as we evaluate our first subject: the equestrian statue of General Joseph Hooker just outside the Massachusetts State House.  After we discuss the dubious military record of the Massachusetts-born, West Point-educated, and Puritan-descended Hooker, I ask the students to consider why the state legislature funded a commanding equestrian statue of Hooker at the turn of the twentieth century.[7]  With some gentle reminders that this was a period defined partly by increased immigration of the so-called “New Immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe and bouts of labor unrest in the city and state, students start to grasp that despite his lackluster credentials as a general, Hooker embodied traits and values that Boston’s Anglo-American elites believed to be threatened by immigrants and labor radicals.  That point is reinforced when we discuss what we have to do in order to view Hooker atop his steed: We look up to Hooker’s imposing figure, set against the gleaming golden dome of the Massachusetts State House.  At this and other points along the walking tour, such as the towering Soldiers and Sailors Monument that stands atop a prominent knoll on Boston Common, students see how monuments interact with urban space in order to create narratives of power.

At each monument on our walk, we engage in a similar type of evaluation of the monument’s place in the cityscape and the historical context surrounding its origins.  In downtown Boston, the Shaw/54th Massachusetts monument, the Boston Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and a statue of Col. Thomas Cass of the Irish-American 9th Massachusetts Regiment afford opportunities to draw connections, respectively, to Emancipationist-Unionist, Unionist-Reconciliationist, and Unionist memories of the war.   As we interpret these monuments, I push students to consider how the various strands of Civil War memory encoded in them might have been deployed by late-nineteenth century Bostonians to advance a political or social agenda amidst the national retreat from Reconstruction and local power struggles that oftentimes unfolded along racial and ethnic lines.

The author photographed in front of the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial by one of his students in April 2023.

 

We then proceed to bronzed statues of the abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, which, when juxtaposed with the Shaw/54th Memorial, bring to light fracture lines within the Emancipationist memory of the war.  The walking tour concludes at the site of the “Emancipation Group” monument in Park Plaza.  Replicas of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Park, the now-removed statues featured a life-sized Lincoln extending his hand over a kneeling, formerly enslaved Black man.  Since the removal of the statues in December 2020, the site includes only the monument’s pedestal bearing the inscription: “A Race Set Free/And the County at Peace/Lincoln/Rests from His Labor.”[8]  The site offers a fitting setting for us to discuss the enduring power of monuments as forms and sites of memory where claims about the past are made and contested.[9]

Caption: Following a petition campaign led by local artist Tory Bullock, the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously in 2020 to remove the Emancipation Group statues in Park Plaza.  Photo courtesy of the Boston Preservation Alliance: https://www.bostonpreservation.org/advocacy-project/emancipation-group [accessed January 7, 2025]

 

The interpretive traditions of Civil War memory evident in a walking (or, depending on distance, bus) tour of Civil War monuments in your vicinity will necessarily vary, but the Place-Based Learning pedagogy that structures this activity offers broadly applicable guidance on how to carry it out.  In order to establish that there is an academic purpose to the excursion, provide detailed instructions well in advance of the trip for what students will produce based substantially on their observations of the monuments they visit.[10]  While it will be necessary for instructors to provide context for the monuments, a participatory conversation about them should be the goal.  At each stop, prod students to make observations about what they see, where they are and what surrounds them, and what connections they can make to the history of the Civil War era they’ve learned in the class.[11]  To keep students focused, especially if they are in a bustling, loud urban environment, require them to take notes as they observe and discuss each monument and encourage them to take pictures of details that catch their eye.  Such data collection also encourages students to see themselves as participants in a dialog or debate over monuments’ meaning and function in their spaces.

Caption: At the Boston Soldiers and Sailors Monument, students make observations of one of four mezzo-relievo plaques designed by the Irish-born sculptor Martin Milmore.

 

During the last couple of weeks of classes and after the walking tour, students build on their observations of the monuments by researching in the Boston Globe’s coverage of the monuments’ planning and dedication ceremonies.  In order to keep students focused on interpretating and synthesizing the evidence, I have collected and made available to them the Globe articles.  Instructors wishing to develop students’ research abilities for this exercise could opt to require that students locate similar types of sources for monuments in their vicinity.  In my experience, students struggle enough to make out the blurred typeset of a digitized late-nineteenth century newspaper and to parse the vernacular of the period.  For earlier iterations of this assignment, I instructed students to put themselves in the shoes of a tour guide who needs to write the copy for a pamphlet to guide visitors on a walking tour of downtown Boston’s Civil War monuments.  However, these final products were typically narrative summaries of what students observed of the monuments or in the newspaper articles.  As a result, I now require students to produce an argumentative essay in which they explain how late-nineteenth century Bostonians remembered the Civil War.  In lieu of a traditional final exam for the class, we meet to share our findings and discuss why Boston’s monument landscape took shape as it did over the last third of the nineteenth century.  By this point, students have studied Reconstruction and its demise in depth and are oftentimes able to draw connections between the emergence of Unionist and Reconciliationist memories of the war in Boston and the national retreat from Reconstruction that was more or less complete by the turn of the twentieth century.

There are substantial challenges to developing and implementing a project like this.  Funding a day-long learning excursion is no easy feat for many of us at institutions where budget cuts are the order of the day.  And all told, the time spent identifying and mapping out monuments; locating and reading scholarship on their subjects; and gathering sufficient contemporaneous accounts about the monuments is substantial.  But I have found this to be one of the most rewarding projects to design, and my students’ feedback on the course consistently identifies the project (particularly the walking tour) as a part of the class they enjoyed and learned from the most.  A few years ago, a Physical Education major who took the class under the mistaken assumption that it fulfilled a General Education requirement called me over to the pedestal of the Boston Soldiers and Sailors Monument.  I had noticed him looking at his phone as I provided context about the dedication ceremony for the monument.  As it turned out, he had pulled up a compass app and determined that the woman atop the statue representing “America” was facing south.  “I wonder,” he asked, “if the sculptor did this on purpose so that she could look down to the Union soldiers who died in the South.”  Moments like this are why I continue to return to this project, for all of the challenges it poses.

 

[1] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Nora, ed., Realm of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1-20; Brown University Choices Program, “What is Historical Memory?” May 31, 2016: https://www.choices.edu/video/what-is-historical-memory/ [accessed January 6, 2025].

[2] David Blight, “In Memory’s Mirror,” The American Interest, September 1, 2011: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/09/01/in-memorys-mirror/ [accessed January 6, 2025].

[3] For this lesson, students read brief excerpts from Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009) and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

[4] Gary W. Gallagher and Joan Waugh, The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (State College, PA: Flip Learning, 2023), 249-268.

[5] This and other challenges to putting Place-Based Learning into practice are covered thoroughly in Alan Boyle et. al., “Fieldwork is Good: The Student Perception and the Affective Domain,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31, 2 (2007), 299-317.  Sons of Union Veterans, “National Monuments Database”: https://suvcw.org/national-monument-database [accessed January 7, 2025]; Southern Poverty Law Center, “Whose Heritage? Map”: https://www.splcenter.org/whose-heritage-map [accessed January 7, 2025].

[6] For an introduction to Place-Based Learning (otherwise referred to as Place-Based Education), see the useful overview and reading list from the University of Nebraska’s Center for Transformative Teaching: https://teaching.unl.edu/resources/introduction-place-based-learning/#:~:text=Place%2Dbased%20learning%20is%20an,learning%20through%20exploring%20their%20environment [accessed January 6, 2025].

[7] Fortunately, our textbook offers a thorough analysis of Hooker’s performance in command of the Army of the Potomac.  Gallagher and Waugh, The American War, 118-21, 131, 134.

[8] https://www.bostonpreservation.org/advocacy-project/emancipation-group [accessed January 6, 2025].

[9] Marie Fazo, “Boston Removes Statue of Formerly Enslaved Man Kneeling Before Lincoln,” New York Times, December 29, 2020.

[10] Gregory A. Smith, “Place-Based Education: Learning to Be Where We Are,” Phi Beta Kappan (April 2022), 593.

[11] S.M. Land and H.T. Zimmerman, “Facilitating Place-Based Learning in Outdoor Informal Environments with Mobile Computers,” Tech Trends 58 (January 2014), 80.

Ian Delahanty

Ian Delahanty is associate professor of history at Springfield College.  His book, Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865, was published in 2024 by Fordham University Press.

The Perils of Pardoning: Ulysses S. Grant and the Legacy of the Ku Klux Klan Pardons

The Perils of Pardoning: Ulysses S. Grant and the Legacy of the Ku Klux Klan Pardons

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Toward the end of his first term President Ulysses S. Grant faced a dilemma. He had campaigned on the slogan “Let Us Have Peace,” yet extralegal violence by the Ku Klux Klan was threatening peace in the South. On April 20, 1871, Congress passed the Ku-Klux Act to combat that threat. It gave the president authority to suspend habeas corpus and use military power to fight conspiracies designed to deprive US citizens of rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In the fall of 1871, for the only time in his presidency, Grant used his full powers to crackdown on the Klan in the hill counties of South Carolina. In his best-selling biography Ron Chernow calls that campaign the “imperishable story of Grant’s presidency.”[1]

Indeed, Grant broke the back of the Klan. As commendable as his actions were, however, his success was not as sweeping as it may seem to a public that imagines the Klan, with its disguises and secret rituals, encompassing all white terrorists at the time. As Allen Trelease noted years ago, after Grant’s crackdown, “Southern violence now assumed other forms, almost as lethal, probably more effective, and certainly more lasting than the Ku Klux Klan.”[2] Despite that ongoing terror, after his re-election in early 1873, Grant started pardoning Ku-Klux. Pardons continued after the horrible racial massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter 1873. Eventually, all sent to federal prison received pardons, including one responsible for the murder of African American Thomas Roundtree. In late March 1871, eighty Ku-Klux raided Roundtree’s home looking for weapons and warning him not to vote. When Roundtree shot to defend himself, the mob filled his body with thirty-five rounds and slit his throat from ear to ear. As if that pardon was not enough, in Grant’s last days in office, he asked his attorney general if any more “political prisoners” deserved clemency.[3]

“Ku Klux Klan” from Invisible Empire by Albion W. Tourgee (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880)

Grant’s pardons are an often-unrecognized precedent for president-elect Donald Trump’s promise to consider clemency for convicted January, 6, 2021, insurrectionists. If granted, Trump’s pardons would, as Grant’s did, provide comfort for white supremacist terrorists. Likewise, although Grant pardoned all convicted Ku-Klux, he claimed that he considered each case individually, as Trump says he will do. History, however, does not always rhyme. Grant was no Trump. Trump deployed his promise as a campaign tactic. Grant’s 1872 opponent former abolitionist Horace Greeley also advocated pardons in his campaign, but to combat charges that he was trying to corral votes, Grant deferred consideration of them until after the election. Most importantly, as outrageous as Trump’s promise is, it makes partisan sense. The insurrectionists supported him. Grant pardoned insurrectionists who opposed him. Trump’s pardons would exacerbate partisan divisions; Grant tried to heal them.

Grant’s efforts to heal pose challenges to Reconstruction scholars. There is a long history of victors extending clemency to bridge divisions after civil wars. Few Unionists disagreed with Andrew Johnson’s first proclamation of amnesty for thousands of Confederates in exchange for oaths of loyalty, especially because he refused to extend it to many covered by Abraham Lincoln. Efforts to reconstruct the nation would have been impossible without some such act of reconciliation. National harmony did not, however, depend on pardoning white supremacist terrorists who refused to accept the terms of peace and violated their oaths. Nonetheless, the few scholars who acknowledge the pardons in the wake of the resurrection of Grant’s presidential reputation are not very convincing in addressing that distinction. When Fergus M. Bordewich first mentions the pardons in Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction he describes a Grant “worried that leniency would be misinterpreted as a confession of federal weakness rather than strength.” After describing Colfax, Bordewich returns to the pardons, this time describing a Grant who “desperately hoped” that pardoning Ku-Klux “would gradually encourage obedience to the law and quell resistance to the government.”[4] What about Colfax made Grant abandon his worry that leniency would be misinterpreted and start hoping that it would encourage obedience?

The answer to that question requires substantial speculation. As Elaine Frantz Parsons emphasized in Ku Klux, scholarship on the Klan has to rely on unreliable or non-existent documents. Secrecy demanded deception or destruction. Pardons can pose similar problems. The Constitution requires no rationale for pardons. The one for unrepentant Randolph Abbott Shotwell cited “good and sufficient reasons.” What were those reasons? Was Grant flattered when white Southerners assured him that pardons would make him president for the entire nation, not just the North. Was Grant imagining a third term after reelection? Was he influenced by the support of reputed Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1872?[5] We can’t tell with certainty. Nonetheless, the quest for reasons can raise possibilities that have gotten little recent attention. For instance, acts of the Klan were so horrendous that it is easy to forget that prosecution of it produced injustices. Only eighty ended up in federal prison. Some of the worst offenders escaped west or to Canada. Pardons coincided with the attorney general’s halt to prosecutions, allowing murders like Rufus Bratton to return home and resume medical practice while convicted Ku-Klux suffered imprisonment.

Even if we can’t know with certainty whether Grant factored such disparities into his thinking, we can recognize that Grant’s pardons have to be considered in the context of other acts of executive clemency at the time. Numerous scholars note that Republicans blamed the Black Codes on the thousands of 1865 pardons Johnson issued to leading Southerners. Fewer note that Grant had encouraged Johnson to grant amnesty to those with property from the start. And the issue goes beyond Grant. None of those who protested Johnson’s pardons, including Frederick Douglass, publicly protested Grant’s Ku-Klux pardons, despite numerous private warnings recorded in Grant’s papers.

President Andrew Johnson Pardoning Rebels at the White House, Harper’s Weekly Magazine, October 14, 1865

The Supreme Court also had a role. Although generally ignored in the countless legal studies of Reconstruction, the period witnessed leading cases on the pardoning power. In Ex parte Garland a divided Court proclaimed that except for cases of impeachment, the president’s pardoning power is “unlimited” and “not subject to legislative control,” only to qualify that absolute pronouncement in a subsequent decision. The Court also sided with the executive branch when Congress claimed that, because “amnesty” is not mentioned in the Constitution, the president cannot proclaim it without congressional authorization. The stakes were high. Traditionally, pardons are designed to address individual cases. Amnesty applies to groups. First declared after the Peloponnesian Wars, amnesty tries to heal divisions after civil strife. Pardons are legal acts of forgiving. Amnesty, linked to the Greek word for “amnesia,” is a legal act of forgetting. Clemency after Appomattox was as much concerned with legal forgetting as with forgiving. Yet the Supreme Court conflated these crucial distinctions, although in numerous countries only legislatures can declare amnesty.

Congress could have asserted its sole authority to proclaim amnesty when it framed the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, in Section Three it confined itself to limiting the scope of Johnson’s pardons by incorporating into the Constitution the provision prohibiting insurrectionists who violated their constitutional oath from holding public office, granting Congress, not the president, power to remove the disability. Long forgotten, Section Three was back in the news because of the unsuccessful effort to use it to disqualify Trump from the presidency. But that brief news cycle did not suggest its possible links to Grant’s Ku-Klux pardons. Prior to the 1872 election Grant urged Congress to pass an amnesty act allowing most affected by Section Three to hold office. Grant had no need to sign the bill, but with a public ceremony he did. Perhaps in his mind Ku-Klux pardons followed logically from this act of reconciliation.

“Dam Your Soul. The Horrible Sepulchre and Bloody Moon Has at Last Arrived.” from Albion W. Tourgee (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880)

Of course, as noted above, there is a clear difference between allowing former rebels to hold office and forgiving white supremacist terrorists. Grant, however, did not see the difference or care. To make matters worse, even though he claimed to be considering the merits of each case, collectively his pardons and the decision to halt further prosecutions had the effect of a proclamation of amnesty. Ironically, although amnesty is a legal act of forgetting, if Grant had granted amnesty to Ku-Klux, as the late Jimmy Carter did for Vietnam draft evaders, perhaps his mercy for acts of terrorism would not be so frequently forgotten. Indeed, in this time of partisan divisions, Grant’s Ku-Klux pardons are a telling reminder of how difficult it can be for someone intent on peace to know when it no longer makes sense to heal through acts of forgetting and forgiving.

[1] Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), xx.

[2]Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Klux Klux Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton: Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1971), 418.

[3] The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-2012), v28, 511.

[4] Fergus M. Bordewich, Klan Wars: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (New ork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 307-08, 330.

[5] William B. Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant: Politician (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1935), 283.

Brook Thomas

Brook Thomas is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of English and the Center for Law, Society, and Culture, UC Irvine. His specialty is 19th-century law and literature in the US. He has published six single-authored books and a case book on Plessy v. Ferguson. The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White (John Hopkins University Press, 2017) won the Hugh Holman Prize.

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