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2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

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

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

Congratulations to Edda Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

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

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

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

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

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

Winner Biography

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

Past Winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bland

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

Conversation with Historian and Curator Jill Newmark

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

Congratulations to Bianca Dang and Christina C. Davidson

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

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

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

 

Congratulations to Dr. Dang and Dr. Davidson!

Robert Bland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsey R. Peterson

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and incoming Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. You can learn more about her work at lindseyraepeterson.com.

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

Robert Bland

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

Call for Papers: JCWE Special Issue on Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era

Call for Papers: JCWE Special Issue on Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era

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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 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).

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.

Interview with Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White

Interview with Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White

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In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever joins Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White to talk about their edited collection, Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves, which was published by UGA Press in 2023.

Interview with Brandon Byrd on JCWE’s Black Internationalism Special Issue

Interview with Brandon Byrd on JCWE’s Black Internationalism Special Issue

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In today’s Muster, JCWE associate editor Robert Bland interviews Dr. Brandon R. Byrd, editor and organizer of the journal’s December 2024 special issue on Black Internationalism. Dr. Byrd is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Robert Bland

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

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