In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor talks with Angela Diaz about her book, Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South, which was published by UGA Press in 2024.
Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s widow. “I have had so much trouble & gone so in debt to get my poor husband’s bounty, that I was able to do no more,” she lamented. With a young child to support, Henrietta certainly needed the money, which would have amounted to several hundred dollars the U.S. government owed to her deceased husband. She also had good reason to be weary of the process of claiming it, however. Having failed in an earlier bid to claim the benefits that was stymied by a corrupt Freedmen’s Bureau agent, J.P. Creager, Henrietta knew better than anyone that winning access to her rights as a war widow was an expensive endeavor. Her success, she had learned, also relied on the design and operation of a federal bureaucracy that consistently treated Black Southerners—and especially Black women—with suspicion. Nonetheless, she asserted, her claim was sound. “I can prove by the best authority, that I was lawfully married to James Emory,” she insisted. “I was married to him by a Methodist preacher, colored, & my husband paid him for marrying us, he was a regular preacher in the conference, & it was the way all the people were married.” Legally married, she insisted, the hundreds of dollars the government had yet to pay her husband ought to be hers.
I encountered Henrietta’s case in my role as an editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) while gathering materials for a forthcoming digital “microedition” on the experiences of Black Marylanders during the Civil War. As I sifted through Henrietta’s numerous petitions to representatives of the Claim Division, I was struck by the forceful manner in which she demanded recognition of her rights as a war widow and by her repeated assertions that the process of securing those rights was expensive and unjust. She repeatedly described herself as “a poor woman” who “can not get any thing done with out paying for it and… [was] not able to stand to it.” After identifying additional materials at the National Archives pertaining to Henrietta’s case over the course of transcribing and annotating the materials already in our collection, the reasons for her frustration became clear. In order to secure her rights, Henrietta had to contend with agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau who were frequently corrupt or racist, or both, enduring a process that seemed designed to disqualify Black women living in poverty as she did, all to obtain rights that were ostensibly already hers as a war widow. As we know from recent scholarship, her experiences were all too common among Black women trying to secure the money due them as the widows of Civil War soldiers. These experiences raise important questions about the design of the postwar state, even during the short existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau that historians have tended to see as taking a proactive role in establishing Black rights in the postwar South. Henrietta’s story offers a radically different account of the relationship between the state and the equal rights it allegedly established.
Emory Final Transcription
If it were as simple as establishing the legality of her marriage to the late James Emory in 1860, Henrietta’s case would have been relatively straightforward, even without the documentary, legal, and social resources from which white claimants benefitted. “I have no money nor cant get any to go to Baltimore,” she explained in July 1867, “but I will send a certificate of my marriage, with the preacher’s name to it, sworn to before the county magistrate I would think this proof enough.” Yet it was not proof enough because, as Brandi Brimmer’s Claiming Union Widowhood methodically demonstrates, the postemancipation state was invested in enforcing white liberal social and sexual norms on Black women rather than simply distributing the benefits to which they were legally entitled. As her case dragged on, Emory seemed increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of Freedmen’s Bureau officials to treat her marriage as legitimate. “I was Jim Emory’s lawful wife, & have proved it to you, & me & his son Moses, are the lawful ones to have [his unpaid bounty and wages],” she wrote in April 1870. “I have gone to much expense to get it, & am not able to do more for I am a poor woman.” Before her case was closed, Henrietta would have to endure many such humiliating inquiries into the nature of her sexual history. And at each step along the way, she told agents that the process was physically, financially, and emotionally draining. It wasn’t meant to award benefits, she suggested, but to keep the wrong kind of women from accessing their rights.
Consisting of thirty-nine pages spread across two separate applications, the documents in our collection pertaining to Henrietta’s case provide an exceptionally rich record of one woman’s struggle to secure her rights and her livelihood in postwar Maryland. At the same time, however, the many gaps and silences in her case both demonstrate the challenges of using the holdings of the National Archives to tell stories such as Henrietta’s and raise important questions about the design and operation of the postwar administrative state and whether it was intended to serve women like her.
Emory Image Sequence Final
One problem with the case files generated by Henrietta’s claims is that they provide only a partial window into her struggle—the records are preserved in ways that omit the demands and expectations of the agents who stood between her and the rights she claimed as a war widow. A May 8, 1871 letter accusing Henrietta of promiscuity, for instance, was not included in the Claim Division’s file pertaining to her case. I uncovered it only after additional searches of the division’s press copies of letters-sent volumes. The structure of these records make it all too easy for a researcher to miss this letter and therefore miss a crucial part of the story, one that gives a fuller picture of the racial and sexual priorities and anxieties of the postwar state. The additional communications from the claims office also provide crucial clues as to Henrietta’s relationships. The May 8th letter that finally convinced Henrietta to risk the expensive trip to Baltimore, for example, alleged that she had lived with several different men during her husband’s deployment before marrying another, John Meads. The gravity of these charges and their potentially fatal impact on her claim help explain the urgency of her reply, her sudden willingness to make a difficult and expensive trip to the claims office in Baltimore, and her switch from her previously frustrated and assertive tone to a more subservient one. Henrietta must have seen her rights evaporating into the disdain of the agents tasked with evaluating her claim.
We can also learn a great deal about the community in which Henrietta lived by paying careful attention to her claims and the ways she crafted each communication in response to what she apparently saw as an imposition on rather than a manifestation of her rights. At first glance, for example, it appears that Henrietta wrote the many petitions herself, each composed in the same handwriting in her voice. A short note towards the conclusion of her case, however, reveals that even before she sought out others to petition on her behalf, she worked with someone in her community to navigate the difficult application process. In response to inflammatory allegations of sexual promiscuity contained in the May 8th letter mentioned above, Henrietta replied on May 11th, “I have heard the letter red that you sent to me but it give me very pore incurgement but I will try to Come over [to the claims office in Baltimore] on monday the 21 if I can.” This short note positions Henrietta in quite a different light, dependent upon those around her for assistance—hearing the agent’s letter read to her—rather than providing evidence and making demands for herself as a struggling but self-reliant war widow. The census records reveal that Henrietta was indeed unable to read or write and had evidently had substantial help staking her claim to the benefits her husband had earned in uniform. In light of her May 11th reply, the omission of any mention of assistance from her earlier letters gives a sense of the expectations Henrietta sought to meet in her previous communications, expectations of literacy and respectability that had quickly unraveled amid the allegations of promiscuity.
If the May 8th letter helps us better understand Henrietta’s interaction with the postemancipation state, it also reveals a great deal about the narrow view of rights and benefits advanced by its agents. In previous communications, claims agent Edward C. Knower had instructed Henrietta that she needed only “two witnesses, colored or white, men o[r] women” to demonstrate “that you lived together as man and wife for several years.” “Unless you attend to this matter,” he had warned her, “you will never get your claim settled.” After the allegations of promiscuity came to light, however, Knower tightened the requirements on Henrietta, demanding that she “furnish the testimony of two or more reliable white persons” to satisfy him that the charges against her were baseless. Black testimony would no longer suffice. Harkening back to the prohibitions on Black testimony under the slave state, this shifting requirement reveals not only the narrow, paternalist manner in which postemancipation rights were administered, but also the general suspicion of Black communities as inherently immoral and incapable of fully exercising the rights of citizenship, among which the right to give testimony was one of the most important. Despite all that Black communities had won, and at such a steep cost—as James’s silence in this account attests—the logic of Dred Scott still seemed to animate elements of the postemancipation state.
We don’t know who helped Henrietta petition for her benefits following the initial mishandling of her claim in 1866 by Creager, but her enlistment of further assistance towards the end of the process only added to the inflammatory charges of immorality. When her claim appeared to stall in 1871, she turned to a white acquaintance, merchant John L. Turner, who wrote to Knower on Henrietta’s behalf, asking how to advance the application. After Knower informed him of the allegations of infidelity against Henrietta made by James’s father Samuel, Turner replied that “Henrietta Meeds was in my Store this morning to see Me about the Matter, and I took her to herself and Questioned her, and I she could not offer any evidence against the Statements that Samuel Emery had already Made.” Not only did Turner seize the opportunity “to do any thing that is wright for Sam,” but added to the allegations: “Hennie lived with me also James Emery her husband at the time he went in the army.” The 1870 census listed Henrietta as a cook, and perhaps this was what Turner meant in noting that Henrietta had lived both with him and James, but the context of the statement—Henrietta’s infidelity—suggests otherwise. Maybe Henrietta had already intuited Knower’s demand that she provide statements from “reliable white persons” when she sought aid from Turner, or perhaps Knower had already made these instructions clear. Whatever the case, Henrietta found in Turner’s “assistance” not only a betrayal of the respectable identity she had carefully constructed as Henrietta Emory, but also additional allegations of immorality.
Henrietta and James Emory evidently separated sometime in 1864 after a difficult and apparently abusive union, one doubtless shaped by the trauma of living under a slave state. As well as accusations of sexual immorality, Henrietta’s claim ran up against allegations that she had abused her husband James while they were together. The statement Henrietta provided from James’s physician, L.H. Beatty, asserted for example that “I have no knowledge of his ever being scalded by his wife, as I understand has been represented.” Disproving allegations of abuse was just as important to Henrietta’s application as refuting charges of infidelity. James’s father Samuel, for instance, alleged in his affidavit, quoted in the May 8th letter, not only that “Henrietta lived with other men while James Emory was in the Army,” but “that she was so living when James Emory came home sick on a furlough and she positively refused to receive said Soldier, and Care for him.” Instead, Samuel asserted, she “forced him to leave her and go to his fathers house & during four week [illness?] Henrietta paid no attention to James & did not see him until his burial.” Henrietta did pay her respects to her first husband, but apparently couldn’t bring herself to share a residence or care for him during his sick leave.
If her marriage to Emory was traumatic and painful, her union with John Meads appears to have been more harmonious. The 1880 census records them as still living together, having welcomed nine children into their family during the thirteen years of their marriage. One of the children, Moses, may have been the child she attributed to James in her letters to the Claim Division. By this time, Henrietta was no longer working outside the home as a cook, work that could carry demeaning connotations as well as the daily risk of sexual violence and may well have contributed to Turner’s suggestion of infidelity. While the state had not dignified her first marriage or her rights as a war widow, her second one, at least, seemed to have the quiet dignity and stability she had presented for herself all along.
Further Reading
Brandi Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household
Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century
Dale Kretz, Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation After the Freedmen’s Bureau
William Horne is a historian of white supremacy and Black liberation movements in the United States. His recent scholarly publications include “White Supremacy and Fraud: The ‘Abolitionist’ Work of Henry Frisbie,” Civil War History 70 no. 3, (September 2024): 69-86; “Abaline Miller and the Struggle for Justice against the Employer Police State after Slavery,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020, Andy Slap and Hilary Green, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 38-46; “Necessary Utopias: Black Agitation and Human Survival,” Green Theory & Praxis 16 no. 1 (February 2024): 14-33; and “Towards an Unpatriotic Education: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Threat of Nationalist Mythologies,” Journal of Academic Freedom 13 (2022): 1-16. His current book project, “Carnivals of Violence,” examines the systems of white supremacy enshrined in state institutions after emancipation. Horne was co-founder and longtime editor of The Activist History Review and has spoken and published extensively in public-facing venues including TIME, Truthout, The Nation, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and the Bucks County Beacon.
Benjamin Franklin Randolph was part of a generation that changed the nation’s political history. Born free and raised in Ohio, he attended Oberlin College and after graduating he served as a principal of a Black public school in Buffalo New York. Like many Black northerners of his generation, he saw the Civil War as a pivotal moment in the race’s larger destiny. In December 1863, Randolph volunteered to serve in the Civil War and joined the 26th United States Colored Infantry Regiment.[1]
“The Late Rev. B.F. Randolph of South Carolina,” Harper’s Weekly, October 25, 1868
After the war, Randolph remained in South Carolina and joined the most important Black political project of his generation. During Reconstruction, he participated in an 1865 Colored Convention in Charleston, joined the Freedmen’s Bureau, and established weekly newspaper for freedmen. “I am desirous of obtaining a position among the freedmen where my qualifications and experience will admit of the most usefulness,” Randolph plead. “I don’t ask position or money. But I ask a place where I can be most useful to my race.”[2]
Motivated by the promise of the new political epoch, he labored tirelessly alongside a larger cohort of freeborn and recently freed Black Americans to make a new world in the postbellum South. In 1867, he was elected as a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868 and played a major role in crafting radically democratic provisions in the document that introduced the first system of public schools in the state’s history and granted the franchise to landless men.[3]
Randolph not only served as a beacon for South Carolina’s movement toward abolition democracy but also became a national leader in the Republican Party. He attended the 1868 Republican National Convention that elected Ulysses S. Grant and was nominated by his peers to be one of the nation’s first African American Presidential Electors. He used his growing celebrity to campaign for Republican candidates across the state of South Carolina, shaping the political project that he saw as central to the larger march toward black America’s new destiny. On October 15, Randolph was in the midst of that very work, campaigning for the Party of Lincoln and Grant in the state’s increasingly violent upcountry region. The next day, while changing trains to head to another campaign event, he was gunned down in broad daylight by three unmasked white assailants.[4]
My book Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation explores the world that Randolph and his political cohort built, as well as the later efforts to remember the legacy of their political world in the face of the larger cultural attack upon their political project by proponents of the Lost Cause who were actively rewriting Reconstruction’s history to reflect their own white supremacist vision of the nation. This “Reconstruction generation,” composed of the Black teachers, missionaries, journalists, and politicians travelled to the South to aid in the destruction of slavery and established the region’s first Republican Party. [5]
The production of this countermemory was inextricably connected to the violence and tragedy that befell the Reconstruction generation’s political leaders. Just as white mobs dealt death with caustic abandon and the white southern press offered various levels of euphemistic cover to justify the campaigns of extralegal violence, the Reconstruction generation sought to fully memorialize both major and minor political figures from their era. When Ida B. Welles reflected before an 1889 conference of Black journalists that “no requiem, save the night wind, has been sung over the dead bodies,” she not only captured the depth and texture of the violence that shaped postbellum South but also crystallized the funereal cadence of an emergent countermemory of the larger era.[6]
Benjamin Randolph’s funeral serves as one of the first moments where this eulogistic memory was used to provide a forceful defense of Reconstruction’s larger importance in the Black world. In the immediate aftermath of Benjamin Randolph’s assassination, prominent members of the Lowcountry’s political bloc began to deploy Randolph’s death to reconstitute the bonds of the state’s Republican coalition. “He seemed to fully comprehend the fact that our State had been very much broken, the fragments scattered, and to gather them up, and properly unite them, master workmen were required,” lamented northern-born Jonathan Wright. “In every sense of the word, he was a master workman.”[7]
Wright hoped that the Randolph’s legacy would “be felt by generations yet unborn,” a sentiment echoed by many of his Republican colleagues in the legislature. Stephen Swails, a free-born Black New Yorker who had met Randolph in 1864 when both men were stationed in the Lowcountry with different USCT regiments, commented “Senator Randolph is dead, but he still lives in the memories of the Senators who are now here, and his memory will be ever cherished in the hearts of the people of this State.” Another northern-born Republican politician remarked “it is our duty to erect a monument to his memory, not only to mark his resting place, but to commemorate the cause for which he lived and for which he so nobly laid down his life.” Free-born Charlestonian Charles D. Hayne called for a memoriam page in the upcoming issue of the Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina.[8]
Memorial insert for Benjamin Randolph in December issue of the Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of South Carolina
More than a local or regional story, the effort to produce a Black countermemory of Reconstruction was part of a larger project of Black sectional reconciliation. A wave of new Black newspapers purporting to be truly national in scope and scale, covered the events in the South with close scrutiny. Black journalists forged relationships with Reconstruction-era politicians and traded information to provide the paper’s growing readership with up-to-date political news. Leading editors opined on the actions and events in the South with concern—and at times consternation. In response, a new wave of southern-based Black newspapers emerged in the century’s penultimate decade to confront both the false myths propagated by the white southern press and challenge the whiggish narratives put forth by northern Black leaders about the perceived failures of Black southerners in acquiescing to the New South political order and abandoning Reconstruction.[9]
A.M.E. Metropolitan Church, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1900
Nowhere did this new national Black public sphere collide with the production of Black history more than in the Bethel Literary and Historical Society. Founded in 1881, the Bethel Literary was hosted in an auxiliary hall of Washington’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. At once a lyceum and cultural hub of Black Washington’s nascent talented tenth, the Bethel Literary was one of the central nodes in the larger national Black public sphere that connected Black communities across the nascent national network of Black newspapers. “Every Washington correspondent of the Colored press, and there were more then than now, gave conspicuous notice to this institution, and the editors of their home papers often continued the discussion,” observed the Bethel Literary Society’s historian.[10]
The Bethel Literary not only held regular discussions about the history of Reconstruction but also played a major role in marking the passage of the Reconstruction generation. In 1895, the Metropolitan A.M.E. church hosted the funeral of Frederick Douglass. Before the century’s end, John Mercer Langston and Blanche K. Bruce would also receive the equivalent of state funerals at this citadel of Reconstruction-era memory. Following Langston’s funeral, the Washington Bee’s famed editor W. Calvin Chase reflected on the larger epoch-defining meaning of the triumvirate’s passing. “Their wisdom, patriotism, statesmanship, their race love may not be fully appreciated by the present generation,” remarked Chase. “But the men of the future will look in amazement and wonder that these men could have been so brave, so true, so constant amid such adverse conditions.”[11]
In this way, the Reconstruction’s generation’s countermemory was especially sensitive to the moments when major figures passed away. By the twentieth century’s second decade, the rapidly dwindling number of remaining Reconstruction-era leaders was a point of genuine concern for the stewards of Black history in the national press. In 1917, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national magazine, The Crisis, published a piece reflecting on the passing of the previous political generation. Of the three figures profiled in the photograph, only P.B.S. Pinchback was still alive. Three years later during an effort to capture oral histories and collect archival material from the Reconstruction era, one interviewee lamented “I have long felt that the last opportunity to collect data concerning this interesting period is while this present generation lives. The next generation will have no interest in it.”[12]
“Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, August 1917
In many ways, Chisholm captured her era’s deep cultural turmoil over the legacy of Reconstruction. Woodrow Wilson had recently ousted a generation of Black officeholders from the federal government, the Republican Party had been made essentially moribund in the South by formal disfranchisement measures, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation exploded as a sensation in American popular culture, reflecting a broader embrace of Confederate memory in the national consciousness.[13]
And yet, Black countermemory persisted during the nation’s Jim Crow years. In Columbia, South Carolina, Randolph Cemetery, which had been established in 1872 to commemorate the legacy of Benjamin Randolph would serve as the final resting place for many of the era’s Black political leaders.
“Randolph Cemetery,” National Park Service, June 23, 2022
Far from forgetting the story, local communities and national institutions sought to preserve the story of Reconstruction, building the intellectual and cultural scaffolding for a new historical vision that would not only challenge the myth of the Lost Cause but also provide a blueprint for the Second Reconstruction—the American Civil Rights Movement. Blood soaked and hard won, the story the Reconstruction generation and their descendants crafted offers a deep and textured portrait of what it means to think deeply about the past. It is a story worth remembering.
[1] “Rikers Island-Trained USCT Regiments’ Chaplains,” New York Correction History Society, www.Correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw-usct/2rikersusctchaplains.html
[2] “Rikers Island-Trained USCT Regiments’ Chaplains.”
[3] Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, Negro in South Carolina, 383; Thomas C. Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 131-34; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), chap. 7.
[4] Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 54-57, 60.
[5] Robert D. Bland, Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026). On the use of generation in African American history, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sarah L.H. Gronningsater, Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Andrew B. Lewis, Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009).
[6] Irvine Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Wiley and Company, 1891), 186. On the broader cultural history of funereal thinking in Black life, see LeRhonda Manigault Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); David Roediger, “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700-1865,” The Massachusetts Review 22 (Spring 1981): 163-183; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
[7] Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 14.
[8] Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 15-16, 44-45.
[9] On the postbellum Black press and public sphere, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107-46; Penn, Afro-American Press; Benjamin Fagan, Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers: Black Organizing and the Press for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026); Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Henry Lewis Suggs, ed. The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).
[10] John W. Cromwell, History of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association, 15-17, 21-22
[11] “Hon. B.K. Bruce Dead,” Colored American (Washington, DC), March 19, 1898; “Death of the Triumvirate,” Washington Bee, March 26, 1898.
[12] “Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, August 1917, 181; Helen James Chisolm to Monroe Work, February 14, 1920, in Scurlock et al., “Additional Information and Correction,” Journal of Negro History 5 (April 1920): 248.
[13] Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). On the production of Lost Cause memory during the early twentieth century, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 394-97; Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003); Paul McEwan, The Birth of a Nation (British Film Institute, 2015).
Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
With this issue of the journal, we complete six years as coeditors and feel inspired by the work of so many of our professional colleagues who keep scholarly journals functioning and humbled by Bill Blair’s much longer tenure in this role. Our term has been shaped by COVID-19’s disruptions of daily life and shutdowns of archives and by the contraction of the academic job market. But the 2025 volume gives evidence of steady and perhaps even resurgent scholarly interest and activity. Most visible are the articles, bolstered by significant research and dedicated writing and revising, along with the book reviews that reveal the continuing vibrance and diversity of the field. And behind all that lies the invisible work of the reviewers who assessed those works so carefully and of the editors and staff who keep the journal functioning. Looking ahead to 2026, we are hopeful this surge in scholarly activity will continue as we all find meaning in our shared intellectual enterprise in these dire times for academia, the United States, and the world.
This issue includes two research articles, a roundtable, a historiographical review essay, and the usual complement of book reviews. The articles remind us of historians’ commitment to the virtue of deep dives, revealing what we can learn by looking closely at topics others might think are already understood. In “Higher Laws, Racial (In)Equality, and Democratic Violence: Theodore Parker’s Abolitionist Theology,” Benjamin Park examines Theodore Parker’s views of religion, violence, and abolition and the influence of his public writings and speeches. Over more than two decades, Parker turned toward not only toward abolitionism but justifications for extralegal violence against slavery, particularly after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Parker’s religiously based support for radical actions against slavery remind us of the role religion played in the spread of abolitionism. At the same time, Parker’s ongoing belief in pseudo-scientific views of racial hierarchies reminds us that abolitionism and antiracism were not one and the same.
In “Soldiers Were Apt to Get Drunk Whenever They Got a Chance”: The Control of Alcohol in Wartime Washington, DC, 1861–1865,” Nathan Marzoli examines the US Army’s surprisingly unsuccessful efforts to regulate alcohol consumption in wartime Washington, DC. The capital remained under civilian control and under the regulation of a US Congress and local authorities subject to lobbying from local businessmen. As multiple law enforcement agencies struggled to confront soldiers’ drinking, they could not decide on common strategies or policies, and many civilian and military officers and backed down in the face of businessmen’s opposition. The history offered here shows us some of the complications of joint civilian/military governance and some of the challenges of regulating alcohol in a city filled with soldiers.
With the challenges COVID-19 posed to archival work and the production of scholarly articles, we—like other journals—have experimented with new formats. One of the most successful has been the regular appearance of roundtables, where scholars discuss important, often emerging topics in the literature. In “The State, Unfreedom, and Emancipation in the Western Borderlands: A Roundtable,” moderator Paul Barba poses provocative questions about the relationship between a thriving literature on borderlands and the questions of freedom and unfreedom that often structure Civil War Era scholarship. The panel—composed of María Esther Hammack, Max Flomen, Naomi Sussman, Vivien Tejada, and Alex Stern—wrestles with questions about the relationship between borderlands scholars’ emphasis on uneven state authority and the meta-narratives of state power that often suffuse scholarship on the Civil War era. The panel helpfully examines the convergence of borderlands scholarship’s emphasis on competing sovereignties, diverse Indigenous polities, and varied slave regimes with the questions of and Black self-emancipation and slavery and emancipation that are, rightly, central to the historiography of the Civil War era.
In the historiographical essay, “Reconstruction and the Regulation of Sexuality,” Felicity Turner brings the history of sexuality into conversation with the history of Reconstruction, beginning with a monumental book in each of the two fields and exploring the literatures’ convergences and divergences across a wide range of topics, including marriage, immigration, sexual violence, same-sex sexuality, trans-ness, contraception, reform, and state regulation. Turner’s essay helps demonstrate the benefits of seeing post–Civil War struggles to define freedom not only in opposition to slavery but also in many other possible ways.
This volume also includes yet another stellar lineup of book reviews. We applaud the authors of new books, the scholars who are willing to take up the work of reading and assessing them, and the field that has sustained decades-long debates and discussions that continue to inspire (and sometimes frustrate) us all and remind us why what we are doing is worth the doing.
Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.
“What if the South Won the Civil War?” Answers to this question reflect shifts in collective memory as authors use artistic license to reframe the real-world past.[1] Mackinlay Kantor’s answer in 1960 signaled the impending shift in the Lost Cause ideology within an emerging cultural landscape that was being reshaped by the Civil Rights Movement. Though slavery is still not the cause of Kantor’s Civil War, the South ends the practice to keep pace with other nations. By the mid-twentieth century, growing numbers of southerners still could not admit to fighting for slavery and maintained that the peculiar institution was far more humane than abolitionists claimed, but also were uncomfortable celebrating a South that upheld the system. The most recent generations of “alt histories” of the war serve as a barometer of the Lost Cause’s new place in the post-Civil Rights cultural landscape, tracing hidden truths authors buried beneath the surface of history. Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (1992), Howard Ray White’s The Trilogy (2018) both use a post-Civil Rights era version of the Lost Cause, but have markedly different memories of the past. Turtledove wrote in the Lost Cause style most historians refer to in studies of modern memory. White’s narrative reflects a variant of the Lost Cause that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s that warrants its own label, the New Lost Cause.
Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South (1992) highlights how deeply entrenched the Lost Cause remains in the white American psyche even amongst more progressive thinkers in the post-Civil Rights-era. Guns of the South rejects aspects of the Lost Cause. Slavery is depicted as cruel an immoral and is the outright cause for secession. Even so, Turtledove falls into the Lost Cause mythos of the southern gentlemen and frequently romanticizes Confederate leaders, especially Robert E. Lee. Lee becomes the second Confederate president and begins the process of abolition. In one scene, Lee visits wounded Union soldiers. A man asks Lee if he came “to gloat,” but another defends Lee, saying, “Come on, Joe, you know he ain’t that way.” Lee confirms that he “came to see brave men.”[2] Thomas Mallon explains how Turtledove used Lee as “a sort of Mandela” figure, implying race tensions would have eased sooner under a gradual emancipation platform than our world’s Reconstruction.[3] David Blight’s theory of white America achieving social reconciliation by agreeing to honor the bravery of both sides and ignore the role of slavery shines through even as Turtledove blames slavery for the war.[4] This is the power of the Lost Cause: even when denying states’ rights as the war’s cause, white memory clings to Reconciliation and forgiveness to the point of distorting the truth.[5]
Guns reflects the growing international scope of white nationalist movements. Twenty-first-century South Africans bring AK-47s to the Confederacy to help establish the South as a white supremacist nation, hoping to prevent the collapse of Apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s. Turtledove foreshadowed the growing international connections between white supremacists. The late twentieth-century’s revolution in personal computing and internet access allowed white supremacists around the world to share ideas online.[6] The Lost Cause and Confederate symbols can be found in many foreign and domestic forums today not just as a white supremacist symbol, but a generalized stance against a multicultural liberal consensus.”[7] Over the past two decades, online white identitarians have increasingly embraced the Confederate flag to the exclusion of more incendiary symbols like the Swastika, which is more likely to be banned by most websites’ rules of conduct.[8] The Afrikaners who time-traveled from 2014 to 1864 hoped that saving the Confederacy would strengthen the white supremacist movement in the 21st century. Post-Civil Rights Movement, American white supremacist organizations that had formerly been at odds, such as the Klan and Neo-Nazis, began working together as they lost political power, and the internet allowed like-minded white supremacists from around the world to commiserate and plan together.[9]
This post-Civil Rights era moment of cultural reinvention created what I call the “New Lost Cause.” Formed in the wake of the late twentieth-century white power movements, the New Lost Cause was part of growing international white supremacist movement that foreshadowed the rise of the alt-right. Post Civil Rights-era literary works in the New Lost Cause use much of the classic Lost Cause mythos but are broader and more flexible in their historical details.
For example, the preposterously titled The CSA Trilogy: An Alternate History/Historical Novel about Our Vast and Beautiful Confederate States of America — A Happy Story in Three Parts of What Might Have Been — 1861 to 2011 has a New Lost Cause memory of the war that has proven useful to the alt-right.[10] Since the 1990s, the Neo-Confederate movement has created a more masculine version of the Lost Cause that works to apply to politics well beyond race. The book is broken into three parts, covering the CSA’s acquisition of new territory and political development through 2011, which White presents as historically possible, claiming even the fictional details are based on sound evidence and reasoning.
The New Lost Cause gives white supremacists a mythos that frames whites as victims of the politically correct and anyone left of center as Communist demagogues. The CSA Trilogy, in which racism only exists in the US rump state, declares the South could have avoided the unpleasantness of the Civil Rights Movement if it had been allowed to self-direct its policies. Nearly every character states their precise racial background, by percentage, upon introduction. In White’s world, blood quantums still matter, but the CSA is still more racially diverse than the “woke” liberals of the North claim to be. Thus far, The CSA Trilogy is bizarre, but still within the Lost Cause narrative that the North caused more race tensions than it solved through the war and Reconstruction.
White’s New Lost Cause coopts progressive language to make white supremacist ideas sound more palatable to those on the fringes of the alt-right and offers a semblance of cover from accusations about white supremacy. For example, “diversity” is literally the CSA’s national anthem, but its meaning is unconventional. For White, diversity “does not mean diverse cultural behaviors” nor does it “mean political agitators can desecrate the monuments erected to Confederate heroes.” Everyone speaks English and follows white customs; assimilation to the dominant culture is critical in this white supremacist utopia.[11] In the modern CSA of 2011, Trumpism and the alt-right have crept in. The mainland country is protected by a “national fence” built by undocumented immigrants, and there is little environmental regulation, limited voting rights, and few labor unions. The immigration policy in White’s idealized Confederacy ensures the population is always at least seventy percent white, reflecting the common critique from the right that too much immigration from the wrong sort of places will destroy the country. Some of these ideas are familiar: the Lost Cause has always aimed to limit the voting rights of African Americans, the dislike of labor unions makes sense for those who wanted to control others’ labor, and it is no secret that the Lost Cause favors whiteness. The New Lost Cause uses almost all of the original Lost Cause, but adds to it by emphasizing cultural assimilation, disregarding environmental regulations, and demanding stringent border control. The alt-right can more easily adapt the New Lost Cause to the current political landscape than the original Lost Cause.[12]
Like the founders of the Lost Cause, who created a new history for political purposes, the New Lost Cause is being written by people who know the real history, but want to create a more politically useful story.[13] By using obviously fictitious elements, Clark makes the true parts of his story stand out: readers see slavery in all its gory detail and are reminded that progress is not guaranteed. In The CSA Trilogy, White presents fiction as the truth, and then gives readers a second fiction as a possibility. But those lies compound to create a frightening picture rather than an aspirational one. The changing landscape of alternative histories shows how much American memories of the Civil War have metamorphosed between the war’s end and today. Emancipationist memory still emphasizes freedom, but also the lack thereof. The Lost Cause and now the New Lost Cause emphasize political utility and have mutated themselves to remain culturally relevant and rhetorically powerful.
[1] Kathleen Singles, Alternate History : Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=39ca3bdf-e949-3f9b-bb91-3f70e62306ea.; Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate History.” History and Theory 41, no. 4 (2002): 90–103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3590670.
[2] Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South. Ballantine, 1992. 192.
[3] “South Africa scraps legal foundation for apartheid system.” UN Chronicle, September 1991, 29+. Gale In Context: Biography. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A11547537/BIC?u=tulane&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=7e2de43c.; Thomas Mallon, “Never Happened.” The New Yorker, November 13, 2011. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/21/never-happened.
[4] Subsequent works, such as Brian Jordan’s Marching Home, have suggested Blight’s emphasis on Blue-Grey reunions overstates the degree of white veterans’ reconciliation, or that the theory only describes white male reconciliation, in the case of Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War. Even so, Blight’s central argument that white Unionists agreed to tolerate the Lost Cause narrative of the war and to downplay the role of slavery holds firm. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001.; Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War. 1st ed. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2015.; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
[5] Turtledove is not the only author to point to slavery as the cause and still be influenced by the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause permeates even Dread Nation (2018) and its sequel Deathless Divide (2020) by Justina Ireland, which are otherwise Emancipationist stories. The duology imagines a world where the dead suddenly come to life at Gettysburg. Ireland tackles the complexities of relative freedom, colorism, and the ability to pass for white. Emancipation and all its nuances are at the heart of both stories. Even so, there are instances where the main character unironically uses “the War of Northern aggression” or “the War between the States,” both of which are strongly associated with the Lost Cause.
[6] The trends towards digital forums accelerated in the 2000s and today most white nationalism and alt-right conversations happen online rather than in person. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home, White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018. 12, 237; Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Beacon Press, 2019.
[7] Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home, White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 238.
[8] For example, see: Margaret Crable, “Germany’s Strange Nostalgia for the Antebellum American South.” USC Dornsife, 31 Mar. 2021, https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/germanys-nostalgia-antebellum-american-south/.
[9] Belew, Bring the War Home.
[10] Howard Ray White, The CSA Trilogy: An Alternate History/Historical Novel about Our Vast and Beautiful Confederate States of America — A Happy Story in Three Parts of What Might Have Been — 1861 to 2011, 2018.
[11] White, The CSA Trilogy. 146.
[12] White is not the only writer to challenge such issues from the standpoint of the New Lost Cause. Many others, usually connected to the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the League of the South, have used their narrative of the Civil War as the historical proof for their modern political beliefs. For examples, see: James Ronald Kennedy, and Walter Donald Kennedy. Yankee Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home. Columbia, South Carolina: Shotwell Publishing, 2021.; Paul C. Graham, Confederaphobia: An American Epidemic. Columbia, South Carolina: Shotwell Publishing, 2017.; Wilson, Clyde N. Annals of the Stupid Party: Republicans Before Trump. The Wilson Files 3. Columbia, So. Carolina: Shotwell Publishing LLC, 2016.
[13] Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Kris Plunkett is a PhD candidate at Tulane University studying Civil War memory. Her dissertation traces the evolutions of Civil War memories from the war’s end to the present. When she’s not in the archives, Kris coaches the speech and debate team at St. Mary’s Dominican High School.
Guy Emerson Mount has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2024. The article, “Shall I Go? Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914” appeared in the December 2024 special issue, Black Internationalism in the Era of Emancipation, guest edited by Brandon R. Byrd.
The prize committee was impressed by the article’s “innovative approach and its illuminating insights” and praised it for creating “an innovative historical arc that illuminates how white state crafters sought to tackle the problem of emancipation through colonization.” The committee called the article “beautifully written” and predicted that it “will not only offer scholars of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and US imperialism a new way to think about the connections between these topics but also fuel further conversation about the place of the Pacific in the histories of nineteenth-century America.”
Mount is an Assistant Professor of History and an affiliate in African American Studies at Wake Forest University. He teaches courses in Atlantic History, Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Global History of Reparations. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago under the direction of Tom Holt. While at Chicago, he co-founded the Reparations at UChicago Working Group which first uncovered the University’s historical ties to slavery while organizing alongside residents of the South Side of Chicago for reparations. Previously he held a Carter G. Woodson fellowship at the University of Virginia and a tenure-track position at Auburn University where he was granted the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2022. His current book project, from which the winning article is derived, is tentatively titled Black Elsewheres: Slavery, Empire, and Reconstruction in the Black Pacific.
Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era. The journal is grateful for the service of this year’s prize committee: Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London (chair); Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Gabriel (Jack) Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law.
Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
This issue exemplifies the wide sweep of the Civil War Era as scholars understand it, and the success of the journal’s now fifteen-year-long effort to promote broadminded interrogation of the many forces that shaped the middle of the nineteenth century and reveal their impacts.
The issue opens with Yael A. Sternhell’s “The Archive / An Archive,” an exploration of the transformed view of archives among historians and of the creation of canonical Civil War archives. The essay is in dialogue with December 2022 special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris, and it is drawn from Sternhell’s November 2024 address at the Southern Historical Association meeting, where her book War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (2023) received the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The book examined the creation of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, historicizing the drive to fashion such an archive, the ways the archive was shaped to reflect contemporary interests and concerns, and the impact of those archival choices on later scholarly production. The essay not only summarizes some of those findings but also draws Sternhell more deeply into the productive debate over how scholars should approach archives not simply as consumers of them but as analysts and critics, part of a broader archival turn in the humanities that asks how we have access to sources and what to do about the silences and absences in archives.
James Howard’s “‘Enlarged by Caucus and Compromise’: Freethinkers, Celebrity Preachers, and the American Anti-Slavery Society” examines the 1850s accommodations between Garrisonians and politically oriented evangelicals like Henry Ward Beecher and George Cheever, as they sought to build an antislavery movement capable of encompassing a wide range of religious beliefs. He demonstrates that Garrisonians in the American Anti-Slavery Society marginalized freethinkers like AASS original member Orson Murray in hopes of diminishing religious critique of the abolitionist movement. The article joins a growing wave of revisions of Garrisonianism that question prior portrayals of its radical rigidity and also contributes to recent scholarship that advances our understanding of the varieties of Northern religion in the antebellum period, several examples of which have appeared in recent issues of the Journal of the Civil War Era.
In “The Crisis of Household Government and the Rise of Democratic Conservatism before the American Civil War,” Mark Power Smith explores the rise of a particularly partisan form of conservatism in the 1850s United States. Through analysis of editorial coverage of two high-profile legal cases involving prominent Democratic men who punished their wives’ lovers, Power Smith argues that Northern Democratic editors created a defense of patriarchal households against what they saw as the corrupting family forms espoused by foreign radical movements and their partisan adversaries. Through these cases, Power Smith connects the cultural debates over masculinity and family structure to the emerging Democratic embrace of conservative patriarchy.
In this issue’s review essay, Rana Hogarth analyzes how historians have approached eugenics and the gaps in scholarship concerning the Civil War’s impact on racial science. Hogarth argues that Civil War scholars have focused on the relationship between US victory and the growth of racial egalitarianism, while historians of eugenics have ignored the era completely. By reading these literatures together and emphasizing more recent scholarship, Hogarth illuminates connections between Civil War debates about race and the untidy origins of eugenic thought and the ways the Civil War left its mark on twentieth-century race science.
The issue also includes the usual run of excellent book reviews, a tribute to the hard work of associate editor Megan Bever, to the scholars who continue to write provocative works, and to the enduring commitment to professional engagement in our field who agree to review books in a busy and tumultuous time.
Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.
Muster is looking for contributors! We are looking for scholars from a wide range of perspectives to add new voices to our roster. Please read the announcement below and reach out to rbland4@utk.edu if you have any questions. The deadline for applications is October 1, 2025.
Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever has a conversation with Shae Smith Cox, Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University about her book, The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939 (LSU Press, 2024).
Today’s Muster continues our series Teaching the Civil War. Each post in the series has examined a different method that college and K-12 teachers have used to make the Civil War era come alive in the classroom. In Todays ‘s post, University of South Dakota professor Lindsey Peterson explores teaching the history of emancipation through the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project’s document collection and public memory of the 1875 Clinton Massacre
“You hear a great deal about the massacre at Clinton, but you do not hear the worst,” reported Sarah Dickey, a white educator from Ohio who had moved to Mississippi to teach freedpeople during Reconstruction. Writing to President Ulysses S. Grant in the aftermath of the violent race massacre, she solemnly added, “It cannot be told.”[1] Yet, in the following weeks and months, freedpeople, Confederate veterans, politicians, and others documented the events in Clinton, leaving behind an archival record filled with contradiction and debate. Black Americans worked diligently to ensure that the massacre in Clinton was remembered as a deliberate attempt to suppress their rights and justify the restoration of white political and economic dominance in Mississippi. Describing the events at Clinton as a “premeditated massacre of the whites,” however, White Democrats framed their accounts as a justification for the state’s “redemption” from Republican rule during the 1875 election.[2] I use the richness of these conflicting records and authentic tasks to teach students about emancipation as a process.
Including freedpeople’s accounts of the Clinton Massacre, the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project provides a vast collection of primary sources to support teaching emancipation as a process. As a project co-director, we are making over 20,000 records sent to Mississippi’s governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction freely available online at cwrgm.org. To increase classroom engagement with Reconstruction, we are developing a backward-designed curriculum that instructs students that emancipation was a non-linear process. Utilizing a series of authentic tasks, the curriculum teaches research method and the practical application of historical reasoning skills for future careers. Content on the Clinton Massacre is central to this approach, providing students with a valuable opportunity to explore emancipation as an uneven process and engage with historical methodology.
Screencapture of freedman Edward Gilliams’ testimony about the Clinton Massacre at CWRGM.
The Clinton Massacre
The Clinton Massacre marked the beginning of the end of Reconstruction in Mississippi. What began as a Republican political rally and barbecue on September 4, 1875, quickly escalated into a brutal massacre orchestrated by White Liners, a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party determined to suppress Black political power. Freedpeople gathered at Moss Hill to hear political speeches in the lead-up to the November elections. To foster open dialogue, Republicans invited a white Democratic speaker, state senate candidate Amos Johnston, to address the crowd. Johnston’s remarks proceeded without incident, but when Republican speaker Captain H. T. Fisher, a former Union officer and newspaper editor, took the stage, he was heckled by a white attendee from nearby Raymond. The rally erupted into violence, leaving three white and five Black attendees dead. In the following days, White Liners terrorized the countryside, lynching between thirty-five and fifty Black Americans and one white Republican supporter. Despite pleas for federal intervention from Governor Adelbert Ames and others, President Grant, weary of Southern unrest, refused to act. His decision enabled the Democratic Party’s violent “redemption” of Mississippi in the 1875 election and paved the way for Jim Crow segregation.[3]
Analyzing Perspectives on the Clinton Massacre
The first authentic task asks students to use post-massacre accounts to judge culpability. However, the real objective is to help students consider the importance of perspective, recognize the limitations of primary sources, and practice the historian’s craft. In this task, students are divided into groups and are assigned different accounts. After reading their assigned source, each group answers:
Chart showing the sub-questions students consider. A student note-taking guide (not pictured here) provides space for students to brainstorm individually, in their assigned groups, and as a class.
These questions are crucial in helping students understand the author’s positionality. For example, Confederate veteran General J. Z. George’s testimony is found in campaign materials supporting Democratic candidates in the upcoming election.[4] Other sources include two eyewitness accounts by freedmen, Edward Gilliam and Jerry Carpenter.[5] The final source is a letter from U.S. Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont to Ames, conveying President Grant’s request that Ames exhaust all local resources before seeking additional troops.[6] All primary sources include transcriptions and audio recordings in plain English and Spanish to support special education students and English language learners.
The class then reconvenes to collaboratively establish a timeline of the facts and determine who should be held responsible for the massacre. Reconciling and discussing the differences in their findings facilitates a discussion exploring how perspective impacted their findings, the assignment of blame in history, and how historians piece together the past with limited and often contradictory sources.
Assessing Election Integrity in the Wake of Clinton
In a second authentic task, students take on the role of Pierrepont, who has just received a letter from Ames assuring him that free elections can be held in the aftermath of the Clinton Massacre.[7] Students are also provided with a letter written by the citizens of Vicksburg to Ames, warning that if protection is not provided for Black voters in Warren County, they will not be able to vote due to racist violence.[8]
After reading the letters, students must write a reply from Pierrepont to Ames, addressing his claim that Mississippi will be able to hold free elections using evidence from both letters and secondary research to support their position. In doing so, they practice analyzing primary sources with contradictory information and writing argumentatively. It also encourages an understanding of the complex positions held by state and federal political leaders, who must balance the interests of multiple constituencies.
Evaluating Historical Public Memories of the Clinton Massacre
In the final authentic task, students analyze how the Clinton Massacre’s collective remembrance has evolved.[9] Acting as members of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History tasked with reviewing public marker submissions, students assess three historical markers and determine which should be adopted, justifying their choice using primary and secondary sources. Their report summarizes the narrative communicated by each marker, evaluates its accuracy, and explains why the Clinton Massacre deserves a public plaque.
Photograph of the original 1949 Clinton historical marker referencing the Clinton Riot (left), photograph of the Clinton Riot marker erected in 2015 (center), and photograph of the Mississippi Freedom Trail marker dedicated on September 23, 2021 (right). Images courtesy of Mississippi History Now.
The first marker, erected in 1949, refers to Clinton as the “scene of a bloody riot… during the election campaign that overthrew Carpetbaggers,” reflecting the Lost Cause interpretation of Reconstruction as a time of excessive federal power while minimizing racial animosity. The third marker from 2021 differs dramatically, noting “In the days that followed, White militias and outlaws terrorized area African Americans, killing as many as fifty men and driving others to Jackson for the safety of the federal garrison.” These differing accounts serve political purposes, most clearly represented by the 1949 marker, which frames the massacre as a glorious campaign to redeem the state from oppressive federal policies, supporting contemporary racial terrorism and Jim Crow laws.
Using authentic tasks helps students explore how various groups, such as freedpeople, Confederate veterans, and politicians, documented the Clinton Massacre, highlighting the significance of differing historical accounts in understanding the massacre’s role in the end of Reconstruction in Mississippi. By utilizing authentic tasks, students gain a deeper understanding of emancipation and the Reconstruction era and the value of historical reasoning skills in analyzing complex historical events.
K-12 and community college educators interested in teaching emancipation as a wartime and postwar process are encouraged to explore CWRGM’s educator resources, including lesson plans, workshops, and National History Day materials. New materials, including those referenced above, are continually being added, so please check back often.
[1] “The Clinton Riot,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, Mississippi), September 29, 1875.
[2] Edward Gilliam, “Legal Document from Edward Gilliam to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 10, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 5 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-05-20 and Jerry Carpenter, “Legal Document from Jerry Carpenter to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 10, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 5 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-05-27.
[3] Edwards Pierrepont, “Letter from United States Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 14, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 6 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-06-15.
[4] Adelbert Ames, “Letter from Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames to United States Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont; October 16, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 11 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-11-01.
[5] Citizens of Warren County (Miss.), “Letter from the Citizens of Warren County, Mississippi, to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; September 14, 1875,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Ames Series 803: Box 997, Folder 6 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed March 30, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_803-997-06-12.
[6] Jones, “The Clinton Riot of 1875,” Mississippi History Now.
[7] Melissa Janczewski Jones, “The Clinton Riot of 1875: From Riot to Massacre,” Mississippi History Now, September 2015, accessed March 1, 2025, https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/the-clinton-riot-of-1875-from-riot-to-massacre.
[8] Quoted in Melissa Janczewski Jones, “Clinton Riot (Massacre) of 1875,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, August 7, 2019, accessed February 2, 2025, https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/clinton-riot-massacre-of-1875/.
[9] “The Clinton Riot,” Weekly Clarion (Jackson, Mississippi), September 29, 1875, accessed January 27, 2025, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016926/1875-09-29/ed-1/seq-1/.
Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and the Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. Peterson has over twelve years of experience teaching U.S. history, developing curriculum, and facilitating continuing education workshops for history teachers.
