Category: Blog
The Militia Act of 1903 in Historical Context

The Militia Act of 1903 in Historical Context

By | | Comments 9 comments

Recent events have turned public attention to the previously obscure Militia Act of 1903 and the even more obscure historians and political scientists interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century insurrection law. President Donald Trump claimed that the measure vests him with the power to federalize members of the California National Guard to curb what he claims is a rebellion by persons protesting U.S. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement activities in Los Angeles or an uprising that is preventing enforcement of federal immigration law. These claims are now being litigated in federal district and federal appeals courts.

The Militia Act of 1903, following the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795, authorizes the president to federalize state militia under the conditions that common and constitutional law authorizes the president to declare martial law.  Federal law and Supreme Court precedent permit the President to federalize state militia and declare martial law only in response to an invasion, a rebellion, or another event, sometimes described as an “uprising,” that prevents federal courts from enforcing federal laws. Federal law and judicial precedent clearly give the president absolute discretion to determine whether to exercise these powers in response to an invasion, a rebellion, or another event that closed federal courts.  No one disputes that Trump under the Militia Act is authorized to decide whether to federalize state national guard members should the United States be invaded by Spain, the former Confederate States repeat their attempt at secession, or massive riots close all federal courts in Texas.[1]

Trump is making a different and more dubious exercise of executive power in California.  He is claiming that the Militia Act of 1903 empowers him to define what constitutes an invasion, a rebellion, and an uprising that prevents federal law enforcement, and then determine whether under his definitions the United States is experiencing an invasion, a rebellion, or an uprising that prevents federal law enforcement. History casts doubt on these claims.  The Militia Act was intended to empower the president to federalize the state militia to confront military forces or the equivalent of military forces. That measure gave the president no power to federalize state militia to confront sporadic violence by protestors who do not resemble in any way a military force.  The events in Los Angeles are inconsistent with common understandings of invasion, rebellion, or uprising that prevents the execution of federal laws in place when the Militia Act of 1903 was adopted.  Presidential power to declare by fiat that the triggering conditions for federalizing the state militia exist, while supported by a passage in Martin v. Mott (1827), is inconsistent with the text of the Militia Act and late nineteenth century judicial precedents, most notably Ex parte Milligan (1865).[2]

 

Text and History

The Militia Act of 1903 was designed to improve the capacity of the United States to fight wars at the turn of the twentieth century, after the difficulties the United States military experienced during the Spanish-American War trying to  combine regular, full time military forces and part-time members of state militia. The provisions focus on training members of the national guard for military combat.  The text prescribes important roles for the Secretary of War and War Department. None speak of the Attorney General, the Justice Department, or any other federal officer or institution charged with law enforcement. The Secretary of War, Elihu Root, in his annual report described the measure as ensuring “preparation in advance for the organization of volunteers in time of war.”[3]

Section Four declares that state national guard may be federalized “whenever the United States is invaded, or in danger of invasion from any foreign nation, or of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States, or the President is unable, with the other forces at his command to execute the laws of the Union in any part thereof.” No federal law permits the president to call the state militia into service under any other conditions, no matter how dire matters may seem to the president or the president may claim.  Root allayed concerns that the national guard might be put into service for routine law enforcement or in circumstances where the United States was not facing a military threat. When asked by a major in the Georgia national guard whether the bill authorized the president to use state national guard in “the suppression of insurrections and strikes,” a controversial matter in 1903, Root noted that the duty of state national guard continued to be “defined by the constitution” and that “the regular army would be employed” for “the suppression of insurrections and disturbances.”[4]

 

Rebellion 

The Supreme Court in the nineteenth century classified as a “rebellion” only massive uprisings aimed at overthrowing the existing government. Courts during the 1860s and afterwards routinely described the Civil War as a rebellion. United States v. Irwin (1888) spoke of the Mormon rebellion of 1857-58, in which Mormon militia attempted to drive all U.S. authorities out of Utah. The Supreme Court during the Civil War and Reconstruction pointed to two other rebellions that had occurred in the United States.  The Amy Warwick (aka The Prize Cases) (1862) declared that Shay’s Rebellion (1786) was a rebellion. Western Massachusetts farmers attempted to prevent the implementation of any law by closing the local courts. Ex parte Milligan spoke of Dorr’s Rebellion as a rebellion.  Dorr assembled a military force committed to overthrowing the government of Rhode Island. [5]

Civil War commentary frequently explored the difference between a rebellion and an insurrection. Webster’s Dictionary in 1865 treated the two as distinctive.  The text informed  readers that a revolt is an attempt to overthrow the government and an insurrection is an effort to resist the legal authority of the government.  More often, Civil War opinions and commentary spoke of rebellions as more extensive or ambitious insurrections. The term rebellion,” Francis Lieber, the leading constitutional commentator on Civil War issues, wrote, “is applied to an insurrection of large extent.” Many state courts agreed that a rebellion was an insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government. Martin v. Hortin (1865), quoting from General Henry Halleck, Elements of International Law and Laws of War, declared that “the term rebellion is applied to an insurrection of large extent or long duration; and is usually a war between the legitimate government of a State and portions or parts of the same, who seek to overthrow the government.” The Supreme Court of the United States adopted a similar distinction between insurrections and rebellions in The Amy Warwick when describing the Civil War as “no loose, unorganized insurrection, having no defined boundary or possession.” Numerous state cases quoted or paraphrased this passage.[6]

Thus, nineteenth-century disorders that were not “insurrections of large extent or long duration” fell outside the legal definition of a rebellion. The Supreme Court in In re Debs (1895) unanimously rejected claims that the Pullman strike was a rebellion even though the strike paralyzed the Midwest and presented severe challenges to local authorities. “Whatever any single individual may have thought or planned,” Justice David Brewer declared, “the great body of those who were engaged in these transactions contemplated neither rebellion nor revolution.” The justices similarly limited rebellions to the places in which the rebellion was actually occurring or where there was a threat that the government might be overthrown in entirety. Ex parte Milligan famously declared that no rebellion existed in Indiana during the Civil War.  The Supreme Court in Bean v. Beckwith (1873) similarly held that there was no rebellion in Vermont during the Civil War that would justify military authority to arrest and detain civilians.[7]

 

Judicial Process and Law Enforcement

Whether the president was capable of enforcing federal law in the nineteenth century depended on whether courts were open, whether judicial orders were being obeyed, and, according to the concurring opinion in Milligan, whether the legal system remained in control of the government.  Milligan turned on the federal courts being “open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction.” Judicial opinions after Milligan made clear that the same principles governed federal use of the military, federal or state, to enforce the law.  Justice Stephen Field declared,  “I know of no law that was ever enacted in the United States, which would justify a military officer in enforcing the payment to him of a debt due from one loyal citizen to another loyal citizen, neither being in the military service, or residing in a state declared to be in insurrection, or in which the courts of law were not open and in the peaceful exercise of their jurisdiction.”[8]

This emphasis on judicial process explains the use of the plural “laws” in all the Militia Acts rather than a presidential power to call on the military to enforce a particular law.  When courts are closed, judicial process is unavailable for any claim of legal right. When courts are open and functioning, by comparison, judicial processes are available for determining whether those thought to be insurrectionists or rebels have valid legal and constitutional claims.  Insurrectionists and rebels often claim that they have a legal right to resist illegal or unconstitutional edicts.  They become insurrectionists and rebels when courts are open only when their claims are judicially rejected and they do not cease their violent opposition.  An alleged insurrectionist or rebel who respects court orders is not an insurrectionist or rebel.  Brewer in In re Debs declared that no rebellion occurred when the offending parties obeyed judicial decrees declaring their tactics during the Pullman strike illegal. “[W]hen in the due order of legal proceedings the question of right and wrong was submitted to the courts, and by them decided,” he wrote, the strikers “unhesitatingly yielded to their decisions.”[9]

 

Presidential Discretion

The Militia Act of 1903, following the Militia Acts of 1792 and 1795, vests the president with absolute discretion to federalize state militia only when certain objective triggering conditions exist. Nothing in the text gives the president the discretionary power to determine whether the United States has been invaded, is experiencing a rebellion, or lacks functioning federal courts in a particular jurisdiction. The Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan determined without any deference to the president that a presidential decision to impose martial law in parts of Indiana at the end of the Civil War was unconstitutional.  Justice David Davis’s opinion concluded the conditions under which martial law might constitutionally be imposed were absent: Indiana was not being invaded, was not a site for rebellion, and the civil courts were open. Presidential decrees or federal laws to the contrary, the majority opinion in Milligan bluntly concluded, “Martial rule can never exist where the courts are open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction.”[10]

The Supreme Court and Supreme Court justices in various post-Civil War cases decided after Milligan similarly determined without any deference to other governing officials that no rebellion or any other condition existed that augmented presidential or federal powers. Justice Field in Bean did not defer to any federal official when declaring no rebellion existed in Vermont in the wake of the Civil War. Justice David Brewer in In re Debs evinced no tendency to defer to the President or Congress when rejecting counsel for the government’s claim that a rebellion existed in Chicago during the 1894 Pullman strike and was as non-deferential in U.S. v. Ju Toy (1905) when declaring no rebellion existed in California that justified denying Chinese immigrants access to judicial process.[11]

Supreme Court practice from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century indicated that the broad language about presidential discretion to federalize state militia in some antebellum cases, most notably Martin v. Mott, had either been silently overruled or narrowed to the particular facts of the case and principles underlying the decisions. Martin concerned a suit by a member of a state militia who objected to federalization when the United States was invaded during the War of 1812. Justice Story opinion declared, “the President (is) the sole and exclusive judge whether the exigency has arisen.” That claim, however, was immediately modified by Story’s concern with the disciplinary and other problems that would result if state militiamen could object to their deployment during an invasion.  The full quotation is:

“Is the President the sole and exclusive judge whether the exigency has arisen, or is it to be considered as an open question, upon which every officer to whom the orders of the President are addressed, may decide for himself, and equally open to be contested by every militia-man who shall refuse to obey the orders of the President?”

The Supreme Court never cited Martin when, after the Civil War, the justices adjudicated lawsuits by civilians claiming that presidential use of the military for law enforcement violated their constitutional rights and interests.  Martin was limited to suits by militiamen challenging their deployment. Milligan supplied the rule when presidents claimed the triggering conditions for using military for law enforcement existed.  In 1932, a unanimous Supreme Court in Sterling v. Constantin held that the justices could determine whether the United States had been invaded, was fighting a domestic rebellion, or was experiencing an uprising that closed the courts when determining whether presidential uses of federal or state militia violated constitutional rights or interests.[12]

 

Conclusion

Americans from the ratification of the Constitution to the passage of the Militia Act of 1903 recognized that Congress could empower the President to federalize state militia only under the wartime or wartime analogue conditions under which Congress could empower the President to impose martial law. These conditions were limited to a foreign invasion, a domestic rebellion, or some other violent uprising that caused judicial proceedings in part of the United States to be suspended. The state militia federalized by the Militia Act were expected to confront troops or the equivalent, not criminals or scattered violent protestors. Interpreting the Militia Act of 1903 or any other federal measure, to give near absolute discretionary power to the president to determine when vast wartime powers may be exercise, Ex parte Milligan noted, would subvert the strict limitations of  in the militia acts and threaten constitutional democracy in the United States by enabled the president and subordinates to “substitute military force for and to the exclusion of the laws,” and govern as they “think right and properly, without fixed and certain rules.”[13]

 

[1] 1 Stat. 424 (1792); 1 Stat. 264, 264 (1795).

[2] 25 U.S. 19 (1827); 71 U.S. 2 (1866).

[3] 32 U.S. Stat. 775 (1903); G. David Crocker, et al., “South Carolina Judge Advocates of the United States Army Reserve, South Carolina National Guard and South Carolina State Guard,” South Carolina Lawyer, 48, 53 (January 2019); 32 U.S Stat. 776-79 (1903); “Root Favors the Canteen,” The Cleveland Leader (OH), December 1, 1865).

[4] 32 U.S. Stat. 775, 776 (1903); “Dick Militia Bill,” The Montgomery Advertiser (AL), May 15, 1903.

[5] United States v. Irwin, 127 U.S. 125, 128 (1888); See James Buchanan, “Proclamation—Rebellion in the Territory of Utah,” April 6, 1858, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-rebellion-the-territory-utah ; The Amy Warwick, 67 U.S. 635, 691 (1862); See Milligan, at 129. For a discussion of Shay’s Rebellion, see Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford University Press:2016), 88-101; For a discussion of Dorr’s Rebellion, see Marcus Alexander Gadson, Sedition: How America’s Constitution Order Emerged from Violent Crisis (New York University Press: New York, 2025), 37-65.

[6] Insurrection, Dr. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 702 (London, Bell & Daldy 1865); Francis Lieber, Instruction for the Government of Armies of the United States, in the Field (D. Van Nostrand: New York, 1863), 34; Keely v. Sanders, 99 U.S. 441, 448 (1878); Martin v. Hortin, 64 Ky. 629, 633 (1865) (quoting H.W. Halleck, Elements of International Law and Laws of War (J.S.Lippincott & Co.: Philadelphia, PA, 1866), 151; The Amy Warwick, 67 U.S. 635, 673 (1862); Smith v. Brazelton, 48 Tenn. (1 Heisk) 44, 55 (1870); Hill v. Boyland, 40 Miss. 618, 630, 632 (1866); Pennywit v. Kellogg, 13 Ohio Dec. Reprint 389, 390 (1870); Texas v. White & Chiles, 25 Tex. Supp. 465, 544 (1868); Hall v. Keese, 31 Tex. 504, 543 (1868).

[7] For a discussion of the Pullman Strike, see David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor and Capital in Industrial America (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, 1999); In Re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 597-98 (1895); Milligan, at 121-22; Bean v. Beckwith, 85 U.S. 510, 514 (1873)

[8] Milligan, at 140-41 (Chase, CJ., concurring); Milligan, at 128; Mitchell v. Clark, 119 U.S. 633, 647 (1884).

[9] In Re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 597-98 (1895)

[10] Milligan, at 121-22, 127 (1866)

[11] U.S. v. Ju Toy, 198 U.S. 253, 274 (1905) (Brewer, J., dissenting)

[12] Martin, at 29-30; 287 U.S. 378 (1932).

[13] Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 124-25 (1866).

Mark Graber

Mark Graber is the University System of Maryland Regents Professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Professor Graber is recognized as one of the leading scholars in the country on constitutional law and politics. He is the author of A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford 2013), Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, 2006). His most recent book is Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War (Kansas, 2023).
Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Robert Bland

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

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

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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bland

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

2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

2025 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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”

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsey R. Peterson

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

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

By | | Comments 0 Comment

 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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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).

Recent Muster Posts

Read the Journal Online at Project Muse

Access the journal on Project Muse

Follow us on Twitter