Early in Free State of Jones a Confederate soldier proclaims he is not fighting for slavery but rather “for honor.” His comrades, including poor Mississippi farmer Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), needle him. Considering the “Twenty Negro Law,” Conscription Act, and tax-in-kind law, they point out that their blood only helps slaveholders get richer. After deserting, Knight leads poor farmers and former slaves against conscription, taxation, and re-enslavement. Against a shared enemy, the Confederacy, he brings black and white fugitives together. But when Knight and his black comrades-in-arms attempt to move from the bullet to the ballot box, white allies fade away and white supremacists rise up.
At a meeting of the Union League, Moses (Mahershala Ali) and Newt (Matthew McConaughey) tell the Freedman that all citizens shall have the right to vote. Image from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
Beginning at the Battle of Corinth in 1862, Free State of Jones is about a long Reconstruction. It uniquely explores African Americans’ struggle for political and economic rights in the face of white power. Here, emancipation has an asterisk. Slavery ends with the war, but freedom does not follow. After former Confederates return to power and reassert slavery’s white hierarchy, political organizer and ex-slave Moses (Mahershala Ali) captures the reality for black Americans: “We free and we ain’t free.” Unlike other films, Free State of Jones illuminates the contingency of black freedom in the South after the Civil War in the face of white supremacist violence, northern Republican abandonment, and insufficient federal troops. After the battle scenes, the Federal troops are entirely absent.
Throughout the film, class, race, and gender overlap and challenge the assumptions of viewers and characters. Women and men, black and white, resist, fight, and survive together. When a white member of Knight’s company tries to deny Moses food because he is black and a fugitive, Moses responds, “How you ain’t?” How, if both are fugitives from compulsory service to slaveholders in a cotton field or on a battlefield, are they different? Through spirituality and experience, Knight considers this equality of the oppressed to be self-evident. McConaughey’s portrayal of Knight suggests Nathaniel Bacon and John Brown: a natural leader wild-eyed for solidarity and justice in the face of economic and racial oppression. Director Gary Ross highlights the many methods of resistance employed by fugitive slaves and enslaved people: fleeing to the wilderness, like Moses; remaining on plantations but assisting runaways, like Rachel (Gugu-Mbatha-Raw); remembering, like Moses’ wife (Kesha Bullard Lewis) and son Isaiah (LaJessie Smith). White characters resist Confederate authority similarly, but Ross also delineates the differences in experience. Rachel’s and Moses’s bodies bear witness to their physical and psychological torture, scars that mark the limits of white abilities to fathom black experiences.
Matthew McConaughey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Free State of Jones. Image from IMDb.
Committed to historical authenticity, Ross consulted historians Martha Hodes, Eric Foner, Margaret Storey, and Victoria Bynum, whose book 2001 The Free State of Jones was optioned for the screen. He also published extensive footnotes for the film that are available online, perhaps unprecedented in Hollywood. Does it suggest a trend towards fact over fiction in historical movies? Only the box office will tell.
Matthew McConaughey as in Newton Knight. Image from IMDb.
Free State of Jones stands out for exploring Reconstruction, but it is not perfect. Few characters are developed beyond Knight. This is a missed opportunity considering the depth Mbatha-Raw and Ali bring to Rachel and Moses, respectively, and the reality that, while Knight leads, he joins a preexisting fugitive slave network. The story of the 1948 Mississippi miscegenation trial of Knight’s great-grandson Davis Knight is all elbows. The pacing disorients, but while this hurts the narrative it strengthens the history. Familiar Civil War and Reconstruction benchmarks are absent, leaving audiences open to surprise when scenes or subtitles challenge assumptions. In one scene, dozens of African Americans pick cotton in a field under the supervision of white overseers when the words “One year after emancipation” appear as a subtitle. “What changed? What was freedom?” perplexed viewers may ask. An apt question, then and now. In Reconstruction, conditions changed both essentially and unnoticably, quickly and slowly, permanently and temporarily. The film unintentionally mimics this.
Free State of Jones emphasizes the inherent inequality of the Confederacy, the violence of white supremacists, and the broken promises of Reconstruction at a poignant moment in our national discourse. Many will find the ending unsatisfying, abrupt, and unfinished. But maybe historicity should get in the way of a happy ending, especially when it reminds us that racial injustice today has deep roots in America’s slaveholding past. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “but it bends towards justice.” By bringing one story of Reconstruction to the silver screen, maybe Free State of Jones will recruit a few more hands to reshape a more just ending to this American tale.
In May 2016, the remains of a dismantled eighteenth century wooden house appeared for sale on eBay. The online listing specified that, “Every single thing has been saved including the original plaster walls.” The seller asked $14.5 million to purchase the structure, claiming that the pieces constituted the “most important Dismantled American House that is available for reconstruction.”[1] In the nineteenth century, the Reverend Lyman Beecher raised his family of activists and abolitionists within these rooms, including reformers Catherine and Henry Ward Beecher, and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the home along North Street in Litchfield, Connecticut, the Beecher family developed an activist ethos, which encouraged Lyman Beecher’s children to advocate for emancipation and women’s rights. Yet despite the family legacy, the building’s neglected remains recently emerged for sale online. The surviving boards and plaster are a stark reminder for students of history about how easily significant sites and historic places are lost.
The Beecher house. Courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.
Rev. Beecher purchased the North Street house in 1810. His daughter Harriet described the home as a “wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts.”[2] Soon after Harriet left Litchfield for the Hartford Female Seminary in 1824, Lyman sold the house and moved the family to Boston. Over subsequent decades, the building endured several transformations. (At one point in the twentieth century, one of its rooms housed a young student of the nearby Spring Hill School named Pete Seeger). In 1996 the Forman School, the property’s owners, placed the old Beecher home on the market, beginning a series of noble but failed attempts to preserve the structure. One of the men to acquire the building was Chandler Saint, who proposed to disassemble the structure, located on land now occupied by a school, and reconstruct the building in another spot in town. An antiques dealer, Saint became the face of the Beecher project. He dealt with the press and led public tours, oversaw the property’s disassembly, commissioned forensic studies of the paint, and directed the search for a location to reconstruct the house. While some Litchfield residents resisted Saint’s ideas, the state historical commission endorsed Saint’s proposal.
In August of 2000, two truck trailers carrying the house triumphantly arrived at the proposed reconstruction site adjacent to the Litchfield town hall. By the end of the month, however, a number of events were set in motion that would result in the house’s disappearance. In response to neighbors’ concerns, the state’s attorney general, now senator Richard Blumenthal, ordered the trailers off the property. Chandler Saint refused. Six months later, the Connecticut Historical Commission declared threated to seize the trailers if Saint failed to comply. In response, Saint declared that he wouldn’t move the trailers until a safe place could be secured. But while he was speaking, amidst a raging snowstorm, the trailers were quietly moved away. Saint refused to divulge the remains’ location, remarking only that the house “went on the Underground Railroad. It disappeared. It went to safety.”[3] Despite Saint’s garbled Underground Railroad metaphor, it pays to remember that Stowe stubbornly refused to help real fugitive slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and her daughter. And, of course, the antislavery novelist imagined many futures, but none of them involved blacks and whites living together as equals. While some old Connecticut families might have been shocked to see their history sold on auction block, the descendants of slaves like Jacobs might have instead enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude. But, to get back to our story, had Saint, the man once celebrated as a preservationist visionary, kidnapped Stowe’s house?
A drawing of the Lyman Beecher House, 1929. Courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.
Like Harriet Jacobs, who hid in her grandmother’s small attic crawl-space for seven years, wherever Stowe’s house went into hiding, it stayed there—for fifteen years. Until a few weeks ago, when the surviving pieces appeared for sale on eBay. Stowe wrote of her childhood home, “Many a pensive, wondering hour have I sat at our playroom window, watching the glory of the wonderful sunsets that used to burn themselves out, amid voluminous wreathings, or castellated turrets of clouds–vaporous pageantry proper to a mountainous region.”[4] In that house, Stowe found her voice. Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to transform the national conversation and perception of slavery. In the book’s opening pages, in the person of Mr. Shelby, the novel’s “good” slave master, Stowe condemned the selling of human beings as, among other things, depriving enslaved peoples of family and history. The sale and subsequent saga of the Beecher home is a powerful reminder of the stakes of historic preservation, and the need to protect the places where we tell the history of slavery and anti-slavery.
Please share with Muster stories of other endangered Civil War-era properties, objects, and sites by contacting the editor, Blake McGready (bmcgread@villanova.edu).
Peter C. Vermilyea teaches history at Housatonic Valley Regional High School (Falls Village, CT) and at Western Connecticut State University. A graduate of Gettysburg College, he is the student scholarship director of his alma mater’s Civil War Institute.
The death of Muhammad Ali reminded people here in America and across the world of the many ways in which his life had meaning beyond his triumphs in the boxing ring. As numerous people have recalled in recent days, Ali was more than a fierce boxer; he lived a fierce life. He fought for recognition of his dignity, integrity, intellect, and humanity and that of black people everywhere. He refused to fight in the Vietnam War, insisting that as a black man, he had no fight there and for that saw his right to earn a living in his profession and to travel abroad stripped away. As the 150th anniversaries of the Civil War and Reconstruction merge and collide, it is worth thinking about the legacy Ali leaves—and remembering the one he inherited. He was the great-grandson of a black Civil War soldier and the grandson of a man who challenged in his own way the racial determinations imposed on black people. His life of resistance to racial discrimination and dehumanization stands as a memoir of the generations-long struggle of black people to give meaning to the freedom won during the Civil War and the enduring legacy of that fight in the ongoing contest over what it means to be free.
Muhammad Ali in Zaire, 1974. Photo by Howard L. Bingham. [1]
Ali’s fight against injustice—his very sense of injustice—rightfully belongs to the long history of the black freedom struggle that began in the first days of black people’s enslavement in this country. In the War for Independence, black men fought on the side of the revolutionaries and others took advantage of opportunities offered by the British to flee slavery and secure their freedom. They fought again in the War of 1812 and then, on their own, in revolts and every day resistance. When the nation split in 1861 over slavery, they took this struggle to the Union side. Over 180,000 black men served as soldiers in the United States Army and Navy during the Civil War, and hundreds of thousands more enslaved men, women, and children put their lives on the line to resist slavery and defeat slaveholders’ attempt to establish an unabashedly proud pro-slavery nation.
The Civil War generation of African Americans, wherever they were, helped to defeat the Confederacy and, as President Lincoln acknowledged, black soldiers were critical to victory. Freedom for the enslaved and the “use of colored troops,” Lincoln wrote to a critic of the Emancipation Proclamation in the late summer of 1864, “constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” Without them, he had concluded, “we can not longer maintain the contest.” Military necessity had forced Lincoln to join the chorus of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass who called for the enlistment of black men and argued that military service translated into a right to freedom and citizenship. “Drive back to the support of the rebellion the physical force which the colored people now give, and promise us, and neither the present, nor any coming administration, can save the Union,” Lincoln wrote. “Take from us, and give to the enemy, the hundred and thirty, forty, or fifty thousand colored persons now serving us as soldiers, seamen, and laborers, and we can not longer maintain the contest.”[2] For black men, military service in the Civil War entailed unique dangers. Those who left slavery to become soldiers faced an enemy that refused to acknowledge them as enemy combatants and a U.S War Department that discriminated against them in matters of pay and disproportionate assignments to noncombat duties. Their families were vulnerable to retaliation from slaveholders. Even so, a future of slavery meant they had to make the sacrifice. Muhammad Ali’s maternal great-grandfather, Thomas Morehead, was among those who reached this conclusion.
Muster roll descriptive information for Thomas Morehead, Ali’s maternal great-grandfather. Image from Ancestry.com. [3]
Enslaved in Kentucky, one of the four border states whose allegiance to the Union Lincoln saw as critical to Union victory, Thomas Morehead, like many black men, left behind a wife and two children when he mustered in at Bowling Green, Kentucky in September 1864. Morehead served in the 122nd United Stated Colored Infantry (USCI) organized at Louisville in December 1864. Within two months he had been promoted to 1st Sergeant. He was with the 122nd when it was ordered to the front in Virginia where Morehead and his comrades participated in the siege operations against Petersburg and Richmond. After the Civil War, the 122nd USCI was ordered to Brazos Santiago, Texas. Morehead was one of some 10,000 black soldiers stationed in Texas in the fall of 1865. After his discharge on September 24, 1865 at Corpus Christi, Sergeant Morehead made his way back to his family in Kentucky. In 1891, at the age of 51, Thomas Morehead married Lizzy, a woman 30 years his junior.[4] To this union was born Bertie (Birdie) Morehead, Muhammad Ali’s maternal grandmother. In adulthood, Bertie married John L. Grady, Sr. Ali’s mother, Odessa Grady Clay, was their child. Morehead passed along more than his name. He left to his descendants a love for and a politics of freedom. The experience of soldiering in Texas taught black soldiers important lessons in what it meant to serve a country that begrudged them basic civil rights.
In changing his name, his religion, and taking a stand against the war, Skip Gates writes, Muhammad Ali “helped move black radicalism into the mainstream.”[5] In this, Ali showed something of his inheritance from Thomas Morehead and his grandfather, John L. Grady, Sr. Asserting that he was a “Natural Born Citizen,” on his World War I Draft Registration card, the Kentucky coal miner listed his race as Ethiopian.[6]
Draft registration card for John Louis Grady, Ali’s maternal grandfather. Image from Ancestry.com.
[2] A. Lincoln to Hon. Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 7, p. 501.
[3] Thomas Morehead, Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served the United States Colored Troops: 56th-138th USCT Infantry, 1864-1866, Fold3 Database from Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, (USCT 122, Box 28, RG 94, NARA). See also Soldiers and Sailors Database, https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm.
[4] It appears that he had six children with his first wife, Georgia Morehead.
[5] Henry Louis Gates, “Muhammad Ali, the Political Poet,” New York Times, June 9, 2016.
[6] John Louis [Lewis] Grady, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, Fold3 Database (RG 163, M1509, NARA).
I was initially skeptical about the Roots remake (especially because of the HistoryChannel’s involvement) and watched the original again to see if an update seemed warranted. I found that while still riveting, it has many shortcomings. The original mini-series inaccurately depicts West African kingdoms, for example, and glosses over the participation of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade. Its set design and makeup look dated, and the acting is often poor. There are too many storylines centered on white characters, glaring historical inaccuracies, and slave agency in the Civil War is unexplored. (Please see my full review on Civil War Pop). Thus, I approached the new series with an open mind.
LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte in Roots (1977). Image from ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/roots-miniseries-cast-now/story?id=20805321.
I was not completely disappointed. The remake has cinema-quality production values, providing more realistic sets, better acting, and more powerful visuals. The series depicts West African kingdoms as economically and culturally sophisticated, and their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade is made clear. The addition of black agency during the American Revolution is well handled, and the last episode focuses almost exclusively on the Civil War. (Along with African American involvement in the conflict, the show demonstrates that Confederates typically murdered surrendering black soldiers). There are fewer unnecessary white characters, trimming much of the fat off the original. The exceptional third episode realistically demonstrates the types of sacrifices the enslaved made to maintain their families, and yet how this tended to force them to remain “loyal” to their master, no matter how despicable he may have been. (More detailed dissections of each episode are available on my blog, History Headlines).
Yet the remake tries to appeal to a new generation by ratcheting up the action scenes (no surprise from the network that turned the Sons of Liberty into Justice League-like superheroes). Most slave resistance in this update is violent, with the enslaved getting retribution in unrealistic fashion and escaping punishment (à la Django Unchained). All the main characters get in on the action: Kunta Kinte eventually kills the overseer that whipped him; Fiddler downs two slave patrollers, dying while fighting to the last; Kizzy dispatches a would-be captor during an escape attempt; Chicken George offs the ex-Confederate that threatens his family. While this gives the show gusto, it creates the impression that only the enslaved who violently resisted were heroic.
What’s missing is more realistic and common day-to-day slave resistance. We see little of blacks manipulatively deceiving their masters, for example. (One exception is a clever scene in which characters fool their owner in order to procure Kunta the less physically demanding job of driver). While in reality the enslaved community most often obtained a sense of retribution by doing such things as hiding or breaking important items, poisoning masters to make them sick, or fooling them in ways that caused annoyances, Roots depicts none of this type of resistance. It also contains no scenes in which blacks defiantly slip away at night for the social, musical, and religious gatherings that were so important to the development of a culture apart from their enslaved identities, instilling the self esteem and hope that masters worked to destroy. The original Roots also featured little of this, but I hoped the remake would.
The original series’ character development is better, however. Understanding slavery requires exploring the master/slave relationship, and while the remake does this brilliantly in the third episode, the important relationship between Fiddler and his master is underdeveloped. In the original, Fiddler’s loyalty and subservience earn him a degree of favor, but he also secretly mocks and manipulates his master. Kunta’s famous whipping scene (in which he is forced to accept his slave name, “Toby”) is intercut with Fiddler privately begging his master to spare the young man. The lifetime of trust Fiddler has built can’t stop the beating, with his master casually dismissing his most trusted slave and indifferently reading the Bible while the whipping commences outside his view. Further, the scene reveals not only that Kunta is determined to hold on to his African identity but also that Fiddler has never truly been broken by a system in which he has lived his whole life. The original Roots movingly reveals this by simply having Fiddler tearfully tell Kunta, “There’s going to be another day.” All this makes the original whipping scene more powerful than in the remake, which opts for a more bloodily brutal scene, as a master that we’ve barely come to know watches from a distance. It’s a perfect example of how modern special effects are no match for good storytelling and character development.
Forest Whitaker as Fiddler in Roots (2016). Image from the History Channel.
More important, in the original Roots, retribution comes in less satisfying but more realistic fashion. For example, Kizzy clandestinely spits in the drink of the white childhood friend that betrayed her. In another scene, Kizzy discovers her father’s humble grave, tearfully scratching out “Toby” and replacing it with “Kunta Kinte.” She will not allow whites to take away her father’s identity even in death, but will also not let them take away hers and her children’s heritage. This is a less rousing triumph than when the remake has Kunta kill the overseer, but it is more emotional and realistic than what we have seen on television lately.
Recent shows like Mercy Street, Underground, and the Roots remake have done much to humanize the enslaved, accurately presenting them as anything but passive victims. Still, the new trend seemingly only celebrates African Americans that violently resisted enslavement. This is problematic, as the number of slaves who took such measures was relatively small until the Civil War, and this focus diminishes the accomplishments and courage of the more numerous enslaved individuals who successfully outwitted and subtly manipulated their masters, never letting their slave status define them or destroy their hope and self-esteem.
The enslaved community’s ability to manipulate and shape their world helped transform the Civil War. Secession was of course a product of white southern fears about the security of slavery, but the federal government’s initial war aim was solely the Union’s preservation. Yet from the beginning of the conflict, the enslaved sought to use it for their own purposes, with many fleeing to Union lines, providing valuable assistance, and starting a process that ultimately led to emancipation. In focusing on the Civil War, the last episode of Roots has the opportunity to explore the role of African Americans in the war’s transformation, yet disappointingly, it does not do so. Still, having Chicken George enlist in the USCTs and his son work with Union spies, does far more to show black agency in the Civil War than did the original. Here, in showing African Americans fighting the Confederacy, Roots is more realistic in its depiction of violent resistance to slavery.
Chicken George and Tom Lea in a scene from the third episode. Image from the History Channel.
Ultimately, the Roots remake gets a lot of things right, providing four episodes of riveting entertainment. In particular, the brilliant third installment is in many ways better than anything in the original (it could stand apart as a movie on its own). Yet if this updating intrigued you, I encourage revisiting the 1977 version (coming out this week in a new Blu-ray edition). Though flawed, it more fully develops its characters, and because it relies less on adrenaline-pumping action sequences, more realistically depicts the tragedies and triumphs of the enslaved.
Glenn David Brasher is an instructor of history at the University of Alabama, and the author of The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation (UNC Press, 2012) which received the 2013 Wiley Silver Award from the Center for Civil War Research at the University of Mississippi. Follow him on Twitter, @GlennBrasher.
As scholarship on the Civil War era expands, Hollywood, too, has cast a wider gaze at the conflict and its roots. This year, with movies like “Free State of Jones” and “Birth of a Nation,” filmmakers continue to explore the struggles beyond the battlefield but still central to the war.
Hollywood’s eagerness to portray the ragged edges of the era beyond the battlefields has cast women, deserters, slaves, veterans, and guerillas into leading roles. The BBC’s “Copper” (2012-2013) took viewers to 1864 New York City rife with ethnic and racial conflict, thick with Confederate sympathizers, and led by honest cops and capricious pols. “Cold Mountain” (2004) opened with the 1864 Battle of the Crater but focused on the Confederate home front. Ruby Thewes (Renée Zellweger) and Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) battled nature and the predations of Confederate Home Guards to survive, while Confederate deserter W.P. Inman (Jude Law) formed unlikely alliances to stay alive. “Lincoln” (2012) charted the political landscape the president and Republicans navigated during debate on the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. Both “Cold Mountain” and “Lincoln” open with battle scenes to remind us of the context and consequences of their stories. Their lenses are otherwise focused on struggles far from the front lines.
Recent films also have captured the violence of slavery. Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (2012) illustrated the violence on which slaveholders relied to support their cultural, social, and economic system. Director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiographical account of his kidnapping into slavery “12 Years a Slave” won wide acclaim with critics (3 Oscars) and audiences alike. Solomon’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) rescue is hopeful yet hollow since audiences know that Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o) will continue to suffer under slaveholder Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Tarantino may give us a world where the slaveholders receive their just deserts and Django (Jamie Foxx) and his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) ride away free, but their triumphant departure takes place in actual darkness. Tarantino implies what McQueen makes explicit and what a former slave articulated in Ken Burns’ “Civil War:” For the slave, it is all night–all night forever.”
Jamie Foxx as the title character in “Django Unchained” (2012).
This year, the jagged edges of the war again took center stage. In “The Hateful Eight” (2015), Tarantino toyed with the racial, legal, and political legacies of the war in 1870s Wyoming before abandoning nuance and complexity to bathe audiences in a sea of blood and bile. This spring, PBS’s “Mercy Street” conveyed life and death, work and love in an Alexandria, Virginia hotel-turned-Union-hospital (check out reviews on Muster by Elizabeth Motich!).
On June 24th, the long Civil War era will return to the big screen with “Free State of Jones,” starring Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali, Keri Russell, and Brendan Gleeson. The story of Confederate deserter and Unionist guerilla Newton Knight’s (McConaughey) battle against the Confederate army and for an egalitarian society carved out of central Mississippi has received substantial attention since the early 20th century. Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (2001), served as a historical consultant on the film. In her book, Bynum illustrates how Knight and his family’s struggle against the Confederate army continued into Reconstruction and beyond. Both the book (and reportedly the film) culminate in 1948 when the state of Mississippi tried Davis Knight, a descendant of Knight and his second wife Rachel (herself a former slave; played by Mbatha-Raw) for violating state laws against interracial marriage. The question before the court was whether Davis Knight, who passed for white and had married a white woman, was to be considered black because of his lineage. Bynum explores the saga of Newton, Rachel, and Davis with aplomb, deftly navigating myth, legend, and bias in the post-war Mississippi political climate. In a new afterword to her The Free State of Jones, Bynum expresses optimism that the film will convey the reality for many unionists and all former slaves in the United States: the war did end slavery, but it left intact the social and cultural barriers to equality which served as foundations for a renewed system of race-based political exclusion.
Mahershala Ali and Matthew McConaughey lead “Free State of Jones,” in theaters June 24.
Based on the history and Bynum’s optimism, historians might find much to like in “Free State of Jones.” Race, gender, and class dimensions form its core, surrounded by considerations of loyalty and nationalism. Above all, it is a story as much about power, paramilitary violence, and Reconstruction as it is about Blue and Gray.
Like “Free State of Jones,” director Nate Parker’s “Birth of a Nation” promises to expand the Civil War era in the popular imagination. In his directorial debut, Parker recounts the story of enslaved preacher Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. With its title alone, “Birth of a Nation” refocuses American attention on the legacies of slavery and origins of the Civil War while further discrediting the moonlight and magnolias of the Lost Cause. Set for a wide release this October, the film will contribute to ongoing contemporary conversations about power, violence, and race.
Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” will be released this fall.
In Hollywood, “based on a true story” usually means “we’ve taken extensive artistic license to sell the movie rather than to tell an accurate story.” As a result, many historians may be pessimistic about the potential of these films. Hopeful anticipation is joined by anxious questions about what simplifications the filmmakers make to reach a popular audience. Will the movies and shows of 2016 lead viewers to think about slavery, Reconstruction, and the legacy of the Civil War in new ways? Time and ticket sales will tell. We might not be party to the filmmaking, but we always can engage the audience before and after the movie.
This post was written by Michael Johnson, a PhD student at George Washington University.
The fourteen-part series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” produced by Sam Katz and History Making Productions, traces the development of American ideals, character, and democracy over four centuries of one of the nation’s most crucial cities. Episode six, “Disorder,” explores the decades before the Civil War (1820-1854), focusing on the tensions of a growing city. The episode examines three conflicts in particular: race, class, and ethnicity/religion, all of which were compounded by the autonomous nature of the city’s townships.
“Portrait Identified as James Forten,” Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, date unknown.
By far the largest focus of the episode is racial tension in the years before the Civil War. Though technically in a northern state, Philadelphia was a city on the border, with strong business and familial ties to the southern slave states. As a result, tensions between whites and blacks were high, and racial violence was a constant threat. The episode focuses on wealthy sailmaker James Forten, whose family was active in antislavery efforts in the city. With the Forten family in the center of black activism, the documentary presents two major race riots of the era. First, in 1834 the destruction of a popular carousel the “Flying Horses” sparked riots against black businesses and homes. Four years later, the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society, an interracial organization, built Pennsylvania Hall as a meeting space for abolitionists. Less than a week after its opening, during a meeting including notable abolitionists such a Lucretia Mott, Angelina Grimke, and William Lloyd Garrison, a white mob attacked and burned the hall. Shortly thereafter Pennsylvania stripped African American men of their right to vote, leaving the black community in an even more precarious position in antebellum Philadelphia.
The second tension explored in the episode is that of class. Antebellum Philadelphia was the nation’s wealthiest city, due in large part to the Second Bank of the United States and its president, Nicholas Biddle. While the bank helped spark industrial growth of all sorts in the city, capitalists also benefitted by depressing wages of the city’s craftsmen. But President Andrew Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United States became a battle of laborers and industrial capitalists. Irish-born weaver John Ferral united workers across trades to challenge long hours, low wages, and unsafe working conditions. While his labor organization excluded black workers, he managed to unite Catholics and Protestants. In the summer of 1835, a strike of over twenty thousand workers effectively shut down the city until employers agreed to a ten hour workday, the first significant organized labor victory in the nation’s history.
The third major tension presented in the episode was ethnic/religious difference. This theme received far less attention than the others, and was limited to a brief mention of the Bible Riots. In the summer of 1844, nativists, wary of the growing Irish Catholic population in the city, attacked Catholic homes, and later churches.
“Map of the City of Philadelphia as Consolidated in 1854,” Image courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
The violence of the era was made possible in part by the autonomous nature of the city’s neighborhoods. Philadelphia was divided into 29 independent townships/districts, in which city officials had little to no authority. Districts like Southwark and Moyamensing were notorious centers for vice and gangs; rioters seeking safe havens had only to cross South Street to be protected from Philadelphia police. But the riots of this period provided strong incentive for unification. In 1854, Philadelphia consolidated into the largest metropolis in the United States. Not only did the city have new power to extend public services, but officials also had new authority to enforce law and order in previously independent townships.
Overall the documentary does a nice job of exploring the tensions, or perhaps more appropriately growing pains, of a developing city. Industrial growth, combined with the influx of African Americans from the south and immigrants from Europe created an environment ripe for violence, and the episode explores some of the more notable instances when tempers erupted. From a production standpoint I (uninformed though my opinion may be) thought the documentary was very well done. There is a nice balance of historical reenactments with period images enhanced with animations. There is also an effective use of local scholars and experts to provide further explanation and context to the narrative.
But perhaps this topic “Disorder” was a little ambitious for a single episode. The documentary tries to cover a lot in 25 minutes (excluding credits), and as a consequence makes specific references without going into detail. One example came with the mention of violence in townships like Moyamensing. Several gangs are mentioned specifically, most notably the Killers, but no details are offered. In a documentary that seeks to highlight notable individuals, the producers could have mentioned William “Bull” McMullen, a leader of the Killers and Moyamensing Hose Company (gangs and hose companies were largely interchangeable in this era) who became a prominent, if oftentimes notorious, Philadelphia politician for much of the nineteenth century.
“Nativist Bible Riots of 1844,” Lithograph, Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
The biggest disappointment is the treatment of the Bible Riots. The bulk of the episode is dedicated to racial tensions (and justifiably so), but with roughly one minute of coverage, the ethnic tensions seem thrown in as an afterthought. Sparked in part by requests from the Catholic Church to excuse Catholic students from using the King James Bible in public schools, the riots included nativists battling Irish Catholics, then nativists battling law enforcement and militia trying to protect the churches being targeted. The violence, notable for its severity and duration, contributed not only to calls for consolidation, but also the growth of self-segregated Catholic schools in the city. Plus, it sparked one of the best tough-guy lines in American History: upon learning of the violence in Philadelphia, Archbishop John Hughes of New York warned the city’s mayor that if a single Catholic Church were attacked in New York, “the city would become a second Moscow,” a reference to the Russian scorched-earth policy during Napoleon’s invasion. Taking Hughes at his word, no New York churches were harmed.
The ending of the episode is also a bit misleading. In the conclusion, a group of abolitionists successfully used the police force of the newly consolidated city to protect their meeting from a white mob. This offers a nice image of progress for the African American community in Philadelphia and a positive way to end the episode. But race relations still had a long way to go. Though perhaps worthy of protection under the law, the black struggle for equal rights and protections in the city would continue during and beyond the Civil War.
“Disorder” is an interesting documentary that explores the tensions and violence of a growing city during a tumultuous period. But in trying to cover several major themes over the course of three decades in under thirty minutes, the episode by necessity is selective in details and may leave curious viewers wanting more.
Perhaps nothing better encapsulates our personal histories than our homes. From the slightly outdated furniture to the embarrassing school-age portraits to the perfect warm spot by the fireplace, the amalgam of objects, images, and spaces that comprise home shapes our core. So too do those within; our families, friends, and pets influence our experience and memory of home. At once a thing, a place, and people, home is also an idea, a mix of the imagined and the real. We define our past, our present, and our future through homes.
Home reveals both personal and national histories. Historians of architecture, material culture, and family, for example, have long argued that American history is made in the home. Americans have always demanded the right to private domestic spaces in which to safely house their families, goods, and hopes for the future, since the time of the fifth amendment, which states, “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
But not all Americans have possessed that right. Millions of enslaved African Americans struggled to build and maintain homes within an institution that sought to strip them of their humanity, including their right to private domestic spaces. The threat and reality of sale meant that slave homes were tenuous. And enslaved people responded to this anxiety in disparate ways. Writing of his life in slavery, Thomas Jones expressed his belief that enslaved Americans shared a natural, acute longing for home: “no one can have…such intensity of desire for home and home affections, as the poor slave.” On the other side of the spectrum, the British abolitionist John Passmore Edwards proclaimed in his supplementary book to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s massively successful Uncle Tom’s Cabin that “slaves have no home.”
Joe McGill has spent nights in more than fifty slave dwellings in twelve states since 2010. Photograph from http://slavedwellingproject.org/.
My own research has been animated by the question: how did enslaved people build private homes, physically and psychologically, while under the impossible burdens of slavery? This past October, I attended the Slave Dwelling Project Conference in North Charleston, South Carolina ready to engage this question more deeply. The Slave Dwellings Project (SDP) is the product of Joseph McGill, who, after spending years as a Civil War re-enactor in South Carolina, began campaigning for the preservation of an oft-ignored Old South relic: the slave cabin. And McGill did so, by determining to sleep in every single extant slave dwelling in the United States. After gaining national attention, McGill formed the SDP as a way to continue his work. The Project brings together groups that too rarely engage one another. From scholars to activists, legislators to business people, the SDP and corresponding conference are great ways for like-minded individuals and organizations to coalesce to save the dwellings of enslaved people.
This mixture of like-minded but methodologically diverse professionals resulted in consensus over some issues and fierce contestation over others. We all agreed that preserving and presenting the history of enslaved people is absolutely crucial to an accurate national story.
Derelict slave cabins, often inhabited by freed people long after the Civil War, still stand throughout the U. S. South. This one is located outside St. Francisville, Louisiana, where a number of antebellum “Big Houses” are carefully maintained. Photographs by the author, 2012.
The grand “Big Houses” of the antebellum South are seemingly omnipotent in America’s physical and mental landscape. The dwellings of enslaved people should have a similar presence (fig. 3). But what constitutes a slave dwelling? Is it always a small log cabin, as pictured in popular culture (when they’re depicted at all)? Does it even have to be a physical building, or simply a space where one might sleep? Historians are well aware that enslaved domestic laborers might have slept in the “Big House,” possibly in their own room but more likely wherever their owner demanded. George Womble related to a Works Progress Administration interviewer in the 1930s that he had “slept in the house under the dining room table all of the time.” Conversations did not even begin to address the dwellings or homes of enslaved people living in cities or on small yeoman farms. Home was never a homogenous concept; the diversity of enslaved living conditions and lived experiences meant that home meant many things and took many forms. If we focus all our efforts on preserving wooden slave cabins on large plantations, are we accurately presenting the history of slavery?
Additionally, many were so focused on the materiality of the slave dwelling, that we sometimes lost the humanity of the dwelling, how enslaved men, women, and children, actually experienced and imagined home. Of course the physical space and conditions of the dwelling are crucial to understanding slavery and our past. As a dedicated material culturist, I will always support that position. But, for enslaved individuals, home was about more than its physical incarnation.
“Margrett Nillin, ex-slave, Ft. Worth,” 1937. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
When we talk, write, think, and construct exhibits about slave dwellings – actually, about any aspect of slavery – let’s not forget the ideas of home held by enslaved people. Home – a true, private, safe home – exemplified the most desired fruits of liberty. At the heart of emancipation was the reunited black family in a comfortable, protected home (fig. 4). As Margrett Nillin, a former slave in Palestine, Texas, noted in a late 1930s W.P.A. interview, “In slavery I owned nothing and never owned anything. In freedom I own a home and raise a family. All this cause me worriment and in slavery I had no worriment, but I’ll take the freedom” (fig. 5). The struggle did not end with emancipation. Housing was a central issue in the twentieth-century civil rights movement, and remains so today. It’s vital that we recognize not only the long history of discriminatory housing practices, but also how home as both physical space and evolving idea shaped the black freedom struggle.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown, 2016.
Edwards, John Passmore. Uncle Tom’s Companions: Or, Facts Stranger Than Fiction. A Supplement to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Being Startling Incidents in the Lives of Celebrated Fugitive Slaves (London: Edwards and Co., 1852), 144.
A short account of Joe McGill as a re-enactor at Fort Sumter can be found in Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998, 47–48.
Nillin, Margrett. WPA Slave Narrative Project. Texas Narratives. Vol. 16. Pt. 3. Federal Writer’s Project. Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, 153.
Jones, Thomas H. Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones; Who Was for Forty Years a Slave. Boston, Mass.: H. B. Skinner, 1854[?], 23.
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in AmericaNew York: Pantheon Books, 1981.
Whitney Nell Stewart is a PhD Candidate in History at Rice University and a 2016-2017 Barra Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Early American Art and Material Culture at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her dissertation, entitled “The Racialized Politics of Privacy: Meaning and Materiality in the Nineteenth-Century Black Home,” has been supported by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture and National Museum of American History, the Huntington Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, among others. Additionally, she has held curatorial fellowships at the Bayou Bend Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Henry Ford Museum.
“Roots, 1977 Promotional Poster,” Image courtesy of Warner Brothers, 1977.
In the last several decades, African Americans have become avid genealogists, turning eagerly to Ancestry.com and DNA testing, joining clubs and traveling to the National Archives in an effort to fill in their family trees. Henry Louis Gates credits the original 1977 television series, Roots, for initiating this interest, saying that after watching the series, African Americans were stricken by a massive case of “Roots envy.”
This week on Muster, Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson and Dr. Erica L. Ball, authors of the upcoming book, Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017) talk about history, slavery, and black genealogy in anticipation of The History Channel’s May 31st premiere of a four-part remake of Alex Haley’s 1977 classic series, Roots. After the first episode of Roots, stay tuned for The Roots of Our History, a documentary about the series.
What do you recall about the original 1977 Roots series?
Prof. Jackson: I remember watching the 1977 Roots for the first time when I was about eight years old. I am one of seven children and we grew up in mostly white communities, so my parents insisted that we read or watch the latest contributions to African American history. Together, we all sat around the television and watched Roots as a family. At age eight, I was sort of traumatized by it! But as I look back, I realized how it and books I read influenced the way I valued American history and my history in particular.
Prof Ball: I remember being quite taken with the 1979 sequel, Roots: The Next Generations. I loved watching James Earl Jones as Alex Haley conducting his search for his family history! Those scenes remained very vivid for me over the years. Roots may well have influenced my decision to pursue this type of work myself. Who knew?
How would you describe the research Alex Haley did in researching his ancestors’ stories in Roots?
Prof. Jackson: This summer, Matthew Delmont’s new book,Making Roots: A Nation Captivated will debut. His book tells the long, remarkable, and complicated story of how Roots came to be. Delmont explains how Haley’s research was years in the making. I’m excited about Delmont’s work and the understanding it will give to many people who wonder, “how did Haley do it?”
Assuming he managed to get past the scandal surrounding plagiarism accusations, if Alex Haley were doing genealogy work today, I imagine he would have a show on PBS where, like Henry Louis Gates, he would employ the use of DNA testing, census data, and local archives to conduct his work.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the original 1977 mini-series?
Prof. Ball: [T]he greatest strength of the original Roots was its success at representing people of African descent as mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, friends, etc., rather than an undifferentiated mass of slaves. While earlier popular representations of slavery invariably characterized black people as happy with their lot, Roots made it clear that black men and women asserted their humanity and resisted and negotiated the institution [of slavery] as best they could. This was a profoundly important achievement.
The original series’ deficiencies really tell us about the historical moment in which the series was produced. For example, a number of scholars critiqued the original series for creating white characters who were not in Haley’s book, in an effort to draw in more white viewers and make them feel comfortable watching a show with a majority black cast. What is interesting to me is how these all these new white characters were positioned on a spectrum from pro-slavery, like the Reynolds plantation master’s niece Missy Anne, to conflicted about slavery (slave ship Captain Thomas Davies), to pro-racial equality (impoverished couple George and Martha Johnson). It’s a remarkable snapshot of white American racial attitudes in the late 1970s.
What conversations did the 1977 Roots mini-series generate? How do you imagine today’s viewers will take to the remake?
Prof. Jackson: The original Roots made television history in igniting and sustaining the conversation on racism, genealogy, identity, belonging, heritage, and so on. When Roots debuted, critic James Baldwin argued, “It can be said that we know the rest of the story–how it turned out, so to speak, but frankly, I don’t think that we do know the rest of the story. It hasn’t turned out yet, which is the rage and pain and danger of this country.” The exact same thing could be said today. This year we are facing the end of an Obama presidency, a contentious national election, and a Black Lives Matter Movement. My hope is that viewers will watch and then take it further by beginning the long and hard work of facing our national past, present, and future.
“LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte,” Image courtesy of Warner Brothers, 1977.
The 1977 Roots series was commended for its honest treatment of slavery. How do you hope to see slavery portrayed in future media? What work remains to be done in television and films about slavery?
Prof. Jackson: I am completely taken by WGN’s new series Underground, which tells the story of several runaway slaves and the dangerous path they embark on to obtain freedom. Shows such as Mercy Street, the YouTube series Ask a Slave, and Nate Parker’s highly anticipated Birth of a Nation tell the story of American slavery in new and exciting ways. The study of slavery in America and the Atlantic world cannot be exhausted. It is completely possible to create complicated, multidimensional characters that operate outside of our expectations. There are many stories to be told, stories that involve pain, loss, and violence, but also stories that emphasize resistance, humanity, survival, love, and if done right, even laughter.
Professor Ball, you have written about African American manhood. How did the original Roots reflect gender and masculinity, particularly LeVar Burton’s portrayal of Kunta Kinte? Like African American history, scholarship on gender is in a very different place than it was in 1977. How do you anticipate this being reflected in in the upcoming 2016 series?
Prof. Ball: The original series was very much about black masculinity. The black male characters are multifaceted and complex and they embrace their roles as members of black families and communities. And both LeVar Burton and John Amos invested the role of Kunta Kinte with such depth, humanity and inner strength. All of the key male characters fulfill their roles as strong but caring heads of households who do the best they can to protect their families under the most difficult of circumstances.
The trailer suggests that the 2016 version will move beyond the family circle to incorporate other stories. For example, I noticed clips about a black Union soldier on the battlefield. This is very important, as that story doesn’t often get portrayed on screen.
“Cicely Tyson as Binta and Maya Angelou as Yaisa in Roots,” Image courtesy of Warner Brothers, 1977.
What role, if any, did slave narratives play in the creation of the 1977 Roots? Has more historical awareness been brought to this historical source in recent decades?
Prof. Ball: We know that Haley read voraciously. And although I don’t have any evidence for this, I would not be surprised if he had read The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in London in 1789. Equiano’s narrative includes a gripping account of the middle passage that details his confusion and horror, the stench of the hold, the violence and the suffering of those being forcibly transported from Africa to be sold in the Americas. Roots does a wonderful job of capturing that experience and presenting it to the modern public.
The trailer suggests that the producers will make use of the all of the wonderful new studies of slavery that have appeared over the past forty years. Thanks to work by scholars such as Deborah Gray White, Stephanie Camp, and Jennifer Morgan, historians know much more about the experiences of enslaved women than they did in the 1970s. And thanks to Jean Fagan Yellin’s success in authenticating the work, Harriet Jacobs’ narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860/1861) is now a standard text in African American history and literature courses. I hope that this new body of scholarship will inform depictions of women in the 2016 Roots. From the looks of the trailer, women exercise a bit more agency and exhibit more complexity than in the 1977 version.
Education plays an important role in the ep. IV of the 1977 series, when Kunta Kinte’s daughter, Kizzy secretly learns to read. Can you comment on the role of education in Roots?
Prof. Ball: The original Roots certainly characterizes education as something that has radical possibilities. Education is so radical that Kizzy is ultimately sold away from her parents for possessing this forbidden knowledge and using it to help the young man she loves try to escape. But Kizzy doesn’t just know how to read and write. She also knows a few Mandinka words she had been taught by her father, Kunta Kinte. These words are passed down through generations until, as Alex Haley tells it, they were passed on to him. This story – whether fact or fiction – offers an important lesson about the importance of remembering that we all have a history worth knowing and preserving for future generations. This, I think, is a lesson worth repeating.
The new mini-series features an all-star cast, including Forrest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), and Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls). The lead role of Kunte Kinte is played by Malachi Kirby (EastEnders).
Kellie Carter Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Hunter College, CUNY. Carter Jackson’s research focuses on slavery and abolition, historical film, and black women’s history. Her manuscript, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, is the first book-length project to address the politics of violence and black leadership before the American Civil War.
Erica L. Ball is a Professor of American Studies and Chair of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her work interrogates the connections between African American expressive culture, gender and class formation and popular representations of slavery.
Ball, Erica L. To Live An Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Middle Class. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Ball, Erica L. “To Train Them for the Work: Manhood, Morality, and Black Conduct Discourse in Antebellum New York.” In Timothy Buckner and Peter Caster, eds. Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men: Black Masculinity in U.S. History and Literature, 1790-1945. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011: 60-79.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Vol. I. London: Middlesex Hospital, 1789. Documenting the American South Database. Accessed April 12, 2016. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/equiano1/equiano1.html
Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of An American Family. New York: Dell, 1976.
Jackson, Kellie Carter. “There’s No Reason to Compare Anything in Modern-Day America to Slavery.” Quartz. May 29, 2015. Accessed April 3, 2016. http://qz.com/414794/slavery/
Roots, The Complete Mini-Series. The History Channel, 2016.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, with “A True Tale of Slavery” by John S. Jacobs. Harvard: Belknap Press, 2009.
“Kevin Bacon Tintype,” Image copyright Victoria Will, Sundance Film Festival, 2015.
In December of 2015, Philly.com’s staff writer Jeff Gammage caught on to a photography trend taking the urban hipster world by storm: the revival of 1860s tintypes. Tintype pictures of average people, well-known folk singers, and even Kevin Bacon from cutting edge dark rooms are fetching high prices. Gammage referred to this art form, practiced by Newport Folk Festival photographer Giles Clement, as “the steampunk of photography.” Steampunk fans re-envision the Victorian past and blend it with modern technology, out of a combined sense of nostalgia for a fictive, smoky-lensed nineteenth-century and a fascination with real antiques. The steampunk movement is often intentionally more fanciful and creative than steeped in history. So why, we might ask, is the medium associated with Civil War battlefield photographers Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner now evolving into a fascinating Gen. Y art movement?
“Unidentified Soldier in Union Mounted Infantry Uniform with Daughter and Wife,” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Lijenquist Collection, 2015.
Most Civil War enthusiasts are familiar with the tintype, a nineteenth-century photo technique that captures an image on a metal plate. The method was developed by Adolphe-Alexandre Martin in 1853 as a successor to the ambrotype and daguerreotype and used the same wet-plate collodion process to create an image through light exposure. This great video from the Smithsonian explains how a tintype was designed during the 1850s-1880s. The subject sat for a few minutes, and the entire process took approximately fifteen to complete. Tintype photography was quick and inexpensive, which led to its rise in popularity. Tintypes fell out of style with the evolution of newer, quicker photography techniques…or so the past generation of photographers thought.
Contemporary tintype photo shoots are nothing new. Civil War reenactors and Steampunk fans have been sitting for their own portraits for decades as a way to recreate the past. The difference this time, according to Gammage, is that tintypes are appealing to a larger audience of artists, musicians, and people simply curious about the process of taking a non-instant photograph. In our hipster age of “slow food” and the return of handcrafted products, modern tintype enthusiasts seek imperfect, yet skillfully crafted images, looking for an art form that is timeless and requires patience to develop. We have all seen pictures of dower-looking Victorians and wondered what it would be like to sit in one pose for several minutes to take a photo. Why not experience it ourselves?
“Portrait by Giles Clement,” Image copyright Giles Clement, 2014.
A small group of photographers is leading this vintage charge; these include Clement, John Coffer, a traveling photographer who hosts students at his Camp Tintype each summer; Victoria Will, who shot celebrities like Bacon at the Sundance Film Festival; and Rob Gibson, who made my own tintype photo (shown below) in Gettysburg a few years ago. Others have also been bitten by the 160 year-old bug, and unlike those old-timey boardwalk photography studios that add sepia tones to digital photos in an attempt to manufacture age, these artists are the real deal. Most use authentic nineteenth-century cameras to shoot their subjects.
But what is the main force behind this new interest in this Victorian-era Polaroid? First and foremost, unlike our digital-age photos, which can be reproduced and retouched with Photoshop, tintypes are only made once. What you see is what you get. The process requires specialization. While anyone can use Instagram filters to beautify images, few know how to take and develop a physical photo, and an even smaller number of photographers are capable of doing so using technology from the mid-1800s. The artistry of the tintype process appeals to our sense of nostalgia. In a world in which images appear and disappear in a second, the tintype allows people to return to an era when photographs were novel and lasting. Taking a tintype connects us with the past in a way that feels grounding, like listening to a favorite song from high school. Like reenacting, sitting for a tintype allows you to feel connected to those who did so more than a century ago. It feels authentic.
Kerry Erlanger is a writer and amateur historian whose main goal is to live in a very old house. She can be found on Twitter @hellokerry, live tweeting an embarrassing amount of television shows.
At some point, a stereotypically boring Social Studies teacher probably made you read The Red Badge of Courage, Across Five Aprils, or Rifles for Watie. There’s nothing wrong with these books. They tell compelling stories through teenage eyes that give very accurate accounts of various Civil War experiences. I have used them in my own classroom. But these novels are, for lack of a better term, old. That doesn’t make them unnecessary—far from it. It’s just a fact that begs this question: what are the modern equivalents of these time-honored classics? What themes are more recent works exploring, and how do the stories reflect contemporary notions of the Civil War?
To answer that, I’ve reviewed a handful of Middle Grade and Young Adult Civil War books from the last ten or so years ranging in topic and presentation. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but a light survey that caught my eye as an 8th Grade History teacher and YA author who spends considerable time teaching the event and writing for the target audience.
This middle grade novel retells the true and horrible story of “The Weeping Time”, the largest slave auction ever held in American history on March 2 and 3 of 1859. The play format gives the reader a front-row seat to the emotions and motivations of each principal character: the indebted plantation owner, Pierce Butler, who mourns the loss of his property—just not enough to keep them; his two daughters, who witness the horror with varied responses; and most notably the young house slave Emma, Lester’s hero, who has no idea that she will appear on the auction block.
Lester creatively peppers the novel with time-hopping interludes that show each character’s future self reflecting back on that horrible day—how it scarred and changed them. Though gut wrenching and vivid, Lester doesn’t leave us in tears: Emma escapes to Philadelphia and eventually onto Canada. True, her husband later dies while fighting in the Civil War, but Emma has her own children, and ends the novel poetically sharing her life story with her granddaughter, over tea. Still, sorrow remains the constant theme of this book, specifically divine sorrow: the torrential rain of that March day was, as Emma’s father says, “God’s tears”.
Myers, Walter Dean. Riot. New York: Egmont USA, 2009.
Similarly unique in presentation—this time a fast-moving screenplay—Riot retells New York’s bloody draft riots of 1863 through the eyes of fifteen-year-old, biracial Claire Johnson. The daughter of Innkeepers John (black) and Ellen Johnson (Irish), Myers sets Claire’s search for identity cleverly against the backdrop of a city foaming with racial tension. Angered that Lincoln’s conscription unevenly targets them, poor Irish lash out at the wealthy who can afford the $300 substitution fee and African Americans who are taking their jobs. Battle-weary soldiers from Gettysburg arrive to maintain order and end up suppressing the riots with particular brutality. So what does all this mean for Claire, who has a black father but looks as Irish as her mother?
This longing to transcend biracial identity drives the novel. “I don’t see why you have to be a black person or a white person,” Clair tells her mother. “Why can’t you just be a person?” Later, Claire questions the notion of race entirely. “I didn’t choose to be black…I just wanted to be a human being. I just wanted to be whoever I saw in the mirror, without a race or a place in life. What is so wrong with that?” By using Claire as a lens to view the draft riots, Myers forces the reader to question race then and now. Coupled with the rapid pace, honest racial dialogue, and more then a few harrowing chases down New York City alleyways, Riot is poised to capture and challenge young readers.
Fact: young adults don’t love nonfiction (nerdy honors kids not included). But when the English Department at my school added Chasing Lincoln’s Killer to their curriculum, our eighth graders took to it. Abridged from Swanson’s bestselling adult version, The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killers, young readers will have no trouble keeping up with the fast, thriller-esque work that chronicles Lincoln’s tragic end and the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. I’m not saying they’re going to be dying for it, but by and large they don’t hate it—a big win for teachers.
Relying on a host of eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, Swanson weaves together the alternating narratives of Lincoln, his cabinet, Booth, and the co-conspirators. Little-known players also appear: actress Laura Keene, who cradled the dying president in the theatre box; Sergeant Robinson, the male nurse who heroically fought off Lewis Powell thus saving Secretary Seward’s life; photographer Mathew Brady, who captured the crime scene; and Thomas Jones, Confederate Secret Service operative who ferried Booth across the Potomac. While the plot loses some tension relatively early after Booth shoots Lincoln, Swanson takes the reader on a heart-pounding chase through the Maryland and Virginia countryside that culminates in Booth’s own death. Filled with era drawings, newspapers, maps, and a superb array of photographs, Chasing Lincoln’s Killer is YA nonfiction at its finest.
Seriously, Disturbingly Dark
Hunt, Laird. Kind One. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2012.
This novel takes you to a dark place and (almost) leaves you there. Told primarily from the perspective of Ginny, a fourteen-year-old girl who marries the abusive, slave owning Linus Lancaster, Kind One examines rape, torture, complicity, and redemption on a pre-Civil War Kentucky farm insidiously named “Paradise.” Linus Lancaster is the archetypal slave-owning monster: tall, muscular, hard-drinking, and complete master of his pig-farming domain. His particular brand of sadism mirrors the slaughtering of the pigs he keeps: “Linus Lancaster liked us all to take a turn at the killing…those of us who ate the most ought to kill the most [he said]. That was me and Linus Lancaster.” For six years Linus has his way with Ginny until he becomes bored of her and begins “visiting” nightly his two teenage slaves, Cleome and Zinnia (who may also be his daughters, Hunt isn’t entirely clear on this). Driven by jealousy or disgust or both, the battered Ginny begins assaulting the girls she once treated like daughters; here Hunt is clear: abuse begets abuse. But when Linus is murdered (no spoilers), the girls turn on Ginny with vindictive sadism, leading to Hunt’s other motif: savagery begets savagery.
Hunt interweaves the brutal narrative with Ginny as an old woman, hinting that forgiveness—despite all the horrible things she’s done and endured—isn’t out of reach. And he tells the story’s (thankfully) redemptive end through the eyes of those around Ginny during and after those awful years, a captivating technique that alleviates pressure and stimulates curiosity. Though stunningly written, I won’t be book talking this to my middle schoolers; objectively speaking, however, Hunt has crafted a haunting look at a demented set of circumstances that took place on many a farm in the Civil War era.
A New Take on Divided Loyalty
I planned this as my guilty pleasure read, but as the pages turned it became something richer—something deeper and more nuanced. Set during a smartly narrow window at the war’s opening year, the story centers on seventeen-year-old Violet Dancey who finds herself running the family farm after her brother is killed at Fort Donelson and her father goes off to fight. Instead of the war itself driving the novel—an exhausted and often alienating feature of YA Civil War books—several unique conflicts propel the plot. New family arrives, including an insufferable stepsister and a cunning, blockade-running cousin; Violet befriends the slaves of a local doctor rumored to practice ‘hoodoo’; and most prominently, Violet discovers a wounded Union officer deep in the woods being kept alive by someone whose motives aren’t immediately clear.
And it’s that secret relationship which forces Violet to confront the inconsistences of her world. The soldier she’s caring for—the soldier she is falling in love with—fought at Fort Donelson; he’s the enemy, maybe the one who fired the bullet that killed her brother, prompting Violet to question her loyalty to the Cause. He also forces her to finally deal with her own nagging suspicion that owning another human is wrong. “…your ‘property’ is men, women and children,” the lieutenant tells her, a truth Violet knows but struggles to calibrate.
Fitting, then, that it’s the family slave, Laney—Violet’s only true friend in the book—who poignantly diagnoses this struggle to love someone you’re taught to hate: “Everything’s different when you get to know folks.” By making this “getting to know folks” the driving theme of the book, Nickerson anchors the narrative in wartime relationships and the difficult task of boundary breaking which young adults will find compelling.
For nine years Matthew Landis has attempted to slay boredom wherever it lurks in his 8th grade Social Studies classroom at Tamanend Middle School. An alum of Villanova's Graduate History program (2013), he recently clawed his way into publishing by signing book deals for his Young Adult debut, THE JUDAS SOCIETY (Sky Pony, 2017) and his Middle Grade debut, PRIVATE OLIVER PRICHARD (Dial/Penguin Random House, 2018). He hopes one day to achieve whatever level of literary success allows him to summer in Cape Town with his wife and daughter and go on safari pretty much whenever they want. You can read more about his books at www.matthew-landis.com, email him at author.matthewlandis@gmail.com, and follow him on Twitter @Matthew_Landis.
![Muster roll descriptive information for Thomas Morehead, Ali's maternal great-grandfather. Image from Ancestry.com. [3]](https://i0.wp.com/jotcwera.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ali2.png?resize=249%2C589)
Kellie Carter Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Hunter College, CUNY. Carter Jackson’s research focuses on slavery and abolition, historical film, and black women’s history. Her manuscript, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, is the first book-length project to address the politics of violence and black leadership before the American Civil War.
Lester, Julius. 
Myers, Walter Dean. 
Swanson, James L. 
Hunt, Laird. 
Nickerson, Jane. 