Category: Muster

“I Was Detected by My Laugh”: The Brief Military Career of Margaret Cathrine Murphy

“I Was Detected by My Laugh”: The Brief Military Career of Margaret Cathrine Murphy

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CW: sexual violence and self-harm

On May 17, 1863, Margaret Cathrine Murphy found herself in an unlikely situation: being interrogated as a spy while imprisoned in Annapolis. As she explained, she was suspected of being a rebel spy, not for harming the Union cause, but for dressing as a man and enlisting in the Union war effort. “I dressed myself in men’s clothes,” she said, “and enlisted in the same company” of 98th Ohio Volunteers as her father, William C. Murphy. “In a few days after I enlisted I was detected by my laugh,” she continued, “and was suspicioned of being a woman,” but “my father reported to the Captain that he had examined me, and that I was a man.”

The story Murphy told her captors, then, was one in which love of family and country inspired her to join the Union cause. Her military record, she claimed, bore out the virtue and validity of this claim. “I served six months in the service,” she boasted, “and was part of the time a Corporal,” not only serving honorably as a man, but with a degree of dedication that warranted promotion.

Despite her valor and sacrifice as well as the protection of her father, Murphy’s identity as a woman in uniform eventually became known and led, in her telling, to allegations of spying. “I was ordered on duty,” she recalled, “and in the meantime got drunk, and while drunk my sex was discovered.” What followed was a scene of harrowing sexual violence at the hands her once-comrades: “they cut my pants off, took my jacket off, dressed me in women’s clothes, and put me in jail, by order of my Captain.” Murphy, who had trained and served alongside the men of her company, was immediately transformed into a target of martial violence and treated like an enemy combatant, stripped not only of her clothes but her accomplishments, dignity, and camaraderie in uniform. “I served in Western Virginia,” she remarked of her military service, “was in Wheeling jail three weeks; from there I was sent to Washington.”

C-4122--Final image sequence Margaret Cathrine Murphy

From Wheeling to Washington, her military service was not only undone, but with it, everything she had stood for and believed about herself. The essence of who she was. Apparently unsure what to do with her, Union authorities deported her to rebel territory, expecting her to join the very cause she had fought to defeat. No wonder, then, after experiencing sexual and ontological violence at the hands of the government to which she had given everything, that she was in extreme distress. Like so many others experiencing gendered and sexual violence, she attempted suicide. “I was ordered to leave the boat and go ashore” and into rebel territory, she recalled, but “I refused, cried, and tried to jump overboard and drown myself.”

Murphy offers us brief windows into her experiences, but there is no telling what abuse she endured under the gendered violence of the state. What must it have been like to constantly worry about being “discovered by [her] laugh”? To have her worst fears realized as she was stripped, searched, prodded, and ridiculed by comrades with whom she had been drinking around the campfire only moments before? Had she intended, moreover, to live as a man or was her story simply a product of patriotism—that she “love[d] [her] country and the Union boys”? Murphy doesn’t tell us, but what she does offer is a damning indictment of gendered regimes of surveillance, coercion, and violence that subject those who fall outside of their bounds—intentionally or not—to untold horrors. While I have chosen to refer to her as a woman here, which is the only way she appears in her interview and public accounts of her activities, her story asks us to think carefully about how we use and even risk replicating the gendered languages of hierarchy and repression that have been weaponized and deployed by the state against people like Murphy who dared to live outside of those narrow confines.

I came across Murphy’s story in my role as an editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) while gathering materials for a forthcoming digital publication, “Black Maryland in the Civil War.” I was immediately struck by the gendered violence she endured at the hands of the state and the Union cause she had fought to advance. Dressing and passing as a man made her an object of intrinsic suspicion and led directly to the ridicule, assaults, and incarceration she suffered. And in fact, a close reading reveals that she likely understood that danger from the outset, taking care to disguise her voice as well as her appearance and volunteering with the protection of her father. The very last line of her account emphasizes the careful discipline required for her military service: “[I] am sure no one in the Regiment knew of my sex, except my father, until I [was] detected when drunk.” She had done no harm, she almost seems to say, and in fact had wanted nothing more than to enlist to serve the cause and country she loved. 

One of the oddities of the document in which her statement was recorded, however, is that it includes the testimony of a fellow prisoner in Annapolis, Mary Jane Green, which significantly complicates her account. Like Murphy, Green had posed as a man and, like Murphy, she had been imprisoned in Wheeling before eventually being transferred to Annapolis. But where Murphy insists that she had been devoted to freedom’s struggle, Green admits that she had, in fact, been spying. From the very beginning of her account, she boasts that “I was dressed sometimes in citizen’s clothes, and sometimes in women’s clothes; I carried the mail from one Rebel army to the other, going through the Union lines.” In Green’s revealing framing, she could present either as a “citizen” or a woman, but never both.

C-4122--Final transcription Margaret Cathrine Murphy

Despite the defiant tone of Green’s story and her unwavering support for the Confederacy, the two women reported having endured remarkably similar experiences. “I was arrested in men’s clothes,” Green recounted, and “I told them I was a woman; [but] they would not believe me.” Occupying the same uncertain terrain between gendered forms of military service as Murphy, Green recalled that “[t]he day I was arrested some officer’s wives were ordered to search me, which they did and made a report that I was a female.” Nevertheless, she complains, “I was confined in the Guard House with men.” In the silence and suggestion of her account, Green seems to imply that there was more to this story, having been intentionally held in such close quarters with men. Where Murphy gives some of the details of her assault—having her clothes torn off and whatever grim scenes then unfolded—Green’s account finds shelter in the muted dignity of silence, asking us to imagine what unfolded while she was “confined in the Guard House with men.”

Normally we perform extensive archival searches at FSSP to make sure we have the full story of accounts like these before publishing them (more on this below), but since this document did not fit within the parameters of the microedition, we opted to forgo that process. Instead, wondering about the potential relationship between the two women, I did a quick newspaper search. What this revealed cast both women’s stories in a different light and suggests that more research on their case is warranted.

According to a May 7, 1863 article from the Baltimore American that was reprinted in the Richmond Whig, Murphy and Green were not only held together, but had been engaged in the same subversive activities. Murphy, the author reported, “is also charged with being a telegraphic wire cutter and a Rebel spy.” Like Green, moreover, the article alleged that “it is proven that she has several times travelled from Wheeling to Pittsburg and conveyed information in relation to army movements of considerable importance to the enemy.”

And in fact, an article reprinted in the June 19, 1863 edition of the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer alleged that Murphy and Green were not only imprisoned together—they were captured together. The editor explained that “about six weeks ago, Margaret, in company with Mary Jane Green and Jennie DeHart, was arrested in Wheeling, charged with acting as a spy to the rebels.” Murphy is listed in the article as a resident of Braxton County in present-day West Virginia, the very place that Green tells us she was first arrested in her Annapolis interview.

Green may well be the key to unravelling the women’s stories. The Intelligencer article presents Green as the potential ringleader of this group of captured women spies. She “is more than ordinarily intelligent,” they observed, “and was continually prompting her [fellow prisoners], cautioning them not to give any information whatever” during their interrogations. After her initial capture, she tells us, she “escaped a day or two afterwards, but was rearrested” and was eventually paroled in Wheeling, where she assumed a false identity that allowed her to make her way back to Braxton County. “Then I went home,” she tells us, “and joined the Rebel service, dressing in women’s clothes, serving as a spy.” She was again captured and released, and “on the road home, about ten miles from Weston,” she boasted, “I broke the telegraph wire, accompanied by about 20 guerillas.”

This 1864 photo illustrates the ways that women deployed military garb to demonstrate their patriotism and support for the Union cause. Pictured are Miss Susie Kerney, Miss Bow, Mrs. John de P. Townsend, Mrs. Benjamin Richards, and Miss Thornburn with military regalia sown onto their dresses. Photo via the Library of Congress.

The language Green uses to describe her activity is important, emphasizing that she “joined the Rebel service” and that she was operating with a band of “about 20 guerillas.” Since she and Murphy appear to have been arrested together at this juncture for cutting the telegraph line, it is possible that they were both part of this rebel guerilla force attempting to wreak havoc in western Virginia.

Yet Murphy’s story, unlike Green’s, appears to have ended in her release. “Miss Murphy was released on Monday,” the Intelligencer reported, “having taken the oath of allegiance.” “She left the city for Wheeling last evening,” they concluded, “and informed us before her departure that she intended to lead a different life.” It does not appear, however, that she served in the 98th Ohio, which mustered no one named either Murphy or Lang and was active in central Kentucky and Tennessee at roughly the time that Murphy was apprehended with Green under suspicion of spying.

There are all sorts of explanations for this discrepancy ranging from Murphy’s interview being poorly transcribed by captors to having given a different name—as did Frances Clayton, Cathay Williams, and countless others who transcended the gendered constraints of their society—or even providing incorrect unit information to protect others who might be incriminated or embarrassed by her story. However, we cannot dismiss the very real possibility that she fabricated all or parts of the account to divert suspicion away from her work as a spy. That does seem to be where the available evidence points, although additional research may well reveal alternate possibilities (more on this below). And if misrepresentation really was the case, it may well have contributed to her release in the weeks following her interview.

Whatever her intentions, Murphy—and indeed Green—generated an incredible account during her interrogation in Annapolis that provides a great deal of insight into the intersection of gender norms, suspicion, and rights. As my students observed when we analyzed this document together, it would be difficult to imagine Black men or women being released under similar circumstances. Black war widow Henrietta Emory Meads, as I wrote recently, could not even obtain the bounty, pension, and back pay to which she was legally entitled because of allegations that she had been promiscuous and insufficiently subservient to her husband. Cathay Williams, the Black soldier who fought Indigenous people on the frontier in the 38th U.S. Infantry as William Cathay, had their pension claim rejected because those evaluating the claim found their deafness suspicious.

Yet just as their status as white women afforded Murphy and Green protection, it also left them vulnerable to gendered violence at the hands of the state. They endured terrible physical and emotional abuse for daring to wear men’s clothes and—it seems—to enter the war effort in combat-related roles. These rigid gender norms both constrained those living under them and coerced feminized forms of public affect and physical labor to affirm the importance of men’s contributions to state violence. From this vantage point, we can see how gendered deviance—wearing men’s clothes and performing masculine labor cutting telegraph wires and joining guerrilla outfits—represented a central source of their abuse by agents of the state.

Perhaps most importantly, Murphy and Green offer insight into the limits of a martial and patriotic feminism that exists at the expense of others. Green and likely Murphy fought tirelessly for the enslaver rebellion, sacrificing deeply for a cause that operated at the expense of millions of Black families—men, women, and children alike. If we take seriously—as we should—their struggle for recognition in male-associated military and saboteur roles, then it becomes all the more important that we understand the ways that white women have acted, often violently, to reinforce and advance white supremacy in the United States. The rights and recognition they sought remain impossible so long as they support a larger system of repression, a dynamic that only a genuine embrace of liberation can alter.

 

A Note on Additional Sources

 Under normal circumstances, we do a series of searches to identify any material relevant to the individual case when we select a document for publication. However, because we elected not to publish this document, which falls outside of the story we seek to tell in “Black Maryland in the Civil War,” we did not perform additional searches. Those interested in the intertwined cases of Margaret Cathrine Murphy and Mary Jane Green will likely find answers in Part IV of Record Group 393 at the National Archives. 

If I were looking for additional information on their cases, I would start with the records of the Post and Military Command of Wheeling, West Virginia. Both the letters-sent volumes (series 1348 and 1349) as well as the General and Special Orders (ser. 1353) seem likely to yield results by examining the records during the rough dates mentioned in their accounts. Less likely are the two series related to the provost marshal of the Wheeling post (ser. 1356 and 1357), which appear to cover the period after the women were transferred to Washington, D.C. and then on to Annapolis, MD, although some newspaper accounts suggest that they may have continued operations in the vicinity. 

Records for the post at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania may also prove useful as newspapers mention Murphy and Green having operated in the vicinity. Given the available date ranges, the Telegrams Sent and Received (ser. 1022) and the List of Stragglers, Deserters, Recruits, and Others Reporting to the Guardhouse at Pittsburgh (ser. 1025 and 1026) may contain useful information, although additional records from that post may prove worthwhile if either of the women operated in the region in 1864. 

In the provost marshal’s records at Annapolis, two registers of prisoners (ser. 1533 and 1534) may shed light on the status of Murphy and Green. Likewise, the letters-sent volumes from which their testimony is drawn (ser. 1530) may contain additional references to their respective cases.

Further Reading

DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 121. Blanton and Cook offer the only published account of Murphy’s story that I have found.

Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1992).

Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (W.W. Norton & Co., 1994).

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

William Horne

William Horne is a historian of white supremacy and Black liberation movements in the United States. His recent scholarly publications include “White Supremacy and Fraud: The ‘Abolitionist’ Work of Henry Frisbie,” Civil War History 70 no. 3, (September 2024): 69-86; “Abaline Miller and the Struggle for Justice against the Employer Police State after Slavery,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020, Andy Slap and Hilary Green, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 38-46; “Necessary Utopias: Black Agitation and Human Survival,” Green Theory & Praxis 16 no. 1 (February 2024): 14-33; and “Towards an Unpatriotic Education: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Threat of Nationalist Mythologies,” Journal of Academic Freedom 13 (2022): 1-16. His current book project, “Carnivals of Violence,” examines the systems of white supremacy enshrined in state institutions after emancipation. Horne was co-founder and longtime editor of The Activist History Review and has spoken and published extensively in public-facing venues including TIME, Truthout, The Nation, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and the Bucks County Beacon.

Call for Proposals: Civil War Era Article Workshop

Call for Proposals: Civil War Era Article Workshop

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The Richards Center at Penn State and The Journal of the Civil War Era announce a journal article workshop for advanced graduate students, recent PhDs, assistant professors, and independent scholars. Selected scholars will be expected to attend an online orientation webinar in June, provide a draft journal article by August 15, 2026, and participate in an online workshop in September. The workshop will be facilitated by a senior historian in the field, and the aim is to assist scholars in crafting a publishable article. Although the workshop is cosponsored by the JCWE, participants are not obliged to submit articles there.

Deadline for applications: April 15, 2026

To apply for the program, please submit the following materials as one pdf file to RichardsCenter@psu.edu:

  • Your C.V.
  • A proposal that includes title and brief (500-word) synopsis of the proposed article; explanation of where the piece currently stands and what kind of advice you would find most helpful.

Robert Bland

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

Extended: Deadline for Richards Center Predoctoral Dissertation Fellowship

Extended: Deadline for Richards Center Predoctoral Dissertation Fellowship

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The Richards Civil War Era Center, in the College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State, invites applications for two 2026-27 predoctoral dissertation fellowships in the history of the Civil War Era.

The Richards Center conceives of the Civil War Era broadly. We especially welcome projects related to the history of slavery, emancipation, and their legacies and the history of struggles for freedom and democracy in the United States. This is a limited-term (one-year) fellowship for advanced graduate students who are in the writing stage of their dissertation. During their residency, the fellows will primarily perform their research; they will have no teaching or administrative responsibilities. The fellows will be expected to make progress on their dissertation and to take an active part in the Richards Center and Penn State’s community of researchers.

The fellowship includes a $40,000 stipend and $3,000 in research funds. The Richards Center will coordinate payment of the stipend through the recipient’s graduate institution. The successful applicant must receive approval from their graduate program to accept the fellowship.

Application Process and Submission Process

To be considered for this position, submit a complete application packet including a cover letter describing your dissertation project and goals for the year, a curriculum vita, and a list of three references to Barby Singer at bqs6@psu.edu.

We will request additional materials and letters of recommendation from candidates who advance in the search process. Review of materials will begin March 15, 2026, and continue until the positions have been filled. Please direct questions about the process via email to RichardsCenter@psu.edu.

Website

https://richardscenter.la.psu.edu/fellowships/predoctoral-fellowship-program/#:~:text=Predoctoral%20Fellows%2C%20History%20of,RichardsCenter%40p

su.edu.

 

Robert Bland

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

The Unspendable Pension of Henrietta Emory Meads

The Unspendable Pension of Henrietta Emory Meads

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Sometime in July 1867, Henrietta Emory wrote to a clerk in the Claim Division of the Maryland Freedmen’s Bureau describing the challenges she had faced in trying to get money due to her as a soldier’s widow. “I have had so much trouble & gone so in debt to get my poor husband’s bounty, that I was able to do no more,” she lamented. With a young child to support, Henrietta certainly needed the money, which would have amounted to several hundred dollars the U.S. government owed to her deceased husband. She also had good reason to be weary of the process of claiming it, however. Having failed in an earlier bid to claim the benefits that was stymied by a corrupt Freedmen’s Bureau agent, J.P. Creager, Henrietta knew better than anyone that winning access to her rights as a war widow was an expensive endeavor. Her success, she had learned, also relied on the design and operation of a federal bureaucracy that consistently treated Black Southerners—and especially Black women—with suspicion. Nonetheless, she asserted, her claim was sound. “I can prove by the best authority, that I was lawfully married to James Emory,” she insisted. “I was married to him by a Methodist preacher, colored, & my husband paid him for marrying us, he was a regular preacher in the conference, & it was the way all the people were married.” Legally married, she insisted, the hundreds of dollars the government had yet to pay her husband ought to be hers.

I encountered Henrietta’s case in my role as an editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) while gathering materials for a forthcoming digital “microedition” on the experiences of Black Marylanders during the Civil War. As I sifted through Henrietta’s numerous petitions to representatives of the Claim Division, I was struck by the forceful manner in which she demanded recognition of her rights as a war widow and by her repeated assertions that the process of  securing  those rights was expensive and unjust. She repeatedly described herself as “a poor woman” who “can not get any thing done with out paying for it and… [was] not able to stand to it.” After identifying additional materials at the National Archives pertaining to Henrietta’s case over the course of transcribing and annotating the materials already in our collection, the reasons for her frustration became clear. In order to secure her rights, Henrietta had to contend with agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau who were frequently corrupt or racist, or both, enduring a process that seemed designed to disqualify Black women living in poverty as she did, all to obtain rights that were ostensibly already hers as a war widow. As we know from recent scholarship, her experiences were all too common among Black women trying to secure the money due them as the widows of Civil War soldiers. These experiences raise important questions about the design of the postwar state, even during the short existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau that historians have tended to see as taking a proactive role in establishing Black rights in the postwar South. Henrietta’s story offers a radically different account of the relationship between the state and the equal rights it allegedly established.

Emory Final Transcription

 

If it were as simple as establishing the legality of her marriage to the late James Emory in 1860, Henrietta’s case would have been relatively straightforward, even without the documentary, legal, and social resources from which white claimants benefitted. “I have no money nor cant get any to go to Baltimore,” she explained in July 1867, “but I will send a certificate of my marriage, with the preacher’s name to it, sworn to before the county magistrate  I would think this proof enough.” Yet it was not proof enough because, as Brandi Brimmer’s Claiming Union Widowhood methodically demonstrates, the postemancipation state was invested in enforcing white liberal social and sexual norms on Black women rather than simply distributing the benefits to which they were legally entitled. As her case dragged on, Emory seemed increasingly frustrated by the unwillingness of Freedmen’s Bureau officials to treat her marriage as legitimate. “I was Jim Emory’s lawful wife, & have proved it to you, & me & his son Moses, are the lawful ones to have [his unpaid bounty and wages],” she wrote in April 1870. “I have gone to much expense to get it, & am not able to do more for I am a poor woman.” Before her case was closed, Henrietta would have to endure many such humiliating inquiries into the nature of her sexual history. And at each step along the way, she told agents that the process was physically, financially, and emotionally draining. It wasn’t meant to award benefits, she suggested, but to keep the wrong kind of women from accessing their rights.

An image of the affidavit of John Smith, the Black clergyman who married Henrietta and James Emory.

Consisting of thirty-nine pages spread across two separate applications, the documents in our collection pertaining to Henrietta’s case provide an exceptionally rich record of one woman’s struggle to secure her rights and her livelihood in postwar Maryland. At the same time, however, the many gaps and silences in her case both demonstrate the challenges of using the holdings of the National Archives to tell stories such as Henrietta’s and raise important questions about the design and operation of the postwar administrative state and whether it was intended to serve women like her.

Emory Image Sequence Final

 

One problem with the case files generated by Henrietta’s claims is that they provide only a partial window into her struggle—the records are preserved in ways that omit the demands and expectations of the agents who stood between her and the rights she claimed as a war widow. A May 8, 1871 letter accusing Henrietta of promiscuity, for instance, was not included in the Claim Division’s file pertaining to her case. I uncovered it only after additional searches of the division’s press copies of letters-sent volumes. The structure of these records make it all too easy for a researcher to miss this letter and therefore miss a crucial part of the story, one that gives a fuller picture of the racial and sexual priorities and anxieties of the postwar state. The additional communications from the claims office also provide crucial clues as to Henrietta’s relationships. The May 8th letter that finally convinced Henrietta to risk the expensive trip to Baltimore, for example, alleged that she had lived with several different men during her husband’s deployment before marrying another, John Meads. The gravity of these charges and their potentially fatal impact on her claim help explain the urgency of her reply, her sudden willingness to make a difficult and expensive trip to the claims office in Baltimore, and her switch from her previously frustrated and assertive tone to a more subservient one. Henrietta must have seen her rights evaporating into the disdain of the agents tasked with evaluating her claim.

We can also learn a great deal about the community in which Henrietta lived by paying careful attention to her claims and the ways she crafted each communication in response to what she apparently saw as an imposition on rather than a manifestation of her rights. At first glance, for example, it appears that Henrietta wrote the many petitions herself, each composed in the same handwriting in her voice. A short note towards the conclusion of her case, however, reveals that even before she sought out others to petition on her behalf, she worked with someone in her community to navigate the difficult application process. In response to inflammatory allegations of sexual promiscuity contained in the May 8th letter mentioned above, Henrietta replied on May 11th, “I have heard the letter red that you sent to me but it give me very pore incurgement but I will try to Come over [to the claims office in Baltimore] on monday the 21 if I can.” This short note positions Henrietta in quite a different light, dependent upon those around her for assistance—hearing the agent’s letter read to her—rather than providing evidence and making demands for herself as a struggling but self-reliant war widow. The census records reveal that Henrietta was indeed unable to read or write and had evidently had substantial help staking her claim to the benefits her husband had earned in uniform. In light of her May 11th reply, the omission of any mention of assistance from her earlier letters gives a sense of the expectations Henrietta sought to meet in her previous communications, expectations of literacy and respectability that had quickly unraveled amid the allegations of promiscuity.

If the May 8th letter helps us better understand Henrietta’s interaction with the postemancipation state, it also reveals a great deal about the narrow view of rights and benefits advanced by its agents. In previous communications, claims agent Edward C. Knower had instructed Henrietta that she needed only “two witnesses, colored or white, men o[r] women” to demonstrate “that you lived together as man and wife for several years.” “Unless you attend to this matter,” he had warned her, “you will never get your claim settled.” After the allegations of promiscuity came to light, however, Knower tightened the requirements on Henrietta, demanding that she “furnish the testimony of two or more reliable white persons” to satisfy him that the charges against her were baseless. Black testimony would no longer suffice. Harkening back to the prohibitions on Black testimony under the slave state, this shifting requirement reveals not only the narrow, paternalist manner in which postemancipation rights were administered, but also the general suspicion of Black communities as inherently immoral and incapable of fully exercising the rights of citizenship, among which the right to give testimony was one of the most important. Despite all that Black communities had won, and at such a steep cost—as James’s silence in this account attests—the logic of Dred Scott still seemed to animate elements of the postemancipation state.

We don’t know who helped Henrietta petition for her benefits following the initial mishandling of her claim in 1866 by Creager, but her enlistment of further assistance towards the end of the process only added to the inflammatory charges of immorality. When her claim appeared to stall in 1871, she turned to a white acquaintance, merchant John L. Turner, who wrote to Knower on Henrietta’s behalf, asking how to advance the application. After Knower informed him of the allegations of infidelity against Henrietta made by James’s father Samuel, Turner replied that “Henrietta Meeds was in my Store this morning to see Me about the Matter, and I took her to herself and Questioned her, and I she could not offer any evidence against the Statements that Samuel Emery had already Made.” Not only did Turner seize the opportunity “to do any thing that is wright for Sam,” but added to the allegations: “Hennie lived with me also James Emery her husband at the time he went in the army.” The 1870 census listed Henrietta as a cook, and perhaps this was what Turner meant in noting that Henrietta had lived both with him and James, but the context of the statement—Henrietta’s infidelity—suggests otherwise. Maybe Henrietta had already intuited Knower’s demand that she provide statements from “reliable white persons” when she sought aid from Turner, or perhaps Knower had already made these instructions clear. Whatever the case, Henrietta found in Turner’s “assistance” not only a betrayal of the respectable identity she had carefully constructed as Henrietta Emory, but also additional allegations of immorality.

Henrietta and James Emory evidently separated sometime in 1864 after a difficult and apparently abusive union, one doubtless shaped by the trauma of living under a slave state. As well as accusations of sexual immorality, Henrietta’s claim ran up against allegations that she had abused her husband James while they were together. The statement Henrietta provided from James’s physician, L.H. Beatty, asserted for example that “I have no knowledge of his ever being scalded by his wife, as I understand has been represented.” Disproving allegations of abuse was just as important to Henrietta’s application as refuting charges of infidelity. James’s father Samuel, for instance, alleged in his affidavit, quoted in the May 8th letter, not only that “Henrietta lived with other men while James Emory was in the Army,” but “that she was so living when James Emory came home sick on a furlough and she positively refused to receive said Soldier, and Care for him.” Instead, Samuel asserted, she “forced him to leave her and go to his fathers house & during four week [illness?] Henrietta paid no attention to James & did not see him until his burial.” Henrietta did pay her respects to her first husband, but apparently couldn’t bring herself to share a residence or care for him during his sick leave.

If her marriage to Emory was traumatic and painful, her union with John Meads appears to have been more harmonious. The 1880 census records them as still living together, having welcomed nine children into their family during the thirteen years of their marriage. One of the children, Moses, may have been the child she attributed to James in her letters to the Claim Division. By this time, Henrietta was no longer working outside the home as a cook, work that could carry demeaning connotations as well as the daily risk of sexual violence and may well have contributed to Turner’s suggestion of infidelity. While the state had not dignified her first marriage or her rights as a war widow, her second one, at least, seemed to have the quiet dignity and stability she had presented for herself all along.

 

Further Reading

Brandi Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household

Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

Dale Kretz, Administering Freedom: The State of Emancipation After the Freedmen’s Bureau

 

William Horne

William Horne is a historian of white supremacy and Black liberation movements in the United States. His recent scholarly publications include “White Supremacy and Fraud: The ‘Abolitionist’ Work of Henry Frisbie,” Civil War History 70 no. 3, (September 2024): 69-86; “Abaline Miller and the Struggle for Justice against the Employer Police State after Slavery,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020, Andy Slap and Hilary Green, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024), 38-46; “Necessary Utopias: Black Agitation and Human Survival,” Green Theory & Praxis 16 no. 1 (February 2024): 14-33; and “Towards an Unpatriotic Education: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Threat of Nationalist Mythologies,” Journal of Academic Freedom 13 (2022): 1-16. His current book project, “Carnivals of Violence,” examines the systems of white supremacy enshrined in state institutions after emancipation. Horne was co-founder and longtime editor of The Activist History Review and has spoken and published extensively in public-facing venues including TIME, Truthout, The Nation, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and the Bucks County Beacon.

Previewing the March 2026 JCWE (Currently Available for Free)

Previewing the March 2026 JCWE (Currently Available for Free)

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This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era departs from our normal work of publishing articles and review essays to ask, “What should historians of crisis do in a moment of crisis?”

We conceived this issue in spring 2025, as we observed two converging phenomena: The Trump administration swept into office and proceeded to—among other things—attack higher education, often using blatantly untrue statements as pretext; undermine federal support for scientific research of all kinds, with particular animus toward research on people of color, racism, and sexual minorities (topics it derisively labeled “DEI”); cancel NEH grants; divert NEH funds to an ill-defined garden of American heroes; demand political review of Smithsonian exhibits created by experts in their fields; revise National Park Service exhibits and websites to conform to its whitewashed vision of history; and rename military bases and other sites for Confederate military figures.

At the same time, our historian friends and colleagues—especially those who study the Civil War Era—felt newly flummoxed. Scholars had approached the first Trump administration’s tilt toward lawlessness and authoritarianism with a defined set of tools honed through years of activism and public engagement. But those tools now seemed quaint or less useful, in the face of what appeared a threat not just at the margins but to the very existence of the political and cultural order we operate within. At conferences and in private conversations, we heard over and again outrage but also confusion and lurking questions: How should we understand this moment, and what should we as historians do?1

We decided to invite some of the most exciting scholars in our field to address these questions. We did not limit contributors’ responses to scholarship or teaching or public activism but instead gave them as much space as they wanted to risk their own answers. Their essays, published here, illuminate scholars wrestling in different ways with their hopes and fears, their expertise and uncertainty, their determination and confusion. They have lifted some of the veils that often cloak us and have exposed themselves—and all of us—as vulnerable at a very vulnerable moment in the country’s history. None of them offer a single trick that will save us from the present predicament. All of them suggest ways of clarifying our thoughts, reckoning with our limitations, and finding meaning in our work.

We had some misgivings about our decision to produce this special issue. We are all-too-aware of the human capacity to magnify momentary conflicts into epoch-defining ones. Like most of our readers, we have been asked many times to compare contested but routine budget negotiations or appointment votes to the coming of the Civil War by people who seem to think that normal politics should be consensual and calm, that any harsh words bespeak political collapse. We have—like most of you—developed pat answers about the normality of conflict in politics and the infrequency of truly epoch-making crisis points in which normal political fighting is replaced by dynamics that are much more sweeping, that cast away prior assumptions and customs. Just as we do not lightly set aside the normal practice of publishing peer-reviewed research for one issue, we also do not lightly make analogies—even loose ones—between our own times and a conflict that killed more than seven hundred thousand Americans, led to the freedom of 4 million enslaved people, and transformed the country’s economy, culture, and Constitution.

At the same time, however, we recognize the many ways the current moment seems unusually disconcerting, especially but not only for historians of the Civil War Era, and thus demands reflections and response. The essays in this issue suggest some of the reasons this moment feels so distinctive—many familiar, a few perhaps less so. Without recounting every news story (or trying to predict the ones that will emerge between copy-editing and publication of this issue), it is clear that the present Trump administration is at war with universities and with history—especially histories of nonwhite people—in ways that mark a significant departure from past presidential administrations and go far beyond the actions of Trump’s first four years in office. At the same time, universities and other institutions, once so formidable, seem to be crumbling amid processes that began well before 2025 and that the Trump administration is surely exacerbating. In many respects, Marshall Berman’s retranslation of one of Karl Marx’s phrases for the title of Berman’s classic study of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, seems prescient, even sickening. Like Wile E. Coyote, we—and many of our contemporaries—feel at times as if we are losing our footing on a narrow ledge that collapses as soon as we look down; we stand on air, waiting to fall.2 

Our sense of dislocation has many sources, some of which may be located in the late-nineteenth-century development of History as an academic discipline, first in Europe then in the United States, and History’s association with the nation state. As Elaine Frantz suggested in conceiving her essay in this volume, History—more than we sometimes acknowledge—emerged as a house critic of liberal nationalism, a critic that scolded but ultimately sought to improve the liberal national project. This is true even as many academic historians do not define themselves as liberals or nationalists but are conditioned by the structures in which they work and by the debates they wish to influence. A good deal of US history has been structured around calling out the nation for failing to live up to its promises, sometimes in harsh language, but in ways that may be fairly read as efforts to shore up that liberal nationalist project from within, to hold it to its purported best values, even as the scholars who conduct the work also see themselves as advancing non-liberal, non-nationalist interpretations.3 Historians of the Civil War Era often write about the United States’ greatest crisis and greatest moral failings, so we may be more implicated than most in the question of the nation itself. Scholars in our field have wrestled against national frameworks over the last three decades and captured the many extranational forces that shape the world. But still our scholarship, even very critical scholarship, often carries the seeds of liberal nationalist premises within its biting critiques.

Whatever our own political outlooks, historians have often seen fit to participate in public discussions that connect the nation’s past to its future. We have done this by insisting that facts, not myths, should guide discussions of history and the lessons we take from it, with the shared understanding that we revise our understandings of the past as present-day issues prompt us to ask new questions and unearth new evidence. Historians have put those principles into action by helping write curricula and participating in public history projects that aim to bring updated understandings of the past to a broader audience. We write op-eds, lobby Congress, participate in popular pressure campaigns, critique and assist National Parks and museums, offer expert testimony and file amicus briefs in federal court cases, and point out the failure of the country to live up to its ideals. This is honorable work, and it has played a role in helping shape meaningful social reform over the last seventy years, buttressing campaigns against segregation and Jim Crow, protecting voting rights, pointing to the deep historical roots of reproductive rights, and illuminating the many reasons for the country’s deep inequalities.

Today, we wonder if our familiar tools are rooted in a set of aspirations and practices that we collectively assumed were enduring but now face existential threat. The principles that ground our field—the value of research and expert interpretation, the importance of open-minded inquiry and revision—are under wholesale attack as the Trump administration seeks to undermine and discredit not just historians’ scholarship but our ways of understanding what it means to study the past and why it is important that we do so.

Values that have grounded our work and that of many historians – that historical scholarship can help forge a path to justice, that experts can play important roles in society, that institutions of higher education should serve as incubators of new knowledge, and that people of divergent political views can agree on the importance of sustaining a culture of American inclusiveness – now seem part of a Cold War system that outlasted the Berlin Wall but appears to be disintegrating beneath our feet, along with the universities that the Cold War sustained and expanded. We may be critics of the US policies associated with the Cold War, but most of us are also products of its assumptions and expectations, and employees of systems devised and expanded in its heyday. This is true not only for people who were adults in the 1960s and 1970s but for academics of our generation—teenagers when the Berlin Wall fell—and even scholars too young to remember the Cold War. Its legacy lived on especially in the great public universities, in humanities forums that brought history to public audiences, in grant and fellowship programs that supported our work and exposed us to global audiences, in efforts to build more inclusive stories of America, and in many other forms. Of course many nonacademics’ paeans to historians’ expertise were, like hypocrisy, the tribute that virtue paid to vice, observed in form but not in function. But that expertise was nevertheless reaffirmed as a virtue. Many conservative politicians nodded to the importance of diversity, even as they may have critiqued specific programs that would actually create inclusion. But now, as one kind of consensus crumbles, none of us know which institutions might crumble with it, which stumble on in reduced form, which survive intact but somehow strengthened in a new form—or which new institutions will arise. That uncertainty, we believe, is some of what underlies the confusion of the moment. Even if we can reach existing handholds, we do not know which of them will support us and which will dissolve in our grasp.

Scholars in our area have turned to many intellectual traditions for inspiration and guidance. The field of Civil War Era history has been fed repeatedly, if unevenly, by Black Studies approaches that did not always take the survival of the United States as a positive thing and did not always foresee an arc toward justice. The boundary between Civil War Era liberal nationalism and Black Studies critique has never been sharp, and it is possible to find echoes of one in the work of the other, as fear about the future of the United States blends with hope that underscoring its continuing failures will help bring about radical change. Last spring, Tera Hunter pointed us to Jarvis R. Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, which emphasizes how Black teachers worked through Black-controlled institutions to create, propagate, and instill a vision of the world that they knew would not be supported by white-controlled institutions. Here are two alternatives in a time of institutional collapse.4 First, Givens’s work reminds us—as do several of the essays that follow—of the importance of teaching as an act of hope in the future, of transmitting values of inquiry and truth-seeking that run contrary to propaganda. Second, it reminds us of the importance of sustaining institutions that stand independent from the government, especially as the administration’s attacks on public and private institutions of higher education reveal how dependent our employers are on a government that can turn off the spigot. Rather than mourning the institutions that fall, we might build new ones we actually control and steer them toward our own visions of what is just and true. But if so, what kinds of institutions? And how would we build them? And what would sustain them?

The essays suggest that one answer lies in looking to the local. Scholars in these pages describe careful, crucial work with area sites and organizations that are doing good history. Providing support, information, and encouragement (and sometimes elbow grease) is central to our conception of good history, and we take heart in these projects, in the endurance of local desires for accurate portrayals of the past, and in the creativity such projects showcase. Undoubtedly, a crucial aspect of our work needs to be on the local level. But as national and institutional structures fracture, will that be enough? And how will local institutions sustain themselves if public and private grants shrink or disappear entirely?

If those are daunting questions, so, too, are the questions that arise from a determination to work within existing, potentially crumbling institutions. Historians have often aimed to inspire hope and also to scold, but both registers rest on the assumption that what we say will have purchase with government actors, politicians, or the broader public. It is unclear whether that assumption is warranted at present. At the same time, part of our work now may be articulating the values of liberal democracy itself—not just invoking those values as interlocutor. It is clear that many Americans have little understanding of why those values matter and are unpersuaded by calls to live up to them.

We have not given up on History. Far from it. Our decision to publish this issue does not stem from a lack of faith in the importance of academic scholarship. We remain as committed as ever to the practices of peer-reviewed scholarship that shape journal publication, and we do not take lightly the decision to pause in that work, even for one issue. Our job as editors recently included a new initiative, cosponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, in which we solicited draft articles from younger scholars and enlisted senior scholars to facilitate online workshops of those articles. We do this work with pleasure and excitement. At its best, the process of revision and improvement that emerges from peer review represents the noblest aspect of our profession, our shared commitment to the social production of truth, our willingness to take time to help others advance that truth a little farther and make it a little more clear. To be sure, for the JCWE this has always also meant an engagement with public memory as well, an enterprise that is fitting for all scholars but especially for those of us who work on a period whose memory and memorialization remains highly fraught and closely connected to current events. The journal has never buried its head in the sand but has always worked with people promoting good history, particularly good histories of people whose stories were traditionally neglected or relegated to the margins, of historical actors of color and stories of emancipation.

We are excited that our next issue includes a slew of deeply researched, expertly peer-reviewed articles that seek to connect nineteenth-century Brazil with the Civil War Era in the United States. Issues later in the year will bring additional excellent, densely researched peer-reviewed scholarship. We continue to believe in the value and necessity of our collective work. But in keeping with that work, we offer the reflections of some of our most-respected colleagues to help us think forward into what may well be a new political and cultural moment, to apply our expertise and energy in ways that may be newly efficacious, and to try to use the confusions of the present to imagine and bring into being a better future for History and for all of us.

We hope the essays in this issue inspire you to consider how you might answer the questions we posed, to clarify your own views, and perhaps to decide on some actions. If so, write us. We hope to find ways to publish responses either online or in print in the future.

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

A Tentative Start: Animal Rights in Florida During Reconstruction

A Tentative Start: Animal Rights in Florida During Reconstruction

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Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Florida wrote a new state constitution and held elections to seat a legislature. Tasked with handling the issues that arose in postbellum Florida society, the legislators interestingly took time to enact a law that addressed an unusual topic – animal protection. Influenced by anti-cruelty laws in other states, Florida passed an 1866 law that established legal penalties for the abuse of animals. Although the anti-cruelty movement was encouraged by the Civil War’s success in ending slavery, in Florida it was operating in an environment that was generally hostile to reform efforts, especially those interfering with attempts to control freedmen. While an imperfect, tentative step, the law’s passage would set the stage for the further advancement of Florida animal rights that took place in later.

 

Cattle Drive at Bartow, 1890, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

 

Although scholars have made extensive studies on the origins of the anti-cruelty movement in the nineteenth century, few have analyzed the important connection between the Reconstruction of the South and the evolution of the region’s animal protection laws.[1] None of those that did, however, gave particular emphasis to the changes in Florida animal protection law after the Civil War.  Similarly, Florida historians have also largely ignored this topic. This short article attempts to address that omission and recover the important connection between Reconstruction and the origin for the modern animal rights movement.

At the start of the nineteenth century, animals had essentially no statutory protection from mistreatment in any state in the country. Legally, domestic animals were considered the same as any other type of property. This began to change, especially with the rise of the social reform movements of the early nineteenth century. Advocacy against animal cruelty became more prominent and was tied to other causes such as campaigns for better care of children, the incarcerated and the insane, and the abolition of slavery, as these issues had the common thread of dealing with vulnerable parts of society that needed more protection, and shared the goal of moving America toward an ideal “reign of a Christian-inspired kindness toward man and beast alike.” [2]


The New York law was followed by similarly-worded laws  in other states, primarily in the antebellum North. Some of the laws were more conservatively-worded and protected animals only if they were the property of another [3]; others, like Vermont’s 1854 law, forbid anyone to “cruelly beat or torture any horse or ox, or other animal, whether belonging to himself or not,” expanding both the types of creatures involved as well as eliminating the ownership limitation, a significant change making the scope no longer one purely of property right infringement but rather of cruelty in and of itself to any animal.[4]

Of the twenty states that had enacted animal protection laws by 1865, only six were states that allowed slavery, reflecting the South’s more agricultural and conservative bent. Texas, for example, passed an 1856 law that largely followed the Vermont 1854 model; on the other hand, South Carolina declined to pass any anti-cruelty laws and instead relied on existing laws that protected property from damage by others.[6] When Florida became part of the United States in 1821, its laws as both a territory and a state made little to no mention of animal welfare.

After the war, this silence on animal cruelty began to change in Florida. As part of a larger endeavor to update Florida statutory law after the war – except where it conflicted with efforts to control the formerly enslaved, state legislators emulated legal changes on animal protection in other states.  On December 21, 1865,  Representative Anderson J. Peeler introduced a bill in the Florida House of Representatives entitled “An act prescribing additional penalties for the commission of offences against the State and for other purposes.”[7] Dealing with a variety of issues, the proposed legislation contained the following language concerning the treatment of animals, clearly influenced by the similar laws enacted earlier in other states:

That if any person shall willfully and maliciously kill by poison or otherwise any horse,
mare, gelding, filly, foal, mule, ass, or any other beast or animal belonging to another, or
cut off the ear or tail, put out the eye, or otherwise dismember, disfigure or wound any
beast or animal belonging to another, or maliciously administer poison to any such animal,
or offer or expose to such animal any poisonous substance with intent that the same be taken,
he or she shall be deemed to be guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction shall be punished
by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or be imprisoned not exceeding six months, or
be put in the pillory for one hour and be whipped not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, at the
discretion of the jury.[8]

The bill passed the House of Representatives on January 4, 1866, with a vote of 43 to 2.[9] While Peeler could be construed as embracing a liberalization of Florida law on animal cruelty, he was not a reformer in other areas, as shown by fact the same bill also introduced a harsh code for postwar treatment of the newly freed.

Florida’s governor David Shelby Walker, 1865-1868, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

 

After passing the House, the bill went to the Florida Senate for consideration. While deliberating over the measure on January 8, Senator William Henry Rosseau proposed that dogs be excepted from the list of protected animals; his motion did not garner any support.[10] The measure passed the Senate on the same day by a 17 to 5 margin.[11] It was then sent to newly-elected Governor David S. Walker who signed it into law on January 15, 1866.

The strong margins in both houses reflected the increasing progress the anti-cruelty movement had made during the conflict. Aided in part by vivid photographs of slaughtered horses and mules on Civil War battlefields, the war helped bring animal suffering to a national audience. It also showed the impact of the war in that merely appealing to public sentiment was not enough – governmental action was sometimes needed to advance reform. Unfortunately, passage of the 1866 Florida bill also reflected that while some social reforms received added support, others did not, especially by the conservative Democrats who supported the same bill’s inclusion of severe treatment for freedmen.  This was typical of the handling of most social reform movements in Florida and other former slaveholding states during Reconstruction – issues like child labor and convict leasing involved practices that were often utilized as instruments of racial control and did not gain traction to the same degree as anti-cruelty measures; for the same reason, the temperance movement had longstanding success in Florida, with alcohol use by the enslaved tightly controlled for decades. [12]

During the New South era, the movement for the humane treatment of animals advanced as the state increased investment in railroads and telegraph lines which stitched the state more closely with Northern money and Northern values. These investments also facilitated new residents arriving from the North who were generally more receptive to animal protection. Additionally, animal protection was particularly advanced by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in New York by Henry Bergh in 1866 to aggressively promote animal suffering prevention to a national audience. By the 1880s, Floridians had begun organizing local cruelty prevention societies, including ones in Pensacola and Tallahassee.[13]

With this change in attitude toward animal suffering, Florida law further advanced on May 30, 1889, when the state approved a new law that completely removed the property aspect of affected animals. Entitled “An Act For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” the new law forbid mistreatment of domestic animals, whether through active or passive cruelty.[14] Incorporating wording from the Twenty-Eight Hour Law, an 1873 federal bill that set rules for the transport of livestock, the Florida 1889 law extended protection to animals purely to avoid suffering by them.

 

Early Florida animal rights protection laws were passed at the capitol building in Tallahassee. Florida’s Capitol before Addition of Dome–Tallahassee Florida, 1870, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

 

Viewed from the present, Florida’s action on animal rights during the early part of Reconstruction appears only a tentative step. Even if a modest measure, the 1866 law paved the way for more substantive change in 1889. Prompted by the social movements of the time and accelerated by the Civil War, it was the start of what would later be a stronger acknowledgment of what nineteenth century social reformers believed – that the humane treatment of animals was a measure of the moral health of society. Like other states in the South during that time, however, the progress in Florida on that issue was not equally shared with the other aspects of reform, especially those involving race. Despite these limitations, the 1866 law was a significant milestone on the road to the proper treatment of animals, a road on which we still have a long way to travel.

 

[1] Numerous historians have examined the rise of animal protection in the nineteenth century. Claire Priest of Yale Law School traced the development of nineteenth century caselaw and statutes and showed how American society came to a “new sensibility of preventing animal suffering and punishing cruel conduct” in “Enforcing Sympathy: Animal Cruelty Doctrine after the Civil War,” Law & Social Inquiry. 2019;44(1):136-169.  Matthew Quallen examined the connection between the efforts against slavery and the campaign for animal protection in his Georgetown University dissertation Making Animals, Making Slaves: Animalization and Slavery in the Antebellum United States, 2016, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1040660?show=full.  For other relevant studies, see Earl J. Hess, ed. Animal Histories of the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022); Janet M. Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Ernest Freeberg, A Traitor to his Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement, (New York: Basic Books, 2020); and Susan J. Pearson. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

[2] Susan J. Pearson, “‘The Rights of the Defenseless:’ Animals, Children, and Sentimental Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD. Diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2004, 202.

[3] New York Revised Statutes 1829: Title 6: Section 26.

[4] 1854 Vermont Acts & Resolves 51.1.

[5] Priest, “Enforcing Sympathy,” 146.

[6] 6th Leg., Ch. IV, Art. 713-714, 1856 Gen. Texas Laws, 140.

[7] A Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Florida at its Fourteenth Session (Tallahassee: Office of the Floridian, 1865) 62.

[8] Ibid., 27.

[9] Ibid., 168.

[10] Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Florida (Tallahassee: Floridian & Journal) 160.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ann-Marie Szymanski, “Beyond Parochialism: Southern Progressivism, Prohibition, and State-Building.” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 1 (2003): 108.

[13] Pensacola News, March 20, 1889; Weekly Floridian, July 2, 1889.

[14] The Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the Legislature of Florida at its Second Regular Session under the Constitution of A.D. 1885 (Tallahassee: N.M. Bowen, Printer, 1889) 157-158.

 

Karl Miller

Karl Miller has history degrees from the University of Florida (B.A.) and Florida Atlantic University (M.A.). An independent scholar, he has published in several historical periodicals, including Florida Historical Quarterly, Earth Sciences History, Southern Studies and others.

Henry ‘Box’ Brown: Tobacco Worker, Stage Magician, Tourist Attraction

Henry ‘Box’ Brown: Tobacco Worker, Stage Magician, Tourist Attraction

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Henry ‘Box’ Brown had a variety of identities in his life-tobacco factory worker, escaped slave, abolitionist, lecturer, and touring panoramist and entertainer on the English stage. In recent years, a variety of artists, performers, and writers have carried on his legacy via the performing arts. However, one aspect of his career is better documented and easier for public historians to trace. Remembered in the United States for his 1849 escape from slavery by having himself mailed from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his newest identity might be as a tourist attraction and symbol of enslaved resistance and black empowerment. Today there is a statue near Richmond’s James River waterfront in his memory alongside other historical waysides and markers, as well as historical tours and a smartphone application that include the statue and other sites associated with his 1849 escape along their routes.[1]

Brown’s transformation into a modern tourist attraction documents the important role and resilience of black resistance in Richmond’s shifting commemorative landscape.[2] In the 21st century, Richmond has distanced itself from a Lost Cause interpretation of its history to include other eras of its past as well as the voices of those long forgotten. Tourists and visitors in the Richmond, Virginia area can now experience Brown’s journey to freedom and hear his story for themselves, simultaneously placing Brown and his narrative of enslaved resistance within the realms of entertainment and public history education. Drawing on my own experience as a tour guide and public historian in Richmond, as well as using my original tour material and the guests’ responses to it along with a digital tour via the CLIO smartphone application, and the secondary works and guidebooks of other local history guides, I argue that the story of Henry ‘Box’ Brown and his escape continues to resonate with the public in the twenty-first century.

The legacy of ‘Box’ Brown and his struggle for freedom is inextricably linked to Richmond’s landscape. Along Richmond’s historic riverfront Canal Walk, near the former location of William Barret’s tobacco factory sits a monument that resembles Brown’s wooden crate. Built in 2001, the statue is accompanied by a nearby marker with interpretive text, telling the story of Brown’s escape including several passages from his 1849 slave narrative. It is the same dimensions that Brown gave in his memoir for the crate that carried him to freedom, ‘three feet tall by two feet wide and two and a half feet deep.’ Inside the metal statue is a life-sized outline of the six-foot-tall Brown sitting in a a fetal position during his journey. [3]

 

The life-sized, box-shaped monument dedicated to Henry “Box” Brown, located along the Canal Walk at ‘Box’ Brown Plaza, downtown Richmond, Virginia. Photo by author.

 

 

The inscription on the box reads “My friends… managed to break open the box , and then came my resurrection from the grave of slavery… I rose a free man.” Photos by author.

 

 

Visitors to the monument are frequently amazed and horrified by the stark image of the statue and Brown’s unique method of escape. Local tour guides include it as a stop on tours of the area. On my tours, I emphasize the drama by pointing that Brown lost his family and became an abolitionist after his escape. Guests often chuckle when I inform them that Brown later became a performer and stage magician in London, England who incorporated boxes as part of his act.[4] Many guests empathize with Brown. I am often asked whether Brown reunited with his family; I respond that unfortunately he did not, however he did remarry while living in London.

A tourism-oriented local history guidebook entitled A People’s Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia by Melissa Ooten Jason Sawyer discusses Brown’s escape and his commemorative memorial alongside other historical and contemporary examples of social justice and resistance movements. Born enslaved in either 1815 or 1816 in Louisa County, Virginia, Henry Brown was one of eight children owned John Barret at his plantation The Hermitage. When he was about fifteen years old, in 1830, Barret’s son William inherited Brown and sent him to work in a tobacco factory he owned in downtown Richmond.[5]

After witnessing the sale of his pregnant wife Nancy and three children, Brown decided to escape from slavery. In 1849, Brown and his landlord enlisted the help of local shoemaker Samuel Smith to mail Brown to an abolitionist meeting house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On March 23rd, 1849, Brown climbed inside a wooden crate marked ‘this side up with care’ and was carried to the offices of the Adams Express Company in downtown Richmond, where he was mailed to Philadelphia.[6] After a grueling twenty-seven-hour journey by rail and water requiring several stops along the way, Brown reached his destination the following day. When four abolitionists received the crate and pried it open, he greeted them with a “how-do-you-do, gentlemen?” before singing a psalm in celebration of his successful escape to freedom. The astonished abolitionists then dubbed him “Box” Brown.[7]

 

With the open door and only an outline of a man in a crouched position inside. Photo by author.

 

Brown soon became a prominent antislavery speaker and performance artist. In 1849 he published an autobiographical slave narrative entitled The Narrative of Henry ‘Box’ Brown and made a panorama showing scenes of slavery and his escape, which he exhibited throughout New England. When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Brown moved to London, England where he continued to exhibit his panorama and performed as a hypnotist, actor, and magician until his death in Toronto, Canada in 1897.

Long forgotten in the United States, Brown’s story found a new audience in the post-Civil Rights era. Artists working in a variety of mediums including sculpture, opera, poetry, and other visual arts began to tell the story of his escape in their work. Sculptor Glenn Ligon’s 1994 installation To Disembark includes marked wooden crates alongside images of Brown and other abolitionists. Similar to the memorial statue installed along Richmond’s Canal Walk, To Disembark forces the reader to consider the symbolic meaning of the crate that carried Brown as an imaginative metaphor for the larger relationship between slavery, freedom, and black resistance. In The Many Resurrections of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Martha J. Cutter provides an assessment of modern poetry and performance art devoted to Brown alongside an analytical historical biography. She argues that in later life Brown became an entertainer in order to subvert the mechanics of slavery and freedom. Further, Cutter argues that performance artists can transcend the limitations of museums to encourage audiences to actively engage with the history at hand. No longer trapped inside his box, Brown is free to entertain and inspire thought by incorporating certain elements of his life and story while remaining unknowable to readers. Having once been enslaved, the real Brown is therefore elusive and free.[8]

In the modern era, public historians using the tourism-oriented mobile phone application Clio have created a tour of sites related to Brown’s journey. A user-driven digital history project, Clio encourages uses to directly engage with history by creating and publishing their own tours. A tour entitled “Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s Journey to Freedom” takes users from a historical marker near Brown’s birthplace in Louisa County to various points along the mail route between Richmond and Philadelphia.

 

Henry ‘Box Brown’s Journey to Freedom digital tour. Screenshot by author

 

Stops include the former location of William Barrett’s tobacco factory in downtown Richmond, the Washington City Wharf, and the abolitionist Quaker meeting house in Philadelphia. Clio users can promote tours on social media, and an activity counter tracks the number of views the webpage for each stop receives.

According to the activity counter provided for every stop on the Clio tour, thousands of visitors have viewed the pages for the two most popular stops on the tour. Other stops along the route each received several hundred visitors. Many stops are in heavily trafficked urban areas near other historical markers and monuments.[9] The popularity of the various historic tours including those given by guides, through local guidebooks and on Clio, alongside resurgent historiographical scholarship and new, innovative artworks and other installations shows that memory of Henry ‘Box’ Brown is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

 

[1] Martha J. Cutter. The Many Resurrections of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023; Jeffrey Ruggles. The Unboxing of Henry Brown, Library of Virginia, 2003, 5.

[2] Melissa Ooten and Jason Sawyer, A People’s Guide to Richmond and Central Virginia, University of California Press, 2023, 26; Kristin T. Thrower-Stowe, A History Lover’s Guide to Richmond, The History Press, 2021, 72.

[3] Henry Brown and Charles Stearns, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown Who Escaped from Slavery, Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself. With Remarks Upon the Remedy for Slavery. Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849. 60; Robbins, Hollis, “Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics,” American Studies, 50, ½ (2009).

[4] The Era, promotional advertisement, Sunday, June 28th, 1857. https://www.newspapers.com/image/387015435/?match=1.; Glasgow Daily Mail, promotional advertisement, Saturday, September 4th, 1852. https:www/newspapers.com/image/805862901/?match=3; Lake’s Falmouth Packet and Cornwall Advertiser, promotional advertisement, Saturday, January 17th, 1863. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1276608469/?match=1

[5] Ruggles, Unboxing, 5.

[6] Cutter, Resurrections, 231; Martha J. Cutter, “Will the Real Henry ‘Box’ Brown Please Stand Up?” commonplace.online, Issue 16.1, Fall 2015, accessed November 15th, 2025, https://commonplace.online/article/will-the-real-henry-box-brown-please-stand-up/; Ruggles, Unboxing, 32; Robbins, Deliverance, 15; Thrower-Stowe, Guide, 72; Mills, Legends, 72; Ooten and Sawyer, People’s, 26.

[7] Mills, Lore, 72;

[8] Cutter, Resurrections, 225.

[9] Meredith Rogan and Casey Wellman, “Henry ‘Box’ Brown Plaza,” CLIO: Your Guide to History, April 9th, 2024, accessed December 9th, 2025, https://theclio.com/entry/43870; Haley Cannada and Meredith Rogan, “William Still: Pennsylvania Historical Marker (Also Briefly the Home of Henry ‘Box’ Brown)” CLIO: Your Guide to History, April 9th, 2024, accessed December 9th, 2025. https://www.theclio.com/entry/143438

R. Elliott Martin

R. Elliott Martin is an early career public historian and tour guide in Richmond, Virginia. Originally from Southwest Virginia, he received his Master of Arts in History and Graduate Certificate in Public History from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2025. A Civil War historian by training, when he is not exploring historic sites and museums, you can find him playing bass guitar in bands as well as publishing and performing original poetry in breweries and cafes around Richmond.

Muster Call for Graduate Student Submissions

Muster Call for Graduate Student Submissions

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The Society of Civil War Historians’ Graduate Student Connection Committee, together with Muster, the blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era, is calling for submissions from graduate students.

Muster’s goal is to foster connections between The Journal of the Civil War Era and its readers, building relationships and offering stimulating conversations about American history in the period between 1820 and 1880. It provides an online space to explore new ideas, discuss relevant issues in the field, and connect with other scholars and enthusiasts. Muster seeks to publish work on slavery and emancipation, the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, including works that focus on gender, politics, social history, and military history.

Submissions to Muster should be roughly 1500 words, on a subject of your choosing. For example, your piece could focus on your research, sources you have uncovered, or any other ideas you have related to the history of the US Civil War era.

Any questions should be referred to Dr. Robert D. Bland, editor of Muster, at rbland4@utk.edu.

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Remembering Reconstruction’s Lost Generation

Remembering Reconstruction’s Lost Generation

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Benjamin Franklin Randolph was part of a generation that changed the nation’s political history. Born free and raised in Ohio, he attended Oberlin College and after graduating he served as a principal of a Black public school in Buffalo New York. Like many Black northerners of his generation, he saw the Civil War as a pivotal moment in the race’s larger destiny. In December 1863, Randolph volunteered to serve in the Civil War and joined the 26th United States Colored Infantry Regiment.[1]

 

“The Late Rev. B.F. Randolph of South Carolina,” Harper’s Weekly, October 25, 1868

 

After the war, Randolph remained in South Carolina and joined the most important Black political project of his generation. During Reconstruction, he participated in an 1865 Colored Convention in Charleston, joined the Freedmen’s Bureau, and established weekly newspaper for freedmen. “I am desirous of obtaining a position among the freedmen where my qualifications and experience will admit of the most usefulness,” Randolph plead. “I don’t ask position or money. But I ask a place where I can be most useful to my race.”[2]

Motivated by the promise of the new political epoch, he labored tirelessly alongside a larger cohort of freeborn and recently freed Black Americans to make a new world in the postbellum South. In 1867, he was elected as a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868 and played a major role in crafting radically democratic provisions in the document that introduced the first system of public schools in the state’s history and granted the franchise to landless men.[3]

Randolph not only served as a beacon for South Carolina’s movement toward abolition democracy but also became a national leader in the Republican Party. He attended the 1868 Republican National Convention that elected Ulysses S. Grant and was nominated by his peers to be one of the nation’s first African American Presidential Electors. He used his growing celebrity to campaign for Republican candidates across the state of South Carolina, shaping the political project that he saw as central to the larger march toward black America’s new destiny.  On October 15, Randolph was in the midst of that very work, campaigning for the Party of Lincoln and Grant in the state’s increasingly violent upcountry region. The next day, while changing trains to head to another campaign event, he was gunned down in broad daylight by three unmasked white assailants.[4]

My book Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation explores the world that Randolph and his political cohort built, as well as the later efforts to remember the legacy of their political world in the face of the larger cultural attack upon their political project by proponents of the Lost Cause who were actively rewriting Reconstruction’s history to reflect their own white supremacist vision of the nation. This “Reconstruction generation,” composed of the Black teachers, missionaries, journalists, and politicians travelled to the South to aid in the destruction of slavery and established the region’s first Republican Party. [5]

The production of this countermemory was inextricably connected to the violence and tragedy that befell the Reconstruction generation’s political leaders. Just as white mobs dealt death with caustic abandon and the white southern press offered various levels of euphemistic cover to justify the campaigns of extralegal violence, the Reconstruction generation sought to fully memorialize both major and minor political figures from their era. When Ida B. Welles reflected before an 1889 conference of Black journalists that “no requiem, save the night wind, has been sung over the dead bodies,” she not only captured the depth and texture of the violence that shaped postbellum South but also crystallized the funereal cadence of an emergent countermemory of the larger era.[6]

Benjamin Randolph’s funeral serves as one of the first moments where this eulogistic memory was used to provide a forceful defense of Reconstruction’s larger importance in the Black world. In the immediate aftermath of Benjamin Randolph’s assassination, prominent members of the Lowcountry’s political bloc began to deploy Randolph’s death to reconstitute the bonds of the state’s Republican coalition. “He seemed to fully comprehend the fact that our State had been very much broken, the fragments scattered, and to gather them up, and properly unite them, master workmen were required,” lamented northern-born Jonathan Wright. “In every sense of the word, he was a master workman.”[7]

Wright hoped that the Randolph’s legacy would “be felt by generations yet unborn,” a sentiment echoed by many of his Republican colleagues in the legislature. Stephen Swails, a free-born Black New Yorker who had met Randolph in 1864 when both men were stationed in the Lowcountry with different USCT regiments, commented “Senator Randolph is dead, but he still lives in the memories of the Senators who are now here, and his memory will be ever cherished in the hearts of the people of this State.” Another northern-born Republican politician remarked “it is our duty to erect a monument to his memory, not only to mark his resting place, but to commemorate the cause for which he lived and for which he so nobly laid down his life.” Free-born Charlestonian Charles D. Hayne called for a memoriam page in the upcoming issue of the Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina.[8]

 

Memorial insert for Benjamin Randolph in December issue of the Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of South Carolina

 

More than a local or regional story, the effort to produce a Black countermemory of Reconstruction was part of a larger project of Black sectional reconciliation. A wave of new Black newspapers purporting to be truly national in scope and scale, covered the events in the South with close scrutiny. Black journalists forged relationships with Reconstruction-era politicians and traded information to provide the paper’s growing readership with up-to-date political news. Leading editors opined on the actions and events in the South with concern—and at times consternation. In response, a new wave of southern-based Black newspapers emerged in the century’s penultimate decade to confront both the false myths propagated by the white southern press and challenge the whiggish narratives put forth by northern Black leaders about the perceived failures of Black southerners in acquiescing to the New South political order and abandoning Reconstruction.[9]

A.M.E. Metropolitan Church, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1900

 

Nowhere did this new national Black public sphere collide with the production of Black history more than in the Bethel Literary and Historical Society. Founded in 1881, the Bethel Literary was hosted in an auxiliary hall of Washington’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. At once a lyceum and cultural hub of Black Washington’s nascent talented tenth, the Bethel Literary was one of the central nodes in the larger national Black public sphere that connected Black communities across the nascent national network of Black newspapers. “Every Washington correspondent of the Colored press, and there were more then than now, gave conspicuous notice to this institution, and the editors of their home papers often continued the discussion,” observed the Bethel Literary Society’s historian.[10]

The Bethel Literary not only held regular discussions about the history of Reconstruction but also played a major role in marking the passage of the Reconstruction generation. In 1895, the Metropolitan A.M.E. church hosted the funeral of Frederick Douglass. Before the century’s end, John Mercer Langston and Blanche K. Bruce would also receive the equivalent of state funerals at this citadel of Reconstruction-era memory. Following Langston’s funeral, the Washington Bee’s famed editor W. Calvin Chase reflected on the larger epoch-defining meaning of the triumvirate’s passing. “Their wisdom, patriotism, statesmanship, their race love may not be fully appreciated by the present generation,” remarked Chase. “But the men of the future will look in amazement and wonder that these men could have been so brave, so true, so constant amid such adverse conditions.”[11]

In this way, the Reconstruction’s generation’s countermemory was especially sensitive to the moments when major figures passed away. By the twentieth century’s second decade, the rapidly dwindling number of remaining Reconstruction-era leaders was a point of genuine concern for the stewards of Black history in the national press. In 1917, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national magazine, The Crisis, published a piece reflecting on the passing of the previous political generation. Of the three figures profiled in the photograph, only P.B.S. Pinchback was still alive. Three years later during an effort to capture oral histories and collect archival material from the Reconstruction era, one interviewee lamented “I have long felt that the last opportunity to collect data concerning this interesting period is while this present generation lives. The next generation will have no interest in it.”[12]

 

“Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, August 1917

 

In many ways, Chisholm captured her era’s deep cultural turmoil over the legacy of Reconstruction. Woodrow Wilson had recently ousted a generation of Black officeholders from the federal government, the Republican Party had been made essentially moribund in the South by formal disfranchisement measures, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation exploded as a sensation in American popular culture, reflecting a broader embrace of Confederate memory in the national consciousness.[13]

And yet, Black countermemory persisted during the nation’s Jim Crow years. In Columbia, South Carolina, Randolph Cemetery, which had been established in 1872 to commemorate the legacy of Benjamin Randolph would serve as the final resting place for many of the era’s Black political leaders.

 

“Randolph Cemetery,” National Park Service, June 23, 2022

 

Far from forgetting the story, local communities and national institutions sought to preserve the story of Reconstruction, building the intellectual and cultural scaffolding for a new historical vision that would not only challenge the myth of the Lost Cause but also provide a blueprint for the Second Reconstruction—the American Civil Rights Movement. Blood soaked and hard won, the story the Reconstruction generation and their descendants crafted offers a deep and textured portrait of what it means to think deeply about the past. It is a story worth remembering.

 

[1] “Rikers Island-Trained USCT Regiments’ Chaplains,” New York Correction History Society, www.Correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw-usct/2rikersusctchaplains.html

[2] “Rikers Island-Trained USCT Regiments’ Chaplains.”

[3] Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, Negro in South Carolina, 383; Thomas C. Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 131-34; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), chap. 7.

[4] Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 54-57, 60.

[5] Robert D. Bland, Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026). On the use of generation in African American history, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Sarah L.H. Gronningsater, Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Andrew B. Lewis, Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights  Generation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009).

[6] Irvine Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, MA: Wiley and Company, 1891), 186. On the broader cultural history of funereal thinking in Black life, see LeRhonda Manigault Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); David Roediger, “And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700-1865,” The Massachusetts Review 22 (Spring 1981): 163-183; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

[7] Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 14.

[8] Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina, 15-16, 44-45.

[9] On the postbellum Black press and public sphere, see Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107-46; Penn, Afro-American Press; Benjamin Fagan, Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers: Black Organizing and the Press for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026); Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Henry Lewis Suggs, ed. The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

[10] John W. Cromwell, History of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association, 15-17, 21-22

[11] “Hon. B.K. Bruce Dead,” Colored American (Washington, DC), March 19, 1898; “Death of the Triumvirate,” Washington Bee, March 26, 1898.

[12] “Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, August 1917, 181; Helen James Chisolm to Monroe Work, February 14, 1920, in Scurlock et al., “Additional Information and Correction,” Journal of Negro History 5 (April 1920): 248.

[13] Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). On the production of Lost Cause memory during the early twentieth century, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 394-97; Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003); Paul McEwan, The Birth of a Nation (British Film Institute, 2015).

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Death by Lightning – An Ode to Service

Death by Lightning – An Ode to Service

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In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1881, newly elected President James Garfield emphasized the importance of ongoing Reconstruction, asserting that the “elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787.”[1] Indeed, President Garfield had fought to ensure the death of slavery during the Civil War, and publicly considered himself an ally of Black Americans since the antebellum period, but the struggle for equality had only just begun. Garfield carried that sentiment to the White House upon his election, where his tragically abbreviated time as commander in chief has left much to the imagination of millions of Americans.

With the recent success of the hit Netflix miniseries, Death by Lightning, and America’s 250th anniversary on the horizon, Garfield’s observations of race and progress in the wake of America’s centennial resonate as much today as they did then. With this in mind, viewers share a consideration, and perhaps a longing, for what could have been. After all, the president which historian Todd Arrington dubbed the last “Lincoln Republican” had a grand appeal as perhaps the last shred of executive hope to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction in the 19th century.[2]

Throughout the four-part production, James Garfield’s story arc, from the reluctant consideration of running for office to the memorialization of the slain president, is viewed through a thoughtful, yet entertaining, lens defined by a blend of quiet introspection and external relationships; all while exploring a parallel timeline with that of his would-be assassin, Charles Guiteau. While depictions of Garfield’s wartime experiences are limited to brief and scattered flashbacks, the thread of military service is woven throughout much of the show. Discussion of service, however, is largely held between himself and fellow veterans. In one instance, Garfield extends a kind gesture of hospitality toward a veteran amputee of the 7th Michigan Infantry, offering his hotel bed to the ailing man while he prepared for the coming Republican National Convention in Chicago; of which the deliberation ultimately led to his nomination to party candidate for the 1880 presidential election.

Even so, there are a few moments throughout the limited series which elevate the portrayal of Garfield’s bond with those who helped put him in office while illustrating the deep connection he maintained with the veteran community. Several scenes, in particular, feature African American members of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) during Garfield’s presidential campaign and subsequent victory. Their support for the Republican Party was found through service, comradeship, and the faith that Garfield had their best interests in mind.

The second episode of the series features Garfield, played by Michael Shannon, receiving countless guests at his Mentor, Ohio home, aligning with the reality of his 1880 “Front Porch Campaign” and a newfound face-to-face relationship between the candidate and prospective voters. Conducted from a place of transparency and principle, Garfield meant to put his convictions on full display for all who traveled to his section of the Buckeye State. Among his guests were several Black army veterans, whose place in the foreground of Garfield’s story emphasizes the importance of this particular relationship not only on the campaign trail, but among those who have a shared experience.

In an earnest tone, one veteran addresses Garfield with concern regarding Black men’s suffrage, which had largely been contested and circumvented since the passing of the 15th Amendment a decade earlier. “Now we soldiers did not put our lives on the line for a republic that will deny us freedom at the polls,” he asserts, “furthermore, that will impugn us with literacy tests the proctors themselves can’t pass.” In response, Garfield acknowledges the light weight of words when not backed by action, swearing “this will be part of my fight, on my honor.” “We fought together…for freedom, not poll tests,” he continues, saying “I’d rather be with you and lose than against you and win.”[3]

In truth, this cinematic interaction between Garfield and Black Grand Army veterans is a vignette of one particular moment likely shared when an estimated 250 men visited the future president in October 1880. Here, Garfield offered some words of affirmation, “whatever can justly or fairly be done to assure to you an equality of opportunity, it will always be my pleasure to do.”[4] In a similar spirit to that of the exchange portrayed on film, Garfield addressed the Fisk University Jubilee Singers during their visit to his farm that same month, declaring “you are fighting for light and for the freedom it brings; and in that contest I would rather be with you and defeated, than against you and victorious.”[5]

One particularly striking scene in which Black GAR veterans are featured exhibits a large group of men gathered among a large crowd in the wake of the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Their appearance reflects the state of an integrated Grand Army of the Republic in 1880; a period before the material uniformity of the latter 19th century, but still emblematic of their political ascension at the dawn of Garfield’s administration. More so, the still somewhat youthful air of the Black GAR veterans, with their assorted civilian clothing and Grand Army ribbons, accurately reflects how they would have appeared just fifteen years following the end of the Civil War.

In foregrounding representatives of these often all too neglected stories, the producers of Death by Lightning have done a great service. The decision to explore and highlight Black veterans of the GAR, in particular, has allowed for a transcendent moment – perhaps the first time these men have been represented on film. In the pursuit of sharing the past, Death by Lightning has made history.

[1] “President Garfield’s Inaugural Address,” The Rutland Daily Herald, March 5, 1881, 1.

[2] Benjamin T. Arrington, The Last Lincoln Republican: The Presidential Election of 1880, (The University Press of Kansas, 2020), 172.

[3] Mike Makowsky, creator, Death by Lightning, Netflix, 2025.

[4] C.S. Carpenter, James A. Garfield: His Speeches at Home, 1880, (New York: E.M. Johnson Press, 1880), 35.

[5] Carpenter, James A. Garfield: His Speeches at Home, 37.

Richard Condon

Richard P. Condon is a historian of military and cultural history during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras and has worked for the National Park Service for seven years. He received his B.A. in Public History from Shepherd University and is currently pursuing an M.A. in American History through Gettysburg College.

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