Category: Muster

Stand Firm Like Fort Pickens: Confederate Florida and the Long Struggle over Unionist Memory

Stand Firm Like Fort Pickens: Confederate Florida and the Long Struggle over Unionist Memory

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Despite being in Confederate Florida, United States Fort Pickens repelled enemy attempts to gain control of the Union holdout. Situated on the bay of Pensacola, Fort Pickens remained in U.S. control for the duration of the American Civil War. However, while the war ended in 1865, Fort Pickens, and other national parks and sites across the United States, now face a new threat—President Donald Trump’s attack on the National Park System. The current administration is determined to whitewash history by removing any materials, signs, and artifacts that share historical experiences of violence, exploitation, and discrimination throughout space and time in the United States, especially as experienced by non-white Americans including, but not limited to, histories of slavery and other hard history topics that critically examine the American past. In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” which set forth his mission to “to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” The order continued, “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”[1] While there are numerous sites across the country that have been targeted, this post will highlight the rich history of one target—the Gulf Islands National Seashore, particularly Fort Pickens. This post will amplify the voices that are trying to be silenced and underline the experiences of Black historical actors that are trying to be erased to serve as a counterweight to the destructive and troubling actions taken by the Trump Administration. Fort Pickens is a powerful example of Civil War era history as the site illustrates U.S. efforts to repel Confederate advancements, the agency of enslaved men and women who leveraged the American military presence to forge their freedom, and the military service of Black men in the United States Army.

 

John Walls, 25th United States Colored Troops. Compiled by William Augustus Prickett, Prickett Family Album of Officers of the 25th United States Colored Troops, 1864, National Museum of African American History.

 

Before Fort Sumter fell to the Confederacy in April 1861, uncertainty clouded the future of Fort Pickens. In January 1861, Florida passed an ordinance of secession severing their state from the United States. “We, the People of the State of Florida, in Convention assembled, do solemnly ordain, publish and declare, that the State of Florida hereby withdraws herself from the Confederacy of States existing under the name of the United States of America, and from the existing government of said States,” the ordinance announced. By March 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, had seceded from the United States. As internal strife ripped the nation apart, the Confederate government sought to control United States forts and military installations and resources in states that seceded and military conflict seemed imminent. The press speculated about what would happen to the fort. The National Republican reported, “The probable effect at the South of the attack on Fort Pickens, which is threatened by the traitors of the Gulf States, is, of course, a point of great interest.” “We have no better right to defend the city of Washington than we have to defend Pensacola; and it would be as base to abandon the latter as it would be to abandon the former.” The paper continued, “Indeed to abandon Fort Pickens would be to abandon both; because Washington could not be held by a Government capable of such an act.”[2] In addition to Fort Pickens, the largest of four forts, Fort Barrancas, Fort McRee, and Fort Advanced Redoubt collectively protected the bay of Pensacola, Florida, and its important navy yard. While Confederates occupied Forts Barrancas and McRee for a period of time, Forts Pickens and Advanced Redoubt remained in U.S. control for the duration of the war. All four forts are located in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, a vital part of the larger U.S. National Park System’s ability to tell an accurate story of the Civil War that fully incorporates African American history.

Since Fort Pickens’ construction, it has been a symbol of the larger promise of Black freedom in the United States.[3] Enslaved people not only built the citadel, but viewed the fort as a beacon for wartime freedom and would later flee to the stronghold solidifying its place on the Underground Railroad. Despite the danger that awaited enslaved people including, but not limited to, Confederate snipers, dogs, snakes, sharks, currents, and enslavers, freedom seekers such as Peter Dyson and his wife, Henrietta, risked it all by rowing to Fort Pickens in a skiff. Once they reached the fort, both provided vital information to the U.S. army about the Battle of Santa Rosa in October 1861, and then were sent on a steamer north to permanent freedom.[4] Black Americans continued to travel to Pensacola Bay and changed the course of American history in the process. Although his last name is unknown, Henry fled slavery in Alabama in December 1863, and headed to Fort Barrancas with an iron bar around his foot. During that same month, eight enslaved men attracted the attention of the United States Navy’s blockading ships as they rowed a boat in between Horn and Ship Islands seeking freedom. In 1864, eight year-old Armstrong Purdee traveled from Marianna, Florida, alone to Pensacola Bay where he forged his freedom along with 600 other freedom seekers.[5]

 

James Tall, 25th United States Colored Troops. Compiled by William Augustus Prickett, Prickett Family Album of Officers of the 25th United States Colored Troops, 1864, National Museum of African American History.

 

As the war progressed and the Emancipation Proclamation allowed for Black men to the volunteer in the United States Army, Fort Pickens and the surrounding forts benefitted significantly from the service and protection of Black soldiers. For example, in June 1864, the District of West Florida was manned by Black soldiers in the following regiments: the 25th U.S. Colored Infantry, 82nd U.S. Colored Infantry, and 86th U.S. Colored Infantry. Company G of the 25th served in the first brigade (Barrancas).[6] The strength and preparedness of these Black regiments did not go unnoticed by other soldiers. Francis H. Semple served in Co. E of the 19th Iowa Infantry and was stationed at Barrancas District, West Florida, and his observations were published in a newspaper back home in Iowa. Semple described Fort Pickens as mounting “about 60 guns, and of larger caliber, and are manned by colored troops who are efficient in drill, and are ready at all times to demonstrate this fact to any force of the enemy, who may attempt to enter the Bay.” Additionally, Semple noted, “Fort Barrancas has 30 guns and is also manned by colored troops.”[7] One unnamed Black soldier made his way to Fort Pickens after escaping his enslaver, now Confederate soldier from South Carolina, after he was injured during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. The formerly enslaved man joined the 25th United States Colored Regiment at Fort Pickens where he was also reunited with his brother who also fled bondage in South Carolina.[8]

 

Sgt. Hiriam White, 25th United States Colored Troops. Compiled by William Augustus Prickett, Prickett Family Album of Officers of the 25th United States Colored Troops, 1864, National Museum of African American History

 

In addition to their physical strength, Black soldiers at Fort Pickens did not shy away from expressing their collective political voice to protest the violence executed against Black U.S. soldiers on battlefields in other areas in the U.S. In the wake of the massacre of Black U.S. soldiers and their white officers who surrendered to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, a newspaper in South Carolina titled the Camden Weekly Confederate reported, “A meeting has been held by the 2d United States (colored) Heavy Artillery at Fort Pickens, denouncing Forrest. One resolution adopts for an inscription on their flag, ‘Victory or Death,’ as no quarter will be shown them.”[9] In addition to the violence of warfare, Black soldiers faced violent racism by Confederate soldiers and their generals who did not treat them as prisoners of war. In addition to the threat of violence, disease jeopardized the health of Black soldiers. Some soldiers took their last breath at Fort Pickens. Forty-four year-old Private Thomas Jefferson of Company H of the 25th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry died on July 23, 1864, of an unnamed disease after enlisting in February 1864 in Trenton, New Jersey.[10] Samuel Johnson, also forty-four years old, of Company E of the 25th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry enlisted January 22, 1864, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died at Fort Pickens on September 27, 1864, from chronic diarrhea. In the spring and summer of 1865, scurvy claimed the lives of 150 men.[11]

While slavery, warfare, racism, and disease challenged Black Americans, they persevered and actively shaped the Civil War era. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of declaring American independence this July, we are also reminded that American freedom remains incomplete. A powerful way to commemorate this milestone, and seriously consider the harmful effects of the Trump Administration’s actions, is to deepen our understanding of, and commitment to, freedom as a process. A process that requires active participation to expand freedom’s accessibility and protect freedom from challenges inside and outside the United States. Highlighting the severe challenges that American freedom has faced, and continues to face, throughout space and time, and the resistance and survival that contested these challenges, prepares us to better realize its promise moving forward. Sharing the vital contributions of Black soldiers to the United States’ war effort at Fort Pickens and the surrounding forts is one step toward this goal. During the Civil War, approximately 180,000 Black soldiers defended American freedom even when they did not benefit from the full benefits of freedom themselves. Similar to how Fort Pickens stood firm against the Confederacy with the help of Black soldiers during the war years, we need to stand firm against new threats against the fort and the legacy of its Black historical actors that seek to control its past and future in 2026.

 

[1] Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” March 27, 2025, The White House, accessed March 15, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/. For responses to the effects of this executive order see Kyle Groetzinger, Lam Ho, and Linda Coutant, “Erasing History, Silencing Science,” National Parks Conservation Association’s Blog, October 1, 2025. https://www.npca.org/articles/10871-erasing-history-silencing-science; Lisa Friedman, “What Displays Get Scrapped at America’s Parks? It Looks Like Anyone’s Guess.,” The New York Times, March 16, 2026.

[2] “The Threatened Attack Upon Fort Pickens.,” National Republican (Washington, D.C.), March 25, 1861.

[3] Thomas Hulse, “Military Slave Rentals, the Construction of Army Fortifications, and the Navy Yard in Pensacola, Florida, 1824-1863.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2010): 497–539. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29765123.

[4] Matthew J. Clavin, “Interracialism and Revolution on the Southern Frontier: Pensacola in the Civil War.” The Journal of Southern History 80, no. 4 (2014): 795, 796-797. See Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

[5] “Stormy Night Escape,” signage at Fort Pickens, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Gulf Breeze, Florida; Casimer Rosiecki, National Park Service: Gulf Islands National Seashore, FL, MS, “Fort Pickens Recognized as Underground Railroad Site,” news release, October 21, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/guis/learn/news/fort-pickens-recognized-as-underground-railroad-site.htm. When you click the aforementioned link, you will see an announcement that reads, “You are viewing ARCHIVED content published online before January 20, 2025. Please note that this content is NOT UPDATED, and links may not work. For current information, visit https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/news/index.htm;” National Park Service, “Peter, Property, and Posterity,” November 14, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/articles/peter-dyson.htm; Dakota Parks, “Uncovering the History of Underground Railroad Sites in Northwest Florida,” Downtown Crowd, June 2021, https://ballingerpublishing.com/uncovering-the-history-of-underground-railroad-sites-in-northwest-florida/; American Battlefield Trust, “Fort Barrancas, Gulf Islands National Seashore,” https://www.battlefields.org/visit/heritage-sites/fort-barrancas-gulf-islands-national-seashore; “Down the Island to Freedom,” signage at Gulf Islands National Seashore, Gulf Breeze, Florida; “Bravery at Barrancas,” signage at Gulf Islands National Seashore, Gulf Breeze, Florida; Patrick Young, “Taking Down the Civil War Historical Signage at Gulf Islands National Seashore?,” The Reconstruction Era (blog), March 3, 2026, https://thereconstructionera.com/taking-down-the-civil-war-historical-signage-at-gulf-islands-national-seashore/.

[6] “District of West Florida,” Official Records, Ser. 1, Vol. 34, Pt. 4, 618. Published 1891; Official Records, Ser. 1, Vol. 35, Pt. 2, 1891, 160; Ronald S. Coddington, “An Album of Faces of the 25th USCT,” Military Images, vol. 32, no. 1, (Winter 2014), 16-18.

[7] The Daily Gate City (Keokuk, Iowa), October 28, 1864.

[8] “For whom will the Negroes Fight,” Kansas Weekly Tribune (Lawrence, Kansas), March 9, 1865.

[9] The Camden Weekly Confederate (Camden, South Carolina), May 4, 1864; George Washington Williams and John David Smith, “The Fort Pillow Massacre (1864),” In A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 182-195.

[10] Thomas Jefferson, US, Civil War Service Records (CMSR) – Union – Colored Troops 20th-25th Infantry, 1861-1865, Record Group 94, Roll 0089, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

[11] Samuel Johnson,  US, Civil War Service Records (CMSR) – Union – Colored Troops 20th-25th Infantry, 1861-1865, Record Group 94, Roll 0089, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; William Augustus Prickitt, Prickitt family album of officers of the 25th United States Colored Troops, United States, 1864. composed by Elizabeth Gilman Warner Prickitt, Photograph, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/item/2010645101/.
JCWE Conversation with Ian Delahanty

JCWE Conversation with Ian Delahanty

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In today’s Muster, JCWE associate editor Megan Bever interviews Ian Delahanty. Delahanty is an associate professor of history at Springfield College and the author of Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865 (Fordham University Press, 2024).

Previewing the June 2026–Special Issue: “Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Brazil”

Previewing the June 2026–Special Issue: “Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Brazil”

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This special issue examines how Brazilian historians have engaged with legal sources to reconstruct the experiences of Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in nineteenth-century Brazil. Since the 1980s, historians of Brazil have been asking new questions about the workings of the law, achieving nuanced understandings of enslavement, freedom, and the changing meanings of race over time. That scholarship led to Brazilian contributions to the “social history of the law,” in which courts were important arenas of contestation and power struggle. Grounded in close readings of the archival sources, the Brazilian contribution to nineteenth-century historiography has extended far beyond mere understanding of the Brazilian context or comparison with U.S. scholarship. Instead, these works have critically challenged traditional concepts of race, highlighting actions by enslaved and freed Afro-Brazilians that questioned established racial hierarchies and expanded notions of rights and social expectations.

 

This special issue is currently available to read for FREE on Project Muse

Robert Bland

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

Birthright Citizenship and Allegiance

Birthright Citizenship and Allegiance

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Birthright citizenship is controlled by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” Everyone agrees that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes children born to Native Americans who had not renounced tribal loyalty or received citizenship through treaties and the common law exceptions of children born to foreign diplomats or invading armies. Donald Trump’s Executive Order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” controversially adds two more exceptions: children born to mothers not legally in the country and children born to mothers only temporarily present with, in both cases, fathers who are neither US citizens nor permanent residents.[1]

Civil-War-era scholars Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur weighed in on the controversy with an amicus brief supporting the challenge to the order in Trump v. Barbara.[2] Their brief compellingly documents antebellum Black Americans’ expansive sense of citizenship, especially when Dred Scott’s denied them US citizenship. But because Trump agrees that the Citizenship Clause was primarily intended to invalidate that aspect of Dred Scott, the amicus brief’s most important contribution for the controversy is to reiterate Gerald Epps’ argument that the Citizenship Clause allows no more exceptions.[3]

Nonetheless, Trump’s Solicitor General suggests another way that attention to the Civil War era undermines Trump’s allegedly originalist interpretation when he makes allegiance the decisive issue by claiming that framers of the Fourteenth Amendment linked the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to a display of allegiance, which the two excluded classes lack because they cannot establish legal domicile in the country. The Citizenship Clause, he writes, “extends citizenship only to those who are ‘completely subject’ to the United States’ ‘political jurisdiction’—in other words, to people who owe ‘direct and immediate allegiance’ to the Nation and may claim its protection.”[4]

As Trump’s opponents note, that argument is problematic because the Fourteenth Amendment mentions neither “allegiance” nor “domicile.” But history raises a more fundamental problem: the framers of the amendment were concerned about allegiance, but not that of immigrants or those temporarily in the country. When the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed in 1866 the framers had to deal with Confederates who had renounced their allegiance to the nation. Indeed, in early 1866 President Andrew Johnson had not yet declared the Confederates’ insurrection over, and Section 3 of the amendment imposed disabilities on Confederates who explicitly broke their oaths to the Constitution. Yet the language of the Citizenship Clause did not deny citizenship to children born to Confederates as they waged war. Even Confederates who renounced allegiance were subject to US jurisdiction.

If the framers had wanted to incorporate “allegiance” into the Fourteenth Amendment, they had a model. Francis Lieber, a German immigrant who authored Abraham Lincoln’s war code, proposed an amendment declaring that every citizen “owes plenary allegiance to the government of the United States, and is entitled to, and shall receive, its full protection at home and abroad.”[5] Lieber’s target was Confederates who chose allegiance to their states over the nation. Rather than draw on the language of allegiance, however, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the power of states by prohibiting them from denying the privileges and immunities of US citizenship or from denying any persons (not citizens) the due process of law or the equal protection of the laws within their jurisdiction. The citizenship clause was added to the amendment after those provisions were approved. Its use of “jurisdiction” was designed to be consistent with the Equal Protection clause, which covers “any person”—legal or not, temporary or not–within a state’s “jurisdiction.” Indeed, if, as Trump’s Solicitor General claims, “jurisdiction” meant “political jurisdiction,” the Equal Protection clause would support Confederates’ argument that people within a state’s jurisdiction owe it political allegiance.

The concern about Confederates’ allegiance when the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed points to an irony thirty-two years later when the Supreme Court finally gave the Citizenship Clause its definitive interpretation. The case was US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which involved the son of Chinese parents born in San Francisco in 1873. In 1895 Wong Kim Ark temporarily left the country to visit China, but on his return the government refused him entry, claiming that he was not a citizen because, like his parents, he was a subject of China. A six-justice majority ruled in Wong Kim Ark’s favor. Both sides in today’s controversy agree that Wong Kim Ark was rightly decided, but Trump claims that Wong Kim Ark was granted citizenship only because his parents were legally domiciled in the country, whereas Trump’s opponents argue that the question of domicile is irrelevant. What neither side notes is that Solicitor General Holmes Conrad, an ex-Confederate, argued the government’s case against Wong Kim Ark.[6]

Holmes Conrad, Confederate Officer, ca. 1864, Virginia Military Institute Archives Photograph Collection

 

Conrad’s brief described Reconstruction as “that unhappy period of rabid rage and malevolent zeal when corrupt ignorance and debauched patriotism held high carnival in the halls of Congress.” After questioning the Fourteenth Amendment because southern states were forced to ratify it to regain representation in Congress, he argued that, because citizens are the people who compose a community, race and culture prohibited Chinese from displaying allegiance to the US. Wong Kim Ark’s lawyers, one of whom was the son of William Evarts who unsuccessfully prosecuted treason against Jefferson Davis, countered by quoting the racial egalitarian Charles Sumner. “Here is the great charter of every human being, drawing vital breath upon this soil, whatever may be his condition and whoever may be his parents. He may be poor, weak, humble or black—he may be Caucasian, Jewish, Indian, or Ethiopian race—he may be of French, German, English, or Irish extraction; but before the Constitution all of those distinctions disappear. . . He is one of the children of the State, which like an impartial parent, regards all of its offspring with equal care.”[7] Likewise, the framers of the citizenship clause refused to punish the children of traitors, like Conrad, for the sins of their fathers. To preserve the meaning and value of American citizenship it is important to follow the framers’ lead.

[1] Executive Order 14610 “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fed. Reg. 8449 (January 20, 2025).

[2] “Brief of Historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents,” Trump v. Barbara, ET AL.

[3] Garrett Epps, “The Citizenship Clause: A Legislative History,” American University Law Review 60 (2010): 331-

[4] “Brief for the Petitioners,” Trump v. Barbara, ET.AL., 2. The Solicitor General’s citations are from the Native American case of Elk v, Wilkins 112 US 94 (1884), 102.

[5] Francis Lieber, Amendments of the Constitution, Submitted to the Consideration of the American People (New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1865).

[6] The government’s case was also argued by San Francisco law professor William Collins, who claimed that Chinese could not be domiciled in the US because they “are utterly unfit, wholly incompetent to exercise the important privileges of an American citizen.”  In his own attempt to protect the meaning and value of American citizenship, Collins referred to the Roman emperor Caracalla who for purposes of taxation extended Roman citizenship to all free people in the empire, thus extinguishing the “pride of country and the observance of national honor which characterized the Roman citizen.” After denouncing the inherent immorality of Chinese, Collins was later convicted of bigamy and perjury. George D. Collins, “Are Persons Born within the United States Ipso Facto Citizens Thereof?” American Law Review 29 (1884): 831-38.

[7] Lucy E. Salyer, “Wong Kim Ark: The Contest over Birthright Citizenship,” Immigration Stories, eds. David A. Martin and Peter Schuck (New York: Foundation Press, 2005), 70-71, 73.

Brook Thomas

Brook Thomas is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of English and the Center for Law, Society, and Culture, UC Irvine. His specialty is 19th-century law and literature in the US. He has published six single-authored books and a case book on Plessy v. Ferguson. The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White (John Hopkins University Press, 2017) won the Hugh Holman Prize.

“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.

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