Category: Muster

Finding Rabbit: What One Freedman’s Story Reveals About Scholarly Editing

Finding Rabbit: What One Freedman’s Story Reveals About Scholarly Editing

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Archives and special collections have long connected users with the raw materials of our history. Researchers visiting our reading rooms encounter the past one page, photograph, and reel at a time. With collections so important to our cultural heritage, history, and future, we’ve been asking: How can university libraries expand access to these materials, help users understand them, and prepare the next generation of scholars and professionals?

When the University of South Dakota Libraries hired me, part of that vision was to deepen the library’s commitment to archival access while also creating meaningful, hands-on professional development opportunities for humanities students. One powerful way archives and libraries are doing both is through digital scholarly editing.

But what exactly are scholarly editions, and how do they differ from collections in digital libraries?

What Is a Digital Scholarly Edition?

A digital scholarly edition is more than a digital archive or scanned collection. Like digital libraries, scholarly editions provide users with access to large amounts of digitized archival materials. What distinguishes them is editorial interpretation.

Researching the historical context, editors transcribe documents, identify and explain references, and create tools that help users discover and understand relationships across the collection. Through this work, scholarly editions transform historical documents from isolated records into a connected, searchable, and contextualized collection.

 

The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) scholarly edition — a partnership between Susannah J. Ural at Mississippi State University and myself in the USD University Libraries — offers an excellent example of how this works in practice. CWRGM publishes annotated, searchable editions of correspondence sent to Mississippi’s governors during one of the most transformative periods in American history.

At CWRGM, users can engage with the archive in multiple ways. They can keyword search transcriptions and metadata to quickly sift through thousands of records. At the same time, they can browse documents using the archivist’s folder arrangement, which recreates aspects of the traditional reading room experience.

Blog posts and podcasts introduce users to collection highlights and editorial discoveries, while the educator resources support meaningful use of archival materials in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate classrooms. The project’s open-access structured data supports digital humanities research by making relationships across people, events, and ideas visible at scale.

While these features help users explore and engage with the collection in meaningful ways, focused at the document level, CWRGM’s editors and researchers use annotated subject tags to provide readers with historical interpretation and connection.

 

Subject tags connect users to the people, places, events, and ideas that appear within documents. These annotations allow readers to move beyond simply reading a document toward understanding its broader historical context.

 

At CWRGM, these subject tags appear directly within document transcriptions. When users hover over the hyperlinked tagged terms, they encounter editorial interpretation adding context, explaining who individuals were, what events are referenced, or why a concept matters. 

And with one click, users are taken down the rabbit hole.

Looking for Rabbit

In the spring of 1868, Rabbit received a letter from Mary Shaifer, the young white woman he had grown up alongside and whose family had once enslaved him. Just three years after the end of slavery, he read her letter while inside the “Walls” — the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Jackson where growing numbers of Black men like Rabbit found themselves incarcerated by a state increasingly profiting from their labor through convict leasing.

By signing the letter with her full name, Mary Shaifer provided CWRGM researchers with enough evidence to identify her in the archive. As a white woman in antebellum Mississippi, her family’s names appear in the 1860 U.S. Federal census, unlike the 436,631 enslaved African Americans living in the state.

With that information, her reference to “my poor blind brother” becomes Henry Frazer Shaifer, Jr. Hovering over the linked terminology, “blind,” adds additional historical context about blindness in the nineteenth century, including how it was understood and treated for interested readers. Selecting Mary’s description of Rabbit as different “from any other of your color” connects researchers with information about African American history and identity during the Civil War Era, while also discovering every document in the collection about African Americans.

But who was Rabbit?

Even though the link to Rabbit led users to a document written by Mary’s mother, Clarrissa, and another even authored by Rabbit himself, his name remained a mystery. Still, these now-connected letters uncover much about his life.

Following the subject tag for Rabbit reveals a remarkable trail of documents identifying him as a freedman incarcerated in the Mississippi State Penitentiary who sought release by appealing to his former enslavers as a person and the governor as an American citizen. These letters provide insights into the complex nature and network of antebellum and postwar interracial relationships and how swiftly freed people adopted citizenship.

Encountering Rabbit

But if you’re a person who is reading an Archives & Special Collections blog because you like to cross your t’s and dot your i’s and sometimes your lowercase j’s, and you’re worried you won’t learn Rabbit’s name, never fear.

On December 8, 1867, a heartfelt collection of letters accompanied a petition to the Circuit Court of Claiborne County seeking clemency in Rabbit’s case. Among the petition is a letter to his former enslaver pleading for information and assistance, signed “truly “Rabbitt” Harrison Turner.”

Through this editorial work, CWRGM users can uncover Turner’s quest for freedom after emancipation. They will learn that Turner was born enslaved in Mississippi around 1846, he obtained his freedom with abolition in 1865 but became incarcerated, and that after being released, he worked as a laborer in Claiborne County, married Jane Ross, and had two children, Isaiah and Emily. He died in January 1929.

Lindsey R. Peterson

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

How Many Died in the Colfax Massacre?

How Many Died in the Colfax Massacre?

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 On April 13, 1873 approximately 140 heavily armed white men, led by ex-Confederate officers, attacked a roughly equal number of Black men occupying the courthouse in Colfax, seat of Grant Parish, Louisiana. In the wake of the state’s disputed 1872 elections, which led to rival sets of officeholders claiming election across Louisiana, the Black men had assembled to defend a slate of Republican Grant Parish officials. The ensuing slaughter of Black men – mostly killed trying to flee or after being taken captive – became known as the Colfax Massacre. Federal authorities arrested nine massacre perpetrators in late 1873, and secured convictions against three of them in 1874. On March 27, 1876, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the verdicts in U.S. v. Cruikshank, a precedent that undermined federal efforts to prosecute violations of African Americans’ civil and voting rights. Further Supreme Court backsliding on civil rights soon followed.[1]

“The Louisiana Murders–Gathering the Dead and Wounded,” Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873

 

Despite the notoriety of the massacre and its consequences, a definitive estimate for the  Black death toll on April 13, 1873 remains elusive. Over the years, claimed death tolls have ranged from as low as 50 to as high as 400. Numerous recent accounts offer a figure of 150, between the extremes, but still in triple figures. For instance, Elizabeth Varon’s 2023 James Longstreet biography mentions a death toll of “at least 150” Black men; and the Equal Justice Initiative’s website claims “nearly 150 Black people were killed.”[2]  Meanwhile, in June 2026 Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson’s concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara cited the toll of 280 mentioned by the Black Louisiana legislator John G. Lewis in Eric Foner’s field-defining 1988 Reconstruction study.[3]

Our efforts to provide a more accurate estimate started with co-author Charles Lane’s work consulting on the text for the Colfax Massacre Memorial unveiled in 2023, when he sought to identify as many of the victims as possible, so they could be memorialized by name. Here we extend this research, re-examining demographic data and the voluminous documentary record, in an effort to provide not only a total count of the Black dead but to name many of them as individuals.[4]  The result is a considerably lower estimated toll than often appears in the literature: the most plausible range is between 62 and 80.[5] It bears emphasis that our goal is not to minimize what happened at Colfax on April 13, 1873. We write, rather, in the belief that discussions of the massacre can, and should, rest on the strongest possible factual basis.

* * *

The highest claimed death tolls – those ranging up to several hundred Black men – can be discounted quickly.  The number of Black men defending Colfax courthouse on April 13 was far lower than the approximately 432 Black males of fighting age – 18 to 45 years old – residing in Grant Parish in 1870. Witness testimonies at trials of the perpetrators suggested an upper limit of 150 Black men defending the courthouse – at least 50 of whom, we found, survived the onslaught and testified in at least one of the two trials in 1874.[6] As we demonstrate below, the most well-informed near-contemporary estimates varied in some important respects, but none supported a triple-digit body count.

The first official report came from two U.S. deputy marshals, Theodore W. De Klyne and William Wright, who arrived near Colfax on April 15, 1873, sent by Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg in their dual capacity as state militia officers. En route, the two men heard of a fight in the town in which 150 to 200 Black men had been killed. Upon arrival, they saw bodies scattered around the smoldering courthouse, but in numbers well below the rumored total. As their report, published April 18 in the New Orleans Republican noted, DeKlyne and Wright supervised the burial of 54 Black men in a mass grave; family and friends of five others removed their corpses for burial elsewhere. In addition to those 59 bodies, the two officers left a sixtieth one – a nearly incinerated skeleton – where it lay under the ruined courthouse. People in Colfax identified 52 of the dead by name, along with 12 wounded — two of whom were so badly shot, the report said, that they “will certainly die.” We confirmed the deaths of these men from other sources. Thus, the DeKlyne-Wright report implies a minimum death toll of 62.[7]

About two weeks after the DeKlyne-Wright mission to Colfax U.S. Army troops arrived to keep the peace. The company’s commanding officer, Lt. Jacob Smith, wrote to his superiors that he had scoured the area for unburied bodies and concluded that “the number killed or died from wounds of the Negroes proves to be 71,” but provided no further elaboration.[8]

In May 1873, a Secret Service detective, J. J. Hoffman, operated undercover in the area of the massacre, assigned by the Justice Department to investigate the crime. Hoffman saw the mass grave in Colfax where, he reported, “fifty-five negroes” had been buried. Four others,  he noted, were “found in the woods, mainly eaten up by buzzards, making fifty-nine negroes known to have been killed.” This report also acknowledged “conflicting” reports as to the death toll. The death toll, 59, implied by Hoffman’s report approximates that of DeKlyne and Wright, but likely errs on the low side. Hoffman either did not know, or did not mention, that DeKlyne and Wright had allowed the burial of five bodies separate from the mass grave.[9]

In his closing argument at the first of the two trials of the Colfax Massacre defendants in early 1874, U.S. Attorney James R. Beckwith referred to “64 or 65 human beings so inhumanly butchered.” In his instructions to the jury, Judge William B. Woods stated facts of the case that both prosecution and defense accepted – specifically, that, “[i]n addition to the fifty-nine dead bodies found” by DeKlyne and Wright, “some charred remains of dead bodies were discovered near the court-house.” In 1875, Beckwith testified under oath to a congressional committee that the dead numbered “probably about seventy, to a certainty.”[10]

On May 29, 1875, another Colfax-based U.S. Army officer, Lieutenant Edward L. Godfrey, wrote to his superiors that 144 men, Black and white, had died in all political violence in Grant Parish and neighboring Rapides Parish since 1868. Godfrey’s report listed names for most of these people, including many that DeKlyne and Wright had listed (albeit sometimes under different spellings). Of those 144 names, 80 were said to belong to Black men killed on April 13, 1873. Godfrey added that he believed “at least one hundred and five (105) colored . . . were killed in the Colfax riot, or in connection therewith.” However, he used an expansive definition of “in connection with” the massacre, adding seven individuals killed on other dates in April 1873 to his list of 80 named victims from April 13. Additionally, Godfrey’s total includes 18 “bodies buried but were not identified,” a reference that invites skepticism, given that Godfrey compiled the information second-hand over two years after the event.

Finally, Godfrey’s report mentioned that “between 15 and 20 were shot on the banks of the river and their bodies thrown in the river,” though he did not include these in his estimate of 105 dead in the massacre or “in connection” with it. DeKlyne and Wright had heard a similar story of an indeterminate number of bodies “hurled in the river.”[11] We are skeptical of this claim. First, none of the prosecution’s trial witnesses—including massacre survivors—mentioned it. Second, many of the dead were captives shot after dark on April 13, 1873 while white men were marching them in pairs in the opposite direction from the river. We therefore believe the most plausible estimate from Godfrey’s report is 80 Black men killed on April 13, 1873.[12]

Less than two months later, on July 22, 1875 Major George A. Forsyth sent a lengthy report on political violence in Louisiana to Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. This document includes more than 70 pages of lists of named individuals reportedly killed in every Louisiana parish during Reconstruction to that point. The entry for Grant Parish named 140 men, Black and white, who had been killed in the parish since 1868. It also included an entry for “eighteen unknown colored men,” purportedly killed during the massacre, likely derived from the same unnamed sources as Godfrey’s similar notation.  Forsyth’s report implies a total Grant Parish death toll of 158 Black and white men over the preceding seven years.[13]

The Forsyth list suggests that 96 named Black men were killed on April 13, 1873, but does not appear to reflect any original research. He constructed it by combining previous reports, including Godfrey’s, and it contains clear errors. For example, it lists the names of three Black Grant Parish men – Hamp Henderson, Charles Vincent, and Tom Milton – twice. In addition, it mistakenly says that the three died in April 1873; they were actually killed in late 1873 in retaliation for an alleged interracial rape. Two names Forsyth presented as victims killed on April 13, 1873 – “John A. Smith” and “D. Foster” – may be erroneous as well. They appear nowhere else in records relating to the massacre, nor in the US Census for Grant or Rapides in 1870.[14]

It is clear from the context that one of Forsyth’s main sources was a document compiled – probably in 1874 or 1875 – by William B. Phillips, then a white Grant Parish Republican. The first 58 names on Forsyth’s list were copied from the Phillips document, in the same order, but sometimes with different spellings. Phillips’ list included two white men, as well as eight Black men we confirmed as having been killed either before or after the massacre. Forsyth reported that all 48 of the remaining Black men were killed during the April 13 massacre, but the Phillips list itself does not indicate that: it provided no dates for any of the men’s deaths. Cross-referencing the names on Phillips’ list against the DeKlyne-Wright and Godfrey lists and other primary sources, we could confirm only 36 of the 48 Black men Phillips identified as killed at the Colfax Massacre. That leaves 12 names of Black men that appear only on the Phillips and Forsyth lists, for which there is no independent confirmation of them having died on April 13. Deducting those 12, as well as the “John A. Smith” and “D. Foster” names, from Forsyth’s list of 96 names of men killed on April 13, 1873 leaves 82 dead – only two more than the 80 we derived from Godfrey’s report.[15]

In short, documentary sources support a range of body counts from a low of 59, in the Hoffman report, to a high of 82, derived from the Forsyth list. However, slight anomalies in those two sources argue against using them to define the likely death toll’s upper and lower limits. We favor instead the on-scene count of 62 by DeKlyne and Wright as a minimum and Godfrey’s later list of 80 as a maximum. There is insufficient space here to unpack the evolution of claimed death toll figures in subsequent decades. In general, though, the highest numbers originated in contemporary hearsay, evolving later through the prism of white supremacist nostalgia – according to which a magnified Black death toll magnified the glory of the white paramilitary victory at an event that passed into white Southern memory not as a massacre but as a “riot.” In 1951, state and local authorities erected a historical marker at the Colfax courthouse celebrating the “riot” and its supposed death toll of “150 negroes.”[16]

Beyond a concern for accuracy, the role that 20th-century white supremacist propaganda played in shaping the massacre’s reported death toll provides another reason to get it right today. Those who cite a triple-digit estimate today are mostly relying on secondary sources; if they have any open agenda, it is, typically, and appropriately, sympathy with the victims and condemnation of the perpetrators. A higher body count highlights the gravity of the crime. Nevertheless, such numbers originated partly in the retrospective exaggerations of the massacre perpetrators and their twentieth-century apologists. In that sense, we honor the victims of the Colfax Massacre by carefully counting them, even if they were not quite as numerous as many have contended.

 

For details on how we arrived at our conclusions, please see the spreadsheet (Appendix 2). It shows that we were able to verify 35 names with high confidence (green rows on the spreadsheet), 14 with moderate confidence (yellow), and 18 with low confidence (blue). This produces a total of 67 names, well within our overall estimate of 62 to 80 dead.

Appendix 1 (List of Names)

Colfax Appendix 1 (List of Names)

Appendix 2 (Color Coded Spreadsheet of Names)*

Colfax Appendix 2

 

*The rows colored in red indicate names that were mentioned somewhere in the record but that we definitely eliminated as possible victims of the Massacre.

[1] For key recent works on the Colfax Massacre, see especially Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt and Company, 2008); LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2008); Joel M. Sipress, “From the Barrel of a Gun: The Politics of Murder in Grant Parish,” Louisiana History 42, no. 3 (2001): 303–21. On memories of the massacre, see also David T. Ballantyne, “Remembering the Colfax Massacre: Race, Sex, and the Meanings of Reconstruction Violence,” Journal of Southern History 87, no. 3 (2021): 427-66. For a recent account of the Supreme Court’s backsliding on civil rights in the 1870s and 1880s, see Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press, 2021), chap. 3.

[2] Elizabeth R. Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon and Schuster, 2023), 194; Equal Justice Initiative, “Louisiana Massacre,”   https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-louisiana-massacre/ (accessed Dec. 22, 2025).  Scholarly accounts since the 1980s have often provided a wider range of possible victim counts.  Eric Foner’s hugely influential Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (Harper and Row, 1988) notes that approximately 50 African Americans were murdered after surrendering, before quoting John G. Lewis’s 1880 claim that “the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes” had been the result of Black self-defense at Colfax. Foner, Reconstruction, 437.  For accounts that provide estimates between approximately 70 and 300, see Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin Press, 2017), 759; Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2006), 22.  For accounts that give a range of approximately 70 to 165, see Keith, Colfax Massacre, 109; Carin Peller-Semmens, Unreconstructed: Slavery and Emancipation on Louisiana’s Red River (Louisiana State University Press, 2025), 196.  As slight outliers, George Rable writes that “perhaps as many as one hundred died,” and Joseph Dawson contends that “probably more than one hundred were killed and wounded.” See Rable, But There Was No Peace, 128; Joseph Dawson, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 144. James Hogue uses Manie White Johnson’s 1929 work (published in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly in 1930) to provide a 64 to 400 Black deaths estimate, but notes the figure “is probably closer to the lower end of the range of estimates.”  See James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 111-12 (quotation on 112).

[3] Ketanji Brown Jackson, Concurrent Opinion, Trump v. Barbara, 609 U. S. ___ (2026), 6 fn 15, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf.

[4] In reassessing the body count at Colfax, this piece complements a rich field of research focussed on quantifying and publicizing the extent of historical instances of racial violence, attempts that began during Reconstruction with the efforts of freedpeople, Freedmen’s Bureau agents and others to produce reliable evidence of anti-Black violence.  See, for instance, Monica M. Martinez, “Lives, Not Metadata: Recovery Methods for Digital Histories of Racial Violence,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 694 (2021): 67–75. For research pitched at a wider public audience, see especially Equal Justice Initiative, “Documenting Reconstruction Violence: Known and Unknown Horrors,” Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876 (Equal Justice Initiative, 2020), http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep30690.6.  On attempts to detail racial violence in the early years of Reconstruction, see, for instance, Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York University Press, 2012); William A. Blair, The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight for Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

[5] These figures apply only to the date of the massacre itself; they do not include the wave of white supremacist violence in central Louisiana that both preceded the massacre and continued thereafter, for which the toll is well above 100.

[6] For figures used to arrive at the 432 estimate, see A Compendium of the Ninth Census (Government Printing Office, 1870), 52-3, 569. For information about Black witnesses at the trials see Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 154-185, and also coverage of the trials in the New Orleans Republican, New Orleans Times-Picayune, New Orleans Bulletin, and L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans.

[7] “From Grant Parish; Official Report of Staff Officers; On the Ground Tuesday Morning; Horrible Massacre; Burial of Sixty Bodies; An Interview With Nash; The Killed and Wounded,” New Orleans Republican, April 18, 1873, p. 1.

[8] Jacob H. Smith to Acting Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Gulf, April 29, 1873, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series), 1871-80 (National Archives Microfilm Publications, M666, Roll 93), file 4882 (1872), Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780-1917, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

[9] Hiram C. Whitley to George W. Williams, June 1, 1873 (letter containing report of Secret Service detective J. J. Hoffman), Letters Received by the Department of Justice from the Treasury Department, 1871-1884, Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Archives, College Park MD.

[10] “The Grant Parish Prisoners; Trial in the United States Circuit Court; Closing Arguments in the Case,” New Orleans Republican, March 13, 1874, p. 1; “The Grant Parish Prisoners; Trial in the United States Circuit Court; Judge Woods’ Charge – Waiting for the Verdict,” New Orleans Republican, March 14, 1874, p. 1; Louisiana Affairs: Report of the Select Committee on That Portion of the President’s Message Relating to the Condition of the South; Testimony Taken by the Committee, 43rd Cong, 2nd Sess., H. Rep. 261, Pt. 3 (Government Printing Office, 1875), 416.

[11] 44th Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 30, Use of the Army in Certain of the Southern States (Government Printing Office, 1877) [hereafter Use of the Army], 436-8 (quotations on 438, original emphasis).  Ted Tunnell made a similar claim in Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 192.

[12]See Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 105-106.

[13] Use of the Army, 456-546 (full report). 511-15 (Grant Parish report of killed and wounded, quotation on 513).

[14] Use of the Army, 511-15 (Forsyth list), 437 (Godfrey list). There are slight variations in spelling: for instance, Godfrey lists a “H. Harrison” as one of the November 1873 deaths rather than “Henderson” reported twice in Forsyth’s list and in 1873 newspaper sources about the alleged rape. The Forsyth list mentions “Tom Middleton” and “Tom Milton,” in addition to “Charles Winston” and “Charley Vincent.” The Middleton/Milton and Winston/Vincent entries are almost certainly referring to the same two persons. On the rape allegation, see also, for instance, Ballantyne, “Remembering the Colfax Massacre,” 434-6.

[15] Use of the Army, 306 (Phillips list).

[16] For contemporary non-eyewitness Black accounts, see, for example, “The War of Races: Nearly Three Hundred Negroes Burned to Death by Whites in Louisiana—A Horrible Affair,” New York Times, April 16, 1873, p. 1; Horrible Massacre in Grant Parish, Louisiana… (New Orleans, 1873), p. 14. In a study sympathetic to the white paramilitaries written more than half a century after the massacre, Manie White Johnson noted the wide range of claimed death tolls in white paramilitaries’ retrospective recollections.  See Johnson, “The Colfax Riot,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1930): 418. 418 fn 115 read: “Mr. [A. L.] Hopkins said Dr Milton Dunn… estimated that about four hundred were killed; according to Mr. Jonas Rosenthal, four hundred; Judge [R. B.] Williams, about ninety; Colfax Chronicle, ninety-five; [Robert H.] Marr, sixty-four; [George] Hoar, fifty-nine; and to the majority testifying before the Congressional Committee, about sixty or seventy. Clearly an exaggeration is the statement of Mr. Duplissey to the effect that later in the summer, Major Smith… remarked that ‘when he got there he found three hundred and seventy-two bodies that he had his soldiers put in their own trenches and cover up, and he said the negros [sic] has been hauling off bodies all the week.’”  The 1941 Federal Writers’ Project-produced Louisiana: A Guide to the State noted “about 120” Black deaths, but this figure contradicted a draft produced under the auspices of the project’s Alexandria office that referred to “about ninety-five” African American deaths. See Louisiana: A Guide to the State (Hastings House, 1941), 49, 661; “Colfax,” File 42, Drawer 7, Works Progress Administration Papers, Louisiana State Library, Baton Rouge. The public prominence given to the 150 deaths figure likely stemmed from the wording chosen for a 1951 courthouse marker commemorating the “riot.” See, for instance, Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 260.

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Ballantyne is a senior lecturer in American History at Keele University. He is the author of Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana (Louisiana State University Press, 2025), and he is the book review co-editor for American Nineteenth Century History. Charles Lane is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Free Press. He was the editor of the New Republic from 1997 to 1999 and the deputy opinion editor for The Washington Post from 2000 to 2024. He is the author of The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt, 2008).

Reasons for Hope: Kentanji Brown Jackson, Civil War Era History, and the Supreme Court’s Struggle over the Second Founding

Reasons for Hope: Kentanji Brown Jackson, Civil War Era History, and the Supreme Court’s Struggle over the Second Founding

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You didn’t expect this.  Part of a majority segment of a U.S. Supreme Court decision—that is, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence in the birthright citizenship case—builds upon and amplifies the writings of historians Eric Foner, Kate Masur, Ira Berlin, Isabel Wilkerson, Kenneth Stampp, David Blight, and Manisha Sinha.  “The architects of the Second Founding,” Jackson writes, did not think or pretend that race didn’t matter.” [1]

She deftly challenges the claims of dissenting Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who pretend that a “color-blind” Constitution provides no sanction for those who might try to uproot “racial caste.”  Following Foner, Jackson celebrates the “paradigm shift” encompassed in the Fourteenth Amendment that repudiated “the notion that there is a superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.” (She quoted the latter phrase from Justice John Marshall Harlan’s spirited dissent in the infamous Plessy case.)

 

If 2029 brings about a change in national political leadership, it may be hoped that Jackson’s concurrence points towards time when we historians may expect to see our work shaping new outlooks in the corridors of power. Jackson specifically saluted “trained historians” for helping her to see that “our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subordination.”

 

Justice Jackson’s concurrence appeared directly after Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, which offered a lengthy exegesis on the common law.  A PDF version of the concurrence is also included below.

Ketanji Brown Jackson Concurrence

[1] Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution         (Norton, 2019); Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Norton, 2021); Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New Press, 1974); Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Penguin, 2020); Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Knopf, 1965); David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2018); Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920 (Norton, 2024).

Daniel W. Crofts

Daniel W. Crofts, Professor Emeritus of History at The College of New Jersey, has written extensively about the North-South political crisis that culminated in secession and Civil War. He was awarded the University of Virginia's Bobbie and John Nau Book Prize for his 2016 volume, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (University of North Carolina Press).

The Stand Watie Monument, the Lost Cause, and Oklahoma Cherokee Memory of the Civil War

The Stand Watie Monument, the Lost Cause, and Oklahoma Cherokee Memory of the Civil War

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In 1921, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in honor of Stand Watie and the Cherokee soldiers he led, inscribed: “Only full blood indian[sic] Brig. Gen. in the Confederate army. This brave Cherokee with his heroic regiment rendered inestimable services to the Confederate cause of Ind. Terr. Born in Ga. Dec 12, 1806, died in Cher. Nat. Sept 9, 1871. A tribute to his memory by Okla. Div. United Daughters of the Confederacy. ‘Lest we forget.’”

In 2020, amidst a cascading list of monument removals around the country, the Cherokee Nation took down the Stand Watie monument. In places like my hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana, monument removals generally came with reflections on how our memory of the past no longer aligns with that of the era who erected these Lost Cause memorials, but such was not the case in Tahlequah. In explaining his decision to remove the monument, Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. noted that it was not erected by the Nation and that the Nation did not even own the land it sat on at the time of its erection. He added that “The days of Cherokees leaving it to others to tell our story are over.”[1]

Allison Herrera and Cherokee Nation, KOSU, 2020

 

Whose memory the Stand Watie monument honored is complicated, and following that thread shows how communities change their memory, so it better matches their present sense of justice. Studies of Civil War memory often focus on the Lost Cause as an example of how memory evolves to suit the needs of its people after defeat, but it is not the only such instance. Tracing Cherokee memory of the Civil War from the war’s end through the 20th century into the present offers an alternative example of a rewritten history that stems from a sense of justice rather than intent to deceive.[2]

The Oklahoma Cherokee fought on both sides of the war and fractured along existing conflict lines over assimilation. Many believed the safest way to preserve their society was to adopt parts of their colonizer’s culture, including plantation style agriculture with African slaves.[3] When war broke out amongst their white neighbors, Cherokee leaders argued over which side to support. The US government had broken many treaties and promises over the years, but to side against them and lose would surely risk annihilation. The Confederate South fought explicitly for white supremacy, but siding with the Confederacy and winning meant having better bargaining power in the future and maintaining their social and economic system that had come to rely on slavery. Cherokee leaders ultimately allied with the Confederate South, though many individuals chose to join the Union army.[4] Their memory of the war, accordingly, is different from the South’s.

Photograph of Stand Watie, c. 1865

 

Like all other forms of Civil War memory, the needs of the present drove perceptions of the past. Jeff Fortney’s 2012 article Lest We Remember explains that Civil War memory was not politically useful for Oklahoma’s Cherokee because it called attention to examples of native disunion in a time when unity was badly needed to combat forced assimilation. Fortney concludes that Cherokee memory as a whole is best defined as “self-silencing.” Forgetting the war left room for reconciliation and unity to face more important issues, like the most aggressive Reconstruction of any Civil War area in which much of Five Nations land was sold off to white settlers.[5]

The Oklahoma Cherokee’s memory of the past thus served to smooth over internal divisions to support a more unified whole. What Fortney calls self-silencing looks to me like a strategic choice better explained under Blight’s Reconciliationist framing: a deliberate decision about what not to say in public, made in the interest of social cohesion.[6] For white Americans, Reconciliationist memory agreed to honor soldiers from both sides and avoid reckoning with the legacy slavery and the struggle for racial equality. The Cherokee people of Oklahoma made an analogous bargain: as Fortney explains, “Rather than point fingers and cast condemnation against those who supported opposing sides, all of the Five Tribes united toward rebuilding homes, farms, and lives.”[7] In not bringing up past divisions in favor of focusing on the ongoing catastrophe of Reconstruction that continued in Indian Territory well into the twentieth century. Cherokee veterans and their descendants worried about the erosion of Native sovereignty and forced Americanization. [8]  Bringing up who fought for which side and what that side stood for was not politically productive to either conversation. Accordingly, Five Nations people referenced less the war’s causes or the battles and more its aftermath. Reconstruction gave the federal government an excuse to further erode the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty, literally telling it who it must count as citizens.[9] Rather than discuss the battles, these stories tend to be about the political pressure to take sides during the war and the loss of land and identity afterwards with the inundation of white settlers after the war. These are Civil War memories, shaped by the experience of a people for whom the war’s aftermath never really ended.

Both Unionist and Lost Cause memories held a place for Native stories, but as it supported GAR and UCV goals.[10] Confederate memorial groups used a mythic imagining of the “noble savage” to bolster their cause.[11] For Cherokee veterans and their descendants, this meant that they had a place within the Lost Cause, but a prescribed one that was far less flexible as a tool for social and political progress even in relation to whites.

The Stand Watie monument highlights how the UDC used Native memory to bolster the Lost Cause. The myth of the vanishing Indian works in tandem with the moonlight-and-magnolias memory of the Lost Cause as a romanticized and irretrievable past and Stand Watie’s image offered the white settlers of Indian Territory a unique local connection to the Lost Cause. The Stand Watie monument is thus a monument to the Lost Cause, but it also was, in part, a monument of Cherokee memory. A 1914 committee of three UDC women, all Cherokee, sought (and failed) to exhume Stand Watie’s body and rebury it in Indian Territory, and their division later erected the 1921 monument.[12] For Cherokee women, joining the UDC may have offered the same social and class benefits it offered to white women who sought membership, and perhaps that outweighed the cost of participating in a white supremacist organization for these individuals. Moreover, given that the Cherokee Nation intentionally made life difficult for freedmen descendants to discourage them from trying to claim membership, the white supremacy aspect may have strategic. The connection to Stand Watie would have offered these women a way to stake their claim in the UDC, and just being a member of the organization came with political access from all the events involving local and state politicians, a unique opportunity for women to engage in the political sphere.

The monument was not requested by the Cherokee Nation, but it was not wholly imposed either. Cherokee veterans typically memorialized the war with veterans from their side of the war, and even if they politely did not mention it in political debates, communities noted whether an old veteran had marched with Sherman or fought with Lee.[13] The inscription is true: Stand Watie did lead a regiment of Cherokee soldiers for the Confederacy, and in the 1920s, Cherokee descendants would not have balked at the reminder that most people fought with the South and in effect fought to preserve slavery. In that sense, the monument may not have been requested, but it did not unfairly represent Cherokee memory either. What may well have been an imposition was the choice of Watie specifically. He was a divisive figure as one of the signers of the Treaty of New Echota that led to the Trail of Tears. Watie was exiled from Cherokee lands for two years because of tensions between “Confederate Cherokee” and “Union Cherokee” before Reconciliationist memory was established.[14]

 

It was right to remove the Stand Watie monument, but it was a missed opportunity to grapple with the real, more complicated legacy of the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and the Cherokee of Oklahoma. Like the 1920s Cherokee who adopted a Reconciliationist memory to shore up cohesion against federal attacks to their national sovereignty, the people of 2020 have altered their memory of the war to better fit the current fight for racial justice.[15] They are not alone: Historian Annette Gordon-Reed recalls that as a child, she thought Native Americans and Black people surely were allies against their mutual white oppressor, but that was not always the case, and certainly not the case for the Cherokee of Oklahoma who had a direct interest in preserving slavery.[16] The assumption that there ought to have been an alliance “displays very well the contingent nature of history, and how difficult it can be, when considering the history of a given time and place, to keep in mind that our view is colored by the knowledge of how things turned out.”[17]  For freedmen, the Cherokee’s former slaves, and their descendants, that natural alliance was sorely missing.[18] Freedmen descendants only won the right to full membership in 2017.[19]

 

The Stand Watie monument is gone but its legacy has yet to be fully acknowledged. Though the debate over whose memory the monument honors is complicated, it must not be simplified for a more coinvent narrative that glosses over those most hurt by its presence.

 

[1] Chuck Hoskin, Jr., “Chief Chat: Why I removed Confederate monuments from the Cherokee Capitol Grounds.” Indian Life, July-August 2020, 8. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints.

[2] Native American memories are rarely included in works on Civil War memory for a variety of reasons beyond academic oversight. Firstly, the sheer number of different nations and tribes, each with their own unique experiences of the war, needs in each subsequent generation, and the resulting memories shaped to meet those needs make it impossible to define a single “Native” memory. Secondly, some historians chose not to focus on native memory of the war to decenter white historical events in Native histories. Native nations had been battling the federal government socially, politically, and militarily long before the war and long after; from this point of view the Civil War was not a unique moment of conflict but an episode in the longer struggle. But not studying these memories means losing valuable insights both for the larger understanding of how historical memory operates and failing to provide clarity for communities today. Thus, I attempt to remedy the two major reasons native memory is usually not included in Civil War memory studies by specifically labeling which native memories are analyzed and put into proper context about the native perception on the war and Reconstruction. Gary W. Gallagher, The Enduring Civil War, Reflections on the Great American Crisis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020.; Frank Towers and Jewel L. Spangler, eds. Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Fordham University Press, 2021.

[3] Michael F. Doran, “Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68, no. 3 (1978): 335–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2561972.

[4] Troy Smith, “Nations Colliding: The Civil War Comes to Indian Territory.” Civil War History 59, no. 3 (September 2013): 279–319. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2013.0054.

[5] Jeff Fortney, “Lest We Remember: Civil War Memory and Commemoration among the Five Tribes.” American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012): 525–44. https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.36.4.0525.

[6] Sarah Elliott’s findings concur. Sarah Elliott, “Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965.” Ph.D., The University of Mississippi, 2024.

[7] Fortney, Jeff. “Lest We Remember: Civil War Memory and Commemoration among the Five Tribes.” American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2012): 525–44. 532.

[8] Reconstruction in Indian Territory long outlasted Reconstruction of the South and was the only region the Federal government permanently reallocated land to former slaves, and later parcels of land were sold off to Black and white Americans from outside the nation altogether. The Federal government mandated that the Five Nations give full membership rights to their freedmen, with some conditions, symbolizing both a rare moment of protection against racism and an all-too-common instance of eroding Native sovereignty by dictating to a nation the rules of its own citizenship. Violence against the Black freedmen who stayed was common. Unlike the Jim Crow South, the Five Nations people did not want to keep freedmen as forced labor; Five Nations members used violence to pressure freedpeople into leaving the territory out of fear that their ethnic and cultural heritage would be lost through intermarriage. Given that the threats to the Five Nations came from without the community, early memories of the Civil War used the same intentional Reconciliationist framing that David Blight described between northern and southern whites towards the end of the century.

One way state and federal governments forced native nations to Americanize was to seize young children from their parents and send them to boarding schools to educate them in white ways. In Oklahoma and the Five Nations, the history of boarding schools is a little more complicated. The Cherokee had long had native-owned boarding schools before the Civil War, sending the children of elite, often from mixed white and native race families. These schools typically taught in both Cherokee and English, and though the purpose was to teach children white ways, often through violent means, the parents at the very least had voluntarily sent their children to school. In 1907, Oklahoma took control of many native nations’ schools; this, combined with the new compulsory education laws in America, meant more Cherokee children than ever were now being brought up away from their culture and communities. Even then, Cherokee parents had comparably more options than other nations’ parents, and some were able to choose their children’s school based on whether it was bilingual, its religious denomination, or its proximity to home. The generational trauma inflected long after the last boarding school closed is not ameliorated just because some parents had choices and some schools allowed children to speak in their native tongue. The mental and physical scars from being raised in isolation from friends and family, intentionally taught to change their cultural identities, and abuse from teachers and staff were just as real and lasting for Cherokee children as any other native children. Julie L. Reed, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History. The University of North Carolina Press, 2026.; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. 1995. 2nd ed. University Press of Kansas, 2020.; Alaina E. Roberts, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

[9] Khal Schneider, “Distinctions That Must Be Preserved: On the Civil War, American Indians, and the West.” Civil War History 62, no. 1 (March 2016): 36–54. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2016.0011. 53.; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters. 110-111.

[10] For many white Union veterans, who met together as the Grand Army of the Republic, westward expansion after the war was a continuation of their service. Thus, Cherokee were cast in the role of the Vanishing Indian, quietly leaving so the land could be settled by ‘real’ Americans. Indian Territory GAR camps were often named for Native Americans, but in the same way one might use Greco-Roman names to harken back to a mythic past. Lindsey Peterson, “The Expansionist Cause: Union Civil War Commemorations as Weapons of Colonization in the American West.” Dissertation, The University of Southern Mississippi, 2022.

[11] The UDC’s use of Confederate Five Nations memory mirrors the larger trend of the white South incorporating memories of a fading Native past, such as the Trail of Tears, into their larger historical memory of the region and its people. As Theda Perdue explains, by sympathizing with the wronged party, white southerners “abolished themselves of guilt for the actions of their ancestors and responsibility for the plight of Indians who remained.” Fortney, “Lest We Remember.”; Elliott, Sarah. “Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965.” Ph.D., The University of Mississippi, 2024.; Theda Perdue, “The Legacy of Indian Removal.” The Journal of Southern History (Houston, United States) 78, no. 1 (2012): 3–36. 23.

[12] United Daughters of the Confederacy. Minutes of the Twentieth Annual Convention, 1913. Edwards & Broughton Printing Company, 1914. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008696825.

[13] “Beautiful Scenery.” The Cherokee Advocate. Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, Vol. 26, No. 15, Ed. 1, April 26, 1902. https://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc1856108/m1/2/?q=reunion. 2.

[14] Stand Watie often stood in opposition to other Cherokee leaders of the day, such as John Ross. Watie was among those who signed the Treaty of New Echota, leading to the Trail of Tears. The others of the Ridge Faction who signed the treaty were executed, but Watie escaped. Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Stand Watie (1806–1871).” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/stand-watie-14563/.; Oklahoma Historical Society. “Watie, Stand | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.” Accessed January 10, 2025. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WA040.

[15] Alaina Roberts has noticed that museums of Native American history in Oklahoma, the Five Nations’ region, rarely mention slavery in their exhibits. “Conversation with June 2025 Special Issue Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, July 10, 2025. https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2025/07/conversation-with-june-2025-special-issue-editors-joan-e-cashin-and-alaina-e-roberts/.

[16] By the time of the Civil War, slavery was not just economically but socially “critical to the Cherokees’ conception of their own national identity.” Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Second edition. American Crossroads. University of California Press, 2015. 187.

[17] Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. New York, London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021. 82.

[18] Recent scholars have dedicated research to the history of the enslaved populations in native nations. Some, like Barbara Krauthamer’s Black Slaves, Indian Masters and Alaina E. Roberts’ I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land focus specifically on the history of slavery and its aftermath, but other works like Tiffany Lethobo King’s Black Shoals tackles Black and Native American historiographies more broadly, highlighting the shoal-like overlaps between two targets of settler-colonialism.

Each nation had its own cultural norms around slavery and legal presidencies for enslaved rights, and like anywhere else these norms and laws changed over the decades, but analysis of other Five Nations offers suggestions for how to interpret Cherokee memory. Caleb Gayle’s We Refuse to Forget follows the story of another Five Nations state, the Creek Nation, offers another example of the complicated relationship between the Five Nations and freemen. We Refuse traces the changes over time from the early years of non-chattel with opportunities to become a full equal, to a more Americanized version of caste slavery, to federal intervention and the forced acceptance of freedmen into the nation, to the 1979 reversal excluding freedmen descendants from citizenship. The 1979 reversal is an example of enduring Civil War memories; Creek resentment over Reconstruction-era infringement on native sovereignty and the right to define citizenship was not forgotten.

[19] Oaster, B. “Toastie.” “7 Questions about Freedmen Answered.” High Country News, October 11, 2021. https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-communities-7-questions-about-freedmen-answered/.

 

Kris Plunkett

Kris Plunkett is a PhD candidate at Tulane University studying Civil War memory. Her dissertation traces the evolutions of Civil War memories from the war’s end to the present. When she’s not in the archives, Kris coaches the speech and debate team at St. Mary’s Dominican High School.

Providence and Prestige: Misguided Faith and Ambition in Southern Defenses of Slavery

Providence and Prestige: Misguided Faith and Ambition in Southern Defenses of Slavery

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In his November 1860 sermon, “Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate It,” Benjamin Morgan Palmer argued that the providential trust was “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing” (emphasis original).[1] The pastor of New Orleans’s First Presbyterian Church, Palmer embodied a providential worldview that was a theological cornerstone of the emergent secessionist project. One Confederate nationalist revealed Palmer’s pervasive influence, crediting him with doing more than “any other non-combatant in the South to promote rebellion.” Mitchell Snay noted that “Palmer’s reputation as an orator, Presbyterian leader, and theologian undoubtedly added to the weight of his words.”[2]

Confederate Flag in unidentified church, date unknown, Virginia Historical Society.

If the theological defense of slavery in the antebellum South strikes modern readers as a religious scandal—and it should—its persistence continues to demand explanation. Proslavery arguments did not endure simply because Southern ministers were deluded interpreters of Scripture or oblivious to better moral reasoning. The arguments endured because powerful cultural incentives made proslavery appear acceptable, pastorally responsible, socially stabilizing, and personally rewarding. The 1845 formation of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), precipitated by disputes over slaveholding missionaries, stands as an enduring reminder of how intertwined ecclesial identity, moral reasoning, and cultural allegiance became. For instance, one of the SBC’s founding resolutions supported slavery.[3] As H. Leon McBeth bluntly observed, “Slavery was the main issue that led to the 1845 schism; that is a blunt historical fact.”[4]

However, Biblical interpretation divorced from erudite moral principles was not the whole story. Two mutually reinforcing drives, or pillars, upheld and normalized proslavery theology among Southern clergy: a distorted appeal to providence and a pastoral pursuit of prestige. No theme loomed larger in antebellum popular theology than divine providence. Even pastors who secured prestigious pulpits and comfortable compensation were plagued by concerns about status, wealth, and cultural influence. Together, this appeal to providence and pursuit of prestige formed an ecosystem of moral accommodation. Defending slavery came to be understood as synonymous with defending order, honor, and even Christian faithfulness. Thus, proslavery theology was sustained not merely by faulty exegesis but by a broader moral failure in which providential confidence and ministerial ambition taught Southern Christians to mistake social power for divine approval. These two pillars would collapse under the forces unleashed by the Civil War.

From Uneasy Acceptance to Confident Justification

Southern evangelical support for slavery was neither inevitable nor immediate. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many churches treated slavery as a regrettable inheritance or a political problem. David T. Bailey described the attitude toward slavery among many Baptists in the South in the late 1700s: talk of ending the practice usually ended with a statement such as “[I]t would be best to wait for the dispensations of Providence, and pray to God for the happy year of their deliverance to commence.”[5] Among Baptists, in particular, loose denominational structures and strong local autonomy kept the issue an uncomfortable topic, one either avoided or quickly deflected. When protest was limited, silence was easy.[6]

By the 1830s, however, that posture hardened. Several pressures converged: fears of slave revolt intensified by events such as the Haitian Revolution and Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy; the spread of militant abolitionist literature; and a growing sense that antislavery criticism threatened not only Southern moral norms but also Southern security and sovereignty. Under those pressures, a “live and let live” ecclesial posture became untenable.[7] As Northern voices increasingly labeled slavery a sin, Southern clergy felt compelled to respond—publicly, repeatedly, and theologically.[8] The result was what Obbie Tyler Todd described as a shift “from criticism to cooperation to defense.” Early ambivalence did not simply vanish; it was retrained. Ministers first learned to accept slavery as a settled reality and then to treat defending it as a test of doctrinal fidelity and communal loyalty.[9]

Pillar One: Providence Turned into Permission

In classical Christianity, providence denotes God’s sovereign governance of creation. In popular usage—among laity and clergy alike—it often becomes something thinner and more immediately legible: if a social arrangement exists and appears stable, it must be God-ordained; if it produces prosperity, it must be God-blessed.[10]

This habit of reading history as a straightforward moral scoreboard was well-suited to American expansion and economic growth. Westward movement was often framed not only as a national ambition, indeed, as the United States’ Manifest Destiny, but also as a providential calling.[11] In the plantation South, the logic intensified. Single-crop agriculture depleted the soil, debt mounted, and enslavers sought new lands—carrying enslaved people with them. Expansion felt necessary; necessity could be named providence, and providence could then sanctify the entire system that made expansion profitable.[12]

Once that frame took hold, the inference was devastatingly simple, according to Southern clergy such as James R. Graves (1820–1893): if slavery existed under God’s government, opposing it could seem tantamount to opposing God’s order. Abolitionist moral critique was dismissed as abstract “philosophy” or as dangerous fanaticism, while the status quo was portrayed as humble submission to divine reality.[13] Providence, in this form, did not generate moral scrutiny; it produced moral sedation.

No example illustrates the cultural utility of this logic more clearly than the so-called “Curse of Ham.” More precisely, the interpretation of the curse on Canaan in Genesis 9 was exegetically flimsy and racially speculative; yet it proved rhetorically effective for slaveholders. It offered defenders of proslavery religion a biblical hook, a vision of racial hierarchy with an ancient pedigree, and the powerful claim that bondage was woven into the deep structure of God’s dealings with humanity.[14]

The Curse narrative’s power lay less in careful interpretation than in its portability. Short, quotable, and easily deployed in sermons, the narrative allowed questioning slavery to be framed as questioning Scripture—or worse, questioning Providence itself. In this way, providence became propaganda: not a confession of God’s mysterious rule, but a claim to read divine approval directly from preferred social arrangements.

Pillar Two: Pastoral Ambition and the Professionalization of Ministry

The second pillar was more ordinary—and therefore more unsettling: clerical aspiration. For many Southern ministers, particularly among Baptists and Methodists, the ministry offered genuine upward mobility. It required little initial capital, and a gifted preacher could rise through education, denominational visibility, and strategic relationships. One example is Basil Manly, Sr. (1798–1868), who became the antebellum South’s leading Baptist educator. During the 1820s and early 1830s, Manly privately expressed doubts about the morality of slavery. But by 1835, as a wealthy slaveholder himself, he had changed his mind.[15]

As the ministry became increasingly professionalized—measured by polish, reputation, and public influence—it also grew vulnerable to the rewards and punishments wielded by local elites. The slaveholding class controlled not only wealth but also cultural legitimacy. Their patronage funded churches, schools, and institutions, and their approval determined a pastor’s respectability, influence, and security. Offending them risked marginalization, salary instability, and stalled advancement. Reassuring them promised visibility, patronage, and professional standing.[16] Here, theology and ambition quietly intertwined. Ministers told themselves they were applying Scripture and realized that applications supporting slavery conferred social dividends.

 

Once slavery became contested, the sermon became more than instruction; it became a communal rite. Proslavery preaching reassured anxious white congregations that their world was morally coherent and divinely sanctioned. For clergy, the arrangement was mutually reinforcing. Proslavery preaching signaled reliability to elites, demonstrated congregational leadership, aligned ministers with “serious” social concerns rather than moral agitation, and positioned ministers as order guardians and authoritative interpreters of God’s will. John L. Dagg’s (1794-1884) Elements of Moral Science, a moral philosophy text, represented the pinnacle of the justification of slavery for sermon preparation. Enslaved people were to obey, and masters were to provide care, including religious instruction. Consequently, society would enjoy stability and blessings. Thus, bondage became wrapped in benevolence and recast as Christian care and stewardship.[17]

 

Ambition also took tangible forms. In a culture where gentility was tied to land and enslaved labor, some ministers secured status through marriage alliances with planter families. Owning enslaved people confirmed elite belonging and created a personal stake in the system’s survival. Bertram Wyatt-Brown quoted portions of a letter written in 1826 by Joel Lyle (1774–1849), a newspaper editor and planter in Paris, Kentucky, to his son, who was away at college. Lyle described the likely elopement by a local young couple and spoke of the allure of the Paris area to aspiring young men: “‛Money, money, money is the object, and a wife a secondary one.’”[18]

 

The Pillars Collapse: The Civil War and the Reconstruction of Proslavery Religion

 

Antebellum appeals to providence served not as humble trust in God’s sovereignty but as a retrospective justification for entrenched power arrangements. As Luke Harlow observed, “Southerners developed the belief that they were a chosen people who participated in a covenantal relationship with God. From this southern religious perspective, the Confederate cause—and the war in its name—was a Christian one. White southerners entered the Civil War convinced that God was on their side.”[19]

 

Then came defeat, emancipation, and economic ruin, shattering not only the Southern social order but also the interpretive framework that had claimed to read God’s will directly from historical outcomes. If providence had smiled so clearly on slavery, what did defeat mean? The Confederate loss exposed the fragility of these assumptions. Many ministers found themselves theologically disoriented, struggling to reconcile their doctrine of providence with historical reality. Equating success with divine approval proved brittle. Providential certainty did not disappear, but was chastened by the realization that history does not submit to simple moral arithmetic. As Mark Noll has shown, the war shattered pastoral confidence in reading God’s will from social outcomes “because God appeared to be acting so strikingly at odds with himself.”[20]

 

John H. Matsui highlighted one aspect of this disorientation, asserting that southern clergy “presided over secession and justified the Confederate war effort.”[21] The influential Semi-Weekly Richmond Enquirer supported this claim, reporting that after the Confederate disasters at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, if the clergy had “‘pronounced . . . against us . . . we never could have carried on the war.’”[22] By 1864, as one observer opined, “men in all classes of society freely lay the blame of this Rebellion . . . at the door of the Church; charging the ministry, more especially, with having caused it.”[23] Falling from the elevated pulpit to the floor of blame must have been disorienting.

 

The second pillar collapsed as well. The planter class was impoverished, institutions were shaken, and the pathways to prestige built on slavery were destroyed. As Eric Foner noted, “On plantation after plantation, ‘Perfect anarchy and rebellion’ reigned . . . in the conscious flouting of the planter aristocracy’s authority and self-esteem.” Among examples: “The magnificent plantation home at Middleton Place near Charleston was burned to the ground, the vaults of the family graveyard broken open and the bones scattered by the former slaves.”[24]

 

The strategy of conflating ministry with gentility was exposed as spiritually thin and morally compromised. The theological defense of slavery must be understood as the convergence of theological rationalization and vocational ambition within a culture rewarding conformity and punishing dissent. The tragedy of proslavery Christianity lies not only in the defense of evil, but also because many ministers believed they were acting faithfully—protecting order, preserving the church’s credibility, and even saving souls. That fusion of sincere conviction with rewarding incentives is precisely why the story remains instructive, making this history more than a closed chapter. Providence can be co-opted for propaganda. Prestige can masquerade as faithfulness. When that happens, the church’s witness weakens. More tragically, the church becomes an instrument that sanctifies injustice. The antebellum South offers an indictment of the past but also a cautionary mirror for every age. The specific issue may vary, but the mechanism remains perennial.

 

[1] Benjamin Morgan Palmer, “Thanksgiving sermon, delivered at the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, on Thursday, November 29, 1860,” 7. Internet Archive, accessed March 29, 2026. https://archive.org/details/thanksgivingserm00lcpalm/page/6/mode/2up?q=now+existing

[2] Palmer, a former South Carolina seminary professor, was elected moderator of the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America in 1861. Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and separation in the antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 176, 179. For Palmer’s biography, see Timothy F. Reilly, “Benjamin M. Palmer: Secessionist Become Nationalist,” Louisiana History, 18.3 (1977) 287-301.

[3] “Address of the Convention,” Proceedings of the Southern Baptist Convention (Augusta, GA: The Southern Baptist Convention, May 8-12, 1845), 18, accessed April 10, 2024, https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/proceedings-of-the-southern-baptist-convention-1845/396922?item=396927. See also “Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” last modified Dec. 12, 2018, https://sbts-wordpress-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/sbts2023/uploads/2023/10/Racism-and-the-Legacy-of-Slavery-Report-v4.pdf.

[4] H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville: Broadman, 1987), 382. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 196.

[5] David T. Bailey, Shadow on the Church: Southwestern Evangelical Religion and the Issue of Slavery, 1783–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 99.

[6] Bailey, Shadow,113–14, 130.

[7] David M. Potter (comp. and ed. by Don E. Fehrenbacher), The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848–1861 (1976; repr. NY: Harper Perennial, 2011), 39.

[8] Eugene D. Genovese, “Religion in the Collapse of the American Union,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78.

[9] Obbie Tyler Todd, “Baptists, Slavery, And The Road To Civil War,” part 2 of the Lyceum Disputation series, Choosing Sides section, accessed April 10, 2024, https://thelondonlyceum.com/baptists-slavery-and-the-road-to-civil-war/.

[10] John Patrick Daly, When Slavery was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 103.

[11] John D. Wilsey, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015), 66. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 216–17.

[12] Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24, 59.

[13] E. Luther Copeland, The Southern Baptist Convention and the Judgment of History: The Taint of an Original Sin (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 12-13.

[14] Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4, 6, 27, 39-41.

[15] Bailey, Shadow on the Church, 215–16, 226.

[16] Luke E. Harlow, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2104), 13. Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 52–52, 62–63.

[17] John L. Dagg, The Elements of Moral Science (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1859), 347, 353, 363, 371.

[18] Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 208–9.

[19] Harlow, Religion, 138.

[20] Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 75.

[21] John H. Matsui, Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares: The American Civil War As an Apocalyptic Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), 2021, 5.

[22] Matsui, Millenarian Dreams, 5, citing the Semi-Weekly Richmond Enquirer, July 14, 1863, 1.

[23] Robert L. Stanton, The Church and the Rebellion: A Consideration of the Rebellion Against the Government of the United States; and the Agency of the Church, North and South in Relation Thereto (New York: Derby and Miller, 1864), vi.

[24] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 71.

T. Michael Wise

Michael Wise is a retired licensed funeral director completing his Ph.D at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the Historical & Theological Studies Department under Dr. John D. Wilsey. His research interests are in the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras, particularly in the doctrines of providence and just war theory.

A Power in the Land: Union Pacific in the Greater Reconstruction

A Power in the Land: Union Pacific in the Greater Reconstruction

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Railroads have long been subjects of Civil War era studies. Scholars have cast them as promoters of growth before the conflict, agents of capacity and connection during the war itself, and instruments of expansion and empire in its aftermath. Most recently, Richard White has argued that the transcontinentals transformed the postbellum West and built modern America through a chaotic process of “creative destruction” that corrupted the political and economic system and induced a series of social and economic crises during the Gilded Age.[1]

But more than unwieldy machines that heralded the rise of the modern United States, railroads like the Union Pacific were companies committed to a new politics of development in the West. With a network history of the Union Pacific, we can understand how a class of financiers, engineers, politicians, and generals attached to the company attempted to fulfill both personal and national ambitions through the building of railroads and western industries in the spaces of the Interior West. In the post-Civil War era, the rising power elite’s connections between private corporations, the federal government, and the U.S. Army facilitated railroad construction on a grand scale. By tracing this “iron triangle” of interests in the mid-nineteenth century, the history of railroads becomes a case study in the institutional mechanics of corporate-state collusion. A new political system of corporate and state interaction tied western development up in the future of American power.[2]

The history of the Union Pacific in the Civil War era is a case study for what I call the “second American system”: a model of economic development through westward expansion. Unlike the first American system’s effort to coordinate federal government involvement in the antebellum market economy and internal improvements, the second American system was shaped by powerful elites who used a porous postbellum public-private divide to facilitate modern development of the West. A reinforced loop of connections between railroad companies, the federal government, and the U.S. Army helped to initiate the origins of a “politico-military-industrial complex” that we have become all the more familiar with in the era following the Second World War. Elites on boards, committees, and other halls of power each took advantage of their respective institutions to fulfill visions for both personal wealth and national security.[3]

The second American system operates within what Elliot West and others have described as a “Greater Reconstruction.” As West argues, the story of the burgeoning modern state during the Civil War and Reconstruction should be understood as not only taking place between North South but also between East and West. The Greater Reconstruction framework allows historians to look at the conditions of state power in the West as part of a broader reconstitution and redefinition of living in the United States and being an American citizen in the mid-nineteenth century. Viewing Reconstruction in this manner further illuminates how railroad development entangled twin projects of industrial capitalism and settler colonialism in the U.S. West. Putting the nation back together was tied to expanding it into an empire, a process which perhaps did not require but ultimately reignited various forms of corporate-state collusion. Members of the postbellum “power elite” among business, government, and the military operated the railroad as an institution that linked Native dispossession with the construction of profitable extractive industries.[4]

The managers of this flexible political network for the Union Pacific served as businessmen, financers, engineers, politicians, and generals, and their relationships with each other mapped corporate and state power closer than ever before. They maintained their connections by meeting in Wyoming officers’ clubs, New York hotels, and Washington, D.C. offices. Corruption was merely one form of interaction and collusion they developed together in an era where the rules of big business and big government were not yet hammered into place. Businessmen, politicians, and generals relied on each other for their respective strengths. Financiers like Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific needed land grants, bonds, military support, and legislation for rights-of-way that only their contacts in Congress, the Interior Department, and the Army could provide. Politicians like James Harlan of Iowa and generals like William Tecumseh Sherman of Ohio were loyal allies. In exchange for political, financial, and military support, the federal government received an infrastructure that supposedly legitimized the U.S. state’s claim over Native lands. The most agile railroad men were able to facilitate and benefit by serving in multiple capacities at the same time. Grenville Dodge was the railroad’s Chief Engineer, its land agent, a U.S. Army general, and congressman from Iowa all during the initial years of construction between 1865 and 1869. Railroad men’s institutional linkages forged a nation that was being built in real time.[5]

“The Republican Standard,” 1860, Library of Congress.

The railroad power elite attached to the Union Pacific Railroad utilized its connctions among private corporations, the U.S. government, and the U.S. Army to lay western rail and accelerate a new western economy through overlapping stages of development: subsidization, occupation, and commodification. Federal land grants and bonds were the bedrock of the Union Pacific’s initial railroad construction from Nebraska to Utah. The Union Pacific received 12,800 acres of land for every mile of track alone. Grading and tracklaying were accompanied by financial schemes, real estate deals, and a new mapping of space. It was an endeavor of corporate and state collusion developed by Republican politicians like Oakes Amess and railroad financiers like Thomas Durant. Corporate and government elites both received a stake in the profits, and the railroad company paved a way for American government and business to leave its imprints in the contested region of the North American West.[6]

Map of the land grant of the Union Pacific Railroad, 1872, Library of Congress.

At the same time, the Union Pacific maintained ties with the U.S. Army across the Great Plains. Army units protected surveyors and led campaigns against war parties of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos fighting to keep their homelands. In case of attack, the ceilings of railroad construction cars held 1,000 army issue rifles for the labor force of mainly Irish immigrants and Union veterans. Even Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge and construction boss Jack Casement had both served in the Civil War. Dodge himself personally knew William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman visited construction sites annually, and Grant told Dodge to use the troops to his discretion. Military discipline enforced the regime of construction, and military violence preempted the settler colonial project to turn over Native lands to white settlers and corporations.[7]

Railroad system of the United States in 1890, 1898, Library of Congress.

With the federal state’s financial and military backing, the Union Pacific carried out an additional stage to its mission: establishing commerce. The Union Pacific positioned itself as the arbiter of economic power in the region by linking together old and new hubs of agriculture. As workers pushed westward, the company sold off their “public lands” in a checkerboard, induced migrants to the territories, and developed towns to efficiently transport western crops to eastern cities. Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming popped off the map at the point of Grenville Dodge’s pen. Land sales translated into wealth produced from meat, wheat, and lumber. Politicians, financiers, businessmen, and boosters formed a spatial order that relied on a revitalized economy as much as a reshaped ecology.[8]

The Union Pacific network became a vehicle for not only binding the nation together but actually manifesting it through a postwar economy born in a settler colonial regime. The railroad power elite was ultimately in contestation with a series of forces competing in the West: other corporations, governments, Indigenous nations, and the environment itself. To accomplish both corporate and state aims, promoters and financiers aligned state power with the reach of the railroad to impose a new political economy in the West. Federal land grants and bonds, military occupation, real estate sales, town development, and the acceleration of western farming, mining, and cattle driving, were the public-private tools that made railroad-building the primary mechanism for nation-building. The Union Pacific reconstructed the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains into an economic unit that railroads linked together. Railroad men shaped the state to build the nation. In doing so, they operated a second American system of economic development which strengthened a particular form of Union—one which has left tremendous echoes.[9]

Railroads and the West have a unique place in both the study of the Civil War era and the memory of the general public. Many Americans feel the pull of the West with its migrations, trains, and industries, but they are often remembered more as myths than actual stories with real people. The Union Pacific story is a history with crucial implications about the immense possibilities and dangers that public-private infrastructure projects can offer. It also shows how space and development is political. Calls for wealth creation demand considered focus and scrutiny. The history of the Union Pacific’s network among private corporations, the U.S. government, and the U.S. Army underscores how Americans in this period molded the landscapes of modern America—those that they envisioned, and those that we are left with today.

 

[1] Transcontinental railroads have been the subject of diverse scholarship in recent decades, from David Haward Bain and Maury Klein’s masterful volumes to Richard White and Manu Karuka’s excellent books on how railroads were deeply embedded in broader histories of capitalism, empire, labor, and the environment. See David Haward Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (Viking, 1999); Maury Klein, Union Pacific: Volume I, 1862-1893, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011); Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvd1c7m4.

[2] Previous studies of railroads and the West, like Richard White’s Railroaded, Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks, and William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, have all handled their subjects deftly, adding to the literature on the political, environmental, and labor histories of nineteenth-century America. I seek to synthesize them together into a new story about the Union Pacific that foregrounds the significance of an adapted business-government relationship. To do this, I am bringing C. Wright Mills’ insights about the “power elite” to this moment in the Reconstruction and Gilded Age United States. White, Railroaded, xxi-xxxiv, 507-517; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, xi-xv, 40-45, 66-73; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 5-19, 25-26, 41-46, 80-81, 92-93; C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956), 3-29, 269-297.

[3] This dissertation project builds on research from my Senior Independent Study Thesis at the College of Wooster, a version of which was published as “A Power in the Land: The First Transcontinental Railroad and the Second American System,” History Matters: An Undergraduate Journal of Historical Research 22 (2025): 111–154, https://journals.library.appstate.edu/index.php/historymatters/issue/view/HM25. Bain, Empire Express, 106-116, 178-180, 184-192, 549, 711; Klein, Union Pacific, 12-33, 367-377; White, Railroaded, 2-9, 26-36; Mills, The Power Elite, 5-20, 271-272.

[4] Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), 454-455; Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford University Press, 2017), 103-135.

[5] Bain, Empire Express, 106-116, 157-163, 549, 711; Klein, Union Pacific, 12-33, 72-79, 142-151; Douglas Allen, “Establishing Economic Property Rights by Giving Away an Empire,” The Journal of Law and Economics 62, no. 2 (2019): 251-256.

[6] Bain, Empire Express, 106-116, 178-180; Klein, Union Pacific, 14-33; White, Railroaded, 17-36; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 117-125; Allen, “Establishing Economic Property Rights by Giving Away an Empire,” 251-256.

[7] Bain, Empire Express, 184-192, 227-233, 265-269, 470-471; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 40-45, 60-79; Grenville Dodge, How We Built the Union Pacific Railway, and Other Railway Papers and Addresses (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 12-20, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.howwebuiltunionp00dodg_1/?st=gallery.

[8] White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 103-135; John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis, United States: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 5-16, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wooster/detail.action?docID=316613; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 25-26, 41-46.

[9] Baird, “A Power in the Land,” 111-117, 141-143; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 117-135; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 60-103.

Andrew Baird

Drew Baird is a PhD student at Ohio State University especially interested in the political and environmental history of railroads, land development, and industrial capitalism in the United States between 1840 and 1920. His research focuses on the public-private interactions within westward expansion and settler colonialism during the Civil War era.

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.

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