Category: Muster
JCWE editor’s collaborative project wins 2026 James Harvey Robinson Prize for Teaching Aids

JCWE editor’s collaborative project wins 2026 James Harvey Robinson Prize for Teaching Aids

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The American Historical Association awarded its 2026 James Harvey Robinson Prize to Kate Masur and Liz Clarke for Freedom Was in Sight!: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, DC, Region (University of North Carolina Press, 2024); teachers Jon Elfner and Krystal Davis (Homewood Flossmoor High School) created supplemental online materials for the book.

A vividly illustrated account of how the second founding unfolded within the nation’s capital, Freedom Was in Sight! draws on the words and experiences of people who lived during Reconstruction and powerfully narrates how the impacts of emancipation and the civil war rippled outward for decades.

The James Harvey Robinson Prize is awarded biennially for the teaching aid which has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. The Robinson Prize was established in 1974 by Council and first offered in 1978.

Congratulations to Kate Masur, Liz Clarke, Jon Elfner and Krystal Davis for their achievement!

Robert Bland

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

JCWE Special Issue Interview with Keila Grinberg and Fabiane Popinigis

JCWE Special Issue Interview with Keila Grinberg and Fabiane Popinigis

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In today’s Muster, JCWE Associate Editor Robert Bland discusses the journal’s recent special issue, “Noisy Archives: Race and the Social History of the Law in Brazil,” with Keila Grinberg and Fabiane Popingis. Dr. Keila Grinberg is a Professor of Brazilian and Latin American History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Popinigis is an associate professor of History at Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

 

Robert Bland: I wonder if you could talk about the origins of this issue, right? How did the idea come about? What was it like working with the JCWE and the Richards Center?

 

Keila Grinberg: So, when the journal approached us, the other editor and me, the idea was to provide the readers of the Journal of the Civil War a sense of the connections with Brazilian historiography, and especially, of course, 19th-century historiography. And one of the things that we, I mean, this is sort of the obvious comparison is that there was a war in South America, the so-called Paraguayan war or Brazilian War between Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina in the 1860s.

But we actually decided to do a different thing. And instead of using Brazil as a comparative case, as there is a long history of comparative studies between Brazil and the US, especially around slavery and 19th-century slavery, we decided to focus on topics that relate to race and the centrality of race to understanding Brazilian society, but not the ones that are normally used for comparison. So, we wanted to avoid, let’s say the comparative fact, right? Just thinking about Brazilian history and Brazilian society in its own terms.

 

Robert Bland: Tied to that point, I really appreciated the “noisy archives” framework that you used to introduce the journal. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this framework, talk about how the idea of a noisy archive emerged. What archival silences do you think have been pervasive in Brazilian history? And how are you seeking to reintroduce some of those lost voices?

 

Keila Grinberg: Thank you for this question because this was a really important point for us. I mean, one is, of course, a direct engagement with a whole discussion about silence and silencing in the archives, especially when you work with slavery and other underrepresented voices from the past. But the idea of the noisy archives, I think it’s an invitation for a conversation about what the archives tell us and what the archives cannot tell us. And every historian working in an archive knows that the archive cannot tell us everything about the past.

I bet that’s history 101, and that’s impossible. And even though in the structure of the organization of the archives are, of course, voices that were not as heard or as visible in the past, when you actually look at the documents, you can hear all those voices. That’s the idea of noise. That we can, in fact, know a lot; and especially in the sort of Portuguese world the ways that the documents are structured, the ways that you can see, for instance, witnesses in trials, it’s different than the US and the Anglo-Saxon world. You can actually engage a lot with those, let’s say, voices. Even though they are not first person necessarily. So, the idea of noise is that you need to know how to hear them, but they are there.

 

Robert Bland: I’m wondering what you found particularly interesting about the new social histories of the law in slavery and abolition? How do you think about legal history, legal archives, and why are scholars of race in kind of Brazil really interested in kind of the turn towards the social history of the law?

 

Keila Grinberg: I think, and then It would be also interesting to know in a particular case about Fabiane’s work, but we’ve been working, this is a very powerful historiography that are very connected with the US. So that’s also why we wanted to frame it around the social history of the law, because, you know, in the US, in Kate Masur’s work, but also Rebecca Scott about Cuba and all the historiography that came after that it’s really an important topic of dialogue between us in Brazil and what is being done since the mid 1980s in the US. So, the idea of the social history of the law is precisely that the law is not defined by the structure. You know, even though the structures are important. When you think about the law and think about the legal struggles, and you think about the people that are interacting with the law.

The results are not predefined. I will use the World Cup metaphor. When you were watching soccer, there’s always space for the underdog, like the possibility for the goalie to do this amazing thing, of not letting the goal to come in, and just and that’s sort of thing. Of course, I’m abusing of this metaphor, but it’s this way that, at first, the law is really important to understand, not just Brazilian, Latin American society, and I would say U.S. society too. So it’s not something that is predefined by the economic structures even though, of course, it is important to understand.

And the second point is that when you are talking about. Legally, the fine categories such as race have a deep connection with reality, but those legal categories have a real impact on people’s lives. This is something that is crucial if we want to understand Brazilian 19th-century society. So that’s why the law has been so important. It’s the sources, the documents that we can find, but it’s not just the documents; it’s the fact that legal decisions have a very big impact on people’s lives and especially the lives of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian groups. So that connection is, I think it’s important. And in many ways they are different from the ones in the U.S. So that’s why we wanted to get this discussion in its own terms. That’s why getting out of the comparative framework was so important. But also, because, as I was saying, there is a meditation about history and the historical process. You know, when you look at the law, when you choose to look at the law, you can see spaces for humans to behave in ways that are unpredictable. Of course, we can see how, but they are kind of unpredictable. And I think this is fascinating, because it doesn’t put us, like, in a box, you know, so it’s for us, look at the subjects in the past, people in the past, and for us to look at our own roles. Just to get outside of this previously defined box. I think this is crucial

 

Fabiane Popinigis:  I feel really connected to Keyla and Celso’s proposal and the introduction to the dossier, which I think is really great because it offers a big key to the reading; it carefully unpacks the historiographical trajectory of the social history of law and justice within Brazilian scholarship. It explains the methodological turn of the 80s and 90s, in close interchange with international historiography, especially U.S. historians of law and justice, in both labour history and the history of slavery. Internally, this coincided with the post-dictatorship period and new social movements.

My article emerges from a broader research project on nineteenth- century wage lawsuits, examining how gender functioned as a key organising principle of the labour market.

That was new, and then I found some Freedmen and freedwomen demanding first freedom, and then wages in court. It was a serious challenge to slavery, but also the demand to be compensated for its illegality.  By turning to the courts, they seemed to believe, in some way, that the justice system could intervene in their favour – that theirs was a legitimate claim. The one I particularly analyse here involves a woman who was kidnapped and enslaved as a child. She fights to win her freedom precisely at the dawn of abolition in Brazil, and she won, but then she wanted to go further, seeking to secure her livelihood, the wages owed to her for her labour, but also compensation for the years she had been illegally enslaved. And so the question I had to answer was: was there a political claim to this kind of compensation for former slaves? And I did discover that yes, there was. One major spokesperson for this cause was José do Patrocínio, a well-known black abolitionist in Brazil who called for a form of reparation and left behind extensive writings on the subject. He fought so that black workers, deprived of a land reform that could never happen, might at least be granted fair wages, education and citizenship. All this was unfolding in the 1880’s, as part of an alternative republican project that never came to fruition. These questions persist, and they remain strikingly relevant today.

And about our field of investigation, at a moment of a kind of history that’s being written, “silencing” historical actors again, especially enslaved people and women who disappear as agents in the history of capitalism, it’s especially important to bring these subjects back into view and to show how much of a difference they made in politics and economics, as relevant subjects of historical process. So, it’s a good time to put these people back in the scene through the “noisy archives” and show what historians can do with the sources and the methodological approaches we have been developing over the last few decades.

 

Robert Bland: Along those lines, I wonder what scholars of the American Civil War can learn from the recent literature in Brazilian history around race and the law, especially around questions of slavery and emancipation. I’m thinking of Greg Grandin’s recent work, America, Ameríca, and the comparative lens he uses. We don’t want to get too bogged down into those comparative questions, but I wonder, for kind of a kind of ongoing conversation between Brazil and the United States in the 19th century. What do you think scholars can learn from each other?

 

Keila Grinberg: I think, I mean, there are several things. And one of the points that I find really interesting in your question is that “what can the US historiography learn” from those different cases? Because it’s normally the other way around, right? Like, just an assumption. And one of the things that I find very powerful. It’s just to think as Brazil was a society that has received around a million enslaved Africans just in the 19th century, and that created a whole different society. A slave society like the US, like places in the Caribbean. But it’s a slave society that is structured around different hierarchies. And even though the number of Africans was so huge, the number of manumitted persons was also not huge in the sense of its hemispheric co-parts. So, what kind of society is that where the racial classifications and the racial hierarchies had such a huge presence in terms of the understanding of this society? So, one of the things that I find really interesting is the dynamics between different kinds of people and not, I mean, just going beyond the slave enslaved person and freed person also the several difference between what we call a master or someone who own another person. That could be someone that just like one enslaved person to 200. So, all these different situations and dynamics that in so many ways they are geographically different than the historians of the Civil War in the US.

I think this is a very interesting topic. So, if you think about, especially about the connections between the Civil War and race and slavery. You see two societies that were created sort of around the same connections between colonialism and the slave trade. But they became radically different. So that’s I think that’s something that can be understood. And also, because we tried to also get out of the particular analysis that connect slavery with the war. It’s all the ways in which the racial Catholic bodies are central to understanding Brazil, even when, you know, in the other articles, even when we’re dealing with indigenous persons, even when we are then we’re just free person. You know, you don’t go anywhere in terms of understanding society without thinking about race.

And one last thing is that by including one article about indigenous groups, the one about Maranhão by Alexandre Pelegrino. I think we are also doing something that is important for us in scholarship as well, which is highlighting the connections between what we can call the non-whites. So, the connections between the experiences of indigenous groups and Afro-Brazilians are new in historiographical terms and definitely need more exploration. So, we understand people’s struggles and people’s movements to change their conditions.

 

Fabiane Popinigis:

I see it as an opportunity of thinking beyond our own subjects and localities, not only by comparing cases, but by understanding how people and ideas circulated, and how people drew on shared experiences to transform their own realities. In the current political moment, this perspective is especially necessary. It keeps open a space for struggles over rights, allowing us to learn from past struggles and carry them forward toward a utopian horizon.

Robert Bland

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

Interview with Lesley Gordon

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In today’s Muster, associate editor Megan Bever interviews Lesley Gordon about her recent book, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Gordon is the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at the University of Alabama and the past president of the Society of Civil War Historians.

 
Previewing the September 2026 JCWE

Previewing the September 2026 JCWE

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This issue’s research essays, all written by early-career scholars, show how conversations in distinctive subfields can help historians develop new perspectives on the Civil War era. One article is deeply informed by environmental history, one by history of religion, and one by the history of foreign relations and empire. Meanwhile all three show how the Civil War opened new and sometimes unexpected possibilities.

Jeremy A. Nelson’s article, “A Beastly Ceasefire: Wildlife in the Civil War South,” demonstrates that amid the destruction of war, some forms of wildlife flourished. The war years, often depicted as a period of unmitigated ecological disaster, were, in fact, a time of regeneration for many species in the South. Many men who hunted game in Southern communities were away at the front, and soldiers often eschewed game hunting, needing to preserve ammunition for combat and finding it more practical to eat rations, often supplemented by livestock confiscated from surrounding farms. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including local government documentation of bounties paid for fox and wolf scalps, Nelson makes a convincing case that by interrupting hunting practices, the war created conditions in which many species lived and even thrived.

Joshua Waddell turns to the question of why the Episcopal Church came back together so quickly after the war, particularly as other Protestant denominations continued to be divided into Northern and Southern branches. In “‘I, for One, Shall Make No Acknowledgment of Wrong’: Race and Sectional Reconciliation in the Reunion of the Episcopal Church, 1865–1866,” Waddell shows that the answers lie in the Church’s particular path toward disunion and in its largely conciliatory Northern leadership. Northern leaders divided over the extent to which their Southern counterparts should express regret for slavery, for withdrawing from the national organization, or for participating in the Confederacy. Southern representatives at a crucial 1865 conference refused to make concessions, but the Northern leadership proved willing to appease them. Thus the Church reunited on conservative, accommodationist terms, setting the stage for a future in which Black Americans often felt marginalized within the institution and chose to leave. Waddell’s article complements a number of articles on the history of churches and religion published by the Journal of the Civil War Era over the last few years.

Freddie Ping takes up the question of how Americans viewed national expansion in the postwar years, looking especially at the purchase of Alaska. Delving into opposition to US acquisition of Alaska, particularly by members of the US House of Representatives in 1868, Ping emphasizes intertwined concerns about climate, geography, and race. In “‘A System of Foreign Colonies’: Space, Nation, and Empire in the Alaska Purchase,” he demonstrates that many Americans subscribed to a vision of climate and geography that wrongly construed Alaska as frigid and largely uninhabitable, at least by people of European descent, and that they also worried that in adding a territory that was not contiguous with the rest of the country, the United States would take on the undesirable attributes of European empires. Although the House did vote to fund the Alaska purchase, opponents’ concerns remained part of political discourse in the United States, reappearing in later debates about the Dominican Republican, Hawai‘i, Guam, American Samoa, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The Alaska question in the 1860s, then, comes squarely into view as in important part of postwar debates about the United States’ geographical limits.

We applaud and seek to encourage early-career scholars’ desires to publish their work. This issue is published as the JCWE hosts a second round of article workshops for junior scholars. In our 2025 workshops, historians convened in small groups on Zoom, each gathering mentored by a senior person in the field. They workshopped their own pieces and discussed what journals look for in articles. In late 2025 and early 2026, we began to see the fruits of those workshops in the form of article submissions. We are excited to be able to run this program again in summer and fall 2026.

Gregory Ablavsky’s review essay draws on recent work in Native American history to suggest characterizing the period from the 1820s through the 1880s as a “long Removal” era. In dialogue with Elliott West’s formulation of a “Greater Reconstruction,” Ablavsky invites us to envision post–Civil War developments that are typically considered new departures (including the Plains “Indian Wars” and the end of treaty-making in 1871) as more consistent with the prewar period than previously thought. With nuanced attention to continuity and change, the article also suggests how, in Native American history as in other areas, the states are often laboratories for policies later adopted by the federal government. Our slate of book reviews reveals the vibrancy of the field as well as the generosity of our many colleagues who agree to review books for the journal, thus helping to ensure that people’s work is read and appreciated. Speaking of the book review section, we’re delighted to announce that book review editor Megan Bever has agreed to stay with the journal for a second three-year term. We love what Megan has done with the book review section, including not just her excellent book selections and editing but also her online video interviews with authors, found on Muster.

This calendar year’s special issues have prevented us, until now, from announcing the addition of a new staff member to the journal, Sheena Carroll. Sheena came on board more than a year ago and is doing double duty as the JCWE’s production manager and communications manager for the Richards Center. We’re excited to be working with her. We also announce our newish graduate assistant, Cameron Sauers, who is a PhD candidate at Penn State and joined us in summer 2025. A belated welcome to Sheena and Cameron!

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

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

Streaming the War: Elizabeth Van Lew, the Richmond Underground, and Amazon Prime’s The Grey House

Streaming the War: Elizabeth Van Lew, the Richmond Underground, and Amazon Prime’s The Grey House

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Union spymaster Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900), circa 1865. Portrayed by actress Daisy Head in The Grey House, she risked everything she had for the Union. Photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation.

 

Amazon Prime Video’s recent Civil War drama series The Gray House presents a fictionalized account of Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew and her Richmond Underground espionage network. The ensemble cast features leading actors Daisy Head as Van Lew, Mary-Louise Parker as her mother Eliza, Amethyst Davis and Christopher McDonald respectively as historical spies Mary Richards and Thomas McNiven, and standout performances from Hannah James and Paul Anderson as the fictional characters Clara, a local prostitute, and villainous Constable Stokely Reeves. James also appeared in the PBS series Mercy Street (2016), which likewise told a complex story set in Civil War-era Alexandria, Virginia featuring multi-dimensional characters. However, unlike Mercy Street, HBO’s The Good Lord Bird (2019) and Steven Spielberg’s epic Lincoln (2012), the producers of The Gray House chose instead to film the episode series in Romania. This artistic license reflects the inauthenticity of the series, despite its efforts to remain faithful to the actual history.[1]

While The Gray House borrows heavily from the historical record, it takes the usual filmmakers’ liberties with the facts to an extreme degree. Although many of the stories told in the show are based on at least a kernel of truth, the series relies extensively on problematic historical source material that often obscures the complexities of the real history at hand. Still, the show cannot be easily dismissed since it presents a variety of realistic historical stories about Van Lew and her network in an entertaining if fanciful format.

Long forgotten, smeared, and erased from history by her contemporaries and writers of the Lost Cause, Elizabeth Van Lew and the Richmond Underground are now being reconsidered by historians in the twenty-first century. Late nineteenth- century myths abound about Van Lew. Created by vindictive former Confederates as a means of producing the popular narrative of a united South with well-defined gender roles and expectations for its elite women, Southern Unionists such as Van Lew were considered rare and dangerous outcasts. The misconception that Van Lew cultivated a ‘Crazy Bet’ persona for her espionage efforts afforded Lost Cause and later mythmakers the ability to portray her as a committed Yankee in a plausible and easy to understand—and hate—narrative.2

Recent historians are more sympathetic to her complex Southern unionism. Elizabeth R. Varon’s biography Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy examines Van Lew’s social status among Richmond’s antebellum elite, and then follows her journey to abolitionism as well as her later career as a Union spy, woman’s suffragist and political appointee during the Reconstruction era. Varon presents Van Lew as a complex figure who was both a socially connected reformer and slave-owning Union loyalist who made numerous sacrifices for the cause in which she believed. In her 2025 biography of Van Lew, Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster Gerri Willis also focuses on Van Lew’s activities during the war, writing a fast-paced narrative that begins by describing the antebellum southern world in which Van Lew lived and worked and ends by discussing how she has been misremembered in the myths of the Lost Cause. Similar to The Gray House, Willis’ narrative format highlights the action, risks, and tension involved in spycraft.

The Van Lew Mansion in Richmond, Virginia was a stately residence for the wealthy Van Lew family, and a frequent setting in The Gray House. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Adams-Van Lew House Historical Marker. After the Van Lew mansion was raised in 1911 by vindictive former Confederates, the city of Richmond built an elementary school on it. More recent public historians have taken an interest in commemorating Van Lew and the Richmond Underground, as this historic marker indicates. Photo by author.

 

Postwar Lost Cause apologists presented the narrative of a united south populated by wealthy, kind-hearted slaveowners and loyal slaves as a means of understanding and contextualizing Confederate defeat. Elite women were portrayed as genteel, passive supporters of the Southern cause and the real history of Elizabeth Van Lew and other southern unionists stood in stark contrast to this idealistic image. To distance themselves from these exceptions to their narrative, southern historians erased the histories of the Richmond Underground by recasting the image of Van Lew and her network. Van Lew, they argued, cultivated the persona of an insane woman as a cover to gain access to Union prisoners at Libby prison and elsewhere in the city. No historical primary evidence survives that supports this claim. In reality, Van Lew was shrewd and knew how to use bribes, guile, and flattery to gain the trust of Confederate officials, often throwing lavish parties for local acquaintances.[4]

Nineteenth and twentieth century historians frequently questioned the relevance of many of the missions Van Lew and her network undertook during the war. One story suggests that Van Lew delivered flowers through the lines to Union General Ulysses S. Grant every morning as a gift. This story is highly unlikely. While Van Lew served in the Grant administration as the postmaster for Richmond after the war, the two did not meet until Van Lew invited General Grant to tea at her mansion after Union forces captured the city. Lost Cause historians created this myth to isolate Van Lew and her contemporaries from other Richmond residents in the postwar era. [5] 

One of the main problems with The Gray House as a means of teaching history is that it relies heavily on historical accounts that are difficult to verify. Shortly before his death in 1904, a Richmond baker named Thomas McNiven claimed to have been an agent in Van Lew’s network. In 1952, his daughter gave the only written account of her father’s espionage efforts entirely from oral memory. Fragmented and lacking documentation, this account is one of the main sources from which The Gray House draws.[6] McNiven claimed to have known Van Lew well, yet she never mentioned him by name in her diary or published papers, despite having done so for Lohmann and other agents. Van Lew does refer in her diary to an individual known as ‘Quaker,’ but she never names this person directly, nor does this person appear in the extensive records of the Union army’s Bureau of Military Intelligence, with which Van Lew worked closely during the final year of the war. McNiven’s daughter, however, claims that her father was the agent known as ‘Quaker.’[7]

For historians, McNiven’s account presents a challenge in telling the true history of southern unionist memory. While many of his claims are demonstrably false—such as that he observed the burial of Union Col. Ulric Dahlgren’s body in Richmond’s Oakwood Cemetery and was involved in its covert recovery soon thereafter—other claims present at least a kernel of truth. McNiven writes of a local prostitute named Clara who worked as an agent at the Exchange Hotel in Shockoe Bottom and had frequent contact with a high-ranking Confederate official he refers to as ‘Big Belly.’ The Gray House suggests this may have been Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin.[8] The Exchange Hotel was indeed a popular establishment during the war. It had a mixed reputation. While the hotel was frequented by elite Confederates, much of the city’s slave market and related businesses were concentrated in the Shockoe district, and the Exchange Hotel is known to have occasionally hosted slave auctions. Given Van Lew’s occasional use of the code name ‘Babcock,’ it is conceivable that this individual may have been him. [9]

The Gray House relies extensively on fictional characters to the exclusion of historical figures such as the verifiable agents in Van Lew’s network, many of whom made valuable contributions to the Union war effort. In 1861, an agent of detective Allan Pinkerton’s agency, gathered extensive data on Richmond’s defenses, troop deployments, and ordinance capabilities.[10] After Confederate authorities conducted a sweep of the city’s known and suspected unionists, Webster was arrested and hanged in April 1862. His contributions are portrayed in The Gray House as having been the decisive factor that influenced Van Lew’s decision to engage in espionage. Still, the series excludes other known agents such as the German grocer and restauranteur F.W.E. Lohmann, who was captured in February 1865 and subjected to torture in the notorious Libby Prison, and local farmer Wiliam Rowley, who allowed the Van Lews to use his land in nearby Henrico County as a drop zone. While Rowley was compensated by the Federal Government for his service after the war, the Van Lews were not.[11]

Still, there is much that the series gets right. The major plot points in its narrative are based in historical fact. One such example is Van Lew’s abolitionism and relationship to the enslaved. Prior to the war, Elizabeth and her family freed their slaves, many of whom subsequently worked for the Van Lews as paid servants. One such woman was Mary Jane Richards, sometimes known as ‘Mary Bowser.’ The Van Lews had paid for Richards to be educated in Philadelphia, and during the war she served as a double agent and spy for the Richmond Underground, and later as an educator after the war. Played in The Gray House by actress Amethyst Davis, Richards was sent by Van Lew to work undercover in the Confederate White House as Varina Davis’s personal servant. The series shows that her espionage efforts were a major intelligence coup by the Richmond Underground that were ignored by Union high command initially but later proved vital to Northern victory.[12]

Elizabeth Van Lew headstone. After Elizabeth Van Lew died in 1900, wealthy relatives of Union veterans donated a boulder from Massachusetts. The epitaph on her grave in Richmond’s Shockoe Cemetery reads “She risked everything that is dear to man — friends — fortune — comfort — health — life itself—that slavery might be abolished and the Union preserved. This boulder from the Capitol Hill in Boston is a tribute from Massachusetts friends.” Photo by author.

 

Historical fiction can be a useful tool for historians. The AMC series Turn: Washington’s Spies (2014) for example covered a similar story and was well-regarded by historians for its historical accuracy while also being commercially successful.  Hollywood can do much to generate public interest in historical subjects. Flaws aside, viewers are more likely to become interested in the story of Elizabeth Van Lew and the Richmond Underground after watching The Gray House than if they had not watched it. Some viewers may seek additional information or purchase books for further reading. The challenge for historians is to educate the public to think critically about historical evidence, to accept nothing at face value, and be judicious with source material to better determine the truth and understand the real history. [13]

 

[1] Richard Roeper, “The Gray House,” review of The Gray House, directed by Roland Joffe, Amazon Prime Video, RogerEbert.com, February 24th, 2026, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gray-house-tv-review-2026; Maggie Lovitt, “The Gray House Review: Kevin Costner’s Gripping 8-Part Prime Video Miniseries is a Must-See War Drama,” review of The Gray House, dir. by Roland Joffe, Amazon Prime Video, Collider, February 24th, 2026. https://collider.com/the-gray-house-2026-review-prime-video/

[2] Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, Oxford University Press, 2003. 257; Gerri Willis, Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster, Harper Collins, 2025. 236; Virginia Lohmann Nodhturft, F.W.E. Lohmann: Elizabeth Van Lew’s Civil War Spy, Outskirts Publishing, 2019. 7; “Working Out Her Destiny: Notable Virginia Women: Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900),” Women’s History in Virginia, 1600-2004, Library of Virginia, accessed June 11th, 2026. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/exhibits/destiny/notable/vanlew.htm

[3] Varon, Spy 158; Willis, Spymaster, 226.

[4] Willis, Spymaster, 235; Nodhturft, Spy,7

[5] “Miss Van Lew Has Passed Away: The Death Yesterday of This Distinguished Old Lady-Sketch of Her Career-Her Sympathies Were with the North During the War-Other Deaths,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 26th, 1900, Richmond, Virginia, https://www.newspapers.com/image/79913899/?match=1&terms=elizabeth%20van%20lew; Nodhturft, Spy, 218; Van Lew’s support for abolitionism and unionism is believed to be the result of her education, her high social status, her love of reading, and her lack of interest in marriage and the accompanying loss of property rights to potential husbands. When her father John Van Lew died in 1843, bequeathed $10,000 to each of his children. Historian Elizabeth R. Varon notes that John Van Lew’s will stipulated that Elizabeth and her sister’s inheritances should “’be free and exempt from the control or use of any husband.’” See Varon, Spy, 21.

[6] “Recollections Told by His Daughter,” Civil War Richmond, accessed April 18, 2026. mdgorman.com/Other_Sites/mcniven_recollections.htm

[7] Civil War Richmond, “Recollections;” Van Lew, Elizabeth. “A Yankee Spy in Richmond: The Civil War Diary of ‘Crazy Bet’ Van Lew,” edited by David D. Ryan, 55; Varon, Elizabeth R. Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, Oxford University Press, 2003, 277n9

[8] Civil War Richmond, “Recollections;” “Nothin’ Like the Fourth of July,” episode one of the Amazon Prime Video series The Gray House

[9] “Exchange Hotel,” Civil War Richmond, accessed April 19, 2026 http://civilwarrichmond.com/other-sites/hotels/exchange-hotel; When Colonel Dahlgren was killed in March 1864 during an aborted raid on Richmond, Confederate soldiers and civilians desecrated his body before burying it in an unmarked grave. Agents of the Richmond Underground including F.W.E. Lohmann located the site of the burial and recovered Dahlgren’s body for temporary reburial in a safe location outside the city.

[10] “Hanging of a Spy,” Richmond Whig, April 30th, 1862, https://www.newspapers.com/image/901009459/?match=1&clipping_id=199320209; “The Execution To Day,” Richmond Dispatch, April 20th, 1862, https://www.newspapers.com/image/87273073/?match=1&terms=timothy%20webster; Varon, Spy, 75.

[11] See Willis, Spymaster, 235; Varon, Spy, 204; Neither Van Lew or her agents received payment for wartime espionage. In 1866 F.W.E. Lohmann and Charles M. Carter petitioned the War Department and received the endorsement of General Grant but Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton denied them

[12] Varon, Spy, 157.

[13]Michael Schelhammer, “AMC’s Turn: Everything Historians Need to Know,” review of Turn: Washington’s Spies, AMC Studios, Journal of the American Revolution, April 1st, 2014, https://allthingsliberty.com/2014/04/amc-turn-everything-historians-need-to-know/

 

R. Elliott Martin

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

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.

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