Category: Muster

The Mystery of William Jones, An Enslaved Man Owned by Ulysses S. Grant

The Mystery of William Jones, An Enslaved Man Owned by Ulysses S. Grant

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On March 29, 1859, Ulysses S. Grant went to the St. Louis Courthouse to attend to a pressing legal matter. That day Grant signed a manumission paper freeing William Jones, an enslaved African American man that he had previously acquired from his father-in-law, “Colonel” Frederick F. Dent. Described as being “of Mullatto [sic] complexion,” five foot seven in height, and aged about thirty-five years, Jones now faced an exciting, but arduous life journey in freedom.[1] As fate would have it, William Jones would become the last enslaved person ever owned by a U.S. president, while Ulysses S. Grant holds the strange distinction of being the last of twelve presidents in U.S. history to have been a slaveholder.

The manumission of William Jones written in Ulysses S. Grant’s handwriting on March 29, 1859. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society.

From 1854 to 1859, Grant struggled to support his family as a hardscrabble farmer in St. Louis, Missouri. During this time he grew fruits, vegetables, grains, and oats at White Haven, an 850-acre plantation that was the childhood home of his wife, Julia Dent Grant, and owned by his father-in-law. Enslaved labor did most of the work at White Haven, and at some point Grant acquired ownership of William Jones.[2] Beyond these basic facts, the relationship between Grant and Jones is riddled with ambiguity. When did Grant acquire Jones? Did he pay money for Jones, or was he a “gift” from his father-in-law? Why did Grant feel the need to acquire a slave in the first place? Why did he free him? What sort of work did Jones do for Grant and his family? What was the relationship between the two men like? Unfortunately the single primary source document for historians to analyze—the manumission paper written in Grant’s own hand—fails to convey reliable answers to these questions. Further complicating matters, Grant never mentioned Jones again in any of his existing papers or in his famed Personal Memoirs. And perhaps the biggest question looming over the entire discussion is “what happened to William Jones after he was freed?”

As an interpreter at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, I face visitor questions about William Jones on a daily basis. While I often struggle to give satisfactory answers to these questions, I have taken a great interest in trying to provide some sort of answer to the last one. After all, Jones should not exist simply as a footnote in Ulysses S. Grant’s life story (as he is so often depicted in popular Grant biographies) but as an individual with his own thoughts, experiences, and struggles both in slavery and in freedom. To that end I have endeavored over the past year to research what may have happened to Jones after his manumission. In the course of my work I have made two important, but very tenuous, discoveries about William Jones.

The first concerns where Jones may have settled once he became free. In a time before the invention of the telephone, major cities throughout the United States published city directories that listed residents’ names, home addresses, and occupation. In the course of looking through the 1860 St. Louis city directory online I found a listing for “Jones William (Col’d)” in the directory. His listing states that he worked as a horse driver and was living at rear 100 Myrtle Street, which was very close to the St. Louis riverfront and is now part of the grounds at Gateway Arch National Park. (“Rear” refers to an outbuilding or small home in a back alley.) Further research in the directory found that Jones was living with five other free people of color in the same house, while a man named Herman Charles who worked in the furniture business was living at the main home. He was most likely renting out the rear home to Jones and his cohorts.[3]

A screenshot of the William Jones listing in the 1860 St. Louis City Directory. Photo Courtesy of Rollanet.

Does this listing represent the same William Jones that was freed by Ulysses S. Grant? Unfortunately, there is no listing in the 1860 federal census for a William Jones of African American descent living in downtown St. Louis. On the one hand, it was common—both then and now—for census-takers to miss residents during the surveying process.[4] Moreover, it is entirely plausible that Jones would have opted to stay in St. Louis. Only two percent of the city’s population was enslaved by 1860, and a small but thriving community of 1,500 free blacks lived and worked in St. Louis as barbers, blacksmiths, cooks, dockworkers, hotel and restaurant workers, and laborers.[5] Where else would Jones have been able to quickly settle and start working, especially if he had any other family to support? St. Louis may have been his best option at the time. On the other hand, a census listing would have confirmed the age of the William Jones listed in the directory and helped confirm if he was the same person previously owned by Grant. That “William Jones” is such a common name further complicates matters. Without a census record the city directory listing is therefore compelling but inconclusive.

A map of St. Louis in 1857. The red square notes where 100 Myrtle Street was located at the time. Today it is part of the grounds at Gateway Arch National Park. Photo courtesy of the author.

The second insight concerns court records from the St. Louis Courthouse. On May 6, 1861, the court records indicate that a “William Jones (Col’d)” was arrested with several other free blacks for not having their freedom papers. Like other slave states throughout the South, Missouri law assumed that African Americans were enslaved unless proven otherwise. When African Americans received their freedom in Missouri, they were required to apply for a “freedom license,” post a bond between 100 dollars and 1,000 dollars, and demonstrate to the court that they were “of good character and behavior, and capable of supporting [themselves] by lawful employment.”[6] Sometimes a benevolent slaveholder would pay the bond, but often the person being freed was held responsible. Grant’s financial troubles while living in St. Louis would have most likely prevented him from posting Jones’s bond in 1859. In any case, the William Jones arrested in 1861 was publicly whipped on the steps of the courthouse for his indiscretion and ordered to leave Missouri within three days. Gateway Arch National Park Historian Bob Moore originally found this court record and stated in an email to staff at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site that he believes it was the same William Jones that was freed by Grant, but nevertheless staff at both sites recognize that the evidence once again cannot fully corroborate the claim one way or the other.[7]

Other research I conducted proved frustrating and led to dead ends. I looked at the military records of more than 250 black soldiers named “William Jones” who served in United States Colored Infantry units during the Civil War without finding one who matched the description for height, complexion, and age listed in the 1859 manumission paper. Likewise, while there are multiple listings for “William Jones (Col’d)” in St. Louis City Directories from 1861 to 1865, it is nearly impossible to confirm if they are the same one previously listed in 1860. Furthermore, there is no William Jones of African American descent listed in the 1870 federal census for St. Louis. My research continues in earnest, but like many enslaved African Americans, the story of William Jones’s life in freedom is shrouded in mystery. As Fredrick Douglass once stated, “genealogical tress [sic] do not flourish among slaves.”[8]

Where else should I look for information on William Jones? What research have you done on enslaved African Americans and their transition to freedom? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.

 

 

[1] The original manumission paper is housed at the Missouri Historical Society. A transcription of the document is located in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Volume 1:1837-1861 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), 347.

[2] National Park Service, “Slavery at White Haven,” Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, April 2, 2018, accessed October 26, 2018, https://www.nps.gov/ulsg/learn/historyculture/slaveryatwh.htm.

[3] “Kennedy’s 1860 St. Louis City Directory,” Rollanet, 2007, accessed October 24, 2018, https://www.rollanet.org/~bdoerr/1860CyDir/1860CD-J.htm#J.

[4] Pew Research Center, “Imputation: Adding People to the Census,” Pew Research Center, May 4, 2011, accessed October 20, 2018, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/05/04/imputation-adding-people-to-the-census/.

[5] National Park Service, “African-American Life in St. Louis, 1804-1865,” Gateway Arch National Park, 2018, accessed October 26, 2018, https://www.nps.gov/jeff/learn/historyculture/african-american-life-in-saint-louis-1804-through-1865.htm; Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, Revised Edition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993).

[6] The mention of William Jones is in the St. Louis County Record Book 10, “May 6, 1861,” 333, Gateway Arch National Park Archives, St. Louis; Ebony Jenkins, “Freedom Licenses in St. Louis City and County, 1835-1865,” Gateway Arch National Park, 2008, accessed October 26, 2018, https://www.nps.gov/jeff/learn/historyculture/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=3120173; Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

[7] Robert Moore, email to Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site Staff, November 10, 2017.

[8] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, 1855), 34.

Nick Sacco

NICK SACCO is a public historian and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in History with a concentration in Public History from IUPUI (2014). In the past he has worked for the National Council on Public History, the Indiana State House, the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and as a teaching assistant in both middle and high school settings. Nick recently had a journal article about Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with slavery published in the September 2019 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He has written several other journal articles, digital essays, and book reviews for a range of publications, including the Indiana Magazine of History, The Confluence, The Civil War Monitor, Emerging Civil War, History@Work, AASLH, and Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He also blogs regularly about history at his personal website, Exploring the Past. You can contact Nick at PastExplore@gmail.com.

Editor’s Note: December 2018 Issue

Editor’s Note: December 2018 Issue

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We are pleased to present the editor’s note for our December 2018 issue, chock full of fascinating articles. To subscribe, please visit our subscriptions page.

This issue features essays on the political and social contexts of the sectional crisis, looking carefully at what Americans read and how they voted—and for whom and why—and situates the crisis squarely in a transatlantic context. Readers will find essays that push us to think again about the Civil War’s outcome, with an essay that uncovers the science of racial difference as it was being made in U.S. Army hospitals and another that nudges us to reconsider how we tell the story of the end of slavery.

Timothy Williams examines the reading habits of young men and women of the American South, finding that elite white southerners who came of age during the war turned to reading as escape, as a way to express their autonomy, and both as a means of self-expression and marking their group identity. In their diaries and letters, young southerners kept track of their reading, recommended good books and regretted time spent reading others, thought about what their reading meant to their senses of themselves as men and women, and established habits that defined them less, perhaps, as uniquely southern but as members of a generation. Once established, these reading habits proved hard to break; young readers carried them through the war and beyond.

Where Williams’s subjects read books Joshua Lynn’s read bodies—the body of presidential candidate, James Buchanan, in particular. Lynn shows how Democrats turned Buchanan’s bachelorhood into an asset. Pitted against the marital state of Jesse Frémont’s husband in the 1856 election, Buchanan’s bachelorhood became very much a political issue, with Republicans questioning his credentials and disparaging his manhood. Democrats touted Buchanan as a candidate who could temper northern radicalism like he controlled his sexual urges; his “portly” sixty-five-year-old frame embodied principles northern and southern men could embrace. As a “manly dough face,” candidate Buchanan had a body that was round, pure, and adroitly intersectional. President Buchanan’s liminality caused problems among his former defenders, who found their man naïve or, worse, dangerously unprincipled.

Joseph Murphy’s essay traces the history of an “antislavery nationalism” in the North. Exploring the critical period from Britain’s 1833 Emancipation Act to the 1842 U.S. Supreme Court Decision, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Murphy notes how American jurists sought to reconcile American law, based on the law of nations, with the dramatic and abrupt changes wrought to the latter by Britain’s “war on slavery.” The debate about how to adjust to this new global reality took place in courtrooms where lawyers argued a number of cases involving American slave trading ships captured–or diverted due to rebellion–in national and international waters; each case raised questions about the security of “slave property” on the high seas and in the Constitution. For those seeking to draw a straight line from the Prigg decision that nullified states’ personal liberty laws to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Murphy’s essay challenges us to see in the decision’s denial of “a constitutional right to slave property” the seeds of an antislavery nationalism, nurtured in the transatlantic crosswinds during this crucial decade. Among the legacies of this antislavery nationalism, Murphy contends, are the principles of equality enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Among the legacies of the United States Sanitary Commission was scientific racism. Although historians have rendered the story of the Commission as one of progress—progress toward medical modernity, progress toward gender equality, et cetera—they have not examined the commission’s role in advancing the science of race and racism. Leslie Schwalm’s essay indicates that the commission’s purposes were never limited to providing supplies and medical care to injured and ill U.S. Army soldiers. Guided by leaders such as Henry Bellows and Frederick Law Olmsted, the Commission aimed to amass “a body of ‘truly scientific work’” that would “document the belief that people of African descent constituted an indisputably inferior race.” Commission doctors turned their unprecedented access to black bodies—the men of the U. S. Colored Troops—into an opportunity to gather data that could be used to document and perpetuate their racial views. Perhaps Schwalm’s most devastating conclusion is that hundreds of thousands of USCT soldiers who enlisted in a war to end slavery, once measured, weighed, and examined by Commission doctors, were drafted to “a massive effort to ensure that racial ideologies would endure slavery’s destruction.”  This essay will change the way we think about the Commission and its “humanitarian” work.

Erik Mathisen rounds out this issue with a review essay that identifies the key points of overlap in the scholarship on slavery and capitalism and on “the second slavery,” a term associated with the nineteenth-century expansion of slavery, and to point out the questions that remain. This scholarship has established slavery’s role in the development of capitalism—and vice versa—and has helped scholars of the U.S. Civil War explain the coming of the war. Scholars of second slavery have focused far less attention on the war and its aftermath. And, importantly, because this scholarship links the prerogatives of capitalism to a continuum of coerced labor, “emancipation in the United States looks less like a turning point and more like a moment of consolidation in the broader Atlantic history of labor.” In this flattened out account of the nineteenth century, what, Mathisen asks, is left of the effort to tell the history of emancipation as the result of human agency?

Judy Giesberg

Judith Giesberg holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities and is Professor of History at Villanova University. Giesberg directs a digital project, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, that is collecting, digitizing, and transcribing information wanted ads taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for family members lost to the domestic slave trade.

Shaping Public Remembrances of Abolition and Emancipation: Memory in the Post-Emancipation Era at the 2018 SHA

Shaping Public Remembrances of Abolition and Emancipation: Memory in the Post-Emancipation Era at the 2018 SHA

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Today we share the last of our conference reports on the November 2018 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held in Birmingham. Thank you for following along with us as these four reporters shared details about these fascinating and thought-provoking panels.

When one attempts to explain to non-historians that their high school knowledge about the American Civil War and Reconstruction was not a simple recounting of facts, but instead the product of subsequent eras of remembrance and silencing shaped by political exigencies, one comes to appreciate in a very real way the compelling power of myth and memory. My audience is not usually undergraduates. As an historian of institutional history, it is more often administrators, board members, and alumni who themselves are shaping a contemporary political narrative in intentional and unintentional ways.

A panel on “Memories and Commemorations of Abolition in the Post-Emancipation Era” at the 2018 Southern Historical Association annual meeting offered some new perspectives on how myths and historical narratives serve the time in which they are invoked, politically and personally. The three panelists focused on events some fifty years after Civil War and Reconstruction. Whether it was disagreements in Richmond over the meaning of emancipation, stories that ex-Confederate soldiers used to justify a pension application, or comparisons to the end of serfdom in Russia–a nearly contemporaneous event–these papers offered a glimpse into the moment of public debate and the contest over popular memory between the races and between generations.

In “The Greatest Exposition Ever: Black Richmonders and the 1915 Emancipation Exposition,” Hilary Green, associate professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama, focused on how African Americans remembered and commemorated the American Civil War and its legacy. In 1915, the city of Richmond prepared to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation with a Great Exposition that would showcase the city’s progress in uplift and racial relations. The planning committee chair, Giles B. Jackson, had been born enslaved and was a proponent of Booker T. Washington’s ideals of racial uplift. Jackson was determined to demonstrate the successes of his race and to challenge the increasingly pervasive Lost Cause myth of white supremacy. The exposition ultimately failed, despite Jackson’s ability to secure the endorsements of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and Virginia governor Henry Stuart.

Part of the opposition to Jackson’s plans, Green told the audience, came from a younger generation of African Americans. With no direct experience of slavery or emancipation, they found more appeal in the work of Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson and the Association’s other co-founders shaped a different narrative of emancipation, one that placed it within a greater history of African achievements through centuries, and which foregrounded the agency of African Americans.

Conflicts over identity played out in other arenas as well. Once former Confederates had regained political power in North Carolina in 1901, they carried out a campaign promise to loosen the requirements for pensions for Confederate veterans. In “The Lying Cause: Falsehoods, Exaggerations, and White Supremacy in Lost Cause Memory,” Adam Domby, assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston, focused on the stories told by pension applicants. Domby’s deep research into the pension narratives and additional records revealed that men sometimes exaggerated and lied about their wartime service in order to be approved. Some applicants asserted that they had served throughout the war, for example, when in fact they had deserted after a few months. Some claimed to have been fervent Confederates when they had been active Unionists, erasing the memory of that past to present a face of united loyalty to the state. Some men, who deserted the Confederate cause and later fought on the Union side, applied for both pensions. Financial need aside, Domby argues that other motivations for this behavior included the desire to be seen as a loyal Confederate in a society that increasingly embraced the Lost Cause narrative. This assertion is reinforced by the fact that pension applications that challenged this myth were often rejected. In erasing and rewriting their own history, Domby observed, pensioners inadvertently reinforced the Lost Cause myth, erasing the history of internal dissension over the war.

At the same time as Americans re-wrote and re-remembered their own history of abolition and emancipation, they compared themselves to a similar narrative–that of the abolition of serfdom in Russia. In “Commemorations of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom on the Fiftieth Anniversaries of Abolition,” Amanda Brickell Bellows, adjunct assistant professor at the New School, shared some of the parallels and contrasts between the two moments in 1911 and 1913, respectively. Despite the differences between the two events, both nations remembered parallels–the subsequent assassination of both leaders, the impulse to see both as progress towards modernization, and the disagreement over the relative success of each endeavor. Bellows explained that Vladimir Lenin depicted the end of serfdom as a failed revolution, one that had not gone far enough and had only succeeded in enslaving serfs in a new kind of forced labor. The parallels to the United States and the failure of Reconstruction, Bellows argued, was in the ways that African Americans at the same time contested the meaning of emancipation and the Lost Cause narrative, likewise pointing out the lack of advancement toward full equal rights.

Barbara Gannon, associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, introduced the topic and the panelists. Comments came from Karen Cox, professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and Ethan Kytle, professor of history at California State University-Fresno. Drawing on their own scholarship in memory and popular culture, they provided useful observations and challenging questions for the panelists.

Cox asked Bellows to consider how, despite the commonalities between the American and Russian narratives, if it was possible that one was more about class and the other more about race. For Domby’s pensioners, she posed the question of the accuracy of memory some fifty years after the fact, and suggested he consider the possibility that the popular narrative had reshaped personal memories, so that these narratives do not so much shape memory as reflect it. Green’s generational divide among African Americans, Cox posited, might have also showed a tension between northern and southern black experiences and political interests.

Kytle (in comments read by his colleague Blain Roberts, professor of history at California State University-Fresno) noted that Domby’s work with pension narratives offers fresh insight, but wondered if narratives were publicly available at the time. Domby noted that pension stories were published in obituaries and other newspaper accounts, and that family and neighbors would been familiar with them. In Green’s description of the conflicts over planning the 1915 Exposition, Kytle saw the limits of the emancipationist tradition and how Woodson’s emerging narrative offered a broader way for African Americans to think about a shared cultural past. For Bellows’s paper, he asked the author to consider more differences between the two ways of commemoration.

Kytle, Gannon, and Cox all emphasized the importance of this work. There is much to learn about Civil War memory and the panelists’ scholarship shows the interest in and dynamism of the field of memory studies. All of these papers are based on forthcoming books. The panelists are informed by the rich body of scholarship that precedes them, including the work of Gannon, Cox, Kytle, and Roberts. Their work is also timely in real ways. What I wish for when I talk with administrators and alumni is for them to understand that the Lost Cause myth was never settled, always contested, and is often revised to fit the moment. Sometimes, great myths serve to justify great injustices. Within the field, scholars continue to debate and explore critical questions of remembrance, public commemoration, and political power. As was shown by the attendance for this panel, their work will continue to attract the attention of multiple audiences.

 

 

 

 

Cecelia Moore

Cecelia Moore is University Historian and Project Manager for the Chancellor’s Task Force on University History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama (Lexington Books, 2017), and co-author of UNC A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina Press, expected 2019).

Defining Defeat and Redefining the Lost Cause: An SHA Panel Recap

Defining Defeat and Redefining the Lost Cause: An SHA Panel Recap

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Today, the Lost Cause is rarely far from historians’ minds. Headlines of Confederate monuments coming down compete for space with stories of southern lawmakers proposing monuments to black Confederates. States are finally rewriting their curriculum to address slavery’s central role in the causation of the Civil War, while reality TV stars are vowing to plant Confederate flags in all fifty states. Many scholars find it daunting to combat such a firmly entrenched version of the past—especially one that celebrates a heroic South defending individual freedoms and states’ rights against great odds. Others have boldly taken to social media and the written word to correct these mistruths. Amidst such valiant efforts a question emerges: are we oversimplifying things by casting ex-Confederates as a monolithic group?

In truth, the Lost Cause manifested itself in numerous ways—as several stalwart scholars learned when they woke up early on a Sunday morning to hear one of the final Civil War era panels at the SHA. Collectively, the papers of “Defining Defeat: Three Approaches to Making Sense of Loss and the Confederate Experience,” revealed that there was no single iteration of the Lost Cause. Instead, they suggested—as chair and commentator Anne Sarah Rubin (University of Maryland- Baltimore County) clarified—that when the war ended and the guns silenced, few Confederates considered themselves defeated. The former rebels found a variety of political, social, and cultural ways to cope with their loss, give meaning to their resentment, and highlight their resistance to Reconstruction. In this way, the Lost Cause was malleable and a reflection of “reactionary pragmatism,” according to fellow commentator Peter S. Carmichael (Gettysburg College).

The all-female panel commenced with Amy Fluker’s (Youngstown State University) “‘We Too Bear the Confederate Name’: The Lost Cause and Missouri’s Contested Civil War Memory,” a preview of her forthcoming book Commonwealth of Compromise: Missouri, the West, and Civil War Memory under contract with University of Missouri Press. Fluker opened with a scene from a September 1889 GAR reunion in Cassville, Missouri, where Union veterans “distastefully” sang “John Brown’s Body,” including its verse about hanging Jefferson Davis from a sour apple tree, for local Confederate veterans they had invited to attend. Such events reflected the complicated and competing commemorative narratives of post-war Missouri. There, former Confederate sympathizers faced unique hardships in their efforts to reconcile their defeat. Because of their divided loyalties and the ineligibility of state guard members and guerrillas to join the United Confederate Veterans, Missourians proved not Confederate enough for most Lost Cause champions. Missourians, therefore, cast themselves as martyrs: their failure to secede was due to uncontrollable circumstances and their commitment to the rebel cause never wavered. They reminded their eastern counterparts that Missouri blood had flowed like water and many Missourians bore the title of Confederate veteran. Ultimately, Fluker reminded us that the geography of the Lost Cause was not limited to the eleven states of the Confederacy, since Missouri actively participated in the contested commemorative terrain of the Lost Cause.

While Fluker’s study explored the complicated local landscape of the Lost Cause, Ann L. Tucker (University of North Georgia) broadened her focus to the international perspective. Her paper “Internationalizing Loss: Former Confederates’ International Perspectives on Defeat”—an initial stab at a new project—continues the global focus of her first book, Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of Southern Nationhood, 1820-1865, forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. According to Tucker, former Confederates contextualized their defeat by looking at the experiences, failed attempts, and political subjugation of Ireland, Hungary, and Poland. In this way, they simultaneously redefined themselves while anticipating the oppression that the United States was sure to inflict on them during Reconstruction. Southern nationalism may have failed but the former Confederates did not consider themselves reunited Americans. Instead, they found solace in their defeat by comparing their suffering to other nations and knowing that they were not exceptional in their failures. This prompted ex-Confederates to shift the blame for the war’s cause to the Union, adopt the Lost Cause, cast the Republican government as despotic, and articulate specific oppressions they anticipated enduring: loss of self-government, loss of suffrage, and loss of white supremacy. Ultimately, former Confederates absolved themselves of culpability and cast themselves as victims; they lost the war because the other civilized nations of the world had abandoned them and their virtuous cause.

The panel ended on a humorous note when Sarah K. Bowman (Columbus State University) explored the South’s comedic coping mechanism against perceived and real oppressions. Her piece, “The Pleasures of Satire: A New Perspective on the Emotion of Defeat,” explained how the defeated South rejected the changes of Reconstruction via hostility and satire— casting the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen as villains, carnival attractions, or comic characters that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Incorporating entertaining anecdotes from poems, plays, visual culture, balls, and political events, Bowman recounted the racist mockery that former Confederates embraced as they lampooned black politicians, satirized the new Republican governments, and recast Reconstruction as a grand farce. The timing of such satire was important as the South sought to get the last linguistic laugh. According to Bowman, Southern humor reached its pinnacle just as the Reconstruction Conventions were meeting to reinstate the former Confederate states and invite African Americans to full political participation. Interestingly, some convention delegates attended the very plays and balls that undermined their efforts and cast them as circus animals. In this context, humor became an effective way to mask fears allowing the South to denigrate change, delegitimize Reconstruction, and ultimately seek revenge against their oppressors. In this way, the former Confederacy rejected their defeat and victimization by reasserting their dominance, affirming their masculinity, and claiming victory over the reconstruction process.

Taken together, these three excellent papers offer nuanced insight into the complicated construction of the Lost Cause. Whether understood locally or internationally, former Confederates utilized a variety of tactics to cope with, interpret, and explain away their defeat. Through humor, global comparisons, and self-constructed narratives, white Southerners crafted the Lost Cause to dig themselves out of the dark hole of Reconstruction. In the process, they crafted a multifaceted and adaptive Lost Cause that we are still unpacking today.

 

 

Laura June Davis

Laura June Davis is an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Utah University. She earned masters degrees from George Mason University and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi before receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2016. Her research and teaching focus on 19th century gender, military, naval, and African American history. She is currently working on a manuscript about Confederate boat burners, sabotage, and naval guerrilla warfare on the Mississippi River. A preview of her work can be found in The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War edited by Brian D. McKnight Barton A. Myers (LSU Press, 2017).

Spatial Roots, Lawsuits, and Leisurely Pursuits: A SHA 2018 Recap

Spatial Roots, Lawsuits, and Leisurely Pursuits: A SHA 2018 Recap

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Morning panels on the last day of conferences can be difficult. But a Sunday morning panel at the SHA 2018 Annual Meeting offered refreshing perspectives on Reconstruction Studies scholarship. The three panelists of “Emancipationist Memory and Radical Dreams of Freedom: New Directions in African American History of the Reconstruction Era” epitomized the benefits of closing out a wonderful conference. With the sesquicentennial celebration underway, Nicole Myers Turner (Virginia Commonwealth University), Giuliana Perrone (UC-Santa Barbara), and Caitlin Verboon (Virginia Tech) demonstrate that Reconstruction Studies as a field offers critical questions and insights for the current political moment. This post attempts to answer the broad questions raised during Carol Emberton’s comments–where does their work fit in the current historiography? Which specific conversations are the authors entering?

Nicole Myers Turner’s paper explores the role of black Baptist networks in shaping African American political identity in Virginia. Her paper enters the scholarly conversations defined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, James M. Washington, and others for understanding postwar African American religious developments, and it extends the Reconstruction-era chronological frame by including the Readjusters as defined by Jane Dailey and others.[1]

By digitally mapping black Baptist networks in Virginia, Turner renders visible the spatial roots of African American Baptists’ political influence. This fresh perspective reveals how religious networks converged with political gains. She cites the petition of Virginia students who despite attending Howard University, expected William Mahone, former Confederate general and Readjuster political leader, to provide a patronage position to their African American professor as a condition of their electoral support. By 1883, these African American Baptists held political sway and applied their networks accordingly for the extension of Reconstruction-era patronage.

Prof. John Mercer Langston, Howard University. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Though not fully appreciating the breadth and depth of these spatial roots, Mahone tapped into Baptist networks by using a circular to canvass for their support. Here, Turner’s use of digital mapping reveals that the robust African American religious networks replicated the political networks necessary for Readjuster success. Mahone’s lack of appreciation of these networks was exposed during John Mercer Langston’s 1888 campaign to become U.S. House representative of the Virginia Congressional Fourth district. Although initially losing to Edward Venable, Langston successfully contested the election and was seated in 1889. His success revealed the strength of black churches and political networks in drawing on older efforts.

The combination of the Howard University students’ petition, Mahone’s canvas circular, and Langston’s successful U.S. House campaign convincingly shows that the “Black Baptist Church held the soul of the nation.” Based on this brief paper, her forthcoming larger work on black Baptist education, and political and religious networks, will definitely be a valuable addition to Reconstruction Studies.

Giuliana Perrone’s “Claiming Freedom: Black Litigants in Post-Emancipation Southern Courts” enters the conversation recently shaped by Sharon Romeo, Melissa Milewski, and Martha Jones.[2] She differs from these legal scholars by seeing judicial opinions as evidence of the preservation and stretching of jurisprudence and not as a revolutionary Reconstruction-era gain. Rather, Perrone emphasizes the role of judges and the burden placed on African American litigants by examining three specific cases of apprenticeship, marriage, and child legitimacy.

As noted by Wilma King and Catherine Jones, former Confederate states employed its apprenticeship laws for restricting African American parental claims and often directly affecting the most vulnerable members of their families.[3] The 1867 Ambrose v. Russel ruling eviscerated portions but not all of North Carolina apprenticeship laws. Perone contends that the ruling merely stretched–without radically dismantling–antebellum jurisprudence. In other words, the Reconstruction Era judiciary extended due process previously afforded to free black North Carolinians to include newly freed African Americans. This is a novel interpretation but one that needs further clarification as suggested by Emberton’s insightful question–“what would a revolutionary judicial opinion look like in this specific example?” Since judicial opinions did not exist in a vacuum, her paper, even if not intentionally, raises another question for future interrogation: what was the lived consequences of jurisprudence on post-emancipation African American children whose lives remained bound to adult decisions, whether their parents, former enslavers, lawyers, and/or appellate judges? Here Perrone’s larger work has the opportunity to bridge legal studies and childhood studies in this example.

The next two examples demonstrate the promise of Perrone’s larger work. The second example explored a legitimacy case between an African American widow and her white husband’s extended family in a Shreveport, Louisiana estate dispute. Despite taking precautions of a postwar Catholic Church marriage and baptism of children born before emancipation, her husband’s extended family contested her and her children’s inheritance rights. The judicial opinion cited the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and Louisiana law sanctioning interracial marriage as eliminating previous disabilities. Thus, the judge applied both federal and state law evenly and not in a revolutionary act. In this regard, Perrone agrees with Mileweski who emphasizes the role of judges in shaping the courts, which now included former enslaved individuals as both litigants and appellants for the defining of postwar citizenship rights. Her last example explored a Kentucky ruling where Julia Martin’s child was ruled as illegitimate because her marriage did not survive the transition into freedom. This continuing disability affected both mother and child and placed an incredible burden on the Martin household. Overall, Perrone’s paper demonstrates the need for further contemplation over the radical (or not) of the Reconstruction-era judiciary.

“The Grand Lay-Out,” c. 1874. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Lastly, Caitlin Verboon explores the circus and leisure activities as tools for defining and redefining notions of race, freedom, and citizenship in “Public Leisure: Black and White Social Life in the Reconstruction-Era South.” Circuses were open to all crowds, including vice along the edges. She shows how “pleasure was political” and deepens the work of David Goldberg and Victoria Wolcott.[4]

The circus functioned as an important site for making and remaking postwar society. Some southern newspapers criticized African Americans for their lack of thrift by spending money at the circus and therefore demonstrating their unfitness for freedom. Some white southerners even employed African Americans’ enjoyment of the circus as justification for denying them the right to participate in state militias. Simply put, the circus allowed for the advancement of white supremacy. In contrast, African Americans actively defended going to the circus as a right of citizenship. Here, they claimed the circus as an emancipatory space and in turn, leisure as a right of citizenship. Some even appealed directly to the Freedmen’s Bureau when their admission was denied. Foretelling later African American struggles for leisurely pursuits, Verboon is astute in her analysis.

Verboon concludes with a discussion of racial incident at a Baton Rouge circus show to demonstrate the competing arguments for and against a racially-inclusive democratic society. By focusing on one racial incident depicted in three different accounts, she sheds light onto how vice occurring at the edges, and how the murder of a circus performer galvanized opposition toward the social-leveling possibilities found at the circus. After taking panel attendees to the circus, her paper raises questions about which other sites of leisure provided similar opportunities and even the role of African Americans’ politics of respectability in either advancing or stifling leisure as a right of citizenship during and after Reconstruction.

By exploring spatial roots, lawsuits, and leisurely pursuits, these three papers demonstrate the rewards of expanding the temporal, spatial, and intersectional boundaries of Reconstruction Studies as a field. Turner, Perrone, and Verboon not only engage with “unfamiliar and uncomfortable ground,” but in so doing, remind us that the legacy of the Reconstruction Era matters politically, legally, and socially in the present moment.[5] These forthcoming larger projects will add both vitality and depth of the current field.

 

[1] Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986); Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[2] Sharon Romeo, Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri (Athens: University of Georgia, 2016); Melissa Milewski, Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[3] Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteen Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Catherine A. Jones, Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

[4] David E. Goldberg, The Retreats of Reconstruction: Race, Leisure, and the Politics of Segregation at the New Jersey Shore, 1865-1920 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Victoria W. Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

[5] Luke E. Harlow, “Introduction: The Future of Reconstruction Studies,” Journal of Civil War Era 7 (March 2017): 4-5.

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

War Trauma and the American Civil War: A Roundtable Discussion

War Trauma and the American Civil War: A Roundtable Discussion

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Today we share the first in our series of panel reports on the recent Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Birmingham, Alabama. There were a number of timely Civil War era panels that we are excited to share with readers. Follow along the rest of this week!

As Diane Miller Sommerville (SUNY-Binghamton) pointed out in her opening remarks, Americans today all have some familiarity with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or the idea that traumatic events can have lasting effects on the people who experience them. In the historical profession, more scholars are researching the effects of the Civil War on those who fought or experienced it, in the context of veterans’ studies, medical history, or soldier experience. Set in a roundtable format, these roundtable panelists at the Southern Historical Association’s 2018 meeting in Birmingham fostered for a meaningful discussion on this scholarship, the opportunities present, and the challenges of pursuing this type of research.

At the outset of the session, each panelist had about five minutes to present remarks to open the discussion. Dillon Carroll (Independent Scholar) introduced a brief historiography of the topic of Civil War trauma studies and how recent scholarship is moving toward what some historians call the “dark turn.” He acknowledged the pushback that these studies have sometimes received, with claims that historians are imposing modern views on the past and interpreting history in a way vastly different than the historical actors would have. To move past that dilemma, Carroll offered some thoughts to open the discussion: Are there alternative ways to interpret trauma in Civil War veterans, such as recurring dreams, that we can use to make connections to our understandings of trauma? How did Civil War veterans themselves see and cope with this trauma? How was the African-American experience of trauma similar to or different from other soldiers?

Matthew Hulbert (Texas A&M University—Kingsville) approached the topic from the angle of irregular or guerrilla warfare, asking how different types of violence created different types of trauma and if that trauma manifested in similar or different ways. He also asked how violence that was considered legitimate versus illegitimate might affect the ways men coped with their experiences; for example, the presence of women and children in the spaces where guerrilla fighting occurred, or the inability to separate the homefront from the warfront, since guerrilla violence occurred within communities. Hulbert also asked questions about the point of transition from when men needed certain skills to survive in war to when those skills became “symptoms” in civilian life. His last question was how the element of trust affected the transition from warfront to homefront; in war, soldiers build relationships of trust with comrades to cope and survive, but when returning home, family is suddenly not in that circle of trust.

Angela Riotto (Army University Press) invited the audience to look past questions of how trauma manifested or how men coped, to look at trauma as an experience in itself. Based on her research about Civil War POWs, Riotto suggested looking at how veterans used their trauma as a marker of their experience and in comparison to the experiences of other soldiers. In her research she saw veterans compare their experiences to one another, ranking their trauma. Historians need to focus on what the sources and historical actors tell us, and in her research the veterans could not find the precise words to describe their trauma. They simply wanted that trauma to be recognized as part of their sacrifice for their nation. She invited historians to look past arguments of terminology and look at how the soldiers and veterans themselves utilized their traumatic experiences to claim a place in the wider story of the war.

Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh (United States Naval Academy) was the dissenting voice on the panel, pushing back on the idea of seeing psychological trauma in the past. He argued that much of our modern understanding of psychological trauma is based on the idea that humans do not want to kill one another, and that when they are forced into an environment of war, this causes trauma. Hsieh said that there is little historical evidence to prove that people did not want to kill, and psychology is problematic to apply to our own time, let alone applying it to the past. He also pointed out that many psychological categories are based on power structures and ideas about proper social behavior which can affect our understanding of trauma.

The discussion that followed these opening remarks was a mixture of questions to further the field of inquiry, and support or opposition to the use of trauma as a lens of study. A few audience members offered thoughts that questioned the use of trauma to study Civil War experiences. One offered the examples of a few studies on Vietnam that suggested PTSD rates were much lower in those soldiers than previously assumed. He asked about overblowing the rate of trauma in the Civil War and suggested the dangers of presentism. Another historian asked about the idea that rates of trauma were under reported in the contemporary records of soldiers; his point being that we cannot know the rates are under reported if there is no data for comparison. This echoed the previous question about overestimating the rates of trauma. A third comment challenged the idea that nineteenth-century brains were the same physically as our modern brains (and thus we cannot use how modern brains experience trauma or cope as comparison) and warned against the practice of diagnosing backwards in history. These were in line with the opinions of Hsieh, who acknowledged the suffering of soldiers, but did not like applying the term “trauma” to their experiences.

Some members of the audience countered Hsieh’s opinions. Lesley Gordon asked him to offer historical examples of men who liked killing and challenged the idea that studying trauma is presentism. Anne Rubin noted that these experiences were not binary—you either had trauma or did not—and that historians can note and support the idea that war changed people, even those who kept their lives together as veterans. Megan Kate Nelson said that she was tired of the presentism argument against this type of research because it suggests that historians either do not have a sense of change over time or that they have some sort of agenda. Historians study what happens in history, but we also want to know why things happened; why should we limit our analytical tools, if modern knowledge can help us?

Besides the back-and-forth about the validity and challenges of the topic, a few audience questions offered ideas for ways this research can expand our understanding of the Civil War experience. One historian asked how previous experiences with death, blood, or conflict impacted a soldier’s response to the traumatic experiences of war, and another asked about the use of alcohol among soldiers and veterans as a coping mechanism. Another question was how those in civilian communities recognized the effects of war or trauma on the soldiers and how social organizations set up to help veterans defined this change or tried to help. Similarly, there was a question on whether civilians who experienced aspects of the war might also show manifestations of trauma. A final comparative question asked how the Civil War affected its soldiers in comparison to other conflicts. These questions offer additional routes of scholarship to look at the idea of trauma in the Civil War, and in their final comments the panelists suggested ways to advance this research while also taking the necessary caution to avoid presentism.

Kathleen Logothetis Thompson

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and universities and leads tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse, a blog on the long Civil War.

Author Interview: Bradley Proctor

Author Interview: Bradley Proctor

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Today we share an interview with Bradley Proctor, who published an article in our September 2018 issue, “‘The K.K. Alphabet’: Secret Communication and Coordination of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas.” Bradley Proctor is a member of the faculty at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Originally from St. Louis, he has a B.A. in history from Bates College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is completing a book manuscript on the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction in North and South Carolina. Before teaching at Evergreen, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.

Thanks for participating in this interview, Brad. How did you get interested in the history of the KKK, and how did this project come to be?

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I became interested in the Ku Klux Klan because of a larger interest in racial oppression and racial equality in the United States after the Civil War. It has always struck me that Reconstruction brought an opportunity for something like real racial equality, at least in terms of political and civil rights. But by the turn of the twentieth century, white southern racists had constructed a whole new system of racial oppression with Jim Crow. I remain very interested in that wider history. Why did white southerners create a whole new system of racial oppression when afforded the opportunity to have a more equitable society? That question of why became entangled with a question about how. Obviously racial violence was a major way white southerners asserted white supremacy after emancipation—arguably the most significant way—and the KKK was responsible for some of the most awful and widespread racial violence in the South. So I wrote my dissertation on how the violence of the KKK worked to reshape racial oppression after emancipation. This article grew out of that dissertation research.

Many of our readers have read your article in our September 2018 issue, but we also have readers who do not subscribe to the journal. Can you briefly summarize the focus and argument of your article?

The article is about a coded letter I discovered in the archives of the South Caroliniana Library in Columbia, South Carolina. Technically it is written in a cipher, not a code, as I soon learned the difference. I was able to decipher the letter because I found a key to the cipher in a book about the Klan in Tennessee, and it turns out that the letter was from a Klansman in North Carolina to his brother in South Carolina about the method of organizing Klan dens. From the bulk of the existing secondary literature, I had gotten the impression that Klan groups had no connections across state lines whatsoever, and that Klan groups were created locally, organically without any connection to the original group in Pulaski, Tennessee. All of a sudden this ciphered letter opened up a world of cross-state Klan organizing I hadn’t even thought existed. It caused me to read other sources in different ways. This article explores the story of the two brothers connected by the letter as a way for us to reassess how organized and connected the Klan was during Reconstruction.

As you say here, and again in the article itself, “this ciphered letter is an exceptional and unusual source” (460). Taking one source and parsing it, and placing it in appropriate context, must have been a fascinating—though challenging—experience. Could you talk a little about other primary sources and secondary sources you used to make sense of this cipher? In other words, how did you approach this research?

The ciphered letter was in an archival collection for Iredell Jones, the recipient of the letter. Jones kept a lot of other documents, including two orders from other Klan officers and a membership roll for his chapter of what they called the “Chester Conservative Clan”—obviously part of the KKK. So those documents provided more direct, immediate context for the ciphered letter. There was also a lot of correspondence to and from other family members, and this immediate family is fairly well documented. There is a second collection of Iredell’s family letters in the archives at Duke University, and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina houses a manuscript collection for one of Iredell’s brothers. Furthermore, there is a lot of documentation about the nineteenth century Klan. Opposition to the Klan led to lots of contemporary documentation of efforts to suppress the violence its members committed, including state and federal trials and many testimonies people gave to a congressional investigatory committee. So I spent a lot of time piecing together primary sources about the KKK in the Carolinas with the particulars of the Jones brothers. And fortunately there are really wonderful secondary sources about the Klan during Reconstruction, including recent books by Elaine Frantz and Hannah Rosen, and classic works by Allen Trelease and Richard Zuczek.[1]

That’s more documentation about this family than I would have expected, and it does make the research and writing process easier if you have a number of primary sources to work from. That said, what were the primary challenges that you faced in the research process?

Despite all those contemporary primary source documents about the Klan, very few of them came from inside the Klan. So one of the major challenges with the article was knowing just how exceptional or representative the ciphered letter was. As I said in the article, it is an exceptional source, but I think that exceptionality comes from the fact that it survived, not the fact that it was written. In other words, I suspect numerous other ciphered letters were written, but almost none of them survived Reconstruction. Proving that suspicion was difficult. It’s always hard, particularly for a historian, to prove that an absence of evidence isn’t necessarily the evidence of absence. Maybe that’s even impossible! So figuring out the significance of this one surviving letter was my major challenge over the course of researching and writing.

The Ku Klux Klan—and racial violence more broadly–have been receiving more scholarly attention of late. Your article is an excellent example of this. How do you think your research enriches our discussions about racial violence in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction periods? 

I appreciate this question. This research helped me to understand the extent to which racial violence in Reconstruction did not arise just because of ephemeral, amorphous cultural reasons but because of conscious organizing by specific people who shared a particular racial and political ideology. I think too often Americans think of racial violence as inexplicable or senseless. There needs to be more attention to the ways in which violence is the result of conscious organizing and specific ideological choices. I find this lesson really important as we’re seeing a very concerning rise in instances of explicitly racist violence in recent years. I think there can be a tendency among some Americans sometimes to think that racism is the natural result of economic distress and political polarization. It isn’t. Racism is a specific ideological choice, and we need to investigate and condemn the social and political networks that foster and benefit from it.

Your point about “conscious organizing” is crucial here. I appreciate how you have framed this issue. Is there anything else you want to share about this project?

I really appreciate the opportunity to talk some about my work with the Muster blog, and I really appreciate the work the JCWE does! I hope my work prompts people to look even more critically at the networks and organizing efforts that have gone into other organizations of white supremacism in the United States.

We really appreciate Dr. Proctor taking time out of his schedule to chat with us about his project. You can read the article on Project Muse, and if you have questions for Brad, he is happy to chat on Twitter, @bdproctor.

 

[1] Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971).

A Transnational View of Medicine and Medical Practices during the Civil War

A Transnational View of Medicine and Medical Practices during the Civil War

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Interest in the medical history of the Civil War has increased in recent years, not in small part due to Shauna Devine’s Tom Watson Brown Award-winning work, Learning from the Wounded.[1] Tens of thousands of U.S. and Confederate soldiers suffered some form of injury in the course of the Civil War. The war, as is often the case, provided an opportunity for medical professionals to experiment with better treatments, more rapid removal of soldiers from the battlefield, and the recovery of wounded men. While the Civil War is often told as an exceptional domestic story, the history of mid-nineteenth-century nursing and medical advances should not start on the wounded-covered banks of Bull Run, but in the filthy and vermin-covered barracks of the other major mid-century war, the Crimean War (1853-1856).

By the time the Ottoman and Russian empires started the next installment of their long ongoing conflict over Black Sea and Mediterranean dominance in 1853, military technology had changed dramatically. The minié ball, a lead-based projectile, caused significant wounds, often leaving parts of the fabric and the bullet itself in the body of the wounded, causing infection. Like in every war, soldiers suffered from cholera, dysentery, and gangrene.[2] However, the emergence of the telegraph and popularity of newspapers allowed the first war correspondent, William Howard Russell, to report on the dismal state of the field hospitals, forcing a change in thinking among both medical professionals and the public.

The British military hospital at Scutari, on the outskirts of Istanbul, was filthy, damp, and infested. Worse, the Inspector General of Hospitals, John Hall, urged his officers against chloroform, writing: “the smart knife is a powerful stimulant; and it is better to hear a man bawl lustily, than to see him sink silently into the grave.”[3] With the French sending a group of fifty charity sisters, the British asked Florence Nightingale, a former director of a sanatorium in London, to recruit a group of British nurses for Crimea. She arrived with twenty-four women in November 1854 and immediately requested “a thousand mops, fifty quart bottles of disinfectant, three thousand tin plates and thousand yards of toweling.”[4] By the end of the war, her work reduced the number of British deaths from sickness. Whereas the French lost 21,191 soldiers to disease, the British only lost 606. The British had made significant advances in the treatment of wounded soldiers; however, these lessons were soon lost to contemporaries. As a result, the majority of Civil War soldiers still suffered horrendously from wounds sustained.

Crimean War: Florence Nightingale and her staff nursing a patient in the military hospital at Scutari. Coloured lithograph, c. 1855, by T. Packer after himself. Courtesy of The Wellcome Library.

Nightingale laid the foundation for the modern nursing profession in both Europe and the United States. She wanted her nurses to be “sober, honest, truthful, trustworthy, punctual, quiet and orderly, cleanly and neat.” She reserved the profession for respectable women. She had no time for “excellent gentlewomen more fit for Heaven than a hospital.” She called for a dramatic revision of the medical service within the army.[5] However, her lessons and work, just like that of the soldiers in the trenches of Sevastopol, were quickly forgotten by contemporary military officials and politicians.

If the Crimean War tried to alter the medical world pre-American Civil War, so did the Wars of Italian Unification (the Second War of Independence in 1859 and Third War of Independence in 1866). Just like the events in Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, or Cold Harbor, many wounded soldiers in Italy remained untreated on the battlefield for days after the fighting ceased. During the Battle of Solferino, Franco-Italian forces assaulted the Austrian army. A bloodletting ensued and many soldiers remained on the field for hours, at times days. On June 27, having tried his best to help, Genevan businessman Henri Jean Dunant departed the region in disgust.

Dunant recollected, “The stillness of the night was broken by groans, by stifled sighs of anguish and suffering . . . Heart-rending voices kept calling for help. Who could ever describe the agonies of that fearful night.” The medical services were incompetent; the French army only had one doctor for every one thousand soldiers and no medical equipment. Dunant observed, “The poor wounded men . . . were ghostly pale and exhausted. Some, who had been the most badly hurt, had a stupefied look. . . . Others were anxious and excited by nervous strain and shaken by spasmodic trembling. Some, who had gaping wounds already beginning to show infection, were almost crazed with suffering. They begged to be put out of their misery; and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the grip of the death struggle. . . . Many were disfigured . . . their limbs stiffened, their bodies blotched with ghastly spots, their hands clawing at the ground, their eyes starting wildly, their moustaches bristling.”[6]

In October 1862, Dunant’s Memory of Solferino was published and Guillaume-Henri Dufour, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and commanding general of the Swiss Confederation forces in the recent Sonderbundskrieg (a civil war that tore the Swiss Confederation apart for a month in 1847) reached out to Dufour to humanize the face of war for wounded soldiers. Dunant, Dufour, and a few others decided to take their idea for an international relief organization to the International Charity Congress in Berlin in October 1863. To lend weight to their project, they established the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded. Questions immediately arose about military doctors in uniforms being indistinguishable from fighting men and thus unprotected from enemy bullets or the treatment of wounded regardless of affiliation. In Berlin, Dunant invited interested parties for another meeting in Geneva.[7]

On October 23, 1863, representatives of sixteen countries were in Geneva. For four days, the delegations debated a list of ten articles which called for the creation of committees in the individual countries, advice to army medical services, preparation to enlist volunteer medical personnel on the battlefields (wearing armbands with a red cross distinguishing them as noncombatants), and the coordination of committees by the central body in Geneva. Out of this conference was born the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC. While these notions and opportunities did not reach the Civil War in time, the ICRC immediately found an opportunity to test their new accomplishments during the Dano-German War of 1864. Unfortunately, many on the ICRC’s accomplishments were neither new nor productive, leaving Nightingale worried that the ICRC would negate many of the changes in medical treatment and care she had pushed for during the past decade.[8]

The Dano-German War was almost over when on August 8, 1864, sixteen nations assembled in Geneva to ensure that hospitals, field stations, and medical personnel were considered neutral. There was disagreement regarding whether nurses were included in this neutrality. The United States had two unofficial representatives from the U.S. Sanitary Commission present, who faced much ignorance about their work and the advances in medicine during the Civil War. On August 22, 1864, those present, except for the United States and Great Britain, the two countries with the most experience in military medicine, signed the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, which institutionalized many of the already agreed upon stipulations. The conference also adopted the inversed Swiss flag as its symbol, which meant the organization was increasingly called the Red Cross.[9]

Picture of the signing of the First Geneva Convention by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq. Reproduced in Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva, Switzerland: ICRC, 2011), 98-99.

Charles Bowles, the representative of the U.S. Sanitary Commission to the conference, wrote, “The result of the Congress is a treaty which, althou’ less than perfect, is far more than was really to have been expected. . . . Its grand test, future practicability, remains to be applied. To reconcile humanity with the exigencies of war, or inhumanity under another name, is a task of almost insurmountable difficulty. Its influence will be felt, and the justice of its principles acknowledged, and those who violate it will at least be morally accountable . . . It will be marked by the future historian as a forward step in the civilization of the nineteenth century.”[10]

Only after the Civil War did the Red Cross get an opportunity to test its operation and principles in wartime, during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The one major battle at Königgrätz caused 30,000 Austrian casualties, versus 10,000 Prussian casualties. Prussia was entirely responsible for the care of all the wounded. Prussian stretcher-bearers wore the Red Cross as they carried wounded off the field. Chloroform was used during operations. The railroads carried the wounded back to hospitals in Prussia with local committees along the railroad providing the wounded on the trains with refreshments. In contrast, Austria was unprepared; five days after the battle Prussian volunteers found a primitive field hospital with 300 badly wounded and barely alive soldiers. There were 800 men already dead for lack of treatment.[11]

The many wars of the mid-nineteenth century dramatically highlighted the suffering among wounded soldiers on the battlefield. As a result, states and private individuals sought to improve the fate of the wounded. The Atlantic was more barrier then highway of information during the Civil War era. In the end, the emergence of nursing, the professionalization of medicine, and the creation of the Red Cross dramatically improved the suffering of soldiers wounded during battle. The battles of the mid-nineteenth century, including the American Civil War, forced this rethinking, but many of these advances came too late for over half a million U.S. residents killed by insufficient medical care in the war.

 

[1] Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)

[2] Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 48-49

[3] Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 30-32.

[4] Florence Nightingale to Sidney Herbert, December 21, 1854, in Florence Nightingale: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, ed. Lynn McDonald (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010): 14:85-86.

[5] Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, 32.

[6] Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (Geneva, Switzerland: ICRC, 2011), 41, 44.

[7] Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, 13-19.

[8] Ibid., 20-21, 30.

[9] Ibid., 43-45.

[10] Charles S. P. Bowles, Report of Charles S. P. Bowles: Foreign Agent of the United States Sanitary Commission, Upon the International Congress of Geneva, for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Sick and Wounded Soldiers of Armies in the Field, Convened at Geneva, 8th August, 1864 (London, UK: R. Clay and Taylor, 1969), 15.

[11] Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, 53-55.

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

Fighting the Good Fight

Fighting the Good Fight

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Today we share the conclusion to our fiction roundtable here on Muster, by our guest editor, Sarah E. Gardner. You can read all of the roundtable reviews by clicking on the links in her introduction. We hope you’ve enjoyed these reviews as much as we have here at The Journal of the Civil War Era.

“With the contemporary world rocking about their ears, American novelists seem bent on deserting the chaotic present for the past,” critic John Chamberlain wrote in 1938. “But the past that is luring more and more of them is no never-never land of shining order and fixed shared values; it is, rather, the chaotic period of the American Civil War, when society was cleft as it is today.”[1]

What was true in 1938 holds true in 2018. Sort of. I have no sense that writers in the 1930s evaded their present—economic depression, political unrest at home, and war clouds looming on the horizon—any more than writers in the first two decades of the twenty-first century seek to retreat from their present moment. Now, as then, writers turn to the past, at least in part, to encourage their readers to contemplate the world they inhabit.

The pressing question we are left with is whether, and to what degree, cultural production affects political change. Consider the conflicted emotions of a young wife whose husband was serving in the Union Army. In 1864, Lizzie Boyton Harbart, who in previous correspondence with her soldier-husband questioned his continued service in the Union Army, had reevaluated her position:

You have countless noticed criticisms upon a new book called “Peculiar”– the hero of the book being a slave, named by his master “peculiar institution.” I read it last week and it is given me more intense views of that most enormous evil of the nineteenth century, American slavery […] that I have ever read before–and when I closed the book and […] thought of all the attendant evils upon slavery I thanked God that I had been called on to give him who is dearer to me than all to a war that will eventually produce its overthrow. Sometimes I feel very brave, feel as though I could if called to do it give you up forever to my country.[2]

Lizzie had struggled with the overwhelming dread she felt when she imagined her husband dying in combat. And she still struggled when she wrote this letter. She thought she could bear the pain of his death. But she wasn’t sure. “At other times,” she confessed, “love obtains the mastery of patriotism. Selfishness predominates over love for country and I weep bitter tears at our separation and feel that if you were once more with me a whole world of wars could not–should not take you hence. It is not that I love my country less, but you the more.”[3]

This was movement, but maybe not enough. As Carole Emberton wrote in her review of Underground Airlines, Benjamin Winters challenges his readers “to imagine what true resistance would look like and how far they might be willing to go to achieve it.”[4] How far might Lizzie Boyton Harbart go? How far might we? Works that challenge the dominant narrative do just that. They lay the ground work, but they do not guarantee the results. To be sure, a novel had recalibrated Lizzie’s thinking about the scourge of slavery. Beyond that, though, tough to say.

What kind of work are we asking Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo or James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird do? Are we expecting too much?

We are well attuned to the cultural hegemony asserted by texts that carried outsized influence, such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. It is easy to forget that it engendered hostile reviews at the time of its publication. Malcolm Cowley’s review, which appeared in the New Republic, was particularly condescending. Mitchell’s novel, he puckishly wrote, told of “the callousness of the Carpetbaggers, the scalawaggishness of the Scalawags, the knightliness of the Ku Klux Klansmen, who frighten Negroes away from the polls, thus making Georgia safe for democracy and virtuous womanhood and Our Gene Talmadge – it is all here, every last bale of cotton and bushel of moonlight, every last full measure of full Southern female devotion working its lilywhite fingers uncomplainingly to the lilywhite bone.” Although this reading of the past was “false,” “silly,” and “vicious,” Mitchell wrote with abandon, unafraid of inevitable comparisons to more talented writers.[5]

When Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Ralph Thompson, a daily critic for the New York Times had this to say: “Here is what seemed to be when I reviewed it last year (and still seems to be) a good but overstuffed story,” he recapped, “grammatically clumsy in certain spots, historically clumsy in others, dominated by a pair of freaks named Scarlett and Rhett, and worked out with an assortment of stock-company Southerners. – and it wins not only a couple of million admirers … but the privilege of going down in history as the most distinguished novel in the year of our Lord 1936.”[6] Thompson’s disgust was palpable. But his views carried no weight with general readers. The novel’s popularity came at great cost.

Gone with the Wind was a scorched-earth text that, for a time, wiped away all other imaginary versions the Civil War. Critic Heyward Broun noted the irony of Mitchell’s claim to have written about a civilization and a culture that “have been blown from the face of the earth.” Mitchell’s fans, who raved about Gone with the Wind, Broun feared, guaranteed that publishers would continue to churn out novels written in the same vein. “You are going to get a great parcel of Southern novels from now on,” he concluded. “And on.”[7] He was spot on, of course. Although others penned Civil War counternarratives in the 1930s, none captured readers’ imaginations like Gone with the Wind.

How much of what Broun wrote in 1936 still holds true? Exciting new work appears and is reviewed favorably and prominently in the leading media outlets. But who reads the Times Book Review or listens to NPR? And how much weight do reviewers carry in an age of Goodreads and Amazon reviews? These are difficult questions to answer, perhaps especially so for those of us who believe (or want to believe) in the transformative power of literature. One wonders whether fifty years from now, when we mark the Civil War’s bicentennial, we will still have these conversations, as if on a repetitive loop of commemoration and violence.

 

[1] John Chamberlain, “Books,” Scribner’s Monthly 103 (May 1938): 82.

[2] Epes Sargent, Peculiar, A Tale of the Great Transition (New York: Carlton, 1864).

[3] Lizzie Boyton Harbart to William S. Harbart, Crawfordsville, Indiana, 15 March 1864, in the Elizabeth Boyton Harbart Papers, Addenda, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

[4] Carole Emberton, “A New ‘Alternative’ History: Ben Winters’s Underground Airlines,” Muster (blog), The Journal of the Civil War Era, October 26, 2018, https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/10/a-new-alternative-history-ben-winterss-underground-airlines/.

[5] Malcolm Cowley, “Going with the Wind,” The New Republic 88 (September 16, 1936): 161.

[6] Ralph Thompson, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, May 5, 1937, 24.

[7] Heyward Broun, “It Seems to Me,” The New York World-Telegram (September 19, 1936): 19A. See also, Sarah E. Gardner, Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920-1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Sarah Gardner

Sarah E. Gardner is Distinguished Professor of History at Mercer University. She is currently writing a book on reading during the American Civil War.

Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo

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Our final review for this week’s roundtable comes from Nina Silber, Professor of History and American Studies at Boston University. You can read all of the roundtable contributions by clicking on the links in the guest editor’s introduction.

In this imaginative and deeply moving book, George Saunders has re-envisioned the moment when President Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie died, in February 1862, ten months into the Civil War. Saunders’ novel is an odd and unconventional book, composed of fragments of actual historical writing and fictionalized historical passages, along with the musings of individuals who have died and now inhabit the cemetery where Willie’s body has been interred. This is the “Bardo” of the book’s title – a sort of in-between place, poised between the land of the living and a more definitive afterlife – and the book’s central premise involves the struggle to get Willie, and his father, to fully accept death so that Willie can leave this disturbing transitional world.

More than just a meditation on Willie’s tragic demise, the book is also a much larger deliberation on the overwhelming onslaught of death that gripped Americans in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It evokes, for example, the sentimental reflections of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who, pondering the misery of losing a child to slave traders, likens that to an experience that would have been familiar to many American families of the 1850s. “Has there never been,” Stowe asks her readers, “in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave.”[1] Indeed, this is precisely what Abraham Lincoln does in Saunders’ book: so grief-stricken is he by Willie’s death that he visits his burial site, opens his coffin, and even lovingly cradles his dead body. And even if the literal handling of the body has more to do with Saunders’ artistic rendering than historical truth, he nonetheless captures the profound sadness Lincoln felt at this moment, a grief that numerous historians have attested to, including some who are quoted in these very pages.

Photograph taken in Matthew Brady’s studio showing Willie Lincoln, center, Tad Lincoln, right, and their cousin Lockwood Todd, 1861. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Also in the spirit of Stowe, Saunders’ book is a story about empathy: about learning to see and feel the full spectrum of the human experience, and especially human suffering. For Lincoln this means confronting not just the death of his child but the thousands and thousands of deaths on the battlefield. Saunders references the battle at Fort Donelson, which occurred just a few days before Willie died, to show the exponential mounting of Civil War casualties, beyond what anyone living had anticipated. “The dead at Donelson, sweet Jesus,” writes one of Saunders’ imagined informants. “Heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top of two on top of three.”[2] As historian Drew Faust has suggested, death at Fort Donelson, and even more so at battles yet to come, forced Americans in these years to reckon with the very meaning of death, grappling with what such monumental sacrifice might signify not just for individual families but for an entire nation. One suspects that Saunders, having read Faust, has exactly this point in mind: to consider how Lincoln may have worked through his sadness about Willie’s death into a larger reflection on Civil War mortality. As Lincoln begins to accept the finality of Willie’s passing we become privy to the president’s inner thoughts: “Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.”[3]

Willie’s death, in short, teaches Lincoln that he must pursue the war, swiftly and efficiently. It also forces Lincoln to think about what the killing means, what purpose, in short, the war would serve; fragments of the Gettysburg Address are even beginning to form in his mind. Saunders moves, perhaps, a bit too mechanically from this one episode of Lincoln’s private suffering to the Lincoln overseeing matters of great national import, yet much about his way of describing the president’s thought process – logical and ponderous, even in contemplating grief – rings true.

Although Saunders, like many historians, sees Lincoln primarily motivated to wage a war that would preserve a society giving opportunity to free white men, the author by no means neglects the horrors of slavery and how that, too, comes to weigh on Lincoln’s conscience. Thus the Bardo holds not only white characters but also, in a segregated section, black ones as well. This group includes Litzie, a young light-skinned woman who has endured such an unspeakable litany of abuse she has been rendered mute. Frequently accompanying Litzie is Mrs. Francis Hodge whose feet and hands have been worn away to bloody stumps. Like the white characters, the black ghosts, too, are moved by the sight of Lincoln cradling Willie’s dead body and see a chance to make their stories known to a figure from that “other place.” And, just like the white spirits, the black ghosts also have the ability to pass through Lincoln’s body, even affecting the living president’s thoughts and feelings. As Lincoln turns away from the cemetery and towards the task of waging a monumental war, he leaves with a black ghost clinging to his form, perhaps even to remain with him in perpetuity.

I suspect Saunders wants us to see this black figure, literally, as the weight upon Lincoln’s conscience. In this, Saunders advances an interpretation that, despite the fantastical scenario, would find favor with many historians: that the impulse to do right by black men and women may not have come completely naturally to Lincoln, but that the circumstances of the war gave the Civil War president a stronger sense of empathy that allowed him to move just a little bit closer towards addressing the human suffering of both white and black Americans.

 

[1] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 93.

[2] George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (New York: Random House, 2017), 152.

[3] Saunders, 306.

Nina Silber

Nina Silber is the Jon Westling Professor of History at Boston University and recently served as the President of the Society of Civil War Historians. Her most recent book is This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (Chapel Hill, 2019).  She’s currently at work on a history/memoir about her father, a central figure in the mid-twentieth century folk revival.

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