Category: Muster

It Was a Good Day: White Supremacy and Legal History

It Was a Good Day: White Supremacy and Legal History

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Today we share the final installment of our roundtable on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power. Scott Hancock is associate professor of History and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College, with expertise in Black northerners’ engagement with the law.

Previous installments of the roundtable are available here, here, and here. We will also share a concluding post tomorrow, from our roundtable’s editor and associate editor of the JCWE, Greg Downs.

It was a good day. It was a historic day, the first day when we were in power. Sitting in my house with the windows open late on a November evening in Gettysburg, during the mildest election day weather since 1956, I could hear Gettysburg College students—usually not the most politically rambunctious group—cheering and chanting on campus a half mile away. It was a good day that arrived in part, we thought, via the persistent though erratic progress of a nation whose king, as Thomas Paine declared, was the law. The law, governed by a sovereign people, had enabled us to elect a black President.

But it was an illusory day. And we Black Americans, of all people, should have seen through the veil. Barack Obama’s faith that the long-term trends of the United States move toward freedom and equality—an optimism rooted to some extent in what historians call a constitutional culture—was infectious. Historians are well aware of the law’s proclivity for what Obama described to Ta-Nehisi Coates as the “zigs and zags” of progress. But the paradigm infecting American legal history is that, despite setbacks, the law has moved toward freedom more than away from it, evinced by the Civil War era perhaps more than any other, except for the Civil Rights era.

The Civil War era is both an obvious and contradictory example. It’s obvious because of emancipation. It’s contradictory because of what comes after, when states and the Supreme Court assaulted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and installed state-sanctioned segregation through Jim Crow. The supposed retreat of the post-Reconstruction era is often perceived as either bad law or immoral law, later rectified by decisions putting law and country back on the correct path.

If, however, historians see the law not as establishing the conditions of freedom but the conditions of plunder, and doing so for white Americans, then the law at virtually every point has consistently fulfilled its purpose. If the law of the people themselves is understood as the law of white people themselves, then everything from Marbury v. Madison to Brown v. Board fits easily within Derrick Bell’s thesis: legal change serves dominant white interests.[1]

This is clearly how Coates reads history. And he’s reading the history that we—and by this “we” I mean we academic historians and legal scholars—have written. But he sees the law as plunder because it has had one unitary, enduring purpose: not just maintenance, but enhancement of white supremacy.

You might counter that law has dismantled significant structures of white supremacy. Exhibit number one is, naturally, emancipation. And that mattered: a law stating your daughter or brother could not be stolen away any longer is an exercise of constitutional power that cannot be overstated. But seeing the law’s utility for loosening tyranny and seeing the law’s central purpose of enhancing white supremacy are not necessarily conflicting visions. In fact, the former has rarely—maybe never—seriously threatened the latter.

You might also counter that like American history in general, legal history cannot take a reductionist view like Coates’s. Many external and internal forces shape and are shaped by the law. Class, gender, economics, the Atlantic world, judicial review…there are a myriad of variables to consider. Why reduce the lenses through which we analyze law to primarily just one?

There was a day, not a good day, when historians and most of American society said something similar about the connection of slavery and the Civil War. There was a day when W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction was radical in its argument that yes, the Civil War was all about slavery and African Americans. Historians have for quite some time now concurred with Du Bois. And yet, as Coates says about the country as a whole, the idea “that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive” infects our scholarship. Just as Coates describes black alienation from Civil War history as “produced by American design” and the “result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other,” the law is a product of design that has not struggled, even inconsistently, to resolve the problem of inequity for black people, but has instead consistently worked to treat black people as a problem to resolve for the purposes of white supremacy. Will a day arrive when the consensus regarding Civil War era law is that it, too, was fundamentally about white supremacy?[2]

If so, what would this history look like? Frankly, I’m not entirely sure. But here is what it would not look like: it would not be replete with unchallenged assumptions like “the Constitution thus privileged no one ideological perspective,” or “the Founders did not speak with a single voice on most constitutional questions,” or that at times judges “have worked… ‘against the grain of the Court’s defense of liberty interests.” While we would not reify or legitimize the bad history of Reagan era political debates that popularized the unsupportable “notion of a single original intent and the idea that constitutional methodology was frozen at the Founding,” we would no longer so unthinkingly discount the singular original intent, voice, and methodology of white supremacy.[3] We would not presume that “the grain” of the Court was in the interest of liberty. We might then write histories with the premise that there was no real divergence of viewpoints among the Founders and subsequent enforcers, Lincoln included, about the role of the law and the Constitution. Instead of seeing decisions that blatantly reinforced white supremacy, such as those defeating Dred Scott and Homer Plessy, as the law not conforming to its core ideals, we’d see these decisions as conforming with and confirming of an unfaltering ideal of white supremacy from 1787 to 1863 to 1965.

This new history would see the law and conditions of freedom for Black Americans in the Civil War era as contingent upon the extent to which freedom for white citizens were threatened, limited, or expanded. The law and conditions of freedom were determined by the law of plunder: how the law enabled or hindered white political and economic progress. Exhibit number one: Thaddeus Stevens’s H.R. 29 in 1867, proposing to confiscate and redistribute well-to-do slaveowners’ lands to now free African Americans and kick start their prosperity, was tabled for nine months in Congress, and then not even debated. In a nation where the law was supposedly king and the people, now including black people, were sovereign, the king would not best the sovereignty of white supremacy.

Understanding Civil War era law as a law of white plunder, a law not moving in zigs and zags but in circles, may be too much for the legal history field. It may require what every historian of the law should already have, a thorough grounding in Critical Race Theory. And we need more histories of Civil War era law from the perspective of black people—both those writing it now, and from those who lived through it then. These wouldn’t be histories that simply complement mainstream narratives, but rather be primary drivers of understanding how law worked from the cotton field to the justice of the peace to the statehouse to the Supreme Court. We need more Thavolia Glymphs and Gloria Browne-Marshalls and Ariela Grosses and Dylan Penningroths at the heart of the legal canon.[4] Otherwise, our field falls into the same trap that Coates busts apart in ownership of being The Atlantic’s “Black Writer”: work that is “premised on the notion that the foundational crimes of the country are mostly irrelevant to its existence.”[5]

Regardless, the law of plunder will not change in our lifetimes. The good day we had has ended like all other days—just like Ice Cube’s day ended in his video of the 1992 song “It was a good day”—with white supremacy making clear it will use the law to ensure its power. On very the day I write this, President Donald Trump is threatening to revoke the licenses of major media networks that report negative news about him. We—and by this ‘we’ I mean both Black Americans and historians—may think that surely the guns pointed at Ice Cube, as he walked into his home at the end of his day, won’t come out against us just for speaking our mind. Well…many of us also thought that mild November election day was a good day.

 

[1] Derrick Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (January 1980): 518-34; Derrick Bell, We Are Not Saved: the Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1987). The “people themselves” references Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World Publishing, 2017), 64, 72.

[3] Timothy Huebner, Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 7; Saul Cornell, “The Bourn Ultimatum: Popular Constitutionalism and Ratification Reconsidered,” Reviews in American History 40, no. 3 (September 2012): 395; Eric Rauchway, “In Retrospect: Landmark Cases in American Society,” Reviews in American History 35, no. 1 (March 2007): 159.

[4] Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gloria Browne-Marshall, Race, Law, and American Society, 1607 to Present (New York, 2007); Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

[5] Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 114.

Scott Hancock

Scott Hancock, associate professor of History and Africana Studies, came to Gettysburg College in 2001. He received his B.A. from Bryan College in 1984, spent fourteen years working in group homes with teenagers at risk, and received his history PhD from the University of New Hampshire in 1999. His scholarly interests have focused on Black northerners’ engagement with the law, from small disputes to escaping via the Underground Railroad, during the Early Republic and Civil War eras. He has more recently begun exploring how whiteness has been manifested on post-Civil War memorializations of battlefields. His work has appeared in anthologies and Civil War History, and he has published essays on CityLab, Medium, and The Huffington Post. He can be contacted at shancock@gettysburg.edu or on Twitter @scotthancockOT.

The Long Struggle of African American Placemaking

The Long Struggle of African American Placemaking

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Continuing our roundtable on We We Eight Years in Power, today we share a post by Kelly Houston Jones, an assistant professor of history at Austin Peay State University. Her research focuses on slavery, agriculture, and the environment in the trans-Mississippi South.

Previous installments of the roundtable are available here and here and subsequent posts are available here and here.

The power of space and place persists in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new compilation, We Were Eight Years in Power. The importance of black homes and neighborhoods looms large in Coates’ reflections on white supremacy’s plundering of black families and futures. Much of that discussion, especially in “The Case for Reparations,” focuses on housing in the twentieth century. Discriminatory laws and practices directed white families to purchase homes that would increase in value and secure buyers’ financial futures, while African American prospective homeowners in and around cities like Chicago were cheated out of ownership by contract scams and relegated to redlined neighborhoods that only depreciated in value. Home ownership, a powerful symbol of the American dream, represented not only economic independence, but autonomy in space—a place where black families could love, nurture, and grow, away from the piercing eyes of white America. Simultaneously, the spaces of homes and neighborhoods served as sites of respectability (the politics of respectability admittedly frustrates Coates), displaying “middle class” values of neatness and hard work that countless black families have leveraged in the attempt to gain respect from whites over generations. It is no wonder, then, that neighborhoods became a battleground. The power of space and place is also evident in Coates’ other mentions of places like Black Wall Street, a sector of prosperous black businesses in Tulsa Oklahoma, which whites torched in 1921. That space harbored and cultivated the black entrepreneurial spirit and offered a contradiction to white supremacy.

Those complicated threads connecting space and place with autonomy, oppression, and resistance reach back to slavery, an institution that Coates refers to time and again in order to drive home the bracing fact that America’s roots are bondage and white supremacy. Reading Coates’ reflections on homes, neighborhoods and families immediately brought to my mind the influential work of the late Tony Kaye. Joining Places shows neighborhoods as the most important “terrain of struggle” for African Americans in bondage. Adjoining farms and plantations created the world in which black men and women forged family ties and a sense of community amid the horrors of bondage. The neighborhood was “the domain of all the bonds that constituted their daily routine” and it was created by enslaved people’s own sense of place—the hills, streams, and bottomlands that they paced as they move through their own social lives, not the gridded surveys that whites used to cut up acreage into fiber factories. This sense of neighborhood was always under construction, however, as slaveholders repeatedly severed ties between family and friends via moves and sales. Place making, then, remained a constant struggle.[1]

The cabins in which enslaved people dwelt also represented ongoing efforts to carve meaning and power out of space. Stephanie Camp explained the quarters as “extensions of two worlds.” Those structures made up a portion of the “public life of the plantation” as spaces to house those who labored over the cash crop and as spaces in which the next generation of laborers were conceived and born. Thus, the quarters remained part of the reproduction of labor. At the same time, those modest cabins incubated the family and community life of those held in bondage, serving as “essential elements in the rival geography.” Camp described enslaved people’s homes as political sites as well, where they contemplated freedom, and where at least a few women displayed abolitionist prints on the walls. Perhaps a far cry from the homebuyers’ activist groups that Coates describes as a pushback against the predatory contract sellers in the twentieth century, but the work of Camp and others reminds us that the story of the politics of black domestic spaces is a long one.

These slave quarters and homes are where African American families resisted the “plundering” that Coates emphasizes throughout his references to slavery and early black America. Parents nourished and instructed their children in the quarters, passing down traditions and creating new ones. Their housing could also serve as the repositories of enslaved people’s gains in hunting, fishing, or clandestinely trading. For some, the small plots surrounding their cabins might yield produce to augment diets, or, for the very fortunate, a space to grow a bit of the cash crop for sale.[2]

The Civil War changed the terrain of struggle, and the fight for the meaning of space and place took on even higher stakes. Formerly enslaved people immediately identified land ownership as central to their meaning of freedom and argued their “right to the soil,” as Coates quotes in the opening to “The Case for Reparations.” Not only had they earned it with their generations of toil, but freedpeople also understood landholding as the best hope for their economic survival and successful entrance into equal citizenship. Long before home ownership in suburbia symbolized the American dream and afforded the most obvious investment route to economic self-sufficiency, it was the ownership over one’s own farm acreage that signaled economic independence, citizenship, and autonomy for black southerners. As many Reconstruction scholars have shown, however, whites snuffed out the opportunity at landholding and rolled back black-owned acreage in the decades after the Civil War.[3] Readers might look into Pete Daniel’s Dispossession for that trend’s continuity in the mid-twentieth century, which occurred simultaneous to the northern housing discrimination crisis Coates chronicles.[4]

Space and place as theorized by historians of the Civil War era create a thread connecting much of Coates’ musings and arguments. Families carved meaningful spaces out of the sites of their bondage, ached with disappointment when blocked from the freedom and independence of land ownership in the aftermath of the great struggle with chattel slavery. While their grandchildren may have been able to flee their stagnant status in the South to pursue the promises of urban, worldly, sites up North, place making remained a dangerous struggle.

 

[1] Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 4.

[2] Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 93.

[3] Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World, 2017), 164. An invaluable source of freedpeoples’ voices on this and other subjects is Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Land and Labor, edited by Steven Hahn, Steven Miller, Susan O’Donovan, John Rodrigue, and Leslie Rowland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013-2016).

[4] Pete Daniel, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Readers might also be interested in Debra Reid’s Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).

Kelly Houston Jones

Kelly Houston Jones is Assistant Professor of History at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. Her research interests include the connections between black life, agriculture, and the environment under slavery, usually focusing on the Trans-Mississippi South. Jones is currently at work on a manuscript about slave life on the ground in Arkansas. Readers can find her work in Agricultural History and the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, as well as in several edited volumes, such as Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas, edited by John A. Kirk, and, most recently, Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas from Slavery through the 1930s, edited by Guy Lancaster.

Reconstruction, Power, and the Personal

Reconstruction, Power, and the Personal

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This is the first post in our roundtable on We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Today’s post comes from Brandon R. Byrd, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in the intellectual history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, looking specifically at African American history and the African Diaspora.

The editor’s introduction is here, and subsequent posts can be found here, here, and here.

 

We were eight years in power.

–Thomas Miller, 1895

Cain’ member nothin’ ‘bout re’struction.

—Frankie Goole, 1936

In the fall of 1895, Thomas E. Miller stood before the South Carolina Constitutional Convention. The free-born attorney, college graduate, and former U.S. congressman was one of six black delegates to the convention called by U.S. Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman and his political allies. He was also one of its most vocal dissidents. Miller knew the convention was supposed to disfranchise black voters and discard the state constitution drafted in 1868. He also understood the propaganda meant to justify the purge. Tillman, Miller told the convention, condemned Reconstruction-era political corruption but had “not found voice eloquent enough, nor pen exact enough to mention those imperishable gifts bestowed upon South Carolina . . . by Negro legislators.” “We were eight years in power,” Miller continued. “We had built school houses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails and court houses . . . In short, we had reconstructed the State.”[1]

Harper’s Weekly cartoon sympathizing with the plight of black people in the Reconstruction-era South. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Power. Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his most recent book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, with Miller’s claim to it before deploying it in much the same way. For Coates, the black politician wields power. Possesses power. Is power. He, and in this rendering it is implicitly a he, is Miller’s cherished memory of “Good Negro Government” and Tillman’s haunting specter of “Negro Rule.” He is both inspiration and threat, symbolic and real.

But power is personal, too. Although Coates writes that “the argument made in much of this book is that Good Negro Government . . . often augments the very white supremacy it seeks to combat,” the common thread in the eight notes that precede each chapter is not white backlash to black governance, then or now.[2] Rather, it is his experience of Barack Obama’s power. Coates invites readers to feel his improving sense of financial security as publishers assigned more value to black writers who covered race, increasing pessimism as America’s experiment in multi-racial democracy seemed to unravel with every officer-involved shooting, growing anxiousness about his professional relationship with Obama, and creeping resignation as Donald J. Trump came closer and closer to entering the White House. He, through these reflections on the past eight years, implies that the “we” in his book’s title includes “me.”

This matters a great deal, not just for those trying to understand current issues of race and politics but also for historians writing about Reconstruction. As Kidada E. Williams writes, we still need “audacious scholarship that connects the history we know to the more obscure inner lives of African Americans experiencing a world remade by the crucibles of war, emancipation, citizenship rights and new forms of governance, and the backlash of Redemption and Jim Crow.”[3] That scholarship would ask what power meant to poor and disabled black people who needed the charitable institutions that Miller saw as crowning achievements of Reconstruction. It would explore how black people imprisoned at the South Carolina Penitentiary, not just the black politicians who fought for its establishment, experienced power. It, in short, would find the personal meanings and memories applied to (presumably) collective black empowerment.

Of course, historians have worked hard to build on the pioneering work of W.E.B. Du Bois and, to quote Williams, “capture the full kaleidoscope of African American life.”[4] Still, there is a need to push further, to consider and reconsider the interior lives of black people like Frankie Goole. Born enslaved in middle Tennessee, Goole was about eighty-five years old and living in Nashville when she gave an interview to an elderly white woman working for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA).[5] It begins with Goole’s assertion that:

Mah ole Missis wuz named Sallie, en mah Marster wuz George Waters. Mah mammy’s name wuz Lucindia, she wuz sold fum me w’en I wuz six weeks ole, en mah Missis raised me. I allus slept wid her. Mah Missis wuz good ter me, but (her son) mah Marster whup’d me.

Goole follows that disclosure about early separation from her biological mother and forced intimacy with white slaveowners who might also have been kin with the claim that “[I] Dunno ob any ex-slaves votin’ er holdin’ office ob any kin.” In fact, she reiterates later in the interview, “I nebber voted en dunno nothin’ ‘bout hit. Hab nebber had any frens in office. Cain’ member nothin’ ‘bout re’struction. I hab bin sick en still don’ feel right. Sumtimes I feels krazy.”[6]

What should we make of this? What can we make of this? On the one hand, Goole tells her interviewer, a white southerner who looked and sounded like those who once enslaved her, that she could hardly recognize the era that Miller remembered and Coates reimagined. Tennessee was the first of the former Confederate states to enfranchise black men but she claims no friends in office. Republicans had controlled Tennessee for two years but she pleads ignorance of Reconstruction. Instead, she dissociates from power.[7]

At the same time, though, Goole provides a wealth of details about what Gregory Downs and Kate Masur call the “postwar era.”[8] She recalls the yellow fever epidemic that devastated Tennessee in the early 1870s and the Ku Klux Klan, sometimes conflating those postwar terrorists with the antebellum “Pat-a-rollers.” She remembers caring for her biological mother, attending Fisk University, and buying her first pair of shoes, “high tops . . . called bootees.”[9] She connects, narratively, her unfamiliarity with the electoral politics and periodization of Reconstruction to her chronic feelings of illness and her occasional bouts of insanity. She steers the interview inward, away from what her interviewer hoped to learn about politics and power.

Julia Ann Jackson, a participant in the WPA ex-slave interviews conducted in Arkansas. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The imperative, then, is that we follow. Although mediated, Goole’s interview, like others given by formerly enslaved people in Tennessee, acknowledges the question of black political participation but defies Miller’s invocation of power.[10] It withdraws, too, from Coates’s investment in collective black empowerment. Rather than encouraging further assessment of “Good Negro Government,” her testimony demands more attention to emancipation’s local variances, black mental illness, and the uses of forgetting and denial.[11] It calls for an accounting of the interiorities that the assumption of power has sometimes influenced but often obscured.

 

[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Reconstruction and its Benefits,” The American Historical Review 15, no. 4 (1910): 794-795.

[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World Publishing, 2017), xvi.

[3] Kidada E. Williams, “Maintaining A Radical Vision of African Americans in The Age of Freedom,” The Journal of the Civil War Era, accessed October 12, 2017, https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies/maintaining-a-radical-vision/. This essay also appeared in the March 2017 issue of the JCWE.

[4] Williams, 15. On Du Bois’s groundbreaking effort to recover the interior lives of enslaved and free(d) black people, see especially Thomas Holt, “‘A Story of Ordinary Human Beings’: The Sources of Du Bois’s Historical Imagination in Black Reconstruction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 419-435. Foundational texts that employ Du Bois’s methodology include Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Tera C. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); and Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[5] The WPA slave narratives are the subject of a debate that exceeds the space granted here. Carole Emberton puts them to excellent use in “The Freedwoman’s Tale: Reconstruction Remembers in the Federal Writers’ Project Ex-Slave Narratives,” in Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker, eds., Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America’s Most Turbulent Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017).

[6] Interview with Frankie Goole, in Nashville, Tennessee, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938: Tennessee Narratives, Vol. 15, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.150/?sp=22.

[7] William E. Hardy, “‘Fare well to all Radicals’: Redeeming Tennessee, 1869-1870,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2013).

[8] Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

[9] Interview with Frankie Goole.

[10] Of the twenty-six informants interviewed in Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee, only seven stated that they had voted, campaigned, had friends in political office, or had knowledge of black voting. Of course, more needs to be done to contextualize and analyze these responses. How, for instance, would formerly enslaved people have interpreted a question about whether they had “friends” in political office? A good starting place for the postemancipation history of Nashville is Bobby Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930: Elites and Dilemma (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

[11] The topic of mental illness is closely connected to trauma, particularly the concept of “soul murder” that Nell Irvin Painter explores in “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in Nell Irvin Painter, ed., Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002). The work on the national memory of Reconstruction is quite robust; that on ordinary black peoples’ troubled recollections of that process, less so. Emberton and Baker’s Remembering Reconstruction thus provides a necessary intervention.

Brandon R. Byrd

Brandon R. Byrd is an Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and an intellectual historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States with specializations in African Americans and the African Diaspora. He is completing his first book, The Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Rise of Radical Black Internationalism, and has publications in outlets including Slavery and Abolition and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. He also co-edits the Vanderbilt University Press’s Black Lives and Liberation series and writes for Black Perspectives, the online publication of the African American Intellectual History Society.

We Were Eight Years in Power: Introduction to a Muster Roundtable

We Were Eight Years in Power: Introduction to a Muster Roundtable

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This week we are running a roundtable about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power. Our guest editor for the series, Greg Downs, offers his introduction here. Please follow along this week to hear from historians about how Coates’s work relates to our study of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Subsequent posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

In the winter of 2008, Civil War Era historians began sending each other Atlantic.com blogposts with subject lines like “So good” or “you won’t believe it.” By some undeserved miracle, a widely circulated magazine hosted a blog for deeply serious, if not yet fully formed, arguments about the meaning of the Civil War and of slavery. Vulnerable, punishingly curious, and fixed on some point not yet visible to us, or perhaps even to himself, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates sparred with the Civil War in near-privacy even as he materialized publicly in Atlantic essays on Bill Cosby, Michelle Obama, and Malcolm X.

When Coates unfolded his ideas about slavery and the Civil War in Atlantic in his February 2012 “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” and his September 2012 “Fear of a Black President,” many historians cheered. A few wept. In a profession increasingly anxious about impact, Coates had earned the only impact that matters: He changed the way people think. While historians—including those who purport to critique capitalism—talk about impact through market metaphors and market logic, Coates garnered something more substantial than an advance or book sales or reviews (though he garnered all that). He changed how people wrote, how they talked, how they thought. Like Rilke’s archaic torso his pieces whispered: you must change your life.

Remarkably, he took us with him as he earned the MacArthur award and the National Book Award. In his essays Coates carefully named the historical acts that excluded African Americans from equal participation in the nation’s economic, social, and political life: slavery, carceral systems, the exclusion of African Americans from the most-profitable housing markets and government subsidies. He even carried our names into the world, checking dozens of scholars in his essays.[1] Coates reminded readers that the story had already been told, and could only be told again because of the work we had done.

Yet, as Coates unveiled his remarkable 2015 Between the World and Me, the emails and texts began to carry doubts. Of course the book was brilliant. Of course in many ways he was right about the present. But what about the way he treated the past? Instead of the complex, contingent events of the Civil War’s emancipations, he offered a story of The Dream that repeated itself (in shifting, creative forms) in each scene. What had happened to his view of history?

With the publication of We Were Eight Years in Power this October, we are in position to answer that question, and here we can contribute to such dialogue by offering a roundtable discussion by talented and thoughtful historians reflecting on this volume’s significance. Along with his eight landmark Atlantic essays, Coates has published an introduction (which opens with a killing quote from Reconstruction politician Thomas Miller), an epilogue, and eight slight but unbearably poignant memoirs of his own intellectual passage. After a pessimistic young adulthood, he found himself transformed, in some ways against his own better judgment, by Barack Obama’s 2008 election. “It now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body.”[2]

Even as his own trajectory shines—beginning the book at a welfare office he ends it at a BET party at the White House—his hopes fade. Reconstruction violence, as described by Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames, introduces not a contingent event but a “familiar cycle.” Coates critiques the “common theory” that “emancipation and civil rights were redemptive” or might finish “the work of ensuring freedom for all” and help the nation escape “the ghosts of history.” Watching the Tea Party response to Obama, he saw “that theory for the illusion that it was.”[3] As he studied the Civil War he “could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave. America had a biography, and in that biography, the shackling of black people—slave and free—featured prominently.”[4]

As he introduces his 2012 essay “Fear of a Black President,” Coates gently mocks his prior faith in “an arc of cosmic justice” and replaces it with his view of “tragedy.” Although Coates spends a good deal of time talking about his tragic view, he does not always talk about it in the same way. At times he suggests the familiar scholarly claim that there is no pattern to history, a way of resisting “the happy ending.”[5] At other moments it is the presence of a recurring, perhaps inescapable, pattern of plunder and destruction, a view he associates with what he calls “black atheism” and that echoes afro-pessimism. “The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.” The “answer was exactly what black people in their hearts believe it to be.”[6]

What drives history is a white supremacy that is “a crime and a lie, but it’s also a machine that generates meaning.”[7] In Coates’s hands, white supremacy is endlessly creative and endlessly shape shifting, manufacturing “niggers” out of whatever tools are at hand. Coates is careful to note the historically distinct forms that it takes in slavery and in Jim Crow and in Chicago housing and in incarceration, just as he, now famously, invokes the novelty that Donald Trump is “America’s first white president.”[8] Yet the very creativity of white supremacy lies in its ability to endlessly recreate the past in the new tools of the present. For Coates, white supremacy is neither a slogan nor a belief, as in Barbara J. Fields’ famous phrase, but a—perhaps the—engine of history.

Coates joins almost all historians in rejecting a Whiggish sense of improvement. But at times Coates frames the alternative as pessimism, if in his hands a particularly historically detailed and complex pessimism. But many historians operate, consciously or unconsciously, on an alternative Coates occasionally but not systematically acknowledges: total uncertainty about the future, a deep skepticism forged by the many contingencies and coincidences that created the present. Coates’s unsettling mix of deep historical specificity and, at times, ahistorical temporal unity—the same song on new notes—poses serious challenges to historians. His stance surely reflects not only his own brilliance but also an understandable, broadly held, cultural anxiety about the future.

Undoubtedly scholars will be grateful to see their work treated so carefully and respectfully. Perhaps they may find themselves challenged to rethink their own skepticism of arguments about continuity. Or perhaps they will feel called to explain the roots of the profession’s general, if not universal, sense of the futility of both optimism and pessimism. And to explain why historians resist turning society into a machine, or an individual body with a psychology and a will. Why we insist on breaking it down into its many pieces. Why we resist the idea of a general psychology, especially one read through particular, contingent policies or electoral outcomes. Historical pessimism is sibling to historical optimism, born of the same sense that knowing the past makes the future also knowable.

Although the initial responses to We Were Eight Years often slide into well-grooved arguments about class and race, or Hillary and Bernie, such “debates” should not be the ultimate result of such a powerful, interesting, and perhaps in some fundamental respect wrong, book. For readers of The Journal of the Civil War Era, some of those debates will likely turn upon the role of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow in shaping the country’s racist past and present. Everywhere around us we see anxieties about present and future expressed in fights about the nineteenth century. More thoroughly perhaps than anyone else, Coates has explained to a mass audience why slavery, the war, and its aftermath matter so much. The wonder that many of us felt nearly a decade ago remains, even if weighed by other doubts. How will we respond to the questions he asks? How will we assess his impact upon cultural understanding of the period we study? The essays that will follow in this Muster roundtable over the next few days will, we hope, begin those conversations.

 

[1] In his new volume We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates actually apologizes to twentieth-century historian Beryl Satter—cited by name in his essay on reparations—for the sin of not citing her enough.

[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World, 2017), 37.

[3] Coates, 65.

[4] Coates, 69.

[5] Coates, 151.

[6] Coates, 113, 110, 222.

[7] Coates, 215.

[8] Coates, 244.

Greg Downs

Greg Downs is a Professor of History at UC Davis and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era. He is the author of Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (UNC Press, 2011) and After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard, 2015) and (with Kate Masur) co-editor of The World the Civil War Made and co-author of the National Park Service National Historic Landmark Theme Study on Reconstruction.

Author Interview: Dale Kretz

Author Interview: Dale Kretz

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Today we share an interview with Dale Kretz, who published an article in our September 2017 issue, titled “Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State.” The article is available for journal subscribers and also on Project Muse.

Dale is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. He received his B.A. at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. At Texas Tech, Dale teaches courses in U.S. and African American history at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript entitled State of Health: Slavery and Pensions in the Age of Emancipation.

We are thrilled to speak with you, Dale, about your research. Can you tell us a little about how you got interested in this topic?

I was initially drawn to the pension files of former slaves after reading the late Anthony Kaye’s remarkable book, Joining Places.[1] As I began writing my dissertation on the relationship between violence and labor in the history of emancipation, I wanted to use the rich pension records of former slaves to learn more about the hardships they endured in slavery. While working through hundreds of pension records at the National Archives I noticed that very few applicants discussed the violence of slavery. Most freedmen I encountered explicitly denied having suffered any hardships until they entered the Union army. Intrigued more than frustrated, I wanted to know why. The answer turned out to be that former slaves were operating within the strictures set by the U.S. Pension Bureau, which held that pre-existing conditions before military service disqualified an individual for a disability pension. It struck me as a vexing situation for a former slave.

Can you briefly explain what the pension process looked like for a black applicant in the nineteenth century?

On paper, formerly enslaved veterans, their widows, and their dependents followed the same procedures as their white counterparts when applying for a pension. Typically they would locate a pension agent who would assist them in filing the necessary paperwork. Moreover, widows and veterans both required a “legal examination,” involving the submission of official records of marriage or military service as well as any depositions, affidavits, or special investigations testifying to the applicant’s claims. Veterans who applied directly would also have to undergo a “medical examination” before a board of three local physicians deputized by the federal government to evaluate the pension claimant’s inability to perform manual labor. Black veterans and widows underwent special investigations roughly twice as often as white claimants, resulting in a wealth of documentation on the most intimate aspects of their lives across years and even decades.

Although procedurally the same for all Union applicants, the colorblind statutes of the pension system betrayed a profound and early example of institutional racism at the federal level. The vast majority of U.S. Colored Troops, and relatives of these veterans, were former slaves—and the vast majority of former slaves remained in the South until the Great Migration. Because the Pension Bureau relied upon local physicians and agents to perform the examinations, former slaves were made to confront parties that were suspicious of their claims, even hostile to them. This was a far cry from the experiences of white Union veterans in the North, where evaluations were often performed by medical examiners who were also family physicians.

These pensions are a fascinating source for understanding the experiences of freedpeople. What questions guided your research, and what is the main argument you make in this article?

The central question guiding my research was: How should we understand the widespread participation of formerly enslaved men and women in the pension system? I was curious not only how African Americans negotiated their pension claims with federal officials but also what those negotiations tell us about the larger story of emancipation in America. I focused on ten infantry regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops: the 21st, 33d, 50th, 52d, 84th, 92d, 93d, 104th, 136th, and 138th. Most of these regiments were organized in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, or western Mississippi, and composed chiefly of former slaves.

In my article, I argue that freedpeople’s experiences with the Pension Bureau tell us a great deal about what freedom meant to them—and what it meant to the central state. Put simply, my article suggests that the Pension Bureau inadvertently worked to bracket off the slave past and reconstitute the nation-state on a free labor foundation. In so doing, the federal government absolved itself from the history and the ongoing legacy of slavery and institutional racism, which garnered surprising protest from ex-slave claimants in the Deep South.

How did these pension applicants help to reformulate the relationship between black Americans and the state? Could you elaborate further on what that relationship looked like in practice?

Many African Americans had first encountered the federal government during the Civil War, either through the Union army or the Freedmen’s Bureau. With the evaporation of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the withdrawal of the Union army from the South by the early 1870s, it has been widely assumed that former slaves were left to their own devices. And while their prospects did in fact diminish considerably without tangible federal support, there remained an important access point to the federal government, one that was not available to any ex-Rebel: the U.S. Pension Bureau. Unlike the wartime federal agencies, freedpeople’s engagement with the Pension Bureau was a sustained encounter, stretching well into the twentieth century.

The face of federal authority in the post-Civil War South, however, was a peculiar one. Given the bureau’s policy of hiring locally, freedpeople in the Deep South found personnel of the old regime—slave doctors, slaveholders, and descendants of slaveholders—in their new roles as federal officials. These men now served as the arbiters of freedpeople’s claims to citizenship rights. The disaffection experienced by many ex-slave applicants offers a new glimpse at how freedpeople understood the American federal state, wherein matters of administrative justice required a full accounting of the nation’s slave past and its ongoing relevance rather than a liberal assumption of unencumbered individualism.

How does your work align with the historiography on pensions and how individuals related to the state, such as work by Theda Skocpol, Donald Shaffer, or Elizabeth Regosin?

Many scholars have done invaluable work on the Pension Bureau. Theda Skocpol’s influential 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, characterized the bureau as a “precocious spending regime” and established its influence on the emerging American welfare state.[2] Almost most historians have chosen to focus on the pension records of white veterans and widows in the North, the pension claims of black Americans and former slaves are quickly becoming an essential source for understanding African American history. Donald Shaffer’s Beyond the Glory and Elizabeth Regosin’s Freedom’s Promise use the pension files of African Americans to great effect, detailing the contours of black life in post-Civil War America.[3] In my article, I move beyond questions of social and family relations and instead focus on how African American pensioners encountered and shaped the federal government.

Do you think knowledge of the pension process in the nineteenth century can help inform how we craft policies to benefit veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I think so. The story of Union veterans and widows in the pension system reminds us—because we need reminding—of the historic responsibility of the state to support veterans and their families. The immense difficulties faced by ex-slave veterans in particular ought to alert us to the moral costs of reducing human beings to a battery of measurements and disorders.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us, Dale, and we look forward to hearing more from you in the future. To learn more about Civil War pensions, please check out his article in our September 2017 issue, on Project Muse.

 

[1] Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

[2] Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

[3] Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2004); Elizabeth A. Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). These historians have also written an excellent guide to using pension files; Donald R. Shaffer and Elizabeth A. Regosin eds., Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

 

Teaching Reconstruction: Some Strategies That Work

Teaching Reconstruction: Some Strategies That Work

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This week we share our first Field Dispatch from Dr. Hilary Green, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. 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).

Teaching Reconstruction is hard. This is a difficult admission, especially for someone who has written about the period. Before launching into possible strategies, there are two caveats to the advice provided below. First, I teach in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. My department and often my classes are located in a postwar campus building named after Basil Manly, the minister who delivered a prayer at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration.[1] As a result, my students deeply understand his role in slavery at the university and how the memory of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction shapes both their understanding of the past and current campus experiences. Second, I do not teach the United States survey, but instead an upper-level undergraduate, nineteenth-century black history course. Some of this advice may be adaptable to different levels and programs, depending on your student population. My students are typically well versed in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality and Michelle Alexander’s the New Jim Crow.[2] Yet, even these more-socially aware students have difficulties with Reconstruction. The strategies I suggest have been tested and refined. I believe they work for teaching across a spectrum of students.

First, center your initial lecture on the newly emancipated. Since I am fortunate to teach Reconstruction over a series of lectures, I have developed an opening exercise that untethers students from any misconceptions and centers them on the major feature of Reconstruction–the newly emancipated African Americans. Students are divided into small groups of recently emancipated individuals who have been given twenty-four hours to decide between staying on the plantation or leaving. After selecting a last name, students address a series of considerations for survival if they decide to leave, or provisions to include in a contract with their former owner if they remain. Students have ten to fifteen minutes to complete the exercise.

“Carolina Singers,” Hovey, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, carte de visite, c. 1870s. Courtesy of the author.

Following the opening exercise, I use photography to discuss how African Americans defined their new identities. Thanks to a personal collection of early African American photography, students are able to view and hold several examples and reflect on the opening exercise. In reading these historic photographs, students bear witness to the Carolina Singers, a group of newly emancipated men and women engaged in a fundraising tour for the Fairfield Institute in Winnsboro, South Carolina. They also grapple with the contrasting depictions of the postwar black Mississippi community through images of John Roy Lynch and an unidentified Mississippian dressed in worn clothing while his eyes beam with the joys of freedom. These visual texts give voice to the many unidentified individuals who left little to no written records but celebrated their new status and existence through photographic technology. For those without such collections, digital examples from the Library of Congress will suffice. The Black Codes, reunification, education, and political achievements also garner special attention before we launch into frank discussions over Reconstruction’s failed economic policies.

Second, engage with the era’s violence, especially when teaching students familiar with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. By centering the initial lectures on emancipated individuals, students become open to examining the second major feature of Reconstruction–violence. Newspaper reports, the Ku Klux Klan hearings, and other sources detailing the violent suppression of white and black Republicans force students to confront some uncomfortable truths about Redemption. For every revolution, there is a counter-revolution. Redemption was neither heroic nor peaceful. Perceptions of emancipation and black freedom unleashed a brutal and widespread backlash. Their previous K-12 education either removed this understanding of Reconstruction or reduced it to the actions of a few individuals. Such simplistic K-12 understandings inform these strategies for teaching Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow segregation, which overturned the era’s gains until the triumphant Civil Rights Movement.

Third, rethink the periodization. I do not teach 1877 as the ending point. Rather, I consider the long retreat from Reconstruction locally, regionally, and nationally. My students read a sampling of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, specifically United States v. Cruikshank, the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson. They learn about the Panic of 1873 and the intermittent periods of recession and depression that enabled white Americans to see the issues experienced by former enslaved people as a southern problem. The national complicity not only encouraged violence but also forced some black southerners’ adoption of an approach best articulated in Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Exposition Address in a concerted effort to preserve black life and rights.[3] They also learn about the alternatives to the long national retreat, including the Readjusters and the Blair Bill.[4] By taking the long view, students are able to better contextualize the ending of the revolutionary era and the emergence of Jim Crow.

Fourth, remember the rhetoric of hope. By centering the lectures on emancipated individuals, violence, and a long retreat from Reconstruction, students are amazed by African Americans’ hopefulness for a better future. At the end of the unit on Reconstruction, I return to the opening exercise and encourage students to view the 1890s through the eyes of individuals who witness the greatest revolution in their lifetime – abolition and change in status from property to citizen. African Americans’ ability to not only assert themselves, but also have their humanity recognized, remained a powerful force. After all, Reconstruction embodied the realization of African Americans’ antebellum rhetoric of hope for abolition. This reality and the revolutionary opportunities achieved with three constitutional amendments, expansion of state and national citizenship, development of a black professional middle class, and the creation of community institutions continued to inspire individuals to persevere, fight, and create meaningful lives. They did not and could not predict the future. Again, I turn to the sources of ordinary African Americans committed to continuing their upward trajectory from chattel and quasi-free to full American citizens.

The rhetoric of hope allowed for perseverance and survival during the post-Reconstruction era. Given the existing political moment, Reconstruction offers both a framework and countless examples of men, women, and children who maintained the rhetoric of hope and preserved. Often, students need such historical examples for thinking through contemporary issues of race, citizenship, and violence directed toward marginalized communities.

These strategies will make teaching Reconstruction less difficult. Students will become better equipped to critically engage with this important period in American history and develop the necessary skills for understanding subsequent social movements past and present. Beyond these standard Student Learning Outcomes, Reconstruction enables students to appreciate the resiliency of the human condition by exploring a group who went from property and quasi-free to citizen. By devoting more time to this crucial historical era, these strategies will allow students to have a deeper understanding of how African Americans’ active participation as political actors committed to reshaping the nation helped to bring about fundamental change to notions of citizenship and American democratic ideals.

 

[1] A. James Fuller, “Basil Manly,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1182, accessed September 25, 2017.

[2] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (July 1991): 1244-1291; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

[3] Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1901), 217-225, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/washington/washing.html, accessed September 25, 2017.

[4] Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 157-173, 185-199.

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).

Gone with the Land: Environmental History in Civil War and Reconstruction Classes

Gone with the Land: Environmental History in Civil War and Reconstruction Classes

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“Confederate Fortifications in Atlanta, Georgia,” 1864. The Civil War was a profoundly environmental event. Troop movements, fortification-building, and other aspects of war reshaped both the physical landscape and Americans’ interactions with it. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Whenever I introduce myself in conversation as an “environmental historian,” many non-academics assume I write about environmentalism as a political movement or the history of environmental policy. It almost never helps to use the full title of my field of study by saying, “I’m an environmental historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S. South,” because inevitably the follow-up is: “Was there an environmental movement during the Civil War?” Brief explanations of the ecological impacts of the Civil War and its relation to the agricultural context of Reconstruction are usually met with nods and smiles, and then always, “But how do you do that?”

I have a lot of practice answering these questions, since this is a discussion I have with my own mother at least once a month.

While environmental history is too well established for these sorts of conversations to happen at conferences, there is still a sense of confusion about the mechanics of that field, its sources, and most importantly, its usefulness to what historians do in the classroom. Just as debates about class, race, and gender infuse our pedagogical approaches to teaching material, so too should “environment.” Whether frogs or fluorocarbons, climate or cholera, soils or sows—considering the larger context of the human experience provides fuller, more nuanced depictions of well-known events in U.S. history.

Environment is particularly salient in Civil War and Reconstruction classes, for by reminding students of the omnipresence of the natural world, we reinforce the intimacy soldiers had with the non-human environment; the effects of disease, terrain, and weather on battle outcomes and questions of military logistics; enslaved people’s necessity for the war effort on both homefront and battlefield; and of course, that issues about labor after emancipation and much of Reconstruction legislation were about labor on the land.

My own work uses an environmental lens to re-examine changes in southern agriculture during the Civil War era. Ecological shifts precipitated by the Civil War shaped the economic and agricultural choices of postwar southerners, and I think greater attention to environmental forces is needed in studies of sharecropping, the closing of the open range in the South, and the expansion of continuous cotton production, particularly as it relates to black southerners. In the September 2017 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era, I published a piece that examined the evolution of agricultural labor arrangements in the cotton-growing areas of the South after the Civil War. Looking at a range of wage labor, tenancy, and sharecropping contracts between landowners and ex-slaves, I conclude that the efforts of freedpeople to achieve a modicum of autonomy in day-to-day agricultural operations transformed land use practices in ways that ironically undermined their long-term economic security.[1]

“Plowing in South Carolina,” by James E. Taylor, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1866. Ex-slaves experienced many of the circumstances of their freedom through interaction with the land. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

My article relies on a new reading of very traditional sources—Freedmen’s Bureau records, planters’ letters, and agricultural contracts—drawing on the insights of crop science, geomorphology, ecology, and botany to reframe our understanding. Applying such an interdisciplinary research methodology to the classroom can be tricky. Few things cure students’ insomnia quicker than readings on nutritional science or epidemiology, and the scientific jargon of such papers causes students to struggle with language rather than focusing on content. But when an instructor can explain that soldiers on the march burned thousands more calories than they consumed, and often quenched their thirst with fecal-flavored water that caused them to sicken at such high rates as to jeopardize the outcomes of major battles, students awaken.[2] They see the role of the environment in the Civil War era in surprising new ways.

Instead of forcing students to learn the precipitation requirements of a pine tree or the sediment loads of rivers, then, I encourage undergraduates to consider the broader environmental context of the war and Reconstruction through targeted class readings and primary source assignments. Since 2010, scholars working on the Civil War have worked to elevate the conflict’s environmental context and implications, so there are a number of excellent monographs, edited collections, and articles available to generate class discussion.[3]

Carefully selected primary sources can encourage students to consider environmental change over time, and how war, emancipation, and reconciliation proved to be a watershed moment for the way Americans used land. I assign a series of primary sources—each typical to historians’ discussions of the Civil War era—but I ask students to read them in new ways and write brief responses:

Slave narratives: In the opening weeks, while surveying the sectional crisis and secession, I provide them with a selection of first-person slave narratives, and part of the response prompt asks students to consider the labor of slaves on the land, and the types of farming practices they performed. This gets at questions of the southern need for land to the West, the centrality of slaves to the profitability of many farms in the region, and begins to contextualize later rejections of certain types of labor by freedpeople.

Soldiers’ letters: The second primary response comes as I begin lecturing on the war itself. Published letter collections and memoirs of soldiers are replete with references to the environment. Troops cut down trees, foraged livestock, suffered disease, and constructed defensive works across farms and fields. I prompt students to reflect on the lived experience of war, and consider some of its longer-term consequences for the land.

Newspaper accounts: Toward the end of the war, the Confederacy faced food shortages, difficulties marshaling supplies, and a dearth of draft animals. So, the third primary source tackles newspaper reports of the war on the homefront. How do changes in agricultural policies affect the battlefield? What does a short corn harvest, or an epidemic of glanders or hog cholera mean for Confederate logistics?

Freedmen’s Bureau contracts: The transition to contract labor was an enormous part of emancipation, and the Freedmen’s Bureau oversaw contracts between farmers and ex-slaves.[4] These documents sometimes hewed very closely to the types of responsibilities seen in the slave narratives, but at other times, readers can see how farming began to change post-emancipation. This response draws on that implicit pre-war comparison, and asks students to think about the ecological implications of freedom.

Reconstruction-era legislation: Black codes, vagrancy laws, and, later on, increased penalties for larceny and carrying firearms all sought to regulate African Americans’ relationship with the land (among other things). Many secondary works discuss this legislation, although sometimes I use selected testimonies from the Joint Committee on Reconstruction rather than the laws themselves.[5] This last response has students think about ways that white planters used legal restrictions to keep black laborers dependent on the plantation both for work and for food.

Final reflection: Depending on the time frame of the class, I like to return to the idea of change over time, asking students to pull all of the narrative threads together in an essay on their final exam. Does a focus on the environmental aspects of these events change the way we view them? What are the limitations or strengths of such an approach?

Ultimately, using readings of traditional sources to see beyond first impressions exemplifies the craft of the historian. I like to think of it as the academic equivalent of the 3-D optical illusions that were popular in the 1990s. Students assume they see one image, or one “truth,” until forced to look deeper. Then they cannot help but see something else. Those “eureka” moments help students understand how history is not the regurgitation of facts, but rather the consideration or interpretation of the past from multiple perspectives.

 

[1] Erin Stewart Mauldin, “Freedom, Economic Autonomy, and Ecological Change in the Cotton South, 1865-1880,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 3 (September 2017): 401-424.

[2] A good example of this type of lecture is Judkin Browning, “Civil War Peninsula Campaign and Seven Days’ Battles,” aired as part of Lectures in History, CSPAN-3, February 28, 2017, https://www.c-span.org/video/?423972-1/civil-wars-peninsula-campaign-seven-days-battles. See minutes 21:36 through 33:14 for the section that incorporates environmental history.

[3] A brief review of the available literature includes Adam Wesley Dean, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2015); Brian Allen Drake, ed., The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Lisa Brady, War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Jack Temple Kirby, “The American Civil War: An Environmental View,” Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History, The National Humanities Center, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/ nattrans/ nattrans.htm (accessed June 1, 2017); Mark Fiege, “Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War,” in Edmund Russell and Richard Tucker, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 93-109; Mark Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), Chapter 5; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter 6; Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Andrew McIlwaine Bell, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

[4] An excellent resource is the Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Land and Labor, edited by Steven Hahn, Steven Miller, Susan O’Donovan, John Rodrigue, and Leslie Rowland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013-2016). Two volumes have appeared—1865 and 1866-7.

[5] Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26 (1982): 37-64; U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1866).

Erin Stewart Mauldin

Erin Stewart Mauldin is an Assistant Professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, and Book Review Editor for Agricultural History. She co-edited the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Global Environmental History, and her book, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

States’ Rights and Antislavery Activism

States’ Rights and Antislavery Activism

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Michael E. Woods, associate professor of history at Marshall University, has joined our team of Muster correspondents. He is the author of two books and several articles about politics in the antebellum period. Here he offers his first Field Dispatch. Let us know what you think in the comments!

The “states’ rights!” refrain is echoing in American politics, often coming from unexpected directions. California has crafted an independent climate change policy. Dozens of states have challenged the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Prospective “sanctuary states” from New York to Nevada might limit their collaboration with federal immigration authorities. There is ample evidence supporting columnist Charles Lane’s remark that, in 2017, “liberals are learning to love states’ rights.”[1]

Is this trend significant? Definitely, although its full influence will not be known until confrontations between state and federal authorities unfold. Is it surprising, ironic, or unprecedented? No. Americans across the political spectrum have leveraged state power against federal might. States’ rights appeals, as battle cries or as blueprints for political action, are neither distinctively Southern nor intrinsically reactionary. Secessionists in the nineteenth century and segregationists in the twentieth claimed ownership states’ rights in the name of white supremacy. But other historical cases are starkly different – and quite pertinent. Take the foundational texts of many states’ rights doctrines, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s Kentucky (1799) and Virginia (1798) Resolutions. They assert that a state government may interpose to protect the civil rights of its citizens against unconstitutional federal usurpation.[2] They were also written in response to federal efforts to suppress journalistic dissent and expedite the deportation of foreigners. States’ rights have been wielded both to attack and to defend the values of liberty and equality that the United States, at its best, has championed.

Among the most important, but commonly forgotten, advocates of states’ rights were the antislavery activists who launched the Republican Party in the 1850s. As I explored more thoroughly in a recent Journal of the Civil War Era article, early Republicans used states’ rights to win voter support and to challenge proslavery federal policies.[3] For Northerners who feared that federal officeholders served an insidious southern “slave power,” states’ rights offered a desperately needed basis for resistance.

Slavery’s foes deployed states’ rights with skill, most notably against the Fugitive Slave Act. Passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, the Act was one of the nineteenth century’s boldest expansions of federal power. Designed to put teeth into the Constitution’s ambiguous provision that fugitives “be delivered up” to their masters,[4] the Fugitive Slave Act made the recovery of runaway slaves a federal priority. Federal officers were bound to help capture accused fugitives. Bystanders could be compelled to assist. Failing to cooperate, or aiding a fugitive, could be punished with fines or imprisonment. And when an alleged fugitive was hauled before a federal commissioner tasked with executing the Act, he or she had no right to legal counsel, a jury trial, or an opportunity to testify. Commissioners who ruled in favor of masters received a ten dollar fee; those who released accused fugitives earned only five dollars.[5]

Political cartoon illustrating a woman being taken into custody
“Practical Illustration of the Fugitive Slave Law,” 1851. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Northern critics denounced the Act for violating civil liberties and states’ rights. They followed Jefferson and Madison’s example by linking individual freedom to the right, and duty, of a state to protect them. Antislavery Northerners, including many future Republicans, regularly joined Salmon P. Chase in denying that the federal government had authority to recover fugitive slaves. They assigned this power to the states alone.[6] Gideon Welles, who would serve with Chase in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, blasted the Fugitive Slave Act as an “invasion of the states” every bit as malicious as the Alien and Sedition Acts.[7]

The oratorical onslaught against the Fugitive Slave Act persisted long after 1850. Individual cases, including the recapture of Anthony Burns in 1854, coupled with efforts to strengthen the law, kept the issue alive. When Southern senators backed an 1855 bill to exempt officers from state prosecution for acts committed while enforcing federal laws, Salmon Chase led the counterattack. He knew the bill’s intent was to embolden federal slave catchers, and he condemned it as “a bill for the overthrow of State rights” which would “establish a great central, consolidated, Federal Government,” and as a step “towards despotism.” He wondered how southerners who “profess State-Rights doctrines” could stomach it.[8]

Salmon P. Chase, c. 1855-1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

These rhetorical appeals helped Republicans deflect criticism. Their proslavery foes, casting themselves as defenders of liberty, denounced the young Republican Party as a cabal of budding tyrants. South Carolina’s James Chesnut accused Republicans of plotting to “prostrate the States, consolidate the Government,” and impose “a mighty and odious despotism.”[9] By pledging loyalty to states’ rights, Republicans claimed space in the mainstream of American political history and theory. Henry Wilson affirmed that his party and Jefferson’s shared more than just a name: “the Republican party of 1856, like the Republican party of 1800, is the party of State rights.”[10]

In the long run, these appeals could win votes for Republican candidates. But fugitive slaves, free blacks, and their white allies lived in the short run, under the threat of federal prosecution. To offer pragmatic resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act at the grassroots level, Republicans again relied on states’ rights.

Many Republicans turned to state legislation to defang the hated Act. Republicans spearheaded the movement for “personal liberty laws” in the mid-1850s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, some Northern states had already passed similar legislation, but after the Fugitive Slave Act and several dramatic fugitive cases, Republicans demanded more vigorous action.[11] These state measures worked on two levels. Most offered legal protections to accused runaways. Michigan’s law, for example, guaranteed defendants’ recourse to the writ of habeas corpus and the right to a jury trial. The law also required prosecuting attorneys to defend accused fugitives; required testimony from two witnesses to prove fugitive status; and made it a criminal offense to arrest free persons with intent to enslave them.[12] Other laws, like Massachusetts’s exceptionally powerful 1855 law, also sought to divorce the state from the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. State officers could not issue arrest warrants under that Act, and Massachusetts attorneys could not represent self-proclaimed masters in court.[13] As the Republican Party’s strength waxed in the 1850s, nine Northern states passed new or reinvigorated personal liberty laws. Many Republicans believed that the Fugitive Slave Act was not merely odious, but unconstitutional. State legislatures could impede its enforcement but it was state courts which attempted to nullify the law altogether.

Nowhere were the links between states’ rights and Republicans’ antislavery politics clearer than in Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s showdown with the “slave power” began when antislavery activists helped fugitive Joshua Glover reach freedom in 1854.[14] Among them was Sherman Booth, an antislavery newspaper editor and future Republican, who was convicted in a federal court for violating the Fugitive Slave Act. In what one scholar deemed “the most extreme declaration of state judicial power north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line,” Wisconsin’s state supreme court overturned Booth’s conviction, holding that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional because states reserved the power to handle fugitive cases.[15] In 1859, the U.S. Supreme Court responded by defending the Act’s constitutionality and asserting its supremacy over state courts. Undaunted, Wisconsin’s state legislature wove the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions into a defiant resolution of protest, insisting that because the states had created the federal government, they alone were competent to define its powers. Republicans cast all sixty of the votes for this states’ rights manifesto.[16]

Byron Paine, n.d. In Henry E. Legler, Wisconsin History: The Story of the State (Milwaukee: The Sentinel Company, 1898), 229.

The case reverberated through Wisconsin politics. When Republican Orasmus Cole ran for a seat on the famed state supreme court, he adopted “State Rights, State Sovereignty, and the personal liberty of all our citizens” as his slogan. This melding of civil liberties, state rights, and antislavery fervor forged a winning campaign. During the next contest for a seat on the court, Republicans boldly nominated Byron Paine, who had represented Sherman Booth. With supporters urging voters to endorse “STATE RIGHTS AND BYRON PAINE,” Paine triumphed.[17]

Given popular memory of the Civil War era, it seems ironic that antislavery Northerners were, as Paul Finkelman has argued, “the most important proponents of states’ rights in the antebellum period.”[18] But their reliance on states’ rights was predictable. With slavery’s supporters dominating all three branches of the federal government, and with proslavery politicians insisting that Republicans aspired to authoritarianism, antebellum Republicans readily used states’ rights to rally northern support, deflect southern criticism, and resist proslavery policies. They would have embraced the eulogy later given to Salmon Chase, whom one admirer described as a “States Rights man always in the interest of liberty.”[19]

 

[1] Charles Lane, “Liberals Are Learning to Love States’ Rights,” Washington Post, March 15, 2017, accessed September 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/liberals-are-learning-to-love-states-rights/2017/03/15/c40044e6-098c-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html?utm_term=.04ee7dd72367.

[2] “Kentucky Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts,” The Avalon Project, accessed September 12, 2017, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/kenres.asp; “Virginia Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts,” The Avalon Project, accessed September 12, 2017, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/virres.asp.

[3] Michael E. Woods, “‘Tell Us Something about State Rights’: Northern Republicans, States’ Rights, and the Coming of the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 2 (June 2017): 242-268.

[4] U.S. Const. art. IV, sec. 2.

[5] Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: A History of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, completed and edited by Ward M. McAffee (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 231-232; Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 145-146; Kristen Epps, “Habeas Corpus, the Fugitive Slave Law, and Executive Authority,” Muster Blog, accessed September 12, 2017, https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/2017/02/habeas-corpus-fugitive-slave-law-executive-authority/. For the text of the Act, see “Fugitive Slave Act 1850,” The Avalon Project, accessed September 7, 2017, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/fugitive.asp.

[6] Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., appendix, 1587 (August 19, 1850).

[7] [Gideon Welles] to My Dear Sir, October 15, 1851, Gideon Welles Papers, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut.

[8] Cong. Globe, 33rd Cong., 2d Sess., appendix, 212 (February 23, 1855).

[9] Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. 1617 (April 9, 1860).

[10] Cong. Globe, 34th Cong., 3d Sess., appendix, 65 (December 19, 1856).

[11] Morris, Free Men All, chapters 3, 7.

[12] William McDaid, “Kinsley S. Bingham and the Republican Ideology of Antislavery, 1847-1855,” Michigan Historical Review 16, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 71.

[13] Morris, Free Men All, 168-173.

[14] H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).

[15] Jeffrey Schmitt, “Rethinking Ableman v. Booth and States’ Rights in Wisconsin,” Virginia Law Review 93, no. 5 (September 2007): 1315-1316.

[16] Michael J. McManus, “‘Freedom and Liberty First, and the Union Afterwards’: State Rights and the Wisconsin Republican Party, 1854-1861,” in Union & Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, eds. David W. Blight and Brooks D. Simpson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 50-51.

[17] McManus, 42-43, 51.

[18] Paul Finkelman, “States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, and the Crisis of the Union,” in Union & States’ Rights: A History and Interpretation of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession 150 Years After Sumter, ed. Neil H. Cogan (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2014), 68.

[19] “Salmon P. Chase,” American Law Record 15 (1886-87): 307.

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods is Associate Professor of History at University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) and Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, 2014), which received the 2015 James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association. His most recent book is entitled Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (North Carolina, 2020).

Public Iconography, Museum Education, and Reconstruction Era History

Public Iconography, Museum Education, and Reconstruction Era History

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Today, correspondent Nick Sacco shares his first Field Dispatch. Nick is a public historian working for the National Park Service as a Park Guide at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in history with a concentration in public history from IUPUI. The views expressed in this essay and future essays are solely the author’s and do not reflect the views of the National Park Service.

In a recent essay about public monuments, statues, and other iconography dedicated to the American Civil War, historian Sarah Handley-Cousins argues that such icons generally sanitize the war’s causes, context, and consequences with a large dose of artistic romanticism. For many Americans, “we love the Civil War so much that when we are presented with the truth of what those monuments mean, we refuse to accept that what we love was actually a violent struggle in which the [humanity] of Black Americans was at the center.”[1] Rather than fostering a deeper understanding of the conflict, many monuments dedicated to people and events on both sides instead portray a war shorn of meaning beyond honoring military service in a time of war. Meanwhile questions over slavery, citizenship, westward expansion, and the very meaning of the concept of “Union” often go unasked within such spaces.

I find myself in strong agreement with such sentiments, which is why I am skeptical of calls to erect more public monuments dedicated to the Reconstruction era as a way of improving popular understandings of a greatly misunderstood period in American history. For example, political scientist Richard Valelly argues that creating monuments to “the heroes of Reconstruction” can possibly establish a “new politics of historical memory” within America’s commemorative landscape.[2] Valelly’s assertion, however, ignores numerous public memorials to Reconstruction that already exist and have failed to accomplish this goal. Additionally, his thesis hinges on the definition of who constitutes a “hero” of Reconstruction. The existing public memorials throughout the U.S. often celebrate “heroes,” but they celebrate the ones who actively worked to end Reconstruction through deadly, racialized mass violence against Black Americans.

The 1950 historical marker to the Colfax Massacre. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

The most extreme examples of such commemorative markers are in Louisiana. To commemorate the Colfax Massacre of 1873 in which more than one hundred African Americans were killed, the state erected a statue in 1950 that openly celebrated “the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” In this telling the victims were actually the oppressors, and the oppressors were heroes restoring the “natural” social order of society. A nearby obelisk previously erected in 1921 honors three white mobsters who died “fighting for White Supremacy” that day.[3]

The Battle of Liberty Place monument in 1932. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Similarly, up until a few months ago a different monument to another white supremacist group in Louisiana—the White League—stood in New Orleans until Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered its removal. Here, too, the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place is commemorated as a space where “usurpers” who had attempted to establish biracial governance and political equality in Louisiana were guilty of disrupting the social order. The White League simply aimed to return the state’s white prewar political elites to power through extralegal means. When federal troops were ordered out of the state after the 1876 presidential election, the federal government, according to the monument’s text, “recognized white supremacy in the south and gave us our state.”[4] More than once in my own work as a public historian I have interacted with a visitor who was adamant that all public monuments in America should stay up, but are then shocked when they learn that a monument had been erected to celebrate the attempted overthrow of a democratically elected state government.

To be sure, some work has been done in recent years to revise the historical record. The state of Florida erected a marker in 1989 to African American Congressman Josiah T. Walls in Gainsville; Alabama erected a marker in 2011 in Montgomery listing all African Americans who served in the state legislature during Reconstruction; Georgia erected a marker in 2009 celebrating the life of John Wesley Moore, an African American farmer in Madison who became an independently successful landowner. In Memphis the National Park Service and the NAACP teamed up to erect a marker on the 150th anniversary of the 1866 Memphis massacre, honoring the victims of that deadly event.[5]

While alterations to America’s commemorative efforts for Reconstruction are necessary, that work alone will do little to change the situation. The work of teaching audiences about the era must start in the classroom and the museum. Former President Barack Obama’s establishment of Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort County, South Carolina, was a major victory in this regard, becoming the first National Park Service site to make Reconstruction a centerpiece of interpretation. NPS officials and academic historians promoted this effort for a number of years (including some at the Journal of the Civil War Era), but it was started and sustained through a grassroots effort by the local community in Beaufort, particularly its African American population.[6]

Five generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

At Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, the staff has embarked on two important initiatives to interpret and increase awareness of the Reconstruction era. Since the beginning of the year we have hosted several interactive workshops for history teachers in the St. Louis area. These workshops include an immersive visit through the park’s facilities, a collection of more than fifty primary source documents from the Reconstruction era (including speeches, letters, and political cartoons) that are distributed to the teachers, and time to brainstorm ideas for designing classroom activities in a collaborative setting.

The teaching of Reconstruction in middle and high school settings is generally unbalanced. Some teachers do not have time in their curriculum to teach it, while others admit that their knowledge is limited and that they are heavily reliant on textbooks—some of which are badly outdated—to teach the material. One teacher stated that his high school spent two weeks reenacting the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. These workshops, however, work to provide documentation, context, guiding questions, and techniques for interpreting Reconstruction. Specifically, the park aims to interpret Reconstruction as a period that was in some ways “a forerunner of the modern civil rights movement,” in the words of historian Eric Foner.[7]

The other initiative consists of utilizing the park’s museum exhibits on Reconstruction and facilitated dialogue techniques to foster conversations with students about universal concepts like freedom, liberty, and justice. One dialogue we use—”The Many Meanings of Justice”—aims to educate students about the power and ambiguity of the concept of “justice” in American society. We discuss the effort to restore the Union after the Civil War and how Americans had competing versions of what would be fair and just moving forward. Would the country’s political system return to the way it was before the war except without slavery, or would other changes occur? Who in society would be considered an American citizen? Who could run for office and vote? How do societies promote political and social equality? What civil rights issues are students concerned with today?

Academic historians have produced an impressive array of scholarship on the Reconstruction era in recent years, but the work of interpreting and commemorating this period must be complimented with the stories we tell to millions of American students and museum-goers every day. Disseminating this scholarship and providing resources for teachers and students is a centerpiece of my work as a public historian, and I relish every opportunity I get to advance this important goal.

 

[1] Sarah Handley-Cousins, “Falling Out of Love with the Civil War,” Nursing Clio, August 21, 2017, accessed September 3, 2017, https://nursingclio.org/2017/08/21/falling-out-of-love-with-the-civil-war/.

[2] Richard Valelly, “How About Erecting Monuments to the Heroes of Reconstruction?” The American Prospect, August 23, 2017, accessed September 2, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/how-about-erecting-monuments-heroes-reconstruction.

[3] Matt LaRoche, “Tributes to Terror: The Mis-Monumentation of the Colfax Massacre,” The Gettysburg Compiler, March 27, 2015, accessed September 2, 2017, https://gettysburgcompiler.org/2015/03/27/tributes-to-terror-the-mis-monumentation-of-the-colfax-massacre/.

[4] Rebecca Solnit, “The Monument Wars,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2017, accessed September 3, 2017, https://harpers.org/archive/2017/01/the-monument-wars/.

[5] “Josiah T. Walls,” The Historical Marker Database, accessed September 1, 2017, https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=55400; “Black Members of the Alabama Legislature Who Served During the Reconstruction Period of 1868=1879,” The Historical Marker Database, accessed September 1, 2017, https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=91290; “Reconstruction Property Rights,” The Historical Marker Database, accessed September 1, 2017, https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=20833; Christopher Blank, “Do the Words ‘Race Riot’ Belong on a Historic Marker in Memphis?” NPR, May 2, 2016, accessed August 30, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/02/476450908/in-memphis-a-divide-over-how-to-remember-a-massacre-150-years-later.

[6] Jennifer Whitmer Taylor and Page Putnam Miller, “The Attempt to Designate Beaufort, South Carolina, The National Park Service’s First Reconstruction Unit” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 1 (March 2017): 39-66; Kritika Agarwal, “Monumental Effort: Historians and the Creation of the National Monument to Reconstruction,” AHA Today, January 24, 2017, accessed September 4, 2017, http://blog.historians.org/2017/01/national-monument-reconstruction/.

[7] David M. Prior, et al., “Reconstruction in Public History and Memory at the Sesquicentennial: A Roundtable Discussion,” Journal of the Civil War Era, May 2016, accessed September 2, 2017, https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-reconstruction-studies/reconstruction-in-public-history-and-memory-sesquicentennial-roundtable/. This forum first appeared appeared in the March 2016 issue of the journal.

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.

New Editor Joins the JCWE Team

New Editor Joins the JCWE Team

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Photo by Wendy Madar.

The Journal of the Civil War Era is delighted to announce the appointment of Stacey Smith as Associate Editor. Dr. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University and author of Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which won the David Montgomery Prize for the best book in Labor and Working-Class History, awarded by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). Stacey is working with Associate Editor, Gregory Downs, to recruit in-depth historiographic review essays.

Stacey is assuming Kate Masur’s position. Dr. Masur was recruited as an Associate Editor, joining Anthony Kaye, when the journal was just getting off the ground. Kate worked alongside Greg to recruit many superb review essays for the journal. Our review essays are critically important, as they bring scholars in disparate fields in conversation with one another and point readers to new directions in the field. Review essays remain one of the most popular features of the journal, are regularly assigned in classes, and enjoy a long shelf life. The success of this feature is a testament to the great work that Kate did for the journal, for which we are deeply grateful.

Please help us welcome Stacey to our JCWE team.

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