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Empty Pedestals and Absent Pedestals: Civil War Memory and Monuments to the American Revolution

Empty Pedestals and Absent Pedestals: Civil War Memory and Monuments to the American Revolution

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Today we share the first of our new Field Dispatches, an examination of Civil War memory by Niels Eichhorn, an assistant professor of history at Middle Georgia State University. Dr. Eichhorn specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations in the nineteenth century, and his work has appeared in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History.

On June 17, 2015, when white supremacist Dylan Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and massacred nine parishioners, he set in motion a renewed debate about the nature of monuments honoring the Confederate States of America. Opinions have ranged widely on the subject. While some unreconstructed Southerners continue to insist that these monuments are about heritage, historians have disagreed about the advisability of their removal. A recent conversation saw James Broomall, Director of the John Tyler Moore Center for Civil War Study in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, suggest that monuments have meaning beyond the Confederate representative at their top, while Megan Kate Nelson offered the dramatic suggestion to take jackhammers to the monuments and leave the rubble as reminders of what once was.[1] In the course of the recent monuments debate in New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu made an interesting comparison. Half joking he said, “It would be like putting King George where the Washington Memorial is or Robert E. Lee where Lincoln is.”[2] I want to use this comment as a linchpin for two interrelated conversations that so far are absent from the removal debate: 1) the historical precedent of monument removal, and 2) the connections between the memory of the American Revolution and the Civil War.

John C. McRae, “Pulling Down the Statue of George III,” 1859, American Antiquarian Society. Courtesy of teachushistory.org.

Reading newspaper articles on the subject of removal, especially in their anonymous comment sections, one gets the feeling that for some white Southerners the removal of these monuments represents the end of the history. However, we should remember that statues have never been safe in the United States. On July 9, 1776, just after the people of New York City heard about the Declaration of Independence, they determined figuratively and literally to break their relationship with the British crown. They tore down King George III’s statue. A memorial to Prime Minister William Pitt also fell victim.[3] In Charleston, a sculpture to William Pitt, erected at the corner of Broad and Meeting Street in 1770, was removed by the city in 1794 for having caused “traffic accidents.” The statue remained at the Charleston Orphan House until 1881, before being moved to a park behind City Hall.[4] Some residents in the newly minted United States fought the symbols of the British Empire. It is an interesting juxtaposition to think about the removal of symbols of British power and the removal of symbols of Confederate power. Maybe Mitch Landrieu should have asked, why there are no statues to George III in the United States?

However, the American Revolution can offer more than just insight into the removal of statues. Where Civil War memory has provided many new insights into reunions, monuments, and battlefield preservation in recent years, the memory of our other defining national conflict has received very little attention. Considering its importance for the country’s history, the American Revolution has scarcely any literature devoted to its memory. It is in this absence where Civil War memory and the American Revolution should interact. In the 1960s, segregationist leaders in Georgia perceived of Cherokee removal as a safe subject to talk about and commemorate, since the Cherokee were no longer present,[5] so too did many people in the country find the American Revolution a safe and unifying topic to commemorate in the aftermath of bloody sectional strife. After all, during the Revolution, North and South had stood united.

Victory Monument at Yorktown, Virginia. Courtesy of the author.

There were initial thoughts about commemorating the American Revolution, but lack of money and Congressional interest prevented the erection of monuments. After the Civil War, in the word of Guilford Courthouse historian Thomas E. Baker, “Patriotism and nationalism were on the ascendant in this period and widespread public support developed for the establishment of memorials to George Washington, the Revolutionary War generation and the principles for which they fought; principles that were the common heritage of both North and South.”[6] It was at the very end of Reconstruction that Congress allocated money to the erection of monuments at Yorktown, Bennington, Saratoga, Newburgh, Cowpens, Monmouth, Groton, and Oriskany. However, Kings Mountain and Guilford Courthouse had to wait until the next decade. The Congressional effort built on a public campaign that had started in the 1850s to collect private money for monuments.

Just like with early Civil War era battlefields, groups only purchased a small piece of land on a Revolutionary battlefield to place their marker. The battlefields themselves often were not preserved for another century. For the 1880 centennial celebration at Kings Mountain, a committee organized, purchased the land where most of the fighting took place, and erected a twenty-nine foot high obelisk.[7] Similarly, although debates over its construction began in 1781, Yorktown finally received its Victory Monument in 1881.

There is one monument in particular that speaks to the use of the Revolution as a commemoration of healing. Dedicated in 1903 at Guildford Courthouse, No North, No South, marks an attempt to look beyond sectional difficulties. On its eastern face is written, “No North/Washington” and on the western face is engraved “No South/Greene.” The choice is deliberate. George Washington was a Southerner who fought largely in the Northern states during the Revolutionary War, whereas the commander of the U.S. forces at Guildford, Nathaniel Greene was from the North. Thus, if these men had no sectional issues, why should people in 1903?

The two faces of the No North, No South monument at Guilford Courthouse. Courtesy of the author.

What does this say about the Civil War? Most importantly, there are two stories of memory that Civil War historians should put into conversation–the American Revolution and the Civil War. It was no coincidence that during and after Reconstruction, monuments to the American Revolution appeared beyond the centennial celebrations. Even more, the dedication and removal of monuments are intricate moments of collective memory. The removal of the William Pitt or George III statues served to the community as a whole a similar purpose as today the removal of Confederate monuments: the symbolic ending of an era of oppression, real or perceived. Reality, as we all know and understand, is that neither the removal of George III in 1776 in New York nor the removal of Robert E. Lee in 2017 in New Orleans fundamentally alter (in the short term) the problems that have caused their removal. However, long term, they can help create a new collective memory. And in the case of the American Revolution that collective memory during Reconstruction may have helped with the healing process, incomplete perhaps, but it still could have offered a commemoration beyond sectional differences.

 

[1] “Empty Pedestals: What should be done with Civic Monuments to the Confederacy and Its Leaders?” History Net, accessed July 23, 2017, http://www.historynet.com/empty-pedestals-civic-monuments-confederacy-leaders.htm.

[2] Jonathan Capehart, “Fighting the Removal of Confederate Monuments is the Real ‘Lost Cause,’” Washington Post, April 27, 2017, accessed July 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/04/27/fighting-the-removal-of-confederate-monuments-is-the-real-lost-cause/?utm_term=.1f6bc31cee13.

[3] Karen A. Franck, “As Prop and Symbol: Engaging with Works of Art in Public Space,” in Uses of Art in Public Space, ed. Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens (New York: Routledge, 2015), 195.

[4] Carl R. Lounsbury, From Statehouse to Courthouse: An Architectural History of South Carolina’s Colonial Capitol and Charleston County Courthouse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 45.

[5] Andrew Denson, Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest Over Southern Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

[6] Thomas E. Baker, Redeemed from Oblivion: An Administrative History of Guilford Courthouse National Military Park (National Parks Service, March 1995), 2.

[7] Gregory De Van Massey, An Administrative History of Kings Mountain National Military Park (National Parks Service, 1965), 11.

Niels Eichhorn

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

Introducing a New Feature, Field Dispatches!

Introducing a New Feature, Field Dispatches!

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Beginning this month, Muster is launching an exciting new feature called Field Dispatches. We have recruited a team of talented correspondents—each with a different historical focus and perspective—who will write posts that provide fresh insight into the Civil War era. In each dispatch, correspondents will share thoughts on research, teaching, current events, pop culture, and other topics to build on the excellent discussions we already enjoy in The Journal of the Civil War Era and on the blog.

Our correspondents are: Martha S. Jones, James Marten, Maria Angela Diaz, Michael E. Woods, Hilary N. Green, Christopher Hayashida-Knight, Niels Eichhorn, and Nick Sacco. To find out more about each author, please visit our Correspondents page.

Muster will continue to publish our regular content, including author interviews, announcements about new issues, and posts that are submitted to us for consideration. We hope that readers will find in these dispatches new ways to engage in conversation, and more reasons to explore the pages of JCWE!

By the Standard of Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment, Trump’s Would Be a No-Brainer

By the Standard of Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment, Trump’s Would Be a No-Brainer

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A President came to office under a cloud, to help govern a badly divided nation. But he squabbled with his own party, which controlled both houses in Congress, and abused the pardon power in ways that emboldened white supremacists and vigilante terrorists operating outside the law. To avoid accountability for his actions, he dismissed a critical figure in the executive branch, and this proved to be the final move that led Congress to impeach him.

That may sound like a description of the near future, but it is actually the story of Andrew Johnson, the first President in American history to face impeachment. There are crucial differences, though, in the scenarios of 1868 and 2017. For all of his numerous faults, Johnson inherited a nation in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems intent on fomenting his own.

Trump’s actions are hastening the prospects of impeachment because they pose the same two questions that Johnson’s did: who can the President fire, and who can he pardon? Trump lurched toward potential impeachment charges in May, when he fired James Comey, the FBI Director investigating the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. Since then, Trump has left open the possibility of firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel continuing this investigation in the wake of Comey’s firing. Pundits have been spending considerable time weighing the legality of such a move and its likelihood of sparking impeachment.[1]

Trump’s potential use of the pardon has also been implicated in calls for his impeachment. In July, Trump asked his attorneys about his pardon powers, concluding that “the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon.” He exercised that power on August 25, pardoning the unrepentant Joe Arpaio, the convicted Arizona sheriff notorious for racial profiling and violating the civil rights of jailed citizens. Trump announced the unusual move by tweet under the cover of a hurricane, having failed to conduct the Department of Justice review typical of Presidential pardons.

To his critics, Trump’s actions not only embolden the white supremacists and nativists who view Arpaio as a hero, but they also reinforce an impression of Trump’s weak commitment to the rule of law. If the President is willing to pardon Arpaio out of affinity with his contempt for legal process, they say, why would Trump hesitate to pardon members of his inner circle, his family, or himself?[2] Does the President understand and respect the limits of his office? In short, the argument runs, Trump’s potential abuse of the pardon power for corrupt purposes portends a true constitutional crisis. Trump may have the legal power to pardon indiscriminately, but, say some legal scholars, he may still be impeached for abusing it.[3]

Andrew Johnson’s impeachment raised these issues as well. In the months after becoming President in April 1865, Johnson issued a proclamation granting widespread amnesty to those who had taken up arms against the Union. Though he initially excluded Confederate leaders and large slaveholders, he pardoned thousands upon request, including Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, respectively the President and Vice President of the late Confederacy. By permitting Confederate leaders back into office but denying the franchise to African Americans, Johnson aided the defeated planter class, which used violence and law to reduce freedpeople to an exploited agricultural proletariat.

Johnson also ran afoul of his fellow Republicans in Congress by firing a leading figure in the executive branch. Edwin M. Stanton, the pro-Congress Secretary of War, believed Johnson acted too leniently toward former Confederates. Republican legislators, mistrusting the President, had passed the Tenure of Office Act precisely to compel Johnson to heed the “advice and consent” Congress. Johnson defied it. He sought to replace Stanton with General Ulysses S. Grant, who he offered to pardon should Congress take exception (Grant refused). The move launched the impeachment effort, which ended when the Senate failed to convict Johnson in May 1868.

Thomas Nast, “Andy’s Trip,” Harper’s Weekly, October 27, 1866, 680-81.

President Johnson’s abrasive personality added vastly to his woes. “The truth is, he is a slave to his passions and resentments,” wrote Ohio Senator John Sherman.[4] Stubborn, self-righteous, and defiant, Johnson offered little grist for his eulogizers’ mills. One conceded that he was “too often swayed by fierce passion and prejudice. . . . His great mistake was that he believed Andrew Johnson to be infallible, and opposition embittered and rendered him obstinate and vindictive.”[5] Even the sympathetic Woodrow Wilson, who was a prominent history professor before becoming President, conceded that Johnson “stopped neither to understand nor to persuade other men, but struck forward with crude, uncompromising force for his object, attempting mastery without wisdom or moderation.”[6]

Yet while Johnson is justly deemed one of the worst Presidents in U.S. history, he did face a formidable challenge. He took up the White House by tragic happenstance rather than design — the first to succeed an assassinated predecessor. And he faced the nearly insurmountable charge of quickly reconstructing a nation torn apart by a horrendous war. There was no playbook for such a moment, for the Framers of the Constitution had never planned for it, and this put him constantly at odds with his legislature. “It is time it was settled who is master of the question of reconstruction of the rebel States, the President or Congress,” asked one confused Congressman in 1867.[7] Alas, the Constitution had no answer. Deprived of that referee, Congress and President became inimical forces, struggling tooth-and-nail for control of policy.

The magnanimous Abraham Lincoln had been unable to avoid quarrels with Congress, so it was unlikely the self-pitying Johnson would. “Who has suffered more than I?” he asked a Cleveland crowd, and then proceeded to label the Republicans who had “traduced and assaulted” him a “common gang of cormorants and bloodsuckers.”[8] The conflict between White House and Capitol Hill over control of Reconstruction dramatically magnified his character weaknesses and increased his likelihood of impeachment.

At the same time, the shaky constitutional foundations of his impeachment have always given Johnson’s defenders a potent source of lasting criticism. Republicans in Congress “determined to remove him by means of trumped-up charges, as disgraceful in origin as in substance,” wrote one.[9] Another praised Johnson for contesting the Radical Republicans’ plan to “Africanize the South” by enfranchising freedpeople.[10] Thomas Dixon’s racist novel The Clansman (1905) summarized the popular conservative view: “the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson would mark either the lowest tide-mud of degradation to which the Republic could sink, or its end.”[11]

The current President’s words echo Johnson’s with eerie precision. If Donald Trump is impeached, though, he will not have Andrew Johnson’s excuse. In 1868, two forces—the President’s volatile personality and a constitutional crisis over Reconstruction—combined to create the possibility of impeachment. Trump, however, inherited no constitutional crisis from his predecessor. Instead, his critics charge that he is fomenting his own—by challenging the legitimacy of the electoral process, by impeding legitimate investigations into his own malfeasance, and by undermining public accountability for his administration.

In 2017, only matters of character—an incapacity to admit wrong, consistently tell the truth, respect the mechanisms of constitutionalism, or maintain the high standards of the office—seems likely to doom the present administration. Should it be necessary to thus remove the current President, we can at least feel assured that history has seen something like this before. As fierce as our political divides may be, we are blessedly far from the discord of Reconstruction. We can feel confident that as rare and difficult as impeachment is, it may indeed still serve its intended function, as a remedy of last resort to secure the nation against an unfit executive.

 

[1] Laura Jarrett, “Can Trump Stop Mueller?” CNN Politics, accessed August 31, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/22/politics/donald-trump-robert-mueller-authority/index.html; Conor Friedersdorf, “The Case for Impeaching Trump If He Fires Robert Mueller,” The Atlantic, accessed August 31, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/impeach-donald-trump-if-he-fires-robert-mueller/534585/.

[2] Philip Bump, “If He’ll Pardon Arpaio, Why Wouldn’t Trump Pardon Those Who Ignore Robert Mueller?” Washington Post, accessed August 31, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/08/25/if-hell-pardon-arpaio-why-wouldnt-trump-pardon-those-who-ignore-robert-mueller/?utm_term=.1965bd64df6c.

[3] Frank Bowman, “Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is an Impeachable Offense,” Slate, accessed August 31, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/08/trump_s_pardon_of_joe_arpaio_is_an_impeachable_offense.html.

[4] John Sherman’s Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet, vol. 1 (Chicago: Werner Co., 1895), 423.

[5] “Death Notice,” Portland (Maine) Daily Press (August 2, 1875), 1.

[6] Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, vol. 5 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1903), 1.

[7] “Speech of Hon. E.C. Ingersoll of Illinois,” February 7, 1867, Congressional Globe, 39 Cong., 2d Sess. (House), Appendix, 90.

[8] “Andrew Johnson, Cleveland Speech, September 3, 1866,” in Great Issues in American History, vol. 1, ed. Richard Hofstadter, Clarence Lester Ver Steeg, and Beatrice K. Hofstadter (New York: Vintage, 1958), 28-29.

[9] “Andrew Johnson and Impeachment,” Little Rock Arkansas Gazette (June 27, 1885), 4.

[10] Robert W. Winston, Andrew Johnson, Plebeian and Patriot (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1928), 386.

[11] Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman, an Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1905), 165.

Patrick Rael

Patrick Rael is Professor of History at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is the author of Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (North Carolina, 2002), which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature (Routledge, 2001). His most recent book, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (University of Georgia Press, 2015), explores the Atlantic history of slavery to understand the exceptionally long period of time it took to end chattel bondage in America.

Gamers Take on the Civil War

Gamers Take on the Civil War

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As historians and teachers, we are often keenly aware of how movies and television influence what students think about the Civil War and about history more broadly. In recent years, historians have weighed in on the virtues and distortions of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, and Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave. Some productions have actively sought Civil War historians’ input into their depiction of the past, including Gary Ross’s Free State of Jones and PBS’s Mercy Street.[1] While academic commentary on Civil War era television and film has become commonplace, few historians have examined another venue in which students and the broader public encounter the Civil War: in video games.

Over the past thirty years, more than two dozen Civil War games have been made. With the exceptions of Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! (1997) and Antietam! (1999), most of these games have not been particularly successful. A new game, released in July 2017, looks like it will replace Meier’s work as the most popular Civil War game ever. Produced by a small Ukrainian design team, Ultimate General: Civil War has already received glowing reviews from the video game press and appears on the way to becoming a best seller. On Steam, a popular game purchase site, it had a 9/10 rating, with more than 1,500 reviews.[2]

Ultimate General: Civil War promotional image of a battlefield. Courtesy of Game Labs LLC.

Ultimate General: Civil War is, in gamer terminology, a real-time strategy (RTS) game, a popular genre that involves moving units around a map to defeat opponents and secure resources and locations. The use of “real-time” distinguishes the genre from turn-based strategy games like Civilization or (for luddites) chess. Some readers might object to the use of the term “strategy,” as UG:CW, like most RTS games, is devoted almost entirely to battlefield tactics rather than larger questions of military strategy. As is typical of the genre, UG:CW allows players to build different kinds of units (infantry, skirmishers, cavalry, artillery) and equip these units with a range of weapons. Players can choose either to fight individual battles or, in campaign mode, fight the entire war, building an army along the way.

There is much to recommend in this game. One can play more than three dozen battles, more than any of its predecessors. The maps are both fairly accurate and artfully rendered. The units behave in ways that seem accurate: they march in column and transition to line when in combat, green soldiers are more likely to panic and run than veterans, and overwhelmed soldiers flee or surrender rather than fight to the death. Compared to other RTS games, the pace is pretty slow, which reflects the actual movement of Civil War armies. Best results are obtained by building a large army, occupying fortified ground, and advancing cautiously. Patience rather than daring is rewarded. To this extent, the game provides a reasonable simulation of Civil War tactics. As an introduction to Civil War military history, students could do far worse than this game.

Ultimate General: Civil War screenshot of the 2nd Battle of Bull Run. Courtesy of Game Labs LLC.

While I found UG:CW both fun and addictive, several aspects of the game troubled me. The game largely neglects the Western Theater. Outside of Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga, the entire campaign is fought in the east. There are significant military developments that the game omits, including Vicksburg and the Atlanta Campaign/March to the Sea, though these may be added in later updates. It overemphasizes the importance and differences between firearms: soldiers equipped with 1863 Springfields are noticeably superior to those with 1855 Harpers Ferry rifles. Guerrilla warfare, the home front, politics, and logistics are almost entirely absent. The most significant and disturbing omission from UG:CW is the almost complete invisibility of the African American experience. There are no black soldiers, even in battles where a significant number of African Americans fought. For instance, two brigades (seven regiments) of USCT soldiers participated in Cold Harbor, but their presence is entirely omitted from the game. Indeed, the only reference I found in the entire game to African Americans or slavery a very brief mention on the Union campaign victory screen which notes that “slavery shall cease to exist.” To a large degree, UG:CW articulates an antiquated view of the conflict, omitting politics, motivation, and race. Indeed, UG:CW can be read as a digital updating of the Civil War board games popular during the Centennial.[3]

Ultimate General: Civil War appears to have been made without input from historical consultants; none appear in the game’s credits or in the promotional material associated with the game. The video game industry as a whole has lagged behind television and film in engaging with historians, just as historians have largely neglected to critically engage with video games. As annual revenue from the gaming industry now far exceeds that of film, it may be time for historians to proffer a critical eye to games, just as we do with film and television.

 

[1] For a small sample of Civil War historians engaging with film and television, see Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Bruce Chadwick, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (New York: Vintage Books, 2002); “Film Roundtable: Lincoln,” Civil War History 59, no. 3 (September 2013): 358-378.

[2] Ultimate General: Civil War can be purchased at http://store.steampowered.com/app/502520/Ultimate_General_Civil_War/. For early reviews of the game, see https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/11/29/ultimate-general-civil-war-review-early-access/ and http://kotaku.com/ultimate-general-is-a-very-good-strategy-game-1789352493

[3] Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 265; Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 98.

David Silkenat

David Silkenat is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (UGA Press, 2016) and Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (UNC Press, 2011).

Tuckered Out: Let’s Correct the Record on the History of Slavery and Abolition

Tuckered Out: Let’s Correct the Record on the History of Slavery and Abolition

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Screenshot from Tucker Carlson Tonight, August 15, 2017. Courtesy of Fox News.

The contemporary moment is witnessing a disgraceful outpouring of violent racism, emboldened by an erratic President who has made the White House a bully pulpit for white supremacy. As disheartening as this is, it is occasioning an extraordinary amount of history education, as scholars and commentators work feverishly to counter the myths and lies being espoused on the streets and in the halls of power.

Amidst Donald Trump’s historical malfeasance, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson offered yet another nugget of bad history lending aid and comfort to white nationalism. His August 15 commentary argued against the removal of statues honoring slaveholding Americans, suggesting that if slaveholding is to be the standard by which historical figures are to be honored, “nobody is safe.”[1]

Carlson then went on to point out that slavery is an old institution, practiced by African tribes and American Indians, as well as figures such as Plato, Mohammed, and Simon Bolivar. If slaveholding bars us from honoring historical figures, Carlson asserts, there would be few left to honor. “If we’re going to judge the past by the standards of the present, if we’re going to reduce a person’s life to the single worst thing he ever participated in, we had better be prepared for the consequences of that.” Many who signed the Declaration of Independence held slaves, Carlson notes, but “does that make what they wrote illegitimate?”[2]

Personally, I don’t care for historical hero worship and am not a fan of using public spaces to make reductionist arguments about historical figures who deserve nuanced investigation. But Carlson has it all wrong. For one, it is untrue that there’s a “movement” among “Leftists” to reduce the Founders to nothing more than “racist villains,” or have slaveholding Founders such as Jefferson “purged from public memory, forever.”[3] Aside from the obvious caricature here, it is clear that statues honoring historical figures represent a mere fraction of our public memory, which is nourished in myriad realms ranging from classrooms and museums to popular literature and feature films. We are in no danger of forgetting the Founders.

Though he fears the implication of his own concerns, Carlson is right to worry that the Founders’ slaveholding throws their words into question. What does “all men are created equal” mean in a society that has constantly and systematically denied the equality of so many?  From the time those words were penned, marginal Americans have asked this question. Indeed, from the very start of the Revolutionary crisis, African Americans raised the specter of hypocrisy, as when Massachusetts slaves petitioned the colony’s legislature in 1773: “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them. We cannot but wish and hope, Sir, that you will have the same grand object—we mean civil and religious liberty—in view in your next session.”[4] Questioning the country’s fidelity to its founding principles is as American as the Declaration of Independence itself, and as relevant today as in 1776. For two and a half centuries the promise of equality inherent in the Declaration has been ignored or denied. Perhaps they are empty words, platitudes useful primarily for those already secure within the civic community.

Carlson is also wrong in posing the slaveholding of men such as Thomas Jefferson as incidental to their lives rather than as a central feature. Indeed, slavery served as a crucial element in the political philosophy of all of the Founders, who could argue against colonists’ political enslavement to Britain largely because they were so familiar with the practice at home. George Washington made the connection explicit in the midst of the revolutionary crisis, writing: “We must assert our Rights, or Submit to every Imposition that can be heap’d upon us; till custom and use, will make us as tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”[5] The morality of slavery was thus not a given in the late eighteenth century, but a subject of intense debate. Jefferson himself famously worried that his fortune and his country owed to an unjustifiable moral outrage. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” he wrote, departing from his customary Deism to predict that “supernatural interference” might bring about “a revolution of the wheel of fortune”—his euphemism for a massive slave revolt. He lamented that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”[6]

Carlson, like many other self-professed conservatives, lauds an American history of expanding freedom. Yet that history was bequeathed to us not by the conservatives who stood against liberty—men such as John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh—but the progressive activists who sacrificed life and limb to make the nation adhere to its principles. Enslaved African Americans protested their status through the limited means available to them, while nominally free ones founded a tradition of protest that propelled white abolitionists into action. Those courageous men and women were the most radical social thinkers of their day. They spearheaded the early labor movement, campaigned for women’s rights, embraced pacifism, stood against the death penalty, and experimented with utopian communities. It is hard to imagine Tucker Carlson, were he alive in 1850, giving such people the time of day. Instead, he would prefer to take credit for progressive reforms in the past while opposing them in the present.

Carlson makes a final claim that demands refutation. It is true that slavery has been a feature of a great many societies throughout history, just as it is true that the nation-states of the modern West abolished slavery through a long and arduous process—one that in the United States uniquely required a bloody civil war that cost up to a million lives. But the slavery pioneered by the emerging nation-states of Europe assumed a distinct form.

New World slavery entailed the forced migration of over twelve million souls across the Atlantic—the largest forced migration in history—in the stinking holds of ships designed for a complex trade network dedicated to the purpose of turning people into things. It consigned millions more to be born into bondage and die from disease and overwork. It erected intricate legal systems designed to uphold the right of property in man, warped Christianity and science into ideological justifications for the otherwise unthinkable, and turned slaveholding societies into racialized police states. The key ingredient here was capitalism—a form of economic, political, and social organization in its nascence in the fifteenth century. The new values of profit and property transformed widely disparate practices of human servitude into a modern state mechanism for the ongoing exploitation and degradation of an entire people and an entire continent.[7]

Thomas Nast, “Worse Than Slavery,” Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1874. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The end of slavery owed to the evolution of capitalism, as new forms of industrial manufacturing and labor control displaced the plantation model. But true to the liberal ideals of the age, freed slaves across the Atlantic were given “nothing but freedom” (in historian Eric Foner’s memorable phrase).[8] Released into competitive economies with nothing but negative social capital and a degraded status in both custom and law, the freedpeople foundered, at which point the liberal state quickly washed its hands of their plight. They fell victim to underdevelopment and exploitation through legal means.[9] In the United States, the white settler population around them banded together to deny their rights through vigilante violence, segregation, and later lynching.[10] It took a century, and yet another progressive movement’s sacrifice of life and limb, to secure the rights promised to the freedpeople upon their emancipation. And as contemporary crises over matters from wealth inequality to police killings of African Americans to the dismantling of statues honoring the Confederate cause demonstrate, the fight is not yet over.[11]

Conservatives like Tucker Carlson may fabricate a past they can live with, but that will not change the truth. Thoughtful readers may decide for themselves the degree to which the country should pat itself on the back for such humanity.

 

[1] “Tucker on Fate of Slaveholders Washington, Jefferson: ‘If That’s the Standard, Nobody is Safe,’” Fox News, accessed August 18, 2017, http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/08/15/tucker-carlson-washington-jefferson-slave-holders-memorials-go-next.

[2] “Tucker Carlson Attempts to Defend America’s History of Slavery by Pointing Out the Aztecs, Africans, and Mohammed Had Slaves Too,” MediaMatters, August 15, 2017, https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/08/15/tucker-carlson-attempts-defend-americas-history-slavery-pointing-out-aztecs-africans-and-mohammed/217649.

[3] “Tucker on Fate of Slaveholders.”

[4] “Four Petitions Against Slavery (1773-1777),” History Is A Weapon, accessed August 18, 2017, http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fourpetitionsagainstslavery.html.

[5] “From George Washington to Bryan Fairfax, 24 August 1774,” Founders Online, accessed August 18, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/GEWN-02-10-02-0097.

[6] Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII,” American Studies at the University of Virginia, accessed August 18, 2017, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jefferson/ch18.html.

[7] Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (New York: Verso, 1988); Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from African to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

[8] Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

[9] Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, eds., From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1999); Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, eds., Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[10] Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Business, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor, 2008).

[11] Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

Patrick Rael

Patrick Rael is Professor of History at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is the author of Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (North Carolina, 2002), which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature (Routledge, 2001). His most recent book, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (University of Georgia Press, 2015), explores the Atlantic history of slavery to understand the exceptionally long period of time it took to end chattel bondage in America.

Teaching with Statistics: A Case Study

Teaching with Statistics: A Case Study

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My great friend Kevin Lambert at California State University, Fullerton says, “Nothing is more humanistic than numbers.” They bring order and precision to our lives, offer definitive and powerful evidence for us, and determine outcomes and decisions on the most difficult and emotionally wrenching issues.

Although the work of historians is an evidence-based profession, most historians are reticent to use evidence from social sciences and sciences, especially statistics. In our quest to better understand the human condition, we draw theories from the fields of humanities, social sciences, and sciences, yet most of our evidence comes from the humanities. Too many historians are completely intimidated by numbers and refuse to embrace them, while others understandably find quantitative studies either tedious reading or insensitive to the joys, hardships, and brutality of the past. But the truth is that numbers and statistical evidence help to enrich and accentuate more humanistic evidence. The question is not only how historians can learn to embrace quantitative evidence, but also, how can we teach this to our students?

The goal in my recent article, “A Tale of Two Armies: The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac and Their Cultures,” published in the September 2016 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era, is to expose readers to the value of combining qualitative and quantitative evidence.[1] I have certainly utilized more conventional sources, such as personal letters, diaries, and official correspondence. More importantly, I use statistics based on a kind of random sample (technically, a stratified cluster sample) to explain how the culture of the Army of Northern Virginia played an important role in its defeat and how the culture of the Army of the Potomac lay at the heart of its success. On my university webpage I have placed simple-to-follow charts in a PDF that are based on the statistical studies from the article, and also some statistical charts from my book Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee, so that individuals may use them for instruction purposes.[2] The statistical charts not only provide interesting information about military service, but they also give background information on the soldiers who constituted these armies. Such statistics can be an engaging way to help students understand the experiences of common soldiers whose lives might otherwise remain closed to us, and to help them understand aggregate trends within each army.

There are some key themes uncovered in my research that can be used in the classroom to help students reconsider myths that no longer hold true. For instance, the statistical evidence indicates that nearly half of all soldiers in the two armies (taken from my sample of 1,400 total men) were not heads of households.[3]

Personal and Family Wealth. Available on the author’s website.

Still, soldiers in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were on the whole wealthier than their peers, which may also challenge students’ previously held assumptions.[4] Although all economic classes were represented in the army, the clear evidence in Lee’s army was that it was not a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Rather, it was a wealthy and disproportionately slaveholding army. Four of every nine soldiers in Lee’s army lived in a slaveholding household and three of eight owned slaves themselves, or their families (with whom they lived) did.

Slaveholding by Percent. Available on the author’s website.

Discussions of desertion in the classroom can also be augmented with hard data. Statistics suggest that wealthy soldiers were far less likely to desert than poor or middle-class troops. The hardships of war weighed heavier on the poor and middle class. While the poor were least likely to have bonds to the community and therefore were more likely to desert, middle-class soldiers had worked hard to achieve that status and had much to lose. They deserted in slightly greater percentages than the poor, which reveals their concerns over losing all they had earned. The fact that so many from the middle class abandoned the army for home also indicates that it had become socially tolerable for soldiers to desert and return home.

Desertion and Economic Class. Available on the author’s website.

An examination of occupations offers our students some great insights into the development of army culture and its influence in leading to Confederate collapse and Union triumph.[5] A majority of Confederate soldiers were farmers, and nineteen of twenty lived in rural areas. Families became the centerpiece of their lives. By contrast, the Army of the Potomac was heavily working class. Three of every five soldiers was a skilled or an unskilled worker, and another 10 percent were farm hands who owned nothing. Most lived in towns or cities, often worked in groups, and were accustomed to structure, discipline, consistency, and reliability. Three in every ten were immigrants, who had endured great hardship to enjoy the civil liberty and opportunities in the United States. Median wealth for men in Lee’s army was six and a half times greater than in the Army of the Potomac. Even though the men in the Army of the Potomac had suffered defeat after defeat, they had developed an esprit de corps. They blamed their leaders and not one another. Thus, when Ulysses S. Grant took over and they suffered staggering losses in the 1864 campaign, the troops endured it. They had lost huge numbers in defeat; at least with Grant they were winning.

In light of this new information, here are some questions that might encourage classroom discussion, when used in conjunction with either my article or the charts available online:

1. How does our perspective of the Civil War change when we take into consideration new data on the comparative wealth of the two armies?

2. What new questions might we ask about decision-making in Lee’s army with this new data on slaveholding patterns?

3. How might we use qualitative data to test these new findings on middle-class desertion?

4. What other myths about the Civil War might it be worthwhile testing with the quantitative techniques discussed here?

Traditional historical evidence and statistics feed each other. They provide fresh insights, amplify the strength of each other, and help to provide a fuller portrait of the Civil War.

 

[1] Joseph Glatthaar, “A Tale of Two Armies: The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac and Their Cultures,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 3 (September 2016): 315-46. An abstract is available at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/628863/summary; the entire article is available through subscription only.

[2] My website is http://history.unc.edu/people/faculty/joseph-t-glatthaar/joseph-glatthaar-resource-webpage/. Click on “A Tale of Two Armies” to access the PDF. See also Joseph Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

[3] See both the “Personal Wealth” chart in the PDF and the “Personal and Family Wealth” chart that also appears in this blog post.

[4] See the “Economic Class, Southern States and the Army of Northern Virginia” chart on my website.

[5] See the chart titled “Desertion” on my website.

Joseph Glatthaar

Dr. Joseph T. Glatthaar is Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (UNC Press, 2011) and General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (The Free Press, 2008).

Editor’s Note: September 2017 Issue

Editor’s Note: September 2017 Issue

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As we do with each issue, below you will find the editor’s note for our forthcoming September 2017 issue. You can access these articles by subscribing to the journal, or through a Project Muse subscription.

The essays in this volume should inspire us to reconsider how we measure the changes wrought by the Civil War. Two essays highlight how the postwar South remained littered with traps that ensnared freed people and poor whites in poverty and dependency. Confederate widows, too, were directed to new roles that looked a good deal like the old ones–although in their case, there were benefits to accepting them. We begin with an essay that suggests a new way to mark one critical change the war set in motion.

Mark Noll uncovers a robust criticism offered by American Catholics of Protestants, whose focus on an individual relationship with and interpretation of the scriptures tore at the social fabric and propelled the country into civil war. By contrast, Catholic approach to scripture, critics insisted, offered a “surer guide for the nation’s future,” because among other things, it was nurtured and guided by proper authority. This critique, launched in the Catholic press early in the war, put church spokesmen in a good position to exploit the chorus of postwar critics who sought to condemn Protestant fanaticism for nearly destroying the nation during the war. And, Noll suggests, this may in part account for the postwar move toward religious pluralism.

While the Catholic Church engaged in the work of critiquing the causes of the war, Confederate widows were enlisted to the work of memorialization through a new type of condolence letter that came into wide usage during the war. “Notification letters,” as Ashley Mays refers to them, were distinct in form and substance from condolence letters, for whereas the latter offered instruction about how widows should grieve, the former enlisted widows to the work of caretaking their husbands’ memories. Both forms could comfort and coerce, at the same time, opening up new questions about what Drew Faust once described as a “uniformed sorority of grief.” Did loss bring Confederate women together?

Erin Mauldin’s essay examines catastrophic ecological changes underway in the postwar South and pinpoints their human causes. Mauldin argues that to understand the New South’s economic stagnation, we must look carefully at how postwar tenancy set in motion changes to the land, such as erosion and the depletion of critical nutrients from soil. These changes exacerbated the economic dislocations suffered by poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers and fed a growing tide of indebtedness and bankruptcy.   Mauldin’s essay explores the deep irony that, in seeking to negotiate the terms of their post war labor contracts, freed people unintentionally helped to set in motion ecological changes that would threaten their economic autonomy.

Dale Kretz uncovers a similar irony in his study of USCT pension files. When applying for pensions, former slaves were asked to prove that their injury or disability—to be qualified for pensions, applicants had to prove they were disabled—did not result from their time in slavery, that upon enlistment, they were in “perfect health.” This stipulation required former slaves to assist federal agents in covering up the serious health consequences of slavery, and, as Kretz suggests, undercut simultaneous efforts to pass an ambitious slavery reparations law. As USCT veterans filled out forms and stood for health examinations, then, they unwittingly participated in what Kretz calls “national reconciliation struggles writ small.”

Lorien Foote’s review essay revisits historians’ use of the term “home front,” which is often invoked as a way to underscore the blurring of lines between combatants and noncombatants but which Foote suggests reproduces the same binary it seeks to dismantle. In its place, Foote proposes a number of alternatives, including “a people’s war,” “house hold war,” or more simply, “insurrection.” The benefits of this new vocabulary are clear when Foote takes account of a number of recent studies of slave resistance and guerilla warfare. We need not choose one from the alternative list she provides, but in trying them out, Foote suggests, we might get “a more accurate picture of the kind of war southerners confronted.”

 

Twenty Negro or Overseer Law?: Ideas for the Classroom

Twenty Negro or Overseer Law?: Ideas for the Classroom

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Application for an overseer exemption, May 1864. From Encyclopedia Virginia. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

For the Confederacy, was the Civil War a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight? College students and historians have grappled with this question as long as they have studied the Civil War. For those who answer in the affirmative, this “yes” is generally followed up by the argument that divisions between rich and poor and/or slaveholder and non-slaveholder contributed to the demise of the Confederacy.[1] Others, however, contend that the Civil War was both a rich man’s and a poor man’s fight. These historians are more apt to argue that the overwhelming power of the North (not internal Confederate divisions) led to Union victory.[2]

To support their argument, those favoring the former view have seemingly found a smoking gun in the “Twenty Negro Law.” Passed in October 1862, this amendment to the April 1862 conscription law allowed planters (those who owned twenty or more slaves) an exemption for someone to oversee their slaves. These historians often quote Mississippi Senator James Phelan’s succinct contention that “never did a law meet with universal odium.”[3] One scholar has claimed that the measure was “perhaps the most widely hated act ever imposed by the Confederacy,” and another has added that in the wake of the measure, “the War of Southern independence was, in consequence, effectively lost.”[4]

At first glance, the measure’s potential to undermine class solidarity appears irrefutable. Nevertheless the reality, as is often the case, is more complex. In the June 2017 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era, I offered my own analysis. There I argue that the October 1862 law represented a response to legitimate concerns regarding slave unrest, especially in light of Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. And, I point out that scholars have too often adopted an overly simplistic view of the measure. Many authors have disregarded the changes to the law in 1863 and 1864, conflated criticism of abuse of the law with criticism of the law itself, and ignored the fact that few men took advantage of the exemption.[5]

My argument is not that all Confederates welcomed the law or that non-slaveholders cheered this privilege extended to their planter neighbors. Instead, it is a reminder of both the complexity in history and the need to consider Civil War history from the perspective of the soldiers, politicians, and civilians of the era. There was no monolithic opinion regarding the measure, and consequently, the primary sources associated with the “Twenty Negro” or Overseer law provide a valuable opportunity to demonstrate how scholars can use the same sources and come to different conclusions.

In order to encourage students to think critically about this law, and about what primary sources can teach us, one option for an assignment in an upper-division Civil War course is to have students write an editorial either for or against the measure, taking into consideration some relevant primary sources (see appendix). There is, of course, no right or wrong answer, but it is more important how students use the primary sources. Some questions that might guide their work would include:

  1. What were the main arguments in favor of the law?
  2. What were the main arguments against the law?
  3. How did the law change over time? Did politicians respond to the law’s critics?
  4. Does the law support the contention that the Civil War was a “rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight”?

Also, when I teach this topic I encourage students to be aware of time and place in their editorial (they are allowed to choose their identity, the date they write, and the place they live). If students write in November 1862, they would be writing about a different iteration of the law than if they wrote in June 1864. And, if they write from a South Carolina county with over eighty percent of its population enslaved, they might come to a different conclusion than if they write from a piney woods county with less than ten percent of its population enslaved. And, of course, wealth, gender, proximity to the enemy, and other factors could also shape their attitude toward the law.

Overall, this assignment gives students the opportunity to consider context and contingency in history. My goal is not to get students to agree on their opinion of the measure. Historians have not reached unanimity on the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” issue in the past 150 years. And, my guess is that it will not be resolved in the next 150 years either, so there is no need for a classroom consensus. Instead, my hope is to get my students thinking in the context of the period, to address a key historiographical debate, and to use sources to make a convincing argument.

Appendix

If you assign an editorial project in class, or you discuss this law in depth, I suggest the following primary sources:

A. The 1860 census:

If your university subscribes to Social Explorer (socialexplorer.com), that’s the best method to get county data. The printed records are available at census.gov and the material is also available at the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) at nhgis.org (the easiest method used to be the University of Virginia census browser but that is no longer operating).

B. Statistics:

State Plantations Overseer Exemptions Percent of Plantations with Exemptions
Virginia 5,777 200 3.5
North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina 15,719 622 3.96
Louisiana 3,925 210 5.3


C. The laws:

  1. First law, October 1862

    “To secure the proper police of the country, one person, either as agent, owner or overseer on each plantation on which one white person is required to be kept by the laws or ordinances of any State, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to do military service, and in States having no such law, one person as agent, owner or overseer, on each plantation of twenty negroes, and on which there is no white male adult not liable to military service…are hereby exempted from military service in the armies of the Confederate States;… Provided, further, That the exemptions…shall only continue whilst the persons exempted are actually engaged in their respective pursuits or occupations. (James M. Matthews, Public Laws of the Confederate States of America, Passed at the Second Session of the First Congress [Richmond: R. M. Smith, 1862], 77-79.)

  2. May 1863 Amendment, which replaced the October 1862 law

    “Sec. 2. For the police and management of slaves, there shall be exempted one person on each farm or plantation, the sole property of a minor, a person of unsound mind, a feme sole, or a person absent from home in the military or naval service of the Confederacy, on which there are twenty or more slaves: Provided, The person so exempted was employed and acting as an overseer previous to the sixteenth April [1862]…for every person exempted, as aforesaid…there shall be paid annually…the sum of five hundred dollars.

    Sec. 3 Such other persons shall be exempted as the President shall be satisfied ought to be exempted in districts of country deprived of country deprived of white or slave labor indispensable to the production of grain or provisions necessary for the support of the population remaining at home, and also on account of justice, equity, and necessity.”(James M. Matthews, The Statutes at Large of the Confederate States of America Passed at the Third Session of the First Congress [Richmond: R.M. Smith, 1863], 158-59.)

  3. February 1864 amendment

    “There shall be exempt one person as overseer…on each farm or plantation upon which there are now …fifteen able-bodies field hands…shall only be granted in cases in which there is no white male adult on the farm or plantation not liable to military service…such person shall first execute a bond…that he will deliver…one hundred pounds of bacon…and one hundred pounds of net beef…for each able bodied slave on the farm…shall further bind himself to sell the marketable surplus of provisions and grain now on hand…to the Government or to the families of soldiers at prices fixed by the commissioners of the State.” (OR, ser. 4, vol. 3: 179-80)

D. Letters/reactions (in chronological order):

  1. “Farmer” to Governor Joseph Brown, February 22, 1862, Washington County, Georgia

    “Some neighborhoods in our Co. will shortly be left entirely destitute of White men & exposed to the ravages of Negroes without any control at all. This state of things arrises from the fact of all men volunteering & leaving from our locality; & no more being willing to stay & risk being drafted. Some farms will be entirely neglected & thereby loose more to the Confederacy than the men would gain by leaving home.”“Some white men should be left in all neighborhoods to carry on the farms & raise corn for the soldiers.” (Governor’s Correspondence, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta.)

  2. General Daniel Ruggles to General S. Cooper, Adj. Gen’l CSA, October 3, 1862, from Jackson, MS

    Voluntary enlistment plus conscription have taken “such a large proportion of the active freemen of this district, including the owners of slaves and other persons engaged in their management, that many plantations with numerous slaves are being left without the ordinary and necessary control of the white man, an daily applications are made to me to detail or to authorize the retention of proper persons to superintend them. Pernicious influences have already been manifested upon many of these plantations, and it is perhaps not without reason that fears are entertained of some serious disturbance in the sections most densely populated by the servile race, which are in most cases approachable by navigable streams…. The magnitude of this interest within this district is such that some speedy remedy and indicated line of future policy seemed to be imperatively demanded.” (OR, ser. 1, vol. 15, 821.)

  3. F.M. Holladay to Vice President Alexander Stephens, November 30, 1862 (from Mississippi)

    After his son has died in Confederate service, he wrote: “Our army is [torn paper]ing a great to do at the Exemption Law. It does look hard to exempt a man because he has 20 Negroes they say it is a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” (Alexander Stephens Papers, Emory University.)

  4. Senator James Phelan to Jefferson Davis, December 9, 1862

    “Never did a law meet with more universal odium than the exemption of slave-owners. Its injustice, gross injustice, is denounced even by men whose position enables them to take advantage of its privileges. Its influence on the poor is most calamitous, and has awakened a spirit of and elicited a discussion of which we may safely predicate the most unfortunate results. I believe such a provision to be unnecessary, inexpedient, and unjust. I labored to defeat it and predicted the consequences of its enactment. It has aroused a spirit of rebellion in some places, I am informed, and bodies of men have banded together to resist; whilst in the army it is said it only needs some daring man to raise the standard to develop a revolt.” (OR, ser. 1, vol. 17, 2: 790.)

  5. John Harris to Becky Harris, February 14, 1863

    “I hear that great dissatisfaction reins in our country in regard to the exemption law, and I cannot blame the people their. I mean those who are poor and have always had to work and all their lives to support their little children…. Who are the men that are detailed to stay at home and attend to the negroes. Is it not those men who before the war … employed the poor men to attend to his negroes and never himself went to the fields. Now how is it those very rich men are the best of overseers, can have more work done and keep the poor negro in better subjugation than any poor man and the poor have to leave those they love to the mercys of the rich and got out to fight the battle of the country – and who for – have not the men of property more at stake than the poor. Certainly they have and they are the ones who ought to face the canon or else when we gain our independence their effects ought to be taken and equally distributed between those who have gained for them their independence.” (John Achilles Harris Letters, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, La.)

  6. North Carolina Legislature

    “Whereas, the Confederate Congress in an act known as the ‘Military Exemption Bill,’ by the exemption of such persons as may be the owners of twenty or more negroes…have, in the opinion of this General Assembly, made unjust discrimination between such persons, and their less fortunate fellow-citizens, contrary to the spirit of our institutions, and in direct violation of the third section of our Bill of Rights…

    Resolved by this General Assembly, That we do not believe there exists a necessity for such distinctions, and we most respectfully ask our senators and representative in Congress to…urge a repeal of said clauses, at the earliest possible day.” (Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly, 1862-63 [Raleigh: W. W. Holden, State Printer, 1863], 49-50.)

  7. W. Courtney to mother and sister, February 7, 1864

    “I have left the Rebbel[sic] army and I intend in a few days to seek protection in the federal lines…. I wil not be governed by a people where there is not justice among them…. They have always made laws to oppress the poor since this war commenced. first the twenty negro law was allowed. next was allowed the rich man who did not own twenty slaves the privilege to hire a substitute in fact all big men who were not exempt in some way are officers in the army then who must do the fighting…the poor who have left families with the promised they should not suffer for want…[families] have been neglected. left without food….” (Stokes Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, La.)

  8. Sam Watkins, Tennessee Private, in his memoirs

    “A law was made by the Confederate States Congress about this time allowing every person who owned twenty or more negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.’ The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and the pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript.” (Sam Watkins, Company Aytch or a Side Show of the Big Show, M. Thomas Inge, ed. [Plume, 1999], 31-32.)


E. Speeches:

  1. President Jefferson Davis speech, Jackson, MS, December 26, 1862

    “I am told that [the Twenty Negro Law] has excited some discontent and that it has provoked censure, far more severe, I believe, than it deserves. It has been said that it exempts the rich from military service, and forces the poor to fight the battles of the country. The poor do, indeed, fight the battles of the country. It is the poor who save nations and make revolutions. But is it true that in this war the men of property have shrunk from the ordeal of the battle-field? Look through the army; cast your eyes upon the maimed heroes of the war whom you meet in your streets and in the hospitals; remember the martyrs of the conflict; and I am sure you will find among them more than a fair proportion drawn from the ranks of men of property. The object of that portion of the act which exempts those having charge of twenty or more negroes, was not to draw any distinction of classes, but simply to provide a force, in the nature of a police force, sufficient to keep our negroes in control. This was the sole object of the clause. Had it been otherwise, it would never have received my signature. As I have already said, we have no cause to complain of the rich. All of our people have done well; and, while the poor have nobly discharged their duties, most of the wealthiest and most distinguished families of the South have representatives in the ranks. (The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Lynda Crist et al., vol. 8, 1862 [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995], 569.)

  2. Alabama Senator William Yancey Speech in Southern Recorder, February 3, 1863

    “The sole question to be considered is, is the exemption of some one competent to manage slaves, demanded by the interests of the army and the community? If it is, the law is wise in this particular…

    “Every slave holding State, that had considered the question, for many years previously…had enacted laws requiring some male adult white person to reside upon a place where as many as 6 to 20 slaves resided…

    The Exemption law is this particular, but endorsed the policy of the State law.”“The slaves, under skillful management, constitute the great and peculiar strength of the South in war.”

  3. Jefferson Davis to Congress, January 12, 1863

    “I specially recommend…some revision of the exemption law of last session. Serious complaints have reached me of the inequality of its operation from eminent and patriotic citizens, whose opinions merit great consideration, and I trust that some means will be devised for leaving at home a sufficient local police without making discriminations, always to be deprecated, between different classes of our citizens.” (OR, ser. 4, vol. 2, 348.)

Notes

[1] For just a few examples of the view that internal divisions doomed the Confederacy, see David Williams, A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (New York: New Press, 2005); Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 188; William W. Freehling The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[2] For examples of this view, see Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008); William Blair, Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); “Everyman’s War: Confederate Enlistment in Civil War Virginia,” Civil War History 50 (March 2004): 5-36.
[3] James Phelan to Jefferson Davis, December 9, 1862, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 17, 2:790 (hereafter cited as OR).
[4] David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage, 188.
[5] John Sacher, “‘Twenty-Negro,’ or Overseer Law: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 2 (June 2017): 269-292.

John Sacher

John Sacher is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida. His research focuses on politics and society in the nineteenth-century South, particularly during the Civil War era. His book, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861 (LSU, 2003), examines antebellum politics and secession in Louisiana. He is currently working on a book on conscription in the Confederacy. This study uses conscription as a lens to view both Confederate identity and the internal strains within the South during the Civil War.

Our New and Improved Website

Our New and Improved Website

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We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new website–same address, new look. As before, you can access information on how to subscribe to the journal, see tables of contents for each issue, learn more about our awards, read forums on the future of Civil War studies and Reconstruction studies, find out how to submit your work for consideration, and you can read and subscribe to our blog, Muster.

Special thanks to Ellen Bush at the University of North Carolina Press for her hard work on the website redesign.

The South Rises Yet Again, This Time on HBO

The South Rises Yet Again, This Time on HBO

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For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how Americans remember the Civil War, the last few months have been something of a treasure trove. The sectional conflict has surfaced repeatedly, in a variety of ways–some hopeful, some troubling–from confrontations over the removal of Confederate monuments to the most recent, even absurd, entry into the Civil War memory landscape: the announcement by HBO that it plans to produce an alternative Civil War history television series. Confederate, created by the showrunners for Game of Thrones, aims to depict a world in which the South succeeds in its efforts to leave the Union and create “a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution.” Spotlighting the lead-up to the “Third American Civil War,” Confederate will depict men and women on “both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone–freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.”   No doubt recognizing the problematic optics in having white men produce a series about a slave society, HBO enlisted the black husband and wife team of Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman who will serve as both writers and executive producers for the show.[1]

Many commentators have already weighed in on this proposed venture, with some expressing deep concern about what it might mean to bring Game of Thrones sensibilities to bear on a television drama focused on American slavery. I have nothing to say about that; I’ve never watched GoT. But as a historian with some awareness of the long historical arc of Civil War memory, I am interested in what this new effort means in the context of the current political landscape. Others, including scholar Roxanne Gay, have taken up this theme and have voiced strong reservations about making a show like this at this unsettled and turbulent political moment.[2]

In an interview with Vulture, David Benioff, one of the white producers and a self-professed “history nerd” explains how he got the idea for the proposed series. “I remember reading a history of the Civil War,” Benioff explains, in which he learned the story of Robert E. Lee’s “lost orders” before the battle of Antietam. Here, let me just note that for those interested in this hypothetical, there is a well-done essay by Civil War historian James McPherson, as yet un-credited in this HBO fantasy, speculating about this very scenario: that if never lost, then Lee’s orders would never have been discovered by a Union corporal and passed on to General McClellan who, in turn, would not have attacked the Confederate commander at Antietam. At any rate, as Benioff explains, he was interested in “what would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked D.C., if the South had won.”[3]

I suppose this seems straightforward enough, but here is where my concerns emerge. It troubles me that Benioff’s starting point is a “dorky” (as he puts it) military fantasy, one that countless neo-Confederates may well have indulged in, which puts their side in the victory seat. Had he mentioned, say, his interest in thinking about our long-standing legacy of racial inequality and its links to the Civil War era, I might feel differently. Even more, Benioff’s remarks show little awareness of how much a Confederate-centric narrative already holds a dominant place in American culture: how our culture has been awash with a romanticized fantasy about the Confederate war effort and whitewashed notions of slavery.

Like Benioff’s account of his artistic inspiration, Americans have long told the Civil War story strictly in military terms, paying little attention to the central problem of slavery, and even less to the drama of emancipation. And as historian Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us, even though Confederates lost the war, the economic and political power held by white Southerners allowed them to create “a landscape dense with totemic relics”. In contrast, “southern blacks could never fix their memory in public spaces in the same manner or to the same extent.” I would urge anyone who wants to imagine, in film, or fiction, or television, a Confederate “victory,” to keep that memory imbalance in mind.[4]

One example of neo-Confederate merchandising that forwards a particular perspective on Civil War history. Image courtesy of fashionnetwork.com.

Benioff and his collaborators enter a crowded field of Civil War counterfactuals, including websites devoted to “Alternative History” along with films, novels, and historical essays. Earlier versions of the story showed considerable interest in how a Southern victory might affect the global balance of power. Winston Churchill penned his own version of this story in 1930, following visits and conversations with Lee biographer Douglas Freeman.   In Churchill’s version, Lee wins at Gettysburg, enters Washington, and proclaims that the “victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy toward the African negroes” that conflicted with western European principles. In short, Lee, cheered on by British leader William Gladstone, freed the slaves. As Churchill saw it, this happy settlement of “the color question” represented a validation of British policies in “dealing with alien and more primitive populations.”   In 1960, noted Civil War novelist MacKinlay Kantor likewise imagined a Confederate victory with the slaves emancipated in the 1880s. Evincing little interest in the race question but considerable concern about the Cold War, Kantor’s main point was to show how the threat of Communism would eventually cause the disunited states to reunite to fight their common foe.[5]

More recently, writers and artists, attuned to the deep and ongoing power of racism in American life, have opted for a scenario in which the South wins and maintains some version of a slave system. In CSA: The Confederate States of America, African-American filmmaker Kevin Willmott imagines the successful Confederate nation and its slave-based economy by drawing on the actual popular culture, replete with racist imagery, of twentieth-century America.   Willmott, in other words, explores how much American culture as a whole bears the stamp of Confederate thinking. In Underground Airlines, the white writer Ben Winters imagines Lincoln’s assassination occurring in 1861 and Congress subsequently agreeing to the Crittenden compromise. As a result, the nation avoids civil war and keeps slavery intact in four deep South states. Like Willmott, Winters contemplates the tenuousness of abolitionist sentiments and the relative ease with which white Northerners accept the perpetuation of racial bondage and a culture of white supremacy. In Winters’ telling, Confederate sensibilities, even if there was never an actual Confederacy, resonate throughout the United States.[6]

Although the HBO series seems, in some respects, to pursue some similar themes as Willmott and Winters, I fear this effort is already moving in a problematic direction, even in the title of the new production. In a world where Confederate flags continue to fly, where many Confederate monuments remain standing, where Confederate supporters feel emboldened by President Trump and many of his policies, it is hard not to sympathize with the growing counter-movement, for people to cry “enough” at this continued emphasis on all-things-Confederate, whether in flags or monuments or television shows.

Although efforts have been made recently to remove some prominent Confederate images, the U.S. has, historically, been awash with Confederate symbolism. In this climate, does HBO’s proposed series stoke the flames of the Confederate victory narrative? Photo by Evan Vucci, Associated Press.

The Confederate version of Civil War history has for years had more clout than a Unionist or Emancipationist account, especially in film and fiction. Think Gone With the Wind or Birth of a Nation or even, more recently, Gods and Generals. To recall how simple it is for Hollywood to erase slavery from the Civil War, think about this year’s cinematic offering, The Beguiled. Putting the word “Confederate” at the center of a prominent television series seems another way to give a discredited system yet more air-time, and not in a historical treatment but in something meant purely for entertainment. Kevin Willmott put CSA in his title, although that was in keeping with his mockumentary approach in which “CSA” was the title of a British-made educational documentary. Ben Winters may well have had the right instinct in Underground Airlines: to imagine a world where there never even was anything called the Confederacy, where there is no need to imagine a Confederate victory, but where American history has nonetheless followed a racially troubled, and all-too familiar, historical trajectory.[7]

Ultimately, perhaps the main problem with this HBO proposal is not just this reimagining of a Confederate victory, but the plan to put the Confederacy–supposedly replete with all its symbols and sensibilities–front and center at this very specific historical moment, a moment when so many people are actively engaged in diminishing the Confederacy’s power on our cultural landscape. I am certainly not calling for historical ignorance or for removing the whole Confederate experience from the history books. I would just urge a greater awareness of how much influence this treasonous movement has already exerted in American life and the increasingly sinister ways it has been and continues to be deployed.

[1] Jackson McHenry, “HBO Picks Up Game of Thrones Showrunners’ Alternate-History Civil War Drama Confederate,” Vulture, July 19, 2017, accessed July 26, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/game-of-thrones-showrunners-hbo-confederate.html; Josef Adalian, “The Producers of HBO’s Confederate Respond to the Backlash and Explain Why They Wanted to Tell This Story,” Vulture, July 20, 2017, accessed July 25, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/hbo-confederate-producers-exclusive-interview.html.

[2] Dave Itzkoff, “‘Confederate’ Poses Test Over Race for ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators and HBO,” New York Times, July 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/arts/television/confederate-hbo-game-of-thrones.html; Roxanne Gay, “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction,” New York Times, July 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/opinion/hbo-confederate-slavery-civil-war.html.

[3] Benioff quoted in “Producers of HBO’s Confederate Respond”; James McPherson, “If the Lost Order Hadn’t Been Lost: Robert E. Lee Humbles the Union, 1862,” in Robert Cowley, ed., What Ifs? Of American History: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: Berkley Books, 2004).

[4] W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Woman’s Hand and Heart and Deathless Love: White Women and the Commemorative Impulse in the New South,” in Cynthia Mills and Pamela Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 71.

[5] Winston Churchill, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History (Summer 1961; reprinted from Scribner’s Magazine, December 1930), 244; MacKinlay Kantor, “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” Look Magazine (November 22, 1960), 29-62.

[6] CSA: The Confederate States of America, Dir. Kevin Willmott, Hodcarrier Films, 2004; Ben Winters, Underground Airlines (New York: Mullholland Books, 2016).

Nina Silber

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

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