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Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction in the Gilded Age

By Dillon J. Carroll | November 22, 2016 | Comments 7 comments

In November 2015, two Princeton economists, Dr. Angus Deaton and Dr. Anne Case, published a startling report, which indicated that the mortality rates of poorly educated middle-aged white Americans had skyrocketed. These mortality rates, Deaton and Case argued, were not being driven by the usual suspects of diabetes or heart disease, but by suicide, alcoholism and opioid addiction. Among 45 to 54 year olds, with no more than a high school education, death rates increased by 134 per 100,000 from 1999 to 2014. This sad revelation has been billed as unparalleled in American history, with Dr. Deaton himself unable to find a historical comparison.[1]

However, rampant opioid addiction rates do have a historical parallel: here in the United States, and especially the American South, after the Civil War. Southern whites during the Gilded Age arguably had the highest addiction rates in the country, and possibly the world. How do we know? Some of the evidence is anecdotal. For instance, in the Opium Habit, published in 1868, Horace B. Day estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 Americans were addicted to opium.[2] Some of the evidence is more empirical. In 1915, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which required anyone who imported, produced, sold or dispensed narcotics to register, pay a tax and keep detailed records. David Courtwright, a historian of addiction, analyzed these records from the Harrison Act and demonstrated that addiction rates in the South were much worse than anywhere else. In Atlanta, for instance, 2 out of every 1,000 people were addicted to an opioid. The worst southern city, though, was Shreveport, Louisiana, where almost 10 out of every 1,000 were addicted to opium or morphine. These numbers were much higher than anywhere else in the United States, arguably the world.[3] Addiction rates were not born equally among Southerners either. White Southerners were far likelier to consume opium or heroin than black Southerners.

the-age-of-drugs — “The Age of Drugs,” by Louis Dalrymple, 1900. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Why was opium and morphine addiction so rampant in the United States in the Gilded Age? The answer rests with the outcome of the Civil War. Thousands of Civil War soldiers who were wounded during combat, or more commonly, became sick in camp, were first dosed with opium or morphine in field hospitals during the war. Many came home struggling with addiction to narcotics, first tasted in a hospital. One Union soldier who had endured “ten months of prison life” at Andersonville, returned home with an opium addiction, first doled out at a hospital in Wilmington. He regularly consumed opium, but when he tried to quit cold turkey, found that opium had an incredibly strong hold on him. “No tongue or pen will ever describe…the depths of horror in which my life was plunged at this time; the days of humiliation and anguish, nights of terror and agony, through which I dragged my wretched being,” he wrote.[4]

“When bachelor dens cast over waking hours a loneliness so deep,” c. 1904. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Confederate soldiers returned to a defeated and humiliated South, with cities like Atlanta in near ruin. Furthermore, one out of every five southern males of military age were killed in the war. Many heartbroken families turned to drugs to cope with the devastating loss of a husband, son, brother or father. “Maimed and shattered survivors from a hundred battle-fields,” Horace B. Day wrote in 1868, “diseased and disabled soldiers released from hostile prisons, anguished and hopeless wives and mothers, made so by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them, have found, many of them, temporary relief from their sufferings in opium.”[5]

Today, much of the opioid epidemic stems from prescription drug abuse. The CDC claimed in 2014 that everyday 46 people die from a prescription drug overdose. Prescription drug abuse fueled the opioid epidemic during the Gilded Age as well. Opium, heroin and morphine were legal tools for the apothecary or physician during and after the Civil War. The science of addiction had not yet emerged, and doctors prescribed opium and morphine regularly for pain management and sleeping problems. A.M. Chappell was a veteran of the Fourteenth Virginia Infantry and had been wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg when a ball crashed through his left knee. It was a wound that Chappell noted he “would never get entirely over.”[6] By 1886, Chappell was “very poor indeed” and “with a wife and children to support.” He wrote to the Lee Camp Soldier’s Home for admission into the institution. In his letter he noted his lingering disability, poverty and his addiction to morphine. “The Dr. put me on morphine and I can’t stop that,” Chappell wrote to William R. Terry. “Can’t get it often except people give it to me.”[7]

The destruction of slavery, and the Southern slave economy, also led many Southerners to turn to drug use. The 13^th Amendment to the Constitution legally overthrew the system of slavery, and four million African American men, women and children were freed. In an instant, the abolition of slavery wiped out billions of dollars in slave capital. In addition, the introduction of wage labor, along with international competition, hobbled the cotton economy. Slavery was an immoral and incredibly cruel institution with no redeeming qualities–its destruction was long overdue. But the institution’s demise wiped out vast sums of wealth in the American South, leaving many white Southerners destitute and impoverished. To cope with this sudden loss, many southerners turned to drug use. This was clear to many Americans living in the Gilded Age. “Since the close of the war,” remarked a New York opium dealer, “men once wealthy, but impoverished by the rebellion, have taken to eating and drinking opium to drown their sorrows.”[8] It also explains why the weight of addiction was not carried equally between the races. Black southerners were far less likely to be addicts, partly because the defeat of the Confederacy was celebrated not mourned.

In the wake of the death and destruction of the war, those most affected by it—soldiers and southern whites—turned to opium in alarming numbers. Many addicts were first introduced to an opioid in a hospital or by a family physician. They used opium or morphine to cope with lingering illness or injury, grief, or economic loss from the war. While much different, the modern opioid epidemic is not the first. Deindustrialization and the shredding of the social safety net has left high school educated, middle-aged whites with few options. Many have turned to opioids to cope.

[1] “Death Rates Rising for Middle Aged White Americans, Study Finds,” New York Times, November 2, 2015.

[2] Horace B. Day, The Opium Habit (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 6-7.

[3] David T. Courtwright, “The Hidden Epidemic: Opiate Addiction and Cocaine Use in the South, 1860-1920” The Journal of Southern History 49, no. 1 (February 1983): 58.

[4] Anon, Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by An Habituate (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876), 67.

[5] David T. Courtwright, “Opiate Addiction as a Consequence of the Civil War” Civil War History 24, no. 2 (June 1978): 103; Horace B. Day, The Opium Habit (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 6-7.

[6] A.M. Chappell to William R. Terry, 24 May 1886, Lee Camp Soldier’s Home Correspondence, 1885-1894, Box 166, Brock Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “Opium and its Consumers,” New York Tribune, July 10, 1877.

Dillon Carroll

Dillon Carroll graduated with his doctoral degree from the University of Georgia in August 2016, where he had worked with Stephen Berry, John Inscoe and Stephen Mihm. He now lives in New York City and teaches at Hofstra University and the University of Bridgeport. He spends his time revising his dissertation into a book, reading, and finding the best happy hours in the city.

Out of the Shadows Redux: A Graduate Student’s Thoughts at the SHA

By Lindsay Rae Smith | November 18, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

Since the firing on Fort Sumter, the Civil War has been the watershed moment of American history. If historians are responsible for explaining the evolution of contemporary American culture, we recognize that at least part of its origin was forged during the war. We repeatedly flock to the same four year period, refining our interpretation of the wars’ causes and consequences. Even now, on the far side of the sesquicentennial, interest seems as strong as ever. Yet, there is a unique vulnerability in being a graduate student, particularly a graduate student studying the Civil War. It is the pervasive fear that all of the important topics are exhausted, that there is nothing left to contribute. With over 150 years of historical scholarship, one cannot help but wonder, is there anything left to say about the Civil War?

Imagine my interest, then, to find a panel at this year’s meeting of the Southern Historical Association titled “Coming Out of the Shadows: New Insight into Understudied Aspects of the American Civil War.” The topic sounded promising, as did the list of panelists: Judith Giesberg, Lesley J. Gordon, and Susannah J. Ural. Each of them was a successful scholar who undoubtedly had something to contribute to the conversation. I was eager for their presentations.

During the panel, each historian presented original research which, despite being loosely connected as “understudied” topics, varied widely. Judith Giesberg began the session with her discussion of soldiers’ consumption of pornography during the war. Explaining that new printing technology made erotic materials more readily available to soldiers, she argued that the consumption of pornography created a unique comradery through an insular sexual culture that regulated how soldiers viewed women and themselves. Such comradery, however, could be as exclusionary as it was inclusive. Using Anthony Comstock as a case study, Giesberg described how Comstock’s inability or unwillingness to participate in his regiments’ sexual culture ultimately led to his alienation.

Giesberg’s research, however, is not simply about the shared sexual culture of military life. It is also about the lasting consequences of that culture, and these consequences hold the exciting implications for her work. With the exception of studies on memory and race, historians often neglect how the Civil War contributed to the social issues of the latter half of the nineteenth century. While the army was never concerned with the sexual expectations shaped by military life, civilian society was. During the war, the government passed laws to restrict soldiers’ access to pornographic material. While rarely enforced, these laws set the precedent for future legislation such as the Comstock Law of 1873, which prohibited the circulation of “obscene” materials including erotica, contraceptives, and information regarding abortion. Thus, Giesberg roots the battle for women’s reproductive rights in the twentieth century within the sexual and legislative consequences of the Civil War.

Lesley Gordon’s research dealt with another factor contributing to soldiers’ potential alienation: cowardice. Focusing specifically on racialized understandings of bravery, Gordon examined how accusations of cowardice held different implications for black and white troops. While white soldiers were thought to have autonomy, choosing to be brave or not, African American soldiers were described as having a “passive” courage which was linked with their obedience to authority. As a result, a regiments’ expectation for success or failure became deeply attached to its racial makeup. While charges of cowardice were equally devastating regardless of race, African American troops carried the additional burden of proving their bravery on the field of battle.

While Gordon’s research contributes to a broader discussion concerning the relationship between African Americans and the military, it also reveals something else. Perhaps more than the other presenters, Gordon highlights the ways historians continue to construct and perpetuate traditional war narratives. Gordon falls in line with historians like John Keegan and Drew Gilpin Faust who assert that the fashioning and retelling of war stories inherently seeks to create order from chaos, telling of victory in the face of defeat. As a result the popular stories passed through the generations privilege narratives of heroism. As such, Gordon’s work is a call to look beyond the comforting narratives of order and into the chaos, where human behavior often fails to meet expectation.

Susannah Ural’s presentation was the result a public history project she is currently heading at the University of Southern Mississippi. There, she and her students are examining the records kept at the Beauvoir estate when it operated as a Confederate Soldiers Home during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Confederate Soldiers Homes are not an understudied topic within the field, the information provided in Ural’s dataset challenges traditional scholarship regarding how these institutions operated. Usually thought to minister to the poorest and neediest of southern society, Ural’s research suggests that residents at Beauvoir were largely middle class compared to the rest of Mississippi. Furthermore, the fluid nature of residency combined with opportunities of civil engagement suggests that residents of the home were not “invisible monuments” to the South’s defeat. Instead, they were integrated members of the surrounding community.

Ural’s work aptly demonstrates how new methods of research and data collection might change the ways historians understand institutions. Indeed, the significance of Ural’s findings is made possible by a database that can easily track statistical information: race, age, gender, economic status, etc. These statistics offer the greatest challenge to the historiography. Ural has clearly discovered that Beauvoir does not conform to historians’ understanding of Confederate Soldiers Homes. The question is why. Was Beauvoir an exceptional case? Or have historians heretofore been incorrect regarding how these homes operated in the South?

Each of these presentations highlights new avenues of research. Whether interested in making more overt connections between wartime culture and the social and political agenda of the Progressive Era, or in deconstructing wartime narratives of heroism and victory, these studies demonstrate the breadth of topics and methods that have yet to be explored. Nevertheless, while each presentation was unique, there was one recurrent theme: a renewed emphasis on the localized study. While general narratives of war and soldiers’ experiences have recently dominated the field, the localized approach shared by Giesberg, Gordon, and Ural reveal unexpected nuances. It is in understanding these nuances, that graduate students may find their voice.

Lindsay Rae Smith

Lindsay Rae Smith is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alabama. Her dissertation, “’Fighting Johnnies, Fevers, and Mosquitoes’: A Medical History of the Vicksburg Campaign,” examines the way campaigning armies were aided, or hindered, by the capabilities of the Army Medical Corps and the limitations of nineteenth-century medical care.

Earl J. Hess Accepts Tom Watson Brown Book Award

By Julie A. Mujic | November 14, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

The Society of Civil War Historians Banquet is an anticipated event on the program of the Southern Historical Association’s Annual Meeting. It is an opportunity for Civil War historians to gather together for conversation over dinner and drinks and hear about a new book that has garnered much attention in the field. On November 3, 2016, the 120 historians in attendance at this year’s event demonstrated their true dedication to the cause by sacrificing two more hours on the beautiful beach at the TradeWinds Grand Island Resort in St. Pete, Florida, to participate in the festivities of the SCWH dinner.

The president of the SCWH, Daniel Sutherland (University of Arkansas), introduced the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Brown’s son, Tad Brown, sponsors the dinner, the complimentary copies of the book, and the $50,000 award each year. He also reads the book submissions and attends the dinner, where this year he presented the prize for the seventh consecutive time. Tad Brown created this award in memory of his father and the SCWH is extremely grateful for his continued support for the field.

Tad Brown, Earl Hess, and Dan Sutherland at the awards dinner, courtesy of the Society of Civil War Historians.

The book prize committee this year consisted of Gary Gallagher, Lorien Foote, and James Marten. In their absence, Dan Sutherland read the report sent by Jim Marten regarding the winning book. Earl J. Hess’s Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (Louisiana State University Press, 2015) captured the interest and acclaim of all three committee members from the start. They appreciated how Hess asked new questions of old sources and took the time to explain and explore the significance of unit-level tactics. In a lighter moment, the banquet audience reacted perceptibly to the committee’s comment that the book will cause historians to rewrite lectures. It was a warm and complimentary letter and demonstrated the committee’s genuine admiration for Dr. Hess’s work in this book.

Dr. Earl J. Hess, Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University, then took the stage and began his talk by mentioning Mark Grimsley’s 1996 online essay “Why Military History Sucks” (http://warhistorian.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-military-history-sucked.html) and calling on historians to not let military history “die a quiet death.” Hess fears the marginalization of military history and believes that academic historians need to take a more prominent role in updating and disseminating military history. He does not want Civil War military history to be dominated by amateur historians who do not have the training and methodology he feels is necessary to analyze the sources and present the most cutting-edge research.

Hess argued that there is a pressing need for new perspectives in Civil War military history, and he stated his agreement with Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier in their recent essay (Journal of Civil War Era, Vol. 4, No. 4, December 2014) when they called for more junior scholars to focus on military history. The historians at the banquet were familiar with this part of Hess’s argument, as it harkened back to discussion that cropped up in the wake of both Hess’s essay in Civil War History (Vol. 60, No. 4, December 2014) and the one by Gallagher and Meier. Megan Kate Nelson and Kevin Levin ruminated on this theme at the time in their blogs (http://www.megankatenelson.com/civil-war-military-historians-are-freaking-out/ and http://cwmemory.com/2014/12/11/in-defense-of-hess-gallagher-and-meier/), as did others, and we have also discussed this topic at length at recent conference sessions and panels. Hess utilized the stage at the SCWH dinner to reiterate his position on these issues.

Hess encouraged graduate programs to offer more military history and to make sure that scholars can be “true military historians.” He contended that Civil War military historians are far behind those of other wars and need to catch up, for example by revisiting old questions such as whether Atlanta’s fall really did secure Lincoln’s 1864 victory and whether the Civil War was truly an unusually destructive American experience. Historians of other American wars understand more about topics like supply, logistics, military engineering, and additional important aspects to conducting warfare than do Civil War historians; Hess would like to see these gaps filled in the literature.

Hess thus offers his book, Civil War Infantry Tactics, as an example and a step forward for Civil War military history. In the book, he analyzes the use of primary, small-unit tactics and discusses basic questions like the definition of column and line, the difference between them, and why it was so important that soldiers needed to know these formations. Hess argued in his banquet speech that primary tactics dominated the lives of soldiers, who were regularly drilled both during times of inactivity, long winters, or to update their skills. He pointed out that drills occurred even as late as March 1865 and that these served to keep idle troops busy and unite disparate men into battle-ready groups. Thus, understanding and drilling primary tactics had both a military and a morale-building purpose.

Hess outlined how American military leaders adopted much of their strategy and tactical knowledge from French military manuals, which were translated and interpreted by various Americans in the years prior to and just after the outbreak of the war. He reminded the audience that the manuals are filled with jargon, not theories or application, and served as a gateway to developing leadership qualities for men who were willing to dredge their way through the material. Hess argues in his book that the overwhelming majority of small unit commanders did learn tactics well enough to be effective. He noted that it was necessary for a commander to employ several maneuvers one after another in rapid succession and to be able to rely on men to obey orders without question.

After explaining the significant impact of successful implementation of tactics in the Civil War, Hess discussed how he expanded his analysis to consider how Civil War tactics fit in a linear examination of tactics in wars before and after it. Hess mentioned that this book complements another recent book of his, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth, and that the two books together demonstrate that the Civil War did not materially alter the nature of warfare in America. The rifle musket did not change how infantry fought on the battlefield – they still mainly employed short-range firing techniques rather than the longer-range opportunities offered by the new weaponry – and linear tactics did not cause the high rates of casualties in the Civil War. Hess does not agree that volunteer armies caused the wars to be long and believes that officers were effective in battle.

Hess rounded out his talk by encouraging the Civil War historians in the room to focus on the international context of the war and to compare the military history of the Civil War with other events globally in the same era. Ultimately, Hess argued that the Civil War was not a modern conflict and that it illustrates how Americans at that time copied most of their warfare style from the French; the Civil War, in Hess’s mind, demonstrated continuity with warfare before it, not American exceptionalism.

Dr. Hess’s final challenge to the audience was directed at graduate students and junior scholars to steer their research more directly toward Civil War military history. He views military history as the link between all topics of the war’s history and he sees the youthful academic historian as leading that charge.

Julie Mujic

Julie Mujic is a historian of the American Civil War who writes about the Midwestern home front. She recently published an essay in Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought The Civil War by the University of Georgia Press. Julie also teaches in the Global Commerce program at Denison University and owns Paramount Historical Consulting, LLC.

Abolitionism, Vigilance Associations, and the Rhetoric of “Law and Order”

By Kristen Epps | October 31, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

In today’s heated political climate, only days away from a contentious Presidential election, Americans are no stranger to public threats of intimidation or violence as a mechanism for maintaining “law and order.” From Donald Trump’s frequent references to the need for restoring “law and order” in urban communities, to his pleas for poll watchers, to the Bundy brothers’ revolt in Oregon, and the state action against #NoDAPL protesters in North Dakota, this theme of restoring the rule of law is inescapable.[1] In many news outlets, and even in casual conversations across the nation, there is a sense that we have lost our way. In many cases, these statements are a reaction to the perceived loss of political power or social hegemony. As women, African Americans, immigrants, the LGBT community, and other groups continue to fight for equality, those who had previously enjoyed significant social privilege are left with a sense of powerlessness. Promises of restoring law and order are both a mechanism for taking back what has been lost and a strategy for silencing dissent.

Such concerns would have been quite familiar to western Missourians living in the 1850s. The strife of Bleeding Kansas had shaken their world. In April 1855, an antislavery minister named Frederick Starr documented the goings on in Platte County, Missouri, a center of pro-slavery sentiment on the Kansas-Missouri border (in what is now the Kansas City metro). He wrote in a letter that “we are in the midst of terrible times…. The ballot box is violated, the press overthrown, the church denounced, surely pro-slavery forces are making great advances and one victory crowds on the heels of another…. Glorious nation this.”[2] He referred here not only to the Kansas troubles, but also to a nearly year-long struggle between Missouri anti-slavery advocates, like himself, and their pro-slavery neighbors. In addition to the battle to populate Kansas, Platte County simultaneously encountered profound internal conflicts over the presence of free-soilers and abolitionists in their midst, men and women whose antislavery views challenged the social order.

image-1-frederick-starr — Frederick Starr, a Presbyterian minister in Platte County, Missouri. From Milton E. Bierbaum, “Frederick Starr, A Missouri Border Abolitionist: The Making of a Martyr,” *Missouri Historical Review* 58, no. 3 (April 1964): 309.

To some extent, this was a contest between anti- and pro-slavery value systems, a battle for the future of the United States. But as abhorrent as anti-slavery views might be to slaveholding leaders, it was only once abolitionist, free-soil, or colonizationist views became public, that they became a public problem, and abolitionists became public nuisances. To protect their definition of how proper slaveholding communities should function, cracking down on dissenting views was necessary to maintain law and order. In response, dissenters like Frederick Starr presented their own interpretations of law and order, critiquing pro-slavery rhetoric and offering a counter-narrative of the community’s needs and values.

Despite the fact that Starr did not preach against slavery from the pulpit, by 1854 he had become known throughout Platte County as an opponent of slavery. Starr’s primary antagonist was an organization called the Platte County Self Defensive Association (PCSDA), which formed at a public meeting in Weston on July 20, 1854, to protect the community from abolitionist threats. These groups were often known as vigilance associations or vigilance committees. They policed any “suspicious looking persons” who emigrated to Kansas, distributed abolitionist literature, or associated with slaves and free blacks. They also styled themselves as protectors of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas who might face abuse from Northern neighbors. They eventually adopted secret passwords and badges. The association had hundreds of members at its height, including such prominent figures as David Rice Atchison and Benjamin Stringfellow.[3]

Members of the PCSDA had repeatedly asked Starr to join, and he always politely declined, on the grounds that he had no slave property to protect. However, while shopping one day in a downtown Weston business, Starr found himself accosted by a slaveholder and PCSDA member, Jack Vineyard. Vineyard was frustrated by Starr’s refusal to recognize that “every good citizen, when there were certain legal institutions and interests in the community where he lived, should do all he could to maintain harmony and quiet and to protect legal property.”[4] In response to this very public disagreement, the PCSDA staged a mock “trial” of Starr. Several hundred people attended. In his vigorous defense, Starr outlined his own, competing definition of the challenge to law and order. Those who harassed citizens based on hearsay and false accusations were the true criminals, he believed, using extra-legal means and intimidation to silence citizens. When it came to Northern transplants like himself, Southerners could expect “that he will not be a disturber of the peace of the community nor disturb the legal rights of any man…. But it [the South] has no right to expect that a man will lay aside or change his opinions and principles.”[5]

image-2-weston — An early lithograph of the Weston waterfront. Courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri.

By the fall of 1854, the Self Defensives’ posturing had tested the Weston community’s patience.[6] On September 1, 1854, citizens of Weston who opposed the use of violence (by either faction), and who were “favorable to law and order,” met in protest.[7] Their published pamphlet referenced the community’s need for stability and protection, stating that “our rights and privileges, as citizens of Weston, Platte county, Mo., have been disregarded, infringed upon, and grievously violated within the last few weeks, by certain members of the ‘Platte County Self-Defensive Association.’” Indeed, these actions had disrupted “the domestic quiet to our families, the sacred honor of our sons and daughters, the safety of our property, the security of our living and persons, the ‘good name’ our fathers left us, [and] the ‘good name’ of us all.”[8]

What mattered above all else, for those of either orientation, was stability. For slaveholders and their supporters, abolitionists were treasonous, cowardly, deceitful rabble-rousers who disrupted the peaceful workings of these Platte County communities. In response, anti-slavery residents, whether self-identified abolitionists or not, forwarded their own definition of law and order, decrying the PCSDA’s extra-legal maneuvers aimed at white dissenters and free blacks, their embrace of violence, and their attempts to constrain the freedoms of speech and press.

We find ourselves in a much different political context today, but Platte Countians’ internal war can provide some powerful lessons. The varying definitions of “law and order” that Republicans and Democrats adopt today—and that anti-slavery and pro-slavery partisans adopted in the 1850s—illustrate how divisive politics can be, particularly when it appears to threaten the normal, predictable workings of our society. This rhetoric of “law and order” speaks to our need for consistency and structure, and our human desire for a society that fundamentally makes sense. But claims (made by anyone) to restore law and order usually hearken to the need for extra-legal resistance as a mechanism to restore that law and order; Trump’s poll watchers and the PCSDA both serve as a perfect example of such cognitive dissonance. Such assumptions also liken the rule of law to justice, a dangerous false equivalency (as we learned from President Nixon’s rhetoric in the 1970s, which led to an epidemic of mass incarceration). The American right to protest, guaranteed by the 1^st Amendment, gives the lie to the idea that law and order is the answer to injustice, or that restoring some mythic past will generate stability. Indeed, much of today’s rhetoric in this regard seeks to silence those who speak out against injustice, or to limit the rights of minority communities. Regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum, this rhetoric carries weight, and those who engage in such language must bear the burden of that rhetoric if—or when—it leads to violence.

[1] For some examples, please consult “We Have to Bring Back Law and Order,” CNN Politics, accessed October 29, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/09/27/clinton-trump-debate-hofstra-stop-and-frisk-sot-five.cnn; Trip Gabriel, “Donald Trump’s Call to Monitor Polls Raises Fears of Intimidation,” The New York Times, accessed October 29, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/us/politics/donald-trump-voting-election-rigging.html?_r=0; Maxine Bernstein, “Jury finds all Oregon standoff defendants not guilty of federal conspiracy, gun charges,” The Oregonian, accessed October 29, 2016, http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/10/oregon_standoff_verdicts_annou.html; Sam Levin and Nicky Woolf, “Protesters pushed back after mass arrests at North Dakota pipeline site—as it happened,” The Guardian, accessed October 30, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2016/oct/27/north-dakota-access-pipeline-police-protesters-live-updates.

[2] Frederick Starr to Unknown, April 1855, Frederick Starr Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, Missouri.

[3] History of Clay and Platte Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historical Company, 1885), 634-635.

[4] Frederick Starr to Dear Father and All, October 30, 1854, Starr Papers, WHMC.

[5] Frederick Starr to Dear Father, January 15, 1855, Starr Papers, WHMC.

[6] Lester B. Baltimore, “Benjamin F. Stringfellow: The Fight for Slavery on the Missouri Border,” Missouri Historical Review 62, no. 1 (October 1967): 18.

[7] At least four members of the committee appointed to draft their resolutions, George T. Hulse, Elijah Cody, A. B. Hathaway, and J. V. Parrott, were slaveholders according to the 1850 census.

[8] “Citizens Meeting,” Starr Papers, WHMC. This was published as a broadside that Starr included in his personal papers.

Kristen Epps

Kristen Epps is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Georgia, 2016). Her research focuses on slavery, abolition, Bleeding Kansas, and the sectional crisis.

Mass Incarceration And Its Mystification: A Review Of The 13th

By Dan Berger | October 22, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and is reprinted here with permission. Although some of the material falls outside the temporal boundaries of this blog, we believe our readers will find it to be a valuable review, due to its connections to the Civil War.

When prisoners in Alabama last spring proposed a national strike to protest “prison slavery,” they called out the infamous clause in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment most known for abolishing slavery included a rider that sanctioned slavery “as punishment for a crime wherein the party shall have been duly convicted.”

That exception provides the foundation for Ava DuVernay’s The 13^th, an exploration of racial criminalization from the end of slavery to the present. The documentary features interviews with several leading scholars, pundits, and activists working on the issue, as well as a host of other commentators, including journalists and politicians. It moves quickly through more than 150 years of history, with a clear goal of providing the backdrop to the present moment of racial violence and resistance.

“Kalief Browder, 1993–2015,” by Jennifer Gonnerman (Photo by Zach Gross).

The film is at its best when it chronicles individual fates of those who encounter the carceral state. For example, the tragedy of Khalief Browder, the 22-year-old New Yorker who committed suicide after being held for three years in Rikers Island awaiting trial on charges—ultimately dropped—of having stolen a backpack, is portrayed with wrenching grace. Browder’s courage is evident in his refusal to accept a plea bargain for something he did not do. Yet the violence he faced during his imprisonment, some of it captured on film, led him to take his own life after his release. The film also presents a thoughtful, searing discussion among Black scholars and activists about the ethics of visualizing Black suffering, from lynching to contemporary killings by police.

The 13^th effectively demonstrates that criminalization has been a persistent feature of anti-Black racism. It shows the recursive nature of “law and order” politics, as DuVernay juxtaposes scenes from Trump’s speeches and rallies with police and vigilante attacks on Black activists in the 1960s. Such scenes, with the accompanying commentary, vindicate the mission, purpose, and structure of Black Lives Matter as the latest manifestation of a long struggle against criminalization. The footage underscores Malkia Cyril’s powerful comment that Black Lives Matter is “about changing the way this country understands human dignity.”

The 13^th describes mass incarceration as a backlash to the civil rights and Black Power movements, with some compelling footage of Black Panther Assata Shakur and other activists. Yet the film focuses more on what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon thought than on what they—or others—did. The reference by CNN contributor Van Jones to the imprisonment, exile, or death of Black activists in the 1960s appears only in the context of why there was not more opposition to the 1994 Crime Bill rather than as part of examining the foundations of mass incarceration in the political repression of 1960s-era social movements. The film does not discuss the policies that gave greater power to police, prosecutors, and prisons in those critical years.

Mass incarceration is the recent expression of a larger edifice of carceral power. It is a political project that began in response to the rebellious social movements in U.S. cities and prisons during the 1960s. It began with state and national politicians giving greater resources and authority to police and prosecutors and expanding the criminal code before embarking on the world’s biggest prison construction program. It now maintains an interlinked system of policing, surveillance, and imprisonment concentrated on the most marginalized sectors of society.

Mass incarceration began through twinned campaigns of targeted antiradicalism alongside the broad political economic destabilization of working class communities of color in the 1960s. It was not simply the “evolution of racial caste,” as Michelle Alexander states. Rather, mass incarceration has always been a bipartisan political project of social control—a counterrevolution by liberals and conservatives alike. It is too narrow to, as the film does, date mass incarceration to Ronald Reagan’s expansion of the war on drugs in the 1980s and Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. That puts the onus on federal prison policy, when 90 percent of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in this country are in state prisons and local jails. Prisons, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents in Golden Gulag, were the state-by-state geographic solution to the American government in crisis.

aaihs-2 In discussing the time between Bill Clinton’s presidency and the present, the film makes several significant factual errors: it states that arrests spiked after the 1994 Crime Bill when arrests have actually fallen since that time (the bill’s more pernicious effects concerned sentencing policy, not arrest rates); it shows a graph claiming that the prison population has expanded dramatically since 2010, when incarceration rates have plateaued or even fallen since that time; and it says that Black men account for 40% of the prison population, which has not been the case for several years. Although Black people remain dramatically overrepresented in prisons, the last several years have seen the number of Black men in prison drop and the number of white and Latino men—as well as women of all races—rise.

The prison system is racist and violent, but in ways that constantly evolve. Presenting old statistics or inventing new ones overlooks the deadly dynamism of mass incarceration. It can also reinscribe some of the same connections between Blackness and criminality that the film seeks to interrupt, such as the mistaken idea–taken from Bureau of Justice Statistics projections and debunked by professor Ivory Toldson–that there are more Black men in prison than in college or that one in three Black men will serve time in prison.

The film also suggests that mass incarceration is a profit-driven system controlled by the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), the shadowy lobbying group of major corporations and mostly Republican officials. The 13^th implies that mass incarceration is driven by private prisons and prison labor, and that ALEC oversees this nefarious scheme. These claims are simply false. As loathsome as ALEC is, it is a minor player in a complex network of public and private interests shaping crime policy. And as the Prison Policy Initiative has documented, private prisons account for less than ten percent of the overall prison population in the United States and are now at the frontlines of pursuing privatized alternatives to incarceration rather than mass incarceration itself. (The one exception is in the realm of immigrant detention, where more than seventy percent of detainees are held in privately run facilities.)

Beyond inflating the role of ALEC and companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, this focus on private prisons obscures the real ways money moves through or is extracted from the prison system, including both the vast expenditure of public funds dedicated to caging human beings as well as the nefarious ways private companies seek to profit off of incarceration. The film does cover the exorbitant rates charged for phone calls incarcerated people make to their loved ones, but only after the long and misleading emphasis on private prisons. Private companies, especially private prison companies, are not the driving forces of mass incarceration. They are the venal byproducts of racial state violence in a capitalist society. And as these entities now seek to steer the ship of prison reform, blaming ALEC for mass incarceration overlooks the true centers of gravity in the terrifying evolution of carceral control. It leaves students or others fired up by the film’s moral power with few places to turn to express their outrage.

Such missteps muddle the issue of where mass incarceration comes from or what it means to end it. One would be hard-pressed to find more astute analysts of racial criminalization and mass incarceration than Malkia Cyril, Angela Davis, Marie Gottschalk, James Kilgore, Khalil Muhammad, and some of the other commentators who appear in the film. Yet they appear alongside several people who have promoted and upheld anti-Black, free-market “solutions”—first to crime and now to mass incarceration. The film makes no narrative intervention to differentiate between its many interviewees, suggesting they are all equally reliable and trustworthy experts. While the cacophony of voices in the film—38 interviewees in 100 minutes—may be meant to suggest the breadth of voices opposed to the American carceral state, in practice it normalizes some dangerous or misleading analyses.

Some of the most robust avenues for understanding mass incarceration are unexplored in the film. The loudest silence is the inattention to women’s incarceration as well as the incarceration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. As many do, The 13^th treats mass incarceration as only a story of Black men in prison. Yet while women have always been a small percentage of the overall number of prisoners, their rate of incarceration—especially for Black women—has been higher than men. The film also overlooks the other labor women and queer and trans people do as a result of mass incarceration in maintaining families and communities. Other distinctive, and distinctly racist, areas of American prisons—such as the death penalty and long-term solitary confinement—are barely mentioned or overlooked entirely.

aaihs-3

DuVernay is exactly right to insist that criminalization has been and remains yoked to racism. And she has assembled some of the sharpest minds—if also, sadly, some of the dullest—to excavate why that is the case. The end result, however, is underwhelming. Overall, the film is too inattentive to the historical ebb and flow of racial criminalization, and it misses some of the most damning components of punishment. As Brett Story, director of another recent documentary on mass incarceration, The Prison in 12 Landscapes, told me, “dehumanization is the consequence, not the cause, of mass incarceration. It is not an attitude but a relation systematically organized and corroborative of other structures of abandonment.” Attending to those structures of abandonment is critical to understand and eradicate mass incarceration.

Dan Berger

Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of several books including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. The book shows that prisons produce a unique and influential form of antiracist politics. Follow him on Twitter @dnbrgr.

The Bubble: Greenbacks, Corruption, and the Politics of Looking Backwards

By Michael T. Caires | October 19, 2016 | Comments 1 comment

Throughout this long presidential campaign season, the specter of the Great Recession is well and alive. Over seven years since the end of the recession, many American workers are dealing with painfully slow wage growth and lingering anger and anxiety about the economy. Reacting to these concerns, the candidates offer voters clashing visions of a path forward. Hillary Clinton promises that she will strengthen financial regulations passed during the recession, reform taxes, and increase infrastructure spending. Donald Trump plans to rewrite or terminate many of these policies, especially international trade agreements such as NAFTA.[1] Critically, he has gone one step farther by stressing corruption in Washington and secret conspiracies of politicians and financial elites as part of the problem. At the first Presidential debate, Trump warned millions of Americans that the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates were actually feeding a “big, fat, ugly bubble” that would favor Clinton.[2] Recently at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump went so far as to suggest a secret “global power structure” that works against himself and the interests of the American working class.[3]

caires1 — The Federal Reserve Building, Washington, D.C., Courtesy of the Federal Reserve.

Conspiracy theories and dramatic promises in the face of a stagnant or depressed economy are nothing new in American history. But when trying to provide a historical context for politics and policy in the shadow of the Great Recession, historians typically explain our current situation by pointing to the history of late twentieth-century conservatism, the decline of labor unions, and financial restructuring. But history does not just provide origins, its also provides perspective. It is in this second mode that the Civil War might speak to our current concerns.

The young Republican Party that took power in 1861 never thought they would argue about banks and money in the midst of a war. Facing what we would call today a liquidity crisis, House Republicans drafted a bill to issue 150 million dollars in paper money in early 1862, with the crucial addition that these notes would be legal tender for all debts public and private. Since the ratification of the Constitution, gold and silver money, called “specie,” had been the only legally recognized “dollar” in the country. True, Congress created two national banks that issued a paper currency, and for decades most Americans used banknotes issued by hundreds of state-chartered banks. But American paper money had always been tied to the promise of gold. To make sure that banks and contractors would take federal paper money, Congress substituted the government’s command, or fiat, for the glitter of gold.[4]

These notes, which were eventually dubbed greenbacks due to their color, thrust the government into every cash transaction in the country. The initial 150 million in greenbacks eventually grew to almost 450 million, plus a morass of postage and fractional currency notes that served as the small change of the country.[5] Armed with the power to create money, the Republican Congress now possessed the ability to affect the price of everything in the Union economy—from a bushel of wheat to the price of securities on Wall Street. In addition to the greenbacks, in 1863 and 1864 Republicans authorized a system of national banks that would push out many of the old state banks after the war.

running-the-machine-figure-2 — Currier & Ives, “Running the Machine,” c.1864, Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

That financial power frightened and outraged critics in every political faction, but especially the Democratic Party. In 1863 and 1864, as inflation pushed up prices, Democrats attacked greenbacks as a vector for moral corruption and political cronyism.[6] One campaign document included tables of basic goods with one column marked “Democratic Prices” (or prewar prices) and the other dubbed “Abolition Prices.”[7] Within the Democratic rhetoric of the era, “greenback” became a synonym for extravagance and corruption. The Old Guard accused Abraham Lincoln of using greenbacks to “buy the hide and tallow of thousands of fishy politicians.”[8] Democrats, on different occasions, dubbed compensated emancipation “greenback abolitionism,” and called greenbacks “abolition rags.”[9] They also attacked the National Banking Acts as a means to enrich Republicans and yoke Main Street to Washington and Wall Street. In a pamphlet published in 1864, Alexander Del Mar warned his readers that “fanned by unscrupulous politicians” they were inside a “great paper bubble” that would “inflict upon the country all the long agonies of financial distress.”[10] Delmar was not alone. Among Republican critics there was a quiet hope that victory over the Confederacy would bring about a quick return to the gold standard and the financial status quo antebellum.

caires3 — “Delmar’s Financial Indicating Bubble,” from Alexander Delmar, The Great Paper Bubble; Or, the Coming Financial Explosion…A Campaign Document for 1864 (New York: Office of the Metropolitan Record, 1864).

That, however, was simpler said than done. Pennsylvania iron manufacturers, Midwest farmers, and voters from every party and region registered support for the greenbacks and thwarted attempts to retire them after the war.[11] This issue was a headache for Democrats and Republicans who both counted goldbugs and greenbackers in their ranks. Eventually the United States did resume specie payments on January 2, 1879; but that act did not turn the clock back.[12] The federal government retained a greater responsibility in American finance overseeing a network of national banks, taxation policy, and the power to issue and reissue millions in notes backed by gold or silver in the U.S. Treasury. For the next thirty years, debates about money, both its volume and form, continued to serve as a forum to debate economic inequality in a changing, and increasingly industrial, market. Resolution of these issues was a long time coming. It was not until 1913, with the creation of the Federal Reserve, that the nineteenth century’s “money question” found its answer—an answer that sought to take money out of politics, but continued the trend of greater centralization of the financial system.

The history of the greenbacks does not offer a simple policy prescription for today’s economic ills. It does suggest three observations. First, while looking backwards will always be a part of our democratic politics, we can never go back to a pure moment of government-market relations—if such a thing ever existed. The Fed’s monetary policy and federal financial reform, just like the Republicans’ decision to create greenbacks and national banks, entangled the federal state with the market and fundamentally changed it. Second, building a new consensus on the appropriate relationship between the people, their government, and the economy takes a very long time. Americans fought over money, labor issues, and corporate power for decades before they found some degree of resolution in the Progressive Era and New Deal. Third, we must remember that Trump’s picture of the economy satisfies some because it offers simple answers to complex problems. Ultimately, the resolution of these difficult issues rests with the decisions that voters will make at the polls this November and in the years to come. Indeed, our ongoing debates about economic inequality and opportunity suggest that we are closer to the start than to the end of a conversation about the relationship between peoples, governments, and markets in the twenty-first century.

[1] Hillary Clinton, “My Plan to Prevent the Next Crash,” Bloomberg, October 8, 2015; “Clinton vs. Trump: Where they Stand on Economic Policy Issues,” WSJ.com, http://graphics.wsj.com/elections/2016/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-on-the-economy/.

[2] Aaron Blake, “The first Trump-Clinton presidential debate transcript, annotated,” The Fix (blog) Washington Post, September 26, 2016, accessed October 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated/.

[3] “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Speech Responding to Assault Accusations” NPR, October 13, 2016, accessed October 14, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/10/13/497857068/transcript-donald-trumps-speech-responding-to-assault-accusations.

[4] For the text of the Legal Tender Act, see Act of February 25, 1862, ch.32, 12 Statutes at Large, 345.

[5] For a table of paper money issued by the U.S. during the war, see Robert T. Patterson, Federal Debt-Management Policies, 1865-1879 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), 150.

[6] Green-Back to his Country Friends (New York: 1862); “The Cost of the War, and Who Must Pay It,” The Old Guard 1, no. 1 (January 1863): 1; “National Notes vs Labor,” The Old Guard 2, no. 1 (January 1864): 8-12.

[7] Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, Hand-Book of the Democracy for 1863 & 64 (New York: 1864), Documents 29, 16.

[8] “Great Purchase and Sale of Damaged Democrats,” The Old Guard 1, no. 4 (January 1864): 95.

[9] “Democratic Union Association,” New York Herald, March 8, 1863; “Untitled,” Sciotto Gazette, March 31, 1863.

[10] Alexander Delmar, The Great Paper Bubble; Or, the Coming Financial Explosion…A Campaign Document for 1864 (New York: Office of the Metropolitan Record, 1864), 14.

[11] See, for example, Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction (Virginia, 2015); Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964).

[12] While the Specie Resumption Act declared that redemption of greenbacks for gold would occur on January 1, 1879, owing to the bank holiday on New Year’s Day, actual resumption did not occur until the next day. See Unger, The Greenback Era, 401.

Michael Caires

Michael Caires is the Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the American Civil War Museum where he is helping to create an exhibit on greenbacks during the Civil War era. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia and has taught at UVA and Hampden Sydney College. He currently at work on a book on how the greenbacks and national banks of the Civil War transformed America in the nineteenth century.

Are There New Lives for Old Objects at the National Museum of African American History and Culture?

By Martha S. Jones | October 11, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

The doors are open at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC.) Perhaps you are among the hundreds who have already made the trek to the Mall’s newest venue to marvel at the architecture, wander the exhibitions, and reflect on how African American history is American history. Or maybe you are, like me, hoping to squeeze in a trip to Washington in the coming months and nab a same-day ticket to view first hand the remarkable range of artifacts installed at the NMAAHC.

If you’re like me, though you’re far away, you’ve already had your first glimpse of the Museum’s exhibitions. There has been extensive coverage, in feature articles like that from Michele Norris in National Geographic and live commentary from Mark Lamont Hill, Treva Lindsey, and Yohuru Williams on BET to countless news pieces. Friends have eagerly, and with great feeling, shared snapshots, selfies, and immediate impressions via social media. My friend, Tulane University historian Emily Clark, invited her Facebook followers to accompany her to opening ceremonies and a walk through the galleries. I gladly went along for the ride.

One object on Emily’s time line caught my attention. It was an academic robe. But of course not just any robe. Emily circulated an image of the robe worn by Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole (today Director of the National Museum of African Art) during her 2002 inauguration as President of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Made of silky royal blue fabric and decorated with gold paint and stitching along with cowrie shells, Cole’s robe introduces the story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) into the Museum’s broader interpretation of African American culture.

jones1 — Academic robe worn by Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole at Bennett College.Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Johnnetta Betsch Cole.

This is a story of no small interest to me. During the very weekend that the NMAAHC opened to the public, I was visiting Bennett College. As one of only two black women’s colleges still operating, Bennett was celebrating its 90^th year with a Founder’s Day weekend and I was the featured speaker. I knew the school’s story well. Its beginnings were, as is the case for so many HBCUs, in the immediate post-Civil War period as former slaves, under humble circumstances, made education a key feature of freedom. Bennett, originally founded in 1873 in a church basement, was reorganized as a women’s liberal arts college in 1926. When Johnnetta Cole took the helm in 2002, she was the 6^th President of the women’s college. And because she had previously served as President of Atlanta’s Spelman College, Dr. Cole is remembered for having woven together the histories of these two women’s HBCUs for all time. The robe’s place at the NMAAHC preserves and passes along that story.

How did the Museum more generally regard the history of HBCUs, I wondered. What sorts of origins stories might it tell of such places, created out of the tumult of Civil War and the promise of Reconstruction? Today so many such institutions, including Bennett—though venerable and beloved—face hard times wrought of aged infrastructures, slim endowments, and competition from predominantly white institutions eager to attract talented African American students. Can the NMAAHC speak to this present as well as to the past of historically black colleges and universities?

I need not, it turns out, wait for a future visit to Washington before answering this question. The curious can pay a virtual visit anytime because the Museum has made its collections – small and somewhat idiosyncratic – available via a website: https://nmaahc.si.edu/. Click on Collections and peek beyond the exhibition halls into the archives and storage spaces of the Museum to glimpse and even re-imagine the stories that its documents, artifacts, and ephemera might tell.

The past of HBCUs are there. A first-edition of J.B.T. Marsh’s The Story of the Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs published in 1883 points to origins in the labor and talent of young people. Pages from a National Association of Colored Women’s meeting program link educator and founder of today’s Bethune-Cookman University, Mary McLeod Bethune, to the history of voting rights activism. A portrait of Charles S. Johnson, the first black president of Nashville’s Fisk University, invokes the legacy of intellectuals who were also institution builders. A gold pendant that marked an Alpha Kappa Alpha member’s diamond anniversary links fraternities and sororities to life-long commitments to community and service. A series of Hale Woodruff woodblock prints elegantly depicts the buildings of the Atlanta University Center, underscoring the architectural and artistic legacies of HBCUs. The earliest years of Howard University and its celebrated Yard come to us by way of a stereographic postcard of the campus.

As I scrolled through these objects, vividly reproduced in high resolutions images, a discomfort crept in. Was I seeing only the past? Michel de Certeau’s notion of the beauty of the dead came to mind. Certeau explained how when an object no longer possesses a functional value, it may find a second life in the museum. That life might be aesthetic, one of beauty, sentiment, evocation and memory. But it is also a life that is past–in Certeau’s terms, dead. On my computer screen–two dimensional, floating on a white screen, changing in size at a mere click–once living artifacts appeared as mere relics, signs of a history and culture lost to the present.

Is this the purpose of the Museum – curating the dead – or might there be more? Once again, my friends on social media showed the way. Along with sights, they began to recount sounds. Sometimes it was their own voices expressing astonishment and pleasure at how the Museum’s artifacts stirred memories and imaginings of the past. Dr. Cole’s inauguration robe took them back to other moments – their own graduations, or that of a child. Certeau’s caution is well placed here, helping us see how when set in cases, illuminated by high tech bulbs, and introduced with labels, once living objects–books read by lamp light, broaches pinned to a lapel, conference programs resting on laps, and the Howard Yard teeming with students moving to and fro–might be rendered beautiful, but dead.

But then my friends began reporting other sounds, those of storytellers: mother to daughter, grandfather to grandchild, teacher to student, and friend to friend. In those stories, the past was no longer past. Instead it was usable, illuminating, and pointing a way forward. Dr. Cole’s robe, in this sense, is ushering in a new generation of students to today’s Bennett College and the HBCU world of which it is a part. The same artifacts that had appeared beautiful but dead on my screen came alive in their new encounters with Museum patrons. Their stories gave such artifacts new meaning and purpose in the present, directing new generations of young people toward our venerable and beloved HBCUs.

Visit the NMAAHC web site. But hurry to Washington where its beautifully dead artifacts are being revived through encounters with living patrons like us. And then take a young person on a stroll across the Howard Yard.

Martha S. Jones

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Among other publications, she is the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, recently published by Cambridge University Press. You can follow her on Twitter at @marthasjones_.

A Conflicted Message: Christian Theology and Political Action During the Civil War Era

By Nick Sacco | October 5, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

When citizens of a democratic society participate in electoral politics, they are often forced to determine the extent to which they are willing to compromise on their beliefs when voting. Voters sometimes find ideal candidates who share most if not all of their views, but oftentimes the best candidate in a given election holds a mix of views that an individual voter simultaneously agrees and disagrees with, leading them to believe they must choose between “the lesser of two evils.” While voters of all types throughout the United States are grappling with this tension amid the current 2016 Presidential election, the conflicted emotions of Christian voters have been particularly noteworthy in popular media coverage. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, many Christians believe that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have poor religious credentials and values that contradict the church’s teachings. Christian voters are studying their Bibles and using its words to interpret the various issues at hand, but their conclusions are widely divergent. Some frustrated Christians are holding their noses and supporting either Clinton or Trump, but some believe that a vote for either is a sinful compromise.[1]

Conflicting political actions among the faithful today echo the ones that emerged before the outbreak of the Civil War. For example, Frederick Douglass, an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, came to believe that participation in electoral politics was the best method for enacting the end of slavery in the U.S, while the Unitarian William Lloyd Garrison could not fathom voting in a sinful political system that condoned the institution. Christians who did vote often disagreed about the best candidates to represent their values. They also debated the proper boundaries for establishing the separation of church and state and discussed if such a boundary was even necessary.

Taken as a whole, the political conflicts between Christians that emerged before the war offer an important reminder that while Christian principles have played an integral role in shaping American values, the challenge of translating Biblical teachings into secular government policy has been fraught with inter-faith disagreements that previously pushed the country towards the brink of destruction. Equally important, these disagreements provoked serious theological crises that questioned what religious principles were necessary for living a virtuous Christian life.

What constituted the “true principles of God” and the correct understanding of the U.S. Constitution was hotly debated during the antebellum era, particularly on the issue of slavery. While Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other Christian denominations had debated the merits of slavery in the United States since the country’s founding, growing antislavery and abolitionist agitation within the church led to each of these denominations splitting into Northern and Southern wings. By the time the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854 the religious debate over slavery led to an unprecedented politicization of the pulpit in Christian churches throughout the country, according to historian Timothy L. Wesley.[2]

sacco1 — The Slave’s Friend, Volume III (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836). The American Anti-Slavery Society was led by abolitionist ministers who believed slavery was incompatible with the Bible’s teachings. Proslavery ministers and congregants considered abolitionist agitation outrageous, and they detested the politicization of the minster’s pulpit. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Slavery’s defenders believed that the institution was a standard economic, social, and political practice divinely ordained by God. Proslavery ministers cited Ephesians 6:5-8, which calls upon slaves to “obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” Southern Baptist minister James Robinson Graves wondered in 1857 “where in the New Testament did Christ and his apostles command the master to free his slave? . . . if any man asserts that the slavery of the family of Canaan be a sin, then God is the author of it, which would be blasphemous to affirm.” That same year Presbyterian minister Frederick Augustus Ross affirmed Graves’s views in the provocatively-titled Slavery Ordained of God, which argued that the Union could only be preserved if all white Christians agreed to support slavery’s preservation and westward expansion “for the good of the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family.”[3]

Antislavery ministers argued with increasing ferocity in the 1850s that the particular form of race-based slavery practiced in the South was not biblically-sanctioned but instead the logical endpoint of racial prejudice throughout the country. Dutch Reformer Tayler Lewis acknowledged that the Bible offered divine approval of non-Jewish “heathens” of all colors to be purchased as slaves, but argued that it offered no such approval for the purchasing of slaves based solely on their color. Lewis also asked if the “heathen” slaves of the South converted to Christianity, why were they not immediately emancipated upon conversion? Baptist James M. Pendleton suggested that if slavery promoted “holiness and happiness” within the black population, why would it not do the same for the white population? And following passage of the Compromise of 1850—which potentially allowed slavery in the Utah and New Mexico territories and strengthened federal power to capture runaway slaves—Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher denounced the compromise, saying that “if the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them.” He also echoed Lewis’s argument that the “Hebrew law of slavery” was not being practiced in the South, leading to millions of black Christians in the bondage of their fellow white Christians.[4]

The arrival of civil war in 1861 was partly the result of hardening sentiments and divergent biblical interpretations within American Christendom over the proper understanding of Christian living within the republic. President Abraham Lincoln understood as well as anyone that these contrasting visions of Christianity were incompatible with each other. “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing,” he commented in 1864. Expanding this thought during his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln remarked that supporters of both the United States and the Confederacy “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” but that “the prayers of both could not be answered.” Regardless of any one person’s interpretation of the Bible, Lincoln startlingly concluded, “the Almighty has His own purposes.”[5]

sacco2 — “Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 1865.” President Lincoln hoped God would bring an end to the bloodshed of the Civil War but acknowledged that it may have been His punishment for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

While the deep theological splits of the Civil War era will most likely not be replicated as a result of the 2016 election, evidence suggests that the election is fostering growing divisions in the Christian faith over issues such as abortion, homosexuality, racial equality, the death penalty, and capitalism. A recent Washington Post essay argues that many pastors are unsure of who to support and are struggling to communicate with their conflicted congregants about the election. Churches around the country are debating the theological underpinnings that guide Christian life and the extent to which compromise is appropriate when participating in electoral politics. These discussions, however, can potentially breathe new life into Christianity. Historian John Fea powerfully argues that churches must use this moment to find spaces “where conversations can take place about how to apply the Christian faith to culture, politics, art, nature, [and] our understanding of the past and its relationship to the present.”[6] Either way, President Lincoln’s words ring true: Christians should all proceed with caution before trusting their mental facilities with the ability to completely understand God’s often-mysterious intentions.

[1] Marisa Peñaloza and Tom Gjetlen, “Religious Voters May Lean Republican, But Feel Conflicted About the Candidates,” NPR, September 21, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/09/21/494722694/religious-voters-may-lean-republican-but-feel-conflicted-about-the-candidates; Steven Andrew, “5 Bible Verses Explain Why Voting for Trump and Clinton is Sin,” USA Christian Church, July 14, 2016, accessed October 1, 2016, https://www.usa.church/5-bible-verses-explain-why-voting-for-trump-and-clinton-is-sin/; Pew Research Center, “Faith and the 2016 Campaign,” Pew Research Center, January 27, 2016, accessed September 30, 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/2016/01/27/faith-and-the-2016-campaign/.

[2] Timothy L. Wesley, The Politics of Faith During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 1-7.

[3] James Robinson Graves, The Little Iron Wheel, A Declaration of Christian Rights and Articles, Showing the Despotism of Episcopal Methodism (Nashville: South-Western Publishing House, Graves, Marks & Co., 1857), 10, 13; Frederick Augustus Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1857), 5.

[4] Lewis and Pendleton quoted in Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 48-49, 54-55; Henry Ward Beecher, “Shall We Compromise?” (speech), quoted in William Constantine Beecher, Samuel Scoville, et al., A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Charles Webster & Co., 1888), 237.

[5] Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore” (speech, Baltimore, MD, April 18, 1864), The American Presidency Project, accessed October 1, 2016, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88871; Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address” (speech, Washington, D.C., March 4, 1865), Bartleby, accessed October 1, 2016, http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html.

[6] Michelle Boorstein, “Why Donald Trump is Tearing Evangelicals Apart,” Washington Post, March 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/03/15/evangelical-christians-are-enormously-divided-over-donald-trumps-runaway-candidacy/; John Fea, “In Supporting Trump, Evangelicals Are Reaping What They’ve Sown,” The Way of Improvement Leads Home, September 30, 2016, https://thewayofimprovement.com/2016/09/30/from-the-archives-in-supporting-trump-evangelicals-are-reaping-what-theyve-sown/.

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.

Whither the Whigs? Donald Trump, the Know-Nothings, and the Politics of the 1850s

By Erik B. Alexander | September 26, 2016 | Comments 2 comments

The historical curiosity of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Republican nomination has resulted in, among other things, a seeming endless litany of historical comparisons. As modern pundits, politicos, and historians have attempted to explain the success of Trump’s campaign, they have compared his candidacy to any number of historical precedents, ranging from Barry Goldwater and George Wallace in the 1960s, to Teddy Roosevelt and Huey Long, and, perhaps most frequently, Andrew Jackson.[1] Of course, Trump’s candidacy is also notable for the fractious impact it has had on the Republican Party, and that, too, has produced its own share of historical parallels. Predictions of a contested Republican nominating convention earlier this year, for example, invoked the stereotype of the supposedly corrupt party conventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when wirepullers brokered nominations in smoke-filled back rooms. When that scenario failed to materialize, the divisive rhetoric of this summer’s Republican National Convention prompted several prominent historians and political scientists to rate it among the worst conventions ever, placing the 2016 RNC alongside such luminaries as the 1868 and 1968 Democratic National Conventions.[2] (As a side note, however, it was disappointing that the 1860 DNC failed to make that list, as it is difficult to imagine a less successful convention than one that adjourned without a nominee.)

alexander_image_1 — Some historians have compared the 2016 Republican National Convention to the Democratic National Convention that met in New York City in July 1868. Harper’s Weekly, July 7, 1868. Courtesy of HarpWeek.

Earlier this month, political commentator Rachel Maddow and the host of MSNBC’s nightly The Rachel Maddow Show offered an extended piece exploring the similarities between the current state of the Republican Party and the collapse of the Whig Party and the so-called “Second Party System” of Whigs and Democrats during the decade of the 1850s.[3] To be sure, Maddow is by no means the first observer to compare the fortunes of today’s Republican Party with the fate of the Whigs. For that matter, neither is today’s political milieu the only historical moment when Americans have predicted the doom of a political party by hearkening back to the Whigs. Indeed, as the only major, national, political party in American history to disappear, over the years the Whigs have served, if nothing else, as political fodder for commentators to invoke any time a modern political party appears in a state of disarray.

Maddow’s piece is noteworthy, however, not only for her focus on the collapse of the Whigs and the Second Party System, but also her explicit, and at times even sophisticated, discussion of the link between the disintegration of the Whigs and the political nativism of the 1850s. That nativism produced the so-called Know-Nothing Party—an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic third party that experienced substantial electoral success in 1854 and 1855. In the editorial Maddow argues that, historically, the breakdown of America’s two-party system (in her words, “when normal politics collapses”) has allowed fringe voices to gain a mainstream audience, even if temporarily, thereby eclipsing “decent political discourse.” Thus, as Maddow tells it, in the context of the 1850s, the collapse of the Whigs created a political “wasteland,” which allowed the Know-Nothing Party to emerge and spread their nativistic message of intolerance, bigotry, and hatred. Maddow suggests that this provides a lesson for our contemporary election, as she claims a similar political message of intolerance, bigotry, and hatred has emerged, in part, “because the Republican Party was weak, and failing.”[4]

The so-called Know-Nothing Party produced virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric. Its supporters believed German and Irish immigrants were disrupting American democracy, as depicted in this ca. 1850s political cartoon, likely penned by political cartoonist John H. Goater. Original held at the New York Public Library. The author thanks Tyler Anbinder for providing the location of the original cartoon, and Jason Stacy for help in tracing the cartoon’s origins, particularly in identifying its hitherto unknown artist.

While there certainly exist eerie parallels between the politics of the 1850s and some of the developments of the 2016 presidential election, Maddow has it slightly backwards. The Know-Nothing Party did not emerge, as she claims, only after the Whig Party collapsed, but rather the other way around. As Michael F. Holt, author of the (1,248 page) book on the Whig Party (and in the interest of full disclosure, my dissertation advisor) has pointed out elsewhere, it was precisely the meteoric rise of the Know-Nothings that served, in part, to finish off the Whigs (rather than the collapse of the Whigs producing the rise of the Know-Nothings).[5] At the very same moment when nativism was emerging primarily in Northern cities as a grassroots social and political movement, some Whig leaders had been openly courting the support of immigrant voters—particularly Catholics who had traditionally voted Democratic. In response, native-born white voters registered their disgust by seeking political outlets outside of the two major parties. In sum, the emergence of political nativism helped destabilize the two-party system, rather than the breakdown of party politics giving rise to political nativism, as Maddow claims. I would argue that the same is true today: Donald Trump has not emerged because the Republican Party is weak and failing, but the other way around. Much like his Know-Nothing forbears, Trump’s success stems from a grassroots appeal. It is that appeal which has in turn created the perception that the Republican Party may be failing, thus drawing comparisons to the Whigs.

Moreover, while the politics of the 1850s provides an intriguing comparison to our current political moment, any serious discussion of the collapse of the Second Party System has to account for the role that slavery played, and on that point, there is simply no modern parallel. As the Whig Party crumbled between 1852 and 1856, Northern outrage at the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act fueled the subsequent rise of the Republican Party. It was only those developments, combined with the Know-Nothings, which led to the displacement of the Whigs. Maddow does briefly mention slavery at the outset of her editorial, though she brushes over the disappearance of the Know-Nothings, which also stemmed largely from the disagreement between its Northern and Southern wings over the issue of slavery extension.[6] In other words, Maddow is correct that there is a link between nativism and the disruption of politics in the 1850s (even as she slightly mischaracterizes that link), but the real story was slavery extension.

It is certainly possible that we are in the midst of some sort of extended political realignment, though I am not sure the 1850s and the death of the Whigs provides the best historical example for comparison. In the years immediately following the Civil War, political observers regularly offered predictions that both political parties would soon disappear, commenting repeatedly on “The Reorganization of Parties” and offering forecasts and explanations as to “Why the Republican Party is Breaking up” (there were plenty of similar predictions for the Democrats, as well).[7] One cannot overstate just how ubiquitous these predictions were. The assumption was that Republicans were essentially an ad hoc coalition that had come together to end slavery and stop secession, while others argued that the Democrats might never overcome the stigma of secession and treason. Informing these predictions was also the belief of many Americans in the mid-nineteenth century that political parties were fundamentally impermanent organizations—as evidenced by the disappearance of major parties like the Federalists and Whigs, not to mention a host of third parties along the way. The decade that followed witnessed several third parties come and go and produced a significant amount of shifting across party lines. Yet, even as the politics of Reconstruction evolved and some voters and politicians switched parties, both the Republican and Democratic organizations remained intact. That, I would argue, provides a more relevant historical parallel. The Republican Party may emerge from this election in a modified form, but the past would suggest that it is unlikely that it will go the way of the Whigs.

If you have thoughts, comments, or questions for the author, please discuss your ideas or pose questions in the comments section below. We would love to hear from you!

[1] Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, “Why I Support Donald Trump: He’s The New Roosevelt,” Forbes, December 15, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/12/15/donald-trump-teddy-roosevelt/#4607493d349c; Matthew Mason, “The Disturbing Parallels Between Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson,” History News Network, March 20, 2016, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162259; Steve Inskeep, “Donald Trump’s Secret? Channeling Andrew Jackson,” New York Times, February 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trumps-secret-channelling-andrew-jackson.html?_r=1.

[2] “The Worst Convention in U.S. History?” Politico Magazine, July 22, 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/rnc-2016-worst-convention-historians-214091.

[3] “Trump anti-immigrant speech follows dark pattern of US history,” The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC), September 1, 2016, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-nativist-speech-follows-dark-us-pattern-755626563851.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Michael F. Holt, “Are the Republicans Going the Way of the Whigs?” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, University of Virginia Center for Politics, March 10, 2016, http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/going-the-way-of-the-whigs/. See also Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 956–957.

[6] On this point, see Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 162–193.

[7] Baltimore Sun, August 31, 1865; Mount Vernon (Ohio) Banner, July 7, 1865.

Erik B. Alexander

Erik B. Alexander is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, where he teaches classes on American history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was an Assistant Editor on volume 9 (1831) of the Papers of Andrew Jackson (University of Tennessee Press, 2013). He is currently finishing his first book manuscript, a study of Northern Democrats after the Civil War, titled Revolution Forestalled: Northern Democrats and the Politics of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. He can be reached at eralexa@siue.edu.

Of Presidential Campaigns and Partisan Press: Journalism in the Elections of 1848 and 2016

By Christopher Childers | September 19, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

In this presidential election year, some political observers have lamented the disappearance of a non-partisan press. Today, Republicans watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal; Democrats prefer MSNBC and the New York Times. The Internet has further fragmented journalism, putting the mass in mass media. For the Republican who suspects that the establishment has corrupted the Wall Street Journal, there is the Drudge Report. A progressive Democrat who sees the Times as too centrist might turn to the Huffington Post. Indeed, after recent coverage of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s ongoing problems with her emails, her associate Lanny Davis penned an angry defense in The Hill, lambasting the Times and the Associated Press, once considered a guardian of objective journalism, for fixating on Clinton’s alleged ethical violations while ignoring the troubles of Republican nominee Donald Trump.[1]

Students of the Civil War era know well the partisanship of nineteenth-century media and the public fascination with news as entertainment. We can look to another rollicking presidential election—the 1848 contest—for insight into how Americans interacted in a hyper-partisan era where the idea of a non-partisan press would have provoked laughter from the press corps. Though different in a number of ways, the election of 1848 bears interesting similarities to our current contest. James K. Polk, a youthful Democrat who beat the presumptive nominee, Martin Van Buren, for the nomination in 1844, prepared to leave office after a term beset by controversy over his signature policy, the conquest of foreign lands and westward expansion. Van Buren lost again in 1848, this time to the sixty-five-year old political veteran Lewis Cass of Michigan. The Whigs nominated a man who had never voted in a presidential election, Zachary Taylor of Louisiana. Both Democrats and Whigs had courted Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, but the sixty-three-year old candidate declared himself a Whig and beat the party’s establishment candidates, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, for the nomination. Meanwhile, a bruised Van Buren left his political home of a quarter century to ally with a third party—the Free Soilers—on a platform that opposed slavery in the territories on moral grounds.

“Grand, national, democratic banner. Press onward,” 1848. A campaign banner for Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass and William O. Butler, produced by Nathaniel Currier, 1848. People often displayed these banners at home. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Cass strived mightily to steer a middle course on the issue of slavery and its extension in the West, and he enlisted his allies in the Democratic press for assistance. Obtaining the Mexican Cession, a territory that today encompasses part or all of seven states, as the spoils of war had reintroduced the slavery issue into politics. He proposed to let the people in the territories determine the future of slavery, an idea that became known as popular sovereignty. Cass unveiled his policy via a common practice in the era: he sent a letter to a political associate, who promptly arranged for its publication in the Washington Union, the Democratic Party’s mouthpiece. Cass knew that popular sovereignty would work, and win him the presidency, only if Northerners believed it would prevent the spread of slavery and southerners thought it would allow slaves to enter the cession. Cass’s campaign managers allegedly produced two versions of his campaign biography, one for the North and one for the South, that glossed the slavery issue to suit each section’s preferences. Democratic party editors could scorn Taylor as the “friend of Southern institutions” while maintaining that “Gen. Cass is presented to the whole Union the same in the North as in the South,” while never elaborating on what exactly Cass believed on the issue.[2]

Democrats and Whigs alike used the partisan press to campaign for their candidates. “Documents of the right sort must be made to pass like hotcakes,” one Democratic newspaper noted, “going into every hole and corner where there is the least possibility of making a convert to our faith.”[3] Establishing newspapers specifically for the campaign season constituted a major expenditure for the Democratic National Committee and the Whig Executive Committee. These papers, like the Recruit for the Democrats and the Grape Shot for the Whigs, supplemented the traditional party organs from cities like Washington and New York. Editors made sure to print political propaganda in other languages, especially German, to reach voters who did not speak English.

The press acted as a campaign apparatus for the candidates. Most towns of any consequential size had newspapers that represented the major political parties, and during a presidential election year they worked feverishly to promote their respective party’s candidate. Most often, they reprinted articles from the major party organs. Newspapers displayed large mastheads on their papers with the slate of candidates they supported.

Masthead from the Sunbury (PA) American, June 3, 1848. The masthead from the Sunbury American, a Democratic newspaper in Pennsylvania. Editors proudly displayed their party’s candidates on the masthead during election contests. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

An Ohio newspaper sought to illustrate the vacuity of the Taylor campaign by offering a fifty-dollar reward to anyone who could find a Whig principle not contained in this curious stanza:

“Sound the kewgag, strike the tonjon

Beat the Fuzguzzy, wake the gonqong

Let the loud hozanna ring,

Bum tum fuzzlegum dingo bim.”

A Whig poet penned this rebuttal:

“Poor Cass they did interrogate,

His silence has revenged us,

“Confusion” seized the candidate

The “noise,” it was tremendous.”[4]

3.Free soil song, 1848. Not to be outdone in song making, the Free Soilers issued the song, excerpted here, sung to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress. — 3. Free soil song, 1848. Not to be outdone in song making, the Free Soilers issued the song, excerpted here, sung to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The election of 1848 shows how the partisan press often acted as a part of the campaign apparatus, a facet of politics that most Americans accepted as standard practice. Candidates used partisan newspapers to promote themselves and their platform without worrying about anything resembling the objective journalism that modern political observers claim we have lost. From the vantage point of the nineteenth century, the non-partisan media seems the anomaly. Imagine the task of a voter in 1848 trying to make an objective choice for president by poring over Democratic, Whig and Free Soil newspapers, sorting rhetoric from fact, seeking to make a decision. Our hypothetical, however, applied to relatively few voters in 1848, as most Americans held strong allegiances to one of the established parties. The scenario mirrors the present age in politics, with the “astonishing decline of the American swing voter,” as the Washington Post put it.[5] We can infer that most voters have already made up their minds and will seek media that support their conclusions. The antebellum press thrived with a captive partisan readership and perhaps we see a similar pattern today. Seeing the ways in which antebellum media served the candidates rather than the people, and reflecting on the parallels to the present, can lead us to question what kind of journalism we want for our current age.

[1] “Lanny Davis: The media’s undisputed bias against Hillary Clinton,” The Hill, September 7, 2016, http://thehill.com/opinion/lanny-davis/294754-lanny-davis-the-medias-undisputed-bias-against-hillary-clinton.

[2] For the Nicholson letter, see Washington Union, December 30, 1847; Christopher Childers, The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 155-156; Democratic Banner (Louisiana, MO), July 24, 1848.

[3] The Recruit, October 3, 1848, quoted in Joel H. Silbey, Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 90.

[4] Quoted in Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, OH: Kent State University Pres, 1996), 197, 211.

[5] John Sides, “The astonishing decline of the American swing voter,” Washington Post, November 3, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/03/the-astonishing-decline-of-the-american-swing-voter/.

Christopher Childers

Christopher Childers is an assistant professor of history at Pittsburg State University. He is the author of "The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics" (University Press of Kansas, 2012) and is completing a book titled "The Webster-Hayne Debate: Defining Nationhood in the Early American Republic."

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Of Presidential Campaigns and Partisan Press: Journalism in the Elections of 1848 and 2016

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