As 2017 begins, the editorial staff at The Journal of the Civil War Era wishes you a Happy New Year! If you are interested in submitting work to the journal, please check out our submissions page for more details.
Here at Muster, we are excited about our plans for this year, including the unveiling of our new header design (see above). It depicts the 127th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, later designated the 5th U.S. Colored Infantry, which served at various places in the Eastern theater, including at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia. This image was taken in Delaware, Ohio, probably in 1863.
We are also looking for post submissions and welcome work that addresses the intersections between the Civil War era and the present day, as well as posts on Civil War pedagogy and reflections on public history resources. Posts are normally 1,000-1,200 words, cited in the Chicago style, with a few relevant images. If you have an idea to pitch, please use either the “submit a pitch” feature, or you can email the digital media editor, Kristen Epps, at kkepps@uca.edu.
If you don’t already, please follow us on Twitter (@JCWE1) and like our Facebook page. We would love to hear from you.
“I have now spent ten difficult holidays without my late husband…so, why am I still surprised a decade later, when my mostly healed heart, breaks back open during the holidays like clockwork? Just what is it about the holidays that brings the pain of our loss back to the forefront of our hearts?” asked Rhonda O’Neill, author of The Other Side of Complicated Grief, in The Huffington Post this month.[1] For many like O’Neill, the onset of the holiday season brings bittersweet memories of holidays past. An old song, a cracked ornament, a smudged family recipe is often all it takes to transport a person back to an earlier time, when a parent was young, a child was new, or a loved one laughed alongside us. The absence of loved ones is particularly acute during the holiday season, a time when families are supposed to be together. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, as we work our way through Christmas present, we are often visited by the ghosts of Christmas past…and we realize that Christmas future will never be quite the same.[2]
Nineteenth century Americans also experienced these pressures of past, present, and future weighing heavily on them during the holiday season of the Civil War. Approximately 750,000 men died in the war. We know this number, know that it earns the distinction of being the bloodiest American war, but often we do not think about what this number meant, in terms of families changed, sons killed, women wearing black, buildings draped in crepe. For war wives and widows, the holidays were an especially emotional time, as women dealt with the absence of loved ones, whether temporarily or permanently, as a result of the war. Confederate widows, who struggled with armies marching through their towns, scarcity, and ultimately, losing a husband to a war that would also be lost, found the holidays to be particularly painful.[3]
“Christmas Eve,” Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1863. Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Southern newspapers of the period broadcasted reminders of holiday loss. “This day, Christmas, again greets us and our readers. We could wish them, one and all a merry Christmas, but we are reminded that many a home in the state is deserted by the strong and the young men, who are off on the battle field,” printed one North Carolina editorial in 1861, continuing, “Were our people to indulge in the usual festivities, they might in the midst of their gaiety, receive the unwelcome tidings that a father, a son, or a brother were weltering in gore on the bloody field.” As time passed, holiday greetings grew even bleaker, as the same paper noted in January 1865, “whilst we write, the warm blood from the heart of many a strong man and bright eyed boy no doubt reddens the soil. The whole nation is a vast house of mourning. Christmas, once so merry and joyous, now finds the widow and her little ones clustered together in grief. Carnage, blood, fiendish malignity, devilish hate, ail the horrors of hell, seem to rise uppermost and turn the land into a vast slaughter-pen!”[4]
Even before the finality of death, couples missed one another during the war. In December 1861, William Gaston Delony, a Confederate officer, wished “a merry Christmas to all my treasures at home.” His wife responded, “I cannot wish you a Merry Christmas…I pray God that this day in the coming year will find us reunited.” “I hope the poor little things will enjoy Christmas,” she wrote of her children, but “I cannot feel ‘merry’ such times, [but] will kill my only turkey and dispose of a slice or so in consideration of the day, but that’s all. A long and rainy spell has begun.” William planned to be home for future Christmases, as his wife wished, but neither plans nor wishes came true. William died just after his 9th wedding anniversary in the fall of 1863, leaving behind three children and his pregnant wife for an even rainier holiday season.[5]
Families anticipated the difficulties of widows’ grief, especially during the holidays. In 1863, a soldier wrote his sister, Louisa, “I hope you may enjoy yourself this day and have a merry Christmas, but no doubt you could enjoy your self much more if dear Jimmy was alive.” Louisa was a recent war widow, celebrating her first Christmas without her husband. “My dear wife,” James Nixon had written back in August, “this is to inform you that my wound is still improving slowly…hope to be able to start home in a few days.” That was his last letter. Instead of being home for Christmas, James would leave a widow with four sons under the age of ten.[6]
“The Effect of the Rebellion on the Homes of Virginia,” Harper’s Weekly, December 24, 1864. Courtesy of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens.
Even those who had not lost husbands recognized the heaviness of the wartime holiday season. In 1861, Sallie Brock Putnam of Virginia reflected, “never before had so sad a Christmas dawned upon us,” for “the friendly congratulations of the seasons were followed by anxious inquiries for dear boys in the fields, or husbands or fathers.” By Christmas 1864, those uncertain inquiries were replaced by certain deaths. Sallie believed the sacrifices for the Confederacy “could all have been borne bravely, cheerfully, heroically – it is almost too trifling to notice, had not the vacant place recalled the memory of one or more, whose bones were bleaching somewhere on the field made red with the mingled blood of friend and foe.”[7]
Most widows never forgot that “vacant place” Sallie referenced. Though Tivie Stephens’ marriage lasted just four years, she mourned her husband’s death for the rest of her life. In her journal, she systematically reminded herself of her losses. On the anniversaries of significant dates until her death in 1908, she noted the absence of her husband, an absence that tinged holidays with grief. Christmas 1864 was “a sad instead of a merry one.” Christmas 1866 was also “a quiet and sad one to me, though the children happy.” For some families, the wartime holiday season was not simply marked with death, but it permanently altered the future.[8]
Unidentified woman, in mourning dress and brooch showing a Confederate soldier, holding a young boy wearing a kepi. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The war, of course, would ultimately end with the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865, and finally, for the first time in four years, Americans would experience a Christmas without war. But even after the formal conclusion of the war, many white Southerners continued to struggle with the celebration of Christmas. In December 1865, a book reading took place in Virginia. “Not during the war, nor since the war, have we seen such an audience assembled at Liberty Hall, last night, to hear Dickens’ Christmas Carol,” reported the local paper. Charles Dickens’ words were “a fitting preface to the holiday season,” enjoyed late into the night. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, who had just woken from a terrible series of nightmares to a new morning, many Americans also woke to new possibilities in 1865. But for widows, across time and generation, Christmas mourning is not nearly so bright. As Rhonda O’Neill wrote a couple weeks ago, “I am finally coming to the conclusion that the holidays will always be difficult, whether one year, ten years, or two decades after my loved ones died. This is the reality we must learn to live with. We will always miss them.”[9]
[2] Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), grew in popularity over the decades, rising to greatest fame in America after the war. Even so, Americans were familiar with the book before the war; for example, the New Orleans Daily Crescent newspaper published the text within their newspaper on December 25, 1852.
[3] Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 136-137; J. David Hacker argues that approximately 750,000 men lost their lives in the Civil War, and that if 28% of the men who died in the war were married, 200,000 widows would be created. J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (2011): 311.
[5] Will Delony to Rosa Delony, December 20, 1861; Rosa to Will Delony, December 21, 1861; Rosa to Will Delony, December 22, 1861; all from William Gaston Deloney Family Papers, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.
[6] Dallas Wood to Louisa A. Nixon, December 25, 1863; James J. Nixon to Louisa A. Nixon, August 8, 1863, both from James J. Nixon Letters, 1861-1863, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville (GSL-UF).
[7] Sallie Brock Putnam, Richmond during the War: Four Years of Personal Observation, ed. Virginia Scharff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 89, 267-9.
[8] Octavia Stephens Diary, December 25, 1864, December 25, 1866, Stephens-Bryant Family Papers, GSL-UF.
[9] “The Reading Last Night,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, December 23, 1865, accessed via http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025007/1865-12-23/ed-1/seq-1/ (accessed December 18, 2016); Rhonda O’Neill, “The Fog of Grief During the Holidays.”
Angela Esco Elder is an assistant professor of history at Converse College. She earned her doctorate at the University of Georgia, and the following year she was the 2016-2017 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. Her research explores gender, emotion, family, and trauma in the Civil War Era South. She is the co-editor of Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln.
At this critical juncture in our history, a new American president will be sworn into office with a nation that appears very divided. Chief among the decisions weighing on Donald Trump’s mind should be how to set up an administration which will bridge that divide. In doing so, he could certainly look to history to find moments when his predecessors faced a similar task. In that regard, there may be no greater parallels than the divisiveness facing President-elect James Buchanan in 1856, and also Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
The stakes for the American republican experiment were perhaps higher in 1856 than at any previous time in the history of the nation. When Buchanan took office, physical violence was occurring in Kansas over the introduction of slavery into that territory. With the votes of the solid South, he had narrowly defeated not only the new Republican party whose platform demanded there be no additional slave territory, but also had faced an anti-immigrant third party.[1] Know-Nothing candidate Millard Fillmore accurately stated, “I tell you that we are treading upon the brink of a volcano that is liable at any moment to burst forth and overwhelm the nation.”[2] With the Republican candidate carrying New England and what today would be considered the “Rust Belt” states of the Old Northwest, and Buchanan, the Democrat, carrying all the slave states and only 45 percent of the total national popular vote, the situation begged for a unifier.
Party unity was indispensable and the selection of Buchanan’s cabinet could have been a major catalyst toward the achievement of this goal. With the threat of secession looming, the future of the Union seemed to be hanging by the slim thread of a Democratic victory in upcoming presidential elections. It would not have been an impossible task to hold that party together. The situation called for firm leadership and a spirit of unity, not only within the Democratic party but within the nation itself. With Stephen A. Douglas in command of Illinois, and Buchanan’s friend Jesse Bright as the leader in Indiana, the president-elect could have forged a working coalition over the next four years. James Buchanan indicated just a few weeks after his election, “the object of my administration will be to destroy any sectional party, North or South, and harmonize all sections of the Union under a national and conservative government.”[3] The first of these aims was almost met by the time Buchanan left office, but it was not the Republicans who were in tatters—rather, it was his own Democratic party, split in an unnecessary rift with Stephen A. Douglas. The latter of these aims was not even a possibility four years later, as by that time, seven states had seceded and formed their own government.
With his cabinet selections, Buchanan was presented with substantial opportunities to not only diminish the growing sectional conflict within the nation, but to also set an example for future leaders within the Democratic party. The president-elect’s harsh campaign rhetoric toward the Republican party had fanned the flames of passion as he had repeatedly referred to them as abolitionists and infidels against the Union. Yet rather than moving to heal the divide and consider all sides in his cabinet choices, Buchanan relied upon the advice of his closest friends and advisers who were either Southerners or “dough-faces” (Northern men with Southern principles). These included Howell Cobb of Georgia, Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, Indiana Senator Jesse Bright (a Kentucky slaveowner), and John Slidell of Louisiana. Many of these men had also been the chief architects of Buchanan’s nomination.[4] To begin with, Buchanan quickly offered all four of these men cabinet posts themselves, but in the end, all but Cobb declined.
Buchanan, above all else, desired harmony within his cabinet, though it was to come at the expense of harmony within his party and harmony within the nation. His thoughts on this subject were revealed in advice to Franklin Pierce in 1852, when he wrote that “without unity no cabinet can be successful…I undertake to predict that whoever may be the President, if he disregards this principle in the formation of his cabinet, he will have committed a fatal mistake. He who attempts to conciliate opposing factions by placing ardent and embittered representatives of each in his cabinet, will discover that he has only infused into these factions new vigour and power for mischief.”[5] Buchanan also desired men who he felt were personally and socially compatible.[6]
Buchanan and His Team of Confederates: (l-r) Jacob Thompson, Lewis Cass, John B. Floyd, President Buchanan, Howell Cobb, Isaac Toucey, Aaron V. Brown, and Jeremiah S. Black. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
When the smoke cleared in early 1857, Buchanan went to Washington with an entirely pro-Southern cabinet which consisted of four Southerners, one elderly Northern statesman quite agreeable to Southerners, and two additional Northern men who were considered doughfaces. In the end, Buchanan’s cabinet did not even represent a range of interests and opinions within the Democratic party, much less the nation. The New York Tribune labeled it a cabinet controlled by slave-drivers. The paper mused, “It is well understood now that the South have got Mr. Buchanan stock and fluke. Nobody who has been intimately conversant with his political career ever doubted this would be so.”[7] There was not one Free-Soiler, not one man from a larger city, and, probably most importantly, not one popular sovereignty Democrat.
Despite assertions by many that Buchanan was the tool of his pro-Southern cabinet, that was not actually the case. They just happened to all agree because he had intended it that way from the start. He and his harmonious cabinet presided over the nation’s hastening dissolution. Buchanan indeed spent much time with his cabinet members. They convened every day in meetings, sometimes consuming four to five hours at a time. Yet Buchanan retained control and made the final decision which almost always coincided with his entrenched classical republican principles favoring the “property” rights of Southerners. Buchanan ranks today at or near the bottom of every poll of presidential effectiveness. A recent popular press book on Buchanan is titled Worst. President. Ever.[8]
In contrast with his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln selected men who were considered his political rivals for cabinet advisors, even retaining qualified men who were or had been Democrats.[9] He generally limited his cabinet meetings to twice per week on Tuesdays and Fridays, at noon in his office.[10] He was a patient listener at all times, regarding the advice of each cabinet member equally and “for what they were worth, and generally no more.”[11] Lincoln’s cabinet sessions often became contentious when members expressed disparate viewpoints. Yet Lincoln, ever respectful of all opinions, made the final decision, and is today revered for beginning the reunification process of a divided nation.
Lincoln and His Team of Rivals: (l-r) Montgomery Blair, Caleb B. Smith, Salmon P. Chase, President Lincoln, William H. Seward, Simon Cameron, Edward Bates, and Gideon Welles. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Buchanan, the political master, chose advisers who already agreed with him and mostly ignored their advice until the secession crisis was upon him. Lincoln, the political novice, chose advisers who held opposing viewpoints, calmly listened to their advice, and deftly managed to win a civil war hastened in many respects by Buchanan’s refusal to reach out to those who disagreed with him. History never specifically repeats itself, but there are parallels between 1856, 1860, and 2016. As we, like Buchanan and Lincoln, transition from one era in our national history to another, let us remember the only way to achieve true success requires the inclusiveness of both people and ideas.
Rick Allen is a history graduate student at Southeast Missouri State University. Having retired in 2016 from a career in the health insurance industry, he is now engaged in writing a thesis titled “Team of Confederates: The Political Ineptitude of James Buchanan” under the direction of Dr. Adam Criblez. Rick’s main historical interests are antebellum American politics, the sectional crisis, the history of leadership, and heritage education. He can be reached at rtallen1s@semo.edu.
There has been much recent discussion of the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which boosted slaveholding states’ representation in the Electoral College by including for apportionment a population that received no benefits from government. Scholars have debated how this influenced national politics under slavery, but this conversation applies to the post-emancipation world as well.[1]
Let us start in 1860. With the three-fifths clause operating, the slaveholding states controlled 120 of 303 electoral votes (EV), or 40 percent. The free states desired a “0/5″ scenario, in which slaveholding states received no representation benefit for the enslaved population. In this case, the South would have controlled only 35 percent of all EV. In 1860, the three-fifths clause thus gave the South a substantial 5 percent bump.[2]
Under the South’s desired “5/5″ scenario — the one in which all slaves counted for representation — the South would have controlled 42 percent of all EV. That is a more modest bump of 2 percent (about 7 EV) over what it actually enjoyed under the 3/5 ratio.
Emancipation enhanced the South’s share of national power by propelling 3.9 million former slaves into the ranks of the population used as a basis for apportionment. With slavery gone, each former bondsperson would now be counted as a whole person rather than three-fifths of one. In principle, this was a “5/5″ scenario, in which all people (former slaves among them) were considered for purposes of representation.
In the 1872 election cycle, which was the first to rely on post-emancipation census figures, the South controlled 138 of 366 (38 percent) EV. Had former slaves not been included (a “0/5″ scenario), the South would have controlled only 90 of 319 (29 percent) EV. The emancipated freedpeople thus gave the South a 9 percent bump in representation in the Electoral College.
It was good that emancipation boosted Southern political power so long as those added to the apportionment population had access to the political process through the 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted citizenship to African Americans, and the franchise to black men. But under the conditions of complete disfranchisement, which southern states came close to meeting around the turn of the 20th century, no African Americans received direct representation in Congress.[3] At that point, emancipation’s boost in Southern power worked (some might say ironically) against African Americans, who struggled against racist state regimes whose disproportionate strength in national government blacks’ presence was artificially inflating. Imagine trying to get federal anti-lynching legislation passed against Southern states that had worked to remove blacks from the voting population, and were stronger than they should have been because of it.
By 1900, African Americans were being largely expelled from the political process. Their concerns went unrepresented, and yet their numbers still boosted Southern representation in the Electoral College. Effectively, the country ran on the “5/5″ principle even though the reality was that close to “0/5″ of blacks could vote for their own representatives.
In slavery, this desire had resulted in the diminishment of Southern power. At the constitutional convention in 1787, representatives from northern states had bargained the South down to counting only 3/5 of each slave for representation. After the war, Republicans had sought to carry this principle into freedom by Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which provided for the diminishment of a state’s enumerated population in proportion to the proportion of voters it disenfranchised. That failed, though, as did the 15th Amendment’s voting protections, when the Supreme Court began (from the 1870s on) permitting ostensibly race-neutral but intentionally race-specific disfranchisement measures. This gave white supremacists the best of both worlds — they received the enhanced political power that went with a larger population, without the obligation to serve that population.
The numbers for 1900 bear this out. In the “5/5″ reality, the states that had held slaves in 1860 (“the South”) had 159 EV, or 35 percent of the total. Under a “0/5″ scenario, in which the South would lose representation for the blacks it refused to enfranchise, the South would have had only 112 EV, or 28 percent of a smaller House of Representatives.
Information from Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
The South thus gained a lot from disenfranchisement. At the turn of the century, its largely disenfranchised African Americans gave it a 7 percent bump in the Electoral College, which was even larger than the 4-5 percent bump the three-fifths clause usually gave under slavery. And, as before the war, this was a population included only to boost representation, for it could make virtually no claim on the political process at all.
The Electoral College has always provided the rule set for selecting the President of the United States. The framers of the Constitution hoped that this membrane between the voters and the office of President would insulate the electoral process from the “heats and ferments” of public opinion, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 68.[4] But the cost has been high, for anti-democratic politicians have always been willing to game the system. One might have thought that ending slavery would have ended the compromise embodied in the three-fifths clause — a system that John Quincy Adams came to call “morally and politically vicious.”[5] It was not to be. Of the many paradoxes to the “freedom” that followed slavery, one of the most neglected may be this: in the era of Jim Crow, ending slavery only made the white South stronger.
[2] All figures based on my analysis of data from Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); “Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: the United States, 1790-1970 (ICPSR 3),” [Computer file] (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 197?). A note of caution: there are many ways of building counterfactual scenarios with these numbers. I have made some plausible but not airtight assumptions, such as that the apportionment basis for each cycle would not change despite having fewer people in the apportionment population. Bottom line: republish these numbers at your own risk.
[3] Absolute disfranchisement was the goal, but it was rarely complete. I make no claims here about how many were actually disenfranchised. This is about hypothetical extremes.
Patrick Rael is Professor of History at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is the author of Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (North Carolina, 2002), which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature (Routledge, 2001). His most recent book, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (University of Georgia Press, 2015), explores the Atlantic history of slavery to understand the exceptionally long period of time it took to end chattel bondage in America.
We are very pleased to announce the publication of our December 2016 issue. To our subscribers, you should find your copy in your mailbox soon, but here is the editor’s note previewing the exciting work being done in Civil War studies!
The essays in this issue are devoted to exploring the Civil War in the West, or, perhaps more aptly, they treat the war and Reconstruction as part of a long project of American empire building that resulted in a number of military conflicts, including the U.S.-Mexican War, Civil War, and Indian Wars. The perspectives and directions laid out here expand the war’s geography and its periodization in exciting ways, and they consider war and reconstruction as simultaneous processes.
Moving decidedly away from a narrative of declension, Pekka Hämäläinen’s essay explores how, for more than twenty years, Great Plains Native Americans—the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche, to name a few—exploited weakness to resist and obstruct American state designs and to score diplomatic and military victories against the state. This essay continues a conversation that Steven Hahn initiated in JCWE when he referred to the period of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction as the “Wars of the Rebellions” and described the war over slavery and the Indian Wars as part of an extended “crisis of sovereignty.” Hämäläinen tells a compelling and convincing story of “indigenous resilience in the midst of an expanding American state.”
Megan Kate Nelson takes this point up again in her essay, which considers the Civil War in Apache Pass, a disputed region of New Mexico and Arizona, where the U.S. and Confederate armies fought each other, and the Apaches, seeking their own advantage, fought them both. Nelson’s piece underscores the significance of belligerents seeking environmental advantages, as the Apache controlled access to the region’s scarce water supplies and pushed this vantage against both armies. So does this essay remind us of the importance of roads that convey men and materiél, something that connects the Civil War in the West with the one in the East.
American Indian resistance not only confounded American nation-building but had the power to move railroads. As both Nelson and Kevin Waite remind us, the Apache determined to rout the southern route of the transcontinental railroad, the one Jefferson Davis, as U.S. senator and secretary of war, promoted tirelessly as part of what Waite describes as his dreams of a proslavery empire in the West. In his essay, Waite identifies Davis and other southern railroad boosters as forgotten conquistadors, for theirs was an ambitious proslavery vision to be built in the Far West. Waite’s forgotten conquistadors include U.S. Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown, who was responsible for the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, whose wagon ruts Nelson explores in her essay that begins with the ruins of U.S. and Confederate empire-building in the West.
Stacey Smith’s review essay surveys the literature on the Civil War in the West from its rebirth, with Elliott West’s idea of a “Greater Reconstruction,” which he dated from the origins of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846) to the Dawes Act (1887). In the last ten years this work has taken Civil War scholarship in new directions; even so, Smith identifies some holes—surprisingly, the shortage of work on African Americans in the Far West, for instance. Smith leaves readers with some questions to consider about whether we can go too far—too far west, that is—but she is surely right when she points out that the crises in sovereignty explored here haunted American expansion into the Pacific after the war.
For his hard work recruiting and nurturing these essays along, I would like to thank guest editor Ari Kelman, whose own work has helped shift Civil War history from the East to the West.
Judith Giesberg holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities and is Professor of History at Villanova University. Giesberg directs a digital project, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, that is collecting, digitizing, and transcribing information wanted ads taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for family members lost to the domestic slave trade.
Plantation tours offer an abundance of learning opportunities, but they can also offer a stereotypical, even anachronistic, portrayal of slavery and life in the Old South. For instance, a tour guide at the Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation Historic Site near Brunswick, Georgia, stated during a tour that “in the holiday season, one of our volunteers comes dressed as Vivian Leigh.”[1] Such a statement may come as no surprise, since readers familiar with Representations of Slavery know that plantations continue to ignore and literally whitewash the story surrounding their properties.[2] However, some plantations have made a significant effort to incorporate the story of slavery into their tours. Regardless whether a plantation does or does not cover slavery, they provide an interesting mechanism to teach about the institutions of the Old South, collective memory, and public history. For this post, I will focus on visits to a series of plantations that happened in the course of my College on the Move-Living History Tour program, which takes students for roughly two-week trips to explore historic sites.
Picture of Latta Plantation’s big house. A rebuilt cabin resembling a slave cabin sits in the very back corner of the property next to a pig pen. Photo by author.
Besides the above-mentioned experience at Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation Historic Site, the tour guide said not a single word about the institution of slavery or the slaves who worked the nearby rice fields. Such a state of affairs is certainly discouraging since many plantations continue to outright refuse, even when asked, to engage slavery. During our first tour in 2015, we visited the Alexander H. Stephens State Historic Site in Georgia. Here, the tour guide continuously referred to the slaves as servants, because they were like family to Stephens.[3] At Latta Plantation, near Charlotte, North Carolina, during our 2016 tour, students inquired toward the end of the tour about the slaves who had worked on the plantations, since the tour guide had not mentioned anything on the subject. The tour guide asked the students to wait until the African-American family, who had been on the tour, left, at which point, he answered in vague and circumscribed terms.
While morally and ethically unacceptable in today’s world, the refusal to talk about slavery offers a great teaching opportunity. A central avenue for addressing slavery’s presentation at such sites is in seeking to understand the role of stakeholders. Public history, as a field, prides itself on listening to stakeholders and their desires when putting together exhibits.[4] However, what happens when your stakeholders at the time of creation were the United Daughters of the Confederacy (as in the case of the Alexander Stephens home), or when you have an overwhelmingly white, potentially neo-Confederate audience? How can historians balance historic accuracy and stakeholders’ desires?
Thankfully, there are exceptions to the rule and some plantations have made extraordinary efforts to incorporate the story of slaves. While Whitney Plantation in Louisiana has received extensive media attention, the plantation remains a work in progress.[5] The visitor experience depends heavily on the capability of the tour guide, which unfortunately did not work out favorably for my group. It also relies on the eradication of some errors, such as the 1868 iron box on display to give a perception of slave pens (see below) and the occasional spelling error on signage. Considering the plantation relies heavily on the narratives compiled by the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, and its memorial walls lack context, there are an abundance of teaching opportunities regarding slavery, memory, public history presentations, and oral history. How can curators deal with memories collected seventy years after slavery? Should they display objects of the era, or replicas?
The 1868, Pennsylvania-made jail at Whitney Plantation, which the signage explains as: “The flat steel bars on the doors are typical of the bars that appeared on doors of slave pens in the large auction houses during slavery.” Photo by author.
Just to the north of Whitney Plantation lies the fabled Oak Alley Plantation, which frequently serves as the popular image of the U.S. South. Aware of a negative reputation, according to the slavery tour guide, Oak Alley determined to change and include slavery in the house tour, but also to offer specialized slavery tours. The guide tells many stories about the enslaved people on the plantation, making a conscious effort to tell the story of their plantation’s slaves and avoid generalizations. The guide explicitly avoided talking about material that they had no evidence for at Oak Alley.
Three of the reconstructed slave cabins at Oak Alley Plantation. The first cabin on the right contains a sharecropper furnishing, while the other two contain an exhibit space on plantation slavery. Photo by author.
In order to present the physical element of slavery, the plantation reconstructed six slave cabins to go along with their new emphasis. Two of the cabins are furnished to represent slave homes, with a frame bed for the house slave and a mattress on the floor for the field hands. The other two cabins illustrate the post-emancipation residences of freed people. The final two cabins contain an exhibit, including a polished wood piece acknowledging the names of all the slaves on the plantation; there are shackles, farm tools, clothing replicas, and text panels explaining the institution. Oak Alley is an excellent teaching example where external pressures, reputation, and the growing diversity of visitors and stakeholders required a different story, unable to embrace a big house, planter narrative. Even more, by complicating the plantation narrative with the inclusion of slavery, these locations have to face the question of what happened after slavery.
Besides the two Louisiana plantations, on the East Coast another jewel has recently emerged: McLeod Plantation on James Island near Charleston. The plantation features an empty big house and the tour does not even set foot into this building. Instead, extremely well-trained tour guides, equipped with iPads for pictures, lead tours literally around the outside of the house to the six remaining, original slave cabins.
The slave cabins at McLeod Plantation. Photo by author.
The guide personalizes the story of slave suffering, including their work and day-to-day life. The slave cabins not only tell the story of the slaves, but also their descendants. Most impressive about McLeod Plantation is the fact that descendants continued to reside here well into the 1990s, despite the lack of running water and innumerable building code violations. The story of freedmen, freedwomen, and post-emancipation suffering within Southern society during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights era are impressively illustrated by the home firebombed in 1954. The charring is still visible on the floor.
Obviously most of us do not reside anywhere near these plantations to take students on a regular tour. However, we might have plantations around our own home institutions or we can utilize the web to digitally visit these locations with students. Plantations provide an opportunity to tackle not only the Old South’s social, economic, and political situation, but also to explore issues of post-emancipation social and economic change, class distinctions, the adjustments from slave to free society, and finally memory, tourism, and public history. Considering most people, including our students on future vacations, will get their history during plantation tours, it is crucial to illustrate the complex history of these sites and how slavery continues to be an overlooked subject in the public mind.
[1] Statement made during a visit in March 2015 at Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation Historic Site, Brunswick, Georgia.
[2] Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: New Press, 2006).
[3] This is in part confirmed in Thomas Edwin Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 65-66, which calls Stephens a benevolent slaveholder.
[4] Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry” Public Historian 28 (Winter 2006): 15-38.
holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.
Colson Whitehead’s eerily brilliant and deceptively simple novel, The Underground Railroad, is much more than a fictional account of historical reality. Like all inspired works of art, the book, even at its most fantastical, deftly unearths the horrible truth at the heart of racial slavery in a manner that very few historical works can accomplish. In his acknowledgements, Whitehead lists the scholars of slavery, race, and the Underground Railroad, who he relied on to write this novel, including Edward Baptist, Fergus Bordewich, Eric Foner, Stephen Jay Gould, and Nathan Huggins. He acknowledges, like most good historians, primary sources such as the iconic slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and the WPA slave interviews. And it is clear from the novel itself that he is familiar with the history of slavery, escape, race, and abolition. With perfect literary license, he borrows and appropriates from history to reveal the heart of darkness of slavery and racism in this country. The result is a lyrical and imaginative novel that is chilling in its clearheaded look at that sorry story.
Whitehead’s novel, which revolves around an enslaved woman, Cora, and her attempts to escape slavery in Georgia is not just an allegorical story of the Railroad but an extended meditation on the history of race and slavery. It starts not with Cora but her African grandmother Ajarry, and in pithy sentences conveys the horror that was the Middle Passage and the commodification of Africans through the Atlantic Slave Trade: “Chained from head to toe, head to toe, in exponential misery” and “In America the quirk was that people were things” and “Ajarry died in the cotton, the bolls bobbing around her like whitecaps on the brute ocean.”
Cora, we learn early on, descends from a long line of resistant black women. Her mother Mabel is one of the few who has escaped slavery. Cora’s memory of her veers between resentment at being abandoned by her and a reluctant admiration for making good her escape. It is only at the end that we learn of Mabel’s miserable end. But for much of the novel she acts as a talisman of resistance. The vegetable patch that Ajarry and she bequeath to Cora, is a symbol of their endurance and enterprise. In fact when a fellow slave Ceasar asks Cora to escape with him, he does so because he thinks she will bring him luck as her mother is the only slave to make good her escape from the Randall plantation. The plantation is the scene of Cora’s own private hell, she grows up a motherless child with no protectors, and the horror of her gang rape is encapsulated in one short sentence, “The Hob women sewed her up.” The Randall brothers, one cruel and one indifferent, preside over plantations, where every manner of cruelty gets full airing. This is not the paternalistic slavery of the moonlight and magnolias myth of popular culture or of the dominant historiographical depiction from U.B. Phillips to Eugene Genovese. Yet Cora resists, shielding the body of a young enslaved boy, Chester, preventing his brutal initiation into slavery. For this act of defiance, Cora must escape.
And so begins Whitehead’s tale of the Underground Railroad, where the reader gets vivid snapshots of the history of slavery, scientific racism, and abolition. The metaphor for the railroad, a literal train with unknown conductors and sporadic branches that just might lead to freedom, is itself apt and gets to the historical truth in an essential sense. This was a dangerous, secretive, botchy enterprise in which the enslaved and their allies took huge risks and were always subject to recapture and torture emerges from this fictive account rather than the mythic, heroic accounts of the Underground Railroad that Kathryn Schulz claims the novel resurrects in her dismissive article “Derailed” in The New Yorker.[1] Each chapter begins with runaway slave advertisements reminiscent of Theodore Weld’s classic abolitionist indictment of slavery, American Slavery As It Is (1839). Significantly, it is the enslaved themselves who dig through and establish the lines and stations of the mysterious railroad. Whitehead’s literal underground railroad also quite remarkably illuminates the history of slavery through the story of Cora’s escape.
Each state that Cora moves through maps the historical geography of enslavement and freedom with Whitehead taking literary license to tell a broader story. Early on, the “City of Pennsylvania,” where organized abolition took root among Quakers and free blacks, is the only source of hope for the enslaved Ajarry. As a historian of South Carolina, however, I found it jarring to have this most rabidly proslavery and secessionist state reinvented as an antislavery haven where Cora and Ceasar find shelter and education, including a museum of black history that actually demeans it. The insidious reality soon emerges–the good teachers and doctors in the state are ardent eugenicists and scientific racists, trained in the best universities and hospitals of the nation and interested in preventing the propagation of an “inferior race.” This literary device in fact accurately evokes historical reality. Not only was South Carolina the birthplace of renowned antebellum scientific racists such as Dr. Josiah Nott and J.D.B. DeBow, but it was in Carolinian plantations that Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist and president of Harvard, collected specimens, photographs of enslaved people, to prove his theory of polygenesis, or the multiple origins of man. Whitehead’s surreal portrait of the slave state of South Carolina allows the average reader to discover with Cora, how the pseudo science of race acted as a handmaiden to racial slavery.
Whitehead’s novel evokes the tropes of fugitivity and the abolitionist underground perceptively. In North Carolina, Cora inhabits the attic of her rescuer’s house quite similar to Harriet Jacobs, who describes years in her grandmother’s attic in her iconic female slave narrative set in the same state. Another escapes evokes Henry “Box” Brown, who famously parceled himself to freedom. But while Jacobs views her clueless master from her hidey-hole, Cora witnesses minstrel shows that etch racism in the popular American imagination and the dangling bodies of apprehended fugitives and those who assist them. A similar fate awaits her friend, Martin, and his reluctant accomplice, his wife, who are betrayed by their Irish maid. The state lies suspended between slavery and freedom in the novel, with gradual compensation (to slaveholders), emancipation laws, and anti-black legislation that prohibits free blacks from entering its boundaries, reminiscent of British and northern emancipation. Cora is just a step ahead and at times behind slave catchers led by the relentless and brutal Irishman Ridgeway, whose assistant Homer is rendered as a black oddity. Rich and poor, native and immigrant, young and old, are all, as Ridgeway puts it, in service to King Cotton in slaveholding America: “It’s a human tax on progress” and “Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh.”
When Ridgeway finally gets Cora in his clutches, there is a reversal of fortune quite common in innumerable histories of the Underground Railroad. A dashing free black abolitionist, Royal, rescues her in Tennessee. The state in the novel is a center of cotton, slavery, and the vast domestic slave trade. Cora is not just a damsel in distress; she has killed a young white boy attempting to apprehend her, a misgiving that keeps popping up throughout the novel, and fights back against her enslavers. With Royal she journeys to a black utopia set improbably in racist Indiana. Many free and independent black communities in fact got their start in the old northwest with their harsh black laws and proslavery politics. The utopian community is Valentine’s farm, a black man who feels himself tied to the enslaved: “As long as one of our family endured the torments of bondage, I was a freeman in name only.” Here fugitives like Cora find shelter, receive a practical and political education, debate the future of the race, where fugitives become fugitive slave abolitionists.
The figure of Elijah Lander, whose lecture at Valentine’s farm is a highpoint, does not just represent the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as many reviewers have speculated, but the entire interracial abolitionist movement. Having just published a big book on abolition, I marveled at how deftly Whitehead constructs the character. Lander like the abolition movement is interracial, like David Walker he has published an Appeal, like William Lloyd Garrison he has authored a “Declaration of the Rights of the American Negro,” run afoul of Maryland law, and been nearly lynched in the streets of Boston, and like Douglass, whom he most resembles, he is a skillful orator famous on the abolitionist lecture circuit. It is during his lecture that a racist white mob attacks Valentine’s farm and raises it to the ground, felling Royal and Lander. But Cora survives and heads west, her journey like the story of black slavery and freedom, unfinished.
Whitehead’s novel has received many well-deserved laurels, including a choice of Oprah’s Book Club and the 2016 National Book Award for fiction. I can only give it my highest compliment as a historian of slavery and abolition. It gets at the black experience of slavery and freedom better than most history books.
Manisha Sinha is professor and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her award winning book, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, was published by Yale University Press in 2016.
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,” 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 13th 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
