Gender and race are center stage in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton, for instance, hopes to derail Donald Trump’s recent pivot to the center and his courting of African Americans by linking him to the white nationalist “alt-right” movement. The current election has thereby brought national attention to the Internet’s extreme right, white supremacist fringe. Alt-right conservatives, disowned by mainstream conservatives, have already achieved notoriety with an epithet applied to presidential contenders deemed weak on immigration and other issues dear to white supremacists. In the alt-right’s lexicon, unmanly “cuckservatives” like Jeb Bush cannot match Donald Trump hypermasculine nativism, misogyny, and braggadocio.[1]
The designation “cuckservative” casts the extreme right’s exasperation with GOP leadership in racial and gender terms. As a conservative critic of the alt-right defined the concept, “by supporting immigration reform, criminal justice reform, etc., a white conservative is therefore surrendering his honor and masculinity (and it won’t be long before his women folk are compromised, as well!). A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”[2] These men fail as conservatives and as white men. They sabotage white racial interests, and the fact that they are cuckolded in the process suggests sexual submission to people of color. For the alt-right, yielding the white race’s political interests is tantamount to imperiling white womanhood through interracial sex. White supremacists in the Civil War era also castigated lukewarm conservatives who defected to the antislavery cause as race traitors. To protect the purity of the white body politic, conservative Democrats compared switching parties and supporting antislavery measures to encouraging interracial sex.
Democrats in the antebellum period routinely called Republicans the “Black” Republican party. A California Democrat invoked racial amalgamation when he disparaged “fusion with the Blacks” in 1859. The offspring of “fusion” with “Black” Republicans was the political equivalent of mulattoes. Political mixing portended actual racial amalgamation. The political coalitions emerging out of the 1850s partisan realignment were described as “Speckled,” “spotted,” and “the mottled tribe.” Their supporters voted the “hybrid” or “amalgamation” tickets. Virginia Democrat Henry Wise accused the Know-Nothing party of being tied to abolitionism and argued that it would siphon away supporters and split the conservative vote. Their 1856 electoral ticket was, accordingly, “a mongrel ticket—that the offspring of it is […] a mulatto, or […] a Mulungeon!” with “Mulungeon” referring to communities of free people of color of European, African, and Native American ancestry.[3]
Democrats pointed to antislavery political meetings as sites of such illicit sexuality. The antislavery movement’s alleged interracial membership represented the racially mixed society they supposedly desired. Democrats fretted over meetings which made no “distinction of sex, color, sect, or party.” Horace Greeley was charged with having “assisted at public meetings of blacks and whites in the city of New York, where both God and the Constitution have been reviled” and with supporting “free love.”[4]
Political cartoons portrayed the 1856 and 1860 Republican presidential candidates pandering to diverse coalitions of male and female, black and white reformers (see figs. 1 and 2). In this 1856 cartoon, a white woman is depicted inviting John C. Frémont to “our Free Love association, where the shackles of marriage are not tolerated & perfect freedom exist [sic] in love matters.” Playing on the candidate’s name, she tempts, “you will, be sure to Enjoy yourself for we are all Freemounters.” The message behind the placement of this scandalous woman next to a stereotyped African American man demanding black racial supremacy would not have been lost on Democrats.
Democratic political cartoon showing “fanatics” making demands of a compliant John C. Frémont, the 1856 Republican presidential candidate. From “The Great Republican Reform Party, Calling on Their Candidate” (New York, NY: [Nathaniel Currier], [1856]), Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Conservative Whigs used similar appeals as they lost members to the antislavery cause. In 1852 critical Whigs lambasted antislavery Whig William H. Seward for hosting a “motley crowd of men and women, white and black” at his home. “Brothers in breeches and sisters in Bloomers, in part—have been feted, entertained, welcomed, shaken hands with, if not embraced, by” Seward. This “miserable and degrading exhibition” was but a forecast of what would happen to the republic should antislavery fanatics triumph.[5]
Democratic political cartoon mocking the fanatics supporting Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Horace Greeley is carrying Lincoln. From “The Republican Party Going to the Right House” ([New York, NY]: Currier and Ives, [c. 1860]), Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Just as modern “cuckservatives” supposedly take pleasure in seeing white women sexually violated, those conservatives who chose to follow Frémont or Seward endangered white womanhood. These men further emasculated themselves by indulging their own illicit sexuality. Conservatives attacked those who entered the Republican and Know-Nothing parties as engaging in same-sex relations. In 1855, Henry Wise contended that southern Know-Nothings secretly cavorted with northern abolitionists “behind the curtain.” “These gentlemen,” he imagined, “shake hands and honey-fuggle with one another. [Much laughter.] This is what is called conservatism.” Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, likewise, used sexually suggestive language in reporting that “the Black Republicans & Know nothings are coquetting with each other,— alternately abusing & coaxing.” “In some dark and hidden recess,” warned a Georgia Democrat, “Abolition and Know-nothingism exchanged the kiss of peace and brotherly affection.”[6]
Conservative white supremacists, however, did not monopolize metaphors of transgressive sexuality and deficient manhood. Antislavery Americans, in turn, denounced northern conservatives for unmanly slavishness to the Slave Power. Republicans and abolitionists regularly indicted the South as “the slave driver’s harem” and charged northern Doughfaces with enabling coercive interracial sex in the South. Americans across the political spectrum played on anxieties over racial amalgamation, testifying to the power of such rhetoric in the Civil War era.[7]
Still, the ubiquity of the rhetoric among nineteenth-century conservatives and its endurance on the fringes of today’s Right reveal that American conservatism has not simply sought to preserve a political and economic regime but has hoped to sanctify an exclusionary racial and gender order, an intrinsic component of conservatism that has emerged starkly in the fraught racial atmosphere of the Age of Trump.
[3] C. S. Whitney to Stephen A. Douglas, San Francisco, September 12, 1859, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Illinois; F. P. Stark to John G. Davis, New Berry, Greene Co., IN, July 27, 1854, John G. Davis Papers (microfilm edition), Manuscript and Visual Collections Department, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis; (Indianapolis) Indiana Daily State Sentinel, July 18, 1854; John S. Armstrong to Stephen A. Douglas, Mission, Lasall [sic] County, July 14, 1858, Douglas Papers; James P. Hambleton, ed., A Biographical Sketch of Henry A. Wise, with a History of the Political Campaign in Virginia in 1855…(Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1856), 165-6; James Buchanan, His Doctrines and Policy as Exhibited by Himself and Friends (New York: Greeley and McElrath, Tribune Office, [1856]), 14.
[4] Infidelity and Abolitionism: An Open Letter to the Friends of Religion, Morality, and the American Union (n.p., [1856]), 3, 5.
[5] Whig Testimony against the Election of General Scott to the Presidency of the U. S….(n.p.: C. Alexander, Printer, [1852]), 7-8.
[6] Religious Liberty. Equality of Civil Rights among Native and Naturalized Citizens. The Virginia Campaign of 1855. Governor Wise’s Letter on Know-Nothingism, and His Speech at Alexandria (n.p., [1855]), 58-9; Buchanan to Henry A. Wise, Wheatland, near Lancaster, PA, September 13, 1856, Wise Family Papers, 1777-1973, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Speeches of Messrs. Weller, Orr, Lane, and Cobb, Delivered in Phœnix and Depot Halls, Concord, N. H., at a Mass Meeting of the Democratic Party of Merrimac County (n.p., [1856?]), 26.
[7] Nebraska: A Poem, Personal and Political (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1854), 25.
Joshua A. Lynn is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions and Lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University. He previously taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he completed his PhD. Josh studies nineteenth-century culture and politics. He is revising a book manuscript on the Democratic party’s reinvention of American conservatism in the 1850s. Josh’s work investigates the intersection of political thought with cultural constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and the body. His article on James Buchanan’s sexuality and the election of 1856 is forthcoming in The Journal of the Civil War Era. He can be contacted at joshua.lynn@yale.edu.
In recent days, Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest about the treatment of people of color in the United States has garnered both applause and condemnation across the fifty states. Lately, he has been joined by a teammate, a college teammate, an opponent, and soccer star Megan Rapinoe in kneeling or sitting during the national anthem. Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh, Kaepernick’s former coach, acknowledged Kaepernick’s right to protest but said he “didn’t respect the motivation or the action.” Harbaugh later apologized and supported Kaepernick’s motivation but objected to his “method of action.”[1] While acknowledging that a protest during the national anthem is difficult for some to observe, President Obama defended Kaepernick’s right to “exercis[e] his constitutional right to make a statement.”[2]
Kaepernick’s protest and the response to his motivation and method remind us of Americans’ complicated relationship with patriotism and the past. The American flag has flown over great national and moral triumphs. It flew, too, during our darkest days: the expulsion and massacre of native Americans across the continent; nativist riots against “foreign” faiths; the protection and promulgation of slavery; the capture of slaves seeking freedom; the institutional and cultural embrace of segregation and white supremacy; and the Japanese internment camps, just to name a few. The Star-Spangled Banner can evoke pride and pain, for some simultaneously. The past, like the present, is not a zero-sum game.
By speaking up and sitting down or, more recently, kneeling during the playing of the National Anthem, Kaepernick reminds us that “the land of the free” has also been the home of historical and contemporary racial injustice. This is not an unfamiliar story for historians. Over the past week, many have noted that Francis Scott Key was a slaveholder and attorney who attacked abolitionism in a series of high-profile cases.[3] Neither was the flag that inspired Key free from the stain of unfree labor. Mary Pickersgill sewed the flag with her daughter, two nieces, and Grace Wisher, a thirteen-year old African-American indentured servant.[4] By 1813, indentured servitude had all but disappeared for white Americans, but many African Americans remained indentured. In slave states like Maryland and non-slave states like Pennsylvania, indentured servitude often served as a cover for whites to hold blacks as slaves in all but name. Key watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a British ship in Baltimore Harbor and saw that American flag, battered but still flying, as an inspiring metaphor of American resilience, righteousness, and freedom. But for slaves in and around Baltimore, the flag represented continued oppression and bondage.
At times in this country’s history, African Americans have struggled with questions of whether and how to be loyal to a country that mistreats them. Black troops helped found the United States during the American Revolution and defend its fragile sovereignty during the War of 1812, but they also fought against the United States, deciding that escape to the British was the likeliest route to freedom. Despite the black contribution to American independence and the rhetoric of liberty and equality, slavery grew and white Americans increasingly assaulted black rights. Black abolitionist David Walker directed his incendiary 1829 Appeal to “the Colored Citizens of the World” and repeatedly used the term “American” to refer to whites only, warning them that if they did not abolish slavery, divine retribution was coming. “God will not suffer [African Americans], always to be oppressed,” he predicted. “Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity…‘Every dog must have its day,’ and the American’s is coming to an end.”[5] In 1842, when it seemed the U.S. might go to war with Great Britain over a border dispute, an unnamed correspondent of the Colored People’s Press urged black men not to fight for the U.S. in the event of war. “If war be declared, shall we fight with chains upon our limbs?” he asked. “Shall we make our bodies a rampart in defence of American slavery?”[6]
During the Civil War, black men fought for the United States and played a crucial role in Union victory. In the war’s early stages, however, Union officials banned black soldiers from enlisting, leading some African Americans to suggest that black men should avoid the war altogether lest they repeat the mistakes of earlier generations by fighting a white man’s war that would do nothing to end slavery or win black rights. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Henry Cropper, the captain of a black militia company in Philadelphia, publicly denied that he and his comrades had tried to fight for the United States. “We have more knowledge of our duty, and more dignity, than to offer our services” and had resolved never to fight for the U.S. except on terms of “equality with all other men.”[7] When U.S. officials began allowing black men to enlist at the start of 1863, the question of whether to serve took on new immediacy for black Americans. When Frederick Douglass urged service before a crowd of black New Yorkers that spring, and upbraided them for failing to enlist sooner, a black New Yorker named Robert Johnson challenged Douglass. By a “few well-spoken words,” Johnson explained that it “was not cowardice that made the young men hesitant to enlist, but a proper respect for their own manhood.” If the Union wanted black men to fight, it needed to “guarantee to them all the rights of citizens and soldiers, and, instead of one man, he would insure them 5000 in twenty days.” Johnson’s remarks occasioned “tremendous and long-continued applause.”[8]
Of course, black men served the Union in large numbers, making up approximately 10 percent of the Union army, helping to destroy slavery and win new rights and citizenship for black Americans. They changed the fabric of America, but the revolution in which they participated went backward. White Southerners, barely punished for mass treason borne of zeal to defend white supremacy, regained control of Southern state governments and constructed a new regime of white supremacy that denied black men and women the ability to enjoy the rights and citizenship they possessed in theory. By the 1880s, some black veterans like the AME minister Henry McNeal Turner turned to emigration as the way for African Americans to find freedom because, as Turner put it, they had been “de-citizened.”[9]
The reemergence of white supremacy post-Civil War, institutionalized in the South through the legal regime of Jim Crow, and perpetuated in the North through informal practice, meant that African Americans faced knotty questions about loyalty and allegiance to the United States into the twentieth century. These questions loomed especially large during wartime. During the First World War, some black leaders followed W.E.B. DuBois in urging African Americans to “close ranks” and support the U.S. war effort, while others like the black journalist William Monroe Trotter, the son of a Civil War veteran of the 54th Massachusetts, argued that Southern lynch law was a far greater threat to black lives than the Kaiser.[10] In the next World War, many African Americans embraced the idea of a “Double V” campaign that sought victory over Fascism abroad and racism at home. The term was coined by James G. Thompson who, after searching his soul, decided that he would fight for the U.S., but only with the caveat that he sought to destroy “our enemies from without…and our enemies within” who were seeking to “destroy our democratic forms of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”[11]
Issues regarding the treatment of people of color and allegiance to the United States remain salient, especially as the country reflects on the ways in which violence against black lives—during slavery, during Jim Crow, today—has been systematic, unprosecuted, and persistent. Kaepernick, to be sure, has not suggested that he does not owe allegiance to the United States; he altered his form of protest specifically to convey respect for the U.S. military and the country itself, while at the same time highlighting its flaws. But his gesture reminds us of the discomfort some African Americans have felt when they have considered the prospect of fighting under the American flag. African American considerations of how, when, and why to serve a nation that institutionalized inequality remind us that interrogation of our national symbols is essential to creating a “more perfect Union.”
Megan Rapinoe kneeling, from Twitter user @GBpackfan32.
American political protests are older than the terms “United States” or “Star-Spangled Banner” (just ask King George about his tea). Like antebellum black activists who rather than celebrate Independence Day, instead held protest meetings on July 5th, Kaepernick is appropriating a bedrock piece of American national culture to make a necessary point. He reminds us that racial injustice still haunts this nation. “American” does not mean–and never has meant–blind fealty to symbols or institutions. Being American is about holding America accountable when it fails to live up to its great promise. Megan Rapinoe, a member of the LGBT community, also reminds us that American injustice comes in many forms and that a sense of solidarity can lead us to stand, or kneel, with our oppressed brethren. Hopefully Kaepernick, Rapinoe, and those beside them will inspire other Americans to embrace the complexity of the past and present and junk the zero-sum game in which you either stand for the anthem, or you are against America. Sometimes the best way to honor the United States is by kneeling down when its anthem plays. We can do two things at once. After all, we are Americans.
[5] David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (Hill and Wang: New York, 1999), 15.
[6] Untitled letter copied from Colored People’s Press, Liberator, April 1, 1842.
[7] Henry Cropper, “Note from Philadelphia,” Pine & Palm, May 25, 1861.
[8] “Great Meeting in Shiloh Church,” Liberator, May 22, 1863.
[9] Henry McNeal Turner to Blanche K. Bruce, Christian Recorder, March 27, 1890.
[10] On African Americans, black service and World War I, see William Jordan, “‘The Damnable Dilemma’: African-American Accommodation and Protest in World War I” Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (1995): 1562-1583; Adrienne Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Chad Louis Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
[11] James G. Thompson, “Should I Sacrifice to Live,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 31, 1942, in Neil A. Wynn, The African American Experience during World War II (Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) 110-111.
Brian Taylor is an assistant teaching professor of history at Georgetown University. He received his PhD from Georgetown in 2015 for his dissertation, "'To Make the Union What It Ought to Be': African Americans, Civil War Military Service, and Citizenship." He teaches courses on antebellum empire building, Abraham Lincoln, War and American Society, and slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. He can be reached at bmt36@georgetown.edu.
Tom Foley is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He co-edited "Memorable Days: The Emilie Davis Diaries" (www.davisdiaries.villanova.edu) and contributed to the Georgetown Slavery Archive (www.slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu). His dissertation explores the politics and the origins of the fossil fuel industry in nineteenth century Pennsylvania. He can be reached at tfoley2@gmail.com.
Democracy is fragile. One whiff of dishonesty, real or imagined, can undermine our dedication to democratic procedures. Even the wildest accusations about an opponent’s unethical or illegal behavior can help us justify rewriting the rules, or ignoring them altogether, in the name of victory. Allegations of electoral trickery are not uncommon in American politics, but they have cast a dark shadow over the ferocious presidential contest of 2016. Talk of voter fraud and rigged elections has proliferated in both the primary and general campaigns and will probably echo long after November. Still, the United States has weathered similar storms before: the “Corrupt Bargain” which allegedly ripped victory from Andrew Jackson’s hands in 1824; the disputed 1876 election, which raised fears of renewed civil war; and Bush v. Gore in 2000.
Outside of presidential politics, America’s record of peaceful, democratic decision-making gets even spottier. Just ask Kansas. In the mid-to-late 1850s, political strife in Kansas Territory captivated national attention and hastened the coming of the Civil War. From a bird’s-eye view, “Bleeding Kansas” represented a titanic struggle between two civilizations, with the fate of the republic hanging in the balance. The authors of an “Appeal to the South” warned that if abolitionists won, they would continue their “war upon the institutions of the South…until slavery shall cease to exist in any of the States, or the Union is dissolved.”[1] William H. Seward, a leading antislavery senator, agreed that the stakes were enormous. Either Kansas would be a free state, or slaveholders would win “at the cost of the sacrifice of all the existing liberties of the American people.”[2] Up close, however, the conflict looked grittier.
Within Kansas, the issues were equally substantial but the action unfolded as a series of sometimes violent clashes over voter qualifications, the validity of election returns, and the legitimacy of the territorial government. It was not supposed to be this way. Organized in 1854 under the principle of popular sovereignty, whereby local white voters would establish their own “domestic institutions” – and decide the fate of slavery – Kansas was meant to be a model of democracy. Popular dissatisfaction with a dysfunctional Congress made popular sovereignty appealing. Convinced that gridlocked antislavery and proslavery legislators could never compromise on the issue of slavery’s expansion, popular sovereignty’s supporters insisted that territorial voters choose for themselves. In practice, however, Kansas revealed democracy’s Achilles heel: if both sides are not willing to accept defeat, the system breaks down. And in Kansas, just as in Washington, D.C., slavery seemed too important to be left up to the whim of a majority.
A nineteenth-century etching entitled “Voting in Kickapoo,” from Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi: From the Great River to the Great Ocean (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869; GoogleBooks), 101.
The trouble began in the winter of 1854 to 1855, when Kansas held a pair of elections to select a delegate to Congress and a territorial legislature. Hearing that hordes of Yankees were en route to Kansas, and fearful of being surrounded on three sides by antislavery neighbors, proslavery Missourians resolved to control the outcome by any means necessary. Declaring that northern migrants had no more right to rule the territory than they did, Missourians crossed into Kansas just before both elections and voted by the thousands. One later testified that, while en route to Kansas, he met three hundred like-minded men whose travel expenses had been paid by slaveholders determined to protect their western flank. They planned to vote at least fifteen hundred times.[3] Many proslavery partisans voted early and often; in the March 1855 election for delegates to the territorial legislature, more than 6,000 ballots were cast in a territory which had only 2,905 legal voters. An overwhelming majority – 5,427 – were for proslavery candidates.[4]
People on both sides denounced their foes. Northern migrants reported armed voter intimidation, theft of ballot boxes, and thousands of ballots cast by Missouri “Border Ruffians” who had no intention of staying in Kansas. Well-armed Missourians surrounded an antislavery candidate, grabbed him by the collar, and mocked him as a “damned abolitionist.”[5] But Missourians insisted that their lives, property, and security were at risk and declared that settlers just arrived from Massachusetts had no more valid right to vote than they did.
“Two Unidentified Border Ruffians with Swords,” ca. 1854-1860. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Given that many of the earliest bona fide migrants to Kansas were from Missouri, proslavery candidates might have won both elections honestly. But their partisans’ unwillingness to risk defeat unleashed a cycle of protest, deceit, and violence that plagued Kansas for years and undermined many inhabitants’ faith in local governance. Rejecting the proslavery territorial government as a sham, antislavery residents established a rival (and federally unsanctioned) government in Topeka and applied for admission into the Union as a free state. By 1856, guerrilla warfare raged across much of the territory, claiming dozens of lives, including Frederick Brown, a son of soon-to-be-infamous abolitionist John Brown. The bloodletting spilled over into Congress when Preston Brooks (D-SC) assaulted Charles Sumner (R-MA) for a speech denouncing efforts to force slavery into Kansas. Outside observers recognized that the escalation of blame and retaliation threatened the whole country. The nation’s proslavery and antislavery factions, wrote one concerned bystander, grew “more repulsive every year….Kansas, in fact, is already the literal battle-ground of this unquenchable contest, where streams of blood have flowed on both sides.”[6]
In our own superheated political climate, Bleeding Kansas might seem disturbingly familiar. Born out of disillusionment and desperation, the struggle in Kansas Territory bred a self-righteous refusal to accept the legitimacy of political rivals – and ultimately released a wave of violence. Whether they fought to protect property, preserve racial privilege, or promote an ideology, participants justified fraud, intimidation, and murder by demonizing their foes. History offers few clear-cut lessons, but it is apparent that democracy cannot thrive amid violence, hectoring, and intolerance. It is precisely when our confidence in “politics as usual” has been shaken that we must shun the temptation to take shortcuts to victory. It is precisely in the high-stakes elections, the ones we are most loath to lose, that we must reaffirm our dedication to democracy as a process. When the process breaks down, everyone loses.
[1] W.H. Russell et al., “Kansas Matters – Appeal to the South,” DeBow’s Review 20, no. 5 (May 1856), 636.
[3] E.P. Vaughn testimony in U.S. House of Representatives, Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas; With the Views of the Minority of Said Committee, Report No. 200, 34th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington: Cornelius Wendell, Printer, 1856), 130.
[4] Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 59.
[5] John A. Wakefield testimony in Report of the Special Committee, Report No. 200, 2.
[6] Samuel Gilman to My Dear Children, August 1856, Samuel Gilman Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, SC.
Michael E. Woods is Associate Professor of History at University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) and Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, 2014), which received the 2015 James A. Rawley Award from the Southern Historical Association. His most recent book is entitled Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (North Carolina, 2020).
The Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area evokes images of sugar sand beaches and crystal-clear Gulf waters. A stone’s throw from St. Petersburg, the Tampa Bay Ferry carts beachgoers two or three times a day between Fort DeSoto County Park and Egmont Key State Park. Egmont Key’s informational brochure boasts that it is a “refuge for wildlife and people,” and it surely is a magnificent place to find solitude, but few vacationers, locals, or historians understand the Civil War history of this island paradise.[1] The story of Egmont Key is not that of a major battle or a significant individual. Egmont Key’s story is about local resistance, disease, and the fight for survival. It reminds the public that the sectional conflict reached even the distant corners of the divided nation and illustrates the challenges that war thrust upon the settlers on the Florida frontier.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Tampa Bay area was a sparsely populated borderland rife with mosquitoes and disease. Indeed, in 1861, one New York Times correspondent denounced it as a “miserable, God-forsaken hole.”[2] But the U.S. government disagreed and, even years earlier, had perceived the strategic value of Tampa Bay and of Egmont Key, which stands guard where the bay’s shallow waters meet the Gulf. When Florida became a state in 1845, recognition of the bay’s importance heightened. The following year, Florida’s senators pressured Congress to appropriate funds for a lighthouse to guide ships into Tampa Bay. Three years later, a group of army engineers, led by young Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, recommended fortifying the Key. Fortifications did not materialize, but Congress appropriated ten thousand dollars to construct a lighthouse, which began operating in May 1848. A few months later, on September 25, 1848, a hurricane inundated the Key with six feet of water, damaging the new beacon. The U.S. Congress responded on August 10, 1856, by appropriating sixteen thousand dollars for a new lighthouse. This structure, completed in 1858, stood eighty-seven feet above sea level and could “withstand any storm.”[3] The sturdy lighthouse has needed very few repairs over the years, but one resulted from the actions of loyal Confederates during the Civil War.
In July 1861, approximately thirty to forty U.S. seamen from the steamer R.R. Cuyler fortified the key with three eighteen-pound guns and erected a battery on the island’s east side. But blockaders did not maintain a constant presence at Egmont Key since blockade duty elsewhere along the Gulf Coast often necessitated their presence. In August 1861, Lightkeeper George H. Richards, an opportunist who feigned loyalty in blockaders’ presence but harbored Confederate sympathies, fled to Tampa in their absence. Upon hearing of the Yankees’ departure, members of the Sunny South Guard and pro-Confederate civilians went out to Egmont Key and removed the lighthouse’s lamp and oil to black out Tampa Bay, scuttle U.S. ships, and frustrate the blockade. The crafty Floridians smuggled the lamp to Tampa and hid it so well at Fort Brooke that it was not rediscovered until after the war, allowing the lighthouse to finally resume operating in June 1866.[4]
One New York Times correspondent decried the theft of the light as “a mark of Southern vandalism,” but the Union persisted in its efforts to thwart blockade runners from reaching Tampa by devising a makeshift light. Union military campaigns, the blockade, and Confederate government directives bled Florida residents of necessities as the war dragged on. Consequently, U.S. troops took advantage of the war-weariness of Bay Area residents, especially those with Union sympathies. Captain Eaton, of the U.S. Ethan Allen blockading Tampa Bay, estimated that there were about forty Unionist families in Tampa and, in February 1862, proposed making Egmont Key into a place of refuge for residents seeking U.S. protection. Nine months later, the New York Times reported that a dozen contrabands and four white refugees occupied the buildings surrounding the lighthouse, cleared the island’s ground, and cultivated sweet potatoes. These men and women recognized that Union forces on the Gulf Coast generally, and on Egmont Key specifically, represented their best hope of survival despite the logistical challenges that U.S. troops faced in supplying refugees and contrabands who sought their protection.[5]
A photograph of an 1864 drawing of three vessels (the schooner Stonewall, the man-of-war James L. Davis, and a steamer Sunflower) blockading Tampa Bay. Courtesy of Florida Memory: The State Library & Archives of Florida.
Egmont Key remained isolated from major engagements, but the men stationed on or near the island felt the ravages of one of the Civil War’s most deadly assailants – disease. A yellow fever epidemic struck the Key in July 1864 and claimed the lives of sixteen young men – seamen and soldiers – whose ages ranged from sixteen to thirty-six. Survivors buried these casualties, along with four others who died from accidental gunshot wounds as well as from unknown causes, in a modest cemetery under Egmont Key’s sandy soil, where they rested until 1909 when the Civil War burials were reinterred in the National Cemetery in St. Augustine.[6] Egmont Key State Park has nonetheless preserved the memory of these lives lost in a replication of the cemetery. The burial ground, which lies only yards from the lighthouse, is harrowing – it is a restricted area filled with the Gulf beaches’ signature sugar-sand and neatly lined white wooden crosses that mark where Union sympathizers and seamen once laid.[7]
On November 18, 1864, the New York Times mourned one of the men buried on Egmont Key. Theodore Woolsey Twining, Acting Assistant Paymaster on the U.S. Bark Roebuck, which was stationed at Tampa Bay, was one of the victims of the smallpox epidemic. A sense of duty summoned Twining into the ranks, and disease stole his life, inspiring both his family and his Yale classmates to grieve his loss. Lives were not the only losses sustained at Egmont Key. The Key’s Civil War history has largely been washed away, and this parallels its current physical state. A significant portion of Egmont Key has been lost to erosion. Its former boundaries are noticeable by looking at the different shades of blue in the Gulf waters.
Despite this loss of land, Egmont Key is a true gem – not only for beachgoers and bird watchers, but also for its rich history, which visitors usually overlook since they come to the Key to escape reality. Visitors really have to dig – and read in advance – to understand the Key’s Civil War history and its pinnacle of importance, which came during the Spanish-American War. As America became an imperial power, the U.S. military constructed Fort Dade in 1898 to protect Tampa, and from there staged military operations in Cuba. Modest interpretive signs offer visitors a self-guided walking tour over neatly laid brick roads through the fort’s remnants and the now absent military town, both of which were active through World War II. These signs get only passing glances as sun, surf, sand, and relaxation beckon visitors down the brick roads that nowadays lead to nowhere.
Contemporary photo of Egmont Key State Park. Courtesy of the author.
Egmont Key’s Civil War history challenges our assumptions about the memory of wartime conflict. Battlefields of the Eastern, Western, and Trans-Mississippi theaters draw tourists specifically seeking knowledge about the war itself, but most tourists who come to the Gulf coast have a different agenda and forget that the region had an entirely different purpose in the Civil War Era. The wartime history of Egmont Key, specifically, and that of Florida’s Gulf Coast frontier from Key West to Cedar Key, generally, are perfect examples of how formal policy and everyday individuals shaped the war and the lives of their contemporaries. They illustrate the blockade’s economic stranglehold and evidence Unionism, internal dissent, and guerrilla activity on the frontier far removed from main theaters of war. Scholars have only briefly acknowledged this story, but routine beach days and one special trip to Egmont Key can provide inspiration to explore how the few people who inhabited its pristine shores, before it was considered paradise, fit into those narratives.[8]
[1] Florida State Parks, Florida Department of Environmental Protection Division of Recreation and Parks, “Egmont Key State Park,” Created December 2015. Brochure available at Egmont Key State Park.
[2] “From the Gulf Fleet,” New York Times (New York) July 14, 1861, 8.
[3] Donald H. Thompson and Carol Thompson, Egmont Key: A History (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012; Kindle Edition, 2013); Florida State Parks, “Egmont Key State Park,” 2015.
[4] “Egmont Key Occupied by a Federal Force,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), August 5, 1861, 1. Tampa resident and former Indian war officer John T. Lesley organized the Tampa Guards in January 1861. This unit later became the Sunny South Guard. It attracted local boys and young men to its ranks. Canter Brown, Jr., Tampa in Civil War and Reconstruction (Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 2000), 26; Thompson and Thompson, Egmont Key; Joe Crankshaw and Nick Wynne, Florida Civil War Blockades: Battling for the Coast (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011; Kindle Edition, 2012). Tampa Peninsula quoted in The Nashville Union and American (Nashville) September 17, 1861, 2.
[5] “West Coast of Florida,” New York Times (New York), November 17, 1862, 1. “Union Feeling in Florida,” New York Times (New York), February 28, 1862, 3. Florida’s residents grew weary of conscription and other Confederate government acts, such as the War Tax Act of August 1861, the Impressment Act of March 1863, and the General Tax Act of April 1863, and the Confederate tithe, which imposed a tax-in-kind of 10% on all agricultural goods. These inspired desertion and heightened Union sympathies by 1864. Canter Brown, Jr., “The Civil War, 1861-1865,” in The New History of Florida, ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 239-240. Floridians were offended that the Confederate government, in February 1864, removed salt makers from the list of individuals exempt from conscription. Thompson and Thompson, Egmont Key; Crankshaw and Wynne, Florida Civil War Blockades; for an overview of Floridians’ disaffection, see John F. Reiger, “Deprivation, Disaffection, and Desertion in Confederate Florida” Florida Historical Quarterly 48 (1969-1970): 279-298.
[6] Thompson and Thompson, Egmont Key. One of the men buried on Egmont Key died of typhoid fever. Information from “Civil War Burials – Egmont Key Lighthouse Cemetery,” interpretive marker, Egmont Key State Park.
[7] The Egmont Key Lighthouse Cemetery also houses burials from the Spanish-American War Quarantine Camp (1898), the U.S. Lighthouse Tender “Laurel,” the U.S. Marine Hospital Service, the Seminole people who were detained on Egmont Key in the 1850s, the Lighthouse Keeper’s Family (the Moore and Bahrt families), and one unknown coal tender for the lighthouse. Information from “Egmont Key Lighthouse Cemetery,” interpretive marker, Egmont Key State Park.
[8] The author wishes to thank Mr. Tom Watson, Assistant Park Manager, for the tour of Egmont Key that he provided on July 8, 2016.
Angela M. Zombek is Assistant Professor of History at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater, Florida. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2012. Her book manuscript, Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War, is under contract with Kent State University Press. She can be reached at zombek.angie@spcollege.edu.
If you were to drive down Cheltenham Avenue north of Philadelphia today between Penrose Avenue and School Lane, you would pass standard urban blocks, nothing extraordinary. A cemetery, gas station, a mixed collection of residences, and a community center. Casual passersby—many residents, even–do not recognize the historical significance of the site, the part those few city blocks played in history. For on those four blocks on Cheltenham Avenue lie the ruins of the largest training camp for African American soldiers in the Civil War, Camp William Penn. A Pennsylvania State Historical marker describing the camp’s history can be found along Sycamore Avenue, situated near where former gates to the camp are located. The Veterans Association (VA) of Pennsylvania erected a stone monument nearby that honors the camp. And about twenty yards from the VA monument, a small former firehouse serves as a seasonal museum, where a small staff of volunteers interpret this history using objects and artifacts from the camp. No federal or state money is spent on the museum, and the volunteers who run the place fight periodically to protect what little they have. Beyond the marker, the monument, and the firehouse-museum, all of which can be missed if you blink, there is no other indication that between 1863 and 1865, more black soldiers in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) trained at Camp William Penn than any other camp in the Union. Nothing here gives a hint of how central the camp was to African American life during the Civil War era. Indeed, without increased awareness, the site is in danger of being erased, entirely. For some time now historians have underscored how important black enlistment was to U.S. victory in the Civil War—nearly 200,000 of these men entered the fight as fresh recruits just when the U.S. Army most needed them–and, yet, this most significant site in that story is in danger of being lost.
A picture of the Pennsylvania State Historical Marker near the surviving gates of the camp. Courtesy of the Camp William Penn museum site, by Jonathan White.
Several unique developments came together to make Philadelphia the home to the U.S. Army’s Camp William Penn. Philadelphia-area Quakers boasted a long and distinguished history of abolitionism, and when the war began, and were able to generate enthusiastic support for the USCT. Gentlemen’s clubs like the Union League provided the financial muscle necessary to support the camp and recruit troops. The North Pennsylvania Railroad that traveled through Cheltenham supplied the infrastructure to transport soldiers. And, most importantly, Philadelphia’s free blacks pressured city and state leaders to be included in the fight against slavery and the Confederacy. “Men in earnest don’t fight with one hand, when they might fight with two,” Frederick Douglass said in 1861, “and a man drowning would not refuse to be saved even by a colored hand.” The Camp opened in the summer of 1863, and by the time its gates closed in 1865, approximately eleven thousand soldiers trained at the site. Eleven Camp William Penn regiments saw fighting in the final years of the war, from Olustee to Petersburg. But beyond the camp’s important work producing black soldiers, Camp William Penn became a center of black community life and a place where recruits and others fought for civil rights.
Camp William Penn, camps and headquarters. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Digital Library.
Racial tensions and conflicts ran through life in the camp, as black city residents, recruits and those who came to support them, came in contact with Cheltenham’s white community members and U.S. Army officers, and white and black Americans negotiated the racial limits of a country in the midst of emancipation. Slave owners from Delaware and Maryland traveled to the camp on several occasions in an attempt to reclaim escaped slaves. Tense showdowns ensued between the masters and the soldiers, a mix of free blacks and formers slaves. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the troops often became “excited.” On one occasion, soldiers surrounded a slave owner and threatened him, forcing him to “beat a hasty retreat.”[1] White neighbors complained loudly about “uncivilized” blacks who visited the camp. “Unless [black visitors] soon change their course,” an unnamed author threatened, “the residents in the neighborhood of the camp will take the matter in their own hands and teach a few how to behave themselves.”[2] Violence in and around the camp was not uncommon. In August 1863, a sentinel named Charles Ridley shot a local white man who had been harassing him while on duty, leading to a public debate over Ridley’s fate. The case extended all the way to the state capital in Harrisburg, when in June 1864, following a campaign by Pennsylvanians who believed the sentinel had been unjustly convicted, Governor Andrew Curtain decided to pardon Ridley, reversing the court’s decision. The soldiers’ white US Army officers treated black civilians harshly. In 1864, black women suspected of bringing liquor to the men were made to wear signs that read “I brought whiskey into camp” while they were paraded around camp. When one woman resisted the shaming, officers shaved her head and expelled her from the grounds.[3]
The racial animosities of the period were on full display. USCT soldiers were initially paid a fraction of the wages received by their white compatriots, were held suspect by white soldiers who thought they could not fight, and were threatened by Confederate soldiers with either death or enslavement if caught. While they fought for equal treatment in the army, that fight continued at their training ground. Friends and family of Camp William Penn soldiers wishing to visit loved ones at the camp suffered the humiliation of being barred from some of Philadelphia’s segregated street cars. These and other hardships engendered a sense of disillusionment among men who had enthusiastically turned out to fight for their country. While in the field, one man in the 6th USCT Regiment wrote in the midst of the struggle over wages,
When I was home I could make a living for [my wife] and my two little ones; but now that I am a soldier they must do the best they can or starve. It almost tempts me to desert and run a chance of getting shot, when I read her letters, hoping that I would come to her relief. But what am I to do…I thought I was a soldier, and it made me feel somewhat proud to think that I had a right to fight for Uncle Sam…but my wife’s letters have brought my patriotism down to the freezing point, and I don’t think it will ever rise again.
The story of Camp William Penn provides historians and the general public a window into not only the story of the USCT, but also racial tension and civil rights activism of the Civil War era.[4]
The photograph that became the basis for the “Come Join Us Brothers” United States Colored Troops recruitment painting.[5]
Thanks to the work of the volunteers at Camp William Penn Museum and the Citizens for the Restoration of Historical La Mott–and the latter’s strong online presence–remnants of this important piece of U.S. history remain. Yet their conservation efforts have yielded few visible results. Only fragments of the camp walls and gates remain. A walking tour of the blocks might allow interpreters to point out where barracks or camp streets were once located. Indeed, fragments of the destroyed barracks and buildings have been repurposed to construct homes in the neighborhood, but these are not marked nor is it clear if these remnants of the city’s distinguished civil rights history are one home remodel or urban renewal away from vanishing too. Although the battle to preserve the camp has been underway for decades, a bigger fight remains to be waged—this one against the public’s nearly complete lack of interest in the site. The story of Camp William Penn is about how hundreds of thousands of men, young and not so young, free and enslaved, turned out to fight for their country, often with other Americans actively working against them. In the process these men realized they had another fight to wage at home, for equality and for respect. Yet our memory of these men, like the camp where they trained and lived, has been slowly disappearing for more than one hundred and fifty years. Out of respect for their memory, Camp William Penn deserves more than a marker and a seasonal museum.
[1] “Incident at Camp William Penn,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 1863, America’s Historical Newspapers.
[2] “The Negro Camp,” The Age, February 1, 1864, in David I. Harrower and Thomas J. Weickowski, A Spectacle for Men and Angels: A Documentary Narrative of Camp William Penn and the Raising of Colored Regiments in Pennsylvania (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2013).
[3] “Temperance Movement at Camp William Penn,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 31, 1864, America’s Historical Newspapers.
[4]A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861-1865, ed. Edwin S. Redkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 237.
[5] Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph,” the University of Virginia.
Blake is a graduate student at Villanova University and is interested in early American history and public history. In addition to his coursework and assistantship, he works as a tour guide for the Encampment Store at Valley Forge National Historical Park in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at bmcgread@villanova.edu.
On May 20th and 21st, a group of scholars, students, and public historians gathered at the University of Memphis to discuss a dramatic event often overlooked in the narrative of Reconstruction, the Memphis Massacre of 1866. The symposium, and the Memphis Massacre Project, informed the public about the massacre and began a difficult and necessary conversation about how Americans approach the history of Reconstruction–how we rethink and repurpose existing spaces and create new public spaces to reflect on that history. The symposium’s directors, Dr. Beverly Bond and Dr. Susan O’Donovan, spoke with Muster about their work and their hopes for the project’s future.
From the capture of Memphis by Union forces in June 1862 through the final surrender of the Confederacy in April 1865, Memphis experienced dramatic demographic, social, and economic change. Thousands of enslaved African Americans fled area farms and plantations for sanctuary in the city. These new arrivals were housed in camps near the Union Army’s Ft. Pickering, on President’s Island, and in surrounding areas. After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African American men were allowed to enlist into segregated units of the U.S.C.T. Some of these soldiers were garrisoned at Ft. Pickering and a U.S.C.T unit from Ft. Pickering was among the black soldiers killed in the 1864 Ft. Pillow massacre, about forty miles north of the city.
The city’s white population also changed during the Civil War. Some Confederate sympathizers left the city to fight with the Confederate army or to refuge deeper into Confederate-held areas. Union military personnel, northern businessmen or war profiteers, teachers and other agents of northern missionary aid societies, and Freedman’s Bureau officials and workers poured into the city. As conflict wound down, some self-exiled white Memphians, returned to the city, hoping to take advantage of President Andrew Johnson’s generous amnesty programs and to reclaim homes and other property. Control of city services shifted back to civilian authorities.
These Memphis populations – newly emancipated African Americans, former Confederates (including many former slaveholders), former free people of color, ethnic whites (including many Irish immigrants), northern military and civilians – were negotiating the new terrain of freedom in the post-Civil War south. As was the case across much of the former Confederacy, white Southerners wanted to confine black Southerners to the narrowest of freedoms. White Memphians were willing to concede the end of slavery, the right to marry, and the right of former slaves to assume responsibility for the economic support of their families, but were not willing to extend full equality, full citizenship or even the fullest exercise of free labor to their black neighbors. Touting the presence of “surplus” African Americans in the overcrowded city, and beginning as early as fall 1865, white civilians and city government officials, sometimes with the complicity of the Union Army and the Freedman’s Bureau, encouraged (or pressured) black Memphians to return to the countryside to satisfy the labor needs of white farmers and planters.
Contemporary portrayal of the 1866 Memphis Massacre. Courtesy of Blackpast.org.
This volatile situation in the spring of 1866 engendered a series of minor confrontations between black soldiers at Ft. Pickering and members of the Memphis police, which escalated into a much larger massacre, a three-day wave of violence that left at least forty-six African American men, women and children dead. Other black Memphians were beaten and/or driven out of the city. Every African American church and schoolhouse was destroyed, homes and businesses were burglarized and burned, and at least five women were raped. Within weeks, a Congress that had already been at logger-heads with President Johnson over Reconstruction policy, dispatched a delegation to Memphis to investigate the massacre and its origins. What they learned, and how they responded to that new knowledge, led to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, changed the course of Reconstruction, and with it, the constitutional underpinnings of the nation. And then, as a nation, we “forgot” about Memphis along with the rest of Reconstruction’s history.
Bringing Reconstruction back into public view poses a number of challenges, both political and practical. The first, of course, stems from the fact that for 150 years, this history has been confined near exclusively to academic circles. Until May 1, 2016, when the Memphis NAACP unveiled a marker to commemorate the victims of the Memphis Massacre, there had been no National Park Service recognition of any aspect of this history anywhere. For reasons best explained by Cecelia O’Leary, David Blight, and others who work on the politics of memory, Reconstruction has been denied a place on our national historical landscape. But aside from having to carve out commemorative space that has for more than a century been claimed for marbled generals, Civil War battlefield sites, and more recently, Confederate battle symbols, Reconstruction didn’t happen in any particular or clearly defined place. Unfolding more as a guerilla action or grassroots insurgency, Reconstruction worked itself out wherever people might meet – on workshop floors, inside white people’s homes, on plantations and farms. This has made it hard for historians to identify a physical location for an interpretive site or a monument. Still, there were moments when debates over black freedom flared largely and violently, and as Kate Masur and Greg Downs have observed, those acts of public violence can both be plotted on a map and used to open up discussion about a deliberately “forgotten” past. The Memphis Massacre of May 1866 gave us that chance.
What we quickly realized, however, was that teaching an event like the Memphis Massacre required teaching a wider and deeper historical context too. Reconstruction is such a cypher that no one knows how to think about it, or where to fit it into our national narrative. But in doing more to teach Reconstruction, we stumbled onto what turned out to be a winning strategy for making the Memphis Massacre meaningful to a 21st-century audience. By broadening our field of inquiry, our audiences quickly came to see that what happened in Memphis in 1866 was more than an idiosyncratic episode of only local interest. By broadening the story, they saw that what happened in Memphis is key to knowing how the nation we live in today came to be. As a number of our May symposium speakers revealed, many of the legal and constitutional rights we now take for granted owe their origins to the nation’s response the Memphis Massacre, and most especially, to the role played by former slaves in prompting those changes.
Indeed, if there was one aspect to this history that hooked our audiences most securely, we would venture to say it was the degree to which Black Lives–and black truths!–Mattered in 1866. Congress listened. A nation listened. And the outcome was a radical shift in American civil and political life. Imagine, for instance, where we would be today without the 14th Amendment, which Congress put the finishing touches on in the wake of the Memphis Massacre. Imagine where we would be today if black truths and black testimony carried the same weight that they did in 1866 when a congressional delegation took those testimonies seriously. For most of the people with whom we worked on the symposium this spring, this aspect of the Memphis story resonated the most deeply. Here was a history they could use.
We brought all these themes together in our capstone event, a two-day public symposium held on May 20-21 at the University of Memphis. It featured historians and scholars from across the country, including Robert K. Sutton, former Chief Historian of the National Park Service. Presenting to an audience that numbered in the hundreds, their presentations pried open what has for 150-years been the carefully concealed history of Reconstruction, its legacies, and the significant role that Memphis played in both. The discussions that followed each presentation were lively, informed, and illuminating. We learned much over these two days: about ourselves, our city, our nation, and the role of public memory in public life.
A picture of the Memphis Massacre Symposium. Image from the “Memories of a Massacre: Memphis in 1866” Facebook page.
Now that we’ve brought the Memphis Massacre and through it, something of Reconstruction, to the surface, we intend to keep it there. But in the absence of a brick and mortar interpretive center, our efforts to commemorate, remember, and understand one of the watershed moments in national history will unfold in the digital domain. As it develops, the Memphis Massacre website will be museum, schoolroom, and public forum. In a sense, the amorphous nature of a digital interpretive center is appropriate given the amorphous character of Reconstruction’s history. Anyone, anywhere, at any time will be able to visit our site to learn more about this historic period. Anyone, anywhere, at any time can relive our May 2016 symposium, all of which was filmed and is now available on the Memphis Massacre blog. Panel four, “The Memphis Massacre,” aired recently on C-SPAN3 and panel 5, “The Radicalization of Reconstruction,” will air on the same channel on July 23. Both sessions will also be available in the C-SPAN Civil War video library.
Our plan in coming months is to continue adding new resources and teaching materials, including primary sources. We will use our blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed to promote Reconstruction commemorative initiatives in other communities as well as nineteenth-century African American history more generally. We’ve found our website and social media “machine” to be very powerful and effective teaching and advocacy tools; our intent is to keep using them to permanently break what have been long-standing silences and to bring about a deeper public awareness of our past and the people and events that have shaped it.
Susan Eva O'Donovan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Memphis. A former editor at the Freedmen & Southern Society Project and author of Becoming Free in the Cotton South, Professor O'Donovan specializes in African American history with a focus on the transition from slavery to freedom in the Civil War era.
Beverly Greene Bond is Associate Professor of History at the University of Memphis. Past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians, Professor Bond specializes in nineteenth-century African American history with a focus on African American women and their experiences.
At the Aiken-Rhett House Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, visitors do not view the beautiful interiors of the slaveholders’ residence until they have become fully acquainted with the slaves’ living quarters and work spaces. Tours begin in the basement and back yard of the house. The site interrupts the nostalgic gaze of the tourist, insisting that guests confront the way that black people held in bondage created, day in and day out, white slaveholders’ grandeur. The southern plantation—and the white supremacist mythology surrounding it—is turned upside down.
Last week, First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, did something very much like this for the entire country. In her speech before the Democratic National Convention, Obama described the arc of African-American history that she sees reflected in her family’s service to the country. That story, she explained,
brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters — two beautiful intelligent black young women — play with the dog on the White House lawn.
Obama exploded a central conceit of American mythology—the idea that in order to honor the founders’ ideas, or their artifacts, we must remember them as essentially pure, free from the taint of avarice, racism, or cruelty. She instead asserted a new way to revere the American project, as something flexible enough to contain, and endorse, the great sea change in American life represented by her husband’s election to the presidency.
The First Lady of the United States delivering her speech on Monday night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Image by CNBC.
Though many listeners responded positively to Obama’s linkage of the present to the nation’s troubled past, other Americans were angered. Some took to Twitter to accuse Obama of lying, prompting multiple media outlets to fact check the speech. Others bemoaned the fact that anyone should point out these facts, even if they were true—this was “bad news” that depressed pride in the country. Others charged that the instinct to share the news was rooted in racial animus. The most talked-about response came from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. While O’Reilly explained to his viewers that Obama hadn’t lied, he described the slaves who worked on the White House as “well fed” and housed in “decent lodgings.” O’Reilly was roundly chastised by citizens, journalists, and scholars who pointed out that, no matter what one ate, a slave was a slave, and bondage, no matter its circumstances, was not liberty. Though D.C.’s slaves labored alongside free workers, they had no control over their labor contracts, and they could be brutalized or sold at will. Moreover, whatever meager capital some were able to accumulate paled in comparison to that earned by their white counterparts.
Let’s be clear—the problem here isn’t about the historical record, or access to facts. In 2009, on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, the same arguments were debated, and the same fact-checking was done. Historians have long acknowledged that slaves helped build the White House. Indeed, though the city’s planners initially tried to recruit only European immigrant laborers to build the city of DC, slaves worked on virtually all aspects of the construction of Washington, D.C. and its various federal buildings, alongside free laborers, both black and white, immigrant and native born.[1]
Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s design of Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
This slave hiring scheme was established in April 1792, when the three commissioners in charge—appointed by President George Washington, and slaveholders, all—ordered their manager to “hire good laboring Negroes by the year, the masters clothing them well and finding each a blanket, the Commissioners finding them provisions and paying twenty one pounds a year wages.”[2] The twenty-one pounds wages (about five dollars per month) went, of course, to the slaveholders, not to the enslaved laborers.
Slave hiring thus became one of the capital’s first business enterprises. Commissioners embraced the system because hired slave labor was plentiful and less expensive than free labor. For slaveholders experiencing declines in the tobacco economy, slave hiring was an attractive way to profit from the labor of men not otherwise profitably employed.[3] And the more closely connected one was to the commissioners (both the original three and others who succeeded them over the years), the more one stood to profit. As historian Bob Arnebeck explains,
The commissioners hired a slave worth about one hundred pounds for twenty-one pounds a year. The slave’s master would not have to feed the slave, and the value of the slave, as long as he didn’t get injured or run away, would not decrease. The master was making roughly a 20 percent return on his or her ‘investment,’ and that was in an era when some thought making over 6 percent was sinful.[4]
Not surprisingly, middlemen eager to exploit opportunities appeared on the scene, subcontracting with the commissioners to locate and hire slaves, both their own and those of area owners. Among them were Samuel Smallwood and Dr. James Blake, both future mayors of the District of Columbia.[5] Such slave-hiring arrangements were typical of the slave economy in the early republic and would grow increasingly important in the Upper South in the antebellum period.[6]
A June, 1795 payroll with the wages paid to slave masters in the construction of the nation’s capital. This image, and others like them, were scanned from the National Archives and Records Administration, and can be viewed at Bob Arnebeck’s blog about the role slaves played in building Washington D.C., capitalslaves.blogspot.com.
We certainly need to know these facts. But it is equally important to understand that negative reactions to Michelle Obama’s speech did not really arise from a failure of expertise, or knowledge. They arose from an anxiety–-not about the slaves who labored and suffered under this system—but about the fate of the reputation of the slaveholders, men whose words and deeds have lived beyond them in ways they could scarcely have imagined.
Many Americans view the White House as an iconic, untroubled repository of patriotism and American identity. This is a conceit as enduring as the plantation myths that the Aiken-Rhett House tour seeks to up-end. The White House was not a plantation per se, but it was nonetheless built for plantation owners, by plantation slaves, hired from other slaveholders, who got richer because of it. Moreover, it was a slaveholders’ home for fifty of the first sixty years of the republic.[7] The institution would not be abolished in the District of Columbia until 1862, during the Civil War, when few slaveholding Congressmen were present to resist, as they had when abolitionists had previously attempted to end slavery in the District.
The building of D.C. is inextricably tied to these historical realities. And for some Americans, placing black slaves at the heart of the national project is simply an unwelcome reminder of the centrality of racism to the financial and political successes of its leading lights, and to the country as a whole.
For those whose nostalgia for the White House is a proxy for an edifying, even purifying, personal connection to the nation, the implications are unsettling, at best. Indeed, they demand a reckoning that many wish to avoid altogether. But the reckoning is necessary. Just as the Aiken-Rhett House asks its visitors to begin by contemplating the morally-corrupt source of its grandeur, Michelle Obama simply asked Americans to consider the sorrowful continuities, and amazing disjunctures, in the nation’s history of racial oppression, all of them inscribed in the building of the White House.
[1] Clarence Lusane, The Black History of the White House (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2011), 115-117.
[2] Bob Arnebeck, Slave Labor in the Capital: Building Washington’s Iconic Federal Landmarks (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 42. The architect of the White House, James Hoban, was an Irish immigrant living in Charleston when he travelled to DC with his enslaved carpenters, Peter, Tom, Ben, and Harry, as well as his assistant’s slave, Daniel. Hoban also owned indentures for three white laborers. See Lusane, 106.
[5] Arnebeck, 29-30. The architect of the White House itself, James Hoban, was an Irish immigrant living in Charleston when he travelled to DC with his enslaved carpenters, Peter, Tom, Ben, and Harry, as well as his assistant’s slave, Daniel. Hoban also owned indentures for three white laborers. See Lusane, 106.
[6] Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2-4, and passim.
[7] In all, twelve United States presidents would own slaves, eight of them while holding office (http://hauensteincenter.org/slaveholding/). George Washington and his wife, Martha, held some three hundred slaves at Mount Vernon and the various presidential residences while he was president, including in Philadelphia, where they exploited a loophole in Pennsylvania’s antislavery statutes. The law in Pennsylvania stated that any slave who lived with their owner in Pennsylvania longer than six months was eligible to petition for his or her freedom. Jesse Holland describes the Washington family’s subterfuge to avoid losing any of their slaves during his tenure in the President’s House. “[B]etween March 1791 and October 1796, the Washingtons made fourteen trips from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon, rotating their slaves in and out of Pennsylvania to keep them under their control.” One of those slaves, Oney Judge, the personal maid to Martha Washington since she was a child, attempted to flee in 1796, hatching her plan with black friends in Philadelphia who aided her in getting away to New Hampshire. The Washingtons continued to attempt to recapture Judge and another slave, Hercules, the Washington’s cook who absconded a year later, until George Washington died. See Jesse J. Holland, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2016), 45-62, quote on 49. See also Michael Coard, “The ‘Black’ Eye on George Washington’s ‘“White” House,’” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 129, no. 4 (October 2005), 468; and “Ten Facts about Washington and Slavery,” at http://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/.
Margaret Storey is Professor in the History Department at DePaul University in Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in United States History from Emory University in 1999 and is the author of Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press 2004), the editor of the memoir of a Tennessee Union cavalryman, Tried Men and True: Or, Union Life in Dixie (University of Alabama Press 2011), and the co-author, with Nicholas Proctor, of the forthcoming Kentucky, 1861: Loyalty, State and Nation (W. W. Norton, expected 2016). Her most recent article, “A Conquest of Manners: Gender, Sociability, and Northern Wives’ Occupation of Memphis, 1862-1865” appeared in Ohio Valley History in May 2015.
Abraham Lincoln was a diehard politico and devoted partisan, but he only attended one national party convention, a Whig gathering that took place in Philadelphia in 1848. He was not even an official delegate to that big event, but just elbowed his way in among thousands of attendees. Yet, like always, the determined future president made the most of his experience.
Abraham Lincoln in 1846. Image courtesy of the House Divided Project and Library of Congress.
By that point in his career, Lincoln, age 39, was by no means an outsider. He was then a first-term congressman, the only Whig member of the seven-man Illinois House delegation. That made him a reasonably prominent figure, at least within his caucus on Capitol Hill. Democrats controlled Illinois almost from top to bottom, but the state was part of a fast-growing “Western” bloc, and thus represented a prime target for national campaigns of that era. Illinois was especially important to the prospects for General Zachary Taylor, the leading contender for the 1848 Whig nomination, and the man whose fate had driven Lincoln to show up in the City of Brotherly Love.
It was rough elbows more than fraternity, however, that motivated the Illinois politician. “In my anxiety for the result,” Lincoln admitted, “I was led to attend the Philadelphia convention.”[1]The congressman was anxious because his party was so bitterly divided. The issues were much different than today, but the open and widespread discontent offers some curious echoes to the grumpy partisan situation in 2016. Taylor and his ruthless forces were busy hijacking the Whig Party, trying to wrench the organization out of the hands of its beloved (but aging) standard-bearer Henry Clay. Despite his long-standing admiration for the Whig Party founder, Lincoln was very much a part of this coup. He had been one of Taylor’s earliest and most effective supporters in Washington.
It had been an ugly nomination fight, conducted mostly behind-the-scenes during the first six months of 1848. Yet the cagey 71-year-old Clay, known as the “Sage of Ashland,” and some of his key media allies, like powerful New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, were still battling fiercely throughout early June for control of the party and its platform. Lincoln feared for the results.
“The Assassination of the Sage of Ashland,” an 1848 political cartoon depicting supporters of Zachary Taylor plotting to attack Henry Clay. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The boisterous Whig convention opened on Wednesday morning, June 7th at a large exhibition hall on the corner of Ninth and Sansom streets, known locally as the “Chinese Museum,” because it had once housed a rare collection of Asian artifacts. Greeley’s Tribune described the scene in Philadelphia as a madhouse, claiming, “No city was ever so much crowded as this one is at present.” Out-of-towners were apparently trying to sleep together in groups, “even ten” to a room, according to the Tribune’s bemused correspondent. Adding to the mayhem was the presence of former U.S. senator Lewis Cass (D-MI), just recently nominated as the Democratic nominee for president, along with throngs of his own energized supporters. As the convention week unfolded, there were multiple fights as the two sides clashed in the city’s streets, sometimes with knives drawn, and after plenty of late-night drinking, singing and shouting.[2]
The Chinese Museum, the site of the 1848 Whig Convention. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Congressman Lincoln did not drink alcohol, nor was he much for street brawling, but he proved quite busy that week in Philadelphia, working the convention hall and the various social gatherings on behalf of the Taylor campaign. Lincoln wrote about some of those conversations shortly afterwards in ways that now help illustrate his maturing political style.
He observed to his wife Mary, for example, that although he felt lost at first, among the “multitude of strange faces,” he still managed to find his way. He told her how he had met up with a delegate from Arkansas named Thomas W. Newton, who actually knew Mary since his local law partner (Robert Crittenden) was the son of a prominent Kentucky family (like the Todds). Lincoln joked that the loose convention rules had allowed Newton to cast three ballots on behalf of his missing state delegation, making the former southern congressman, “a sort of Trinity.”[3]
This was also the moment when Lincoln first encountered the ever-memorable Thaddeus Stevens. At the time, the cantankerous future Radical leader was merely a shrewd attorney from Lancaster, Pennsylvania struggling, like Lincoln, to make the social rounds. Yet somehow these two rising nineteenth-century political titans found each other, and Lincoln later made sure that they stayed in contact. “You may possibly remember seeing me at the Philadelphia Convention,” wrote the Illinois networker in early September, “introduced to you as the lone whig star of Illinois.” Still anxious about the fate of Taylor’s chances (now as the party’s formal nominee), Lincoln claimed he was looking for the “undisguised opinion of some experienced and sagacious Pennsylvania politician” on how the Keystone State would turn out in the fall. “In casting about for such a man,” Lincoln wrote smoothly, “I have settled upon you.” Stevens proved equally charming in reply, offering guarded optimism about Pennsylvania, though only if the Whigs managed to co-opt the state’s powerful anti-immigrant “natives” (a force apparently still to be reckoned with). Stevens also asked Lincoln for insight about the perennial swing states of Ohio and Indiana, since “your means of information are much better than mine.”[4]
Thaddeus Stevens. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and the House Divided Project.
All of this suggests some revealing ways that Lincoln was starting to emerge as a major national partisan figure, a full decade before the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Yet perhaps no bit of evidence from the Philadelphia convention evokes as much about Lincoln’s future as a recently discovered fragment from the very moment of Taylor’s nomination.
The Whigs nominated Taylor on Friday morning, June 9th at about 10:30 a.m., after four hotly contested ballots. Lincoln was thrilled and soon rushed out of the Chinese Museum, in order to share the news with his fellow party activists back in Illinois. He drafted a message for a nearby telegraph operator that was to be sent to his hometown Whig newspaper, the Illinois Journal. “General TAYLOR has received the nomination of the Convention for President of the U. States. A. Lincoln,” read his urgent dispatch, sent at exactly 11:15 a.m. and received in Springfield by noon.[5] It was only 17 words, but this marks the first known example of Lincoln actually using the telegraph. That telling milestone, however, slipped out of general notice and has only just recently been rediscovered and posted online by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project.
The telegraph was a new phenomenon back then, unveiled only four years earlier, by Samuel F. B. Morse, during the 1844 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. By the time of the Whig convention in Philadelphia, American newspapers had only just started to rely on telegraphic correspondence for their national political reporting. This explains the birth at that time of the Associated Press. It also helps explain Lincoln’s haste. He was not merely excited about the results of the balloting or the prospect of using the newfangled technology. Lincoln was also clearly intent on helping out his close friends and allies Simeon Francis and Alfred T. Bledsoe, Whig editors of the Illinois Journal, who had been touting their telegraphic access for months to skeptical prairie readers. This was presumably a break out moment for their big investment.
Page image of Lincoln’s first telegram, announcing Zachary Taylor’s nomination. Image courtesy of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.
It was also a breakout moment for Abraham Lincoln. He followed up on his first national convention with his first national speaking tour, delivering pro-Taylor campaign speeches as far North as Massachusetts. He soon established himself as the leader of the Illinois Whig Party. But, of course, the Whigs were a dying movement, and Taylor proved to be a short-lived occupant of the White House. Lincoln would need to reinvent himself in the 1850s as a Republican and reconnect with Eastern contacts in order to gain his own nomination for president from the 1860 Chicago convention. That was a happy result, by the way that he heard on the streets of Springfield, reported to him from the nation’s now-ubiquitous telegraph wire.
[1] Abraham Lincoln Richard S. Thomas, June 13, 1848, Collected Works, 1: 477-8.
[3] Abraham Lincoln to Mary Todd Lincoln, July 2, 1848, Collected Works, 1: 495.
[4] Abraham Lincoln to Thaddeus Stevens, September 3, 1848, Collected Works, 2: 1 (via Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition). Thaddeus Stevens to Abraham Lincoln, September 7, 1848, in Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa, eds., The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens: Volume 1, January 1814 – March 1865 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 1: 102-3.
[5] Abraham Lincoln to Simeon Francis, June 9, 1848, in (Springfield) Illinois Journal, June 15, 1848, p. 2:4, Papers of Abraham Lincoln.
Matthew Pinsker holds the Brian Pohanka Chair for Civil War History at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he also serves as director of the House Divided Project, a multi-media effort designed to provide engaging instructional resources on the Civil War era for K-12 and undergraduate classrooms. He has written widely about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War era and the history of American politics. His next book, tentatively entitled, Boss Lincoln: Understanding Abraham Lincoln’s Partisan Leadership is forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co.
This May, roughly 500,000 high school juniors across the nation nervously sat in classrooms and gymnasiums for the Advanced Placement (AP) United States History exam.[1] The number of students enrolled in AP U.S. History courses increases every year, reorienting the US history survey from university campuses into secondary history classrooms.[2] Because many universities accept AP credits in place of the U.S. history survey, these students might never take a U.S. history course in college, and might not be directly exposed to academic historians’ rigorous scholarship and interpretations of the Civil War era. In the coming years, an increasing ratio of the instruction about the Civil War era will be shifted to AP instructors in the secondary classroom. Two recent news headlines—on the controversy over Mississippi’s Confederate Heritage Month and another tracing the outcry against the College Board’s redesigned AP U.S. History curriculum—serve as reminders that the presentation of the Civil War era is hotly contested in secondary classrooms. These recent events underscore how historians of the Civil War era have few opportunities to shape the presentation of the Civil War era in high schools—and even these are shrinking.
Students sit for a standardized test. (Fabian Pittroff, The Atlantic). Found in: Laura McKenna, “What Happens When Students Boycott a Standardized Test?” The Atlantic, April 9, 2015, accessed July 15, 2016.
In February, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant declared April 2016 as ‘Confederate Heritage Month.’ This is only the most recent example of a ritual perennially performed by governors of several Southern states, including my home state of Texas.[3] However, in the context of the post-Charleston national debate over the Confederate flag and other symbols of slavery and racism in Southern politics, Bryant’s pronouncement sparked fresh outrage.[4] Several aspects of the governor’s declaration made national headlines. First, the declaration came at the behest of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), an organization that denies the role of slavery in secession and claims that true story of the Civil War era is “consciously distorted by some in an attempt to alter history.”[5] Second, the declaration’s wording called on Mississippians to reflect on the “four-year struggle” of Mississippi confederates that began in April 1861, while carefully omitting any reference to slavery. Third, Bryant’s announcement came in February, Black History Month, and while the state legislature considered proposals to remove the Confederate battle flag symbol from Mississippi’s state flag.
Mississippi’s observation of Confederate Heritage Month put many of the state’s history teachers in an awkward position. Southern civil religion dictates that public schools are often required to formally observe such holidays with announcements over PA systems, addresses by administrators, or moments of silence during the school day.[6] These mandates distort the learning objectives for the Civil War era as defined the Mississippi Department of Education’s social studies curriculum, and force black students and teachers to commemorate Mississippi’s heritage of slavery and secession.[7] While the language of Bryant’s declaration included no formal requirement for classroom observance, Bryant’s implicit endorsement of the SCV’s stance on slavery and secession carried enough official weight to make any educator who is ideologically opposed to the SCV’s propaganda nervous. One U.S. History teacher in Mississippi argued that students and educators should not be led to celebrate Confederate heritage, because to do so would necessitate sidestepping the inextricable link between secession and white supremacy.[8] A Mississippi Studies teacher tellingly noted that his students struggle to understand that white Mississippians fought the Civil War in order to protect slavery, because the pro-Confederate heritage stance of the state government obscures the relationship between white supremacy and the Confederacy.[9]
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed a proclamation declaring the month of April “Confederate Heritage Month” in his state. (Joe Ellis/The Clarion-Ledger via AP). Found in: “Mississippi Governor Declares April ‘Confederate Heritage Month,’” NOLA.com, February 25, 2016, accessed July 10, 2016.
The pressure that the SCV and Gov. Bryant put on Mississippi’s secondary teachers to distort the presentation of the Civil War era, and the teachers’ protests, struck a chord for me. They reminded me of my own experiences as an AP U.S. History teacher at a public high school in McKinney, Texas. In both Mississippi and McKinney, the presentation of the Civil War era in secondary history classrooms is hotly contested, and is defined more by political pressure than by academic historians’ interpretations.
Like Mississippi, Texas has a troubling legacy of white supremacy, and the state often celebrates Confederate Heritage Month. McKinney, an affluent suburb just north of Dallas that was ranked as the “Best Place to Live in America” by Money Magazine in 2014, is not immune to Texas’ racial tension.[10] Last summer, McKinney made headlines when a white police officer was caught on video assaulting a black teenaged girl after a noisy pool party in an upscale neighborhood, my own neighborhood.[11] Despite being nationally recognized for academic excellence, McKinney’s public high schools are not above racial controversy. In 2014, U.S. News & World Report ranked my former school in the top three percent of high schools in the nation, and our top students are consistently admitted to Ivy League and other prestigious universities. In fact, the class of 2016 valedictorian, Larissa Martinez, made headlines last month for revealing, in her commencement address, that she was an undocumented immigrant.[12] Martinez, who will enter Yale University in the fall, was subjected to racist attacks on social media. Episodes like these remind us that high schools are politicized spaces where racial tension is present and the portrayal of history is contested.
The politicization of the Civil War era in the secondary history classroom became most clear to me during the 2014-2015 school year. That year, the College Board implemented a redesigned curriculum for AP U.S. History. The organization updated the end-of-year AP exam format to emphasize critical thinking and writing and revised the testable content for the AP exam to align with the most current historical interpretations. Against the backdrop of the 2014 election season, this redesign quickly became campaign fodder. The Republican National Committee condemned the new AP U.S. History standards as reflecting a “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects,” including white supremacy.[13] Oklahoma’s state legislature considered defunding AP U.S. History because the new curriculum was a threat to “public peace, health, and safety.”[14] State legislators in Texas and Georgia promptly followed suit with similar efforts.[15] Dueling protestors even took the streets in Jefferson County, Colorado to support or decry a local school board member’s plan to alter the AP U.S. History curriculum in local high schools.[16] McKinney’s incumbent representative on the Texas State Board of Education, Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, made lambasting the AP U.S. History redesign a staple of her campaign platform; Miller was reelected.[17]
Students protest against a Jefferson County School Board proposal to censor the 2014 AP U.S. History curriculum (Thursday Sept. 24, 2014, AP). Found in: T. Keung Hui, NC Board of Education to hear AP US History controversy,” The News and Observer, Nov. 26, 2014, accessed July 15, 2016.
Like the SCV that stood behind Mississippi’s Confederate Heritage Month, critics of the redesigned AP U.S. History had academic historians’ interpretations of the Civil War era squarely in their sights. In my own classroom, one anxious parent cornered me at an open house, asking if she should be worried about academics indoctrinating her child through these new learning standards for the Civil War era. A student threatened to write the mayor and school board, demanding that I be censored for emphasizing the role of slavery in the coming of the Civil War, a standard in the new curriculum.[18] A group of students petitioned our school administrators to revise their course grades upward, claiming that my interpretation of this history was biased against their own views about the era. Another student angrily informed me that teachers should not allow history to be debated by students in class; instead the Civil War era should simply be “taught” in order to sidestep discussion of institutional racism. My experience was not isolated. Enough anger and political pressure eventually mounted against the redesigned curriculum that the College Board relented to AP U.S. History’s critics and revised the course framework again in 2015, this time softening the language used to describe slavery as a cause of the Civil War and racism in its aftermath.[19]
How the history of the Civil War era is presented in textbooks, taught in classes, and assessed is highly contested in secondary education. While academic historians emphasize slavery as the cause of the Civil War and recognize institutionalized racism and violence in the war’s aftermath, that long-ago settled consensus on slavery as a cause of the war continues to be openly and fiercely attacked in education policy and local legislation.[20] This often causes conflict in and around secondary classrooms in states like Mississippi and Texas. High school history classrooms are politicized spaces where groups like the SCV and opponents of AP U.S. History actively, and successfully, lobby in favor of ahistorical portrayals of the Civil War era. This trend is especially alarming when we realize that the AP U.S. History program is redistributing the teaching of the Civil War era from universities to high schools and that many college-bound students will never be exposed to academic historians’ teaching on the period. Ensuring that revised textbooks and open-access learning resources are in secondary history teachers’ hands can only ameliorate this situation so far.[21] As a discipline, historians need to forcefully argue in favor of public education policy that stresses a rigorous, critical interpretation of the Civil War era. Without active intervention, the Civil War era that many students will learn about in years to come may look very different one than the one we teach now.
[2] For a description of the AP U.S. History course and exam, see: “Course Overview,” AP United States History – Students – AP Courses – The College Board, accessed July 14, 2016, https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-united-states-history. For national AP enrollment in all subjects over time, see: “10 Years of Advanced Placement Exam Data Show Significant Gains in Access and Success; Areas for Improvement,” The College Board, February 11, 2014, accessed July 11, 2016 https://www.collegeboard.org/releases/2014/class-2013-advanced-placement-results-announced. For the Fall 2014 curriculum framework, see AP United States History Course and Exam Description Including the Curriculum Framework, Effective Fall 2014 (New York: College Board, 2014). Note that as of July 2016, the College Board has removed the Fall 2014 curriculum framework from the AP U.S. History course webpage. I will circulate it by request. For the Fall 2015 curriculum framework, see AP United States History Course and Exam Description Including the Curriculum Framework, Updated Fall 2015 (New York: College Board, 2015), accessed July 12, 2016, https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-us-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf.
[18]AP United States History Course and Exam Description Including the Curriculum Framework Effective Fall 2014. For the 2014 curriculum framework, see Key Concept 5.2.I.C: “States’ rights, nullification, and racist stereotyping provided the foundation for the Southern defense of slavery as a positive good.”; Key concept 5.3.II: “The Civil War and Reconstruction altered power relationships between the states and the federal government and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, ending slavery and the notion of a divisible union but leaving unresolved questions of relative power and largely unchanged social and economic patterns.”; Key concept 5.3.III.A: “Although citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and voting rights were granted to African Americans in the 14th and 15th Amendments, these rights were progressively stripped away through segregation, violence, Supreme Court decisions, and local political tactics.”
[19] For example, the 2014 curriculum framework’s Key Concept 5.2.I.C reads: “States’ rights, nullification, and racist stereotyping provided the foundation for the Southern defense of slavery as a positive good.” (Emphasis my own). The 2015’s curriculum framework’s Key Concept 5.2.I.C reads: “Defenders of slavery based their arguments on racial doctrines, the view that slavery was a positive social good, and the belief that slavery and states’ rights were protected by the Constitution.” (Emphasis my own). The 2014 curriculum framework’s Key Concept 5.3.III.A reads: “Although citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and voting rights were granted to African Americans in the 14th and 15th Amendments, these rights were progressively stripped away through segregation, violence, Supreme Court decisions, and local political tactics.” The language in 2015 curriculum framework’s Key Concept 5.3.II.E has a more uplifting tone: “Segregation, violence, Supreme Court decisions, and local political tactics progressively stripped away African American rights, but the 14th and 15th amendments eventually became the basis for court decisions upholding civil rights in the 20th century.” (Emphasis my own). See also Anya Kamenetz, “The New, New Framework For AP U.S. History,” NPR, August 5, 2015, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/08/05/429361628/the-new-new-framework-for-ap-u-s-history. See also Zoe Schlanger, “Revised AP U.S. History Standards Will Emphasize American Exceptionalism,” Newsweek, July 29, 2015, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/revised-ap-history-standards-will-emphasize-american-exceptionalism-358210.
[20] See Adam Rothman, “Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011): 75-95; Stephen Berry, “The Future of Civil War Era Studies,” Journal of Civil War Era 2, no. 1 (March 2012), http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era- studies/; Eric Foner, “Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,” in New American History. ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990): 73-92.
[21] Examples of textbooks commonly used for AP U.S. History courses that have been revised to meet the 2014 and 2015 curriculum frameworks can be found at: http://www.collegeboard.com/html/apcourseaudit/courses/us_history_textbook_list.html. The Gilder Lehrman Institute’s of American History’s AP U.S. History modules are an excellent example of open access instructional materials ready-made for classroom instruction. This resource can be found at http://ap.gilderlehrman.org.
Jonathan Jones is a PhD student at Binghamton University (SUNY). His research and teaching interests include the Civil War era and the history of American medicine. He is a former secondary history teacher, who maintains active involvement with the College Board’s AP U.S. History program. He can be reached at jjones19@binghamton.edu.
In 2014, bystanders’ video evidence of Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths at the hands of police thrust racial bias and police brutality against people of color into the national spotlight. Black Lives Matter subsequently became both a rallying cry and a movement, with followers asserting that the deaths of Brown and Garner are indicative of systemic racism, not only in the criminal justice system but among media outlets that rigorously scrutinize black victims while they fail to recognize the larger pattern of which this incidents form a part. The recent deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile captured on video–and then the killing of five police officers in Dallas, Texas–have forced the conversation about institutional racism and criminal justice to a new level of urgency. The violence is not new, and neither is the denial of rights to people of color and other marginalized groups. What is new are the means available to minority communities to testify to the general public about their experiences. With the dissemination of video and photographs across the internet, Americans find themselves confronting a reality that they might have previously simply ignored. Yet even this increased awareness is not without some precedent. Over the course of the Civil War, black Americans often found support in the court of public opinion, while their gains in legal protections were limited.
Black Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War faced a far more dangerous battleground than their white comrades. When captured, the laws of war protected white Union soldiers; black soldiers, however, could be enslaved or murdered. The Confederate government declared that black men in uniform were not soldiers, but rather slaves in “servile insurrection.” Tens of thousands of armed black men fulfilled the worst fears of a slave society whose survival depended upon eradicating black resistance. In the second half of the war, battles sometimes were sites of racially motivated war crimes.[1]
The Battle of Fort Pillow became a byword for atrocities committed against black soldiers. In early 1864, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s 1st Division Cavalry Corps, consisting of about 1,500 men, moved through Tennessee and Kentucky capturing Union prisoners and supplies while destroying posts and fortifications. On April 12, Forrest ordered his men to take Fort Pillow in Henning, Tennessee, occupied by about 580 Union troops consisting of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, the 6th U.S. Heavy Artillery Colored (USHAC), and the 2nd U.S. Light Artillery Colored.[2] After demanding surrender, Forrest’s soldiers attacked and captured the fort, leaving behind a lopsided death toll among the white and black soldiers trapped inside. An estimated 70% of the black troops stationed at the fort were killed, compared to about 40% of the white troops.[3] Soon, reports came in detailing that black and white soldiers had been shot down after surrendering their weapons, black soldiers had been buried alive, and that at least one soldier had been nailed to a wall and burned. Northern newspapers demanded retaliation, and southern newspapers celebrated the victory.[4]
The Battle of Ft. Pillow, a lithograph from Kurz and Allison. Courtesy of Blackpast.org.
U.S. congressmen who made up the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War investigated the reports, interviewing about 50 of the survivors and witnesses, including 18 soldiers from the 6th USHAC. Private Thomas Adison, Company C, 6th USHAC testified that he saw Forrest’s men shoot children serving officers at the fort, stating that “never saw folks shot down so in my life.” Another private in Company C, Arthur Edwards, spoke about his helplessness in the face of Forrest’s men.
Committee members: Were you at Fort Pillow when it was taken?
Pvt. Edwards: Yes, sir.
Q: Tell me what you saw there.
A: I was shot after I surrendered.
Q: When?
A: About half past four o’clock?
Q: Where were you when you were shot?
A: I was lying down behind a log.
Q: Where were you shot?
A: In the head first, then in the shoulder, then in my right wrist; and then in the head again, about half an hour after that.
Q: How many men shot you?
A: One shot me three times, and then a lieutenant shot me.
Q: Did they say anything when they shot you?
A: No, sir, only I asked them not to shoot me, and they said, “God damn you, you are fighting against your master.”[5]
Excerpts from these testimonies and the news of Ft. Pillow soon elicited a public conversation.
In the following months, the ordeal of the 6th USHAC and the other victims of Nathan Bedford Forrest captured attention and sympathy among members of the northern public. Newspapers in the North carried the story of Forrest’s indiscriminate “slaughter.” USCT recruiters wrote to Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, that knowledge about the massacre was widespread enough to discourage free blacks in the North from enlisting in the Union Army.[6] Joint Committee member and Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade wrote in the New York Times, “It will appear from testimony thus taken, that the atrocities committed at Fort Pillow were not the result of passions excited by the heat of conflict, but were the result of a policy deliberately decided upon, and unhesitatingly announced.”[7] Survivor and witness testimonies from Ft. Pillow engendered a conversation throughout the Union, not just among politicians, about the relationship between justice and race.
For the 6th USHAC, the testimonies led nowhere. Forrest and his 1st Cavalry escaped any legal reckoning for the massacre at Ft. Pillow. But the episode at the fort, and the broader experience of racial atrocities in the Civil War, provided an opportunity for black Americans to testify to the general public in their own words. When black Americans testified, they found a platform with the northern public with which to talk about atrocities that would have gone unnoticed and unrecorded. Today, social media is fueling grass roots activism to force another such reckoning with racially-motivated violence.
The deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile last week were part of one historical legacy—that they were witnessed and recorded is part of another.
[1] There are still no reliable estimates as to how many black soldiers suffered these fates. The official tally of black POWs is merely an estimate, numbering a scant 770. An updated total has yet to be determined, but given the numbers of captured black soldiers found throughout the Official Records, 770 is a likely an underestimation. See Lonnie Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 114.
[1] George Washington Williams, AHistoryoftheNegroTroopsintheWaroftheRebellion,1861-1865 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 221.
[2] Albert Castel, “The Fort Pillow Massacre: An Examination of the Evidence,” in Black Flag Over Dixie, 90-98. Castel notes that many of the men in the 13th Tennessee were deserters from Forrest’s command, which may have contributed to the massacre.
[5] “Report on the Fort Pillow Massacre,” U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Conduct of War, 1864, Internet Archive edition, 20-22.
[6] “Interesting from Washington: Rebel Account from Fort Pillow Massacre,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1864, America’s Historical Newspapers; Thomas Webster to Edwin Stanton, 27 April 1864, Abraham Barker Collection on the Free Military School for the Command of Colored Regiments, c. 1863-1895, #1968, Folder 21, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Caroline Newhall is a PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill. Her master's thesis, “’This is the point on which the whole matter hinges’: Locating and Including the Voices of Black Civil War POWs,” argues that black prisoners of war are largely understudied, yet they were central figures in the narrative of Civil War military prisons and prisoner exchanges. She can be reached at cwoodn@live.unc.edu.
![Democratic political cartoon showing “fanatics” making demands of a compliant John C. Frémont, the 1856 Republican presidential candidate. Source: “The Great Republican Reform Party, Calling on Their Candidate” (New York, NY: [Nathaniel Currier], [1856]), Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.](https://i0.wp.com/jotcwera.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Lynn1.jpg?resize=640%2C492)
![Figure 2. Democratic political cartoon mocking the fanatics supporting Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Horace Greeley is carrying Lincoln. Source: “The Republican Party Going to the Right House” ([New York, NY]: Currier and Ives, [c. 1860]), Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.](https://i0.wp.com/jotcwera.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Lynn2.jpg?resize=640%2C478)
