Muster Archives - Page 41 of 43 - The Journal of the Civil War Era

Paradise Lost: Florida’s Egmont Key during the Civil War

By Angela Zombek | August 31, 2016

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.

Key1 — A photograph of an 1862 drawing of the Egmont Key lighthouse. Courtesy of Florida Memory: The State Library & Archives of Florida.

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]

General Collection — 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.

Key4 — 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 Zombek

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.

Camp William Penn and the Fight for Historical Memory

By Blake McGready | August 24, 2016 | Comments 1 comment

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.

CWP Gates — 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 from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Digital Library. — 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 6^th 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. — 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 McGready

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.

“A History They Can Use”: The Memphis Massacre and Reconstruction’s Public History Terrain

By Susan O'Donovan and Beverly Bond | August 15, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

On May 20^th and 21^st, 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.

Historical marker of the massacre. Image from Depiction of the 1866 Memphis Massacre. Image from http://www.memphis.edu/memphis-massacre/. — Historical marker of the massacre. Courtesy of the Memphis Massacre Project.

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 14^th 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 O'Donovan and Beverly Bond

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.

Slavery, Nostalgia, and the White House

By Margaret Storey | August 1, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

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 Michelle Obama delivering her speech on Monday night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Image from CNBC. — 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., image courtesy of the Library of Congress Digital Collections. — 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 that indicates 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. — 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.

^[3] Lusane, 115-117.

^[4] Arenbeck, 29.

^[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

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.

A. Lincoln, Conventioneer

By Matthew Pinsker | July 25, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

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 9^th 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. — 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.

[2] New-York Daily Tribune, “The Convention –Arrival of General Cass –Loco-Foco Disturbances,” June 8, 1848, p. 2: 1.

[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

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.

A School Divided: The Civil War Era in the Secondary Classroom

By Jonathan Jones | July 19, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

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. — 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.

[1] “2016 AP Exam Score Distributions,” Totalregistration.net, June 24, 2016, accessed July 10, 2016. http://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Service/2016-AP-Exam-Score-Distributions.php.

[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.

[3] Donna Ladd, “Mississippi Governor Declares April ‘Confederate Heritage Month,’ No Slavery Mention,” Jacksonfreepress.com, February 24, 2016, accessed July 09, 2016, http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2016/feb/24/mississippi-governor-declares-april-confederate-hi/. See also “Mississippi Governor Declares April ‘Confederate Heritage Month,’” NOLA.com, February 25, 2016, accessed July 10, 2016, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/02/mississippi_governor_declares.html; and Steve Almasy, “Mississippi Governor Defends Confederate Heritage Month Proclamation,” CNN, February 25, 2016, accessed July 10, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/25/politics/mississippi-confederate-heritage-month/.

For Gov. Bryant’s declaration, see: “Gov. Bryant Proclaims April ‘Confederate Heritage Month,” April 24, 2016, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/documents/2016/feb/24/gov-bryant-proclaims-april-confederate-history-mon/. For earlier examples of Confederate Heritage Month, see Dahleen Glanton, “Southerners Share Confederate History,” Chicagotribune.com, March 22, 2009, accessed July 10, 2016, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-03-22/news/0903210133_1_confederate-flag-confederate-history-month-sons-of-confederate-veterans.

[4] Melissa Batchelor Warnke, “Controversy Continues as Confederate History Month Comes to a Close,” U.S. News & World Report, April 29, 2016, accessed July 10, 2016, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-29/confederate-heritage-month-in-mississippi-sparks-controversy.

[5] “Members Information,” Mississippi Division Sons of Confederate Veterans, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.mississippiscv.org/member-info.

[6] Adam Gamoran, “Civil Religion in American Schools,” Sociological Analysis 51, no. 3 (1990): 235-256.

[7] Mississippi Department of Education, “2011 Mississippi Social Studies Framework,” November 19, 2010, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/docs/curriculum-and-instructions-library/2011-mississsippi-social-studies-framework.pdf?sfvrsn=4. See competencies and objectives for: Eighth Grade United States History from Exploration Through Reconstruction, Domestic Affairs, 2, d.

[8] Timothy Abram, “Editorial: Why I Can’t Celebrate ‘Confederate Heritage Month,’” NBC News, February 28, 2016, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/editorial-why-i-can-t-celebrate-confederate-heritage-month-n526246.

[9] Casey Quinlan, “What Mississippi Educators Are Telling Students About State Sanctioned Confederate Heritage Month,” Thinkprogress.org, March 21, 2016, accessed July 09, 2016. http://thinkprogress.org/education/2016/03/21/3761030/confederate-heritage-month/.

[10] “#1 Best Place to Live,” McKinney, TX – Official Website, accessed July 11, 2016, https://www.mckinneytexas.org/1017/1-Best-Place-to-Live. See also Olga Khan, “The Dark Side of McKinney, the ‘Best Place to Live in America,’” The Atlantic, June 9, 2015, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/the-dark-side-of-mckinney-the-best-place-to-live-in-america/395372/.

[11] Dorothy A. Brown, “McKinney Pool Party Incident Was about Race,” CNN, June 9, 2015, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/09/opinions/brown-mckinney-pool-party/.

[12] Jobin Panicker, “High School Valedictorian Reveals Undocumented Status in Speech,” WFAA, June 9, 2016, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/education/high-school-valedictorian-reveals-undocumented-status-in-speech/237807524.

[13] “Resolution Concerning Advanced Placement U. S. History (APUSH),” Republican National Committee Counsel’s Office, August 8, 2014, accessed June 11, 2016, https://cdn.gop.com/docs/RESOLUTION_CONCERNING_ADVANCED_PLACEMENT_US_HISTORY_APUSH.pdf. See also Adam B Lerner, “History Class Becomes a Debate on America,” Politico. February 21, 2015, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/ap-us-history-controversy-becomes-a-debate-on-america-115381.

[14] Colleen Flaherty, “Oklahoma Legislature Targets AP US History Framework for Being ‘negative,’” Inside Higher Ed, February 23, 2016, accessed July 12, 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/23/oklahoma-legislature-targets-ap-us-history-framework-being-negative.

[15] For Texas, see: Michele Richinick, “Texas Moves to Veto AP History Course,” Msnbc.com, September 19, 2014, accessed July 11, 2016, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/texas-moves-veto-ap-history-course. For Georgia, see Kristina Torress, “Senate Targets AP History Courses as Too ‘radically Revisionist,’” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 11, 2015, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.ajc.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/senate-targets-ap-history-courses-as-too-radically/nkSrm/.

[16] Jenny Brundin, “After Protests Over History Curriculum, School Board Tries To Compromise,” NPR, October 3, 2014, accessed July 12, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2014/10/03/353327302/school-board-wants-civil-disorder-deemphasized-students-walk-out. See also Alan Gionet, “Months After Protests, Jeffco Board Scraps AP US History Curriculum Review,” CBS Denver, February 19, 2015, accessed July 12, 2016, http://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/02/19/months-after-protests-jeffco-board-scraps-ap-us-history-curriculum-review/.

[17] Tincy Miller, “SBOE’s Tincy Miller Says APUSH Is a Fight for the Soul of America,” TexasInsider.org, September 19, 2014, accessed July 18, 2016, http://www.texasinsider.org/sboes-tincy-miller-says-apush-is-a-fight-for-the-soul-of-america/. See also “Biased Statements In the AP U.S. History Redesign,” TincyMiller.com, August 26, 2014, accessed July 18, 2016, http://tincymiller.com/biased-statements-in-the-ap-u-s-history-redesign.html. For Miller’s bio, see “SBOE Member District 12,” Texas Education Agency, accessed July 18, 2016, http://tea.texas.gov/index2.aspx?id=3721.

[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

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.

Witnessing Racial Violence: Public Awareness and the Battle of Ft. Pillow

By Caroline Newhall | July 14, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

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. Image from Blackpast.org, accessed July 14, 2016. — 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, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 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.

[3] Ibid, 91.

[4] The Liberator, October 28 1864, accessed July 7, 2016, https://www.newspapers.com/image/35048830/; The Daily Confederate, April 22 1864, accessed July 7, 2016, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025813/1864-04-22/ed-1/seq-2/#date1=1864&index=18&rows=20&words=Fort+massacre+Pillow&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1864&proxtext=fort+pillow+massacre&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1.

[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

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.

Right and Wrong in “The Free State of Jones”: Making Sense of the Civil War Film Tradition

By Patrick Rael | July 1, 2016 | Comments 5 comments

No one quite knows what to make of “The Free State of Jones,” the latest big-budget feature film about the history of the Civil War. Some have praised it as the “final word on racism’s vicious legacy” while others have lambasted it for engaging in “the passive violence of distortion.” All this has left the future of the genre in doubt. In the wake of the film’s disappointing opening weekend, Variety wonders whether there is money to be made in “quality movies for adults with top talent” like this, which hope to contend with the successful formulas superhero and fantasy franchises. “The Free States of Jones” winds up accomplishing considerably more than its critics assert, and yet still much less than the genre of Civil War films needs it to.

Matthew McConaughey stars in The Free State of Jones.

More than other recent films on the Civil War era, “The Free States of Jones” melds the racial politics of slavery with the politics of the nation’s greatest conflict. Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” (2013) was built on one of the slave narratives that helped fuel the antislavery cause, but understandably its plot never made it to the consummation of the abolitionists’ campaign. Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012) explored how the Civil War led to emancipation, but managed the feat while marginalizing the very subjects of emancipation, relegating them to roles as onlookers and reminders of the moral gravity of the work undertaken by national leaders, who are white men all.

In contrast, “The Free State of Jones” is centrally concerned with the intersections of race and slavery with the Civil War and its domestic politics — with some interesting gender complications thrown in as well. In a film tradition typified by reconciliationist fantasies, evasive race politics, and unexamined gender norms, this alone situates it on progressive terrain. Its story accomplishes even more, for it is the tale of Newton Knight, the Mississippi native who led a rebellion within a rebellion, establishing the interracial Free State of Jones as a challenge to a Confederacy built on class privilege and white supremacy.

The film quickly establishes its moral order, making no bones about its objections to slavery nor its Unionist sympathies. Its protagonist, Newton Knight, comes from a region of Mississippi as poor in slaves as in other forms of wealth. As the Confederate government demands ever greater sacrifices to defend itself against Union invasion (it has become “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”), the disillusioned soldier-gone-AWOL leads his community in rejecting Confederate authority and establishing an egalitarian republic. “Every man’s a man,” Knight recites as the key principle of the new state, a statement that concedes to gender norms something the film itself challenges. Women take on strong roles throughout, to the point where pre-teen girls show down Confederate cavalry with hastily assembled shotguns. Knight’s love relationships cross barriers of class and propriety, elevating his enslaved partner Rachel to a prominent (though secondary) role. Indeed the legacy of this union is depicted in the plight of Knight’s mixed-race great grandson Davis Knight, who in frequent flash-forwards is tried for marrying a white woman despite having no discernible African ancestry (more on which later).

This is a film for the post-Charleston age, which does not soft-pedal its cultural politics for fear of offending large segments of its audience. It is unabashedly anti-Confederate, offering an ideal of class unity across racial lines. Resisting the Confederacy represents the central external challenge, but achieving cross-racial community constitutes the film’s primary internal struggle, and the higher moral goal the resistance itself serves. “You cannot own a child of God,” cites Moses, Knight’s closest African American ally, but it will take more than a rejection of property in man to unite the people of Jones.

The film’s delicate work around the N-word illustrates screenwriter Garry Ross’s skill at accomplishing this. In its first half hour, the film assiduously places “Negro” on the lips of white southerners who might be expected to use its vulgar alternative. But when a white resident of Jones uses the N-word to scold a black resident for seeking an equal share of food, the risk of division becomes apparent. Knight lectures the bigots, warning them to appreciate their black neighbors “before a whole new war breaks out here.” The script thus leverages the word’s historical appearance against its modern volatility. At some point, Knight says, “everybody is just somebody else’s nigger” — a statement dismissive of the unique plight of a people singularly subjected to chattel bondage, but necessary for building the cross-racial unity required of the moment. (Later, Knight will respond to a question about whether his community is one of N-words by stating, “Ain’t no niggers up there at all,” reasserting the humanity he shares with African Americans.) The film thus fully embraces a kind of progressive ideal: a polity that, if only briefly, embodies a class alliance of non-elite men and women across racial lines.

To understand the meaning of this achievement requires recalling the history of the Civil War film tradition, which amazingly enough has still not fully assimilated the scholarship and cultural politics of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, the old Lost Cause classics (e.g., “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind”) gave way to softened depictions of race in the war. Those like “Shenandoah” (1965) presaged later films by accommodating the presence of African Americans, but at the cost of factoring out the racial issues at the heart of the conflict, and hence its moral significance. Others, such as “Major Dundee” (1965) and “The Undefeated” (1969), depicted the post-war reconciliation of North and South in the struggle against centralizing states. All shared a libertarian ethos that grew into later films such as “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), which can largely be understood as a way of stripping the genre of Confederate sympathy without contending with the moral imperatives raised by slavery. The enemy became war itself, and the demands of powerful state authorities that it justified.

The genre never adopted a template that attempted to contend frankly with slavery. The most likely candidates were 1970s efforts like “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” (1973), a critically-hailed television version of Ernest Gaines’s fictional account of a woman who journeyed from slavery to civil rights. Yet it and another television milestone — “Roots” (1977) — failed to inaugurate a new era of Civil War interpretation in American film. When “Glory” (1989), the story of a black Civil War regiment, appeared, it came in the form of an androcentric military tale that failed to follow the story to the end of the war, let alone into the post-war Reconstruction — once mandatory for any epic examination of the era.

“Glory” broke a Vietnam-generated logjam on Civil War films, but most that have come out since then have seemed satisfied to let it mark an end rather than a beginning. Having tipped its hat to the role of race in the war, the genre largely excused itself from exploring it any further. “Gettysburg” (1993) put on screen Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974), a popular novel that seems to excuse the racism of its central northern protagonist, Joshua Chamberlain. The follow-up, “Gods and Generals” (2003), is a notorious modern classic of Lost Cause mythology. Other films make similarly suspicious elisions. Ang Lee’s “Ride with the Devil” (1999) depicts border-state Confederate guerillas as historical underdogs (much like his Taiwanese compatriots), while the film version of Charles Frazer’s Confederate Odyssey, “Cold Mountain” (2003), is set in an Appalachia so far removed from the plantation zone that few blacks, slave or free, ever appear.

As recent works such as “12 Years” and “Lincoln” attest, the film tradition has become gradually more willing to focus on slavery itself. But it is frankly amazing that so many years have passed — six decades since Brown v. Board of Education, a half-century since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forty years since the Bicentennial, and a quarter-century since the genre’s rebirth in “Glory” — without a more incisive cinematic depiction of an era that has served as the subject of some of the most important films of pre-World War II America. Earlier films captured the national mood on race, slavery, class, and gender — while also melding well with contemporary historical scholarship. The rebirthed genre has found it difficult to accomplish the same.

It’s not as if the historical profession hasn’t offered ample fodder for reinterpretations of the period. It would be impossible in so short a space to survey the massive transformations that have struck the historical profession since the Civil Rights Movement, but suffice to say that they have been profound. While pre-Civil Rights era historians once considered the war a needless consequence of a “blundering generation” of politicians, most modern professional scholars cannot imagine its key causes and consequences unrelated to slavery. And once the province of antiquarians’ fetish for battle maneuvers and military personalities, the war is more and more understood as embedded in a broad social and cultural matrix. Maris Vinovskis’s provocative 1989 question, “have social historians lost the Civil War?” can now be answered with a resounding negative. The current scholarship examines an incredibly wide range of questions — from the role of the enslaved in the emergence of the Union’s emancipation policy, to veterans’ problems readjusting to civilian life, to the role of women in border-state guerilla activity.

How do we explain the disjuncture between the scholarship and the films? Has the historical profession failed to teach the public? Or is it something intrinsic to the stories one can tell with the historical materials at hand? Perhaps it is a combination. Telling the historical stories Hollywood likes to tell — of heroic individuals overcoming crisis-ridden personal histories while also working toward a more just society with enhanced freedom for all. But it’s not often that history can be made to serve liberal agendas in feature films while also remaining true to the past.

Consider the negative example of “Gangs of New York” (2002), Martin Scorsese’s effort to re-situate the revenge-driven gangster film in the class politics of the Civil War North. In the film, the protagonist Amsterdam must slay Butcher Bill Cutting, the rival who killed his father. Amsterdam, positioned between his Irish heritage and creole birth, must gather a multicultural force to take down Cutting, whose working-class politics are built on a nativist aversion to foreign immigration. In the film, the climactic fight between the forces of tolerance and intolerance is inexplicably interrupted by the Draft Riots of July 1863, which are depicted as utterly divorced from the moral conflict going on in the city’s underworld. In reality, though, Irish immigrants hostile to fighting for the freedom of African Americans formed the core of the rioters. History thus directly contradicts Scorsese’s script, for immigrant roots did little to build the multicultural tolerance the film so desperately tries to endorse.

The truth is, Hollywood loves telling stories of slavery and freedom — so long as they are not about actual historical slaves. We give Best-Picture Oscars to films such as “Braveheart” (1995), which relates the birth of “freedom” through the efforts of 13th-century Scottish brigand William Wallace to free his people from the Norman Yoke. The success of such films inspires other efforts, such as Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” (2010), which attributes to the social bandit of lore credit for no less a statement of freedom than the Magna Carta. These Whiggish visions of history — it unfolds as the troubled but inevitable march of progress and liberty — carry easily into the story of the United States, as told in such films as “The Patriot” (2000). Many of the most popular historical movies are thus about white people becoming free, or freeing others. Obviously, this leaves little room for agonizing over the ambiguities of the actual past — of American Revolutionaries holding slaves, or of working-class Irish heroes rioting against black freedom. Too uncomfortable; too difficult.

The truth is, Hollywood loves telling stories of slavery and freedom — so long as they are not about actual historical slaves…We delight in narratives about everyone’s freedom struggle but actual African Americans.

This is affirmed by freedom struggle films that are freed from the rules of history. Science fiction — that most social of film genres — loves to pose challenges to oppression in convenient hypotheticals that offer audiences the requisite resolution (liberty triumphs!) without the attendant difficulties (liberty for whom?). Think of films such as “Star Wars” (1977), “Dune” (1984), “The Matrix” (1999), “Avatar” (2009), and “Elysium” (2013) — as well as “Jones” screenwriter Garry Ross’s own “The Hunger Games” (2012). All concern the politics of liberation; all covertly rehearse the American Revolution and the journey from political slavery to freedom and self-determination. When they appear at all, people of African descent (or various forms of “natives”) do so as objects of the benevolence of a charismatic white protagonist, who in exorcising his (yes, almost always male) personal ghosts also gets to liberate others.

It’s not hard to imagine the thought process involved in green-lighting these film projects and not others. After all, few risk-averse studio executives get excited about trying to market films about black history to audiences that are largely white. In interviews following his portrayal of South African anti-Apartheid activist Steven Biko in Richard Attenborough’s 1987 eponymous film, Denzel Washington acknowledged that “because of the reality of economics of a $22-million film, it would be mostly the story of the [white] journalist, Donald Woods,” who escaped South Africa with the martyr’s story. There are exceptions to this rule, such as the brilliant, non-Hollywood “District 9,” which glorifies in rather than camouflages its historical analogy. By and large, though, we delight in narratives about everyone’s freedom struggle but actual African Americans’.

This aversion owes partly to objections from African Americans themselves. No matter how true to its source material, “12 Years a Slave” is brutal in its portrayal of slavery. Viewing it is an exercise in civic reverence rather than entertainment. Such films inevitably spawn critics who worry that their popularity may owe as much to the prurience offered in depictions of slaves’ torture as to their moral importance. As Saidiya V. Hartman argued in Scenes of Subjugation (1997), the depiction of brutality on black bodies has been a staple of white allies’ calls for black liberation since the earliest days of antislavery. Others contend that inordinate focus on the past prevents progress in the present. The rapper Snoop Dogg recently offered a candid version of this objection when commenting on the re-make of the miniseries “Roots”: “They going to just to keep beating that shit into our heads about how they did us, huh?… Let’s create our own shit based on today, how we live and how we inspire people today. Black is what’s real. Fuck that old shit.”

Forces conspire, then, to make it risky to depict the most difficult parts of our past in big-budget feature films. In the old formula, works like “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind” extrapolated from a racist historiography to appeal to even more racist public attitudes; they depicted the redemption of white civilization from a central national authority that has mobilized black savagery in its campaign of vengeance against a people who dared to be “free.” A new formula, nowhere near as sure of itself, is still only slowly emerging, with each entrant into the Civil War-era genre of vital importance in gauging its ultimate direction amidst the shifting winds of our popular historical consciousness.

“The Free State of Jones” must be understood against this backdrop of a film tradition badly lagging behind a scholarly revolution in the ways the Civil War era has been understood. It offers the boldest political vision yet of any Hollywood feature film about the Civil War. More than any other to date, it centers on the class and racial iniquities of slave society, exposing not just the maltreatment of the enslaved, but the impoverishment of non-slaveholding whites as well. But this does not mean it is unassailable. Indeed, the film’s numerous shortcoming reveal much about the sticking places in our historical consciousness, and the challenging work that remains.

Most tellingly, the film partakes of a “white savior” formula that has been the bane of all too many films about the black freedom struggle, from Robert Gould Shaw’s character (Matthew Broderick) in “Glory” to Samuel Bass’s (Brad Pitt) in “12 Years a Slave.” Matthew McConaughey’s Newton Knight is about as ideal as they come: steadfast and resolute, yet also honorable and sensitive. His demons are all external. He never abuses his authority, loses his cool when it matters, or wrestles with character defects. His courage emboldens those around him, as when Rachel begins resisting the sexual advances of her master; “I couldn’t anymore,” she states. When Knight cannot understand the awe-filled looks of the slave fugitives he keeps free, Rachel explains to him that “nobody done nothing like that for them before.” At points, the film risks descending into “Robin Hood among the maroons,” or “Braveheart meets Solomon Northup.”

To the film’s credit, though, the story it chooses to tell is indeed an extraordinary tale that requires (by Hollywood standards) little departure from the known record — a failing that often fuels scholarly criticism of these films. Whereas “12 Years a Slave” depended on only one source — a slave narrative self-consciously produced in the years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to perform the ideological work of antislavery — the story behind “The Free State of Jones” draws on many sources, from census and genealogical records to oral history and lore. The filmmakers have made a solid choice here, which relieves them of the need to fabricate much. Modern scholarship shows that the film is correct in moving the portrayal of dissention on the Confederate home front beyond its function as pretext in “Cold Mountain.” Ultimately the Confederacy lost because it could not conscript the huge fraction of its population necessary to stave off a numerically superior foe. Whether it came in the form of resentment toward the need to maintain the plantation police state through measures such as the twenty Negro law, or whether it came in the form of individual calculations weighing family security against the value of an independent Confederate state, homefront support proved decisive to Confederate defeat.

At a finer degree of resolution, it is surely forgivable that “Jones” (like many historical films) constructs composite figures to condense the cast. Lieutenant Barbour, for example, stands in for the many Confederate officials who deprived Jones County residents of cotton, livestock, and foodstuffs during the war. More critically, the filmmakers could not resist the urge for period detail not found in the record. We first encounter the fictional fugitive slave Moses confined in a horrible spiked collar, but I’m aware of no mention of this in the historical evidence surrounding the Jones uprising. Clearly, the filmmakers have borrowed the famous image of Wilson Chinn, an emancipated Louisiana freedman who in 1863 posed for a Union photographer in such a torture device. The resulting carte de visit likely served as propaganda, confirming the value of the fight against slavery in the northern public mind. Static images of African American workers in the field likewise recall contemporary photographs. (The film cleverly uses one of these staged scenes to suggest how little changed from before to after emancipation.) In toto, though, such gestures are not uncommon to historical feature films, and do not intrude on interpretations of scholars such as Victoria Bynum and Sally Jenkins, whose conclusions on the Jones uprising are, admittedly, often speculative. But they make “Jones” no less inaccurate than Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” a work that lavishly touted its debt to professional historian Doris Kearns Goodwin yet departed from the evidence in many film-like ways.

Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana--Also exhibiting instruments of torture used to punish slaves (1863). Courtesy Library of Congress. — Wilson Chinn, a branded slave from Louisiana–also exhibiting instruments of torture used to punish slaves (1863).
Courtesy Library of Congress.

The biggest historical problem in “Jones” is also its most important feature. The pre-World War II film tradition around the Civil War notoriously posed the Reconstruction that followed the war as central to its themes. While Scarlett O’Hara merely stumbled upon the burning of Atlanta, the post-war years were her real hardship. In “The Birth of a Nation,” the war itself is merely pre-text to the real calamity that is to follow an honorable brothers’ war. Following the Civil Rights revolution, “Jane Pittman” and “Roots” sought to radically reinterpret Reconstruction as African Americans’ fight to make freedom meaningful, but the new vision never took hold in cinema. “Beloved” (1989), Oprah Winfrey’s beautiful evocation of Toni Morrison’s novel, is set in Reconstruction but is not about it. Not since “Sommersby” (1993) have audiences been treated to a Hollywood film with a meaningful setting in the immediate post-war period. That film used the end of the war as an excuse to narrate a soldier’s return home, much as in “Cold Mountain.” Sommersby’s antagonist is ultimately foiled by his incapacity to check his racial prejudice — the same motif as in “O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) — but the film is really about identity and relationship rather than politics. Spielberg’s story of the Thirteenth Amendment doesn’t even get to its final ratification in December 1865; it ends with Lincoln’s death in April. And, according to its erroneous opening subtitle, “Django Unchained” takes place in 1859, “one year before the Civil War”; we never get to explore the life Django later crafted with Broomhilda.

“Jones” is the first major modern film to take Reconstruction seriously, and this alone makes it remarkable. That the film stumbles in this pioneering endeavor is a subject not for dismissal but contemplation. Once the Jones community is saved from impending extermination by Union victory, hope that the biracial community will thrive is reduced to despair. Government promises of forty acres and a mule are left unfulfilled, leaving black workers to toil in the fields just as they had before emancipation. “We free and we ain’t free,” says Moses. This apt summation feels clichéd to students of the subject, but does the necessary work of establishing a popular narrative for many unaccustomed to it.

The film should also be credited for portraying the Black Codes, the series of measures passed by the first southern state governments after Reconstruction. Crafted in 1865-66 by legislatures filled with former Confederates who had been pardoned on lenient terms by Lincoln’s inept successor Andrew Johnson, the codes severely limited the civil rights and working lives of former slaves. Among the most hated of their provisions were “apprenticeship” laws that compelled the children of former slaves to perform unpaid agricultural work for white planters. Knight saves Moses’s child from such a fate, but the film ignores the broader consequences of the laws, which led directly to the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibiting states from passing laws that discriminate against specific classes of people.

Inexplicably, this goes unmentioned, and we proceed directly from the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 to the Fifteenth, which passed in 1869 — two full years after Congress took over Reconstruction and undermined racial restrictions on the vote. What follows is a jumbled story of decline and disunity that mirrors the community’s rise in reverse symmetry. We somehow jump from 1867, when the first open elections were held in Mississippi, to 1875, when a subtitle tells us that in 1875 the Republicans garnered only two votes in Jones County. The film neglects the intervening years of black and Republican achievement, fast-forwarding to their overthrow. African Americans seek to organize Republican votes, but too many whites fear the retribution of white terrorists who murder black organizers. Elections are lost to fraud and the church, the community’s symbol of civic unity and political organization, is burned to the ground. In the end, despite Knight’s persistence, his community cannot be saved by the national state, for that state itself has failed in its resolve to protect the rights it went to war to win.

The film’s concatenated timeline of Reconstruction is not exceptional. “Birth of a Nation,” for example, completely omitted the period of Andrew Johnson’s rule, and thus the entire premise of Congressional Reconstruction. But if we are to see more films examining the period, it will be important to craft a narrative that makes sense. This is no small feat, for if the moral purpose of the Civil War remains open to debate, the meaning of Reconstruction is truly challenging. We are still waiting for that movie — a big-budget feature film that offers Reconstruction itself as an American freedom struggle.

The genre’s failure to depict Reconstruction is the most telling reminder that American popular culture still has not come fully to grips with the real meaning and consequences of the Civil War. Perhaps this is so because Reconstruction is now rightly regarded within the academy as a narrative of decline rather than victory — of diminished rather than expanded freedom. To its credit, “Jones” wrestles with this. As Rachel comforts Newton amidst the experiment’s implosion, “It ain’t your fault we lost that war.” The downward trajectory of the actual historical narrative will continue to bedevil filmmakers. Filmmakers might choose to free themselves from convention and embrace narratives that end in collective defeat. The record, though, is not good, as 2004’s box-office disaster “The Alamo” attests.

The other possibility is to find ways of wringing success from the jaws of failure. It is likely for this reason, I suspect, that Ross chose to frame the story of Newton Knight around the 1948 trial of his great-grandson, Davis Knight, for violating Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation laws by marrying a white woman. While Davis loses his case, he scores a moral point that the audience knows will soon be vindicated by civil rights gains. In this way, the film links a story of freedom’s failure to a future of success. This is the same move that “Jane Pittman” makes, and may become a theme in any successful Reconstruction formula that emerges.

We might dare hope for even more. If the popular historical consciousness ever does become capable of telling stories of Reconstruction’s failure, it may be a healthy sign of maturation, an indication that we can come to own our disgraces as well as our glories. For no period in our past ever put our commitment to democracy to a stricter test, and none has ever witnessed a more ignominious failure. It is the very stuff of epic history. Having submitted the fate of slavery to a trial of arms, the nation could determine the fate of slavery, but not of freedom. The victorious Union struggled to define that condition in law and constitution, but lacked the political will to make it a reality on the ground. In its zeal to achieve in peace what arms could not secure it in war, the white supremacist South launched the most potent terrorist campaign in American history. It won by breaking the will of the public to support continual federal intervention. This left African Americans friendless against those who refused to grant them the most basic human dignities, alone to battle for decades against the grossest perversion of democracy the country has ever known. As Newton Knight says of the national politicians who permitted the South to return to home rule, “their war is over.” African Americans’ had just begun.

Patrick Rael

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

Aiming for Accuracy: Free State of Jones, Contingency, and the Meaning of Freedom

By Tom Foley | June 27, 2016 | Comments 2 comments

Early in Free State of Jones a Confederate soldier proclaims he is not fighting for slavery but rather “for honor.” His comrades, including poor Mississippi farmer Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), needle him. Considering the “Twenty Negro Law,” Conscription Act, and tax-in-kind law, they point out that their blood only helps slaveholders get richer. After deserting, Knight leads poor farmers and former slaves against conscription, taxation, and re-enslavement. Against a shared enemy, the Confederacy, he brings black and white fugitives together. But when Knight and his black comrades-in-arms attempt to move from the bullet to the ballot box, white allies fade away and white supremacists rise up.

At a meeting of the Union League, Moses (Mahershala Ali) and Newt (Matthew McConaughey) tell the Freedman that all citizens shall have the right to vote. Image from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Beginning at the Battle of Corinth in 1862, Free State of Jones is about a long Reconstruction. It uniquely explores African Americans’ struggle for political and economic rights in the face of white power. Here, emancipation has an asterisk. Slavery ends with the war, but freedom does not follow. After former Confederates return to power and reassert slavery’s white hierarchy, political organizer and ex-slave Moses (Mahershala Ali) captures the reality for black Americans: “We free and we ain’t free.” Unlike other films, Free State of Jones illuminates the contingency of black freedom in the South after the Civil War in the face of white supremacist violence, northern Republican abandonment, and insufficient federal troops. After the battle scenes, the Federal troops are entirely absent.

Throughout the film, class, race, and gender overlap and challenge the assumptions of viewers and characters. Women and men, black and white, resist, fight, and survive together. When a white member of Knight’s company tries to deny Moses food because he is black and a fugitive, Moses responds, “How you ain’t?” How, if both are fugitives from compulsory service to slaveholders in a cotton field or on a battlefield, are they different? Through spirituality and experience, Knight considers this equality of the oppressed to be self-evident. McConaughey’s portrayal of Knight suggests Nathaniel Bacon and John Brown: a natural leader wild-eyed for solidarity and justice in the face of economic and racial oppression. Director Gary Ross highlights the many methods of resistance employed by fugitive slaves and enslaved people: fleeing to the wilderness, like Moses; remaining on plantations but assisting runaways, like Rachel (Gugu-Mbatha-Raw); remembering, like Moses’ wife (Kesha Bullard Lewis) and son Isaiah (LaJessie Smith). White characters resist Confederate authority similarly, but Ross also delineates the differences in experience. Rachel’s and Moses’s bodies bear witness to their physical and psychological torture, scars that mark the limits of white abilities to fathom black experiences.

Jones3 — Matthew McConaughey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Free State of Jones. Image from IMDb.

Committed to historical authenticity, Ross consulted historians Martha Hodes, Eric Foner, Margaret Storey, and Victoria Bynum, whose book 2001 The Free State of Jones was optioned for the screen. He also published extensive footnotes for the film that are available online, perhaps unprecedented in Hollywood. Does it suggest a trend towards fact over fiction in historical movies? Only the box office will tell.

Matthew McConaughey as in Newton Knight. Image from IMDb.

Free State of Jones stands out for exploring Reconstruction, but it is not perfect. Few characters are developed beyond Knight. This is a missed opportunity considering the depth Mbatha-Raw and Ali bring to Rachel and Moses, respectively, and the reality that, while Knight leads, he joins a preexisting fugitive slave network. The story of the 1948 Mississippi miscegenation trial of Knight’s great-grandson Davis Knight is all elbows. The pacing disorients, but while this hurts the narrative it strengthens the history. Familiar Civil War and Reconstruction benchmarks are absent, leaving audiences open to surprise when scenes or subtitles challenge assumptions. In one scene, dozens of African Americans pick cotton in a field under the supervision of white overseers when the words “One year after emancipation” appear as a subtitle. “What changed? What was freedom?” perplexed viewers may ask. An apt question, then and now. In Reconstruction, conditions changed both essentially and unnoticably, quickly and slowly, permanently and temporarily. The film unintentionally mimics this.

Free State of Jones emphasizes the inherent inequality of the Confederacy, the violence of white supremacists, and the broken promises of Reconstruction at a poignant moment in our national discourse. Many will find the ending unsatisfying, abrupt, and unfinished. But maybe historicity should get in the way of a happy ending, especially when it reminds us that racial injustice today has deep roots in America’s slaveholding past. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “but it bends towards justice.” By bringing one story of Reconstruction to the silver screen, maybe Free State of Jones will recruit a few more hands to reshape a more just ending to this American tale.

Tom Foley

Tom Foley is a graduate student at Georgetown University. He can be reached at tfoley2@gmail.com.

Bidding on History: The Strange Afterlife of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Birthplace

By Peter Vermilyea | June 13, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

In May 2016, the remains of a dismantled eighteenth century wooden house appeared for sale on eBay. The online listing specified that, “Every single thing has been saved including the original plaster walls.” The seller asked $14.5 million to purchase the structure, claiming that the pieces constituted the “most important Dismantled American House that is available for reconstruction.”[1] In the nineteenth century, the Reverend Lyman Beecher raised his family of activists and abolitionists within these rooms, including reformers Catherine and Henry Ward Beecher, and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the home along North Street in Litchfield, Connecticut, the Beecher family developed an activist ethos, which encouraged Lyman Beecher’s children to advocate for emancipation and women’s rights. Yet despite the family legacy, the building’s neglected remains recently emerged for sale online. The surviving boards and plaster are a stark reminder for students of history about how easily significant sites and historic places are lost.

The Beecher house; image courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society. — The Beecher house. Courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.

Rev. Beecher purchased the North Street house in 1810. His daughter Harriet described the home as a “wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of afterthoughts.”[2] Soon after Harriet left Litchfield for the Hartford Female Seminary in 1824, Lyman sold the house and moved the family to Boston. Over subsequent decades, the building endured several transformations. (At one point in the twentieth century, one of its rooms housed a young student of the nearby Spring Hill School named Pete Seeger). In 1996 the Forman School, the property’s owners, placed the old Beecher home on the market, beginning a series of noble but failed attempts to preserve the structure. One of the men to acquire the building was Chandler Saint, who proposed to disassemble the structure, located on land now occupied by a school, and reconstruct the building in another spot in town. An antiques dealer, Saint became the face of the Beecher project. He dealt with the press and led public tours, oversaw the property’s disassembly, commissioned forensic studies of the paint, and directed the search for a location to reconstruct the house. While some Litchfield residents resisted Saint’s ideas, the state historical commission endorsed Saint’s proposal.

In August of 2000, two truck trailers carrying the house triumphantly arrived at the proposed reconstruction site adjacent to the Litchfield town hall. By the end of the month, however, a number of events were set in motion that would result in the house’s disappearance. In response to neighbors’ concerns, the state’s attorney general, now senator Richard Blumenthal, ordered the trailers off the property. Chandler Saint refused. Six months later, the Connecticut Historical Commission declared threated to seize the trailers if Saint failed to comply. In response, Saint declared that he wouldn’t move the trailers until a safe place could be secured. But while he was speaking, amidst a raging snowstorm, the trailers were quietly moved away. Saint refused to divulge the remains’ location, remarking only that the house “went on the Underground Railroad. It disappeared. It went to safety.”[3] Despite Saint’s garbled Underground Railroad metaphor, it pays to remember that Stowe stubbornly refused to help real fugitive slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and her daughter. And, of course, the antislavery novelist imagined many futures, but none of them involved blacks and whites living together as equals. While some old Connecticut families might have been shocked to see their history sold on auction block, the descendants of slaves like Jacobs might have instead enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude. But, to get back to our story, had Saint, the man once celebrated as a preservationist visionary, kidnapped Stowe’s house?

A drawing of the Lyman Beecher House from 1929; image courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society. — A drawing of the Lyman Beecher House, 1929. Courtesy of the Litchfield Historical Society.

Like Harriet Jacobs, who hid in her grandmother’s small attic crawl-space for seven years, wherever Stowe’s house went into hiding, it stayed there—for fifteen years. Until a few weeks ago, when the surviving pieces appeared for sale on eBay. Stowe wrote of her childhood home, “Many a pensive, wondering hour have I sat at our playroom window, watching the glory of the wonderful sunsets that used to burn themselves out, amid voluminous wreathings, or castellated turrets of clouds–vaporous pageantry proper to a mountainous region.”[4] In that house, Stowe found her voice. Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to transform the national conversation and perception of slavery. In the book’s opening pages, in the person of Mr. Shelby, the novel’s “good” slave master, Stowe condemned the selling of human beings as, among other things, depriving enslaved peoples of family and history. The sale and subsequent saga of the Beecher home is a powerful reminder of the stakes of historic preservation, and the need to protect the places where we tell the history of slavery and anti-slavery.

Please share with Muster stories of other endangered Civil War-era properties, objects, and sites by contacting the editor, Blake McGready (bmcgread@villanova.edu).

[1] “Elijah Wadsworth Harriet Beecher Stowe House Litchfield Ct Civil war Slavery”, EBay, accessed May 21, 2016, http://www.ebay.com/itm/Elijah-Wadsworth-Harriet-Beecher-stowe-House-Litchfield-Ct-Civil-war-Slavery-/3116055235170?hash=item488d1e8de2:g:oJOAAOSwLs5XKQ-w.

[2] Annie Fields, ed., Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1897), 31.

[3] Joel Lang, “Who is Chandler Saint and Why Did He Hide Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Birthplace?,” The Hartford Courant, April 8, 2001.

[4] Fields, Life and Letters, 31.

Peter Vermilyea

Peter C. Vermilyea teaches history at Housatonic Valley Regional High School (Falls Village, CT) and at Western Connecticut State University. A graduate of Gettysburg College, he is the student scholarship director of his alma mater’s Civil War Institute.

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