Civil War Archives - Not Even Past

15 Minute History – History of the Second Ku Klux Klan

Guest: Linda Gordon, Professor Emerita of History at New York University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin

Historians argue that several versions of the group known as the Ku Klux Klan or KKK have existed since its inception after the Civil War. But, what makes the Klan of the 1920s different from the others? Linda Gordon, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, writes in The Second Coming of the KKK The Ku Klux Klan: of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition that the KKK of the 1920s expanded its mission to include anti-Black racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, electing legislators and representatives in government, and were hyper-visible. “By legitimizing and intensifying bigotry, and insisting that only white Protestants could be ‘true Americans,’ a revived and mainstream Klan in the 1920s left a troubling legacy that demands a reexamination today.” With more than a million members at its peak, the Second coming of the KKK was expansive, to say the least.

Episode 132: History of the Second Ku Klux Klan

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The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman (2018)

by Ashley Garcia

The Field of Blood is a timely publication that examines congressional violence in antebellum America. The work reorients our understanding of the road to American disunion and the political conflicts that dominated Congress in the three decades before the Civil War. Freeman has unearthed an overlooked history of congressional brawls, fights, duels, and other violent encounters between northern and southern representatives on the Senate and House floors. These violent conflicts were more than personal disputes and petty quarrels. Freeman shows how these incidents were representative of larger sectional tensions and were entangled in a web of party loyalty, personal honor, and regional pride.

One of the joys of reading this work was Freeman’s superior prose. It is at once witty and poignant as she guides readers through a violent world of congressional brawls, fistfights, and canings without sensationalizing the subject matter. Many of the incidents she describes are stomach churning and attention-grabbing in their own right, yet Freeman manages to integrate incidents of congressional violence into a more significant narrative of sectional tension, institutional mistrust, and ideology. Each chapter follows one violent incident as experienced by Freeman’s historical tour-guide, Benjamin Brown French. French was a house clerk from New Hampshire who spent thirty-seven years in Washington D.C. from 1837 to 1870 surrounded by Congressmen and witness to their violent quarrels. Freeman uses Brown’s extensive diaries as guides to the congressional world of “friendships and fighting; of drinking and dallying; of the passions of party and the prejudices of section and how they played out on the floor.” The diaries also personify the way the nation changed over time. Freeman often uses French as an embodiment of the political transformations that took place in the antebellum period. His loyalties, friendships, and party affiliation evolved as southern violence, sectional tension, and fears of a domineering block of slaveholders at the heart of the national government (known as Slave Power) altered party membership and political ideology in the 1840s and 1850s.

Arguments of the chivalry,1854 (via Library of Congress)

Many of the stories Freeman tells will be well known to students of antebellum American history, but what makes The Field of Blood so innovative is that Freeman shows the role of emotions and values in the political and ideological divisions that led to the Civil War. Freeman’s retelling of Preston Brooks’ caning of Charles Sumner, for example, highlights the importance of honor, pride, loyalty, and patriotism in Northern reactions to the Sumner tragedy. On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina brutally beat Senator Charles Sumner with his cane until it shattered. Brooks believed that Sumner insulted him personally and politically by admonishing Brooks’ relative Andrew Butler in an anti-slavery speech about the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Honor, pride, and loyalty played a role in Brooks’ motivation to defend Andrew Butler, South Carolina, and the rest of the South against Sumner’s supposed insult. However, honor, pride, and loyalty also played a central role in Republican responses to the violent act. While, the brutality of Brooks’ violence was cause for outrage in the North, it was Brooks’ violation of the rules of congressional combat that infuriated and offended Northerners. Previously, most acts of physical violence on the congressional floor were spontaneous encounters, whereas Brooks’ attack was premeditated. Brooks also elevated the political stakes of his attack by beating Sumner on the congressional floor rather than outside where personal disputes could be settled apart from political ones. Freeman shows how the location and timing of the Brooks-Sumner encounter exacerbated regional tensions and gave Northerners an opportunity to play up the notion of Southern violence in the press. Brooks’ violent escapade was the personification of pro-slavery brutality and arrogance.

Sacking of Lawrence (via Wikipedia)

Further intensifying the strong reactions, Sumner’s caning occurred around the same time as antislavery settlers were ransacked by proslavery aggressors in Lawrence, Kansas. Northerners viewed these violent encounters as a series of ongoing attacks against the North by the Southern Slave Power and believed the attacks would not stop until the North fought back to take control of the future of the Union. The rise of congressional violence in the 1850s exemplified the civic breakdown and unyielding polarization in Congress that made war seem inevitable. By the end of Freeman’s book, it feels unbelievable that it had taken so long for someone to tell the story of disunion through the lens of congressional violence. As she reminds readers early on in her work, “The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it, even in Congress.”

Freeman’s work breathes life into what often feels like a stagnant field of antebellum political history. Her use of violence as an analytical category provides a new framework for understanding the nation in the antebellum period that synthesizes the existing literature and illuminates an overlooked component of American political development. By deploying emotion and honor in her work, Freeman proves that there is still more to explore in what often feels like an overly dense field and time period of American history. The Field of Blood reassures students and scholars that there are still unchartered territories to explore in the antebellum period.

Political Map of the United States, 1856 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The Field of Blood will do for historians of the antebellum period what Freeman’s 2001 work, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, did for historians of the early republic. Her discovery of a “culture of honor” that guided politics in the early republic provided a new way of thinking about political conflict and nation-building in the 1790s. Affairs of Honor was one of the first books I read as undergraduate history major and I returned to the book this fall, delighted all over again by its reinterpretation of the history of the young United States. In that book, Freeman showed how previously undervalued and overlooked modes of political communication, such as political gossip and print culture, affected reputations of political leaders and influenced political alliances and elections. She provides a connecting line from Affairs of Honor to Field of Blood through her repeated methodological use of emotion and honor to dissect patterns of political thought and political behavior in the first seventy years of the nation’s existence.

At a time when congressional polarization and violent political rhetoric have reached an unimaginable height, Freeman’s work feels especially significant. Current party strife and widespread disillusionment mirror similar political developments of the antebellum period in chilling ways. The web of fanatical party loyalty, excessive personal pride, and regional tension that Freeman exposes in her work echoes in the contemporary halls of the U.S. Capitol and Oval Office. The Field of Blood confirms that the time is ripe for a resurgence of historical scholarship that examines the early political development of the United States, which can shed light on our own puzzling state of political disarray.

You might also like:
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (2008)
Harper’s Weekly’s Portrayal of the Civil War: The New Archive (No. 11)
IHS Talk: “The Civil War Undercommons: Studying Revolution on the Mississippi River” by Andrew Zimmerman

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (2008)

In Eric Remarque’s 1921 novel, The Road Back, a group of veterans (now enrolled as students at a local university in Germany) quietly seethe at the back of a classroom while their professor eulogizes their fallen comrades. The professor’s platitudes cause them to wince, but his romanticism of death makes them boil over in angry laughter. The professor speaks about how the fallen have entered a “long sleep beneath the green grasses.” After the laughter subsides, the veteran Westerholt spits out a tirade: “in the mud of shell holes they are lying, knocked rotten, ripped in pieces, gone down into the bog—Green grasses! … Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? All day long he lay out on the wire screaming, and his guts hanging out of this belly like macaroni … now you go and tell his mother how he died.” The scene dramatically underlines the painful tension that arises in a culture between realistic and romantic memory after a dreadful war.

Two unidentified Civil War soldiers in Union uniforms via Library of Congress

Like Remarque’s The Road Back, Faust’s This Republic of Suffering is a cartography of sorts—mapping how people respond to trauma, defeat, and above all mass death. Faust’s originality is grounded in a rudimentary social fact—that during the civil war, a lot of people died (over 620,000) and those who lived had to deal with it. In a similar-sized conflict today, that would mean about 7 million Americans or 2 percent of the population perishing. For Faust, the sheer magnitude of this number meant that “the United States embarked on a new relationship with death.”

Civil War Militia via Library of Congress

The elegance of Faust’s concept is illustrated by her simple chapter titles: Naming, Numbering, Burying, Accounting. Her point here is that to respond to death is to work. It takes time, thought, effort, and energy to name, number, bury, and account for the dead. But this work can also be figurative as alluded to in chapters titled Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Surviving: “the bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead … [they] must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.” Like Remarque’s soldiers, civil war Americans struggled to come to terms with the reality of death—not just its sheer volume, but also its individual reality. In “Dying” Faust outlines the established concept of the “good death” in antebellum American culture, which she claims was prevalent across classes and regions. The “good death” was peaceful and relatively painless, with its resolute subject at home, full of religious faith and surrounded by their family. The Civil War exploded such notions, and left society reeling. Soldiers might die in tremendous pain, far from home amidst the chaos of combat. Corpses were often left strewn across battlefields or hastily buried. Exploding shells might mean there was little left of a person to bury.

Battle of Antietam via DPLA

In wake of the death of the “good death,” Faust captures a culture in transition, forced to innovate at the level of the individual, the market, and the institution. At the individual level, Faust perceives a challenge to traditional religious belief. Whether evangelical or traditional in their Christian affiliations, most Americans believed in an afterlife that assumed the restoration of their body in a heavenly realm, contingent upon a mature profession of faith in the present life. But how was one’s body to be resurrected if it were blown to bits? Were teenager soldiers as accountable for their beliefs as their elders? Thus, “the traditional notion that corporeal resurrection and restoration would accompany the Day of Judgment seemed increasingly implausible to many Americans who had seen the maiming and disfigurement inflicted by this war.”

Republic of Suffering isn’t a religious history, but it is certainly a book about the self. What most Americans came to believe about the self was based not on “scripture and science but on distress and desire.” Works such as Elizabeth Phelp’s The Gates Ajar (only Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more books in the 19^th century) catered to death as effectively as did the churches. In this sense, Faust’s book has as much to say to scholars of secularization as it does to cultural historians. Americans yearned for a more benevolent God—one who respected personhood beyond the grave, and one who operated a liberal gate policy—so they invented one. Other needs arose as well. Embalmers and morticians, burial scouts and gravediggers, coffin makers, private detectives, and journalists all found work during the Civil War. They were entrepreneurs in an economy of death, an ontological marketplace where a new concept of the self was born—a self that (with the help of God and the market) would survive the transition from life to afterlife.

In addition to the market, government too had to respond to the new reality of mass death. There was the basic need for national cemeteries and provisions for the burial of unknown soldiers. However, Faust sees beyond such responses to detect an acceleration of nation-building: “execution of these newly recognized responsibilities would prove an important vehicle for the expansion of federal power that characterized the transformed postwar nation.” The significance of the sacrifices of the enlisted pivoted from being individual, local, or religious to being national.

Map of Antietam National Cemetery at Sharpsburg, Maryland (1867) via Library of Congress

Or was this simply the case on the Union side? Faust tends to flatten the experiences of northern and southerners into the category of “Americans.” However, the South lost around 18% of its fighting-age men, compared to 6% in the North. Surely this made a difference, but Faust chooses not the broaden her inquiry in this direction. Furthermore, for all the book’s originality, it lacks historiographical context. In particular, Faust chooses not to engage directly with the scholarship on trauma. Perhaps doing so would have disrupted a book that brings letters, memoirs, photographs, and diaries to life. On the other hand, by relying mostly upon written sources, Faust limits herself to the most articulate people of the past. How might we better understand the emotional life of those who left little historical trace, those like Remarque’s Westerholt who responded with angry laughter? Nevertheless, This Republic of Suffering provides a moving snapshot of Americans responding to calamity. Using death as a lens furnishes Faust with an original and effective framework for understanding the more national, more secular, and more nostalgic America that arose during the Gilded Age. It reasserts the Civil War as a truly transformative event in American history, that should be seen not only as the midwife of modern America but also as a truly, chillingly modern conflict.

Monumental Reinterpretation

On the west side of the Denver Capital building stands a soldier atop a stone monument. The soldier is easily recognizable as a Civil War soldier with his rifle ready, sword at his side, his distinctive hat, and the gaze of a vigilant soldier, saddened to be fighting his brother and countrymen. Ari Kelman dedicates portions of his book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, to a discussion about the history of this Civil War monument. The monument was erected and dedicated in 1909. This date places the monument in a period of United States history that saw the rapid erection of monuments across the landscape. Americans had emerged from the smoke and haze of the Civil War into a brave new world of freed slaves, Indian wars, and reform movements. Memorialization allowed for the reinterpretation of the racially motivated fratricide and cleansing of the west. Instead memorializers could reforge the familial bonds of the Union in stone. Denver memorialized this glory with their Union Soldier statue and a plaque that proudly displays a list of all the battles and engagements of the Civil War that Coloradans participated in. Notably listed in the battles is Sand Creek.

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington, with 700 men, attacked the Cheyenne and Arapahos camped peacefully along Sand Creek. Within the encampment was Black Kettle, a well known peace negotiator between the white settlers and the Indians. Black Kettle had recently returned to the Sand Creek camp, after concluding peace settlement negotiations at Fort Weld, where Chivington happened to be stationed. Upon realization of Chivington’s betrayal, Black Kettle immediately raised the American Flag and a white flag of surrender above his tipi, desperate to prove how those in the camp were friends of Americans and therefore peaceful. Chivington and his men took no heed of the raised flag, and continued the attack, killing not only men, but women and children who begged for mercy on their knees. Many ran to the sand beds along the creek where they burrowed into the sand, seeking cover from the sea of bullets. As the dust settled, 150 Cheyenne and Arapahos were dead. Chivington suffered the loss of ten men. His remaining 690 men proceeded to mutilate and desecrate the bodies of the deceased, with many keeping various body parts as grisly mementos.

As Kelman shows, immediately following the events of Sand Creek the public memory becomes cloudy and convoluted. For Chivington, the Union soldiers, and the American Nation, Sand Creek was a glorious battle in the story of westward expansion and the expulsion of the rebellious and violent Indians from the landscape. For the Cheyenne and Arapahos, Sand Creek was a brutal slaughter and massacre. One of Chivington’s men saw it the same way. Silas Soule was uneasy as he marched out on the day of the attack. When they arrived at Sand Creek, Soule refused to order his men to fire and he watched from the sidelines as the rain of bullets poured down on Black Kettle’s camp. Soule recorded the event in his letters, agonizing over his memories of that day.

A battle is often defined as an extended struggle between two organized armies. A massacre on the other hand is understood as the brutal and violent killing of multiple victims. The terms battle and massacre both carry heavy and violent meanings, but the picture they evoke are not the same. This difference in how to view the history and memory of Sand Creek coalesced around the Civil War monument in Denver in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The inclusion of Sand Creek in the list of battles and engagements on the monument at the Denver State Capitol projects an authority over the definition of the event and downplays its injustice by suggesting that there was a more even playing field between two opponents equally engaged. This leads the general public to believe that the band of Cheyenne and Arapahos provoked Chivington’s attack.

The Sand Creek Massacre as imagined by Harper’s Weekly in 1868 (via wikimedia)

The debate over the monument was strikingly similar to the many debates we have seen in the past year over the many Confederate monuments across the American landscape. The central question is what do we do with these monuments that valorize highly politicized motivations but also provide a glimpse into the people, culture, and history of those who erected these very monuments? For historical preservationists, this question creates a crucial internal battle. Preservationists recognize the white veil that hides the ugly truth of the monument’s history and purpose. However, their desire to preserve leads them to a fiery inferno. Ultimately, preservationists cannot come to a consensus on what should be done, however. many advocate for at least reinterpretation of the monuments.

Reinterpretation was the path Colorado ultimately decided upon. A small plaque was attached, not to the monument itself, but to the brick knee-high wall around the monument. The plaque provides a small nugget of insight into the controversy over the memory of Sand Creek; and yet it still leaves open just enough ambiguity to allow a visitor to interpret Sand Creek as a battle.

Monuments have authority. They are literally etched in stone. They influence the way the public perceives and remembers history. After all, how do you argue with a giant bronze plaque attached to a monumental piece of stone, holding up a heroic citizen soldier who fought to preserve our Union?

Further Reading:

Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2004).

Stephanie Meeks, “Statement on Confederate Memorials: Confronting Difficult History.”

The Littlefield Lectures 2018: The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 2)

On February 26-27 2018, The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin was pleased to welcome Dr. Manisha Sinha, Professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, as the featured speaker for The Littlefield Lecture Series. Dr. Sinha’s first lecture, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction,” is featured here.

Watch Professor Sinha’s second lecture on Not Even Past, titled “The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction:”

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15 Minute History Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition with Dr. Manisha Sinha
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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Littlefield Lectures 2018: Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction (Day 1)

Watch Professor Sinha’s first lecture on Not Even Past, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction:”

Dr. Manisha Sinha was born in India and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty and received the Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award in Recognition of Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Advising from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for over twenty years.

Her recent book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Prize, is a groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War.

Her first book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, was a Finalist for both the Avery O. Craven Award for Best Book on the Civil War Era, Organization of American Historians, and the George C. Rogers Award for Best Book on South Carolina History. It was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015.

Dr. Sinha’s research interests lie in United States history, especially the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is a member of the Council of Advisors of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg, New York Public Library, co-editor of the “Race and the Atlantic World, 1700-1900,” series of the University of Georgia Press, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Civil War Era. She has written for The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Time Magazine, CNN, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post, and been interviewed by The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and Slate.

In 2014, she appeared on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. She was an adviser and on-screen expert for the Emmy nominated PBS documentary, The Abolitionists (2013), part of the NEH funded Created Equal film series. In 2017, she was named one of Top Twenty Five Women in Higher Education by the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Professor Sinha is currently working on her new book on abolition and the making of Radical Reconstruction.

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The Curious History of Lincoln’s Birth Cabin

The monument at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jesse Ritner

School children across the United States learn that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin. For seven weeks this past summer I worked at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, Kentucky, where that cabin (as legend has it) is encased in a stone monument. Imposingly large when viewed from the bottom of its 56 steps, the monument is almost claustrophobic inside. Designed by John Russel Pope, the early twentieth-century’s titan of neo-classical monuments and government buildings, the monument only has one room, about the size of a large living-room. The entire log cabin fits inside, reinforcing the difference between the monument built in Lincoln’s honor and his humble origins. The Grecian inspired edifice was built between 1909 and 1911, atop the knoll where legend (and some deeds with Thomas Lincoln’s name) lead us to believe Abraham Lincoln was born. The now largely forgotten monument was once national news. Over 100,000 Americans donated money to build the publicly funded temple. The cornerstone was laid by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt and, two years later, it was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, himself a member of the Lincoln Farm Association, which led the fundraising effort.

The intended lesson of the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial is clear. Those who begin in rags, can rise to riches. Those men who save the nation will, for their services, have their less than impressive childhood homes enshrined in granite and neo-classical architecture, thereby tying them for eternity to the everlasting fight for freedom and democracy that can be traced all the way from ancient Athens to today’s rolling hills of Kentucky. Yet, the monument and the cabin inside teach us much more than an overwrought story about the American dream; instead, it serves as a piece of history in of itself.

The cabin inside the monument’s granite walls never housed the Lincoln family. It was constructed in 1895 by entrepreneur Alfred Dennett and his agent, James Bigham, from logs found in a log cabin near the sinking spring where records suggest Lincoln was born. In 1897, the fabricated cabin was toured around the country, where it was matched with another ersatz birthplace cabin – that of none other than Confederate President Jefferson Davis. As the caravan of cabins continued around the United States, it finally landed on Coney Island. There, due to poor organization while shipping, parts of each cabin became mixed so they were simply joined together creating a single Lincoln-Davis Birthplace Cabin. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies across America, when this cabin, now combining logs from the separate counterfeit cabins of the enemies of the Civil War, was sent back to Kentucky in 1906, it was represented as Lincoln’s “original” birthplace cabin. While the National Park Service does acknowledge that the cabin is not the original, but instead is “symbolic” (the quotation marks are theirs, not mine), it is largely silent on the actual origins of the cabin.

The symbolic cabin enshrined in the monument at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park (via Wikimedia Commons)

In today’s conversations about Confederate statues, few are discussing the relationship between Confederate and Union memorials dating from the early twentieth century, both of which quite consciously use matching metaphors to affect their viewers. In Kentucky, monuments such as Lincoln’s birthplace offer insight into the way historical narratives created by turn of the century endeavors in public history by both Union and Confederate supporters are often intertwined, despite the heated rhetoric and violence that results from these supposedly competing historical narratives today.

The Park Service’s silence calls to question why we need the monument in the first place and why we, as taxpayers, should support its preservation. As a remembrance of President Lincoln, the monument and park are markedly outdated. Far removed from population centers, the monument is largely forgotten. On the other hand, the story of the cabin now enshrined in its “Temple of Fame,” as Theodore Roosevelt dubbed the granite structure, gives real insight into the way Americans, both Confederate sympathizers and Union patriots, collectively built historical narratives about the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. Both Presidents Davis and Lincoln were born in Kentucky and, at the turn of the century, their rags to riches stories were not seen as inherently independent of each other, but were instead part of a single American narrative that both Southerners and Northerners could claim as their birthright.

A postcard of Lincoln’s Birthplace Memorial, ca. 1930-1945 (via Boston Public Library)

The cabin today, with no mention of the monument’s convoluted history, ignores the partially fabricated histories that brought both to power, and brought these Kentucky brothers symbolically back together, even after a long, violent, and devastating war. But, the monument, despite the faults inherent in its creation, also holds valuable potential as a piece of public history that can truly engage with the way in which historical narratives are created and why monuments are built, rather than simply reinforcing centuries old attempts at public education and nation building. It suggests historical precedents to the Republican Party simultaneously claiming heritage as the party of Lincoln, while supporting the maintenance of Confederate monuments and minimizing or even erasing the history of slavery and its role in the bloody Civil War. And it shows that in towns like Hodgenville, where Confederate flags fly freely next to memorials to Lincoln, the apparent conflict in historical memory is not new, but is part of a conscious narrative built in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and continuing today.

The current dialog revolving around Confederate memorials is far more complicated than many analyses acknowledge. Considering the current unrest regarding Civil War monuments, it is necessary for us to examine the influence of all sides on the historical narratives they choose to create. Remedying the wrongs that statues of people such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee represent is harder than simply taking prominent statues down. As a nation we must reassess the way we have remembered the entire history of the Civil War and we must reexamine the ways past generations remembered as well, regardless of whether the historical figures in question are currently viewed as villains or heroes.

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A Historian views Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), by Nicholas Roland
Watch: panel discussion of confederate statues at the University of Texas
Charley Binkow on the Lincoln Archives Digital Project

IHS Panel: The Confederate Statues at UT

What do statues commemorating Confederate leaders mean? Why has the university decided to remove such statues? And why has the issue been so controversial? On Thursday, August 31 2017, speakers from the University of Texas, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Briscoe Center for American History came together to address these questions and more.

Featured speakers included:

Walter L. Buenger
Chief Historian, Texas State Historical Association; Summerlee Foundation Chair in Texas History, and Barbara White Stuart Centennial Professor in Texas History | The University of Texas at Austin

Peniel E. Joseph
Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy; Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs; and Professor of History | The University of Texas at Austin

Ben Wright
Associate Director for Communication at the Briscoe Center for American History and curator of “From Commemoration to Education: Pompeo Coppini’s Statue of Jefferson Davis” | The University of Texas at Austin

with

Jacqueline Jones, Moderator
Professor and Chair of the Department of History; Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History; and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History | The University of Texas at Austin

This event was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies.

Connected content:

Mark Sheaves on slavery and its legacy in the USA
Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry on history and memory in Savannah
Jacqueline Jones discusses Civil War Savannah

The Works of Steven Hahn

By Jacqueline Jones

This week on February 15 and 16, the Littlefield Lecture Series in the Department of History presents Dr. Steven Hahn, Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian and Professor of History at New York University. (Details on the lectures below).

Here, Prof. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of The Department of History and regular contributor to Not Even Past, offers a short review essay of Dr Hahn’s major works.

In all his works, Steven Hahn, Professor of History at New York University, seeks to challenge, or at least de-center, prevailing historical narratives especially for the period 1830 to 1920 or so. The results are invariably provocative and fresh.

His first book, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (1983) took us away from the great planters of the South, and examined small, non-slaveholding farmers. Before the Civil War, these family farmers were self-sufficient, growing corn, instead of cotton, and relying on the spinning and weaving skills of their wives and daughters. The war caused severe damage to these homesteads and, in order to repair and rebuild, farmers had to secure loans from local banks and other credit institutions. To get these loans, they had to promise to grow cotton, which could be sold reliably in foreign and domestic markets. Bad harvests meant that increasing numbers of these small farm owners lost their property to the bank, causing tremendous resentment and paving the way for the Populist Party of the 1890s.

His second book, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2005) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Merle Curti Prize in Social History, and was also a finalist for both the Lincoln and Frederick Douglass Prize. In this book, Hahn seeks to account for black political organization before and after the Civil War, looking not to the cities or to the North, but to the rural South. Here he finds resistance to slavery before the war and a variety of proto-political organizations after the war. These include extended kin networks, the Republican Party, emigrationist schemes (to go out West or to Africa), and, in the 1920s Garveyism, a movement for black empowerment and pride organized Marcus Garvey. Hahn locates the sources of these organizations in families, churches, and workplaces, and suggests that during Reconstruction and after, black men and women offered up an expansive view of American citizenship—one that highlighted the role of work, family, and schools in defining equality for all citizens. The result of this organizational activity was a nation within a nation—that is, a sense of heighted black collective consciousness–that paved the way for the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century and beyond.

Hahn’s most recent book, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016) offers a fresh overview of U.S. history during this period. Hahn chronicles the growth of a centralized U.S. government that was the agent of both industrial capitalism and expansionism of various kinds. He considers the land grab in Mexico (the War of 1848), the destruction of native tribes in the West during the last third of the nineteenth century, and imperialist designs on Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines in 1898. He argues that these wars of conquest and relentless expansionism had wrenching effects on various groups—not only blacks and Indians, but also New England farmers and others who lost out when the circuits of international trade came to dominate the American economy. He shows how different groups reacted to these developments, fighting back against employers, landowners, and government officials. This book offers a counter-narrative to the conventional view, which highlights “progress” in the form of technological innovations, the growth in foreign immigration, and the spread of the factory system after the Civil War—all supposed to be ingredients in the forging of a “modern” nation.

In all these works, Hahn brings to the fore groups that have not received their due as political and proto-political actors (small family farmers, slaves and freedpeople, Indians, and industrial workers), in order to provide a fuller, more nuanced picture of the development of industrial capitalism and the role of the state in promoting expansionism (in the form of conquest over vulnerable groups) at home and abroad.

The Littlefield Lectures:

Day 1 | Wednesday, February 15

The United States from the Inside Out and the Southside North
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41026

Day 2 | Thursday, February 16
Reconstruction and the American Political Tradition
4:00 PM | AT&T Center, 1900 University Ave. | Amphiteater 204 on Level M2
liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/events/41028

Directions: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/directions
Parking: http://www.meetattexas.com/page/parking

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary to attend.

More from Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

History in a “Post-Truth” Era.
On the Myth of Race in America.
On Civil War Savannah.

Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri

By Guy Raffa

“We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others.

Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown’s execution for attempting to arm slaves with weapons from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. “This will be a great day in our history,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1859, the day of the hanging, “the date of a new Revolution” needed to move the nation farther toward the Constitution’s goal of “a more perfect Union.” Even “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his famous poem on the Revolutionary War, was “less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “a calls to arms, rousing northerners to action.” This rallying cry serendipitously appeared on newsstands on Dec. 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

henry_wadsworth_longfellow_by_thomas_buchanan_read_img_4414-1

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via Wikimedia Commons).

Longfellow had voted early on Nov. 6, 1860 and was overjoyed by the news of Lincoln’s “great victory,” calling it “the redemption of the country.” His diary marks steps toward fulfilling the promise of this victory, from enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 (“A great day”) and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery, on January 31, 1865 (“the grand event of the century”) to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865: “So ends the Rebellion of the slave-owners!”

Longfellow had gained notice in abolitionist circles two decades earlier with publication of his Poems on Slavery. He judged his verses “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast,” but still they triggered a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper and were left out of an 1845 edition of the author’s collected works to avoid offending readers in the south and west.

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1863, New York’s Evening Post cast Longfellow as the nation’s prophet. Crediting the poet’s “discerning eye” for foreseeing “the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government,” the paper lamented that his words had gone “unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation.”

1863 also saw Longfellow complete a draft of his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working closely with Dante’s poem helped him cope with the traumatic loss of his beloved wife. On July 9, 1861, Fanny had suffered fatal injuries when her dress caught fire as she melted wax to seal a lock of her daughter’s hair. The translation provided “refuge” from an ordeal “almost too much for any man to bear,” he wrote to a friend.

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, a detail of a painting by Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Living with Dante’s vision of the afterlife also gave Longfellow some perspective on the war. On May 8, 1862, soon after translating Paradiso, he reflected, “Of the civil war I say only this. It is not a revolution, but a Catalinian conspiracy. It is Slavery against Freedom; the north against the southern pestilence.” The reality of this moral disease hit home when he visited a local jeweler’s shop. There he saw “a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon, to go into the mouth.” “Every drop of blood in me quivered,” he wrote, “the world forgets what Slavery really is!”

The war to eradicate slavery by suppressing this “conspiracy” brought its own set of horrors. Longfellow was acutely aware of the high toll of death and mutilation on both sides, the destruction extending far beyond the war zone. “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field,” he lamented, “but in faraway homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

Charles Longfellow in Uniform (1st Massachusetts Artillery), March 1863. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The hell of war weighed heavily on Longfellow’s mind when he finally turned to translating Dante’s Inferno—he saved this first part of the Divine Comedy for last—on March 14, 1863. He began during an especially “sad week”: Charles, his eighteen-year-old son, had left home, unannounced, to join the Army of the Potomac in Washington. Initially attaching himself to an artillery regiment, “Charley” benefited from family connections to receive a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry. “He is where he wants to be, in the midst of it all,” wrote the worried father. During this first month of Charley’s military service, Longfellow translated a canto of Inferno each day. Amid “many interruptions and anxieties,” he completed all thirty-four cantos by April 16, 1863. Two weeks later Charles Norton, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Dante expert, urged him to hold back publication of the translation until 1865 so it could be presented during Italy’s celebration of the poet’s six-hundredth birthday in Florence.

On December 1, 1863, Longfellow received a telegram from Washington saying his son had been “severely wounded.” He immediately left Cambridge with his younger son Ernest and headed south to find Charley and learn the extent of his injuries. The soldier, who had already survived a bout of the ever-dangerous “camp fever” the previous summer, made another “wonderful escape,” as his relieved father put it. Fighting near the front lines in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley took a Confederate soldier’s bullet in the shoulder. He returned home in one piece and slowly recovered from his wounds, but his fighting days were over.

As the war continued and congress worked to repeal the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850, Longfellow resumed editing his translation in preparation for the Dante anniversary. He admired Charles Sumner’s speech on the proposed amendment to abolish slavery: “So long as a single slave continues anywhere under the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest.” Longfellow shared his friend’s relatively expansive view of liberty, observing on April 20, 1864: “Until the black man is put upon the same footing as the white, in the recognition of his rights, we shall not succeed, and what is worse, we shall not deserve success.” The following year Longfellow asked Sumner for assistance in having a privately printed edition of the first volume of his translation delivered to Italy in time for the Dante festivities. In the same letter of February 10, 1865, he thanked the senator for his role in abolishing slavery, proclaiming that “this year will always be the Year of Jubilee in our history.”

Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno took its place among the works by eminent foreigners on display in Florence to honor the poet’s birth. Three days of festivities in 1865 doubled as a celebration of Italy’s independence while the nation awaited the additions of Venice (1866) and Rome (1870) to complete the unification begun in 1859-61. At a banquet for foreign dignitaries, an American speaker drew rousing applause from his Italian hosts and their guests when he toasted the “Re-United States”—a poignant reminder that Italy was taking its first steps as an independent and (mostly) unified nation just as America emerged from the greatest test of its own unity and promise of freedom.

The statue of Dante Alighieri that today stands in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence was unveiled in 1865 during the festival (via Wikimedia Commons).

Dante’s prominence in these parallel national struggles was clear to Longfellow, as it was to the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, and other black “freedom readers,” the title of Dennis Looney’s book on the African American reception of Dante and his poem. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante to accompany the commercial publication of his translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867. The final sonnet, composed on March 7, 1866, glorifies Dante as the “star of morning and of liberty,” his message of freedom reaching “all the nations” as his “fame is blown abroad from all the heights.”

“Hideous news.” This was Longfellow’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, from the bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth the night before at Ford’s Theatre. Star of morning and of liberty: Longfellow’s epithet for Dante would have sounded like a fine description of Abraham Lincoln to millions of Americans who mourned the slain president.

Featured Image: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study, 1868. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Sources: “Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”; “Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” ed. Samuel Longfellow; “Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, ed. Andrew Hilen; “Poet’s Warning,” The Evening Post Jan. 20, 1863; Henry Clark Barlow, “The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna”; Dennis Looney, “Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy”

For more information on Dante and Longfellow, see the special edition of Dante Studies on this topic (vol. 128 in 2010), edited by Arielle Saiber and Giuseppe Mazzotta.

You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones discusses Civil War Savannah.
Marc Palen debates the causes of the Civil War.
Alison Frazier suggests some “lightly fictionalized” books about the Italian Renaissance.

Check out Guy Raffa’s multi-media journey through the three realms of Dante’s afterlife, via Thinking in Public.

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