Civil War Archives - Page 3 of 4

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

By Dennis Fisher

You wouldn’t think much of the limestone walls hanging on for dear life as you walked along Bluff Springs to get to the grocery store or the bus stop. Not least because they are set back about thirty feet from the road and concealed by trees. I first heard something about the walls and the Sneed mansion they once supported while walking along the Onion Creek greenbelt in South Austin. “The mansion on the hill was built by slave labor,” a local told me.

I decided to explore for myself on a recent drizzly Sunday. The entire neighborhood, mostly apartment complexes, a few empty lots, and bus stops, has grown up around this small patch of land, which has been just barely “preserved” (given its dilapidated state) by city officials. Walking past the crumbling walls of the Sneed mansion, marked by graffiti and littered with plastic bottles, evokes not only Austin’s past but also a sense of loneliness.

A black and white 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House still intact taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Sebron Sneed Sr. was born in Kentucky in 1802. He spent his early years bouncing around—first in the Missouri militia in 1823 and later in Arkansas practicing law. He married Marinda Atkins of Tennessee in 1824 and they both ended up in Austin, Texas in 1848 after the conclusion of the War on Mexico, making a new home for themselves. They both joined the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church—which still stands today on William Cannon across IH-35. Sebron started the local Democratic Party chapter in 1857. It’s probably not too hard to discern what the Sneed family thought about Texas in the 1850s. Coming from the Appalachian borderlands into newly conquered territory they probably hoped to prosper in a land that would soon expell its Native inhabitants—Tonkawa, Apache, and Comanche peoples around here—and in a place where black slavery was firmly entrenched and outside of the reach of the troublesome former Mexican government as well as the current Federal one—up until 1861, that is, when Lincoln was elected to the presidency. Sebron Sneed Sr. owned 21 people as property in 1860. One of them, Nancy Jane, was purchased by Sneed as “the highest bidder . . . of a certain mulato girl” in Arkansas in 1848 just before he relocated to Texas. We have no idea what Nancy Jane, almost entirely lost to us in the historical record, must have thought, felt, and dreaded–torn from her relatives and brought to a strange land.

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 in an ornate gold frame

Daguerreotype of Marinda Atkins (1809-1878), wife of Sebron Sneed, ca. 1849-1850 (Image courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library)

The location chosen for Sneed’s mansion still makes good sense. It stands on a hill that lifts slightly to the west but then drops down to where IH-35 currently sits. The land gently slopes downward on all remaining sides. Close by on the north and east sides of the house wind small streams that gently make their way downhill. Limestone, soft and porous, is readily available in this area. All of south Texas (and extending down into Guatemala and Belize) was covered by a shallow sea some sixty million years ago, which left behind as its primary legacy a thick layer of limestone—great for building houses and pyramids as well as collecting and channeling water into natural wells, creeks, and aquifers.

Sneed made his money in the legal profession. His papers, located at the Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas, are full of promissory notes from clients. In 1860, he paid fifty dollars in “occupation taxes” as a lawyer. By looking at his tax receipts we find that he owned enslaved people, horses, cattle, and land in Del Valle (just east on Highway 290)—the numbers vary from year to year suggesting he sold people as well. In 1864, he paid his county taxes in kind with 545 bushels of corn. During the war he made money by selling two enslaved men—Peter and Isaac—to Confederate General Magruder for building fortifications at Galveston. If Sebron saw Texas as a promised land, his vision and future rested firmly on the foundation of white supremacy. Furthering that vision, Sneed opened his mansion in south Austin as a recruiting station at the outset of the Civil War and later as a convalescent home for returning wounded soldiers. Both he and his son fought in the war—he as a provost marshall and his son as a captain. Sebron Sr. would die in 1879, at the time engaged in “agricultural pursuits”—the records shed little light on this post-war aspect of his life. He would be buried in the adjoining family cemetery along with his wife, other family members, and “infant Sneed.” After the war, his son moved downtown to Colorado and 3rd and kept busy as a lawyer, acting Comptroller, and later as superintendent of Travis County schools.

Black and white photograph of the second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936

Second floor fireplace of the Sneed House, 1936 (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Today echoes of that era linger in both small and not so subtle ways. Ranch owners along the Onion Creek greenbelt still regularly take their horses out along the trails and locals flock to McKinney Falls to play along the limestone and creeks that crisscross the area. Confederate flags still find a place at rallies at the capitol as well as on t-shirts and pickup trucks. But today south Austin at William Cannon and IH-35 looks very different. Anglo-Americans, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans all call this place home. Hispanic Texans constitute the majority of enrolled students in a state that could swing Democratic in a decade or less in a country that has twice elected an African-American to be president. Looking at what remains of the Sneed mansion serves to remind us of the very different histories that have inhabited these places.

If you’d like to learn more about the Sneed family:

A 1982 issue of the Austin Genealogical Society which includes an 1860 letter from Sebron Sneed jr. to his wife

The Sneed House’s city zoning information

A guide to the Briscoe Center’s Sneed family papers

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.

Honorable Mention of 2013 Essay Contest: Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg by Rod Gragg (2000)

by Adrienne Morea

Harry Burgwyn was twenty-one years old when he led more than eight hundred soldiers of the 26th North Carolina Infantry into battle at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Two and a half days later, after two bloody assaults, fewer than one hundred remained fit for duty. According to some calculations, the 26th North Carolina “incurred the greatest casualties of any regiment at Gettysburg” (Gragg 210). Despite these losses, the 26th rebuilt itself and continued fighting for an additional twenty-one months.

This fascinating regiment is the subject of Rod Gragg’s Covered with Glory: The 26th North Carolina Infantry at Gettysburg. As the subtitle indicates, the majority of the book covers the Gettysburg campaign, but it is also an admirable history of the 26th North Carolina and its role in the American Civil War, from the regiment’s establishment in the summer of 1861 to its surrender at Appomattox and the postwar lives of its survivors.

This book is the story of the men and their regiment. By and large, it is not about politics, nor is it an argument about the causes or broad issues of the war. It is a narrative of the experiences of men and boys, in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield. Such a detailed, personal view can enhance anyone’s understanding of the monumental history involved.

Readers make the acquaintance of many Tar Heels, from privates to generals, who fought in or were closely associated with the 26th North Carolina. This regiment was remarkable for the youthfulness of its commanders, several of whom were college students before the war. Colonel Henry King Burgwyn Jr. had graduated from two

institutions of higher education before he was twenty. Major John Thomas Jones, twenty-two, had been a schoolmate of Burgwyn. Lieutenant Colonel John Randolph Lane turned twenty-eight the day after the fighting at Gettysburg ended. At thirty-four, Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew, who commanded the brigade that included the 26th, was already an accomplished scholar in several disciplines. The officers are important and engaging characters, but they are not the entire story. Readers also meet lowlier fellows such as Private Jimmie Moore, a farmer’s son who was fifteen when he enlisted and seventeen when he was wounded at Gettysburg, and Julius Lineback, a slight, observant musician of twenty-eight.

Gragg tells the tale with eloquence, with great affection for the men of the 26th, and with respect for their opponents in blue. Covered with Glory is a work of nonfiction, but it is also a fine piece of storytelling. Sixteen pages of images help to put faces on the people in the text.

We are now in the sesquicentennial year of the Gettysburg campaign. This is a fitting time to study the events and people of the Civil War. As Lane said in a postwar speech, the story of the men of the 26th does not belong only to North Carolina or to the South, but rather it is “the common heritage of the American nation” and represents “the high-water mark of what Americans have done and can do” (Gragg 245). If you are interested in the American Civil War, in nineteenth-century life, or in military history, you should read this book. If you are or ever have been a college student in your twenties, you should read this book.

Photo credits:

Unidentified Union soldier, 1860-1870 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

And be sure to check out Kristopher Yingling’s winning submission to Not Even Past’s Spring Essay Contest.

A Historian Views Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012)

By Nicholas Roland

Steven Spielberg’s latest historical drama chronicles the 16th President’s final months and the struggle for passage of the 13th Amendment by the House of Representatives in 1865. Lincoln’s enduring popularity in both scholarly and popular circles means that this film will be subjected to intense scrutiny and debate by historians, movie reviewers, and culture warriors.

Fortunately, Lincoln is blessed with a remarkably accomplished cast. Daniel Day Lewis is Abraham Lincoln. Having supposedly read over 100 books on Lincoln in preparation for the role, he manages to convincingly replicate many aspects of Lincoln’s persona and physical aura. Lincoln’s purportedly high voice, his wry sense of humor and knack for storytelling, his slouched posture and awkward gait, and the overwhelming weariness incurred by the “fiery trial” of war all ring true in this portrayal. Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Fields) is portrayed as a more or less sympathetic character, in accordance with more recent scholarship rejecting long-standing depictions of Mrs. Lincoln as a shrew, possibly suffering from a mental illness. Instead, Fields plays a First Lady who is grief stricken over the loss of her son Willie and weary from the stress of a wartime presidential marriage. During a scene at a White House reception, she draws on her social training as a daughter of the Kentucky planter elite to skillfully and acerbically defend herself and her husband against political critics. Secretary of State William H. Seward (David Strathairn) also appears as an important source of support for Lincoln. Seward cuts patronage deals with lame duck Democratic Congressmen in order to help secure the passage of the 13th Amendment and acts as a sort of political muse to Lincoln. Seward harangues and cajoles Lincoln on policy and political strategy but ultimately serves as a loyal ally in carrying out Lincoln’s intent, a depiction born out in the historical record. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) is also a convincing secondary character, albeit with some historical problems. A leader of the Radical wing of the Republican Party, Stevens is accurately portrayed as an advocate of racial equality and a vehement opponent of secessionists. However, a scene revealing the purported relationship between Stevens and his African-American housekeeper risks conveying the sense that this relationship was the primary motivation for Stevens’ crusade for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

Despite the excellent performances turned in by the star-studded cast, Lincoln has a number of shortcomings from the historian’s point of view. Based on Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the film is at times a taut political thriller and at times the inspirational story of the final abolition of American slavery. The choice to focus on the last few months of Lincoln’s presidency is appropriate given the ultimate outcome of the American Civil War: the defeat of the

Confederacy and the end of legal slavery. However, this narrow focus glosses over Lincoln’s famously ambiguous views on slavery and racial equality. Spielberg’s Lincoln appears committed to rapidly ending slavery and even suggests that suffrage might be extended to black men in the future. In his lifetime, Lincoln was consistently criticized by Radical Republicans and African-American leaders such as Frederick Douglass for his equivocation on slavery and lenient plans for Reconstruction. Lincoln seems to have held a lifelong commitment to the free-soil ideology that every man, white or black, has the right to earn for himself by the sweat of his brow. Despite this conviction, Lincoln repeatedly stated that he wished to preserve the Union, either with or without slavery. Lincoln viewed the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black troops as a wartime expedient to preserve the Union.

To its credit, Lincoln does make some references to contradictory statements Lincoln made earlier in his presidency about slavery. Despite this nod toward the complexity of Lincoln’s political career, Spielberg risks reviving the Great Emancipator myth. The best evidence suggests that Abraham Lincoln personally abhorred slavery as an institution while simultaneously denying the concept of racial equality. Some historians have argued that Lincoln’s personal beliefs underwent a significant change during the last year of the Civil War, and Lincoln did in fact suggest to the reconstructed government of Louisiana in 1864 that “very intelligent” black men and “those who have fought gallantly in our ranks” might be given access to the ballot box. As depicted by the film, during the 1864 Presidential campaign Lincoln threw his support behind passage of the 13th Amendment and was active in securing its passage in 1865. Nonetheless Lincoln never became a radical abolitionist like Thaddeus Stevens or an outright advocate of racial equality. Lincoln continued to put forth plans for the resettlement of freedmen to the Caribbean even after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and possibly even after the passage of the 13th Amendment.

Too narrow a focus on the actions of Lincoln and other white politicians unfortunately downplays the role played by both enslaved and free African-Americans in the Civil War-era struggle for freedom. Black characters largely appear passive in Spielberg’s account. Kate Masur points out that White House servants Elizabeth Keckley and William Slade were deeply involved in the free black activist community of Washington, D.C. Instead of appearing as dynamic characters within the President’s household, they are relegated to cardboard roles as domestics. Keckley has one brief, earnest discussion with Lincoln, but cannot offer a vision of black life outside of slavery to the President. Frederick Douglass, who visited the White House during the time depicted in the film, does not appear at all. The most assertive black character in the movie is a soldier who confronts the President about past ill-treatment and future aspirations. Lincoln artfully deflects the soldier’s concerns and the scene ends with the soldier quoting the Gettysburg Address. The one-dimensional black characters in Lincoln are unrecognizable as depictions of African Americans during the Civil War. Early in the war, when Lincoln strenuously wished to avoid confronting slavery, black enslaved workers fled to federal lines and congregated around federal camps such as Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861 in reaction to this development, marking the first movement by the federal government to separate rebellious slaveholders from their enslaved workers. While Lincoln continued to insist that the war was a struggle to preserve the Union, African Americans did not wait for the Emancipation Proclamation to turn the war into much more than a sectional conflict. Slavery was destroyed as much by their individual actions as by the political workings of white politicians.

A number of smaller inaccuracies and stylistic issues can be pointed out. For example, Alexander H. Coffroth is depicted as a nervous Pennsylvania Democrat pressured into voting for the 13th Amendment. Coffroth actually served as a pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral, indicating that he was more than a simple political pawn of the White House. In another scene supposedly taking place after the fall of Richmond and Petersburg, Lincoln solemnly rides through a horrific battlefield heaped with hundreds of bodies. A battlefield such as this would likely represent one of the worst instances of combat in the Civil War. Richmond and Petersburg fell primarily due to General Ulysses S. Grant’s maneuvering to cut Confederate supply lines rather than through bloody fighting on the scale Spielberg depicts. Lincoln did in fact visit Richmond after it had fallen and was greeted there by hundreds of jubilant freed slaves in the streets of the former Confederate capital. The chance to depict such a poignant scene is not taken up by the filmmakers in favor of a continued focus on the political and military struggle waged by white Americans.Perhaps most inexplicably, the movie does a poor job of identifying the various cabinet officials and Congressmen central to the plot. While this poses little obstacle to historians familiar with the time period, the average moviegoer is likely to be somewhat unsure of the exact role or importance of several characters. This is especially curious given the fact that obscure members of a Confederate peace delegation such as Confederate Senator R.M.T. Hunter and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell are explicitly identified on screen.

Taken on the whole, Spielberg’s Lincoln is a masterful politician and a dynamic character, able to carefully mediate between his own evolving beliefs and the political realities of his age. This interpretation falls solidly in line with the mainstream of Lincoln scholarship. For an incredibly complex, sphinxlike figure such as Abraham Lincoln, perhaps we shouldn’t expect a more thorough interpretation from Hollywood.

***

You may also like:

Henry Wiencek’s NEP review of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial, which examines Lincoln’s changing views on race and slavery

Photo Credits:

Series of Thaddeus Stevens photographs by Matthew Brady, sometime between 1860 and 1865 (Image courtesy of Brady National Photographic Art Gallery)

Lydia Hamilton Smith, housekeeper and alleged common law wife of Thaddeus Stevens, photographed sometime prior to 1868 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mary Todd Lincoln, 1846-7 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Lincoln depicted as The Great Emancipator in Thomas Ball’s statue, Lincoln Park, Washington, DC (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Promotional studio image of Abraham Lincoln (left) and Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln (right)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Texans at Antietam: 150 Years Ago Today

By Nicholas Roland

By the early autumn of 1862, Americans were reconciled to the fact that the military struggle to determine the fate of the Union was going to be a long and bloody one. Intense fighting was reflected in lengthy casualty lists printed in newspapers, and the names of small towns and rural communities where battles took place became burned into American collective memory: Manassas, Shiloh, Malvern Hill. The grim task of burying fallen soldiers became almost routine as thousands of young men fell in battle and died from illnesses.

Black and white image of covered wagons crossing the stone bridge at Antietam

Then, on September 17, 1862, the cataclysmic one-day battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg as the Confederates called it), took the staggering losses to shocking new heights. In a single day of fighting in western Maryland, there were nearly 23,000 casualties, making Antietam the bloodiest day of the entire war. Approximately 3,000 soldiers were killed outright, while thousands more would die in the coming days and weeks or suffer from debilitating injuries for the rest of their lives. In the aftermath, Alexander Gardner toured the battlefield and took a series of photographs. These photographs, the first ever taken of dead American soldiers, shocked the public when they were exhibited in New York.

Black and white image showing dead Confederate soldiers by a fence at the Hagerstown Turnpike after the Battle of Antietam — Confederate dead by a fence at the Hagerstown Turnpike, after the battle of Antietam

The sight of bloated corpses lying among the detritus of war brought the carnage to the home front in ways that newspaper reports, casualty lists, and funerals had not. The New York Times wrote of Gardner’s images (mistakenly attributed to Mathew Brady), “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it…”

The battle of Antietam held particular significance for Texans. Over a thousand miles from their homes, the Confederate soldiers of Hood’s Texas Brigade would suffer the second-highest casualty rate of any unit during the Civil War. On the morning of September 17, the men of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Texas Infantry regiments were held in reserve and attempting to cook breakfast as the fighting opened. They arrived in the hamlet of Sharpsburg, Maryland at the end of several months of hard campaigning in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Assigned to duty in Virginia early in the war, the Texans earned a reputation for hard fighting after battles at Seven Pines, the Seven Days battles, and the second battle of Manassas. Lee affectionately referred to the men of Hood’s Brigade as “my Texans.” Lee’s army had reversed Confederate fortunes in Virginia, defeating two Federal armies and completely clearing the Commonwealth of Federal forces. Lee’s fateful decision to invade Maryland brought his ragged and outnumbered army to a defensive position in the Maryland countryside opposite George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

The Texan’s breakfast was abruptly interrupted when the Federal army launched an assault on the Confederate left flank. Hood’s Brigade fell into formation and marched north, passing wounded and frightened Confederates streaming to the rear. Emerging from the woods in the vicinity of the Dunker Church, named for a German Baptist sect noted for its pacifism, the Texans were ordered forward in a counterattack. The Lone Star soldiers launched a ferocious assault through a cornfield, driving Federal units before them. The attack eventually foundered in the face of intense artillery and musket fire. The Texans stubbornly attempted to move forward, but massive casualties decimated their ranks. Eventually Hood’s Brigade was forced to withdraw under heavy fire. When the Texas Brigade regrouped and counted their losses, it was determined that over 550 of the brigade’s 850 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured. The First Texas Infantry, advancing the farthest of any unit in the brigade, suffered a casualty rate of 82% of the 226 men engaged in the battle. The “Ragged Old First” lost their regimental colors as well. Historian John Cannon reports that when a Federal soldier later in the battle picked them up, he found thirteen Texans lying dead within arm’s reach of the Lone Star flag. The First Texas’ casualty rate at Antietam was the second-highest of the Civil War on either side.

Ultimately, the Texan’s counterattack through the cornfield yielded a pyrrhic tactical victory for Confederate arms. Lee and McClellan clumsily traded blows for the rest of the day, and the Army of Northern Virginia avoided total destruction largely through the timidity of McClellan. The slow moving Federal general allowed Lee’s army to withdraw and declined to aggressively pursue the ragged Confederates. Lincoln, frustrated by McClellan’s blundering and refusal to reengage Lee, eventually removed McClellan from command. McClellan would later run unsuccessfully on the Democratic ticket against Lincoln in the crucial 1864 presidential election.

Black and white image of President Abraham Lincoln meeting with Union General McClellan and his officers outside a tent after the Battle of Antietam

Lincoln with McClellan after the Battle of Antietam

The battle of Antietam was a critical turning point in the Civil War. Although Union victory was not decisive, Lee’s repulse from Maryland was enough for Lincoln to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. After Antietam the character of the Civil War would change from a limited struggle to preserve the Union to a total war against slavery. The future of thousands of enslaved Texans was therefore directly affected by the fighting in far off Maryland.

Historical documents allow us to see the tragic affect that Antietam and other battles had on individual families in Texas communities during the Civil War. Lieutenant James Waterhouse was killed in action at Antietam. A native of San Augustine, he was the son of wealthy planter and merchant Richard Waterhouse. The 1860 census lists Richard Waterhouse as owning real and personal property totaling $117,300, making him tremendously wealthy for the time. Both Waterhouse sons, Jack and James, served in the First Texas Infantry. Jack transferred from the unit prior to Antietam and appears to have survived the war. James’s death in battle, at age 20, is documented in his service records. The Confederate government later paid Richard Waterhouse $231, the remainder of James’s monthly pay owed him by the army. Tragedy would revisit the Waterhouse’s during the war. In the turmoil of wartime Texas, Richard Waterhouse was murdered and his store robbed on New Year’s Eve, 1863. The case was never solved.

While James Waterhouse’s family remained to mourn his death, Antietam claimed the lives of other young men who are perhaps only remembered in archives. In the 1860 census, Jacob Frank was listed as a 29 year old German immigrant living in Galveston. He was not married and gave his occupation as “Merchant”, although he did not own any property. A young Jewish man seeking opportunity in Texas, Frank joined the First Texas Infantry in the spring of 1862. He likely joined in anticipation of the imminent Conscription Act and to improve his economic and social status. Upon his enlistment in Houston on April 1, 1862, he received a $50 bounty from Confederate recruiting officer Lieutenant W.A. Bedell. On the morning of September 17, Jacob Frank was killed in the cornfield at Antietam. He left no property and no family behind. The American Civil War, staggering in the scope of its destruction, is illuminated through historical documents as the accumulation of thousands of personal tragedies.

You can see Jacob Frank’s $50 bounty certificate here.

All photographs by Alexander Gardner, via Wikimedia Commons

The Civil World: A Global “War Between States”

by Henry A. Wiencek

Can historians reinterpret the American Civil War as a global event? This question inspired Henry Wiencek, a first year doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, to create the website “The Civil World: A Global ‘War Between States.’”

A rendering of the naval battle between in the infamous CSS raider, Alabama, and the Union Keasarge.

Weincek designed the site to provide an “intellectual portal” for historians, students, and general interest readers alike to consult in order to learn about the economic, diplomatic, and social changes ushered in by the Civil War on the international stage. That the Civil War can be interpreted as an international event may come as a surprise to many readers. The conflict, after all, is often taught and thought of as a regional phenomenon: its origins, key players, events, and consequences are traditionally thought to be constrained within U.S. borders. Wiencek’s website tells a different story. Through its diverse collection of maps, newspaper clippings, and recent historical literature, “A Civil World” argues convincingly that the war’s international stage played a significant role in the war’s origins, trajectory, and eventual outcome.

(A Harper’s Weekly cartoon satirized the widespread fear that a post-bellum, pre-Reconstruction America will descend into a “Mexican” state of constant civil war.)

Abraham Lincoln as the “Federal Phoenix” in the British magazine Punch.

University of Texas at Austin – Department of History

(Professor: Jeremi Suri)

The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner (2011)

By Henry Wiencek

Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial examines Abraham Lincoln’s views on American slavery, southern secession and the convergence of events that produced the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although Foner’s narrative relies on speeches, correspondence and newspaper materials many scholars have previously engaged, the author seeks a new “Lincoln in motion” by “tracking the development of his ideas and beliefs.” Rather than framing emancipation as an inevitable outcome, Foner approaches it as a confluence of both ideological and contingent forces: Lincoln’s personal desire to curtail slavery, the military necessity of destroying its economic value and, above all, the President’s determination to preserve the Union.

Beginning with Lincoln’s childhood years in Kentucky, Foner’s sees in the future President a moderate temperament and perpetual anxiety over division—a judicious disposition that helped shape his views on slavery. As a state legislator, Lincoln spoke out against the institution’s divisive nature, anticipating its potential to threaten America’s social and political stability. However, the author is careful not to cast Lincoln as an arbiter of total race equality, revealing instances in which he was all too willing to engage, and manipulate, contemporary racial ideologies. One notable example is the presidential campaign of 1858, during which Lincoln accused the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce, of encouraging racial “amalgamation” by opposing the Fugitive Slave Act. Foner depicts these attitudes as fairly ordinary within the Republican Party of antebellum America, at that moment between “radical abolitionism” and the Democratic Party’s virulent racism.

Foner argues that Lincoln’s instinctive moderation continued to inform his presidency throughout the Civil War. Calming sectarian tensions and reestablishing legal authority across the Union persisted as his chief objectives. During the early years of the war, abolition was not an inherent objective for Lincoln, but rather a bargaining chip to encourage reunification. While he sought to avoid the slavery question on a national level, the President was simultaneously courting border states with offers of compensated emancipation, leading one contemporary writer to note that to “soothe southern wrath…the negro is thrown in as the offering.”

At The Fiery Trial’s conclusion, Foner directly challenges the dominant view of the Emancipation Proclamation, namely that it represented a uniquely progressive decision impelled solely by the moral evil of slavery. Stressing the document’s political and military objectives, Foner depicts the pronouncement as one final effort to entice slaveholders back into the union. Although its language eschewed the gradualism of Lincoln’s earlier views on abolition, the Proclamation’s emancipatory edict was borne out of wartime necessity. In addition to providing fresh soldiers for the Union cause, it effectively gutted the Confederacy’s labor pool and, by extension, larger economic system.

Foner ultimately portrays the Emancipation Proclamation as a pragmatic means of achieving both political and military objectives; and very much in keeping with Lincoln’s inclination to be “propelled” by provisional events rather than moral imperative. Lincoln himself even acknowledged as much: “I claim not to have controlled events…but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” By forgoing the inevitability of emancipation, Foner removes Abraham Lincoln from the idealism of history and recasts the 16th President as a practical administrator, intent on restoring political control over the United States. Emancipation, despite its broader significance in American history, was a means of attaining that outcome.

You may also like:

Our blog post debating the origins of the American Civil War.

George Forgie’s offers a list of his favorite history books about the Civil War.

Kristie Flannery reviews a book about the very visible legacy of the American Civil War.

Professor Jacqueline Jones talks about her latest book Saving Savannah.

Photo credits:

Alexander Hay Ritchie (engraver), F.B. Carpenter (artist), “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet,” 1866. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen (2008)

by Cristina Metz

To say that the US Civil War (1861-65) was tragic and destabilizing is a glaring understatement. Hundreds of thousands died or were wounded in combat, entire cities were destroyed, and afterwards, the large segment of the nation that had seceded had to be reincorporated into the national body, and a new citizen-subject remained to be embraced by post-bellum societies. Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom analyzes the experiences of recently freed blacks, released from the bonds of slavery and plantation life, who sought to create new lives as freedmen and women. Many headed to cities as part of a “mass exodus from slavery.” The city of Memphis, Tennessee became one such “city of refuge” where freedpersons practiced their freshly conferred citizenship. They established new communities, built churches, opened their own schools, and formed African American benevolence societies that sponsored community events. In short, freedpersons in Reconstruction Memphis, as in many other cities, catalyzed changes in the socio-spatial boundaries of urban spaces that had previously been closed to them.

These changes did not come without tensions, which the continued occupation of southern cities by federal troops exacerbated. White society had also undergone transformations in the wake of the Civil War. In Memphis, working-class white immigrants filled a political vacuum left by the outmigration of the city’s antebellum commercial and political elite. These immigrants lived primarily in South Memphis, a region of the city that also happened to be a major destination for recently arriving freedpeople. Not only did the emerging white elites have to contend with a federal force that undermined their hegemony, they also encountered an expanding entrepreneurial and professional Black elite that they viewed as another threat to their political and economic ascendance. These tensions came to a head on Tuesday, May 1, 1866 in what is known as the Memphis Riot.

On this day, black Union soldiers that had been the primary federal force occupying Memphis turned in their weapons as part of their very public discharge. Because of the public nature of their de-armament, Rosen believes that the city police and white civilians chose this day to act. Over the course of three days, white rioters killed 48 African Americans, wounded 70 to 80, and set fire to 91 homes, four black churches, and 12 black schools. The rioters also raped several freedwomen. What started as a clash between black Union soldiers and Memphis police soon came to affect many more people and to symbolize much more.

Recently, historians have found that the Memphis Riot was not entirely spontaneous, random, or anarchic. It was “well-orchestrated” and the assailants made a “clear political expression.” What historians have missed in previous studies, Rosen argues, is the symbolic weight of the sexual assaults that African American women suffered during the riot. In the wake of the riots, a series of Congressional hearings were convened in Memphis with the aim of clarifying what had happened in Memphis that May. Rosen goes back into the records of the congressional investigating committees that took freedpeople’s testimonies in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, as well as the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to uncover the “coherent symbolic order” demonstrated in the riot. This order was the “nexus of racial and gendered meanings…performed and rearticulated through [rape].”

Why did freed people testify? Rosen’s close analysis of the meanings and discourses embedded in their testimony about the rapes suggests that for freedmen and women, testifying was an act intended to claim the right of all citizens “to live free of violence.” Freedom for formerly enslaved persons meant more than “to be free.” It also meant “to be a citizen,” which presupposed the same rights and protections for all citizens (in law and practice, however, citizen typically signified adult male). Women who described acts of rape had to “find the words to narrate and record” what they had witnessed or experienced. Many of the testimonies of freedwomen who the white rioters raped described the men as having acted very nonchalantly before the sexual assault. Rosen interprets this as stemming from a mentality that saw black women as occupying a position so low on the socio-sexual hierarchy that they simply did not have the choice to refuse a sexual act. Several women recalled having asserted their free status to no avail. Quite convincingly, Rosen contends that by ignoring freedwomen’s freedom claims “the assailants thereby asserted, through their words and gestures, that emancipation was of no significance and that black women continued to be different from white women…who were…protected from sexual exploitation by patriarchal family structures and the rights of citizens.”

White northerners viewed the Memphis Riot as evidence of the continued need to take a hardline in the reintegration of former Confederate states. One of the most polemical Reconstruction Acts, which set the terms for the reincorporation of the seceded states, was the 14t Amendment. Southern states debated the issue of universal citizenship rights and their extension to former slaves in a series of Constitutional Conventions. Rosen examines one such convention held in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 1868 to uncover the meanings ascribed to masculinity and femininity that contributed to the “racist terror” that continued unabated from 1865 to 1876 even though Congress and the northern press publicized the riot and the testimonies of freedpeople.

What is so powerful about Rosen’s study is that it shows the hope that freedpersons had for their future, their trust that government institutions would protect their rights as citizens, and the mentalité that “impinged on their ability to claim their rights as citizens.” The subject matter is not light, but Rosen offers a study of the post-bellum period that helps us interpret the violence against African Americans that was to come and it proposes a way of “reading” rape that has relevance to studies of violence against women used as a political weapon, both past and present.

Photo credits:

Alfred R. Waud, “Scenes in Memphis, Tennessee, during the riot,” 1866.
Harper’s Weekly via The Library of Congress

The Freedmen’s Bureau: Work After Emancipation

by Jacqueline Jones

In March 1865, the U. S. Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau for Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to ease the transition between slavery and freedom for 3.5 million newly liberated slaves. The bureau had three main functions—to distribute rations to Southerners who had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War, to establish public schools for black children and adults, and to oversee labor contracts between landowners and black workers.

Alfred R. Waud, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” Harper’s Weekly (July 25, 1868)

Federal officials put great faith in annual labor contracts as a means to resume cotton staple-crop production in the South; get black workers back into the fields; and protect freed men, women and children from abusive employers. Typically, a worker would sign an agreement with an employer on January 1, and promise to work for the full calendar year. On December 31, the landowner would “reckon”—that is, tally up the amount of money the worker owed the employer for credits and supplies advanced to him during the year, the amount of cotton the worker and his family had produced, and the amount of money owed the worker from his share (usually one-third) of the crop. Northern whites in general assumed that these contracts would encourage white planters, many of whom had been slave owners, to treat their workers fairly and to refrain from coercive practices such as whippings and beatings that had been a hallmark of the institution of bondage. However, the bureau was chronically understaffed, and enforcement of labor contracts was difficult, since most bureau agents were stationed in towns, far away from isolated plantations.

The two documents below illustrate some of the limits and unanticipated consequences of these labor contracts. In the first, a letter to a Freedmen’s Bureau official, a Georgia planter named M. C. Fulton complains that the black women on his plantation are staying at home and not working in the fields as they had under slavery. He writes, “Now these women have always been used to working out & it would be far better for them to go to work for reasonable wages & their rations—both in regard to health & in furtherance of their family wellbeing.” This planter, like many others in the postbellum South, feared that the large-scale withdrawal of black women from the cotton fields would hinder the South’s ability to achieve pre-war cotton production levels.

As you read the document, note Fulton’s argument that these women “are as nearly idle as it is possible for them to be.” What are they doing? Are they in fact “idle”? According to Fulton, what is the danger of having these wives dependent upon their husbands for support? Can you think of reasons why these women would not want to work in the fields, and why their husbands would support them in this decision? How does Fulton seek to ingratiate himself with General Tillson? Does Fulton’s argue that only black women should have to work in the fields? Note his last sentence: What is he saying about class relations in the South?

The second document is a labor contract for employees on the South Carolina plantation of John D. Williams. Williams goes over the detailed terms of the agreement, at the outset stating his responsibilities, and then launching into a long list of behaviors he deems unacceptable among his workers. He notes that if any worker violates the terms of the agreement, he (Williams) reserves the right to fire that worker and deprive him of his share of the crop. In most cases a fired worker also lost his home, since most sharecroppers lived on the plantations where they worked. Williams probably assembled his workers together this day (Jan. 1, 1868), and read the contract to them, since a note at the bottom reveals that all of the black “signers” were illiterate. The last part of the contract indicates that black people were not the only southern workers to become caught up in the cycle of debt and dependency that flowed from the sharecropping system. A group of white men also signed this contract; their names are listed separately at the bottom of the document.

What are the stipulations governing the responsibilities and behavior of Williams’s sharecroppers, as outlined in this contract? In what ways are these rules broadly—and vaguely—defined? What power did Williams retain over his workers? What was their recourse, if he treated them badly or failed to live up to his contractual obligations? What is the significance of the fact that seven whites also signed this contract? Although black families were trapped in the sharecropping system in disproportionately large numbers, many white families too became landless after the war, and they too worked as sharecroppers. In fact, by 1930, southern white sharecropping households outnumbered their black counterparts.

These two documents suggest that the federal officials who conceived postwar labor contracts for the freedpeople were either naïve or overly optimistic about the role of the contract as a means to protect the economic interests of the former slaves. The annual contract was not really appropriate for the cultivation of a crop that consumed only a part of the year—April to November—leaving the rest of the year a source of conflict between worker and employer. Black fathers and sons often left the plantation in the winter or early spring to seek wage-work elsewhere, while employers wanted them to remain and work on fences or perform other “off-season” tasks. Many landlords engaged in abusive or fraudulent conduct toward their employees, making it difficult for black families to leave one place and find a better place down the road. And finally, very few sharecroppers were able to purchase even small parcels of land; most received no cash wages for their year’s labor, and many whites refused to sell land to blacks at any price.

DOCUMENTS:

To read more about Reconstruction:

The Freedman’s Bureau Online

Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1980)

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (2005)

John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961-1994)

Charles Lane, The Day Freedom died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (2004)

Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (1997)

Carol Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedman’s Aid Movement (2007)

You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones on Civil War Savannah (NEP, January 2011)
Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work, and Sexuality (NEP, October 2011)
Enslaved Life and Labor in the US (NEP October 2011)

Document Sources:
The Contract: Rosser H. Taylor, “Post-Bellum Southern Rental Contracts,” Agricultural History 17 (1943):122-3
The Fulton letter: M. C. Fulton to Brig. General Davis Tillson, 17 April, 1866, Unregistered Letters Received, Georgia Assistant Commissioner, Record Group 105 (Records of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands), National Archives, Washington, D. C.

Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war

By Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Discovering Dominga (2003), directed by Patricia Flynn

Denese Joy Becker, a cosmotologist living in Iowa, was adopted as a child from Guatemala. Although she remembers nearly nothing about her past, a cousin from her American family realizes that Denese’s age corresponds with the period of la violencia in Guatemala. Denese and her adopted family travel to Guatemala, where she discovers she is Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor from a 1982 Guatemalan massacre in which both her parents were murdered by the Guatemalan military. The documentary recounts how Denese rediscovers her own identity as Dominga—an Achí Maya woman, and the horrendous political context that led to her being put up for adoption in the United States.

When the Mountains Tremble (1983), directed by Pamela Yates

This is a documentary about the armed conflict between the Guatemalan military and one of that nation’s most important armed guerrilla groups, the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), who in the context of this film are primarily indigenous people, the Maya. This documentary was made during the nadir of Guatemala’s 36-year long civil war, and includes remarkable footage from both sides of the conflict. It also includes narration by a very young Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Ki’che’ Mayan activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Virginia Garrard-Burnett recommends related books here in READ.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

by Kristie Flannery

In his introduction to Confederates in the Attic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz recounts the very strange moment when his weekend sleep-in was rudely interrupted by the loud cracking of gunfire.

The noise came from an unexpected Civil War re-enactment being filmed outside of his bedroom window. Horwitz had once been a little boy who would spend hours engrossed in an old, enormous book of Civil War sketches, captivated by images of Yankee and Dixie soldiers engaged in battle. But despite spending a number of years working as a war correspondent, it was this surprise encounter with the “men in grey” that prompted Horwitz to turn the critical gaze of the journalist upon his own and his country’s enduring fascination with the bloody conflict that pitted American against American in 1861-1865.

Confederates in the Attic is an informative and entertaining record of the extended road trip that Horwitz made through the Confederate heartland of the United States to investigate how Americans and southerners in particular continue to remember the war, and to make sense of that strange and enduring Confederate pride. Along the way Hortwitz gets to know a number of interesting people. His exchanges with Civil War enthusiasts from all walks of life spur the narrative along. They include the famous Civil War Historian Shelby Foote, female members of the Daughters of the Confederacy who devote considerable effort to finding Dixie soldiers in family trees, and bands of modern day “hardcore” Civil War re-enactors; factory workers who devote much of their free time and money to re-living as authentically as possible the experiences of nineteenth-century Confederate soldiers. For these rough and ready men who are perhaps the most interesting Horwitz introduces us to, this means sewing their own Civil War uniforms, dressing up to march for miles through wild country in ill-fitting boots, and spending nights in open, near-freezing conditions under thin blankets, spooning together for warmth.

Of course race cannot be left out of a book about the Civil War past or present. Horwitz does not meet one Civil War-obsessed African American in his travels. He concludes through his many conversations with white southerners who cherish the memory of the Confederacy that slavery has been conveniently forgotten in popular conceptions of why the South ceded from the Union and went to war against it. Horwitz provides a sobering account of the role the Civil War plays in modern racial violence; how in 1995 the ostentatious display of the confederate flag could lead one young man to kill another young man, and how the Klan is never really far away.

Horwitz demonstrates that the Civil War is very much still alive in the imaginations of Americans and shapes the way in which many perceive themselves and the world they live in. Confederates in the Attic is a must read for anyone studying the US Civil War and modern US history, or history and memory. It is a wonderful resource for teachers who want to get their students excited about this history and its continued influence on the present. It is truly a delight to read and would make a perfect gift for anyone who enjoys history.

You may also enjoy hearing UT professor of History Jacqueline Jones read from her book “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War.”

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