Bernath reports:

While page 99 captures well the spirit and vision of Confederate nationalists at the start of the war, it does not speak to what Confederates actually did in their attempt to secure southern intellectual independence during the war – the periodicals they launched, the books they published, the poems they wrote, the plays they produced, the critiques they leveled – which is the focus of the bulk of my book. Nor does it mention the related and essential campaign for southern educational independence in which Confederate teachers and educational reformers sought to liberate southern children from the pervasive and, in their view, insidious influences of the North by writing and publishing their own textbooks, training and hiring their own native teachers, and supporting their own native schools.

His full response can be found at The Page 99 Test blog

The journal is being developed as a means of publishing creative work and fresh perspectives on military, political, and legal history of the era. With new research and understanding of the struggles in that period, The Journal of the Civil War Era will be an engaging publication with scholars addressing myriad subjects, such as popular culture, intellectual history, expansionism and the history of African Americans, women, capitalism, and more.

Subscription info:

Members of the Society of Civil War Historians receive a subscription to The Journal of the Civil War Era as a benefit of membership. To join the society, go to http://scwh.la.psu.edu/. For non-SCWH members, individual subscriptions for one year (four issues) are currently being offered at a special pre-publication discount of $36.00/year (10% off the $40.00 regular price). Institutional subscriptions are $60.00/year.

To learn more about advertising, subscribing, or submitting papers to The Journal of the Civil War Era, you can check out the website.

Although the first issue of the quarterly journal isn’t due until March 2011, we have a sneak preview of the Table of Contents:

Volume 1, Number 1
March 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor’s Note

William Blair

Welcome to the New Journal

Articles

Edward L. Ayers and Scott Nesbit

Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South

Melinda Lawson

Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage,
1776-1860

LeeAnn Whites

Forty Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the
Civil War on the Western Border

Review Essay

Douglas R. Egerton

Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a Post-Colonial Era: The Civil War in a Global
Perspective

Book Reviews

Books Received

Professional Notes

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

The Nineteenth-Century U.S. History Job Market, 2000-2009

Current Issue Contents

I want to start by introducing Victoria E. Bynum, author of three books with us, including, most recently, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Discontents. Focusing on regions in three Southern states — North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas – The Long Shadow of the Civil War introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of the South and of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause. [Author photo by Chandler Prude.]

Some excerpts from our interview with Bynum:

Q: What led you to combine three Civil War home fronts, all noted as areas of violent disorder, in one study? Why these three?

A: Most basically, I combined them in order to provide in-depth comparisons of the communities within the same volume. But there’s more to it than that; the communities have important links to one another. The North Carolina Piedmont was the ancestral seedbed of migration into what became Jones County, Mississippi. Later, East Texas attracted many non-slaveholding Mississippi families seeking a less-developed piney woods region.

All three regions exhibited fierce Unionist activity during the Civil War, with brothers fighting in separate deserter bands across state lines in two of the communities. So, combining them in one study provided a wonderful opportunity to identify common characteristics of Southern Unionism, while also showing how different geographic settings influenced the nature of the inner civil wars.

. . .

Q: For thirty years, Newt Knight petitioned the federal government to compensate his ad hoc military band, the Knight Company, for its support of the Union during the Civil War. What do those petitions reveal about the claims process itself, as well as the Knight Band?

A: The transcripts from Newt Knight’s extensive claims files suggest the federal government’s hostility toward claims of Southern Unionism, especially after 1887, as the nation sank into a deep economic depression. That year, Newt renewed efforts begun in 1870 to win compensation.

Several depositions of Jones County men made a strong case for Unionism among the Knight Company. The passage of time, however, doomed Newt’s claim to failure. His Washington, DC, lawyers were unfamiliar with the Jones County uprising, while witnesses’ memories of the war faded over time. Most damaging, crucial evidence presented in Knight’s 1870 petition was misplaced by the government and never presented after 1887. At the same time, an expanding literature that portrayed the white South as having been unified around secession made Northerners all the more suspicious of Southern claims of Unionism.

You can read the full interview here.

Bynum is also a blogger herself over at Renegade South, where she explores “histories of unconventional southerners.” In recent posts, she offers a Memorial Day remembrance for southern veterans who fought for the Union and discusses how race and class have historically shaped mixed-race communities.

Check out her blog, and check back with this one to meet more authors in the future.

cheers,
ellen

Even though Confederate History Month is now coming to a close, from where I sit—in Mississippi, not Virginia—sometimes it seems like it’s perpetually a time for celebrating the Lost Cause.  Perhaps because of my locale, but certainly because I am a historian of the South, there wasn’t much about Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell’s creation of Confederate History Month that caught me by surprise.  Anyone who has lived south of the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River knows that many white southerners are still obsessed by Civil War history and how to remember it.

Of course, for many white southerners, interest in the Confederacy is not academic.  It was with a sense of knowing resignation that I noted, as did so many in the mainstream media and the history blogosphere, that the first version of McDonnell’s proclamation didn’t include any mention of slavery.  My time teaching U.S. history in the deep South has taught me to expect the assertion that southern states seceded in order to defend that noble but vacuous concept: “states’ rights.”  “States’ rights to do what?” goes my tired rejoinder, “To protect their right to own slaves.” I trot out the Declaration of Secession and point to the line where Mississippians admit, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery” and that owning slaves is crucial to the state’s economy because “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.” Sometimes I even think a few students are convinced.

To most people familiar with the way this memory works, especially scholars, McDonnell’s omission of slavery was expected.  To put a fine point on this southern solidarity, my own governor, Haley Barbour, claimed on CNN that criticism of McDonnell’s comments “don’t amount to diddly.”  What a couple decades of scholarship on historical memory has taught us, however, is that this re-writing of the war’s causes does indeed amount to diddly.  More than diddly, in fact.

As I bet the governors would admit if pressed, this year’s celebration of Confederate History Month has more to do with 2010 than with 1861.  Scratch the surface of McDonnell’s statements about secession and you find that the timing is no mystery.  While his stated justification for renewed interest in Confederate Virginia was that the Civil War sesquicentennial is just around the corner, one cannot miss a deeper meaning in his language.  The governor called on Virginians to remember that his state “joined the Confederate States of America in a four-year war between the states for independence.”  His use of the phrase “war between the states” and even “independence” are particularly resonant in a time when polls show Americans are increasingly fearful and distrustful of the federal government.

Re-branding the Confederate experiment as a Jeffersonian struggle against Washington bureaucracy resonates with the Tea Party’s own language and purpose. Not to mention the fact that setting aside the issues of slavery and race when explaining slaveholding Virginians’ secession 150 years ago may resonate with Americans increasingly upset about the politics of our first black president.

Although it would be easy to see McDonnell’s comments as just another backward-looking, nostalgic view of the past that seeks to write off issues of race or to forget slavery entirely, the governor’s incantation of Civil War memory, like other invocations of the Lost Cause over the last nearly 150 years, is much more complicated than simple romanticism. The Lost Cause celebrations of the twentieth century serve as a reminder that in times of economic stress, white Americans are likely to engage in the politics of memory that are equal parts resentment of “other” people (African American, Latino, impoverished, rich, etc.) who appear to be getting more than they deserve, and nostalgia for the times they believe that members of their racial or demographic group had it better.  Calling on a glorious and empowering history can be a very useful tool for assuaging worry and claiming power in the present.

While the Lost Cause may seem to be a southern phenomenon, its appeal is almost universal. Confederate history month itself may seem only appropriate in states that seceded 150 years ago, but the language of states’ rights that Governor McDonnell employed certainly carries appeal beyond the South.  Tea-partiers in Akron, Moline, and Tucson may not share the same Civil War history as the citizens of Virginia, but they can buy into its values.  This is a scenario that has played out many times in the past.

As I write about in Creating A Confederate Kentucky, white Kentuckians who remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War—and most of them did—embraced the Lost Cause in the decades after the sectional conflict as a way of resisting racial change. More broadly, numerous historians have chronicled how late-nineteenth-century white Americans, amidst their racial and economic anxieties, grew nostalgic for the cultural vestiges of the slave South, which represented a pre-industrial and more clearly racially delineated time.  One hundred years after the Lost Cause emerged as a powerful and effective political message, Ronald Reagan proved that it was still a way to reach voters skeptical of the federal government. At a campaign stop Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1980, where only 16 years earlier and a few miles away three Civil Rights workers had been killed by the Klan and local police, he assured not only southerners, but all voters, that he stood for the return of “states’ rights.”

With next year marking both an important campaign season and the 150^th anniversary of secession, there is undoubtedly much more to come.  As conservative candidates across the country continue to employ the states’ rights rhetoric, one wonders if and when they will cut to the chase and start declaring it “American History Month.”

Anne E. Marshall
Mississippi State University
author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (available December 2010)

William Blair, of the Pennsylvania State University, serves as founding editor, and Anthony Kaye, of Penn State, and Aaron-Sheehan Dean, of the University of North Florida, are associate editors. The new journal will take advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.

Besides offering fresh perspectives on military, political, and legal history of the era, articles, essays, and reviews will attend to such topics as slavery and antislavery, labor and capitalism, popular culture and intellectual history, expansionism and empire, as well as Native American, African American, and women’s history. The editors also intend The Journal of the Civil War Era to be a venue for scholars engaged in race, gender, transnational, and the full range of theoretical perspectives that animate historical practice.

The editors are recruiting an editorial board that reflects the wide range of specialties and theoretical engagements that form the scope of this publication. Board members include:

Nancy Bercaw, University of Mississippi
Stephen Berry, University of Georgia
David Blight, Yale University
Peter Carmichael, West Virginia University
Gary Gallagher, University of Virginia
Thavolia Glymph, Duke University
Stephanie McCurry, University of Pennsylvania
Tiya Miles, University of Michigan
Christopher Morris, University of Texas at Arlington
Carol Reardon, the Pennsylvania State University
Seth Rockman, Brown University
Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa

The Journal of the Civil War Era has been adopted by the Society of Civil War Historians, providing a substantial readership base that will provide authors with visibility.

Manuscript submissions and inquiries about guidelines should be sent to William Blair, Editor, The Journal of the Civil War Era (wab120 [at]psu[dot]edu). All material should be double spaced and not exceed 10,000 to 11,000 words, including notes. Electronic submissions are welcome, but please include an attachment that serves as a cover letter with contact information. Queries concerning book reviews should go to Anthony E. Kaye (aek12[at]psu[dot]edu).

The editorial home for the journal is at the Richards Civil War Era Center, The Pennsylvania State University, 108 Weaver Building, University Park, Pa. 16802.

Visit the journal’s website for information on subscribing, advertising, and more.

Likewise, Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, a volume of critical examinations of the most famous speech in American history, adeptly rethinks the work of the man known as “The Great Emancipator.” Edited by William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger, this volume shows how much work came from many people prior to Lincoln’s speech, and how much work was left to do after he delivered it: Border State slaves were still not legally free. Many men and women in Confederate strongholds were still enslaved. The writers included in Lincoln’s Proclamation do great jobs of demythologizing the most mythologized writing of any American president, creating a better understood historical document in the process.

While John Wilkes Booth succeeded in assassinating Abraham Lincoln 145 years ago, these fine scholarly works prove that the man’s impressive and influential words and actions have continued to live on. Take advantage of our new “View Inside” feature for each book, and take today to dive into the mind of President Abraham Lincoln.

–Matt

Well, now you see the reason for this exercise, but do you know the man?  Even if you know by now that I’m talking about John Tyler, it’s probably also true that you really don’t know as much about him as you think you do.  So argues Edward Crapol in John Tyler: The Accidental President.

In this impartial and wide-ranging account, Crapol describes the decisive nature of Tyler’s first days in office, when he changed the way the cabinet was run (from a voting body to an advisory council), swore himself in as president, and promised a renewed separation of the executive and legislative powers.  Though only four years long, 1841-1845, his was a tumultuous presidency that included his expulsion from the Whig party, the annexation of Texas, and the descent toward civil war.

And throughout his presidency and the years that followed, Crapol shows that Tyler proved to be a bold leader who used the malleable executive system to his advantage, and he challenges previous depictions of Tyler as a die-hard advocate of states’ rights, limited government, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

In pursuit of his agenda, Crapol argues, Tyler exploited executive prerogatives and manipulated constitutional requirements in ways that violated his professed allegiance to a strict interpretation of the Constitution. He set precedents that his successors in the White House invoked to create an American empire and expand presidential power.

Daguerreotype of Tyler taken in 1845 by Brady

Crapol also highlights Tyler’s enduring faith in America’s national destiny and his belief that boundless territorial expansion would preserve the Union as a slaveholding republic. When Tyler, a Virginian, opted for secession in 1861, he was stigmatized as America’s “traitor” president for having betrayed the republic he once led.

As Crapol demonstrates, Tyler’s story anticipates the modern imperial presidency in all its power and grandeur, as well as its darker side.  I’ll leave you with his own words, spoken in 1820, as an argument for why we need to know him and his presidency more clearly: “We direct the destinies of a mighty continent. Our resources are unlimited; our means unbounded. If we be true to ourselves, the glory of other nations, in comparison with ours, shall resemble but a tale from the days of chivalry.”

–beth

There was a time when Republicans did celebrate Grant. In a speech delivered in 1900, for example, Theodore Roosevelt maintained that among the past presidents, the trio emerging as the “mightiest among the mighty [were] the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln and Grant.” Roosevelt’s deeply appreciative comments reflected the widespread respect of his generation for Grant, and for good reason.

Yes, Grant’s administration was marred by corruption and controversy. But Grant himself remained steadfast in his belief that the goals of the war — unity and freedom — should be preserved even as the country’s enthusiasm for biracial reconstruction of the South faded away.

He proudly signed off on the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, describing the law enabling black suffrage as “a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.”

Grant’s final task as president hearkened back to his first and perhaps most important achievement: to ensure a stable transition, this time in the disputed election of 1876. He succeeded, and the country reconciled for good.

Read the full text of Waugh’s full piece: Ulysses S. Grant earned his $50 bill.

For March, we’re celebrating National Women’s History Month at the Press, and I’ll be highlighting some fantastic new books we’re publishing that focus on women in America. We have titles spanning this history of women in the United States, from before the Revolution through a book profiling women of the past decade.

Women at War

Today’s post centers on two new books from UNC Press that focus on women at war in America. Published in September, Judith Giesberg’s Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front explores how both black and white women assumed increased social and political roles in the Union while their husbands and fathers fought the Confederacy. Giesberg includes striking details about how even with the return of the soldiers, these new gender roles remained.

150 years after the stories found in Giesberg’s Army at Home, Laura Browder and Sascha Pflaeging have put together this arresting new collecting of images and oral histories of women returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, titled When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans. Along with 48 of Pflaeging’s portraits, Browder presents the oral histories that run across the emotional spectrum, providing the reader with a sense of just what it means to be a woman on the front lines of both a physical war and culture war.

Check back here for more posts in March about the great coverage of women’s history we have at UNC Press. Next week, I’ll provide a post on two new titles about the role of books in the lives of American women.

–matt

And a third reason is that most people–and until recently myself included–do not know the connection between Ruggles and Douglass, or why it even matters.

Here’s the short version, necessarily missing many details: Ruggles (1810-1849) was an African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who secured liberty for more than six hundred former bond people, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass. Ruggles received Douglass–at the time, Bailey–on the docks of New York City on September 3, 1838.   Here’s the story of the days that followed their meeting, as told by Hodges in the opening pages of his book:

“Deep in distress, Bailey anxiously pondered his future. Luckily, Ruggles searched for the forlorn fugitive and took him home, where Bailey joined several other fugitives from slavery. At Ruggles’s house at 36 Lispenard Street, Bailey had long talks into the night with Ruggles about abolitionism. Ruggles advised Bailey that New York was unsafe. The fugitive from bondage indicated a desire to go to Canada, but Ruggles favored New England, where a fugitive could find work as a caulker or go seafaring.

In addition to advice on work and safety, Ruggles helped Bailey forge a new identity. To celebrate his freedom and to throw off potential slaver catchers. . . Bailey adopted the name of Frederick Johnson.”

In the following weeks, Ruggles helped reunite Johnson (formerly Bailey, and soon to be Douglass) with his fiancee, and held their wedding at his home. He moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and found work as a caulker, just as Ruggles suggested.  And it was in New Bedford that he chose the name Douglass, with Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” as inspiration.

Hodges writes also of how Douglass remembered Ruggles:

“He had learned that Ruggles was a man of action as well as of words and feeling. During the days that Ruggles sheltered Douglass, Ruggles was beaten and thrown into jail for his part in the Darg case, a highly complex slave rescue. Upon his release, Ruggles quickly resumed antislavery activism. Douglass observed that, “though watched and hemmed in on every side, [Ruggles] seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.” Ruggles was the kind of black man that Douglass wanted to emulate.”

In addition to Douglass, Ruggles mentored Sojourner Truth and William Cooper Nell in the skills of antislavery activism. As a founder of the New York Committee of Vigilance, he advocated a “practical abolitionism” that included civil disobedience and self-defense in order to preserve the rights of self-emancipated enslaved people and to protect free blacks from kidnappers who would sell them into slavery in the South.

In New York, Ruggles moved among the highest ranks of state leaders and spoke up for common black New Yorkers. His work on the Committee of Vigilance inspired many upstate New York and New England whites, who allied with him to form a network that became the Underground Railroad.  That bears repeating:  he helped form the Underground Railroad, and yet for most students of the time, his name is not recognizable.  With this book, Hodges works to change that.

– Beth

P.S.  Late breaking news!  Check out the New York Times article about the New York Historical Society event, and about Ruggles’s life.  It’s here.

Supporters of the Confederate States of America regarded themselves as the true progenitors of the republic and their secession from the Union as a return to the world of limited national government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. In his Inaugural Address of February 1861 delivered in Montgomery, Alabama, President Jefferson Davis declared: “We have assembled to usher into existence the Permanent Government of the Confederate States. Through this instrumentality, under the favor of Divine Providence, we hope to perpetuate the principles of our revolutionary fathers. . . . Therefore we are in arms to renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.” Thus from the southern perspective, the Union was in peril, but not from the secessionists; rather, the danger came from a big government in Washington that had subverted the original Union’s emphasis on states’ rights into a northern tyranny. Southerners sought to unseat the northern power brokers who had devised an oppressive central government that had for too long trampled on the minority South by violating its right to managing its own affairs, whether tariffs, internal improvements, or slavery. The Union, as southerners saw it, had become an overly centralized governing mechanism run by a repressive northern majority. The agreement underlying the Philadelphia compact of 1787 had been broken; secession was the only remedy.

Shortly after the Civil War erupted in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asserted that his central objective was to preserve the Union based on a strong federal government and created by the Founding Fathers. Secession therefore posed its most severe challenge because the South’s attempt to stand on its own would destroy that Union. “The right of revolution,” he wrote, “is never a legal right. The very term implies the breaking, and not the abiding by, organic law. At most, it is a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause.” Otherwise, revolution is “simply a wicked exercise of physical power.” In his Inaugural Address of March 1861, he declared, “I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.” No government ever included “a provision in its organic law for its own termination.” Secession was “the essence of anarchy.”

On many levels Davis and Lincoln waged a war for the very survival of the republic as each president defined the vision of the Founding Fathers. Well known were Davis’s advantages in military leadership from the beginning of the war; also well known was Lincoln’s frustrating search for a general who could rally a massive yet ineptly led war machine to victory. Lesser known were the two presidents’ struggles on an international level—Davis’s efforts to win diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy and hence the right to negotiate military and commercial treaties, and Lincoln’s attempts to ward off a foreign intervention in the war that could have led to southern alliances undermining the Union. Whereas Davis sought to maintain the status quo—a southern civilization built on slavery and dependent on the Constitution’s guarantees of property—Lincoln soon tried to construct an improved America based on ending slavery and adhering to the natural rights doctrine that underlay the Declaration of Independence. Davis considered the war a struggle for liberty, which he defined as the absence of governmental interference in state, local, and personal affairs—including the right to own slaves. In contrast, Lincoln came to regard the war as the chief means for forming a more perfect Union emanating from a new birth of freedom that fellow white northerners interpreted as the political and economic freedoms enjoyed under the Constitution but that he expanded to include the death of slavery and the Old South.

Davis had such a legalistic mind that he thought the European powers relied on international law only when it served their self-interest; Lincoln was highly pragmatic, knowing he had to convince the foreign governments that it was not in their best interest to intervene in America’s affairs. Davis appealed to Europe to acknowledge southern independence as a righteous cause and welcome the Confederacy into the community of nations; Lincoln insisted that the conflict in America was a purely domestic concern and warned that any outside interference meant war with the Union.

Both sets of arguments were morally and legally defensible and thereby right, making the two opposing leaders’ positions irreconcilable and, combined with the vendetta-like infighting that often comes in a familial contest, ensuring a massive bloodletting that would stop only when both sides were exhausted.

Excerpted from: Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 9-11.

Click on any cover image to go to the bookpage on the Press website, where you can get more information and place an order.