Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea Caroline Wood Newhall (bio) Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Gordon C. Rhea. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 200. Cloth, $29.95.) Gordon C. Rhea’s latest work on Stephen A. Swails is a welcome and compelling biography of a “long-forgotten central participant” in the “political history [of Kingstree, South Carolina], in the story of African Americans’ participation in the Civil War, and in South Carolina’s Reconstruction experience” (xi–xii). Swails, a Black Pennsylvanian who achieved fame as the first Black commissioned officer in the history of the United States, spent his life after the war dedicated to the intertwined causes of justice, Black equality, and uplift through education and property holding in South Carolina. This quick read serves as an informative microhistory of the tumultuous events that informed Swails’s life from the early 1830s to his death in 1900. As Rhea notes, “Biographies of the nearly 200,000 African Americans who fought in the war are exceedingly rare” (xii), and his research into Swails is a necessary step in bringing greater attention to Swails and to the devastatingly difficult circumstances African Americans faced in the South after the Civil War. Earlier works have examined Swails’s career to some degree, [End Page 266] including Eric Foner’s Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Office-holders during Reconstruction (1996) and William E. Jenkinson III’s Stephen A. Swails: Soldier, Politician, and Lawyer (1998), but no published works have so thoroughly examined Swails’s life from childhood, to his military service, to his tumultuous career in Reconstruction-era South Carolina as a member of the Freedmen’s Bureau and later the state legislature. The book is composed of eleven brief chapters. The first six largely focus on the lead-up to the Civil War and the service of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, as well as background information on reactions to Black soldiers and their experiences in war. Chapters 7 through 11 deal with Swails’s postwar life and career and form the bulk of original research and insights that make this work a significant contribution to the historiography of the period. Rhea relies on the research of Hugh MacDougall, an attorney in Cooperstown, New York, and Jenkinson, an attorney in South Carolina, as well as Swails’s personal papers, Freedmen’s Bureau records, and Swails’s correspondence with South Carolina governors and federal officials. Rhea’s work is a welcome addition to the field wherein the complexities of Reconstruction and the persistent terrorism embittered white supremacists used against African Americans and pro-equality whites receives significant examination. As such, it is in good company with the work of historians such as Cynthia Nicoletti, Bradley Proctor, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Adam Domby, and presents an excellent discussion of South Carolina’s highly contested postwar elections. Rhea’s discussion in chapter 9 of white supremacists’ use of violence to undermine democratic processes is especially rich in detail on the challenges that people like Swails and his family faced, as well as the connections between violent events in South Carolina, the passage of federal legislation such as the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871, and the end of Reconstruction with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in 1877. Rhea illuminates Swails’s involvement in these processes, including a near firefight on the floor of the state legislature in 1876 and a horrifying day in 1878 wherein Red Shirt members of the Democratic Executive Committee nearly lynched Swails in front of one of his children. White residents threatened to execute Swails if he remained in South Carolina, while both President Hayes and Governor Wade Hampton, a former Confederate, proclaimed they could do nothing about it. This violent intimidation and thwarting of justice meant that Swails was forced to live in Washington, D.C., for the next twenty-two years while his family, whom he often visited, remained in Kingstree, South Carolina. One critique of this work is that Swails’s story does not begin in earnest until chapter 7, in part...