Transforming heritage discourse on the landscape at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

For enslaved and newly freed African Americans, attaining freedom and citizenship without health for themselves and their families would have been an empty victory. Even before emancipation, African Americans recognized that control of their bodies was a critical battleground in their struggle for autonomy, and they devised strategies to retain at least some of that control. This book tells the stories of African Americans who fought for access to both medical care and medical education, showing the important relationship between medical practice and political identity. Working closely with antebellum medical journals, planters' diaries, agricultural publications, letters from wounded African American soldiers, WPA narratives, and military and Freedmen's Bureau reports, the author traces African Americans' political acts to secure medical care: their organizing mutual-aid societies, their petitions to the federal government, and, as a last resort, their founding of their own medical schools, hospitals, and professional organizations. She also illuminates work of the earliest generation of black physicians, whose adult lives spanned both slavery and freedom. For African Americans, the author argues, claiming rights as both patients and practitioners was a political and highly charged act in both slavery and emancipation.

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reviewed by: Democracy and the American Civil War: Race and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Kevin Adams and Leonne M. Hudson Francis Curran Democracy and the American Civil War: Race and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Kevin Adams and Leonne M. Hudson. (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2016. Pp. vii, 103.) To commemorate the tragic events that unfolded on its campus on May 4, 1970, Kent State University hosts a biennial (formerly annual) symposium on democracy. A product of the 2012 symposium, organized with the sesquicentennial celebration of the American Civil War in mind, this relatively slender [End Page 76] volume examines the intersection of race and democracy during the Civil War era. It contains essays on a variety of topics—ranging from the abolitionist movement to the Cherokee Nation to the White League of Louisiana—loosely tied together by the two aforementioned themes. Rather than advancing a unifying thesis and making a historiographic contribution, the work collectively aims simply to “remind us of the historical importance of democracy and the complexity of issues of race during the nineteenth century and beyond” (2). The volume is composed of five relatively brief essays. Stanley Harrold leads off with his piece on the abolitionist movement. Partly a work of original research and partly a historiographic review, Harrold’s essay argues that “because of abolitionism’s relationship to the antebellum sectional struggle, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, issues of violence have most affected perceptions of it” (6). He begins by revealing the close relationship between abolitionists and violence, chronicling how abolitionists first embraced violence as a means of creating positive change before and during the war. After the war, however, they later abandoned it for peaceful means when they came to realize that they had failed to accomplish one of their main goals, black equality. Harrold then takes his readers on a historiographic tour, showing how interpretations of the abolitionists changed over time and how the backgrounds and experiences of each school of historians influenced how they portrayed their historical subjects in their writings. John David Smith devotes his essay to an exploration of Lincoln, race, and the United States Colored Troops (USCT). He begins by painting a compelling portrait of Lincoln as a “man of his time and place” concerning racial attitudes, yet one who never wavered in his moral distaste of slavery (27). Smith then charts Lincoln’s intellectual journey, which eventually led him to embrace emancipation and the creation of the USCT. The author contends that by mid-1862 Lincoln understood the political and military value of emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation, therefore, according to Smith, was a calculated move on the part of Lincoln to accomplish his primary goal, preserving the Union. In her essay, Fay Yarbrough examines race and citizenship in the Cherokee Nation following the war. According to Yarbrough, 1866 was a watershed in the history of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees could either embrace their former black slaves as full and equal members of society along with white spouses or “uphold and strengthen older racial divisions in Cherokee society and create a hierarchy of legal citizenship” (48). Unfortunately, as Yarbrough observes, the Cherokees chose the latter, thus imbuing race with immense importance in debates concerning Cherokee citizenship. Kevin Adams’s piece studies the relationship between democracy, race, and the role of the US Army during Reconstruction. Adams argues that, in [End Page 77] occupying the South after the war, the US Army transformed into an “army of democracy” by helping to safeguard the rights of newly freed African Americans and white Republicans (63). Emphasizing the role of the US Army as a posse comitatus, or an “institution of domestic law enforcement” during Reconstruction, the author contends that “these duties put the US Army at the forefront of the civil rights struggle after the Civil War” (4, 64). Adams concludes by asserting that the president still possesses the authority to deploy the military to protect Americans’ civil rights. In the volume’s final essay, Mitchell Snay looks at the White League of Louisiana during the final years of Reconstruction. Uncovering agrarian and populist sentiment in the writings of White Leaguers, the...

Reviewed by: Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image ed. by Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan Tom Burden (bio) Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image. Edited by Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 245. $34.95 cloth) Images, as exemplars of memories, have a chance to move the viewer in a way that words alone cannot. In Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image, twenty-two images are featured alongside essays detailing the fundamental disruption to everyday life caused by the Civil War. Edited by Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan, Visions of Glory explores how ordinary Americans felt about, and made meaning of, the seismic shifts created by the Civil War (p. 4). Essay topics range from discussions of the apprehensions and hopes of African Americans at slavery's potential end, to the role of women as healers and advocates in hospitals. Organized into subsections covering each year of the war, Visions of Glory offers the reader the chance to see how the exigencies of wartime fundamentally altered life in Civil War America. Several of the essays relate to race, with African American agency in resisting slavery a paramount focus. Aston Gonzalez's discussion of Robert Small's escape from bondage by captaining the Confederate steamer Planter, and Benjamin Fagan's discussion of Black literary militancy in opposition to slavery in the newspaper Anglo African, demonstrates that African Americans were anything but passive in the face of slavery. Eric Gardner's discussion of African American resistance to attempts to exclude them from mass meetings commemorating [End Page 647] Abraham Lincoln in San Francisco demonstrates how the western states participated in "white washing" slavery from the war. Hope, anxiety, and a willingness to expedite the end of slavery among free and enslaved African Americans is discussed using newspapers and the writings of prominent abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Through these and a variety of other monographs and primary documentation, Visions of Glory successfully demonstrates that African Americans were actively engaged in redefining the notion of race despite white resistance. Women also experienced firsthand the changes that wartime brought as exemplified by the prevalence of female authored hospital narratives. Jane E Schultz, building on her own research in Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2004), cites the narratives authored by nurses like Julia Dunlap and Emily Bliss Souder to conclude that women became the conduit for telling the national story of suffering. Each essay, though brief, is thoroughly documented, and the footnotes are easy to follow for readers seeking a greater understanding of the topics covered. Concluding with a look at the dichotomous relationship between Jefferson Davis's 1861 inauguration at the Alabama state house, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1965 speech in the same location, Diffley and Fagan argue that the American civil rights movement is the successor to the struggle for equality initiated by the Civil War. By placing race at the center of how Americans understood the changes and opportunities the Civil War brought, Visions of Glory joins its voice to the chorus of scholarship that refutes the "Lost Cause" mythos and brings the true nature of the war to light. Readers will feel how Civil War Americans grappled with the changes around them and be forced to confront the fact that much progress remains to be achieved. [End Page 648] Tom Burden TOM BURDEN is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include Civil War prisoner of war camps and the records of the Freedmen's Bureau. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Reviewed by: An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia Eugene Van Sickle An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. By Marie Tyler-McGraw. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 264.) An African Republic is one of several recent works examining American efforts to colonize Africa in the nineteenth century. Tyler-McGraw contends that the study of the colonization movement provides insight into the meaning of "citizenship in a republic and race as a category" in nineteenth-century America (1). Tyler-McGraw's study adds to the literature by examining Virginia's role in the movement. In her analysis, the state of Virginia played a central part in the colonization movement as well as in the national discourse over the future of bonded labor in the United States. Virginia was central to the movement, Tyler-McGraw claims, because of its location between the North and South (3-4). As an Upper South state, Virginians understood the "interests of both sections" of the country (4); thus, Virginia offered the best hope in resolving questions about the status and future of African descendants in the United States (24-27). The methodology and interpretation of the African colonization movement and the American Colonization Society (ACS) in this work reflects current trends in the scholarship. Relying on vast collections of ACS and [End Page 112] state colonization societies as well as personal correspondence, An African Republic traces the movement's origins in Virginia as it gained momentum to become a national effort. Central to the formation of the ACS were events in Virginia such as Gabriel Prosser's Rebellion and the influence of revolutionary ideals. Slave rebellions combined with revolutionary era notions of citizenship provided the impetus for colonization as a solution to the contradictions exposed by the presence of free and enslaved African Americans. The interpretation places the movement in an antislavery context, suggesting colonization advanced emancipation towards the peaceful extinction of slavery (43). In the following chapters, Tyler-McGraw details the colonization program in Virginia, the reasons both black and white Virginians supported or opposed the movement, and the experience of American settlers who went to Liberia. The focus on Virginia adds to the scholarly discourse, though those specifically interested in West Virginia history may find little to interest them. What distinguishes this work from other studies of colonization in the nineteenth century is the section on women as colonizationists. The majority of studies merely mention women in colonization; Tyler-McGraw dedicates an entire section to their role in the movement. Broadly speaking, women participated in colonization for the same reasons they were prominent in social reform efforts such as temperance and antislavery. Activism in colonization gave women a chance to "engage the world of ideas and actions and to demonstrate their abilities" (86). Most contend that women's participation in reform movements was the only accepted means for them to influence the budding American republic. Tyler-McGraw contends, however, that women involved in African colonization sought to remake their society on a more personal and local level. Female supporters believed that "encouraging respectability, piety, and education in black families would enhance those qualities in their own white families" (84). The text concludes with a discourse on Liberians in Africa and America and how the colonization movement became a footnote to history after the Civil War. American social, political, and cultural influences on Liberia are well documented. Consistent with her goal of demonstrating Virginia's centrality to colonization, Tyler-McGraw focuses on the influence Virginia emigrants had on the development of Liberia, particularly because so many of them became leaders in the African republic. Their presence shaped the Liberian historical narrative in a way similar to that in which Virginians contributed to the American narrative. Despite the obvious connections between Liberia and the United States, the colonization movement has, as [End Page 113] the author points out in the last chapter, become a novelty in American history. Colonization was made moot by the American Civil War and became an afterthought by the end of the nineteenth century. This was due as much to American events as it was to the...

Extract © 2021 Stephen Cushman All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by April Leidig Set in Garamond by Copperline Book Services, Inc. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Cover illustration: Gen. U. S. Grant writing his memoirs, Mount McGregor, June 27, 1885. Courtesy Library of Congress. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cushman, Stephen, 1956– author. Title: The generals’ Civil War : what their memoirs can teach us today / Stephen Cushman. Other titles: Civil War America (Series) Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021009992 | isbn 9781469665016 (cloth ; alk. paper) | isbn 9781469666020 (paperback) | isbn 9781469665023 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Biography as a literary form. | Generals—United States— Biography—History and criticism. | United States—History— Civil War, 1861–1865—Biography.

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Reviewed by: Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era by Laura E. Free Jerrad P. Pacatte Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era. By Laura E. Free. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015, 235 pages, $39.95 Cloth. Historian Laura Free's monograph Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era explores an often overlooked chapter in nineteenth-century United States history: why, in the aftermath of the Civil War, did the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intentionally use the word "male" to articulate the ideal citizen-voter? Beyond contextualizing the gender politics at play in this "unprecedented moment in American constitutional history," effectively excluding women of all races from the vote, Suffrage Reconstructed delves into the writings and speeches of key white female suffragists, many of whom hailed from the Empire State and whose antebellum and post-Civil War agitation helped reshape the political landscape of New York State (5). In the process, Free insightfully unpacks these women's complicated relationships along lines of race and class, exposing how their racial prejudices informed and undergirded their crusades for suffrage in post-Civil War era America. Free identifies the various ways Americans reconstructed—and in the case of women and African Americans, constructed—their access to the ballot box. Wedding American political thought, African American history, and women's suffrage, the book unpacks the ideological underpinnings of the oft-cited [End Page 506] phrase "We the people," a phrase predicated upon suffrage, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Suffrage Reconstructed chronicles the ways the American nation fashioned and refashioned its definition of the ideal citizen-voter from the time of the writing of the Constitution. When the founders signed the Constitution in 1787, virtually no gender pronouns were to be found in the document. In the Early Republic, the words "citizen and voter" were synonymous with white, landowning males over the age of twenty-one. Yet Free reminds her readers that the antebellum system of property-based voting rights was not without its own Achilles heel, particularly in the case of free African American men and landowning women whose presence challenged the hegemony of white male patriarchy north and south. Drawing from New York state convention records, Free describes how in 1821 the Empire State instituted the requirement that male African Americans had to own at least $250 worth of property in order to cast votes. She documents several instances whereby black male New Yorkers satisfied these property requirements, and in turn, voted; all others, i.e., the poor, the landless, free and enslaved African Americans, Native peoples, and women were barred from the franchise. The 1830s and 1840s witnessed the emergence of social and political movements spearheaded by African American women and men and white women in the North to both expand the franchise and abolish the "peculiar institution" of slavery. As the abolitionist fervor gained traction across the Northeast in the early 1830s, several northern states responded to these calls for the enfranchisement of the North's black male citizenry by doubling down on their state's suffrage restrictions. Free revisits the 1846 New York State Constitutional Convention, a meeting where state delegates ultimately rejected a provision to extend equal voting rights to African American men, to prove her point. Citing convention transcripts held in the Empire State, as well as other federal and state documents, Free persuasively argues that African American men justified their enfranchisement because of their gender, whereas white suffragists initially pointed to abstract principles of democracy enshrined in the Constitution (156–61). Although divided by race and gender, white suffragists and African American men shared identical goals: the right to vote and the full recognition of their citizenship. [End Page 507] Free shows that the supposed gender neutrality of the federal Constitution persisted until 1866. Faced with the pressing issues of African American citizenship and congressional representation following the Civil War, white male politicians serving in the Reconstruction-era United States Congress opted to enfranchise all male citizens of the nation. Consequently, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thereby incorporated the word "male" three times in the amendment's second section. Free...

Reviewed by: The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warby Todd W. Wahlstrom John McKiernan-González The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. By Todd W. Wahlstrom. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xxx, 189. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4634-8.) How does southern history shift when Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans share pages and a central narrative with Confederates after the Civil War? Todd W. Wahlstrom’s The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warprovides a clue. The book seeks to anchor Confederate ambitions after the Civil War in a more global and multiethnic cultural frame. To me, this is the abiding tension in the project: Wahlstrom brings southern history to the northern Mexican borderlands, treating individual Confederate merchants and soldiers alongside [End Page 946]Comanche and Kickapoo migrants within a sharp-edged Mexican political context. The tension lies in keeping the southern dimensions of this North American migration prominent but not overwhelming. By bringing the tenuous dimension of the commercial allegiances between erstwhile Confederate elites and conservative landowners and politicians in Tamaulipas and Coahuila into view, Wahlstrom has done Mexicanists a great service. The book mines a variety of personal papers in special collections across the United States that give both day-to-day reports and textured portraits of the way Confederate southerners learned to work with politically conservative Mexican elites. These documented interactions provide a window into the direct military challenges Confederate soldiers faced from local Mexican, Apache, and Kickapoo militias when they sought to take possession of land south of the Nueces River. Many U.S.-based historians portray an easy projection of American power southward; Wahlstrom makes the weak jury-rigging of these projects very clear. In this fashion, he challenges the seamless way classes and popular books proclaim “America in the World.” Wahlstrom has done historians of the West and Native America a large favor. The same papers and documents that illuminate the transnational alliances between conservative elites also make a political project of various Comanche, Kickapoo, and Apache bands clear. They worked to remove white southern and conservative political influence from the Coahuila and Nuevo León borderlands. Wahlstrom’s analysis of the attacks makes it clear that these bands fought French and southern influence and often allied themselves with Mexican popular militias for this purpose. His discussion of African American movement south hints at individuals’ ability to seize the moment when Confederate authority and anti-black conservative political power receded in the regions, using the violence and chaos to escape owners and employers and to make new and perhaps more peaceful lives away from their earlier bonds. Wahlstrom’s account points to the territories opened to peasants and workers by the collapse of the French empire in Mexico, an opening rendered tragic by the rural enclosures that came with mines, railroads, and resurgent haciendas under the Porfiriato. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoadds to the growing argument that Mexico is a key part of the American West. This brings us back to the earlier question: how southern is The Southern Exodus to Mexico?If southern history predates nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, includes Mexican Americans and Comanche leaders by name, and treats the movement of families as a key theme, the chastening of Confederate exiles in northern Mexico by multiple ethnic communities—as Wahlstrom amply demonstrates—should be central to the South. I am not convinced that northern investors eluded similar obstacles in imposing their vision on Mexico, in particular if the time frame for their investments included the Mexican Revolution. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoshould be included in any conversation about the global dimensions of southern history. [End Page 947] John McKiernan-González Texas State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

This paper reports findings from a study that compared older (n=21,≥age 50) and younger (n=96,≤age 49) African Americans' stories (N = 117) of living with HIV/AIDS to determine how they make sense of the experience. The purpose was to: (1) identify and describe the cultural models African Americans use to inform their stories of living with HIV/AIDS, and (2) to compare older and younger adults' HIV stories. To characterize the cultural models engaged in the telling of these HIV stories, we conducted schema analysis. Analyses documented six diverse schemas, ranging from "Stages of Grief", "12 Steps", "Wake Up Call", "Continuity of Life", to "Angry and Fearful", "Shocked and Amazed". Comparison conducted by age group showed older adults more frequently expressed their story of living with HIV as "Stages of Grief" and "Continuity of Life", whereas younger adults expressed their stories as "12 Steps" and "Wake Up Call". Findings contribute by documenting African American stories of living with HIV/AIDS, important heterogeneity in cultural schemas for experiences of living with HIV and differences by age group. These findings may help by identifying the cultural resources as well as challenges experienced with aging while living with HIV/AIDS for African Americans.

Reviewed by: Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles Rebecca K. Shrum Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. By Tiya Miles. Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xx, 154. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2633-8.) It has been fifteen years since the publication of Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small’s Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, D.C., 2002), which documented the absence and trivialization of African American lives and experiences at historic sites across the South. In the intervening years interpretative content about African Americans at southern sites has increased substantially through a relatively new type of tour: the ghost tour. In Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, Tiya Miles explores this phenomenon, focusing on the Sorrel-Weed house in Savannah, Georgia; the Madame Lalaurie house in New Orleans, Louisiana; and Myrtles plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. Miles’s interest in this subject developed on a tour of the Sorrel-Weed house. There she heard a horrible yet beguiling story about a male enslaver and Molly, an enslaved woman, that ended with the suicide of the enslaver’s wife and Molly’s murder. The ghosts of these two women haunted the house, the guide claimed, and an evening tour told these ghost stories. As Miles recounts it, she “could not let the terrible story go,” and so she returned that night to hear the “supernatural story” (p. xvi). At each of these sites, visitors hear claims (often, Miles contends, unfounded) about enslaved African Americans whose ghosts haunt the premises. These stories, Miles argues, allow people to maintain a “safe distance” from history, which both gives listeners more room to imagine the horrors of slavery and enables them to avoid facing the consequences of such accounts by relegating the stories to the realm of “fancy” (p. 7). Although African Americans play significant roles in these tours, Miles concludes that “ghost tourism at historic sites of slavery appropriates African American history in a way that outweighs the value of inclusion” (p. 123). She observes, for example, a troubling pattern in the ghost tours’ reliance on African American religious expression—most often Voodoo but also the beliefs of Gullah and Geechee people—“to increase the level [End Page 240] of threat and titillation” (p. 119). These elements convey nothing about the complexity of the religious beliefs that have played a critical role in constructing black identity in America. Tales from the Haunted South is a page-turner, as Miles describes both the tours and her own apprehensive feelings as she ventured out to historic sites after dark to hear these scary stories. It is appropriate, then, that Miles considers why ghost stories are so beguiling. Her conclusion resonates far beyond sites associated with slavery, observing that “ghosts represent history in a way that feels like magic.... [T]he ghost story is an intensified version of the magic of historical interpretation writ large—the weaving of words, ideas, and events into a pseudo-spell that can spirit us back to days gone by” (p. 125). Finding ways to connect visitors with the past is a noble goal, but historic sites must be mindful of costs that can be associated with these methods. The tours that Miles experienced made clear the problems with how historic sites have incorporated African American history into ghost tourism. At the same time, African American experiences far too often continue to be excluded altogether from other kinds of tours offered at historic sites. In the tradition of Eichstedt and Small’s work, Tales from the Haunted South should serve as a call to historic sites to undertake the hard work of telling complex stories about the past that enable visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of African American lives under slavery. I highly recommend the book to public historians, scholars of slavery and its current-day legacies, and anyone interested in the gothic...

Reviewed by: In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America by Andrew F. Lang Mark Grimsley In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America. By Andrew F. Lang. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 317. $47.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-6706-9.) In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America is an exceptional work and a major addition to the burgeoning literature on the Union military occupation of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Military historians focus overwhelmingly on where the action was: the battlefields on which the war was won and lost. Andrew F. Lang examines where the action was not: the mostly tedious, unromantic, and unsung duty of occupying strategically important sites in the Confederacy. Despite the greater lethality, most Union soldiers preferred service in the field armies. It was the type of service they imagined when they enlisted, and it accorded with their image of a citizen-soldier. Occupation duty, which entailed control of the local population and enforcement of the changing social order, flirtations with illicit trade, and no-holds-barred clashes with guerrillas, did not fit that image. In fact, such duty seemed more suited to a standing army, something that most mid-nineteenth-century Americans still regarded as alien to the nation's ideals. Troops thought assignment to occupation duty made them second-tier soldiers: the top tier belonged to soldiers in the field armies. Partly for that reason, white volunteers rejoiced when the Abraham Lincoln administration authorized the formation of African American units but consigned them largely to garrison duty (something the Emancipation Proclamation made explicit), [End Page 187] thereby freeing up more white men for service in the field. Second-class status was demeaning to white volunteers but seemed wholly appropriate for the U.S. Colored Troops. Widespread was the assumption that black southerners were ideally suited for such fatigue duty because they were accustomed to the climate and to hard labor. Equally widespread was the stubborn conviction that black men would not make good combat soldiers, despite ample evidence to the contrary. But inarguably most widespread was the view that placing African Americans in the perceived second tier of military service affirmed the racial order. African American soldiers understood what white people thought about them, and they naturally resented it, particularly the skepticism about their combat value. They did not, however, see themselves as second-tier soldiers but rather as black men helping midwife the birth of the postemancipation order. Occupation duty did not strike them as work suited to a standing army but rather as that of citizen-soldiers, though they had their own ideas about what the term entailed. African Americans, Lang writes, "embraced the opportunities of occupation, enforcing their conceptions of liberty and challenging planter legitimacy" (pp. 160–61). Occupation afforded them "the opportunity to cleanse the South of its slaveholding character, to eliminate the symbols of white supremacy, and to erase the artifacts of plantation life" (p. 173). With the end of the war, white citizen-soldiers soon went home, leaving the regular army and African American volunteers to occupy the South. Lang argues that the U.S. Colored Troops would have been far more committed to postwar occupation, but the high command, seeking to avoid interracial trouble, consigned the black troops to the West, leaving Reconstruction in the hands of white troops who found the work distasteful. Throughout the book, Lang makes use of republicanism as a major component of his interpretation, but I found this argument neither convincing nor necessary. The book would be just as strong without it. Combining thorough research, lucid writing, and unusually perceptive analysis, In the Wake of War is one of the best books on the Civil War to appear in recent years. Mark Grimsley Ohio State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Perhaps no subject in early American history has undergone as thorough an interpretive overhaul recently as the colonization movement. Once mostly derided as the self-serving ruse of proslavery southerners and the chimerical fantasy of white American racists, a bevy of studies have now taken colonization seriously, providing a multidimensional understanding of the many and long-standing efforts to remove Black Americans from the land of their birth—a goal that, at its core, remains inscrutable to our modern sensibilities.Into this increasingly crowded field steps Sebastian Page, whose Black Resettlement and the American Civil War provides readers with an encyclopedic analysis of the “embarrassment of projects aimed at removing African Americans from the United States” (12). To cast his interpretive net as widely as possible, Page employs the term “resettlement” rather than colonization—the designation normally assigned to white-guided initiatives of Black repatriation to Africa—or emigration—the word used for the periodic, Black-led undertakings to urge at least some of their compatriots to leave the United States. Using resettlement as his lens allows Page to adopt a kaleidoscopic view that is inclusive of a host of removal schemes: from the more conventionally studied destination of Liberia to the far less scrutinized proposal to relocate freed people on territory within the former Confederacy that remained in Union hands in the aftermath of the Civil War.Page's book covers much more ground than its title implies; it begins in the antebellum era and ends with President Ulysses S. Grant's bid at pairing Black emigration with the annexation of the Dominican Republic. The first two chapters contextualize the birth and growth of Black resettlement and include a nuanced and incisive account of several Black-initiated emigration programs prior to the 1860s. But it is really in chapter 3 that the crux of this monograph begins to emerge. Page chronicles the rise of African American resettlement to, as he sees it, a central place on the Republican Party's agenda. Throughout succeeding chapters Page shows the enduring quest to relocate Black Americans outside the bounds of the American republic during the Civil War and immediate postwar years. From Latin America to the British West Indies to the American South, he illustrates how a motley group of reformers, adventurers, charlatans, visionaries, and prominent politicians—including, as Page painstakingly demonstrates, Abraham Lincoln himself—held on far longer and more sincerely to Black resettlement than historians have heretofore recognized. Even amid one of the United States' most celebrated hours of racial progressivism—when the Emancipation Proclamation recast the republic as a nation of universal human liberty and people of color fought by the thousands to preserve the Union—there remained endeavors to expatriate African Americans.Prodigiously researched and written in lively and clever prose, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War achieves the author's objective to “chronicle the full geographic and institutional range of the drive for black resettlement” (1). This book is now the fullest account we have of the persistent efforts to resettle Black Americans during the Civil War era.But Page is less successful in establishing the greater import of the impressive research he has compiled for the history of race, liberty, and African American rights in the nineteenth century. He conflates the staying power of Black resettlement plans with their significance. And he overreaches several times in the text by making claims about colonization's relevance that outstrip his evidence. For example, a handful of Republican advocates of Black resettlement, who hardly represented the mainstream position of their own party on African American citizenship, are, for Page, indicative of the views of “white Americans” as a whole. Ultimately, there is an expansive difference between the endurance of colonization and resettlement proposals, on the one hand, and their centrality, or even relative importance, to the larger national debate over Black freedom, race, and rights, on the other.By nearly the same time period that Black Resettlement and the American Civil War ends its narrative, a critical mass of the white American electorate had endorsed the abolition of slavery, approved of the incorporation of African Americans into the republic as citizens, and signed off on the constitutional right of Black men to suffrage. We all know how the retreat from Reconstruction and the nationalization of white supremacy made a mockery of much of these accomplishments by the Jim Crow years. And yet during the Civil War era they still seem more noteworthy facts than the fanciful and abortive racially exclusionary schemes of a relatively small number of individuals.

Even though, the American Civil War is considered as a seminal event in the history of the United States, there are not many empirical studies examining economic conditions of the Union and the Confederate states. Even though, economic conflict is not considered to be a cause of the Civil War, economic conditions after the war were vastly different in the Union and the Confederate states. The purpose of this study is to analyze the economic outcomes of individuals in the Confederate states and the Union states before and after the American Civil War using census data for 1860 and 1880. Our goal is to analyze the improvements in the occupation income scores. Since the slaves were freed, we also examine whether there was a reduction in the farm households.

This article presents a case of collaborative pedagogy of digital humanities involving a virtual version of historic Salem, North Carolina. “Hidden Town in 3D” is a partnership between Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History, Animation, and Aerospace programs, and Old Salem Museums and Gardens. The object of Hidden Town in 3D is to use digital technologies to recover and represent the stories of the African Americans of Salem. The anticipated outputs for this project are an augmented reality application that can be used on-site at Old Salem, allowing visitors to see slave dwellings where they once stood and a virtual tour using gaming technology of the entire town in the year 1860 with African-American stories and homes reintegrated. Along with enhancing the museum’s visitor experience, these outputs enhance the educational experiences of undergraduate and graduate students through interdisciplinary, project-based learning. Thus, the technical work of modeling, animating, and augmented reality benefits teaching, historical scholarship, and museum offerings.