Louisiana State University Press Research Articles

Calvo, Zamora, Jesus, Maria (eds.) (2021) Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LU), 260 pp. £31.60 hbk., £12.99 ebk.

Calvo, Zamora, Jesus, Maria (eds.) (2021) Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LU), 260 pp. £31.60 hbk., £12.99 ebk.

Gin, Jesus, & Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South. By Brendan J. J. Payne. Making the Modern South Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. xii + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth; $19.95 ebook.

Gin, Jesus, & Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and Religious Politics in the South. By Brendan J. J. Payne. Making the Modern South Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. xii + 273 pp. $45.00 cloth; $19.95 ebook.

Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France , David G. Haglund , Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2023, xv -294 p.

Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France , David G. Haglund , Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2023, xv -294 p.

H aglund David G., Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France , Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2023, 294 pages

H aglund David G., Sister Republics: Security Relations between America and France , Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2023, 294 pages

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

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...

Animal Histories of the Civil War Era ed. by Earl J. Hess

Reviewed by: Animal Histories of the Civil War Era ed. by Earl J. Hess Marcy S. Sacks (bio) Animal Histories of the Civil War Era. Edited by Earl J. Hess. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0807176917. 288 pp., cloth, $45.00. In his provocative contribution about the late nineteenth century sectional debate over the National Zoo, Daniel Vandersommers notes that laughter often erupted on the floor of the US House of Representatives when members considered whether to fund the proposed park. Animals, Vandersommers explains, “were not considered subjects worthy of discussion” and therefore provoked disparaging outbursts when they were mentioned in the chamber (235). Fortunately for us, historians are increasingly taking a different view of animals, as Earl J. Hess’s wonderful edited volume, Animal Histories of the Civil War, ably highlights. Indeed, the anthology answers the call that Vandersommers makes for scholars to “think about [animals] as parts of larger systems while we simultaneously consider them as individual beings” (236). The thirteen entries of this volume collectively do just that. Spanning a chronology from the antebellum era into the early twentieth century (though mostly focused on the Civil War period), the essays explore the importance of animals both as omnipresent living beings and as creatures instrumental in shaping the human experience. While Hess asserts that the “fundamental objective of the book is to raise the awareness of Civil War scholars to the presence of nonhuman animals in the story of the war,” the contributors valuably do far more than this, demonstrating how profoundly influenced humans are by other living beings (2). Many of the essays feature ways people exploit animals to fulfill myriad needs. Antebellum Southern whites relied on dogs and camels for their utility in buttressing white supremacy and cotton profits. Lorien Foote demonstrates the importance of bloodhounds to the creation of a carceral landscape that ensnared Black people within the system of slavery. And in telling a story about the introduction of camels to the American South in the decade prior to the Civil War, Michael Woods exposes proslavery advocates’ dreams of creating an expansive hemispheric empire. Humans’ dependence on animals uncovered vulnerabilities during the war, as some of the collection’s most valuable chapters highlight. Abraham Gibson’s work on warhorses makes the surprising connection between environmental conditions in the South and challenges to Confederate military capabilities. A dearth of high-nutrient pastureland in much of the Cotton Kingdom meant that many [End Page 92] Southerners imported horses from west of the Appalachians. As the war dragged on, the Confederacy found itself at a substantial equine disadvantage, made worse by the further degradation of forage land caused by the conflict itself. By 1865, Gibson tells us, “Grant had more horses than his opponent had soldiers” (94). This imbalance strategically benefitted the US army, helping to explain the war’s eventual outcome. And in perhaps the collection’s standout work, for the way it obligates us to reimagine numerous aspects of Southern ideology and the war, Jason Phillips analyzes hogs not only as an exploitable food source but for their connection to “slavery, western expansion, sectionalism, secession, Civil War, emancipation, memorialization, and Reconstruction” (135–36). Emblematic of cultural and economic differences between the North and South, hogs were inscribed with sectional symbolism. Expecting them to fend for themselves, Southerners released hogs onto the open commons. The booming population offered proof, Southerners insisted, of their society’s harmony and superiority. Northerners, however, eschewed the fierce independence represented by such reliance on the land and instead penned their animals. Trusting in the public and the government, they viewed their own livestock husbandry as demonstrative of Northern ingenuity and enterprise. These differences, Phillips informs us, had real-world consequences in some unexpected ways. The dependence on open commons in the South contributed to expansionist pressure—the root of the sectional conflict altogether. Not only were Southerners seeking more cotton land as they looked westward, but they also needed pastureland. And while the South boasted more swine per capita at the start of the war, the North raised fatter hogs and already had systems in place for packaging the meat. The United States was therefore more able...

Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery ed. by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby

Reviewed by: Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery ed. by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby Nora Doyle (bio) Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. Edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 240. Cloth, $45.00.) Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery continues the conversations begun during a symposium on medicine and healing in the age of slavery that took place at Rice University in 2018. The essays in this collection center the knowledge and experiences of enslaved people in a range of Atlantic world contexts, while also revealing how state and medical authorities used medical knowledge and practice to shape ideas about race and to assert control over enslaved bodies. Spanning the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century and considering such locations as West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, the essays offer an exciting glimpse into new directions in the history of slavery and medicine. Inspired by the work of such scholars as Sharla Fett, whose epilogue concludes the volume, this collection decenters Western medical traditions [End Page 243] and emphasizes the ways in which healing practices were embedded in the social dynamics of slave societies and communities of enslaved people. There were many traditions of health and healing that defined the Atlantic world between 1500 and 1900, and often these traditions contained unexpected similarities. The transmission and exchange of knowledge and practice created new contexts of cooperation and contestation, contributed to the formation of new identities and new concepts of race, and allowed enslaved people to develop creative strategies of self-healing. The volume is organized thematically around the concepts of knowledge, experience, and profession, further reinforcing the ways in which histories of healing traverse more traditional boundaries of geography and periodization. The three essays that constitute the first section, on knowledge, explore healing traditions that were indigenous to Africa and the Americas and the ways these traditions persisted and evolved in the face of colonization and slavery. These essays highlight the roles that Africans and Native Americans played as healers and purveyors of knowledge. Mary E. Hicks’s essay centers the practices of Black barbers and Brazilian sangradores, who drew on West African healing traditions to develop “adaptive strategies of bodily restoration” (64). The practice of bloodletting was particularly significant in that it drew on West African traditions, but also shared important similarities with European healing practices, giving the practitioners significant credibility in the eyes of European colonial and medical authorities. This relationship changed over time, however, and by the late eighteenth century, European physicians began to insist on the superiority of their medical knowledge and to minimize other healing traditions as superstition rather than science. The essays in this section highlight the diverse traditions of knowledge that sometimes converged and sometimes competed in the Atlantic world, giving rise to distinctive practices and social relations of healing. The three essays in the second part of the volume focus on enslaved people’s experiences of illness and healing and highlight the contested nature of the medical archive. Beginning with a meditation on methodology by Deirdre Cooper Owens, the essays point to new interpretations and new approaches that recover the lived experiences of enslaved people and the strategies they used to control their own health and medical care. Elise A. Mitchell’s essay reexamines cases of feigned illness among enslaved women to recover their very real experiences of illness and injury. While previous scholars have interpreted accusations of feigned illness as instances of resistance, Mitchell argues that enslaved women in particular were often falsely accused of feigning illness because of slaveholders’ [End Page 244] racialized and gendered beliefs about deception and suffering. She suggests that these cases were defined by real suffering (and sometimes healing), and she calls on scholars to focus on “the crucial quotidian work of survival, self-reliance, and self-advocacy that happened in the thick of slavery” (112). The essays in this section emphasize the emotional and physical experiences of enslaved people and, as Brandi M. Waters writes, explore the many strategies enslaved people used to “pursue healing on their own...

Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 by Adam Fairclough

Reviewed by: Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876 by Adam Fairclough John C. Rodrigue (bio) Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Elections of 1876. By Adam Fairclough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 311. Cloth, $45.00.) The disputed presidential election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877, which decided the outcome and ended Reconstruction, have generated a [End Page 268] wealth of historical scholarship. In this exhaustively researched, engagingly written, and brilliantly executed study, Adam Fairclough makes a welcome addition to this literature, focusing on the Louisiana dimension of this extraordinarily complicated affair. Fairclough’s title refers to Louisiana Republicans, who, although themselves no saints, were “bulldozed” by Democratic intimidation, violence, and fraud during the campaign and election and then subsequently “betrayed” by Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they had risked their lives to put into the presidency only to be abandoned with the collapse of Reconstruction. As scholars have long known, the election was a sordid affair, with virtually no heroes. “The Democrats stole the election,” as was said at the time, “and the Republicans stole it back.” Yet the election that Republicans stole back was the presidential one, and the theft was predicated on betraying Republicans in Louisiana and South Carolina. While Fairclough offers an overview of the 1876 presidential and state elections in Louisiana, the book centers on the workings of the Potter Committee, the congressional committee chaired by New York House Democrat Clarkson N. Potter. The committee was charged in 1878 with investigating only certain aspects of the 1876 election: in effect, to disprove Republican allegations of electoral fraud in Louisiana and Florida while precluding any substantive inquiry into Democratic irregularities. The goal was not necessarily to remove Hayes from office, though some Democrats still clung to that delusion, but rather to discredit further the Hayes presidency and to strengthen the prospects of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden for another presidential run in 1880. Yet, as many Democrats feared, relitigating the 1876 election in any way would potentially open a Pandora’s box, given the whole history of Radical Reconstruction in general and of the 1876 election in particular. If Fairclough’s analysis focuses on the Potter Committee, the committee’s investigation would ultimately hinge on two key questions. The first was the allegation by “Republican” (in name only) election official James E. Anderson that longtime congressman, and Hayes’s secretary of the treasury, John Sherman had promised in writing patronage jobs to Anderson and his confederates for their roles in securing Louisiana’s disputed electoral votes for Hayes. The so-called Sherman letter most likely never existed, Fairclough concludes, although it generated no shortage of “copies” or of theories as to its origins and ultimate fate. The quid pro quo implicit in the Sherman letter may have discredited Republicans, but the discovery of the “cipher dispatches” that Tilden’s agents wrote during the tumultuous aftermath of the 1876 election was a political catastrophe for Democrats. Fairclough traces the circumstances surrounding the [End Page 269] creation and discovery of these dispatches and the breaking of the code that allowed for their translation and publication. The dispatches clearly proved that some of Tilden’s closest confidantes were involved in attempts to bribe presidential electors in Louisiana and Florida. Strictly speaking, the dispatches lay beyond the Potter Committee’s writ, but public opinion forced the committee to look into them, and thus to address the second key question: whether Tilden knew of these efforts. Tilden eventually testified before the committee and categorically disavowed any knowledge of the dispatches’ contents. But his denials were so implausible, even some Democrats had to concede, as to destroy what little was left of his political career. Indeed, as Fairclough argues, the Potter Committee could not have backfired more badly for Democrats, paving the way for the 1880 presidential victory of James Garfield, who had been deeply involved in the shenanigans of 1876–77. Fairclough meticulously disentangles the complicated circumstances surrounding the 1876 elections in Louisiana and their resolution, and he details the equally byzantine maneuverings of the Potter Committee in conducting its investigation. He offers lucid descriptions that bring to life the many colorful characters involved...

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll Diane Miller Sommerville (bio) Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. Dillon J. Carroll. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0807169667. 368 pp., cloth, $45.00. [End Page 88] Eric T. Dean Jr. broke new ground in 1997 when he suggested in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that Civil War soldiers exhibited symptoms he suspected were related to war trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Historians, however, resisted taking on the psychological impact of the Civil War on its participants for about two decades. In recent years, though, studies on the war’s impact on individual soldiers and their families have proliferated. The convergence of social history, history of medicine, gender and family history, and military history has yielded valuable works on Civil War soldiers and their families that expose the horrific and damaging consequences of war on the psyches of combatants. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers is an important addition to this literature. Carroll’s ambitious agenda is to examine “how the Civil War damaged the minds of its participants” (10). In eleven chapters, he touches on the experience of soldiering, institutional care of soldiers and veterans, the impact of war on Black soldiers as well as US and Confederate veterans and their families, and the rise of the field of neurology. Throughout the book, Carroll identifies myriad ways the Civil War affected the mental health of its participants. He makes good use of both published and archival sources: letters, diaries, memoirs, asylum records, and pension applications. And he is exceedingly cautious, as he should be, about overstating links between war-generated trauma, like PTSD, and aberrant behaviors of Civil War soldiers and veterans. Carroll’s thesis, that participants in the Civil War suffered psychological damage, mirrors those of Dean and authors of recent studies including this reviewer, Jeffrey McClurken, and David Silkenat (Diane Miller Sommerville, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018]; Jeffrey W. McClurken, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009] and David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011]). Carroll’s original intervention is to consider not merely those who suffered from psychological distress but those who did not. He raises a new question: what of those who emerged from war with their minds intact? Carroll identifies coping mechanisms, like religion, humor, and camaraderie that, he believes, allowed some soldiers to resist succumbing to psychic disorders. Whether he can then claim that Civil War soldiers “were not as psychologically traumatized as some historians believe,” however, remains an open question, perhaps even unanswerable (5). Scholars will no doubt grouse about the skimpy coverage of relevant historiography and Carroll’s reluctance to explicitly situate his own work in a number [End Page 89] of these debates. He makes clear his work rejects the “triumphalist narrative” and aligns with the so-called dark turn in Civil War literature. But he misses important opportunities to inform his readers about myriad conversations historians have engaged in about many of the subjects he raises. For instance, he might have more effectively used the debate about death and the Civil War spawned by Mark Schantz and Drew Gilpin Faust to elevate his own argument about war trauma and death (Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008]; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]). Carroll has ample goods to challenge Schantz’s assertion that Civil War soldiers were insulated from the shock of death because it was so prevalent and familiar in the nineteenth century and to instead fall into the Faust camp, which asserts that...

Rebel Salvation: Pardon and Amnesty of Confederates in Tennessee by Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius

Reviewed by: Rebel Salvation: Pardon and Amnesty of Confederates in Tennessee by Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius Heather Carlquist Walser (bio) Rebel Salvation: Pardon and Amnesty of Confederates in Tennessee. Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0807174906. 368 pp., cloth, 50.00. On May 29, 1865, Andrew Johnson announced his policy of pardon and amnesty toward former Confederates as one of the first steps in Reconstruction and perhaps, more obviously, reconciliation after the Civil War. Historians have often overlooked this crucial but “improvised and unpredictable process” in Reconstruction, and Kathleen Zebley Liulevicius’s detailed study of pardons in Tennessee works to correct this oversight and demonstrate the importance of reconsidering the role of amnesty in the policies and outcomes of Reconstruction (1). Focused on the argument that because the “Civil War had been a people’s war” it required “a people’s peace,” Rebel Salvation examines the crucial role local individuals and communities played in establishing and defining peace in Tennessee. Instead of considering Reconstruction as a top-down policy, Liulevicius looks at how reconciliation, particularly in the form of applying for and granting pardons, “began at the community and county stage and percolated up to the state and national level” (46). After Johnson offered his first proclamation of pardon and amnesty in May 1865, the majority of white Southerners found themselves quickly reintegrated into the body politic as long as they took and abided by an oath of allegiance. With this initial offering of amnesty, Johnson specifically excluded fourteen different classes of people and required them to apply directly for a presidential pardon. While he promised “clemency will be liberally extended,” he failed to establish a clear procedure for applications (3). The absence of defined guidelines allowed local communities to “invent and elaborate conventions that spread virally through the entire pardon process, shaping it in unexpected ways” (3). Through a detailed analysis of over 630 pardon applications from Tennessee, Liulevicius demonstrates how individuals, communities, and state officials determined who should be forgiven for their actions during the war and its consequences for federal Reconstruction policies. Each chapter of Rebel Salvation focuses on the applications related to one of the specific exceptions Johnson listed, including former Confederate office holders, judges who abandoned the bench to join the South, former Confederate military officials of a certain rank and higher, former US congressmen; military men [End Page 99] who either resigned their commissions or had been educated at military academies prior to the Civil War; those who mistreated Union prisoners; civilians who moved south from occupied areas; individuals with indictments for treason, conspiracy, or aid and comfort to the enemy; and those with taxable property over $20,000 in 1860. The chapters highlight many of the recurring themes in the Confederates’ pardon applications: claims of reluctant support for the Confederacy, the desire to protect family members and preserve their wealth, the miniscule and largely peaceful role played in the war, and a familiarity or existing relationship with Johnson. Particularly as they repeatedly appear in petitions in very different classes of exceptions, the author explains clearly how and why petitioners relied on these familiar stories in an effort to be granted a pardon. But the most important theme, Liulevicius argues, is the communal nature of the war and, therefore, the pardon process. As friends and acquaintances offered their endorsements of petitioners in letters of recommendation included with pardon applications, they demonstrated how communities grappled with understandings of loyalty and reconciliation. Despite Johnson’s plan for amnesty and pardon not requiring letters of recommendation, “the process organically evolved and broadened to include gathering signatures and testimonials from neighbors” and the application and approval process became one “marked by nonstop communal attentiveness to its development and outcomes” (255). These examples of how “encounters with given realities” in a local context shaped presidential policies reveal how quickly neighbors and communities were ready to reintegrate former Confederates after the war and ultimately, helped doom Reconstruction (24). The emphasis on the communal nature of the pardon process is not Rebel Salvation’s only contribution to the scholarship on Reconstruction and amnesty. As Liulevicius notes, previous scholarship has offered important insights into the process, but...

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

Reviewed by: Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea J. Brent Morris (bio) Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Gordon C. Rhea. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780-807176269. 200 pp., cloth, $29.95. Reconstruction was hotly contested even as the United States took the first steps to rebuild—physically and ideologically—in the midst of the Civil War. The historical memory of the era has been just as fiercely debated. In the middle of both fights has been the subject of Gordon C. Rhea’s newest biography Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction. In his own lifetime, Swails became one of the most prominent politicians and community leaders in South Carolina, yet he was largely forgotten after the South’s counter-revolutionary “Redemption” of the late nineteenth century. His name and life story have occasionally resurfaced as the historiography of the era continues to move away from the Dunning school, and Rhea’s biography now serves as the [End Page 101] most powerful reminder yet of the part played by Stephen A. Swails in America’s “new birth of freedom.” After a brief preface, Rhea introduces his subject to his readers with a precis of Swails’s early life. He then follows his subject through his service in the Civil War. Swails was among the first northern African Americans to volunteer to serve in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment and fought with distinction in that unit for the duration of the Civil War. He was quickly promoted to the regiment’s highest noncommissioned rank—first sergeant, the highest then available to an African American soldier—and eventually became the first African American in a combat role to be appointed a commissioned officer in the US Army. After the war, Swails worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, where he built a reputation as a strong and effective spokesman for both Black rights and fairness and efficiency when dealing with whites in his district. This skillset helped launch him into the forefront of Reconstruction politics in the Palmetto State and earned him the reputation as the “political boss” of Williamsburg District. Swails represented Williamsburg District at the 1867 constitutional convention, where he served on two prominent committees, chairing one. Once the new state constitution was in place, Swails was elected to represent his county in the state senate (an office he held for eight years) as well as concurrently serve as county auditor. In May 1868, he represented South Carolina at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, where Ulysses S. Grant was nominated for the presidency. And when South Carolina cast its electoral votes for Grant, Swails was one of the state’s official electors (a role he would assume again in 1872). He was also elected the mayor of Kingstree and served as Republican Party chairman for the South Carolina First Congressional District, a state Republican executive committeeman, Williamsburg County’s representative to the state party convention, agent for the state land commission, commander of the state militia, and trustee of South Carolina College. Rhea attributes Swails’s success to several factors. As a Freedmen’s Bureau agent, he had developed close relationships with his county’s Black majority. His responsiveness to issues of housing, employment, and disputes over labor contracts had proven him an advocate for the Black voters of his constituency, and few voters would have not been aware of his role in coordinating the distribution of rations in the times of greatest need. He was a decorated war hero who had shed blood for his country and for the freedom of formerly enslaved African Americans, and his status as the first African American commissioned as an officer in the US Army gave him an unmatched level of prestige in the community. Formally educated, intelligent, Swails communicated effectively with constituents Black and white. Indeed, he also openly courted the white vote in [End Page 102] Williamsburg County and brought together an uncommon multiracial coalition of politicians from the Republican and Democratic Parties to facilitate the efficient governance of his constituency. Like...

Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher

Reviewed by: Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher Kenneth W. Noe (bio) Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers. By John M. Sacher. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. Cloth, $45.00.) Alas the poor conscript, we hardly know him. Forced into Civil War armies against his will, sometimes at bayonet point, he suffered and sometimes died for a cause that was never fully his. Succeeding generations shut their eyes to him in their urgency to depict every soldier-ancestor as a heroic volunteer worthy of veneration. In the avalanche of scholarly books about the Civil War soldier experience that ensued in the 1980s, historians ignore him too. Despite conventional estimates that perhaps 4 percent of Federal soldiers and 10 percent of Confederate soldiers or more were draftees, scholars hasten past the conscript’s embarrassing shade in favor of those eager boys of 1861. Often illiterate or nearly so, the conscript, to be sure, did himself no favors by leaving many fewer traditional sources for later students. Small surprise that Albert Burton Moore’s standard examination of conscription appeared almost a century ago.1 Like Moore’s venerable volume, John M. Sacher’s new study is more concerned with the policy of conscription and its top-down implementation than the draftees themselves. Unlike the older book, Sacher’s firmly rejects the familiar argument that conscription undermined the Confederacy from within. Embracing an “externalist” interpretation of Confederate defeat, the author contends that most white Confederates understood that they were outnumbered, grasped the need to field as many soldiers as possible, and supported the draft when volunteering failed to meet expectations. The first conscription laws of 1862 passed with little debate or opposition in Congress or in public. Only a few die-hard states’ rights proponents, hardly more than unpatriotic ideologues according to the author, attacked conscription’s constitutionality then and later. Where [End Page 261] most Confederate loyalists came to differ with the law, Sacher argues, was in the devilish details of conscription, in terms both of a community’s individual cases and of questions about which additional professions and trades deserved exemptions in order to feed and serve both soldiers and civilians. While such debates reflected real class and ideological fault lines in the Confederacy, as well as competing ties of loyalty to locality and the nation-state, Sacher insists that, as a rule, they did not indicate significant general opposition to conscription itself or to the government that mandated it. Soldiers resented the extension of their enlistments, disliked the rules of substitution, and damned the men at home who gained exemptions denied to volunteers already under arms, yet they too supported the overall concept and largely fought on. Richmond’s willingness to debate and amend the rules and practice of conscription several times won further support. Conscription constantly evolved, according to Sacher, reacting to civilian and military needs. Both Jefferson Davis and Congress demonstrated responsiveness to a supportive public that largely wanted the draft tweaked for fairness but not eliminated, as the 1863 congressional election results seem to indicate. Congress notably passed, and then later in the war tightened, the notorious “Twenty Negro Law,” first in direct response to complaints from the folks at home who feared starvation and violence in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, then again later when citizens came to fear the evils allegedly wrought by stay-at-home speculators. Sacher adds that no more than 10 percent of planters ever took advantage of the law. Rich men fought the so-called rich man’s war. In a similar manner, Congress widened age limits for the draft as a direct reaction to the expressed needs of proconscription generals, such as Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, after Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. The lull before the Federal onslaught in 1864 brought similar calls for more men, resulting in the elimination of substitution and in the drafting of men who had hired substitutes. Lee’s need for more men at Petersburg likewise led directly to congressional debate over drafting the enslaved. Sacher admits that Bureau of Conscription officers still had their hands full when it came...

Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher

Reviewed by: Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher Keith S. Bohannon (bio) Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers. John M. Sacher. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-8071-7621-4. 296 pp., cloth, $45.00. John M. Sacher’s Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers is the first book-length study of the topic since Albert B. Moore’s Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy appeared in 1924. Moore, like some later scholars, wrote that conscription was anathema to ordinary Confederates. Recent historians like Paul Escott and David Williams who emphasize internal factors in explaining the Confederacy’s collapse also argue that conscription greatly exacerbated class tensions. The Twenty-Negro Law passed by the Confederate Congress in 1862, these historians claim, resulted in the widespread belief among white Southerners that they were engaged in a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Sacher, in contrast, claims that conscription policy is “best considered as a lens to analyze competing loyalties in the Confederacy” (6). White Southerners believed in states’ rights, Sacher argues, but also acknowledged that their national government needed additional power in times of war. Many people, including soldiers, might have admired the stern efficiency of army-run conscription but also realized that a civilian-run Bureau of Conscription would provide more protection for civil liberties. Civilians wanted conscription enforced on an equitable basis, believing that the country must meet military demands while also fulfilling the needs of the home front. Sacher’s interpretation of the debate over conscription and its enforcement is based on deep research into a wide array of government documents, newspapers, personal papers, and memoirs. While the study encompasses the entire Confederacy, Sacher pays particular attention to Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, in part because the surviving records related to conscription from these states are more complete than others. He also analyzes how the governors of Georgia and North Carolina offered some of the most outspoken criticism of conscription, while also considering themselves loyal Confederates. Historians who argue that conscription undermined the Confederate war effort, Sacher rightfully points out, often make two key errors. They fail to see that conscription was a policy that evolved over the course of the Confederacy’s brief [End Page 87] existence. Sacher believes that the South’s conscription policy represented a “give-and-take” among various stakeholders, including the Confederate president, Congress, the army, governors, state judges, prospective conscripts, and ordinary Confederates (202). Leaders listened to the complaints of soldiers and civilians, writes Sacher, striving to make the enforcement of conscription equitable. The other major mistake historians make is to conflate criticism of Confederate policies like conscription with a lack of support for the cause of Southern independence. Sacher instead provides ample evidence to suggest that while Confederates fiercely debated aspects of conscription, a majority of white Southerners saw the policy as the best means to mobilize manpower to win the Civil War. Politicians such as Jefferson Davis and Georgia’s Governor Joseph E. Brown might argue about whether the policy of conscription violated states’ rights, but Sacher says that those involved in both sides of the debate had the same shared ultimate goal of Confederate independence. The final chapter of Sacher’s book includes a detailed analysis of the incomplete records and figures for conscription in the Confederacy. Sacher points out that while there are records of conscripts brought into the CS Army by the Bureau of Conscription, it is far more difficult to assess conscription that took place outside of the scope of the bureau. Ultimately, Sacher concludes that conscription did not completely strip the Southern home front of white men. Instead, enrolling officers left a sizeable minority of men at home, “as medically unfit, in exempt occupations, detailed, or as principals [who had hired substitutes]” (196). John Sacher’s well-written and well-researched Confederate Conscription is a welcome addition to the scant body of existing scholarship on an important topic. It offers a convincing counterargument to recent studies that portray Confederate conscription as a failed policy that alienated ordinary white Southerners and contributed to the Confederacy’s defeat, a...

Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann

Reviewed by: Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann James Hill “Trae” Welborn III Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. By Brian C. Neumann. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 216. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7690-0.) In Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, historian Brian C. Neumann achieves his overarching purposes—to reframe the nullification crisis by “emphasizing the partisan conflict within South Carolina” and to restore “the state’s Union Party to the center of the story, providing insight into the hopes, anxieties, and convictions of Jacksonian-era southern Unionists” (p. 4). Neumann argues that these Unionists “viewed the Union as a fragile experiment in self-government—the last hope of liberty in a world dominated by despotism” (p. 4). This focus enables Neumann to recast larger historiographical perspectives on the coming of the Civil War, the ideological force of Unionism in antebellum America, how an idealized southern manhood shaped these dynamics, and the broader transnational context in which these ideological contests transpired. Neumann’s analysis proceeds chronologically from the “rise of radicalism” in South Carolina between 1822 and 1828 (chapter 1), through the “process of political realignment” that followed between 1828 and 1830 (chapter 2), to the proliferation of “partisanship and political violence” between 1830 and 1832 (chapter 3). The next three chapters chart the convoluted course by which radicalism transformed South Carolina’s political culture, turning the state toward proslavery sectionalism and disunion, beginning with the “nullification winter” of 1832–1833 (chapter 4) and continuing through “the test oath controversy” of 1833–1835 (chapter 5) before terminating in the consensus forged around “the politics of slavery” in 1835–1836 (chapter 6). Throughout Neumann asserts that such reframing focuses less on why the American Union collapsed beneath the strains of slavery and sectionalism and more on how it persisted through these crises as long as it did. This analysis extends perspectives previously forwarded most notably by Elizabeth R. Varon. [End Page 353] Though Neumann readily acknowledges that nullification exposed the fault lines of the Union and Unionism, he also expands on the work of Gary W. Gallagher, especially in arguing that the crisis exhibited the sustained commitment to the Union’s promise and perpetuity, even providing “a lexicon of Unionism for all future crises” (p. 7). A tension between what Neumann terms “martial manhood” and “moderate manhood” inflected both the partisan disputes between nullifiers and Unionists and dissension among Unionists. He shows that as they fought against nullification and disunion, some Unionists defended the Union as the political embodiment of “moderate manhood,” while others adopted the more aggressive “martial manhood” of the nullifiers, albeit to defend the Union rather than destroy it (pp. 7–8). Neumann’s analysis of manhood expands most directly on the gendered analyses of historians Amy S. Greenberg, Stephanie McCurry, and James Brewer Stewart. And alongside scholars of Civil War–era transnationalism such as Edward B. Rugemer, Timothy M. Roberts, Adam I. P. Smith, Ann L. Tucker, and Niels Eichorn, Neumann emphasizes how these events unfolded “against the backdrop of global history,” making frequent and pointed references to the earlier French and Haitian Revolutions as well as “a wave of liberal revolutions” in the 1830s that swept “France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Poland,” which lent “the crisis in South Carolina . . . [a] global significance” in the minds of its combatants (p. 8). Neumann centers the dissenting arguments of Unionists against the growing tide of radical nullifiers bent on capturing the state’s political system and wielding it toward increasingly defiant ends. Neumann rightly emphasizes that proslavery convictions and antislavery fears permeated these processes among both Unionists and nullifiers throughout. He shows that these factions only reached a formidable and, for Unionists, insurmountable consensus beginning in 1835, when South Carolinians tempered their partisanship in response to the American Anti-Slavery Society’s direct mail and petition campaigns. Neumann succinctly summarizes this trend toward radical proslavery consensus in South Carolina by highlighting that though “some state leaders worked to harness federal power to preserve and expand slavery’s reach” during...

Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 by M. K. Beauchamp

Reviewed by: Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 by M. K. Beauchamp Aaron R. Hall Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815. By M. K. Beauchamp. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 314. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7428-9.) In 1803 the United States became the latest empire striving to govern the complex world encompassed by the territory of Orleans. Native nations, enslaved Africans, free people of color, Creole slave owners, and Anglo-American settlers populated the region, and each group pursued competing desires for autonomy and freedom, power and security, and health and wealth. This internal heterogeneity was compounded by delicate geopolitical relations with imperial rivals and indigenous neighbors. If eventual statehood and affluence through expropriated labor and land was the common aim of Anglo-American arrivals, then it was the daily work of U.S. administrators to steer the territory toward these ends. That meant maintaining order while producing a new one. A cohort of local officials made the orderly administration of Louisiana their business with varying degrees of diligence and faithfulness. In Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815, M. K. Beauchamp shows that the problems these officials encountered, the resources they accessed, and the policies they adopted “rendered Louisiana’s territorial experience republican in theory but imperial in practice” (p. 3). Taking an administrator’s-eye view of early national Louisiana, Beauchamp delivers a fine-grained analysis of how officials cultivated and exercised authority during Louisiana’s formative decade under the jurisdiction of (but not yet within) the United States. In ways that were unique to Louisiana but that also resonated with other zones of territorial rule, officials deployed techniques of imperial governance: accommodating local elites, moderating the metropole’s directives, arbitrating between factions, tailoring racial exclusions to suit strategic concerns, displaying military capacity, and modifying institutions in response to discontent. Through a careful reading of state papers and administrative correspondence, Beauchamp delivers a sophisticated account of the reorganization of Louisiana, a process that appears at once abrupt or gradual and shallow, depending on subject and vantage point. Instruments of Empire is a clarifying contribution to Louisiana political history and a valuable [End Page 347] addition to a field of scholarship on the early federal government in which continuities of political practice loom large (see Gautham Rao, “The New Historiography of the Early Federal Government: Institutions, Contexts, and the Imperial State,” William and Mary Quarterly 77 [January 2020]: 97–128). Instruments of Empire unfolds in six thematic chapters addressing different facets of official concern. It opens with a chapter analyzing external challenges to American sovereignty, introducing territorial officials’ abiding anxiety about Creole loyalties. As Spanish power receded, however, American officials came to trust the Francophone “ancient Louisianans” with greater authority (p. 183). Next, Beauchamp draws out administrators’ multipronged approach to Native American relations before the post-statehood arrival of enfranchised, land-hungry settlers. Their initiatives included efforts to maintain peaceable relations with the Comanche, counter Spanish influence among the Caddo and the Wichita, incorporate the Native communities around New Orleans known as petites nations, and court Choctaw allies. A significant third chapter illustrates how the violence of racial enslavement was foundational to governance. Slavery was the subject of extensive regulation by new elected bodies, and it created a shared interest through which American order could be appreciated by new and old slaveholders. At no time was the centrality of slavery more evident than during the suppression of the German Coast uprising, when U.S. troops provided critical support. This bloodshed confirmed slaveholders belonged to “a common planter class, since the rebels did not distinguish between Anglo and Francophone plantations” (p. 104). Given this evidence, one is left to wonder whether concerns about Creole loyalty were exaggerated. When Anglo-Americans took charge, free Black Louisianans hoped to gain rights by being the most loyal of allies; but in chapter 4, Beauchamp shows that they held little leverage to move territorial officials. The arrival of statehood in 1812 would only empower white Louisianans to make that racial order...

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler

Reviewed by: True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler Wendy Hamand Venet True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Clayton J. Butler. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 228. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7662-7.) In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Clayton J. Butler makes an important contribution to our understanding of Unionists in the Deep South during and after the Civil War. Butler asks several key questions. Who were these white men? Why did they remain loyal to the Union? How were they viewed in the North and the South? What roles did they play during and after the war? He seeks answers to these questions by focusing individual chapters on three Unionist military units: the First Louisiana Cavalry, the First Alabama Cavalry, and the Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. While acknowledging that his approach undervalues the important role played by Unionist women during the war, Butler notes that “donning a blue Federal uniform represented the most unambiguous expression of national allegiance one could make” (p. 2). Butler finds that white Unionists came from many backgrounds and professed a variety of motivations for their unconditional loyalty. Some were slave owners, while others were laborers motivated by class resentment. In New Orleans, many Unionists were German or Irish immigrants. Although some were former Whigs, many Unionists were Democrats who had voted for Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential contest of 1860. While some Unionists disliked slavery, most did not express sympathy for slaves as a motivation to enlist. Instead, they professed a strong dedication to the United States as a nation. For these men, secession represented a violation of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founders. Butler does not make a case that Unionist soldiers influenced the outcome of the war, but he does argue that these units had a respectable military record, fighting at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in the Red River campaign, and during William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Sherman, Butler shows, understood the public relations value of having Unionists serve in his ranks. Of greater [End Page 368] interest to Butler is the role of newspapers’ support of the Union or the Confederacy through the dissemination of information about soldiers’ allegedly heroic or traitorous efforts. Butler’s impressive newspaper research encompasses big city dailies and small-town papers, and it helps broaden the relatively narrow focus of his book. Another strength of this book is Butler’s discussion of the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre, in which Confederate soldiers under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest killed close to half the garrison of 585 U.S. soldiers rather than allowing them to surrender. While not taking attention away from the massacre’s Black victims, Butler notes that Forrest’s men also killed nearly one hundred white Unionists, as well as the commander of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, Major William F. Bradford. Bradford initially escaped the bloodshed but was executed by Forrest’s men several days after the massacre. Butler argues convincingly that the episode should be understood both as an expression of Confederates’ racial hatred and as their reaction to the presence of white and Black defenders of Union. In a volume of fewer than two hundred pages of text, the book’s coverage of Reconstruction is understandably brief and largely focused on Louisiana and Alabama. Although many white Unionists ultimately endorsed emancipation during the war, in the postwar period their diverse political views reemerged. Unionists played roles during both Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, but Butler joins other scholars in emphasizing that their failure to form a long-term alliance with African Americans contributed to Reconstruction’s broader failure. In his conclusion, Butler discusses the “relatively small place” unconditional Unionists occupy in both national Civil War memory and current historiography. Small in number but consequential nonetheless, these Deep South Unionists found “their voices drowned out by the chorus of returning Confederates and their descendants” (p. 166). Clayton Butler’s book reminds us of...

The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner

Reviewed by: The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward ed. by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner Matthew Karp The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward. Edited by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner. Foreword by Edward L. Ayers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 276. $38.95, ISBN 978-0-19-086395-1.) In the early 1950s, C. Vann Woodward released a burst of scholarship whose intellectual and political impact has probably never been equaled in southern history: The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), a field-defining survey; Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951), an influential monograph on the Compromise of 1877; “The Irony of Southern History,” his 1952 Southern Historical Association presidential address that was an iconic exploration of southern identity; and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1955), a subversive account of segregation’s origins that Martin Luther King Jr. is famously said to have called “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” When Strange Career was published, Woodward was just forty-six years old. He worked actively for another four decades, giving lectures, writing essays, leading organizations, and training graduate students. Yet Woodward, at the peak of his powers, never produced another book of original historical research. It was not for lack of trying: across the 1960s and beyond, Woodward persevered with a number of book projects, chief among them a long-promised, much-discussed, and lucratively contracted narrative of Reconstruction. It never appeared. For biographers and close readers of his scholarship—a category that includes a fair portion of all southern historians since 1955—the interlocking stories of Woodward’s efflorescence and its eclipse retain intrinsic interest, above and beyond the rich content of the work itself. This volume of previously unpublished writing, skillfully edited and introduced by Natalie J. Ring and Sarah E. Gardner, sheds considerable light on both sides of the Woodward conundrum. It is principally drawn from two series of invited university talks Woodward delivered at the summit of his career: the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures, given at Louisiana State University in his scholarly annus mirabilis of 1951; and the Messenger Lectures on the Evolution of Civilization, given at Cornell University in 1964, as he attempted to shape his research into a book on Reconstruction. A 1969 lecture Woodward delivered at Yale University, on “The Problem of Failure in American History,” serves as a kind of coda. As Ring, Gardner, and Edward L. Ayers (who contributes a foreword) all note, Woodward’s interest in the idea of failure—during Reconstruction and across U.S. history— overlaid his own intellectual struggles with a kind of tragic irony that Woodward himself would have appreciated, if not exactly relished. [End Page 383] The lectures printed here easily justify the work of restoration undertaken by Ring and Gardner. Many of Woodward’s lavish talents as a historian are on display: his flair for arresting, sharply framed topic sentences—“Never in history had the franchise been conferred on a proletariat so utterly deprived” (p. 221); “The advent of Republicanism marked the advent of class politics in the South” (p. 225)—and his gift for compact characterization, marked by a telling anecdote, as when he introduces the unworldly antislavery prophet Theodore Dwight Weld, who “often had to go to the window to see whether it was winter or summer” (p. 61), or the formidable southern abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who announced their new religious commitments with a ceremony: “Then one solemn morning the sisters destroyed a set of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which Angelina had purchased, according to Sarah, ‘before she was serious’” (p. 65). At his best, as in the irresistible Origins, Woodward’s sentences and characters together conjure a kind of narrative momentum seldom achieved by other great historians, even those whose interpretations we now find more persuasive. Enough hints of that mysterious alchemy are visible here, in this raw form, for scholars today to take note. When we read Woodward’s editors at Louisiana State University Press, contracted to publish the revised Fleming lectures, urging him to keep “coining the golden prose”—practically...

A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War by James P. Byrd, and: Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares: The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict by John H. Matsui

Reviewed by: A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War by James P. Byrd, and: Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares: The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict by John H. Matsui C. David Dalton A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War. By James P. Byrd. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. [x], 376. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-090279-7.) Millenarian Dreams and Racial Nightmares: The American Civil War as an Apocalyptic Conflict. By John H. Matsui. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 295. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7482-1.) Over the past several decades religion, specifically evangelical Protestantism, has become a focal point of Civil War–era scholarship. The denominational schisms, the influence of clerical sermons, and the interactions between religion, slavery, and politics have been extensively examined in studies by historians from C. C. Goen, David B. Chesebrough, and Richard J. Carwardine to Steven E. Woodworth, Mark A. Noll, Timothy L. Wesley, and George C. Rable. Two recent works by James P. Byrd and John H. Matsui make significant contributions to this area of study. Byrd, an associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, previously authored Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (New York, 2013). He carries his work into the mid-nineteenth century with A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War. Byrd argues that most Americans had a copy of the King James Bible, and that many looked to the book for guidance during the nation’s bloodiest conflict. Chaplains told soldiers to place their faith in God, whose divine guidance could be most easily discerned through a close reading of scripture. Both armies viewed victories on the battlefield as God’s will and defeats as tests of devotion—calls to rededication rather than signs of the Almighty’s eventual judgment. After all, the Bible revealed that God’s people had disobeyed His Word and had been punished in many ways, from being enslaved in Egypt to wandering in the wilderness for years. With its exhaustive analysis of references from thousands of sources, including sermons, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Byrd’s work is the most in-depth examination of the Bible’s presence and importance during the Civil War. The appendix includes a ranking of the most cited verses across these sources, revealing striking differences between how Confederates and Federals viewed the Bible. Northerners cited the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans— in which he condemns those who rebel against their rulers (Romans 13)—to defend the Union and its government, describing the United States as “God’s chosen nation” (p. 13). Abolitionists frequently invoked Acts 17:26, where Paul declares that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men,” to justify [End Page 363] their call for freedom and equality for slaves (p. 190). Confederate clergy countered with the Genesis story of the curse of Ham, asserting that even if God had created all people from one blood, the Almighty also had favored some races and cursed others. And as battlefield casualties mounted, and eventual defeat began to seem inevitable, Confederates continued to turn to the Bible for solace, comparing their plight to the trials of Job and reminding themselves that their ultimate reward was not of this earth. Byrd chronicles the pronouncements of both well-known and relatively obscure clergy, detailing their views on slavery, secession, and war. The author includes enough political and military detail, interspersed with biographical stories, writings, and sermons, to make for a smooth-flowing narrative. Some of these men of God were anything but blessed peacemakers, advocating for war while believing that God was on their side. They encouraged both their congregations at home and the companies they served on the battlefield to trust in the Lord, just as their revolutionary predecessors had done in 1776. But the slaughter often stirred mixed emotions among lay soldiers, especially those who put great emphasis on Christ’s injunction, from the Sermon on the Mount...

Lowell Gudmundson, Costa Rica after Coffee: The Co-Op Era in History and Memory Louisiana State University Press, 2021, pp. xxii + 141

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John Frederick Bell. Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. 298 pp.

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