Union Troops Research Articles

Ink, Blood, Bones

Abstract Natasha Trethewey's poem “Native Guard” begins and ends with the phrase “Truth be told,” but the poem demonstrates just how difficult it can be to tell the truth — or even a truth — about history. “Native Guard” excavates historical events that many readers will find unfamiliar: the experience of Black Union troops guarding Confederate prisoners on Ship Island in the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the Civil War. This complex history is expressed in a crosshatched poetic form: contemporaneous journal entries arranged in a series of interlinked sonnets that juxtapose the history written in ink on paper with the pain written in blood on people's bodies and the bones buried beneath every historical account. While teaching the poem requires careful attention to historical context, poetic form, and repetition of words, the experience provides an answer to the question students keep asking: Why do we have to keep reading about slavery? This essay describes some pedagogical choices that may help students grasp their responsibility for seeking truths that can't easily be told because they lie buried beneath unexamined historical narratives.

Moral Bushwhacking and Political Quantrellism: Thomas Ewing Jr. and the Clamor of Guerrilla Politics

Moral Bushwhacking and Political QuantrellismThomas Ewing Jr. and the Clamor of Guerrilla Politics Jeremy Neely (bio) By the spring of 1863, no military commander seemed capable of suppressing the irregular violence that raged along the Kansas-Missouri border. The partisan warfare that began five years before Fort Sumter had exploded in scale and intensity with the outbreak of the Civil War. A succession of Union generals cycled through Kansas and Missouri, each devising more stringent policies than the last, but the danger posed by Confederate guerrillas who burned, killed, and roamed the western countryside with apparent impunity only grew worse. “There seems to be no concerted plan,” exclaimed one exasperated Missourian. “Very little is being accomplished now, while every interest of loyal and peaceable citizens is suffering severely from the ravages of these wretches. Is there not a man somewhere equal to the emergency?”1 Thomas Ewing Jr. believed he was such a man. An unlikely champion, he had no military experience before the Civil War, but like many former novices who came to lead Union or Confederate forces he moved quickly through the ranks due to some combination of performance, luck, and political influence. The namesake of a former Ohio senator, Ewing was familiar with the rough-and-tumble of midcentury Washington and the factionalism of his adopted Kansas home. In 1861 he won election to the state supreme court but a year later resigned to help raise the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry. “During the war the [End Page 11] Chief Justice of Kansas should be an old man or a cripple,” he explained to his father.2 Their family included three future Union generals—brothers Hugh and Charles Ewing, plus foster brother William Tecumseh Sherman—and by April 1863, the younger Thomas became a brigadier general himself.3 His appointment to lead the District of the Border nonetheless caught observers by surprise, particularly in Kansas, where most expected the position would fall to Maj. Gen. James G. Blunt, Ewing’s commander during the Union army’s victory at Prairie Grove, Arkansas.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr. (Courtesy Library of Congress) Eager to prove himself, Thomas Ewing Jr. rode twenty miles southwest from district headquarters in Kansas City to deliver an address that set forth [End Page 12] his intentions for the new command. His jurisdiction included the Missouri counties south of the Missouri River, where no natural barrier separated the states, and all of Kansas north of the 38th parallel. The Kansas town where he chose to speak, Olathe—just five miles from the open border—was an apt spot to confront the challenge before him. Almost a year earlier Rebel guerrillas, led by William Clarke Quantrill, sacked the village, killing two people and pillaging every store. The perception that citizens must rely on themselves for mutual self-defense stretched back to the earliest days of Kansas Territory, but after Quantrill’s 1862 attack, doubts grew about the ability of Union troops to protect noncombatants. T. Dwight Thacher, a newspaper editor in nearby Lawrence, expressed confidence in Blunt, then the Federal commander, but cautioned his readers, “Let our other towns take warning. The success of this raid will encourage similar ones on a bolder scale.”5 At Olathe, Ewing announced there was little for civilians to fear, as he would employ a “rough hand” to halt the plunder of innocent households. Kansas and Missouri had previously been put in separate military departments but now were under the command of a single general, who vowed to aggressively pursue the raiders who once eluded capture as they slipped between jurisdictions. “I will keep a thousand men in saddle daily in pursuit of [guerrillas],” said Ewing, “and will redden with their blood every road and bridle path of the border, until they infest it no more.” Such thieves, he added, “will be compelled to quit stealing, or get out of this District, or get me out of it.”6 In the weeks that followed, the general noted with satisfaction that the wide circulation of his June 27 speech “made a decided impression” among newspaper editors in each state. Confident that he had earned...

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine

Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed MedicineJim DownsHarvard University Press, 2021Applying the study of history to medicine can often be uncomfortable, so I had some trepidation as I picked up Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs. The title certainly grabbed my attention; did these events really transform medicine? After reading this provocative book, it is hard to argue otherwise.With meticulous research and compelling evidence, Downs demonstrates how colonialism, slavery, and war enabled physicians to study the spread of disease among captive populations, contributing to the development of the emerging field of epidemiology. Between 1756 and 1866, these history-shaping forces created bureaucracies that collected information, analyzed data, and issued reports, allowing physicians to develop theories on the cause, spread, and prevention of infectious disease.Downs skillfully brings together seemingly disparate events, arguing that the international slave trade, the expansion of colonialism, the Crimean War, the US Civil War, and the travels of Muslim pilgrims—topics isolated from each other until now—changed the medical profession's understanding of disease transmission, significantly shaping the study of epidemiology. More importantly, he emphasizes how the people who were the subjects of study—the enslaved, the imprisoned, the poor, and the dispossessed—have been largely erased from history. Downs brings these people to the forefront, telling their stories, documenting their lives, their sufferings, and often their deaths, as best one can with a limited historical record.Maladies of Empire offers a history lesson on the cost of medical progress. When British soldiers died while packed into a tiny Calcutta jail in 1756, the infamous “Black Hole of Calcutta,” researchers drew conclusions on the dangers of crowded spaces and the importance of fresh air. Alternately, women washing the linens of passengers on ships from plague-infected countries in the 1830s unknowingly became the subject of studies. Passengers traveling from North Africa and the Middle East were forced to quarantine on the island of Malta before continuing to Europe. Researchers discovered that the laundresses did not contract the disease, leading some to question contagion theory and the need for quarantine laws.The slave trade enabled physicians to study how long humans could live without food, and how placing large numbers of enslaved people in crowded and unsanitary conditions in the bottom of ships, which then led to medical disorders, provided valuable information for researchers.Downs details the work of “the Lady of the Lamp,” Florence Nightingale, known by most for her work providing nursing care to wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. Nightingale studied the spread of disease in India, a place she never visited, by collecting reports, collaborating with investigators, publishing papers, and developing theories, making her a pioneer in the use of statistics to study disease. That Nightingale's significant contributions to epidemiology have been ignored is likely due, Downs contends, to the fact she was a woman and a nurse in a field dominated by white European men.During the US Civil War, facing smallpox vaccine shortages, doctors injected lymph into the arms of enslaved children, then used the children's bodies to harvest vaccine matter for use in soldiers. Southern doctors experimented with vaccines on Union soldiers at the infamous Andersonville prison, causing the deaths of men who were suffering from scurvy. Doctors studying Black Union troops began classifying racial differences as key factors in examining the spread of disease. Unsurprisingly, this led to the development of racist theories that persisted for decades.Ultimately, Downs contends that part of the origin story of epidemiology has been largely ignored because it resulted from studying people who suffered from war, enslavement, and imperialism, most of whom were people of color. Downs' stated purpose in Maladies of Empire is to shift the focus from the physicians to the people they studied, whose suffering and death contributed to foundational medical knowledge, but whose identities have been erased from the medical record. Downs believes it is far past time for these oppressed groups of humanity to reclaim their rightful place in history.While I find the history of medicine, given its generally grisly track record, to be anything but pleasant—the words ghastly and abhorrent also often come to mind—understanding how the medical profession treated certain underprivileged—to put it mildly—groups of people in the past can, as witnessed by this insightful work by Jim Downs, perhaps, raise awareness of how unconscious racial and ethnic biases contribute to health inequities among marginalized groups today.

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era by Jonathan A. Noyalas

Reviewed by: Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era by Jonathan A. Noyalas Daniel B. Thorp Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era. By Jonathan A. Noyalas. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xx, 226. $85.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6686-8.) Jonathan A. Noyalas's Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era provides a solidly researched and well-written addition to the literature concerning slavery and the Civil War and furthers the effort to make more widely known a number of important aspects of the African American experience. Noyalas makes extensive use of newspapers, military records, memoirs, and records of the Freedmen's Bureau to capture [End Page 397] the experiences of African Americans, especially enslaved African Americans, in a region that Union and Confederate armies took turns controlling for the first three years of the Civil War and was close to Union territory throughout the war. Most fundamentally, the book provides additional evidence that slavery was well entrenched in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley by the middle of the nineteenth century. Though many of the region's original German and Ulster-Scot settlers may have lacked the desire or the wealth to acquire slaves, by the early nineteenth century those impediments had been erased, and slavery was widespread in most parts of the valley. More important, Noyalas also demonstrates that men and women enslaved in the Shenandoah Valley did not simply wait passively for Union troops to liberate them. Hundreds joined the Union army once they were permitted to do so; many more fled slavery and weakened the productive capacity of their enslavers; and some of those who remained in bondage still managed to provide intelligence to aid the Union effort or took steps to undermine the Confederacy. Finally, Noyalas makes clear that throughout the years of war and Reconstruction, Black Virginians calculated what was in their best interest and acted accordingly—even if those actions seem counterintuitive to modern historians. They may, for example, have remained with their enslavers in spite of what seem to have been frequent opportunities to escape during the war. However, they did so not out of ignorance or because they accepted enslavement but because they believed the long-term risk to themselves or their families of trying to escape at that particular time outweighed the possible benefits of such an escape. As good as the book is, it does have its weaknesses. The author rarely, for example, acknowledges the significant variations that existed among regions and conditions in the Shenandoah Valley. Slavery was much more common in some counties than in others, and those enslaved in the region lived in a variety of circumstances—on small holdings, on plantations, and on industrial sites. Noyalas, however, treats the valley as a single locale and rarely distinguishes among different varieties of slavery. Similarly, the author reports that more than six hundred Black men with connections to the Shenandoah Valley joined the United States Colored Troops during the war but offers little detail about who they were, where exactly they came from, and when they joined the Union army. The book's treatment of Reconstruction shows the same pattern of strengths that could be even stronger. Noyalas does an excellent job discussing schools, churches, and employment among the freedpeople but says less about their political activity and almost nothing about their success or failure in acquiring land. Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era may leave some readers wanting more, but it is an excellent start. The research supporting it is impressive in its breadth and its depth, the prose is enjoyable and easy to read, and the author demonstrates clearly that enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley made calculated decisions and took deliberate actions to advance their well-being in the midst of a chaotic situation over which they had little control. [End Page 398] Daniel B. Thorp Virginia Tech Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Editor's Page

Editor's Page Daniel J. Burge One of the first things that I realized upon moving to Kentucky was how difficult it can be to define the state from a regional perspective. Although many signs welcomed me to the "front porch of the South," I was quickly struck by the wide variety of differences found within the commonwealth's border. Perhaps because it shares a border with seven states, occupies a liminal position between North and South, and sits just outside of the Midwest, Kentucky has never fit comfortably into the broad categories historians like to devise. It can be challenging, after all, to extrapolate broad conclusions from a state that somehow managed to produce both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln in the years leading up to the Civil War. As this issue of the Register illustrates, however, studying Kentucky as part of a broader region can inform how we understand American history. Keith Harris focuses his attention on the years immediately after Kentucky achieved statehood, in "Demanding a Market at Home: Stability, Independence, and Protection in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1792–1816." Placing Kentucky within the region of the early West, Harris shows how Kentuckians and other westerners looked to the government to protect their economic interests. Harris challenges the frequently made assertion that Kentuckians were early proponents of free trade and demonstrates that even prior to the War of 1812, many westerners looked to the federal government to secure land and to help provide a home market for their increasingly diverse economic needs. Harris' article forms a natural segue to Laura Ellyn Smith's examination of perennial presidential candidate Henry Clay, a politician known for his embrace of protective tariffs. Smith's article, "A Clash [End Page 215] of Ideas: Presidential Election Policy Debates in 1832 Kentucky," examines the contest that pitted Henry Clay against Andrew Jackson. Historians have traditionally dismissed the election of 1832 as un-important, especially considering that Clay captured a mere six states and under 40 percent of the popular vote. Smith challenges this traditional interpretation by digging into Kentucky newspapers and a trove of personal letters. In doing so, Smith shows Kentuckians were drawn to Clay's ambitious policy proposals, including protectionism, and believed that his American System would improve Kentucky's economy. Yet the Union Henry Clay fought so hard to preserve was eventually rent asunder by the Civil War, causing a particular dilemma for Kentuckians. Christina Adkins's article "Josie Underwood's Union Blues: A Kentucky Diarist's Civil War" examines how one woman handled the splintering. Josie Underwood came from a prominent family in Bowling Green that owned a large plantation called Mt. Air. Fortunately, Underwood decided to keep a diary, which provides a window into the perspective of a loyal Kentucky woman. As Adkins observes, many published diaries were kept by southern women who saw Union troops as invaders. In contrast, Underwood denounced Confederates and rejected suitors who embraced secession. Underwood also firmly believed in the institution of slavery and despised those whom she felt threatened the institution. Through the Civil War, Underwood refused to accept that Kentuckians were somehow better off outside of the Union, even after her beloved home went up in flames. The three authors in this issue effectively use stories centered on Kentucky to illustrate larger points. In the years leading up to the War of 1812, for example, many Kentuckians, and others west of the Appalachian Mountains, were more interested in cementing their ties to the federal government than they were in sundering them. As the years passed, and as Henry Clay rose to national prominence, Kentuckians continued to turn to the federal government for economic aid and protection. While it might be easy to write off Kentucky's [End Page 216] vote in 1832 as insignificant, Kentucky was not so much an outlier as it was a harbinger of the broad appeal that Clay's policies would soon have across the nation. Similarly, Underwood's story helps us understand those who perceived the Civil War primarily as a war for the Union. Unconcerned over the plight of the enslaved, these Americans nevertheless saw secessionists as traitors who had abandoned the Constitution. By examining...

The Women’s Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. By Thavolia Glymph (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2020) 392 pp. $34.95

Glymph’s breathtaking history focuses on the home in order to highlight the centrality of women to the physical and ideological battles of the American Civil War. Although both northerners and southerners defined the home as separate from politics and war, Glymph shows how households became enveloped in war regardless of location. The Confederacy rallied to the defense of white homes, but both white and black women had to take to the road as refugees, heading away from or toward Union lines. Northern women repurposed their homes to support the war effort and sustain their families; some of them also moved south to contribute directly to the war and emancipation. At a moment when many historians prioritize narrative, Glymph’s book is a sustained argument, confronting previous scholarship that divided women into abolitionists, Unionists, and southerners, and separated enslaved and freedwomen into their own category. Her book offers an inclusive history of women’s experiences during the Civil War, and ultimately the ways in which it brought women into conflict.Glymph includes powerful stories based on original research to support her many historiographical insights. She divides the book into three sections (“Southern Women,” “Northern Women,” and “The Hard Hand of War”), beginning each chapter with a discussion of an individual or family to show how the Civil War exploded the idealized image of the home as a sanctuary, and exposed women and children to danger and suffering. The war also magnified the gender, class, and racial hierarchies among women and underscored women’s clashing views of home and freedom. As slaveholding women fled from the advance of the U.S. army, they tried to bring as much of their households with them as possible. Enslaved men and women had a different idea of what the presence of Union troops, and the absence of slaveholders, meant for their families and future. Slaveholding families often migrated to communities, including those in the mountains of North Carolina, that had little stake in the Confederacy and viewed the newcomers as competitors for scarce resources.Glymph also traces the northern wealth generated by slavery that enabled elite white women to devote themselves to organizations such as the Sanitary Commission. As white northern women went south as freedmen’s agents or teachers, they adapted easily to the role of mistress, marshaling the labor and children of freedwomen in support of their own newfound independence. African-American women forged an alternative politics of freedom as they forced the U.S. army to contend with their presence. In refugee camps, freedwomen reconstructed their families and communities in the face of brutal violence and death.The Women’s Fight considers how much life changed for women during the Civil War, and how much it did not. Other scholars portray the Civil War as unleashing something new. Glymph contextualizes women’s experiences, particularly their memory of other wars, even as she observes the disruptions in their lives. As some women fought for freedom, others fought to return to their pre-war status. In this creative and comprehensive study, Glymph concludes that the Civil War left racial and class divisions among women mostly intact.

Zagrożenie interwencją wojsk Związku Radzieckiego w myśli politycznej opozycji przedsierpniowej (KOR, ROPCiO)

The emergence of an organized political opposition in the People’s Republic of Poland after the events that took place in June 1976 in Ursus and Radom influenced the shaping of program concepts regarding changes in the state. The scope of the proposed reforms depended on the limiting factor, which was the threat of the entry into Poland of the troops of the Soviet Union, and thus the threat to state securityand social security. This factor had a significant impact on the political thought of opposition activists and the divisions within it. The emergence of the Movement for the Defense of Human and Civic Rights, the Confederation of Independent Poland and the Young Poland Movement resulted from different program concepts, among which the threat of intervention by the Soviet Union troops played an important differentiating role. The article is based on an analysis of program concepts contained in the second-circulation press, and also uses a comparative analysis, which allows to resolve the research problem concerning the importance of conceptualizing the threat of intervention on the differentiation of the Workers’ Defense Committee and the Movement for the Defense of Human and Civic Rights.

Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making by G. Ward Hubbs

Reviewed by: Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making by G. Ward Hubbs Alston Fitts III Tuscaloosa: 200 Years in the Making. By G. Ward Hubbs. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. Xi, 204 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5944-7. G. Ward Hubbs has written a richly entertaining history of the city of Tuscaloosa. The “Druid City” (so called because of its many oaks) has known some dramatic moments during its two centuries of existence, and Hubbs tries to do justice to them all. Tuscaloosa was burned by Yankee troops on April 4, 1865, and largely devastated by a tornado on April 27, 2011. In between these two April disasters, the city attracted national attention with the University of Alabama’s football triumphs during the 1930s, with a triple lynching in 1933, and with attempts to integrate the University of Alabama in 1956 and 1963. Hubbs recounts the history with an emphasis on the builders and architects, not the political leaders. Tuscaloosa was a frontier village when it was made the capital of the state in 1825. Pigs roamed the streets and one even had her litter under the Presbyterian minister’s pulpit. Then William Nichols, whom Hubbs considers the best architect of the period, set to work designing classic buildings for the University of Alabama, the Alabama Legislature, and the Episcopal Church. By the time Nichols left Tuscaloosa in 1833, he had succeeded in transforming a frontier village into “one of the South’s great showplaces” (24). Unfortunately, not much of his work has survived. Most of the classic buildings he designed for the University were [End Page 284] destroyed by Union troops in 1865. The statehouse was converted into a women’s college and went up in flames in 1923. Christ Church Episcopal remains as a lone witness to Nichols’s architectural genius. Institutions of higher education have been an integral part of Tuscaloosa’s story. White students had been able to attend college at the University of Alabama since 1831; black students had to wait until 1876, when the Presbyterians set up Tuscaloosa Theological Institute to train black ministers. In 1895, the school changed its name to Stillman Institute and added an academic program. Montgomery took over as state capital in 1846, and Tuscaloosa began looking for a suitable industry to replace the population it lost. The town’s boosters had their hopes raised again and again in the decades that followed, provoking amused asides by Hubbs. When a Tuscaloosa newspaper editor proclaimed that the city “was in sight of the promised land,” Hubbs writes, “Surely (the editor) was using binoculars” (77). When the boosters rejoiced in 1884 that making the Black Warrior River more navigable meant that the city was about to enter a new era, Hubbs recalls that they were saying the same thing in 1874. Hubbs traces the evolution of downtown Tuscaloosa by focusing on three buildings. The seven-story Alston building, Tuscaloosa’s first “skyscraper,” was erected in 1909. The eight-story Merchants Bank and Trust, which combined a conventional exterior with its avant-garde interior, went up in 1925. It was designed by D. O. Whillbin, then Alabama’s top architect, who went on in 1937 to create a building that would house both the Bama Theater and the Tuscaloosa County Court House; it was the first air-conditioned building in town. Tuscaloosa underwent what Hubbs calls “a revolution in values” during the 1960s (161). While its first attempt to integrate the university ended in chaos, the second (which included Governor George Wallace’s famous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”) was choreographed in advance and ended in success. Black and white Tuscaloosans worked out better relations in education, politics, and daily life during the decade that followed. [End Page 285] Hubbs closes his narrative with a triple climax. First, the city finally achieved its dream of becoming an industrial center after its selection by Mercedes Benz in 1994 as the site for the German automaker’s first American plant. Alabama Governor Jim Folsom, Jr., asked, “Is this (selection) as good as a national football championship?” He then answered, “I think it’s better!” (159). Second, when a 2011 tornado destroyed...

Walls Tumbling Down: Teaching Black Family History and Genealogy in Social History Context

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 2 (EXTENDED DIGITAL VERSION) 83 No.2 WALLS TUMBLING DOWN: TEACHING BLACK FAMILY HISTORY AND GENEALOGY IN SOCIAL HISTORY CONTEXT By Katherine Scott Sturdevant Family history—which to this historian means the rich, contextual narrative of a family over time (the “flesh”) built upon the skeletal genealogy charts of names, dates, and places (the “bones”)—has become increasingly popular, with so many trends to prompt its rise. Those trends, of course, include the website dominance of Ancestry.com; the intriguing but everchanging results of DNA testing; and the appeal of “finding family” stories through all media. African American family history is no exception to these trends; indeed, it has spawned some of them. So many of us who practice family history are fulfilling needs, goals, obsessions, and callings by researching, recording, analyzing, synthesizing, and legacy-making. Most important: sharing precious primary sources of family history—such as recording oral tradition or preserving documents, artifacts, and photographs—is a service to society and to the history of all of us, by capturing resources before they are lost. Therefore, teaching students to do family history well, with best methods, and conscientiously interpreted in the context of that family’s times, is a gift to the historical record as much as any research results from historians’ scholarly work with primary sources. Overcoming “the Brick Wall of Enslavement” “Brick wall” is a popular genealogical term for an informational barrier one hits in generational research, a barrier that frustrates the researcher, who tries many ways to address the problem, to find the sources and methods that will get around the barrier. Some African Americans have been understandably reluctant to attempt genealogy and family history over the years, because of “the brick wall of enslavement.” Enslavement can be a research barrier. When people refer to it as such, they mean that records showing Black people by name diminish (or the names change) when researching back to the pre-emancipation period of history. This is a problem but is not insurmountable. As shown often on the PBS series Finding Your Roots with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. (and in his earlier series African American Lives, featured in the following Lesson Plan), there are ways around this brick wall. Censuses and schedules of people who were enslaved show how many Black people and White people were on a plantation, with their gender and age indicated, and this is useful information, though painful. Gathering statistical information like that can make it apparent which enslaved person is your ancestor. Indeed, Reconstruction (the period after the Civil War when Union troops occupied the South, 1865–1877) is a rich period for family research. Former enslaved people sometimes seem suddenly born full-grown into historical records because, during this period, the Freedmen’s Bureau first identified them as named individuals. This is when you see them searching for their separated family members; legally marrying someone who might be new to them or might be someone to whom they were unofficially married already; and choosing new legal first and last names. Freedmen’s Bureau records are some of the richest in which to start a search, but you are starting after emancipation, after likely new identities, and after probable disconnection with the previous “owner.”1 BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 2 (EXTENDED DIGITAL VERSION) | 31 83 No.2 One modern source can catapult the researcher over the brick wall of enslavement to a much earlier time: DNA. As interpreting DNA becomes more sophisticated, Black researchers can see general locations and cultures of their African origins. This can seem disappointingly broad and distant at first, but is a great discovery. With that information, a person can research those African cultures and perhaps even pinpoint likely routes and time periods of transit to the Americas. DNA also offers the opportunity for researchers to find and connect with fellow descendants of common ancestors. As fellow descendants contact one another—say, through a medium like Ancestry.com messaging—and form a network, they can better discover the locations and identities of the owners and their enslaved people who were previously anonymous. Each advancement is not a panacea, so the...

“This Act of Brutal Savageism”: Coverage of Native Americans at the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas

The clash between Confederates and Yankees at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, in 1862 is famous as the battle that saved Missouri for the Union, preventing a Southern army from a planned invasion to drive through the state and capture St. Louis. But a less well-known fact is that Pea Ridge was the only major battle of the Civil War in which Native American troops participated in significant numbers. About 1,000 Indians from the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee tribes fought for the South at Pea Ridge, and some might have scalped dead and wounded Union troops. This article examines stories about the battle from a sample of both Northern and Southern newspapers with the intent to shed light on the coverage of Native Americans during the Civil War. The article concludes that the type and quantity of coverage of Indians at Pea Ridge depended upon whether the journalists were Southern or Northern. The article thus adds further support to the notion that the Civil War press served as an arm of the government, and the stories of war correspondents of both sides have to be evaluated with the knowledge that facts were often secondary to supporting the war effort

Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky

Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky Crystal N. Feimster (bio) In spring 1862 when General Benjamin Butler arrived in New Orleans with Union troops, he was greeted by a mob of men and women dismayed by defeat and outraged by the prospect of Union occupation. White New Orleanians challenged and resisted the authority of Butler and his 2,500 soldiers at every turn. Confederate women were the most openly hostile and resistant to Union occupation. When women met Union officers or soldiers on the sidewalk, some contemptuously gathered up their skirts and walked to the other side of the street. When federal soldiers boarded streetcars or entered churches, Confederate women got up and left with great to-do. They wore Confederate flags pinned to their hats and dresses and hummed Confederate songs within earshot of northern troops. One woman, draped in a Confederate flag, walked up to a Union soldier standing guard, stared at him, and spat in the gutter before walking away in disgust; others spat directly in the faces of men dressed in federal uniforms. Some went so far as to empty their chamber pots onto passing Union soldiers. Of displays like these, General Thomas Williams remarked, "Such venom one must see to believe. Such un-sexing was hardly ever before in any cause or country so marked and so universal. I look at them and think of fallen angels."1 [End Page 301] As far as Butler was concerned it was not enough to merely look at them as fallen women. On May 15, only two weeks into his command, he issued "General Order No. 28," declaring, "hereafter when any female by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any office or solider of the United States," she will be treated like "a woman of the town plying her avocation."2 In other words, women who resisted federal occupation would be treated as prostitutes, as women not only unworthy of protection, but as women who invited sexual advances. The mayor of New Orleans, John T. Monroe, the first to condemn General Order 28, clearly understood its implications and accused Butler of insulting "the honor of the virtuous women of the City" and giving "license to the officers and soldiers . . . to commit outrages . . . upon defenseless women."3 Butler, however, argued that the order did not "contemplate any virtuous women," and insisted, "if obeyed, it will protect the true and modest woman from all possible insult—the others will take care of themselves."4 He was adamant that women who resisted federal occupation by insulting and assaulting federal troops, behaved like prostitutes. As prostitutes, they not only forfeited male protection, but invited sexual attention, wanted or unwanted. While Butler's "Woman's Order" clearly exposes how one officer exploited long held beliefs about prostitutes, it also brings into focus the connection between wartime prostitution and sexual violence. By sexualizing women who resisted Union occupation, Butler exploited ideas that justified violence against women who publicly stepped outside the bounds of respectable womanhood. While Butler's order was unique to New Orleans, the ideas about prostitutes and sexual violence that it mobilized to police women who dared to challenge the authority of Union soldiers and officers were [End Page 302] hardly new.5 In the context of war and occupation, the blurring of lines that separated respectable women from so-called "fallen women" functioned to justify the threat of rape. Most scholars have focused on the implications of Butler's order for elite white women of New Orleans, while overlooking what the order meant for women who were indeed prostitutes or perceived as "fallen angels."6 Moreover, most scholars have accepted that the Civil War was [End Page 303] "a low rape war," even as they have argued the war marked the most "dramatic leap in the number of American prostitutes" in the nation's history.7 Yet, few historians have explored the link between sexual coercion and the exponential expansion of the sex trade during the [End Page 304] Civil War. Indeed, we know very little about the lives and experiences of Civil War prostitutes or women who were treated as "a woman of the town...

Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters

Reviewed by: Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters Peter C. Luebke (bio) Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War. By Kristopher A. Teters. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 225. Cloth, $32.95.) With Practical Liberators, Kristopher A. Teters has provided a much-needed and bracing look at how Union officers approached emancipation [End Page 483] in the West during the Civil War. Drawing on diaries, letters, and official documents, Teters charts how soldiers came to embrace emancipation. As the title of his work suggests, he finds that Union soldiers supported emancipation as a war measure and that their wartime experience rarely shifted their deeply held racist views of African American people. Teters selects the area west of the Appalachians for his analysis because “the Lower South was the area where the Union army would free the most slaves and smash the heart of the South’s slave-based economy” (6). The broad geographic range and variations in economy meant that Union soldiers had a wider opportunity to encounter the institution and those held in bondage. The comparatively larger number of Union troops spread across the theater also allows Teters to survey a variety of soldiers. For his study, Teters relies primarily on the testimony of 410 Union officers. He provides a thorough description of his data set and points out that “this study’s conclusions are thus drawn from a balanced and illustrative source base” (165). He supplements these personal accounts with official documents from the Official Records, finding a wealth of information on the implementation of policy during the war. Teters duly acknowledges the presence of abolitionists within the armies, but he also finds that they and their views represented only a narrow sliver of the western armies. Teters finds that Union officers’ approach to emancipation mirrored legislation emanating from Washington, D.C. Officers began the war as conservatives, and as the conflict wore on they became more radical in their views about the end of slavery. As Congress clarified its policy toward the Confederacy with the First and Second Confiscation Acts, the army adjusted its behavior. In the first chapter of the book, Teters demonstrates how the loose stipulations of the First Confiscation Act—that soldiers could not return enslaved people to their masters—permitted local variations in enforcement. Union officers, confronted with escaping slaves, sought their own local and ad hoc expedients, leading to friction between the layers of the army hierarchy as conflicting policies in different locations led to inconsistencies. These inconsistencies in turn led to frustrations, particularly when dealing with local white civilians. In the absence of guidance from higher authorities, however, the army could not set its own effective policy. In his second chapter, Teters shows how the strengthened Second Confiscation Act provided clearer guidance to the military, resulting in a consistent policy across the western theater. While officers could vary their own policies, the latitude for local innovation decreased. Soldiers paid attention to policy and sought to act within its boundaries. Moreover, [End Page 484] with legal sanction they fully embraced emancipation as a way to weaken the Confederacy and punish secessionists. As Teters observes, the crucial shift with emancipation on the part of western armies occurred not with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation but with congressional enactment of laws. Teters clearly and convincingly shows how officers translated policy made in Washington into action in the field. The Confiscation Acts and emancipation enjoyed support from officers, because they saw that attacking slavery gave them a potent weapon to use against the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant, for instance, reflected in a letter to his sister that “I dont know what is to become of [slaves] in the end but it [is] weakning the enemy to take them from them” (46). Ample testimony from others echoes Grant’s sentiments; officers embraced emancipation as a pragmatic measure to hurt the Confederacy. Considerations as to what would happen to the enslaved people after the war, or even during it, often took a secondary place to the knowledge that hurting slavery would hurt the Confederacy. Subsequent chapters examine...

The Mayfly: May 12, 1864

The Mayfly: May 12, 1864 Geoffrey Brock (bio) Geoffrey Brock, poetry after Miroslav Holub Having risen from a branch of the Ni Riverduring a lull in the Battle of Spotsylvania,she settled on the blue upper lip of a deadConfederate corporal, weary. As Union troops began their fifth assault on Laurel Hillshe began to molt, her cloudy wingsclearing with the weather, her spectral bodybrightening and swelling, as if the life spilling from the ephemeral creatures around herwere filling her. Soon, she rose again,joining the sudden frenzied cloud of her kindcongregating then above the creek's fizzing waters, their wings ten thousand leadedwindows pierced by an angling evening sun. [End Page 64] Geoffrey Brock geoffrey brock is the author of two poetry collections, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of numerous volumes of Italian poetry and prose. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, where he founded and edits The Arkansas International. Copyright © 2019 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Yea, Alabama!: A Peek into the Past of One of the Most Storied Universities in the Nation, the University of Alabama Volume 1: 1819 through 1871 by David M. Battles

Reviewed by: Yea, Alabama!: A Peek into the Past of One of the Most Storied Universities in the Nation, the University of Alabama Volume 1: 1819 through 1871 by David M. Battles James P. Cousins Yea, Alabama!: A Peek into the Past of One of the Most Storied Universities in the Nation, the University of Alabama. Volume 1: 1819 through 1871. By David M. Battles. ( Newcastle upon Tyne, Eng.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Pp. xiv, 260. $81.95, ISBN 978–1-4438–7252-2.) Historians of the antebellum era and of education in particular will appreciate David M. Battles's attempt to chronicle the rise of Alabama's first institution of higher education. It is a story worth undertaking, one wherein schools born in the expansion-minded, populist age were victims of remorseless political slander and incessant religious zealotry. Southern universities often got the worst of both, and schools that were not undone by partisan squabbling were almost always finished off by Union troops. The fact that the University of Alabama (UA) survived all of this, including an actual siege of the campus, is enough to warrant a read. Battles presents this first volume of a projected multivolume history of the university in seven chronologically arranged parts, closing with an overview of southern slavery. The work is intricately researched and well referenced, with over fifty pages of color illustrations, photographs, and scans of primary sources. UA's history is told through a succession of university presidents from Alva Woods, the New England transplant who designed UA's initial approach to curriculum and student discipline, through the short tenure of William Russell Smith, who struggled to maintain the viability of a diminished postwar southern university. But this is more than just a story of survival, and UA stands out from other state institutions in several important ways. At a time when most states were curtailing commitments to higher education, the Alabama state legislature was amenable to support, allotting money from land endowments to build the campus and maintaining an active interest in the school's long-term fiscal [End Page 190] health. The board of trustees' scheme to auction land for the university's benefit was not remarkable, but it is surprising that the plan worked. Other states pinned their hopes on land sales but sometimes came up short. Kentucky, for example, struggled for decades to fund education with land. Student life constitutes one of the major themes of the book. Battles presents a never-ending parade of student code violations, including periodic dustups between students and professors, occasional brawls between students and townspeople, and all too frequent student duels. UA students showed incredible inventiveness in their pranks, firing guns from dormitory windows and decorating the campus church with liquor bottles. On at least one occasion, students hoisted a bull yearling to the roof of a campus building and tied it to a lightning rod. Battles describes the militarization of the campus—the introduction of military discipline, drills, and uniforms—as a partial response to student rowdiness, though others, Battles admits, may have seen things in a different light. In the years preceding Alabama's voteto secede, legislators came to appreciate the need for military training on campus. Battles is careful to stay well within the boundaries of available source evidence, but the result is something that resembles a chronicle. Bland enrollment statistics, lists of faculty hires, and abstruse budgetary figures may be uninteresting to the uninitiated and of little value to scholars. And, like a chronicle from the ancient world, information is presented without context and with little reference to what comes immediately before or after. For example, a series of two-page chapters, like "Roads Leading to Tuscaloosa," are awkward interludes that appear suddenly and without warning. In the strictest sense, this is an institutional history with little reference to larger developments in the state and almost nothing to inform the reader of wider developments in higher education. Yet there is value in the information Battles presents. Institutions like the University of Alabama survived because they were able to adapt to their circumstances, to their students' needs, and to the public's expectations. James P. Cousins Western Michigan University...

Occupied Vicksburg by Bradley R. Clampitt

Reviewed by: Occupied Vicksburg by Bradley R. Clampitt Thomas W. Robinson Occupied Vicksburg. Bradley R. Clampitt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8071-6338-2. 304 pp., cloth, $48.00. Many people know the age-old Civil War trivia that, after the fall of the city on July 4, 1863, the residents of Vicksburg did not formally celebrate Independence Day again until the early twentieth century. Much like many other stories related to the war, there is still debate as to how true the tale is. Regardless, when many people think of Vicksburg, they conjure up images of the city on the bluff falling, in tandem with Gettysburg, turning the tide of the war, and the tales of unrepentant Rebels refusing to completely accept the Confederate loss. Bradley Clampitt's book breaks new ground in seeking to understand what happened once the city was under Union control. In this fascinating work, Clampitt shows how Union occupation from the city's capture until the war's end laid the groundwork for the hostility toward "Yankees" but also how the city and surrounding area became an incubator for testing out policies regarding treatment of former slaves, former combatants, and southern civilians. Clampitt begins by discussing the Confederate surrender, but most of the ground he covers is well trodden and there is not much new here, other than the author pointing out where Union and Confederate leaders may have been self-serving in later accounts. The book really begins to tread new ground in chapter 2, in which Clampitt focuses on the first week of occupation. The officers and men of both sides intermingled, and Ulysses S. Grant spent the week feeding the Confederate army and Vicksburg's civilians while also grappling with what to do with the POWs and the influx of slaves arriving inside Union lines. Grant emerges as a man who [End Page 395] attempted to blend compassion with pragmatism in dealing with all parties. Once Grant moved on, four other Union commanders took turns setting local occupation policy, blending hard war with conciliation, and Clampitt deftly compares the strategy of each. The most intriguing portion of the book is the final two chapters, which cover Union policy toward African Americans and Confederate resistance to Union occupation. Not surprisingly, what to do with the large numbers of freedpeople occupied the thoughts of both the army and the federal government. Concurrently, Clampitt points out that the army and government were also struggling with what role the newly formed African American troops should take. In works on this era, the two issues are often dealt with separately, and yet I think Clampitt is wise to discuss them in tandem, because it is obvious that with both the former slaves and the black troops, neither the commanders in Vicksburg nor the leaders in Washington, DC, knew what to do with either group. Clampitt mines Union letters and diaries to show that the white soldiers in Vicksburg were equally unsure of what to make of their African American comrades and the refugees. The author does an admirable job of blending the stories of both the high and on-the-ground views. Sadly, though, and perhaps due to a dearth of sources, there are not that many African American voices to discuss their response to Union policies or attitudes. Confederate resistance to the Union occupation came in two forms. First, within Vicksburg, the white citizens detested the constant presence of Union troops and they did not accept emancipation or African American soldiers. White civilians reacted with disdain and incredulity when forced to comply with the orders of black soldiers. Unsurprisingly, though, Clampitt finds that in order to survive Union occupation, even the most ardent Confederates were not often openly defiant, afraid of the threat of punishment. The second form of resistance was open and flagrant as southern guerillas constantly harassed freedmen and whites who attempted to work abandoned plantations outside the city. Clampitt finds that these guerillas were the main cause of the general failure of the US Treasury Department's scheme to lease plantations. Unfortunately, Clampitt is not able to devote many pages to discuss the guerilla actions, and that...

Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River by Thomas W. Cutrer

Reviewed by: Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River by Thomas W. Cutrer James M. Bartek (bio) Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River. By Thomas W. Cutrer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 608. $40.00 cloth) Thomas W. Cutrer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Arizona, has at last completed his magnum opus, a military history of the trans-Mississippi theater of the U.S. Civil War. His stated purpose is to "establish the foundation and build the framework" on which future historians might build more detailed studies exploring the economic, political, and social aspects of the war in the region(p. xii). The potential of the trans-Mississippi region to contribute to Confederate victory was vast. Grain, livestock, and additional recruits for the army promised to add substantially to the cause. These recruits notably also included the Native Americans of the Indian Territory, many of whom legitimately supported the Confederate cause, and others who were pressured to do so by dint of proximity. Texas offered the only international border and a potential alliance via the French puppet emperor Maximilian in Mexico, while a brisk trade in cotton was conducted across the Rio Grande. Beyond Texas and seemingly ripe for the taking, New Mexico and California offered the prospect of precious metals and an outlet to the Pacific trade. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, the potential of the trans-Mississippi [End Page 264] region went unrealized. The southern dream of creating a transcontinental empire was snuffed out early on with the Union victory over General Henry Hopkins Sibley's Army of New Mexico, and the region as a whole was beset by a host of problems. A shortage of war materiel left Confederate forces destitute, poor infrastructure hindered military operations for both sides, and the Mississippi proved an almost impassable barrier for Confederates. For most Confederate soldiers in the trans-Mississippi region, this was perfectly agreeable as they were adamantly opposed to fighting in the far-flung reaches of Virginia. With the fall of Vicksburg, timely communication with Richmond ceased. The region became, as the title of the book suggests, a theater of a separate war. Edmund Kirby Smith assumed the role of de facto dictator, forced to act as magistrate and general, and more successful in the former role than the latter. Smith in fact was par for the course in the theater. It was, as Cutrer asserts, too often a dumping ground for the less talented and incompetent who, for various political or familial reasons, could not be outright dismissed. Political infighting between commanders hampered operations, as did the lack of a clear strategic vision for the territory on either side. General Ulysses S. Grant thought operations in the region a waste of manpower, particularly the disastrous Red River Campaign in Louisiana, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis saw it mostly as a resource to be exploited for operations in the east. In the end, Confederates held the territory by forfeit, and even won the last battle of the war in Texas. The modest scale of military operations in the theater belied the brutality that attended them, as a pronounced viciousness defined this separate war. Endemic guerrilla warfare, especially in Missouri, resulted in a scale of civilian suffering that had no counterpart in the east, while the strong presence of African American Union troops guaranteed racial atrocities on the part of Confederates. Nor did the ongoing clash between whites and Native Americans cease, as the great Dakota uprising of 1862 in Minnesota and continuing hostilities [End Page 265] with the Native peoples in the Southwest attested. For all Indians, the consequences of the war in the West would prove disastrous. Cutrer set out to write a comprehensive military history of the trans-Mississippi theatre, and in this he has succeeded admirably. His work is the first general treatment since Alvin Josephy's excellent The Civil War in the American West more than twenty-five years ago, and joins an increasing number of studies on this heretofore neglected but important facet of the conflict. James M. Bartek JAMES M. BARTEK teaches...

Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War ed. by Christopher Grass

Reviewed by: Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War ed. by Christopher Grass Madeleine Forrest Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War. Ed. Christopher Grass. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-3002-1096-5. 264pp., cloth, $35.00. With the overall acceptance of the importance of guerrilla warfare to our understanding of the Civil War, guerrilla scholars have turned the focus to specific individuals, events, and regions. Much of the academic literature focuses on Missouri, and for good reason—some of the harshest guerrilla fighting during the war occurred within the state. Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War offers a new point of view of the partisan warfare that occurred in southwest Missouri, showing it through the eyes of a Union soldier. Union guerrilla Kelso comes to life in this very first edited edition of his autobiography, ably edited by Christopher Grasso. A former Methodist preacher and Missouri schoolteacher living in Dallas County, Kelso first enlisted in his county's home guard to aid the Union troops commanded by Capt. Nathaniel Lyon. Following the Federals' loss at Wilson's Creek in August 1861, Kelso joined the 24th Infantry Regiment as a private, by war's end ultimately serving as a cavalry officer and guerrilla fighter. Although he came from a proslavery family, Kelso considered himself an ardent patriot (who embraced the ideals of the American Revolution) and resented the institution and the wealthy men who perpetuated it. His natural talents and aptitude for military life were quickly [End Page 309] recognized as he was sent into Confederate-occupied areas of Missouri as a spy. His introduction to guerrilla life came in late 1861 when the Union army retreated from southwest Missouri, where Kelso's family lived. Helping unionist families, including his own, escape the looting and pillaging by Confederate troops, Kelso vowed to get revenge. And revenge he got. Through a beautifully written introduction and exhaustive footnotes, Grasso brings Kelso to life. While the exploits of fellow Missouri guerrillas and bushwhackers such as Jesse James, Bill Anderson, and William Quantrill are now well known, Kelso's autobiography adds a much-needed Union guerrilla voice to the historiography. In many ways, he seems incredibly similar to the men whom he found himself fighting, and he was described in a newspaper article published after the war as "brave to the point of recklessness" (xxiv). Kelso can pinpoint the moment he felt his "whole nature changing" with a vengeance reminiscent of other vicious Confederate guerrillas. "I found myself thirsting for blood," Kelso writes. "In my madness,—what else shall I call my condition?—I vowed to slay twenty five rebels before I cut my hair. If it was madness to make such a vow, what was it to keep it, as I did?" (52–53). Kelso's unionist views provide another framework by which to interpret the horrific fighting in the state's unconventional war. Like his pro-Confederate counterparts, Kelso relished his time as a guerrilla and believed the violence in which he took part was necessary in the storm of war. While only the chapters written through 1863, written in Kelso's own hand, survived the test of time, Grasso makes sure to chart Kelso's postwar life, first as a representative to Congress and then again as a schoolteacher and writer. To this end, two of his political speeches from 1864 and 1865 are appended to the work. Kelso became quite disillusioned with the country he fought to protect, as he believed the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were not being realized, especially when it came to the fate of the newly freed African Americans. Voting with Radical Republicans in Congress, Kelso became a champion for "negro equality" (xxxi). Surrounded by the wealth and excess of the Gilded Age by the time of his death in 1891, the wizened Union guerrilla fighter once considered "a monster" who was "fanatical in his Unionism" grew to regret his wartime experience and became a self-proclaimed anarchist (xxiv). Kelso's wartime experiences are riveting, and Grasso does a superb job of placing in historical context the many events the soldier only briefly discusses or embellishes...

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans

Reviewed by: A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland by Sydney Nathans John C. Rodrigue (bio) A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. By Sydney Nathans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 313 Cloth, $29.95.) Some forty years in the making, Sydney Nathans's new book tells a remarkable story and is a monumental achievement. It delineates the experiences, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, of a group of 114 enslaved persons and their descendants. The slaves belonged to Duncan Cameron, one of the largest slaveholders of the North Carolina piedmont, whose son Paul managed his vast agricultural operations. In 1844, Paul Cameron purchased a 1,600-acre plantation near Greensboro, Alabama, and convinced his father to allow him to remove the 114 slaves, mostly in family units, to it. The story also includes 82 slaves whom Paul Cameron later sent to another plantation at Tunica, Mississippi. (After Duncan Cameron's death in 1853, Paul Cameron remained in North Carolina as an absentee owner.) Slaves were shuttled between Cameron's two western estates before and during the Civil War. Late in the war, as Union troops threatened western Alabama, most of the Greensboro slaves were returned to North Carolina, where they gained their freedom after Confederate forces surrendered in late April 1865, at nearby Raleigh. Many of the slaves sent to Alabama, despite the trauma of the move, had come to see it as home, as did those born and raised there. After emancipation, a number of them eventually made their way back. Almost from the moment he laid eyes on the Alabama estate back in 1844, Paul Cameron realized he had made a bad deal. He came to loathe the place and saw it as [End Page 329] an albatross, from which he was unable to free himself. After trying during the immediate postwar period to turn the estate around financially, enduring all of the familiar difficulties that former slaveholders throughout the South experienced with emancipation, Cameron eventually gave up on finding a white buyer and decided in the early 1870s to begin selling it off—in small parcels, entirely on credit, and with no down payments—to a number of the former slaves (and other black people) who resided there. In essence, Cameron's Alabama plantation became one of the several black, independent communities that sprouted up in the postemancipation South. The second half of the book traces the many difficulties and challenges—including internal conflicts—that these black landowners and their descendants faced in defending their community and holding onto the land: from Reconstruction, through the Jim Crow era and civil rights movement, up to the present. For instance, one of the community's descendants, David Hargress, was a career Navy man who secured the plum assignment of cook at Camp David under President Barack Obama. In telling the story of this community, Nathans focuses on a select number of families and individuals. The account centers on the slave Paul Hargis (he changed the name to Hargress after emancipation) and his family and heirs. A child when Duncan Cameron acquired him and his parents, Hargress grew up to become a trusted slave and confidante to Paul Cameron, and he and other family members (though not all) were among the slaves first removed to Alabama. Hargress was also among the slaves sent to North Carolina near the end of the war but who returned to Alabama as a free man, along with his wife, Dicey, and later acquired Cameron land. One of the Hargress descendants, through marriage, was Alice Sledge Hargress. Born in 1914, she died just shy of her one hundredth birthday (and was the grandmother of the aforementioned David Hargress). She provides much of the backbone of the twentieth-century story and insisted on the former Cameron lands being held as "heir land"—property to be held communally and for the benefit of all, not to be broken up and sold. Other important individuals include Sandy Cameron, a carpenter and the most trusted slave of the original 114; and, later, Louie Rainey, the community's "oral historian" (247); James Lyles, a minister and visionary who played a key role in...

Civil Wars and Their Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands

Civil Wars and Their Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands Andrew R. Graybill (bio) Janne Lahti, ed. Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, 1848–1886. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. x + 234 pp. Map, notes, figures, and index. $29.95. Andrew E. Masich. Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. x + 454 pp. Map, notes, figures, appendix, bibliography, glossary, and index. $34.95. For many historians of the U.S. Civil War, the causes of the conflict are straightforward: the war was a struggle between the North and South over secession and especially slavery. The war's geography is, if anything, even clearer: the fighting began at Fort Sumter and ended at Appomattox, and the major battles took place almost entirely to the east of the Mississippi River, at locations such as Antietam, Chancellorsville, Manassas, and the Wilderness. In this traditional view, represented by scholars such as James McPherson and especially Gary Gallagher, the war's "western theater" refers to Arkansas and Tennessee, with perhaps a passing mention of skirmishing between Union and Confederate forces in the New Mexico and Colorado territories. In sum, the message advanced by these historians is simple enough: the consequential action unfolded in the East, and everything else was a colorful—if distracting—sideshow. The pair of books under review here offers a much-needed corrective to this blinkered vision, extending the chronology, landscape, and cast of characters typically associated with the American Civil War era. Both volumes focus on the multicultural and transnational Southwest, where key battles did, actually, take place, which in turn exacerbated preexisting tensions among and between the region's diverse populations, producing new clashes. In this way, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands and Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands are in conversation with much of the best recent scholarship on the Civil War, which seeks to integrate the West into the larger narrative about the conflict, demonstrating that many key events happening simultaneously along the [End Page 586] frontier were not coincidental, and that the U.S. incorporation of the region marks an early thrust of U.S. imperialist ambitions. As he explains in his acknowledgments, Andrew Masich was raised in the East but graduated from high school in Arizona; though presently working in Pennsylvania, his scholarship has focused on the Southwest, including a co-authored biography of George Bent (1843–1918), whose life encapsulates many of the themes in Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands. The author, in other words, is no stranger to the idea of the Civil War as a truly national struggle, and in this study he seeks to offer a definitive account of its "least understood theater." He has succeeded, focusing on the period between the eruption of the fighting in South Carolina and the mustering out, in 1867, of the last Civil War troops in the region. To tell this story, Masich has consulted archival collections in Mexico and the United States, with particular attention to the Indian Depredation Claims within the U.S. Court of Claims records, seven hundred of which pertain to Arizona and New Mexico between 1861–67, and "contain depositions, testimony, cross-examinations, and other evidence detailing the nature of raids and warfare in the Southwest" (p. 10). This is to say nothing of his wide reading in the relevant secondary literature, which makes the bibliography alone an extraordinary research tool. Masich's key insight—one advanced by other scholars, but rarely in such a persistent and comprehensive fashion—is that the advent of the Civil War exacerbated old conflicts in the Southwest while inaugurating new ones. In his telling, "The American Civil War was not the root cause of the multiple civil wars of the Southwest Borderlands, but it did fan the smoldering embers of cultural and economic insecurity into flames of war" (p. 286). As it happens, Union and Confederate forces squared off in the Southwest, most famously at the battles of Valverde and Glorieta Pass in New Mexico in early 1862, when Union troops ultimately repulsed the Confederate attempt to secure a route to the Pacific. But of greater interest to Masich are the multiple campaigns in this trans-border region...