Showing papers in "The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2016"

The Salt Water Civil War: Thalassological Approaches, Ocean-Centered Opportunities

Abstract: Beginning with this journal's 2011 inaugural issue, its contributors and readers have witnessed the conceptual power of oceanic place-names. "Atlantic," "Caribbean," and "Pacific rim" perspectives have been prominently featured, and each has significantly enhanced our understanding of the North American 1860s. (1) This watery nomenclature has involved both more and less than it implies. As an exercise in innovative metageography, the "worlds" of oceans and seas have reconfigured vast networks of interaction and influence that earlier histories often separated by national, continental, or hemispheric boundaries. (2) Yet, both in this journal and across the field of Civil War studies more generally, the terminology has mainly applied to terrestrial locales situated on the dry (or semidry) edges of dynamic maritime zones. While we have gained much in looking out from ports and coastlines upon and across the high seas, there are a series of Civil War-era maritime conflicts, controversies, and programs that need to be viewed from the decks of ocean-borne ships surrounded by nothing but water. This essay's chief concern--to explore how and with what effect the Confederate rebellion sprawled across the oceans--begins with a simple suggestion: to consider the "blue water" theater as an integrated whole, whose sea lanes connected Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific waters to those of the Indian Ocean and the Bering Sea. This far-flung salt water complex confronts us as the largest and the least conceptualized spatial arena of an ever-more globalized Civil War. (3) The notion of a Salt Water Civil War offers more than a new spatial category. By drawing attention to a series of war-related developments in international waters, the terminology addresses how American belligerency mattered to all members of a global community, which in the mid-nineteenth century was fixated on the terms and possibilities of oceanic sea power, trade, exploration, and reform. A key goal of this essay is to survey the burgeoning specialized literatures devoted to war-related maritime incidents, beginning with that spate of Civil War naval histories capped recently by authoritative overviews of James McPherson and Craig Symonds. (4) Another objective is to demonstrate how such impressive summations, and the increasingly sophisticated and ambitious research agendas of naval history as a subfield, can benefit from a more sustained engagement with the economic, scientific, diplomatic, and cultural studies of the 1860s high seas. (5) Setting Civil War narratives aside from work developed apart from U.S. history can be a step toward embedding Union and Confederate initiatives within world history, broadly conceived. In combining synthesis and agenda-setting, this essay uses the New Thalassology as a point of departure and framing device. A bit more than a decade ago, Mediterranean specialists deployed the ancient Greek term thalassa ("the seas") to a distinctive mode of historicizing the waters of the Earth. (6) As the approach was taken up and applied to an increasing array of blue water settings, a set of defining thalassological principles have placed sea-based human endeavors at the center, rather than on the margins, of historical narratives, thus offsetting a prevalent "terracentric bias." (7) Thalassological approaches consider the high seas a realm of meaningful human activity in its own right and insist that the economic, legal, and imaginative construction of these spaces involved historical developments of enormous consequence. (8) Rather than the spaces "in between" continental land-masses and "around" island archipelagos, oceans in these renderings have been forums for international economic development, intercontinental migration, scientific discovery, war-making, and resource management, to name the most critical topics. (9) A similar ocean-centered approach can provide new vantages on the international dimensions of the American Civil War. …

The Quarrel Forgotten? toward a Clearer Understanding of Sectional Reconciliation

Abstract: Americans slaughtered one another in horrific numbers in the 1860s. According to the most recent estimate, at least 750,000 soldiers may have perished in the Civil War, while perhaps 50,000 noncombatants died indirectly as a result of military operations. (1) Yet by the end of the nineteenth century President William McKinley, a Union veteran from Ohio, was able to tour the reunited republic hailing the restored amity that supposedly prevailed between the erstwhile warring sections. In December 1898 he told spectators at a peace jubilee in Atlanta, Georgia, that it was time the U.S. government accepted responsibility for care of the southern dead-men who had given their lives to destroy the country he loved. Fifteen years later, a Virginia-born president, Woodrow Wilson, journeyed to Gettysburg, site of the most famous Federal victory of the war, to tell an audience of veterans and civilians that Americans had "found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten-except that we shall not forget the splendid valour, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes." (2) This essay reviews a range of modern scholarship on the tangled process of sectional reconciliation-a process that greatly assisted the United States' emergence as a great power by reducing persistent and divisive internal tensions after the carnage of the Civil War. It contends that while historians such as Nina Silber and David W. Blight have been right to pinpoint construction of a sentimental culture of reconciliation as a primary source of North-South amity, their influential studies unwittingly conceal the persistence of smoldering wartime hatreds and tenacious partisan allegiances built on perpetuation of those animosities. During a period dominated socially, politically, and culturally by men and women who had experienced the turmoil of the Civil War era, sectional memories-northern as well as southern-countered and sometimes trumped the gushing rhetoric of nationalist politicians. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, most Americans certainly thought of one another as compatriots. However, the formidable strength of Civil War remembrance made the process by which they came to that conclusion both complex and uneven. The first modern scholar to sense that reconciliation between Americans was a genuine historical problem rather than an inevitable attainment requiring no explanation was Harvard professor Paul H. Buck, whose book The Road to Reunion 1865-1900 was published in 1937. (3) Born in 1899, Buck was himself a product of sectional reconciliation who regarded it as one of America's "noblest achievements." Acknowledging that considerable animus existed on both sides after Appomattox, he charted the damaging impact of Reconstruction on sectional relations before explaining the rapid growth of reconciliatory forces primarily in terms of the development of a national market, the rise of a sentimental literary culture, the decline of sectionalism in mainstream politics, and a burgeoning soldiers' reunion in which "ordinarily the mass of veterans on each side accepted an easy camaraderie." Although Buck noted the determination of politicians, especially northern Republicans, to sustain sectional hostility for selfish political purposes in the 1880s, he contended that reconciliation was virtually complete by 1898, when northerners and southerners joined forces once again to fight against Spain. Blacks, he conceded, were the losers from this process (he devoted several pages to the failure of federal voting rights enforcement) but he voiced no criticism of his fellow northerners' decision to accept racial segregation as part of the postwar settlement. Optimistically, he told readers that Jim Crow had "permitted a degree of peace between North and South hitherto unknown, gave to the South the stability of race relations necessary to reconcile her to the re-united nation, and gave to the Negro a chance to live and to take the first step of progress. …

"Like a Cord through the Whole Country": Union Bonds and Financial Mobilization for Victory

Abstract: On September 18, 1863, on the eve of his trial, Union spy Spencer Kellogg Brown wrote from his Richmond jail cell to his sister Kitty, relaying to her the supreme faith he held in the Almighty. "God has been very kind to me, and for the past twelve months I have tried earnestly to please Him," exclaimed Brown. Resigned to his fate, he attempted to put his house in order regarding "some little trinkets." Of greatest importance was his back pay, owed by the Federal government; he left no doubt for his uncle as to where this money should go. "Tell him to invest in United States six per cent bonds," Brown ordered. He left the purchase of such bonds to his Uncle Cozzens in St. Louis, who acted on his wife's behalf. Brown was executed a week later, on September 25, 1863. (1) Given their broadly acknowledged importance to the Union war effort-"The Yankees did not whip us in the field, we were whipped in the Treasury Department," one Confederate leader famously groused--it is odd that the Federal bond drives have not received more scrutiny from historians. To be sure, there is a general, if vague, consensus that the bond drives were unusually "democratic," drawing on a significant portion of the northern populace. (Estimates range somewhat wildly, from five hundred thousand to more than 3 million northerners purchasing bonds.) But this is usually chalked up simply to the indefatigable genius behind them, Jay Cooke. Too frequently, the bond drives seem but an extension of his biography; in this narrative, we learn little of the salesmen of the world--the Willie Lomans, if you will--of the bond trade and even less about the purchasers. $2.28 billion of northern bonds found their way into the hands of millions of individual investors, large and small, strewn across the Atlantic World and at the hands of various financiers, from large bankers to small salesmen. By taking a closer look at these transactions, historians can garner a deeper appreciation for how this war spurred a financial industry that tied the people writ large into the supreme cause of Union. For in doing so, a new chapter in American finance was born, one that brought buyers and sellers together as part of a new national narrative wedded in debt. (2) It is well established that American money markets underwent dramatic evolution in the Civil War period. The repatriation of American securities from Europe, domestic financing of Union bonds in close coordination with the state, the rise of a national banking system, and the abandonment of the gold standard for the fiat currency of greenbacks all fueled the new rise of an American banking class with an urge to push product. Between 1864 and 1870, the number of registered bankers and brokers in New York City alone increased from 167 to 1,800. The national debt rose during the Civil War from $65 million to $2.6 billion by 1866, with American securities sales during the war coming in at a staggering $2.28 billion. Yet the overall capital in railroads increased by only $23 million during the war itself. Thus, capital became quickly and heavily entrenched in government securities before ultimately transferring over into rail in the postwar period. The two chief bond drives were the $500 million 5-20 bond drive of 1862-64 and the $830 million 7-30 drive of 1864-65. Combined, these two drives constituted more than half of all funds raised through borrowing among the American populace. Given the broadly distributed nature of these new products, the Civil War represented what was, up to that time, the most democratic investment scheme in American history. Close coordination between the federal government and various financial firms made Americans across the North American continent believe that their purchasing power was a key to Union success. (3) To be sure, the Civil War did not represent the first foray into bonds and wartime finance for the Treasury. The Revolutionary War had seen Robert Morris rise to fame as a prominent wartime financier, selling bonds on behalf of the fledging independent nation in its war against the British. …

Mission Impossible: Reconstruction Policy Reconsidered

Abstract: A central theme of Reconstruction historiography is the consideration of Reconstruction policy as debated, adopted, and implemented at the federal level. Inherent in that exercise is the contemplation of whether policymakers, working within the limits of what was possible politically, could have pursued a different course that would have met the twin objectives of sectional reconciliation and the promotion of a new birth of freedom and opportunity for African Americans liberated during the course of the American Civil War. To do that, scholars have to wrestle with counterfactual scenarios, an exercise with which not all of them are comfortable. Yet historians are also ill at ease with the alternative conclusion that, given the circumstances, the end result was not only likely but also inevitable. Thus speculation about alternatives goes hand-in-hand with a critique of what happened, for how can one offer criticism of what was done unless one outlines an alternative that would have improved upon the historical result? A simple glance at Reconstruction historiography reveals that historians have always evaluated Reconstruction policy and policymakers according to what was possible, what was preferable, and what actually happened--at least according to the scholar in question. By now that tale has been told so often that one risks boring the reader in the retelling of the familiar trinity of Dunningites, revisionists, and post-revisionists, an exercise that blurs differences within each grouping to sharpen the contrast between them. To practitioners of the Dunning school, who prized sectional reconciliation, policies founded on the federal protection of black rights were doomed because they were built upon the shaky foundation of black capability and equality. Reconstruction was a misguided experiment that imperiled sectional reconciliation among American whites by engaging in irresponsible social engineering to elevate incapable former slaves to an ill-fated equal inclusion in the body politic. Republican efforts in the 1860s to create state regimes where blacks voted and held office were exercises in futility and never should have been undertaken. Revisionists, who embraced the goal of black equality and opportunity, passionately disagreed. They deplored the failure of Reconstruction policy to achieve those laudable ends: they were far less concerned about sectional reconciliation. While few revisionist scholars questioned the objective of restoring civil governments, some believed it would have been far better for Congress to have confiscated planter land and redistributed it among the freedpeople to provide them with the economic foundations of freedom and opportunity. To such scholars, Reconstruction was an opportunity lost. And then there are the post-revisionists, a term very much associated with understandings of Reconstruction politics and policy. Post-revisionists tend to stress the inherent conservative tendencies in policymakers and political institutions and express skepticism that the goals of Reconstruction embraced by the revisionists were likely to be achieved under the circumstances. Nevertheless, as their name implies, post-revisionists are rarely understood apart from the revisionists they evaluate, who in turn continue to war against the pernicious impact of the Dunning school on public understandings of Reconstruction. Such a thumbnail description risks distorting the various ways scholars have addressed Reconstruction policy both as it was and as it might have been, rendering the whole exercise problematic. After all, one of the unfortunate consequences of any exercise in historiography is that it leads some scholars to forego reading the works of the people under discussion in favor of a brief characterization of their work. This is especially true when it comes to Reconstruction, for any exploration of Reconstruction history almost inevitably includes a treatment of Reconstruction historiography and memory, with various scholars announcing their intention to overturn long-held assumptions about the period that have shown an amazing durability in the minds of many Americans. …

The Local, National, and International Politics of Slavery: Edward Everett's Nomination as U.S. Minister to Great Britain

Abstract: On July 16, 1841, President John Tyler nominated Edward Everett to be the United States' minister to Great Britain. The Senate debated Everett's nomination in executive sessions; this dragged on intermittently until Everett's appointment was confirmed by a 23-19 vote on September 13, the last day of this special session of Congress. (1) The Senate's executive sessions were secret, but as the delay grew protracted word leaked out that southern senators opposed Everett's appointment because they considered him a dangerous abolitionist. Those in the press who seconded that opposition based it on public letters Everett had written while governor of Massachusetts in the late 1830s. The resulting press furor in the North produced talk of retaliation and ultimately disunion. The storm dissipated when Everett won confirmation, but its lightning had illuminated how interconnected local, national, and international questions could be in American politics when slavery was at issue. Most historians of American foreign relations have underrated the links between sectional domestic politics and international questions. Those who call for study of these connections continue to take the posture of voices in the wilderness, insisting quite rightly that both political and diplomatic historians could benefit from increased interchange. (2) In recent years, scholars of the sectional politics of slavery in the Civil War era have turned their attention increasingly to the international arena. (3) But the Everett episode adds to this emerging picture by demonstrating that what a politician said with an eye to reelection to his state capital could reverberate in deliberations in the nation's capital concerning who should represent the nation in a great foreign capital. The Everett confirmation imbroglio thus highlighted how vulnerable national party coalitions were to sectional disruptions by epitomizing the multiple angles from which such disruptions could appear. At a time in which the Whig Party already faced serious sectional and ideological cleavages, the confirmation combat placed even greater pressure on party unity. Northern Whigs, previously among the staunchest of unionists, shocked many observers by indulging in bitter sectional rhetorical responses to the threat to Everett. And while Democrats were happy, from a partisan point of view, to inflict travail on a Whig nominee and potentially divide their opponents, only southern Democrats found opposition to Everett on grounds related to slavery a straightforward proposition. The course of the debate and the Senate's eventual endorsement of Everett, however, demonstrated how loyalty to party and the Union could triumph over sectional politics. Within the framework of southern politics, the Democrats and southern rights men in this debate employed a classic version of what scholar William Cooper has called "the politics of slavery," in which antebellum southern politicians accused the other party of unsoundness on slavery. In this cycle of "sectional one-upmanship practiced by the two parties," the standard charge was that one's own northern allies were reliable on slavery, while the other party's northern men were rank abolitionists. Although pushing the slavery issue into state and sectional politics in this way proved counterproductive to keeping it out of national politics, Cooper argues, neither party could seem to help itself. (4) But while national party managers were caught off guard by the controversy, they neither found themselves paralyzed by it nor blundered through it, proving creative and resourceful in managing the final vote. Furthermore, the months-long war of words demonstrated the passionate devotion to the Union among southern Whigs. Strongly committed moderates may seem oxymoronic to us, but southern Whigs, as leading unionists, deserve more attention than most modern scholars have paid them. (5) They were certainly much in evidence in key roles during the Everett confirmation dispute. …

Reannealing of the Heart Ties: The Rhetoric of Anglo-American Kinship and the Politics of Reconciliation in the Prince of Wales's 1860 Tour

Abstract: On the evening of September 20, I860, a crowd estimated at thirty thousand gathered in the Detroit quays. Illuminated by the light of hundreds of colored lanterns affixed to riggings of the docked vessels, the individual faces of those who waited showed a mixture of excitement, anticipation, and fatigue, as many of them had been there for hours. (1) As the election campaign that would decide the next president of the United States was in its final, feverish weeks, mass meetings were far from unusual, but the crowd had come to engage in a decidedly unrepublican activity-welcoming the heir to the British throne. The royal visitor was none other than Albert Edward, eldest son of Queen Victoria and the great-grandson of George III, who was commencing his travels in the United States after a state visit to British North America. Any hope the young prince and his advisors had of relaxation following the frenetic pace of the Canadian tour was abruptly dashed upon his arrival in the City of the Straits. Upon landing, his steamer was besieged by curious onlookers who surged forward with such single-minded purpose that one member of the prince's retinue was shoved overboard and nearly drowned by the paddlewheel. (2) The prince was finally extricated and bundled into a waiting carriage to be conveyed to the relative safety of his hotel, but the reception he received in Detroit largely set the tone for the remainder of his visit. During his thirty days in the United States, the Prince of Wales and his suite traveled nearly twenty-six hundred miles from the sparsely settled prairies and booming commercial cities of the West to the nation's capital and then briefly to Virginia before continuing to some of the principal cities of the eastern seaboard. Nearly everywhere the prince visited, from St. Louis, Missouri, to Portland, Maine, he was enthusiastically welcomed with balls, addresses, parades, and spontaneous demonstrations of affection. Until the moment of his departure, crowds of curious spectators were his constant companions. (3) When his train stopped in rural Illinois, onlookers jumped up to peer into the carriage windows and offered their dirty hands for shaking. (4) Not even the sanctity of his lodgings was respected, as chambermaids sold strips of his bedclothes and water from his washbasin. (5) While the prince and his companions generally bore these incessant intrusions with good humor, the London Times wryly observed that the young royal was being "mobbed by democratic hospitalities." (6) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The enormous popularity Albert Edward enjoyed during his brief visit to the United States raises several questions but none more compelling than the seeming contradiction of a nation steeped in republican tradition and intensely Anglophobic political rhetoric welcoming to its shores the great-grandson of the monarch from whom its founders had fought to obtain their liberty. At first glance, that all of this occurred against a backdrop of sectional division only heightens the inherent contradictions. As closer examination reveals, however, these fears of disunion shaped both the visit and the language Americans deployed to convey its significance. More than any other interpretive framework, Anglo-American kinship, both literal and figurative, defined the visit. Familial metaphors had long been used to describe relations between the mother country and her former colonies, but in the context of the royal visit they gained a higher emotional valence, expressing the matrix of reciprocal rights and responsibilities that continued to connect the two nations even after political separation and inspiring dreams of a common destiny. (7) By embracing Albert Edward as a kinsman, the visit's organizers reoriented the relationship between the United States and Great Britain around intimacy and affection rather than power. The language of family they popularized in the context of the royal visit lent added poignancy to the rites of remembrance and reconciliation in which the prince participated, laying a firm foundation for new avenues of Anglo-American friendship. …

The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth-Century North America

Abstract: In 1865, while the United States struggled to reconstruct itself, war raged in Mexico between invading French forces supporting Emperor Maximilian and partisans of Benito Juarez's republican government. The uncertain futures of the United States and Mexico underscored the instability of the boundaries that the two nations had drawn across North America in the preceding decades. While this impermanence was a source of anxiety for officials in Washington, D.C., Mexico City, and Paso del Norte (the city from which the Juarez government operated), for others it was an opportunity. Among those opportunists was a former California senator named William McKendree Gwin. Gwin, a Tennessee native who had amassed wealth in Mississippi and political success in California and Washington, D.C., spent the summer of 1865 in Mexico City, where he worked to secure military backing for a mining colony in northern Mexico. His activities drew the attention of Matias Romero, the Juarez government's minister to the United States. Writing to U.S. secretary of state William Seward in July 1865, Romero claimed that Gwin was working with French emperor Napoleon III to "take to the frontier of Mexico all the discontented citizens of the United States living in the south, with the design of organizing them there under the protection and with the assistance of France." (1) This plan echoed earlier efforts to colonize Americans in Texas and Sonora, neither of which, from the Mexican perspective, had ended well. Moreover, in the context of the French occupation of Mexico and the U.S. Civil War, it raised warning flags as a threat to the Juarez government and a possible refuge for unrepentant Confederates. Although this scheme sounds harebrained in hindsight, at this moment in which Mexico and the United States were both fragile, it touched on insecurities about the weakness of national identities, boundaries, and loyalties. Sharing Romero's concern, Seward concluded that Gwin was "disloyal," his actions "injurious" to the reconstituted Union. (2) When Gwin returned to the United States later that year, federal officials arrested him. To Gwin, however, this scheme was neither treasonous nor far-fetched. (3) On the contrary, it was in line with the work he had done throughout his life. As a young man, Gwin had moved from Tennessee to Mississippi--where he had helped distribute land, from which the U.S. government had forcibly removed Choctaws and Chickasaws, to white speculators and settlers (including himself). He had also speculated in land in Texas and advocated for its annexation by the United States. With the discovery of gold in 1848, he relocated to California, where he became one of the state's first senators. Over his almost decade-long career in the Senate, he promoted settlement and economic development in California, worked to annex additional territory to the United States, and defended the rights of Americans to settle and seize power throughout the western hemisphere. (4) While Seward and Romero viewed Gwin's plan for a colony of Americans within a Frenchbacked Mexican imperial government as a challenge to the sovereignty of the nations they served, for Gwin this scheme was simply a variation on a theme in which he could help Americans disperse across the continent and put its resources to economic use, and become rich and powerful in the process. In the nineteenth-century North America in which Gwin lived and achieved political and economic success, territorial boundaries were impermanent; national loyalties were conditional; and many alternative configurations of land, power, and people seemed possible. From his first speculative ventures in Mississippi through his Mexican scheme and on to the end of his life, Gwin was an archetype of the entrepreneurial state- and nation-builder who viewed the map of North America as malleable and sought to reshape it. Gwin belongs to a historical cast of characters that includes Aaron Burr, who, after serving as U. …

"Wrestling at the Gates of Death": Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post–Civil War North

Abstract: On the night of June 17, 1864, Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain walked anxiously among his sleeping soldiers. They were outside of Petersburg, Virginia, preparing for a major attack against the Confederate city's fortifications. Something was bothering the colonel. He was no stranger to warfare--he had been in the hardest of the fights at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, but something about this place felt different. "I had a strange feeling that evening, [a] premonition of coming ill," Chamberlain later wrote. "A dark shadow seemed to brood over me, dark wings folding as it were ... and wrapping me in their embrace." (1) His unnerving premonition proved true. The next afternoon, he led his men in an attack against Rives' Salient on the heavily fortified Confederate Dimmock Line around Petersburg. The fight quickly became intense. His staff scattered in the action; many lay wounded. The corps moved forward and came upon wet, marshy land that would be difficult to cross. He lifted his sword in one hand and the flag bearing the Maltese Cross of the Fifth Corps in the other, using them to motion his men to the left. As he held the flag and sabre aloft, a minie ball smashed into him, traveling through his right hip to the left, crushing his bones and cutting into his bladder and urethra. Blood pooled around his feet. Stunned, he braced himself with the flag and sword as his men passed, until the loss of blood brought him to his knees. Removed to the division hospital, Chamberlain believed he was a dead man. Surgeons located and cut out the ball, but there was little else they could do. Chamberlain urged the surgeons to leave him aside and put their efforts toward the other wounded soldiers and officers filling the hospital. The surgeons agreed. Chamberlain asked for pen and paper in order to write a bloodied last letter to his wife Fanny, then lay back to wait for the end. (2) But the end never came. Chamberlain survived that long night, though it seemed impossible even to him: "I never dreamed what pain could be and not kill a man outright." After six months "wrestling at the gates of death," he returned to the front of his brigade. (3) He served out the remaining year of the war, was promoted twice for bravery, and left the army in 1865 as a brevet major general. When Chamberlain returned to his civilian life at the war's end, he was the very picture of a citizen-soldier. The former college professor was charming, handsome, and intelligent, but perhaps most importantly, he was a war hero. In addition to his action at Petersburg, his leadership had helped win the Battle of Gettysburg, and was crucial in the war's final battles in the Appomattox campaign. During his three years in the army, Chamberlain was wounded six times and seriously ill twice. He returned quickly to the field each time, and his bravery and dedication helped him to rise through the ranks. When the war ended, he used his reputation to win four years as the governor of Maine, followed by twelve years as the president of Bowdoin College. Chamberlain was adored among Civil War veterans and regularly served as a featured speaker at commemorations and encampments. This carefully constructed heroic public image, however, obscured a troubling dimension of the general's life. Hidden beneath his blue uniform and fine suits, the wound from Petersburg quietly tortured Chamberlain. Because of the damage to his urethra, he initially required a catheter, which created a fistula near the base of his penis that never healed. It leaked urine constantly and left him susceptible to chronic bladder and testicular infections that caused him, in his own words, "unspeakable agony." (4) He underwent surgery in 1883 to close the fistula; he barely survived, and his symptoms--including the fistula-soon returned. Over the next thirty years, recurring infections plagued Chamberlain's self-described "weak spot," often leaving him incapacitated. (5) A pension examiner noted in 1893 that painful adherent scars impaired his mobility. …

"To Make Something out of the Dying in This War": The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science

Abstract: EDITOR'S NOTE: The following represents the acceptance speech for the Watson Brown Prize for the best book published on the Civil War era in the calendar year 2014. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Shauna Devine for her book Learning from the Wounded, published by the University of North Carolina Press. These remarks were given at the annual banquet of the Society of Civil War Historians (SCWH), held during the Southern Historian Association annual meeting on November 13, 2015, in Little Rock, Arkansas. The SCWH judges and administers the book prize. Dr. Devine's address employs a variety of medical terms; these are explained in a glossary at the end of this article. On July 10, 1863, Pvt. Charles McElroy of Connecticut was transferred from the Eleventh Army Corps Hospital to the Jarvis USA General Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He was suffering from a wound to the left leg, received during the Battle of Gettysburg. The case report noted that the whole belly of the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles had been carried away by the fragment of a shell and that the limb presented a "frightful appearance," its vitality having been destroyed far beyond the seat of the injury, "terminating in extensive suppurative inflammation and sloughing." For the next few weeks, the doctors at the Jarvis General Hospital monitored the patient daily and treated the inflammation in the hope that the wound would granulate. But on September 3, the case file noted that the patient was suddenly seized with violent constitutional disturbance, a high grade of fever; pains in his head, back, and limbs; and frequent chills. The doctors studied the abnormal inflammation, diagnosed gangrene, and quickly got to work. They opened the entire wound, moving the skin back, which revealed a pulpous slough, described as dark ash in color, which seemed to liquefy the flesh every hour as it progressed. The discharge worried the doctors; it was described as a thin saneous liquid with an odor so pungent and offensive that the nurses and others in attendance could scarcely remain a moment without experiencing sickness of the stomach. The patient sank rapidly as the disease progressed, and he was monitored every hour, night and day. Hoping to stimulate the patient's tissues and help counter the poisons, the doctor prescribed cold-water dressings, poultices, stimulants, tonics, and a nutritious diet. In deciding how to proceed, the doctor had some resources to consult. A year earlier, U.S. Surgeon General William Hammond had sponsored a series of investigations in which physicians at field and general hospitals were ordered to study the causes, transmission, pathology and treatment of hospital gangrene. (1) In these investigations, physicians were asked to submit their case histories to the new Army Medical Museum. Some case reports were also submitted for debate and discussion to local medical societies and medical schools, and a number of findings were published in medical journals. The approaches to the study of gangrene were highly individualistic, and the directive to study the diseases produced an epistemological innovation. Some physicians advocated studying bodily fluids and the products of disease with a microscope; others engaged in clinical trials that tested new methods and remedies; still others suggested studying the chemical processes of these diseases; and yet more engaged in new experimental methods trying to prove contagion. Many doctors concentrated on active prevention-using disinfectants to avoid the disease erupting in the first place, which added a new element to the practitioners' clinical responsibility. There was a developing consensus that bromine appeared the most promising prophylactic and therapeutic remedy. (2) The findings of these investigations were widely disseminated during the war. They were not only reported through the medical schools, societies and journals but also to medical inspectors and medical directors who then passed along the findings and recommendations, sometimes in the form of direct orders, to doctors in the general hospitals. …

A Tale of Two Armies: The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac and Their Cultures

Abstract: Every organization or institution develops a culture, and armies are no different. The culture of an army is important because it determines and influences proper and improper conduct individually and collectively. It imposes standards and expectations that affect how persons and groups react to crises, how they behave on the campaigns and in camp, and how they fight, among other things. (1) The culture that emerged in the Army of Northern Virginia was distinct from that of the Army of the Potomac. What dictated the development of that culture was the background of the soldiers; the training and regimentation that their officers imposed, particularly early in the war; and their formative experiences in combat and on the march. Once that culture took hold, it was extremely hard to break or alter, and it shaped the course and outcome of the war. To understand the formulation and impact of those cultures on the war, I am going to utilize quantitative as well as qualitative data. Half a century ago, a shift toward the influences of social science on the discipline of history and the development of the computer sparked historians to dabble in a sophisticated use of statistics. Within two decades, however, the field was largely dismissed. Many historians were completely intimidated by numbers and refused to embrace them, while others found quantitative studies either tedious reading or insensitive to the hardships and brutality of the past. (2) Over the past couple of decades, many social scientists have recognized the limitations of pure numbers and have added qualitative evidence, the kind most historians use, to their studies. Historians, too, have begun to embrace digital history, which the American Historical Association defines as "scholarship that is either produced using computational tools and methods or presented using digital technologies." (3) Most of that work has relied on computers and software to present scholarship with digital technologies, particularly the exploration of geospatial relationships, which provide powerful insights into networks, neighborhoods, and pathways of communications. Yet historians have lagged in the first part of the definition, scholarship that is produced using computational tools and methods. (4) This study seeks to employ statistics along with some choice traditional historical evidence to compare two of the principal armies of the Civil War, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, and the cultures that developed. (5) It will not focus on the generals or the politicians; rather, it will revolve around the background and experiences of the officers and enlisted men of both armies, who are to my mind the most intriguing subjects to investigate. As one man in the Army of Northern Virginia wrote home, "Common soldiers by name, however, are often times very uncommon--like common sense." (6) These statistics will give us insights into the prewar lives of the soldiers and help answer questions such as why they served, what kind of culture developed in each army, and how that culture affected Union victory and Confederate defeat. The evidence for this talk comes from more traditional sources, published and unpublished official reports and communications, letters, diaries, and even memoirs. But the critical source--the statistics--comes from two stratified cluster samples, one on the Army of Northern Virginia and the other on the Army of the Potomac. The sample for the Army of Northern Virginia consists of 600 soldiers selected randomly: 150 artillerymen, 150 cavalrymen, and 300 infantrymen. Sample units in the Army of Northern Virginia represented all Confederate states plus Maryland and Kentucky. Data from individual soldiers was weighted based on his branch and the branch's percentage within the army. Information for the sample came from Compiled Service Records, Census Records, pension files, obituaries, family histories, and other sources, much of it now available on the internet. …

Cotton, Clemency, and Control: United States v. Klein and the Juridical Legacy of Executive Pardon

Abstract: When the guns of war fell silent in 1865, Americans throughout the reunited states grappled with the logistics of peace. At virtually every turn lay nebulous but critical questions of race, class, allegiance, and identity. More pragmatic legal stumbling blocks could also be found strewn across the path to Reconstruction; some of them would ensnare the healing nation for decades to come. Among their number was notorious Supreme Court decision United States v. Klein (1872). Born on July 22, 1865 out of a small debate over the wartime seizure of Vicksburg cotton stores, Klein quickly evolved into a legal behemoth. In its tangles with the separation of powers, the presidential power of pardon, and the supremacy of the executive in judicial matters, United States v. Klein would ultimately amount to the very poster child of the snowball effect at work in Reconstruction law. Widely forgotten or overlooked today, the decision of United States v. Klein nonetheless stands as one of the most crucial battles of the American Civil War era.

The Jerry Rescue: The Fugitive Slave Law, Northern Rights, and the American Sectional Crisis by Angela F. Murphy (review)

Abstract: At times, however, readers may long for additional discussion of the broader implications of these cases. For example, the cases seem to challenge the familiar narrative of an increasingly ineluctable binary binding whiteness to freedom and blackness to slavery during the antebellum era. Family Bonds suggests that free blacks’ ability to claim rights waxed and waned, sometimes in response to prominent developments like Nat Turner’s revolt but also according to the vicissitudes of neighborhood feuds and deaths. The book provides a strong foundation for future investigations into the complex relationship between race and slavery. While many of the Virginians who populate Family Bonds succeeded in using law to insulate themselves against the state’s most racist policies, for most enslaved Virginians racism and the laws of slavery worked seamlessly in ensuring their bondage. Scholars exploring the relationship between these two realities and the people who inhabited them might provide additional insight into the abolitionist politics of black Virginians. While the book makes the case that political ideology decisively shaped white Virginians’ attitudes toward the rights of free people of color, future scholars might consider whether these cases provide new insight into the political thought of black Virginians as well. Building upon extraordinary archival research, Family Bonds does invaluable work in particularizing and concretizing meanings of freedom within a slave society. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of law and slavery in the American South. Catherine Jones

The Transatlantic Roots of Irish American Anti-Abolitionism, 1843–1859

Abstract: That most Irish immigrants opposed both abolitionist reformers and antislavery politicians in the antebellum era was beyond dispute to contemporaries in all three camps. As early as 1842, the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison perceived and made it his mission to disrupt "a stupendous conspiracy ... between the leading Irish Demagogues, the leading pseudo democrats, and the southern slaveholders." More than a decade later, a Know Nothing Party-affiliated newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, blamed "the ignorance and superstition of a half a million semi-civilized Irish voters" for the electoral successes of proslavery politicians. Irish American newspaper editors disputed the tenor if not the specific complaint in these accusations. In 1856, the New York Irish-American cheerfully acknowledged that "Irish emigrants join the Democratic Party and take sides against abolitionists" before defending its readers against abolitionists' accusations that immigrants frequently and wantonly assaulted African Americans. (1) Scholarship on the antislavery movement, the antebellum sectional crisis, and Irish immigration in the Civil War era echoes the contemporary consensus that Irish Americans were foes to abolitionist reform and antislavery politics. (2) Historians are far from unanimous, however, in explaining why Irish Americans were so singularly hostile to all shades of antislavery. Immigrants' fears of labor competition from freed slaves, their purported need to establish a white racial identity, their attachment to the proslavery Democratic Party, and their receptiveness to the influence of a proslavery American Catholic hierarchy have all weighed heavily in the discussion. (3) Cumulatively, these explanations interpret Irish American opposition to antislavery as a product of the social, political, and cultural influences in America that shaped the contours of Irish immigrants' lives. Such an interpretation is useful in highlighting the forces that acted on Irish Americans as they encountered the sectional politics and nascent industrial capitalist economy of antebellum America. But it can also convey the impression that immigrants arrived in the United States as blank slates, whose views on the major social and political questions of the day would be etched out by priests and ward bosses. Yet studies of Irish Americans' involvement in Jacksonian-era politics, participation in the Civil War, and resistance to exploitative labor conditions have shown that immigrants brought certain ideas and practices with them from Ireland. Under the right circumstances, immigrants' backgrounds in Ireland or the connections they maintained with their native land informed the ways they adjusted to life in the United States. (4) While Irish history has featured prominently in more recent works on Irish immigrants and antislavery, the pre-famine era dominates the scholarship. In the years just prior to the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845-54), the revered Irish politician Daniel O'Connell insisted that the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic--but especially Irish Americans who supported his efforts to win Irish political autonomy from Great Britain--make common cause with abolitionists. The historian Angela Murphy explains that Irish Americans rejected O'Connell's antislavery pleas in order to demonstrate their bona fides as respectable American citizens who would not be beholden to foreign influences. On the eve of the famine migration, then, the demands of loyalty to their adopted country led Irish immigrants to spurn antislavery appeals from Ireland. Other works on the pre-famine period similarly emphasize a contrast between the popularity of antislavery in O'Connell's Ireland and an anti-abolitionist consensus among the American Irish. (5) While most Irish immigrants remained steadfastly opposed to antislavery throughout the antebellum era, the argument here is that the basis of Irish American anti-abolitionism shifted in the late 1840s and early 1850s. …

"Spare your country's flag": Unionist Sentiment in Frederick, Maryland 1860-1865

Abstract: The historiography of Frederick, Maryland has maintained in the years since the Civil War that the area was firmly pro-Union. However, through the 1860 presidential election, as well as the reactions of residents of Frederick to the Confederate Army through 1862, it becomes apparent that there was a significant, although perhaps not sizeable, group with Confederate sympathies. In 1863, Frederick County began to shift its sympathies. Through the narrative written by one diarist about the Confederate Army’s march through Maryland prior to the Gettysburg Campaign, the army’s residence in Frederick during the Battle of Monocacy, as well as the 1864 Presidential Election returns, there is evidence that the city and county became more proUnion as the war went on. Frederick County, as well as the city of Frederick, was divided in its sympathies at the beginning of the Civil War. By 1863, the county began to favor the Unionist sentiment for which it is known and has been remembered.

Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy

Abstract: In 1861, on the very eve of the Civil War, Edmund Ruffin published a speculative novel titled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time, in the Form of Extracts of Letters from an English Resident of the United States, to the London Times, from 1864 to 1870. (1) It has never quite enjoyed the attention from historians that it deserves. Ruffin did fairly well in anticipating the future. He foresaw urban riots in the North during a civil war with the South, though he thought they would arise from class consciousness rather than objections to conscription. He predicted that the states of the Old Northwest would eventually cleave to the southern confederacy, and indeed anxieties about that possibility were often expressed during the actual Civil War of 1861-65. On his most important point, namely, that guerrilla warfare would lead to southern independence, he was proved wrong, but he looked hopefully to see its embrace by Confederate society throughout the war. (2) What is most significant about the book is simply that Ruffin was thinking about the future in 1861, about what might happen if the South really seceded, trying to figure out how the slave states might gain independence despite the North's great military advantages. It is difficult to find any substantial consideration of those questions in books or pamphlets published in the South on the eve of secession; arguments over the constitutionality of the act of secession itself dominated the polemical literature of the day. Emory M. Thomas, after writing many works on the Confederacy, still wonders at the lack of foresight displayed in the immediate origins of the Civil War and raises the question, "Both sides, it seems, decided to go to war because they could not--or would not--calculate the cost of their decisions." (3) Thus Ruffin stands out. Say what one will about his amateurish exercise in futurist fiction, he was thinking about the apparently unthinkable: what would happen if the South really did secede from the Union and faced a war with the North, which was obviously greatly superior in population, transportation, and manufacturing. The dangerous resort to secession needed some plausible strategy for success, and Ruffin had at last figured out what it was: guerrilla warfare. To read the confident prose Ruffin dreamed up to show how guerrilla warfare would work for southern independence is doubly surprising, coming as it did from the pen of an ardent proslavery apologist. Current wisdom on the subject suggests something altogether different, that the Confederacy did not dare consider a self-conscious adoption of guerrilla warfare as a strategy for military victory from fear for the security of slavery amid the disorder of irregular war. The most forthright statement of that view comes from Gary W. Gallagher, but other historians agree, and all who have considered the idea have at the very least taken it seriously. "The threat of such chaos in a slave-based society," Gallagher argued, "stood as the most important obstacle to a Confederate policy of guerrilla war." "Both late antebellum fears of insurrection," he added, "and behavior when confronting Union invaders during the war strongly suggest that white southerners would not have countenanced a national guerrilla strategy in 1861." Guerrilla warfare defied "the models of earlier wars to which white Southerners looked for guidance." Guerrilla warfare was only "marginally related to their martial tradition." "Announcement of such a strategy in 1861," he said, would not "have prompted an enthusiastic response." (4) The proposition has attracted the attention of some of the most important writers on the war: in addition to Gallagher, George M. Fredrickson, Reid Mitchell, and the writing team of Herman Hattaway, Richard Beringer, Archer Jones, and William N. Still. Considering why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Reid Mitchell, in 1992, said, "In 1861 the Confederacy did not choose to fight a guerrilla war--because, in large part, it did not seem possible to fight a guerrilla war and keep slavery intact. …

"The Honor of Manhood:" Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Notions of Martial Masculinity

Abstract: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is perhaps best known as the commander of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry during the Battle of Gettysburg. While depictions of Chamberlain's martial glory abound, little attention has been paid to the complicated motives of the man himself. This paper seeks to examine the unique ways in which Chamberlain interacted with Victorian conceptions of martial masculinity: his understanding and expression of it, his efforts to channel it, and his use of it as a guiding principle throughout the trials of both the American Civil War and his post-war life.

The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts by Amber D. Moulton (review)

Abstract: in 1861 and its subsequent failure (12). (In one example of this historical foreshadowing, Lord Palmerston, who as British prime minister blocked recognition of the Confederacy, refused to recognize the Republic of Texas in the late 1830s because of its commitment to slavery.) Torget discusses the economic struggles and political isolation of the Republic of Texas in a world in which cotton prices fluctuated wildly and the international abolitionist movement was quickly gaining strength. He notes that the weakness and “swift downfall” of the Texas Republic “marked the first failure of American farmers to construct a nation built atop cotton and slavery” (14). Civil War scholars will have much to ponder in Torget’s provocative argument that, given the experience of the Republic of Texas between 1836 and 1845, “winning independence might have been only the first of the Confederacy’s struggles for survival” (264). Well written, expertly researched, and interpretatively ambitious, Seeds of Empire immediately moves to the front rank of monographs examining the long Civil War era on both sides of the Rio Grande. Patrick J. Kelly

"For Safety and For Liberty," The Devan Family of Gettysburg

Abstract: This article explores Gettysburg’s 19th century black history through the exciting experiences of the Devan family. Originally from Frederick County, Maryland, they came to Gettysburg as free people of color. In town, one member of the family was suspected of assisting slave catchers by handing over escaped slaves for a profit. Four members of the family served during the Civil War in the United States Colored Troops, three of whom died in the service. This complex story proves the fact that black history is extremely complex and should not be painted by historians with a single brush stroke.

Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton by William Marvel (review)

Abstract: is underemphasized (to be fair, Frank specifically states that it is not one of her study’s objectives), and at times the reader forgets that there were women in Sherman’s path who were not wealthy and not white. Beyond that, as other studies—most recently Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012)—have shown, the elite plantation homes that Sherman targeted were immensely complex spaces, and the construction of separate spheres does not neatly apply. Certainly, as Frank contends, the invasion of the home’s interior rooms and the destruction of personal belongings were a private violation. But plantations were centers of business. They were public as much as they were private. Such critiques aside, historians will find Frank’s book useful. She has combed through the substantial personal accounts of the women and men involved in Sherman’s March. Likewise, because Frank focuses on both Georgia and the Carolinas, her study fleshes out the gendered components of Sherman’s entire campaign in a way that scholars should find helpful. In all, Frank’s study complements the growing body of scholarship that illustrates the myriad ways in which the war blurred the lines between battlefield and home front, civilian and soldier. Megan L. Bever