THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America provides an important overview of the

main themes within the study of the long nineteenth century. The book explores major
currents of research over the past few decades to give an up-to-date synthesis of nineteenth-
century history. It shows how the century defined much of our modern world, focusing
on themes including: immigration, slavery and racism, women’s rights, literature and
culture, and urbanization.This collection reflects the state of the field and will be essential
reading for all those interested in the development of the modern United States.

Jonathan Daniel Wells is Professor of History in the Departments of History and

Afroamerican and African Studies, and Director of the Residential College, at the
University of Michigan.
 T H E ROU T L E DGE HI STO RI ES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important
topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-
renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will
be judged.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FOODWAYS

Edited by Michael Wise and Jennifer Jensen Wallach

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF RURAL AMERICA

Edited by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF DISEASE

Edited by Mark Jackson

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN SPORT

Edited by Linda J. Borish, David K.Wiggins and Gerald R. Gems

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF EAST CENTRAL

EUROPE SINCE 1700
Edited by Irina Livezeanu and Árpád von Klimó

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE

Edited by William Caferro

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF MADNESS AND MENTAL HEALTH

Edited by Greg Eghigian

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF DISABILITY

Edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown and Nancy E. Hansen

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF ITALIAN AMERICANS

Edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao G. Pugliese
THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY
OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY
AMERICA

Edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells

 First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Jonathan Daniel Wells to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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ISBN: 978-1-138-78487-1 (hbk)

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Typeset in Bembo
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The author wishes to thank Kimberly Guinta, Eve Mayer and Theodore Meyer
for their invaluable help in getting this volume to publication
 C ONTEN T S

List of Contributors xi

Introduction 1
JONATHAN DANIEL WELLS

PART I
The Early Republic 9

1 Race, Slavery, Sectional Conflict, and National Politics, 1770–1820 11

JOHN CRAIG HAMMOND

2 Class, the Market Revolution, and Urbanization 33

CHRISTOPHER CLARK

3 “Female Women or Feminine Ladies”: Gender and Women’s Rights

before the Antebellum Movement 47
LEIGH FOUGHT

4 Religion and Reform in the Early American Republic 62

JOHN FEA

5 Borderlands and Cultural Survival: Native Americans in the Early

National Era 74
DAVID A. NICHOLS

PART II
Antebellum America 87

6 International Travel, Intellectual Life, and Global Influences on the

United States 89
DANIEL KILBRIDE

7 Party Politics and the Sectional Crisis: A Twenty-Year Renaissance in the

Study of Antebellum Political History 109
FRANK TOWERS

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 C O N T ENT S

8 Literature and Culture during the American Renaissance 131

JOHN ERNEST

9 Capitalism and Slavery in the United States 146

MICHAEL ZAKIM

PART III
The Civil War Era 169

10 Secession and the Onset of Civil War 171

RACHEL A. SHELDEN

11 Wartime Military Mobilization, Business, and Technology 191

MARK R. WILSON

12 The Confederacy on the Battlefield and Home Front 202

PAUL D. ESCOTT

13 Politics and Civil Liberties on the Union Home Front 216

JOEL H. SILBEY

14 Waging War, Conducting Diplomacy: Leadership and the American

Civil War 231
BROOKS D. SIMPSON

15 African Americans and Emancipation in the Civil War 241

AARON SHEEHAN-DEAN

16 Law, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution, 1840–1880 253

TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER

PART IV
America in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 273

17 Women’s Rights and Gender Ideology, 1848–1890 275

BONNIE LAUGHLIN-SCHULTZ

18 Race, Crime, and Segregation 292

VIVIEN MILLER

19 The Paradox of the Business and Political Economy of the

New South 307
NATALIE J. RING

20 American Literary and Cultural History in the Post-Civil War Era 321
SARAH E. GARDNER

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 C O N T ENT S

21 Industrial Empire: The American Conquest of the West, 1845–1900 333

ANDREW C. ISENBERG

22 Crisis, Protest, and Reform in Industrializing America 346

WILLIAM A. LINK

Index 358

ix
 C ONTRIBUTOR S

Christopher Clark is Professor and Head of the History Department at the University
of Connecticut. His books include The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts,
1780–1860 (1990); The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton
Association (1995); Social Change in America: From the Revolution through the Civil War (2006);
and, with Nancy Hewitt, volume 1 of Who Built America? (2000, 2007). He is currently
writing a book on agriculture and landownership from the late colonial period to the
Cold War.
John Ernest is Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor of English and Chair of the Department
of English at the University of Delaware, and the author or editor of twelve books,
including Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009) and The Oxford
Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014).With Joycelyn K. Moody, he serves
as series editor of Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture.
Paul D. Escott is Reynolds Professor of History at Wake Forest University. His recent
books are The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture, Uncommonly Savage: Civil War
and Remembrance in Spain and the United States, and Lincoln’s Dilemma: Blair, Sumner, and the
Republican Struggle over Racism and Equality in the Civil War Era.
John Fea is Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of History at
Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of The
Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Leigh Fought is an Associate Professor of History at Le Moyne College in Syracuse,
New York. She is the author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University
Press, 2017) and Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord
(University of Missouri Press, 2003), and was an associate editor on The Frederick Douglass
Papers: Series Three: Correspondence,Volume 1: 1842–1852 (Yale University Press, 2009).
Sarah E. Gardner is Professor of History and Director of the Spencer B. King, Jr. Center
for Southern Studies at Mercer University. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern
White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 and Reviewing the South: The Literary
Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941. She is currently working on a book
that examines reading habits and practices during the American Civil War, titled “‘A New
Glass to See All Our Old Things Through’: Reading During Wartime.”

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 C O N T R I BU TO R S

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History at Penn State, New Kensington.
He is the author of numerous books and articles on slavery and politics from the Revolution
through the Civil War. His is currently at work on a book-length examination of slavery
and politics from the 1760s through the 1830s.
Timothy S. Huebner is Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College, Memphis.
He is the author of Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism
(2016), The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy (2003), and The Southern Judicial
Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790–1890 (1999). He is co-editor (with
the late Kermit L. Hall) of Major Problems in American Constitutional History, second edition
(2010). Professor Huebner also serves as associate editor of the Journal of Supreme Court
History, published three times a year by the Supreme Court Historical Society.
Andrew C. Isenberg is Professor of History at Temple University. He is the author of
The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang,
2005); and Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), which was a
finalist for the Weber-Clements Prize in Southwestern History.
Daniel Kilbride is Professor of History at John Carroll University outside Cleveland,
Ohio. He is the author of An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia
(University of South Carolina Press, 2006) and Being American in Europe, 1750–1860
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He is researching a book on American engagement
with Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century, which has so far resulted in two
publications: “What Did Africa Mean to Frederick Douglass?” Slavery & Abolition 36:1
(March 2015), 40–62; and “The Old South Confronts the Dilemma of David Livingstone,”
Journal of Southern History 82:4 (November 2016), 789–822.
Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States who
specializes in American women’s history. Her first book, The Tie That Bound Us:The Women
of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, was published in 2013 and was
named a Kansas Notable Book in 2014. She is now working on a project about nineteenth-
century women’s rights reformers and the intersections of their ideology about women’s
rights and citizenship with their experiences of motherhood.
William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida.
He is a historian of the South whose work includes The Paradox of Southern Progressivism,
1880–1930 (1992), Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (2003),
Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath (2013),
and Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (2015). He is currently writing a
study of the life and times of Frank Porter Graham.
Vivien Miller is Associate Professor of American and Canadian Studies at the University
of Nottingham. She is the author of Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison”
and Chain Gangs (2012) and Crime,Violence and Sexual Clemency: Florida’s Pardon Board and
Penal System in the Progressive Era (2000), and co-editor of Transnational Penal Cultures: New
Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance (2014) and Cross-Cultural Connections in
Crime Fictions (2012). She is currently working on the death penalty in the pre-1972
United States.

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 C ON T R I BU TO R S

David A. Nichols is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University. He has

an AB from Harvard and received his doctorate from the University of Kentucky. He is
the author of Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order
on the American Frontier (University of Virginia Press, 2008), Engines of Diplomacy: Indian
Trading Factories and the Negotiation of American Empire (University of North Carolina Press,
2016), and Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes
Region, 1600–1870 (Ohio University Press, 2017, forthcoming).
Natalie J. Ring researches and teaches on the History of the American South. Prior to
arriving at UT Dallas she taught for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Tulane
University. She is the author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State,
1880–1930. Dr. Ring also is the co-editor of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated
South, a collection of essays offering a new look at the history and historiography of Jim
Crow.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana
State University, where he teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil
War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is the author of Why Confederates
Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia and the Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S.
Civil War, and the editor of several books.
Rachel A. Shelden is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She
is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War
(University of North Carolina Press, 2013), and the co-editor, with Gary W. Gallagher, of
A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Political History
(University of Virginia Press, 2012).
Joel H. Silbey is the President White Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University.
He has written extensively on nineteenth-century politics. Among his books are studies
of pre-Civil War presidents, and of Congress, including most recently, Martin Van Buren
and the Emergence of American Popular Politics and an edited study of the antebellum
presidents.
Brooks D. Simpson is Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University,
where he is a member of the faculties of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts and
Barrett, The Honors College. Among his books are Ulysses S. Grant:Triumph over Adversity,
1822–1865 (2000); The Civil War in the East: Struggle, Stalemate, and Victory (2011); The
Reconstruction Presidents (1998); The Political Education of Henry Adams (1996); and America’s
Civil War (1996).
Frank Towers is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary. He co-edited
Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era (University of Chicago Press,
2015).
Jonathan Daniel Wells is Professor of History in the Departments of Afroamerican and
African Studies and History, and Director of the Residential College, at the University of
Michigan. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Origins of the Southern
Middle Class: 1820–1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Women Writers and
Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Southern

xiii
 C O N T R I BU TO R S

Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (LSU Press, 2011), and A House Divided:The Civil
War and Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, second edition, 2017), in addition to articles
in academic journals and chapters in books. He is currently working on two book projects
related to the Fugitive Slave Crisis in the antebellum North.
Mark R. Wilson is a Professor in the History Department at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Chicago. He
is the author of The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Destructive Creation: American Business and the
Winning of World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Michael Zakim is the author of Ready-Made Democracy, a political history of men’s dress,
and of the forthcoming Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made, as well as the
editor, together with Gary Kornblith, of Capitalism Takes Command:The Social Transformation
of Nineteenth-Century America, all published by the University of Chicago Press. He teaches
history at Tel Aviv University.

xiv
 INTRODUC T I ON

Jonathan Daniel Wells

The historiography of nineteenth-century America, like that of the nation’s history more
broadly, has changed in dramatic and profound ways in recent decades, carving out entirely
new fields, adding immeasurably to the complexity of our work, and redefining even our
most fundamental understandings of the past. This historical awakening, inspired in no
small part by the Civil Rights Movement and the succeeding struggles for greater civil and
human rights in post-World War II America, has reshaped virtually all fields and subfields
by shifting attention away from white male political and military leaders and toward
ordinary actors at the grassroots, while also tending to refocus academic lenses onto the
local as opposed to the national. Along with such shifts has come the assertion that
the experiences of common people can be most readily understood not through analyses
of high politics, but rather through the cultural tropes and contours that guided the beliefs
and practices of the public.This is not to say that scholars have completely ignored powerful
decision-makers in influential centers like Washington and New York, only that the
“cultural turn,” as the last few decades of historiography have been labeled, has added
incalculably to the breadth and depth of our knowledge of the past.
While the cultural turn has reshaped historiography in revolutionary ways, it bears
reminding that throughout the twentieth century there were always scholars listening for
marginalized voices. Long before the cultural turn, leading voices emerged in African
American scholarship; men like W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, and Benjamin
Quarles wrote crucially important histories of the black experience that continue to
resonate with modern historians. Women like Louise Fargo Brown and many others
offered their own perspectives on the nation’s history, often (though by no means
exclusively) uncovering complicated stories of women and gender. And, of course, even
white male scholars did not focus exclusively on high politics or the battlefield, as the
carefully nuanced work of academics like C. Vann Woodward and Kenneth Stampp
attests.1
Yet it remains a truism that until the last half-century, American historiography was
largely the bastion of white male scholars, and their interests reflected their own personal
histories. Interested primarily in major historical actors like George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln, academic historians
engaged in lively debates about the constituencies of the Whig and Democratic Parties
(which together comprised what political scientists termed the Second Party System), the
causes of the American Civil War, and whether Reconstruction marked the rise of

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 I N T RO DUCT I O N

meddlesome and corrupt northern carpetbaggers or a badly needed head start on a “New
South.” Military historians charted the back and forth of generals and armies on battle-
fields; the War of 1812, the US-Mexican War, and of course the Civil War offered aca-
demic and popular audiences seemingly endless material on which to base books and
articles. The opening of the West in the mid-nineteenth century and the conflicts between
cowboys and Indians also garnered tremendous attention, reflected in the popular mind
by John Wayne, the Lone Ranger, and Davey Crockett.
Yet the historian transported from 1957 to 2017 would hardly recognize the field.
Beginning with studies of the African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s,
scholars have reshaped debates over antebellum slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,
and all three fields have benefited from a wider scope of analysis. The study of antebellum
slavery has been reconfigured dramatically as historians began in the 1960s to consider
enslaved people as significant historical actors in their own right, rather than mere pawns
of national politicians in the sectional crisis. One landmark study that established beyond
question the importance of examining the African American experience was John
Blassingame’s The Slave Community (1972). Utilizing long-ignored slave narratives,
Blassingame helped to reignite interest in the southern plantation and the people of color
who lived there. Soon Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan, Roll (1974), Edmund Morgan’s
American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family (1976),
and other works helped to reinforce the notion that race and racism were fundamental to
understanding American history. The cultural turn, and specifically the historiographical
redirection toward the history of race, was in full motion.2
More recently, the history of slavery and capitalism has been enjoined once again, as
Michael Zakim’s essay in the present volume shows. Works by Sven Beckert, Edward
Baptist, Calvin Schermerhorn and others have investigated the role of cotton in creating
a world-wide system of trade, a business on which capitalism was heavily dependent, so
much so that as Baptist demonstrates terrible violence was inflicted on the enslaved to
increase production.3
While the renewed interest in the entwined history of slavery and capitalism continues,
the great conflict to emerge from the sectional crisis also remains of great relevance to
both scholars and the reading public. New studies of individual battles and campaigns by
Anne Sarah Rubin, Elizabeth Varon, Allen Guelzo, and others have been published in
recent years, adding nuance to our understanding of Sherman’s March to the Sea,
Appomattox, and even well-studied clashes like the Battle of Gettysburg.4 Yet scholars
have also increasingly turned toward the home front and to less studied subjects, including
Union soldiers of color, the role of women, and the importance of the international
dimensions of wartime diplomacy. In common with other work after the cultural turn,
recent academic studies of America in the 1860s have tended to highlight the roles played
by ordinary people, in contrast to popular perceptions that Lincoln and a handful of
Washington leaders like Representative Thaddeus Stevens were primarily responsible for
emancipation, a perception reified by director Steven Spielberg’s highly successful film
Lincoln.
Given the academy’s current emphasis on ordinary historical actors as drivers of change,
it should not surprise us that the Reconstruction era and the late nineteenth century have
witnessed a similarly noteworthy shift toward race, gender, racism, and culture. This

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 I N T RO DUCT I O N

authorial stance contrasts sharply with the work of previous generations of historians, such
as the Dunning School of the late nineteenth century, as well as with the work of promi-
nent professors like Ulrich B. Phillips in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Dunning and his adherents, modern observers have remarked, were more interested in
depicting Reconstruction as a corrupt era of carpetbaggers who kept white southerners
under martial rule, while Phillips was intensely interested in the southern plantation but
not at all intrigued by the enslaved people who toiled on them.5 Leading historians like
Thavolia Glymph, Crystal Feimster, Eric Foner, Talitha LeFlouria, and others have added
rich detail to our knowledge of the brutality of the postwar era.6
The revolution in nineteenth-century American historiography on race and racism
has been dramatic indeed, but one could easily point to seismic shifts in other fields and
subfields like the history of women and gender, Native Americans, LGBTQ Americans,
and the new and growing areas of transnational and global studies. Many of these fresh
and exciting subfields are discussed at length in the present volume, illuminating formerly
marginalized groups in valuable ways that will no doubt continue unabated over the next
decades. Historians remain interested in political culture, as the fine work of Rachel
Shelden, Michael Landis, and many others attests.7 But the cultural turn has proven not
to be a temporary detour but rather an enduring new road that has led us to a much fuller
and broader appreciation of the nation’s past.
Some scholars, it should be noted, do not share this optimistic prediction of a rosy
future for academic history. As this volume heads to publication, the humanities are
under fire as undergraduates and their families, laden with the heavy burden of college
debt, search for paths to well-paid careers upon graduation. Academics themselves, some
scholars have argued, have exacerbated this uneasiness by fostering the fracturing of the
many fields and subfields into ever smaller (and perhaps ever more esoteric) circles of
experts. According to this view, the cultural turn has damaged the profession more
generally, making it increasingly difficult for historians even within the same fields of
inquiry to speak to one another, not to mention the expansion of the wide gulf separating
academic historians from the literate public.8 Indeed, in 1945, Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of
Jackson appeared prominently on best-seller lists just as it garnered awards from the
historical profession. Books widely acclaimed by academics today often earn no broader
readership than being assigned in undergraduate university lecture courses. There is no
doubt that the cultural turn, even as it has greatly enriched and fundamentally reshaped
the study of history, has kept turning past the notice or interest of the reading public,
surrendering the best-seller lists largely to the likes of former Fox television personality
Bill O’Reilly.
The cultural turn, one might also argue, has obscured earlier important analyses of
class and economic inequality. The once-vibrant field of nineteenth-century labor
history, at one time a field no self-respecting history department would do without, has
waned considerably in recent decades, though optimistic modern labor historians might
point to promising renewed attempts to consider once again the importance of union and
worker history. And whether the recent surprising success of the presidential campaign
of Democratic Socialist and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders presages a rekindling of
interest in the history of class consciousness, class conflict, and social inequality remains
to be seen. Whether or not social class reemerges as a topic of consistent and widespread

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 I N T RO DUCT I O N

interest in the humanities, the historiographical shifts of the past half century have
populated our understanding of the past with people and topics once marginalized. The
nearly two dozen essays in this volume, a mix of history and historiography, provide
tangible proof that history remains a vital discipline.
***
Until recently, volumes such as the one you are reading now were largely unnecessary;
graduate students studying for qualifying exams or scholars in other fields seeking to
understand recent trends on a given subject could turn to historiographical essays in
periodicals. Such works were common in the immediate postwar era and the later
twentieth century, appearing regularly in the foremost journals and often penned by
leading scholars, and both graduate students and other scholars read them eagerly and
referred to them often. The twists and turns of scholarship on the Second Party System,
for example, were enough to spin the heads of even the most attentive students. The
consensus historiography of the mid-twentieth century gave way in the 1960s to an
ethnocultural approach to understanding the partisan allegiance of Whigs and Democrats,
which in turn rendered political history more quantitatively driven in the 1970s and
1980s. The literature was vast and daunting. The same might be said about scholarly
explanations for the causes of the Civil War. In the aftermath of World War II and in the
wake of the Cold War, the Civil War seemed to reflect broader fights for human rights.
By the 1990s, the ground shifted again; the conflict began to appear as the cumulative
result of contingencies rather than any great clash between slavery and freedom.
The historiographies of intensely researched topics like politics and the Civil War
would have taken months to master, but every so often, a prominent historian of political
culture or the sectional crisis like Edward Pessen or Ronald Formisano would publish a
historiographical essay that walked readers through recent trends, “catching up” those
who remained primarily interested in other fields.9 It does appear that historiographical
essays are a lost or at least dying art, though many academic journals have published
longer reviews that allow for expanded historiographical context, or even occasional
blogs online that are less constrained by the costs (and therefore length requirements) of
the printed page. In the meantime, volumes such as the present one will seek to fill the
remaining gaps, and in the process provide a greater understanding of that great century
or so between the American Revolution and World War I, a period often called “the
Long Nineteenth Century.”
The nineteenth century is of interest to many of us for the rich array of topics to
analyze, study, and puzzle over. Change seemed to come at an unprecedented pace. A
woman born in rural New York in 1810 would have witnessed a remarkable array of
startling changes if she lived to be eighty. Likely born on a small farm, she would have
witnessed revolutionary shifts in virtually every aspect of her life. The emotionally intense
conversion experience of evangelical religion would have changed the way that she and
her family worshipped. Rather than take several days or even weeks to travel to visit
family, as her parents had endured, she would grow up in a nation more connected by
railroads, canals, a postal system, and eventually as she grew older, the telegraph and
telephone. News in her parents’ generation took weeks to cross the Atlantic; the laying
of the transatlantic cable in mid-century provided almost instant news from Europe.

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 I N T RO DUCT I O N

Even as a northerner born in the early 1800s, she might have seen slaves firsthand without
ever travelling to the South, since many northern states had only provided for the gradual
end of bondage. Her sons might have marched off to the Civil War, and their sacrifices
might have been mitigated by the Union’s victory and the end of slavery. Even after
seeing so much change, she would never earn the right to vote, a privilege that would
only be enjoyed by her grandchildren. But she would have witnessed the expansion of
the suffrage to nearly all white men, as well as a public debate about whether such a right
should be granted to those who just a few years prior had been property under the law.
The woman who lived throughout most of the nineteenth century would have expe-
rienced many changes indeed, and this is why so many historians remain fascinated by the
1800s. That century witnessed, for example, stunning literary and artistic creativity, as
antebellum Americans eagerly read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and
Ralph Waldo Emerson boldly stood in front of the conservative Harvard faculty and called
for a new kind of American scholar. Emily Dickinson, safe in her own chamber of her
family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, mere miles from where Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne penned their own contributions to the “American
Renaissance,” wrote poem after poem that in a few lines relayed more emotion and
experience than some entire novels.
Even while reading the latest productions from Hawthorne in The Democratic Review,
a monthly partisan magazine matched only by the Whigs’ American Review, Americans
would have lined up largely as they do today: behind one of two major political parties.
The Jeffersonians and the Federalists would give way to the Second Party System, and for
the first time campaigns would champion the virtues of the common man, reflecting the
broadening of white male suffrage in the early part of the century. Yet as potent as these
two parties were in the 1830s and 1840s, they would both collapse under the weight of
the sectional crisis. Though the Democrats would limp on during and after the Civil
War, they would have to contend with a new and powerful Republican Party.
African Americans like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman pushed Republican
leaders like Lincoln to go further and faster in the remaking of America. Douglass’s
own Narrative (1845) was an indictment of the country’s claim to be a shining city
upon a hill, a nation based ostensibly on the notion that all men were created equal. As
in any age, those who could stand apart from their own societies and recognize the
injustice surrounding them, those who called for greater rights for women as well as an
end to slavery and discrimination, were but a few. And yet, in large part because of the
tireless work of agitators like Douglass and Tubman, as well as that of thousands of
lesser known reformers, the North and South would come to blows in 1861 in a war
that abolished slavery.
The Civil War stands, of course, right in the middle of the long nineteenth century,
a seemingly impassable divide that separated the American experience into two worlds:
one of slavery, states’ rights, abolitionism, fugitive slaves, border wars, and King Cotton,
the other of joyful emancipation tempered by Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan violence,
federal preeminence, Republican administrations, industrialization, union activism,
and the emergence of a supposedly New South. The war really did render an entirely
new nation.

5
 I N T RO DUCT I O N

Yet even as it answered old, thorny questions surrounding slavery and states’ rights,
the war and the Reconstruction era that followed generated new concerns. The
Thirteenth Amendment declared slavery illegal, but how would the four million freed-
people be integrated into society? Would black men be able to vote? Would black and
white Americans be able to work, worship, and live together in the same communities?
Violent paramilitary groups like the KKK and the White League, in concert with one-
party Democratic control over politics, tried to keep the Civil War from marking a
watershed in race relations: codes seeking to control the behavior of southern African
Americans replaced antebellum slave codes. Yet, in time, southerners of color in places
like Birmingham, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, and Greensboro, North Carolina would
rise up and stage a second reconstruction known as the Civil Rights Movement.
And this brings us back to the cultural turn. It is not that historians are presentist,
judging the past by the standards of the here and now, nor do historians always seek to
draw direct connections between past and present to justify our corner of the brow-
beaten humanities. We are intrigued by the past, and indeed many of us have dedicated
our professional lives to understanding it, but our experiences in the present shape what
we are interested in studying, the questions we ask as we head to the archives, and the
historical problems we pose to our students in the classroom. In this crucially important
way, the study of history is alive and ever-changing.

Notes
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903); John Hope
Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Knopf, 1947);
Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little Brown, 1953); C. Vann Woodward,
The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951); Kenneth Stampp,
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956). Louise Fargo
Brown of Vassar College and Louise Ropes Loomis began the famous Berkshire meeting for
women historians in 1930. Southern women historians were also active: Lillian Adele Kibler, for
example, wrote a widely admired biography of a southern Unionist: Benjamin F. Perry: South
Carolina Unionist (Durham: Duke University Press, 1946).
2 John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1972); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves
Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom:
The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black
Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976).
3 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014);
Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
(New York: Basic Books, 2014); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of
American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Sven Beckert and
Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
4 Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Knopf, 2013); Anne Sarah Rubin,
Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2014); Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the
End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
5 On the Dunning School, see John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning
School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 2013).

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 I N T RO DUCT I O N

6 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1988); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation
Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern
Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
(Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2015).
7 Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War
(Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013); Michael Todd Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties:
The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
8 For an excellent analysis of this view see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity
Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
9 Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?”
American Historical Review 85 (December 1980); Ronald P. Formisano, “The Invention of the
Ethnocultural Interpretation,” American Historical Review 99 (April 1994).

7
 Part I

THE EARLY REPUBLIC

 1
RAC E , SLAVERY, S EC T I O N A L
CONFLIC T, AND N AT I O N A L
POLITIC S, 1 7 7 0 – 1 8 2 0

John Craig Hammond

Slavery, sectional differences, and the conflicts they engendered proved manifest less than
a month after the thirteen colonies declared their independence.While devising means to
pay for war, the Continental Congress debated whether slaves should be taxed as persons
or property. Anticipating eight decades of threats that lay in the future, South Carolinian
Thomas Lynch, Jr. warned that “If it is debated, whether their Slaves are their Property,
there is an End of the Confederation. Our Slaves being our Property, why should they be
taxed more than the Land, Sheep, Cattle, Horses, &c.” To this early threat of disunion,
Benjamin Franklin sardonically replied that “Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the
State, and there is therefore some difference between them and Sheep. Sheep will never
make any Insurrections.”1
Similar conflicts, debates, and threats would carry through the War for Independence
and the Confederation years.The Continental and Confederation Congresses divided over
matters such as the use of black soldiers in the Continental Army, British compensation for
wartime losses of slaves, the levying of taxes on slaves, and foreign commerce, including
both the importation of slaves and the exportation of slave-produced cash crops. The
Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787 was deeply divided by sectional
matters, with northern and southern delegates promising rejection in their respective home
states unless certain sectional demands were met. Sectional issues continued through the
ratification debates. Supporters and opponents of ratification parsed the document, keeping
tabs on the advantages gained by one section and lost by another. In states where ratification
was contested, Federalists and Anti-Federalists marshalled forth constitutional clauses and
claims demonstrating that their section had scored a divisive victory, faced impending
doom, or had struck a fine balance between sectional interests.
Sectional disputes hardly ended with ratification. The first several federal Congresses
wrestled with numerous issues surrounding slavery that the Constitution left open to
interpretation and implementation. With Quakers, free blacks, and their political allies
determined to force Congress to take action against slavery, and with southern politicians
equally intent on protecting slaveholders’ interests, sectional conflicts and clashes over slavery
became an inescapable part of national politics. In one form or another, and in varying
degrees of duration, significance, and severity, disputes over slavery struck every Congress
that met between 1789 and 1820. More broadly, slavery and sectional conflict were persistent
features of local, state, national, and international politics from the 1770s through 1820.

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 J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

From the 1960s through the early 2000s, the historiography on slavery, politics, and
sectionalism in the early American republic was strongly shaped by assumptions grounded
in American exceptionalism and nationalism.2 Slavery was clearly antithetical to the values
and principles of the American Revolution. As such, historians assumed that there existed
a revolutionary moment when the founders could have placed slavery on the road to
abolition, leading historians to frame their analyses around the question of “why did the
founding generation fail to abolish slavery?” Led by this question, historians have long
taken the American nation-state and elite political actors as their main subject of analysis.
David Brion Davis and Winthrop Jordan, whose magisterial works nearly founded the
subject of slavery and politics in Revolutionary America, were modest in their criticisms
of revolutionary inaction against slavery, even if their findings were less than flattering to
the founders, the Constitution, the American political process, voters and politicians, and
institutions such as Congress and the presidency.3
The dark realities of slavery and racism in the early republic uncovered by historians in
the 1960s and 1970s led historians in the 1980s to reverse the meanings of American
exceptionalism without abandoning their use of the concept. Led by Paul Finkelman and
Gary Nash, these historians tended towards nationalism in that their analyses focused on
elite political actors and the institutions of the nation-state. They tended towards excep-
tionalism in assuming that the United States, as a nation conceived in liberty, should have
somehow been immune to historical processes found elsewhere in the Americas and the
Atlantic world. The exceptionalism and nationalism that informed much of the literature
on slavery and politics in the early republic found expression in something like a standard
narrative that became generally accepted by historians in the 1990s. Expressed most force-
fully in works by Paul Finkelman,William Freehling, and Don Fehrenbacher, that standard
narrative held that Revolutionary challenges to bondage resulted in gradual abolition laws
in the North, a brief surge of manumissions in the Upper South, and the passage of the
Northwest Ordinance in 1787. From this high-point of antislavery fervor, northern and
southern founders allowed racism, hypocrisy, and narrow self-interest to undermine efforts
to rein in slavery’s growth and to place it on the road to peaceful abolition. Southern
slaveholders forged a pro-slavery constitution while facing minimal opposition from
self-interested and hypocritical northerners. In the first two decades of the republic, the
Democratic Republican Party served as a vehicle for southern slaveholders to gain north-
ern support for pro-slavery laws and measures. Free from criticism and serious challenges,
southern politicians quietly fashioned the United States into a slaveholders’ republic, while
slavery grew in both absolute numbers and territorial extent as a result of an informal
policy of silent sanction.4
This narrative would continue to shape scholarship into the early 2000s. By then,
scholarship on slavery and the founding became even more nationalistic and exceptionalist
in both its positive and negative forms, as historians turned to evaluating the roles of
various founders in creating or opposing a pro-slavery constitution and a slaveholders’
republic. In practice, this scholarship often resorts to anachronistic moralizing where
historians contrast the antislavery merits of founding fathers such as John Adams and
Timothy Pickering against the hypocritical, pro-slavery demerits of founders such as
Thomas Jefferson. In other cases, historians ruminate on how political victories by New
England Federalists might have altered the course of slavery in the United States, or

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 RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

castigate the founding generation for sacrificing the principles of the revolution on the
altar of self-interest and racism. When these works move beyond the confines of the
United States, they typically do so to provide contrasts between functionally pro-slavery
founders in the United States and antislavery advocates and revolutionaries in places such
as Britain and Haiti. Recent works by Douglas Egerton and Gary Nash exemplify much
of the recent literature on slavery and politics in the early republic in that both treat free
and enslaved blacks as political actors who shaped conflicts over slavery and abolition.
Both works, however, confine their analysis of politics mainly to the actions of a small
group of founders. More broadly, recent founders-centered literature assumes that had
certain founders – particularly Jefferson – acted in a certain way, at certain key moments,
slavery could have somehow been placed peacefully on the road to abolition.5
Interpretations which hold that the founding generation should have abolished slavery
still hold considerable sway in the historiography. Over the past fifteen years, however, they
have been joined by a group of historians who have revised this understanding of slavery
and American politics in significant ways.6 While much previous scholarship placed the
founders at the center of the politics of slavery, recent scholarship instead shows that
political elites found themselves reacting to events and actors that forced slavery into local,
state, regional, and national politics far more frequently than they initiated and directed
them. Political icons such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington remain prominent
in this literature, as do important national-level institutions such as Congress and the
presidency. However, they have been joined by an expansive cast of groups, individuals, and
institutions that includes free and enslaved blacks, northern and southern farmers, eastern
and western planters, early antislavery activists, minor Federalist and Republican politicians,
urban mechanics and newspaper editors, free black churches and self-help societies, and
Quaker-led antislavery societies. More than just a means of placating calls for more inclusive
history, historians have shown how these various groups repeatedly forced slavery into
local, state, regional, national, and international politics, and then shaped the outcome of
events and conflicts, for better or for worse.
In place of moralizing about the failures of the founders, historians now favor analysis
of the interests of various groups, sections, nation-states, and empires: the motives and
conditions that drove them to act; the actions they undertook to protect their interests; and
the institutions they created to further them. Rather than asking why an amorphous group
of founding fathers failed to abolish slavery, and rather than assuming that slavery should
have been abolished, historians now ask how and why some groups defended slavery; why
other groups remained indifferent about it; why some well-meaning whites strove for its
eradication; and how free and enslaved black people sought to gain freedom for themselves
and others. And rather than positing a period of unbridled slaveholder victories, this group
of historians has constructed a narrative of nearly continuous conflict, compromise, and
accommodation that pitted slaveholders against a shifting amalgamation of slaves, free
blacks, antislavery groups, and rival partisan, sectional, and imperial powers.
Taken collectively, these works point towards a narrative of the politics of slavery in the
early republic that focuses on the workings of a nation-state where slaveholders wielded a
tremendous amount of economic, social, political, and cultural power. In other slave
societies in the Atlantic world, planter elites found themselves subordinate to imperial
authorities and prerogatives. In the United States, slaveholders reigned as the most powerful

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 J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

political class, and they did so within a single nation-state with imperial ambitions. Unlike
their counterparts elsewhere, slaveholders in the United States wielded a tremendous
amount of political influence both in their states and in the confederal and then federal
governments. Recent literature thus treats the founders and a broader class of slaveholding
politicians not as moral monsters or as hypocrites, nor as villains or heroes, even if many
were certainly capable of acting in all of these roles. It instead treats slaveholders as an
extremely powerful class, loath to relinquish their power and always hungry for more,
whether that was power over slaves and lesser whites, power over their local communities
and states, or power over the federal government. Slaveholders exploited powerful incentives
to expand slavery; they confronted a shifting array of challenges to slavery; and they fought
strenuously to maintain their sovereignty over slavery as an institution and their claims of
mastery over black people as individuals and as slaves.
Much of the recent literature on slavery and politics in the early republic focuses on
understanding these struggles and confrontations, along with their outcomes. Side-
stepping the negative expressions of American exceptionalism that pervade so much of
the past three decades of scholarship on slavery and politics, this group of historians finds
it utterly unexceptional that an elite class of slaveholders who helped lead a movement for
independence and oversaw a revolution in government, then insisted on protecting their
interests and the base of their power.
Historians’ understandings of the conflicts over slavery in the early republic have also
been aided by situating slavery in the United States in broader Atlantic, continental, and
hemispheric frameworks. In doing so, historians have placed what once appeared to be the
exceptionally harsh forms of slavery and racism in the United States in a larger context: the
ubiquity of state-driven exploitation, racial hierarchies, and unfree labor in the Americas
from the early 1500s through the late 1800s.There was nothing peculiar about slavery in the
early American republic. Furthermore, slavery in the Atlantic world and the broader
Americas was not an institution in decline in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Indeed, between 1770 and the 1810s, in what historians increasingly label a period
of “second slavery,” the transatlantic trade in slaves and slave-produced commodities
underwent its greatest period of growth, while the territorial reach of the institution
expanded greatly. This period might have been an Age of Revolutions that birthed the rise
of liberal and antislavery values, but it was also an age of slavery and imperial expansion.The
principles of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions might have favored abolition,
but the interests of emerging nation-states, empires, merchants, planters, and consumers in
the Atlantic world favored expanding empires using state power to force more slaves to
produce more cash crops, in areas that were marginal to the eighteenth-century Atlantic
plantation slave complex. Slaveholders in the United States – like slaveholders elsewhere –
used state power to exploit these developments for their own benefit.7
As the most recent literature demonstrates, there was nothing exceptional about the
growth and expansion of slavery in the United States between 1770 and 1820. The enormous
growth and territorial expansion of slavery in the United States mirrored broader trends in
the Americas and the Atlantic world. Only in two places in the Americas – Haiti and the
northern United States – did slavery contract and shrink during this period; only in Haiti
and northern New England was it fully and more or less immediately abolished. What was
exceptional in the early American republic was not slavery’s growth and expansion, but its

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 RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

gradual abolition in the North and its prohibition from the Northwest. That created deep
sectional differences within an expanding imperial nation-state; those differences gave rise
to continuous conflicts over slavery.

Accentuating Sectional Differences: War, Independence,

Revolution, and Slavery in the States, 1770–1820
Even before the Imperial Crisis, the northern and southern colonies of British North
America differed in significant ways. The Imperial Crisis, the War for Independence, and
the process of forging new republican institutions wrought changes that magnified exist-
ing cultural, economic, and political differences between the two sections. Slavery existed
in all of the northern colonies, but the 50,000 slaves there in 1770 accounted for less than
5 percent of the overall population. The northern colonies were societies with slaves
rather than slave societies, and only in the Hudson Valley did the population of slaves near
20 percent. Politically, ordinary white men in the northern colonies had fashioned a form
of politics that was perhaps the most democratic in the Atlantic world, even if urban elites
and rural potentates still wielded considerable power and influence. The American and
then French Revolution, along with the migration of British radicals to northern port
cities, amplified these lived democratic realities. From the 1770s through the first decade
of the 1800s, ordinary people and sympathetic elites in the North seized the principles
that underwrote the case for independence and fashioned a decidedly egalitarian ideology
that elevated equality, personal and family independence, and democratic self-government
as the highest ideals of republican government and society. Middling whites and sympa-
thetic elites used these egalitarian ideologies to chip away at hierarchy and privilege in the
North in principle if not always in practice. In doing so, they opened crucial spaces that
slaves, free blacks, and antislavery whites used to claim natural rights for enslaved blacks,
and to begin the process of state-level abolition. Across the North, state-level abolition
was ideologically grounded in free and enslaved black claims to the natural rights claimed
by whites. In general, even when northern whites denied black claims to citizenship and
equality, they accepted the legitimacy of black claims to freedom.8
Natural rights principles and egalitarian ideologies did little to change the basic social,
political, and economic hierarchies that had dominated southern life since the 1750s. For
southern politicians, the purpose of government, whether in 1750 or in 1820, was to
empower the gentry, who then governed those beneath them according to their race,
gender, and rank. In the South, elites met popular challenges to their rule and authority
– from both black slaves and non-gentry whites – in various ways. Southern slaveholders
used the Revolution’s emphasis on property rights to blunt popular attacks on slavery
and gentry political power. They emphasized white supremacy and insisted that free
blacks and whites could never live together peacefully in the United States.When pressed
by lesser whites for democratic reforms, southern planters created an imagined gentry of
all white men, emphasized the authority and mastery that all white men were to exercise
over all black people, and wrote protections for themselves as a class into state constitu-
tions and laws. By the early 1800s, antislavery voices and emancipation societies in places
such as Virginia had been publicly silenced. As one Virginia legislator noted in an 1806
debate over tightening Virginia’s manumission laws, the principles of the Revolution

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meant little in Virginia, for “Those principles have been annihilated by the existence of
slavery among us.” Hierarchy and racial subordination remained as vital in the South
of 1820 as in the 1750s, even if the particulars of how they operated changed in their
details.9
The dominant ideologies circulating in each section possessed some adherents in
the other section: northern conservatives shared southern slaveholder concerns about the
excesses of democracy; some southern radicals and enlightened gentlemen espoused
the rights of man and equality, providing at least rhetorical support for democracy.
Nonetheless, the Revolution produced significantly different effects in the two sections.
The American Revolution in the North unleashed egalitarian ideologies and an emphasis
on individual rights that allowed for state-level emancipation and the flourishing of
antislavery principles and politics. The American Revolution in the South produced an
ideology that slaveholders used to justify gentry rule, white male supremacy, black slavery,
and the sanctity of slaveowner property rights. The American Revolution strengthened
slavery in the South, and it accelerated abolition in the North.
The disruptions caused by independence, war, revolution, state building, and expansion
also magnified the differences that marked slavery in the two sections. Slavery declined
in both numbers and in its significance in the North. There were perhaps 50,000 slaves
in the North in 1770; by 1820 slavery had been eliminated or nearly eliminated in
every northern state except for New Jersey and New York, where the institution limped
on in ever-declining numbers. In the North, free blacks and well-meaning whites could
facilitate emancipation because the opposition they faced was weak and scattered,
confined mostly to the comparatively small class of slaveholders in the North. Most nor-
thern whites, however, were at most indifferent about black efforts to gain freedom, and
put up little resistance to free and enslaved black efforts to pass state-level emancipation
laws.
Free blacks, enslaved blacks, and sympathetic whites blazed a clear if nonetheless diffi-
cult and prolonged path to state-level abolition. During the War for Independence, slaves
used the chaos and disruptions of war, along with military demands for manpower, to free
themselves from slavery. For most northern whites, winning the war and securing inde-
pendence ranked as far higher priorities than maintaining the property rights of the sec-
tion’s comparatively small number of slaveholders. By war’s end, perhaps 5,000 former
slaves had gained their freedom through military service in both Patriot and British forces.
Another 5,000 slaves fled their owners, mostly to the anonymity of cities such as Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia. By war’s end, perhaps 10,000 northern slaves had effectively
freed themselves from slavery in one way or another. Even before the war ended, these free
men and women joined with sympathetic whites and Quaker-led antislavery societies to
work for the full abolition of slavery in the North. Due to the combined efforts of these
groups, by 1784 six northern states had taken legislative or judicial action providing for the
immediate or gradual abolition of slavery. New York and New Jersey proved exceptions, as
powerful slaveholders from the Hudson Valley still dominated state politics. Slaveholders
in those states fought off early efforts at gradual emancipation, but blacks and whites com-
mitted to ending slavery in those states drove relentlessly for abolition. In 1799 and 1804,
when expanded and more democratic legislatures diluted the political power of slave-
holders in those states, gradual abolition legislation passed.

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Emancipation proved to be both a quick and a long process in the North. A significant
number of slaves managed to gain freedom within a decade of passage of gradual abolition
laws, either through flight, negotiation, or lawsuits, the latter two almost always facilitated
by Quaker-led antislavery societies. Other slaves, however, remained trapped in bondage,
and slavery continued to linger on, particularly in the countryside, until the 1820s and
1830s in places such as New Jersey. With emancipation, northern whites sought to exclude
blacks from public and civic life, and forced them out of all but a few menial trades and
services. Unlike in the South, however, northern whites stopped short of seeking direct
control over the private and laboring lives of black people. In turn, by the 1820s the
nascent free black communities of the 1770s had won a large degree of autonomy and
the right to self-government within black institutions and communities, even if black
individuals, communities, and institutions were severely constrained by the denial of
economic opportunities and civil rights to free black northerners.10
In the South, the effects of independence, war, revolution, and state-making on slavery
were far more limited. While some slaves struck blows for their own freedom during the
war, southern whites always fought the war with one eye towards minimizing the damage
it might inflict on slavery and white control of black lives. For example, South Carolina
rejected Congress’s proposal to fund the emancipation and arming of 3,000 South
Carolinian slaves, even as British forces stood poised to reconquer the Low Country.
And though Virginians emancipated some slaves for military service, they far more fre-
quently dangled a promise of emancipation at some time in the future to prevent flight, or
used violence and terror to keep blacks in slavery. With the war’s end in 1781, southern
whites fought to regain white control of black lives, reconstructing their slave societies and
the routines of terror that kept black people enslaved. By the late 1780s, southern whites
had met and bested slaves’ efforts to disrupt and dismantle the slave societies of the South.
In the Upper South, economic and political changes seemed most likely to result in
some kind of long-term program of gradual emancipation or abolition. Beginning in the
1760s, the economy of the Upper South shifted away from a singular focus on tobacco
towards the production of grains and mixed farming, while commerce and small-scale
manufacturing appeared in the towns and cities that sprouted up across the Chesapeake
and Piedmont. These economic changes lessened the region’s theoretical dependence on
slave labor – crops like wheat did not require year-round, unfree labor as tobacco did.
Nonetheless, slaveholders readily forced their enslaved workforce to adapt to these
economic changes.The work and lives of slaves changed dramatically in the Upper South
between 1770 and 1820: by then, slaves were as likely to work as cartmen, day laborers in
cities, boatmen, skilled craftsmen, or grain harvesters as they were to labor on tobacco
plantations.While these economic changes produced significant differences in the lives of
slaves, they did little to alter the importance of slavery in the region, especially in the
lower Chesapeake and the Piedmont. The significance of slavery in the Upper South also
increased due to the great expansion of slavery into the interior Lower South and the
trans-Appalachian West. Chesapeake planters and their sons used their slaves to pursue
new opportunities in the cotton fields of upcountry South Carolina, and in the tobacco
and hemp fields of Kentucky. The expansion of slavery into the interior of the Lower
South also led to the creation of the “Georgia trade,” a burgeoning interstate slave trade
that resulted in the sale of tens of thousands of Chesapeake slaves southward to Georgia

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and South Carolina from the 1790s into the 1810s.While some Upper South slaves clung
to the possibility that circumstances might allow them to somehow gain their freedom,
far more found themselves sold into the “Georgia trade,” followed by a life of labor on
Georgian or Carolinian cotton plantations. If slavery appeared to be on the decline in the
Upper South after 1770, slaveholders nonetheless had every intention of controlling that
decline, and they fully intended to profit from it while exercising control over the laboring
lives of blacks, whether in freedom or in slavery.11
Political changes and the disruptions of war and revolution likewise offered hope that
slavery might yet be placed on the road to abolition in the Chesapeake. But as had hap-
pened with economic changes, slaves, free blacks, and antislavery whites who sought
gradual emancipation proved no match for ordinary whites heavily invested in racial
subordination, or for the South’s ruling class, planters whose wealth and place in society
were grounded in slavery. Upwards of 10,000 slaves managed to gain their freedom during
the war, mainly by flight and military service. In 1782,Virginia passed a manumission law
that eased the process of individual emancipations, largely due to the pleas of conscien-
tious Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists. The law and the manumissions it produced faced
immediate backlash from whites, who in 1784 and 1785 inundated the Virginia legislature
with petitions calling for repeal of the 1782 manumission law. After the first wave of
emancipations by Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists in the 1780s, emancipation became
far less frequent by the 1790s. From then on, emancipation became attainable only with
particularly guilt-wracked owners, with slaves deemed particularly meritorious, or when
slaves could convince owners that slave self-purchase was somehow advantageous to a
slaveowner. In Virginia, the absolute number of slaveholders grew between the 1770s and
the 1780s, despite the cessation of the international slave trade, the surge in the free black
population, and the developing interstate slave trade. Proposals for state-level gradual
emancipation made little headway in the 1780s and 1790s. White southerners fiercely
fought any suggestions that their individual states should enact some type of gradual abo-
lition plan, even when those plans originated from Virginians themselves, as luminaries
such as Thomas Jefferson and St. George Tucker quickly learned. Slavery in the Chesapeake
emerged from independence, war, and revolution no weaker and perhaps even stronger
than it was in the 1760s. From the 1780s through the 1810s, white migrants from the
Chesapeake expanded the basic political and economic institutions of the Chesapeake
into the Piedmont, Kentucky, Tennessee, the interior of South Carolina and Georgia, and
after 1815 into Mississippi and Alabama.12
While Upper South slaveholders frequently lamented the existence of slavery and
promised its eventual abolition, these professions were almost always deployed in defense
of the honor of southern politicians to foreign and northern luminaries, or as part of a
deliberate effort to defeat northern efforts to take some kind of action to rein in slavery’s
growth and expansion. Frequently lamenting about the troubles of slavery and slaveholding,
Upper South slaveholders deceived generations of historians, antislavery advocates, and
perhaps themselves into believing that there existed, or that circumstances would someday
produce, a protean moment where abolition would become a reality. That moment never
came to pass; Upper South slaveholders worked as hard as anyone to ensure it never
would. Slaveholders proved unwilling to relinquish voluntarily their power over blacks
and the base of their power over lesser whites. Slaveholders and southern white men more

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generally would never willingly give up their sovereignty over slavery as an institution, or
their claims to mastery over all black people.13
In the Lower South, wartime disruptions allowed some slaves to strike for their freedom,
but whites had no doubt that their states were and would be anything other than slave
societies. In Georgia, perhaps 5,000 of the enslaved population of 15,000 escaped in the
midst of war. In neighboring South Carolina, as many as 15,000 of the state’s 75,000
enslaved persons fled their owners. Though slave flight hurt slaveowners, it did nothing to
advance the cause of emancipation in the Deep South. Slaves who fled to Spanish Florida,
low country swamps, or interior Native American nations faced an incredibly difficult
existence. Slaves who fled to British-occupied Charleston and Savannah fell to diseases
such as malaria by the thousands; the unlucky survivors who fled with British forces after
the war faced an uncertain future: some found a difficult freedom in British Canada,
others were sold as slaves in the British Caribbean. With the war’s end in 1781, southern
whites fought to regain fuller white control of black lives and to reconstruct their slave
societies. At the same time, Lower South planters exploited growing transatlantic demand
for slave-produced commodities, and harnessed the powers of the nation-state to defeat
Native Americans and then oversee slavery’s great expansion into the interior. In the
1760s, South Carolina and Georgia were coastal slave societies that barely reached inland;
by the 1810s slavery extended deep into the interiors as a result of the first cotton boom.
Fed by both the international slave trade and the “Georgia trade,” the 90,000 slaves labor-
ing in the Lower South in 1770 had grown to 200,000 by 1800, and to 400,000 by 1820.
Slavery’s greatest growth and expansion in the Americas between 1770 and 1820 occurred
in Georgia and South Carolina, laying the groundwork for the cotton regime’s later
expansion into Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.14
Independence, war, revolution, and state building posed a multitude of threats to the
slave societies of the South in the 1770s and the early 1780s. By the late 1780s, southern
whites had met all of those challenges, and slavery began its great growth and expansion
in the United States. Between 1770 and 1790, the enslaved population of the southern
states grew from 400,000 to perhaps 650,000. By 1820, there were 1.5 million slaves in
the United States, and slavery stretched from the Chesapeake to Georgia, from the
Atlantic to the Mississippi Valley, from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico.15 Southern
whites would never abolish slavery on their own, and they would do everything within
their power to resist outside efforts to do the same. It is difficult to dispute historian
Annette Gordon-Reed’s conclusion that “the problem of American slavery could only
have been solved in the way that it ultimately was solved: through bloody conflict and
strife.” Only a massive and prolonged foreign invasion of the kind that happened during
the U.S. Civil War could allow slaves and their white antislavery allies to destroy such an
invidious institution.16

The National Politics of Slavery and Sectionalism, 1770–1820

Growing sectional differences meant sectional conflict, which was a persistent feature of
politics in the early American republic. Sectional politics and the politics of slavery from
the 1770s through 1820 took on certain characteristics, was marked by a large degree of
continuity, and conformed to a general set of patterns. Conflict stemmed not only from

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the differences between the North and the South, but from the difficulties inherent in
creating and governing an immense, diverse, and expanding continental union.To create,
govern, and preserve a continental union required various groups to confront slavery in
various ways, whether those groups were New England farmers opposing ratification of
a constitution they deemed overly generous to slaveholders, Philadelphia free blacks
petitioning Congress in the 1790s, or Tidewater planters fighting off widespread slave
flight to the British during the War of 1812. Slavery was an immense and important
institution in the United States, commanding a significant share of the nation’s population,
wealth, economic activity, and political power. As such, it generated conflicts from
multiple sources in multiple ways. In the period between 1770 and 1820, war, revolution,
and state building posed challenges to slavery. At the same time, growing Atlantic world
demand for slave-produced commodities offered slaveholders a host of new opportunities.
Slavery frequently entered into all matters of governance at the local, state, regional,
national, and international levels. Sometimes it did so in unforeseen ways as an adjunct
to other issues; sometimes because free blacks, slaves, and their northern political allies
forced the issue; sometimes because southern planters anticipated threats and challenges;
and sometimes because planters sought to use state power to advance their interests. In
any case, to govern the United States was to govern slavery; and governing slavery always
entailed political conflict.17
Whether in 1776 or 1820, free and enslaved blacks – much like northern and southern
whites – acted in predictable ways when slavery entered politics. Free and enslaved
blacks were as responsible as any party for forcing slavery into local, state, national, and
international politics between 1770 and 1820. Slaves and free blacks refused to acquiesce
to enslavement, seeking greater freedoms within slavery, and freedom from slavery. Much
of the legislation and action demanded by southern politicians reflected their understand-
ing that state power was indispensable in keeping black people in slavery: slaves sought
whatever freedoms presented themselves whenever even the slightest crack appeared in
the fortress of state-power erected by slaveholders. In war and peace, slaves sought freedom
through flight whenever circumstances permitted it. By the 1790s, a small but growing
stream of Upper South slaves had learned how to make their way to the North, prompting
passage of a fugitive slave law in 1793. Slave flight across the Ohio River from the 1790s
into the 1810s continuously informed local, state, and national politics in the old North-
west’s first state. The stream of fugitives increased between the 1790s and the 1810s, and
slaveholders demanded but failed to gain more stringent federal fugitive slave laws in 1800
and again in 1818. Slave flight to Spanish Florida and to Native American controlled areas
in the west fed southern calls for war with Native Americans and their British patrons,
leading to the War of 1812 and provoking Andrew Jackson’s invasions of Spanish Florida.
The British invasion of the Chesapeake in 1813 offered a new avenue for flight. The first
group of former Chesapeake slaves who took up service in the British Marines in 1813
made it a point to free their families and friends when they returned to the Chesapeake
with the British Navy in 1814. Over the next five years, federal officials expended copious
amounts of diplomatic time and energy seeking the return of their former slaves or
compensation from the British.
In the North, free and enslaved blacks could count on assistance in securing their
freedom from black churches and organizations, along with Quaker-led antislavery

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societies. Slaves and free blacks immediately recognized the potential of natural rights
ideology and the Revolution’s emphasis on liberty, equality, and independence. Assisted by
antislavery white groups such as the Quakers and state-level abolition societies, free and
enslaved blacks incessantly petitioned state legislatures to pass emancipation legislation.
When this was accomplished, they sought laws accelerating the emancipation process, laws
protecting against kidnapping, and laws to prevent the out-of-state sale of “term-slaves,”
slaves and their children who were legally entitled to freedom at a future date according
to gradual emancipation legislation. When the federal Congress took up residency in
Philadelphia and then New York, free blacks stood as one of that body’s most persistent
petitioners. Free and enslaved blacks incited lengthy and cantankerous congressional
debates about the place of slavery in the United States when they asked Congress to place
regulations on the domestic and international slave trades, to protect the rights of free
blacks and northern “term-slaves,” and to expand federal power to regulate and restrict
slavery. Whether in freedom, slavery, or in the netherworld between the two, African
Americans repeatedly forced the problem of governing slaves and slavery into local, state,
national, and international politics.18
Northern white opinion on race, slavery, and political action ranged widely. At one
extreme, committed abolitionists worked to promote abolition, to end the transatlantic
slave trade, to halt slavery’s expansion in the west, and to secure black freedom in the
northern states. Other whites held that blacks were unfit for freedom and could remain
in the United States only as slaves. Depending on the issue, the positions of most whites
could shift anywhere on a spectrum ranging from indifference to support for gradual
emancipation, with or without removal. And while many northern whites would have
gladly accepted the abolition of slavery in the United States, they also recognized that they
had no real power to compel southern whites to do so.
Though prevalent, northern white racism and occasional indifference towards slavery
did not preclude the development of a meaningful form of antislavery politics. In general,
many white northerners accepted the legitimacy of black claims to freedom and agreed
that blacks enjoyed a natural right to freedom, even if they denied black claims to equality
and citizenship. Furthermore, most northern whites held that slavery was a plague on the
South, a stain on the national character, and detrimental to national interests, republic
society, and economic development.They expected their representatives to take meaning-
ful action against slavery when circumstances permitted, whether in drafting a new
Constitution for the Union, in closing the international slave trade, or by limiting slavery’s
expansion. After 1815, northern voters and politicians began to take a more explicit stand
against what they perceived to be the excessive and illegitimate demands made by
slaveholders, along with slaveholder control of the Democratic Republican Party. By then,
a growing chorus of northern voters and politicians contended that over the previous
decade, the federal government had come under the sway of slaveholders and that southern
interests had been promoted at the expense of the North. As slaveholders placed a growing
number of demands on the North, including in 1818 a call for a new fugitive slave law,
northern politicians began to identify a distinct northern interest that had to be defended
against the machinations of slaveholders.19
In the South, a few conscientious whites took seriously the Revolution’s challenge to
slavery; for most southern voters and politicians, however, protection of white supremacy

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and the rights and interests of slaveholders was axiomatic and sacrosanct. Southern
politicians and voters insisted that blacks and whites could never live together in peace,
that slavery was necessary to keep blacks in their place, and that whatever evils inhered in
slavery, it was a necessary institution in the southern states because abolition promised
calamities far worse than black slavery. Politically, southern states were slaveholders’
republics which either directly or indirectly granted slaveholders a host of protections
and legislative advantages. As the governing elites in those states understood matters,
the purpose of government, whether at the state or the federal level, was to empower the
governing gentry, who then governed their subordinates, white and black. Government
was also tasked with promoting the rights and interests of slaveholders by recognizing and
protecting their property in slaves. Working from these assumptions, slaveholders insisted
that any terms of union had to acknowledge southern state and slaveholder sovereignty
over slavery as an institution, and a de facto veto over any unfavorable legislation, which
would be realized with the three-fifths clause.20
In national politics, southern politicians defended the rights of slaveholders in sectional,
political, legal, constitutional, and extra-constitutional terms. They also used theories of
natural law and republican government to develop a wide-ranging defense of property
rights. Southern politicians could be counted on to use any and all of these positions
whenever they sought to protect or advance their interests. Thus, southern slaveholders
could insist on extra representation in the House of Representatives as a necessary means
for the slave states to protect their interests, and further ground these demands in republi-
can theories about representation of wealth. Conversely, they also maintained that slavery
was protected from normal democratic and constitutional processes by insisting that the
Constitution was a sectional compact, and by claiming that as a southern institution,
southern politicians alone had the right to make decisions regarding it. Slaveholders also
warned that with or without a certain piece of legislation, the South would be immedi-
ately visited by slave rebellion, racial civil war, and all of the horrors of Saint-Domingue.
More broadly still, southern politicians refused to consent to any action or legislation
unless they could gain guarantees that their interests would be protected and that southern
slavery would be free from northern interference.
When northern politicians continued to push for antislavery action, southern politi-
cians always stood ready to play the disunion card. All of these strategies belied the under-
lying political and ideological defensiveness that southern slaveholding politicians felt in
this period. They may have won political battles most of the time, but they were con-
stantly haunted by the idea that they could lose at any moment. Thus, when challenged
or when seeking to promote their interests, slaveholders acted as a powerful, determined,
and self-righteous lot. They fought ruthlessly to retain their sovereignty over slavery as an
institution and their mastery over slaves as persons, even if they frequently squabbled
among themselves over the best way to preserve their sovereignty and mastery.21
Northern politicians frequently fell short of their own expectations and the expectations
of their constituents, as slaveholders employed a host of tactics to defeat antislavery
measures. Nonetheless, the period between 1770 and 1820 should not be characterized as
a period of unbridled slaveholders’ triumphs. Instead, the period was one of continuous
conflict, accommodation, and compromise between the two sections. That being said,
while slaveholders rarely had all of their demands met by northern politicians, they almost

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always came out ahead: they defeated any antislavery legislation they opposed as a section;
and they frequently managed to dictate the terms and implementation of any antislavery
legislation that did pass.22
The processes of conflict, accommodation, and compromise weighted in favor of
slaveholders are exemplified by the Constitution. The Constitution created a union that
included five states where slavery was the single most important economic, social, and
political institution. Those five states would ratify a constitution and enter into union only
with certain guarantees, protections, advantages, and privileges. As a result, the Constitution
created a republic and a union that acknowledged the existence of slavery as a powerful
state and sectional interest, albeit using euphemistic language. Northern delegates made it
clear that the words “slave,” “slavery,” or “negro” could not appear in the Constitution if it
was to have any hope of being ratified in the northern states. Southern delegates agreed to
this concession, but won many more of their own.The fugitive slave clause gave slavehold-
ers national guarantees for their property in slaves. The three-fifths clause granted the
southern states a de facto sectional veto that could be used whenever the South acted in
unison. Despite these advantages and privileges, southern Anti-Federalists identified signif-
icant deficiencies in the Constitution. The three-fifths clause provided political rather than
constitutional protections for slavery in the states. Southern Anti-Federalists also recognized
that the advantages conferred by the three-fifths clause would prove effective only so long
as the South maintained parity in Congress and the electoral college. Indeed, as southern
Anti-Federalists repeatedly pointed out, the Constitution failed to define slaves as property
and to cast the institution in explicitly racial terms, leaving the door open for future chal-
lenges to slavery.
Whether or not the Philadelphia convention produced a proslavery constitution that
created a proslavery nation-state has become an irreducible matter of teleology and
terminology centering on how one defines “proslavery.” It also engages in a form of
essentialism that ignores the conflicting positions that went into the construction of both
the Constitution and the clauses regarding slavery and slave state political power. The
clauses addressing slavery were the product of too many clashing interests, too much
conflict and compromise, to bear the weight of any singular intent, purpose, or effect.
These clauses were also suggestive rather than definitive, and they left their implementation
to normal political processes in Congress. These clauses would prove limited enough,
vague enough, and imprecise enough to allow for multiple positions on what actions were
permissible under the Constitution, as seven decades of sectional politics, culminating in
civil war, would demonstrate. Finally, these clauses were ambiguous enough to allow for
endorsement and quick ratification of the Constitution in places such as Pennsylvania and
South Carolina, states that possessed wildly divergent interests and positions on the place
of slavery in the federal union. Nonetheless, what remains clear when the Constitution is
situated in the larger period between 1770 and 1820 is that its slavery and sectional clauses
were the product of conflict, accommodation, and compromise. As with just about every
sectional conflict in this period, the slave states gave up a little and received much in
return. The little that they did give up, however, allowed for a multitude of challenges to
slavery. In the end, the Constitution maintained the status quo of an expanding conti-
nental union, half-slave and half-free. It also put off – albeit temporarily – irreconcilable

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disagreements about the place of slavery under a republican government and in a union
with continental ambitions.23
The ability of the slave states to come out ahead in national politics was due to several
factors: the South always acted in unity whenever they perceived a real and tangible threat
to slavery; they made concessions on issues unrelated to slavery to gain northern votes in
support of southern interests; they expertly exploited partisan ties, gaining needed
Federalist or Republican votes to defeat legislation the South opposed. When all else
failed, they threatened disunion and promised that whatever calamities followed from
disunion would rest in the hands of northerners who issued unreasonable demands that
no southern slaveholder could accept.
Southern politicians used threats of disunion even before independence was declared.
In 1774 South Carolina threatened to forego signing on to a non-export agreement
unless they received exemptions for rice; in 1776, the same group of planters refused to
sign on to the Declaration of Independence unless the Continental Congress excised
Jefferson’s famous antislave trade clause. During the Confederation years, Lower South
planters threatened disunion whenever Congress considered levying taxes on slaves. South
Carolina and Georgia insisted that neither state would sign on to the Philadelphia
Constitution without protections for the international slave trade. More broadly, southern
delegates to the Philadelphia convention promised that the Constitution stood no chance
of ratification in the South unless something like the three-fifths clause granted slavehold-
ers sufficient weight in the federal legislature to protect southern interests. Threats of
disunion were commonplace in Congress during the 1790s, prompted by free black and
Quaker antislavery petitions. Disunion threats subsided once the Democratic-Republicans
gained control of the presidency and Congress and the capital moved South, but those
threats of disunion came back with a vengeance after 1815, culminating in the Missouri
Crisis. By then, the disunion card had become the favored tool of Virginia planters who
feared that their influence in Virginia and over the federal government was waning.24
Threats of disunion proved effective against even the most committed northern aboli-
tionists who believed that perpetual union was more important than immediate action
against slavery. For them, republican self-government and natural rights could only be
realized in union; if disunion transpired, then all hopes of abolition went with it. Thus,
while Philadelphia Quakers and their allies such as Benjamin Rush lamented the conces-
sions made to slaveholders in the Constitution, they accepted them as the necessary price
of union, which they hoped would be the mechanism by which they could nudge the
nation towards gradual emancipation. Likewise, northern Anti-Federalists condemned
constitutional concessions to slaveholders from every conceivable angle. But like Abraham
Lincoln, they preferred to “nobly save” rather than “meanly lose the last best hope of
earth”: union, the only means by which republican government and the values of the
Revolution could be maintained and then more perfectly realized. Southern slaveholders
always stood ready to cynically exploit northerners’ pragmatic and increasingly sentimental
devotion to union.25
Southern politicians had other methods of protecting their interests. They proved
masterful at gaining sufficient northern votes by agreeing to concessions on issues unre-
lated to slavery. Examples of this kind of sectional horse-trading abound. New England
delegates to the Constitutional Convention supported the three-fifths clause in exchange

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for granting Congress authority to make commercial regulations with a simple majority.
The first federal Congress agreed to cease debating Quaker petitions on slavery in exchange
for southern support for federal funding and assumption of state debts. That same body
dropped a Virginia-led effort to impose a $10 tax in the international slave trade after Deep
South representatives struck a bargain with New Englanders to lower the import tax on
molasses. When the legislative advantages gained under the three-fifths clause diminished
after 1810, slaveholders used parity in the Senate to protect their interests, for example, by
blocking the house-passed Tallmadge Amendments which set off the Missouri Controversy
in 1819. Southern politicians prevailed frequently in national politics – not because they
were superior parliamentarians – but because they acted as a class when their interests
were threatened; because they enjoyed institutional advantages thanks to the three-fifths
clause; because they were willing to make trade-offs for northern support; and because
they always proved willing to threaten disunion.26
Despite southern successes in protecting slavery and in using state power to promote
slavery’s expansion, real and tangible antislavery gains were made from the 1780s to the
Missouri Crisis. That being said, whenever antislavery actions were undertaken by
the federal government, they were always done with the consent of at least some southern
politicians, on southern terms, and with the expectation that southern states would receive
important concessions in return. Thus, the Confederation Congress and then the first
federal Congress passed and repassed the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery
in the Northwest territories. In exchange for this measure, southern politicians gained a
fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, and passage of the Southwest Ordinance of 1790,
which exempted the territories south of Kentucky from the Northwest Ordinance’s ban
on slavery. Likewise, the terms by which Congress closed and patrolled the international
slave trade were largely dictated by southern politicians. Despite vociferous northern
objections, the 1807 law prohibiting the international slave trade provided light penalties
for violators, and allowed states themselves to dispose of seized slaves as they saw fit, which
in practice meant that state officials auctioned off any Africans seized from violators.
Congress and northwestern farmers beat back efforts to legalize slavery in Indiana and
Illinois, but western planters and farmers defeated congressional efforts to prohibit slavery’s
further growth in Mississippi in 1798 and in Louisiana and Missouri in 1804. When
emancipation and colonization gained institutional expression in the formation of the
American Colonization Society in 1816, southern slaveholders insisted that they alone
would determine how the Society would be used. In the Missouri Crisis, northern
politicians managed to ban slavery from the regions north of the 36° 30' line, but they did
so by abandoning their quest to end slavery’s expansion in all future territories, and
accepting that Congress could not impose conditions on incoming states.27
***
The antislavery legislation and actions from the period between 1770 and 1820 can be
understandably taken as so many half-hearted measures, repeatedly compromised by racism
if not outright hypocrisy from a people who professed liberty while maintaining slavery.
At the same time, however, they represent very real antislavery accomplishments in the face
of a nation-state where slaveholders constituted the single most powerful economic and
political interest. If slavery persisted and then grew and expanded in the United States, it was

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in no small part because slaveholders in the United States – unlike slaveholders elsewhere –
did not have to answer to a powerful imperial metropole. Instead, they were the metropole,
and more than any other group, they controlled the levers of state and imperial power. Above
all else, they used the powers of the imperial state to protect and promote slavery, and to
defeat efforts to undermine it.

Notes
I acknowledge the generous and jovial assistance of Nic Wood, Wendy Wong, Paul Polgar,
Jennie Goloboy, Matt Mason, and Paddy Riley in providing valuable comments on various
drafts of this chapter.

1 Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962), 2:246.
2 For the ways in which nationalism and exceptionalism have structured much of the historiography
of the early republic in both their older celebratory and newer critical forms, see Rosemarie
Zagarri, “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic: Globalization
in the Age of Nation-Building,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Spring 2011), 1–37. Though she
does not write specifically about slavery, Zagarri is especially helpful in distinguishing between
the old and new forms of nationalist and exceptionalist historiography.As Zagarri notes,“whether
celebratory or negative, however, both forms of exceptionalism result from the same basic
premise: an approach that emphasizes the country’s separateness and distinctiveness as a nation-
state rather than its connections to and similarities with the rest of the world” (quote at 6). For
critical analyses of nationalist and exceptionalist histories of the United States, in both their
celebratory and negative forms, see Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in
World History (NewYork: Hill and Wang, 2006), 3–14; Johan N. Neem,“American Exceptionalism
in a Global Age,” History and Theory 50 (Feb. 2011), 41–70.
3 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1966); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1975); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes towards
the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Donald L.
Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1971);William W. Freehling,“The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical
Review 77 (Feb. 1972), 81–93; Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American
Paradox,” Journal of American History 59 (June 1972), 5–29; Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and
the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); William Wiecek, The
Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977); Don Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Howard A. Ohline,“Slavery, Economics, and Congressional
Politics, 1790,” Journal of Southern History 46 (August 1980), 335–360. The most critical work of
this first great wave of scholarship was Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United
States Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967).
4 Building on and expanding Lynd’s analysis, in the 1980s and 1990s the literature took a
decidedly critical turn, led by Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study
in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Winter 1986), 343–370; Paul Finkelman, “Slavery
and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death,” in Beyond Confederation:
Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, eds. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein,
and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 188–225; Paul
Finkelman,“Evading the Ordinance:The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal
of the Early Republic 9 (Spring 1989), 21–51; Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI:

26
 RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

Madison House, 1990); William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay,
1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); William W. Freehling, “The Founding
Fathers and Conditional Antislavery,” in The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the
Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery:
Treason against the Hopes of the World,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181–221; Paul Finkelman, “The Problem of Slavery in the
Age of Federalism,” in The Federalists Reconsidered, eds. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 135–156. Most of Finkelman’s articles from
the 1980s and 1990s were collected in Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty
in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), and expanded in subsequent editions.
Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s
Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), challenged many of the critical
works on slavery and the founders, but did so without challenging the nationalism and
exceptionalism that informed so much of the literature.
5 For founders-centered works on slavery in the early republic, see Freehling, Road to Disunion,
and “Founding Fathers and Conditional Antislavery”; Nash, Race and Revolution; Douglass R.
Egerton, “The Empire for Liberty Reconsidered,” in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race,
and the New Republic, eds. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2002); Paul Finkelman, Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd
ed. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). Debates over the proslavery and antislavery positions of
the “founding fathers” featured considerable cross-over between academic and popular history.
See, for example, Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the
Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s
Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Harcourt, 2003); Gary B.
Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Koåciuszko,
and Agrippa Hull: A Tale of Three Patriots,Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New
Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson
and His Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth:
African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008). For a critical analysis of this assumption that a select founder or
group of founders could have placed slavery on the road to abolition, see Matthew Mason, “A
Missed Opportunity? The Founding, Postcolonial Realities, and the Abolition of Slavery,”
Slavery and Abolition 35 (June 2014), 199–213.
6 The first wave of newer scholarship that looked beyond the founders drew on the new political
history of the early republic, exemplified in Jeffrey L. Pasley, David Waldstreicher, and Andrew
Robertson, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American
Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For a listing of the influential
works on the new political history of slavery in the early republic that were published before
2010, see John Craig and Matthew Mason, “Slavery, Sectionalism, and Politics in the Early
American Republic,” in Contesting Slavery:The Politics of Freedom and Bondage in the New American
Nation, eds. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2011), 1–8. More recent examples of this new work include George William Van Cleve,
A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2010); Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘To Put into Complete Practice Those
Hallowed Principles’: Edward Coles and the Crafting of Antislavery Nationalism in Early
Nineteenth-Century America,” American Nineteenth Century History 11 (March 2010), 17–45;
David F. Ericson, Slavery and the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2011); Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade,
Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,”
William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 68 (October 2011), 597–630; John Craig Hammond,
“Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the

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North American Continent, 1770–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Summer 2012), 175–
206; Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton,
2013); Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Martin Öhman, “A Convergence of Crises: The
Expansion of Slavery, Geopolitical Realignment, and Economic Depression in the Post-
Napoleonic World,” Diplomatic History 37 (June 2013), 419–445; Paul J. Polgar “‘To Raise Them
to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise
of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Summer 2011), 229–258; Paul
J. Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’: The Politics of Partisanship and Free Black
Voting Rights in Early National New York,” American Nineteenth Century History 12 (March
2011), 1–23; Paul J. Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope: Abolishing Slavery and Racial Inequality in Early
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Nicholas P. Wood,
“The Missouri Crisis and the ‘Changed Object’ of the American Colonization Society,” in
Reconsiderations and Redirections in the Study of African Colonization, eds. Beverly C. Tomek and
Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016); Nicholas P. Wood,
“Antislavery Activism Before and After the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution,” in The Critical Period, eds.
Douglas Bradburn and Brian Murphy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016);
Nicholas P. Wood, Before Garrison: Antislavery and Politics in the New Nation (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming); Matthew Mason, “Keeping up Appearances:
The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,”
William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 67 (Oct. 2009), 809–832; Matthew Mason, “Federalists,
Abolitionists, and the Problem of Influence,” American Nineteenth Century History 10 (March
2009), 1–27; Matthew Mason, “The Maine and Missouri Crisis: Competing Priorities and
Northern Slavery Politics in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Winter 2013),
675–700; James Alexander (Alec) Dun, “Atlantic Antislavery, American Abolition: The Problem
of Slavery in the United States in an Age of Disruption, 1770–1808,” in The World of the
Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed.Andrew Shankman
(New York: Routledge, 2014), 218–245; Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress
and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); Padraig
Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition:
Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2015); Patrick Rael, Eighty-Eight Years:The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
7 The term “second slavery” was coined by sociologist Dale W. Tomich in a series of articles
reprinted as Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). For recent works that analyze slavery in wider
imperial, Atlantic, and continental contexts, see Trevor Burnard, “Freedom, Migration, and the
American Revolution,” in The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, eds. Eliga Gould and
Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 295–314; Robin Blackburn,
“Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser.
63 (Oct. 2006), 643–674; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage:The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the
New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories
of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009); David Eltis,“Was Abolition of the U.S. and British Slave Trade Significant
in the Broader Atlantic Context?” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 66 (Oct. 2009), 717–736;
Anthony Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the
Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009), 627–650; David Geggus, “The
Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840,
eds. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 83–100;
Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2010); Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation

28
 RAC E, S L AV ERY, S EC T I ON A L C ONF L I C T, NAT I O NA L PO L I T I C S

and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011); Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire”; John
Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the
American Civil War, 1660–1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era (June 2014), 264–298; David Head,
“Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers:The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early
Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Fall 2013), 433–462; Christopher Leslie Brown, “The
Problems of Slavery,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward G. Gray and
Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 427–446; Trevor Burnard, Planters,
Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015); Rael, Eighty-Eight Years. Recent work on race and slavery in Native
American nations has also been instructive in pointing historians towards the ubiquity of racial
subordination and slavery in the broader Americas rather than the peculiarity of slavery in the
United States. See, for example, Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country:The Changing Face of
Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
8 Population figures from Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Table I, 369–371. For politics and
democracy in the revolutionary north, and the transatlantic dimensions of northern political
democracy and radicalism, see Alfred F. Young, Gary Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary
Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011);
Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Alfred F. Young and Gregory H. Nobles,
Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding (New York: New York University
Press, 2011); Matthew Mason, “Necessary But Not Sufficient: Revolutionary Ideology and
Antislavery Action in the Early Republic,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 11–31;
Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory
Democracy in the Early American Republic,” in Pasley et al., Beyond the Founders, 31–56;
Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007); Rosemarie Zagarri, “The American Revolution and a New National Politics,”
in Gray and Kamensky, Handbook of the American Revolution; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic
Conscience. For the ways in which black and white northerners drew on natural rights ideology,
see Dun, “Atlantic Antislavery, American Abolition”; Polgar, “‘To Raise Them to an Equal
Participation’”; Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge It Expedient’”; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope;
Wood,“Antislavery Activism Before and After the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution”;Wood, Before Garrison;
Rael, Eighty-Eight Years.
9 Virginia Argus, January 17, 1806 (quote). For the American Revolution in the southern slave
states, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American
Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Robin L. Einhorn,
American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Eva Sheppard
Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat
Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Michael A. McDonnell,
The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2007); Lacy K. Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil”:The Slavery Question in the Old
South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Trevor Bernard, “Slavery and the Causes of
the American Revolution in Plantation British America,” in Shankman, World of the Revolutionary
American Republic, 27–53; Peter S. Onuf, “The Empire of Liberty: Land of the Free and Home
of the Slave,” in Shankman, World of the Revolutionary American Republic, 195–217; Taylor, Internal
Enemy; Wood, Before Garrison. For the ways in which planters met cultural and social challenges
to slavery and gentry authority from black and white Baptists, Methodists, and other religious
groups, see Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross:The Beginning of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf,
1997); Monica Najar, “‘Meddling with Emancipation’: Baptists, Authority, and the Rift over
Slavery in the Upper South,” Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Spring 2005), 157–186.
10 Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black
Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); David N. Gellman, Emancipating
New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

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 J OHN C R A I G H A M M O ND

University Press, 2006); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North,
1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Richard Newman, The
Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African
Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New
England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Gary Nash and Jean R.
Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991); Egerton, Death or Liberty; Polgar “‘To Raise Them to an Equal
Participation’”; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope; Wood, “Antislavery Activism Before and After
the ‘Proslavery’ Constitution”; Wood, Before Garrison; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Mason,
“Necessary But Not Sufficient”; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Gigantino, Ragged Road to
Abolition; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion.
11 For the ways in which economic changes in the Chesapeake allowed some slaves to gain
freedom, see Jennifer Hull Dorsey, Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early
Maryland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History
of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); T. Stephen
Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage,
1775–1865 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2006); Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New
Nation; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Holton, Forced Founders.
12 Annette Gordon-Reed,“Thomas Jefferson and St. George Tucker:The Making of Revolutionary
Slaveholders,” in Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: The American Dilemma of Race and Democracy
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 15–33; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of
Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2007); Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell, Politics of War; Ford, Deliver Us from
Evil; Egerton, Death or Liberty; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation;
Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Wood, Before Garrison; Berlin, Generations of Captivity.
13 See Stuart Leibiger, “Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis: An Alternative Interpretation,”
Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Spring 1997), 121–130; Brown, “Problems of Slavery”; Wood,
Before Garrison. For the best, most recent analysis of the ways in which Upper South slaveholders
deceived themselves and others, see Taylor, Internal Enemy.
14 Kathleen DuVal, “Independence for Whom? Expansion and Conflict in the South and
Southwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a
Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 97–115; Watson W. Jennison,
Cultivating Race:The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2012); Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global
Origins of the United States Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); James A.
McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2004); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The
Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1998); Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South
Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Egerton, Death or Liberty; Cassandra
Pybus,“Jefferson’s Faulty Math:The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 62 (April 2005), 243–264.
15 For slavery’s growth and expansion into the Georgia and South Carolina interior, the trans-
Appalachian West, and the lower Mississippi Valley, see John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom,
and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007);
Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire”; John Craig Hammond, “‘Uncontrollable
Necessity’: The Local Politics, Geo-Politics, and Sectional Politics of Slavery Expansion,” in
Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 138–160; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American
Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005);
Ford, Deliver Us from Evil.

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16 Gordon-Reed, “Jefferson and Tucker,” 16.

17 Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006); Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union; Hammond and Mason, Contesting
Slavery; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Wood, Before Garrison; Ford, Deliver Us from
Evil. For the insight that governing the United States required the governing of slavery, see
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2009).
18 Matthew J. Clavin, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Richard S. Newman, “Freedom’s Grand Lab:
Abolition, Race, and Black Freedom Struggles in Recent Pennsylvania Historiography,”
Pennsylvania History 82 (Summer 2015), 357–372; John Craig Hammond, “‘The Most Free of
the Free States’: Politics, Slavery, Race, and Regional Identity in Early Ohio,” Ohio History
(2014), 35–57; Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and
Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Egerton, Death or Liberty; Taylor,
Internal Enemy; Wood, Before Garrison; Polgar, Well Grounded Hope; Hammond, “Slavery,
Sovereignty, and Empires”; Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism; Newman, Freedom’s
Prophet; Gellman, Emancipating New York.
19 Donald J. Ratcliffe, “The Decline of Antislavery Politics,” in Hammond and Mason, Contesting
Slavery, 267–290; James Oakes, “Conflict vs. Consensus in the History of Antislavery Politics,”
in Hammond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, 291–303; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and
Expansion; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Wood, Beyond Garrison; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic
Conscience; Polgar “‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’”; Polgar, “‘Whenever They Judge
It Expedient’”; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope; Wood, “Antislavery Activism Before and After the
‘Proslavery’ Constitution”; Wood, Before Garrison; Mason, Slavery and Politics.
20 Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion;
Onuf, “Land of the Free, Home of the Slave”; Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery;
Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell, Politics of War; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the
Democratic Conscience; Rothman, Slave Country;Van Cleve, Slaveholders’ Union.
21 Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion;
Onuf, “Land of the Free, Home of the Slave”; Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery;
Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell, Politics of War; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the
Democratic Conscience; Rothman, Slave Country.
22 The best one-volume study of the politics of slavery in the early republic remains Mason,
Slavery and Politics, but it should be joined by Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Wood,
Before Garrison; Polgar, A Well Grounded Hope. Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of
American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) remains a useful if
not indispensable guide to political debates about slavery.
23 My interpretation of the Constitution is heavily influenced by five works, though my
interpretation differs from all of them. See Matthew Mason,“Slavery and the Founding,” History
Compass 4 (2006); Earl M. Maltz, “The Idea of a Proslavery Constitution,” Journal of the Early
Republic 17 (Winter 1997), 37–60; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholders’ Republic; Van Cleve, Slaveholders’
Union; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution.
24 Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An
Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001); Wood, Before Garrison; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and
Expansion; John Craig Hammond, “Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over Slavery: James
Monroe,Virginia, and the Missouri Crisis,” in Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders on America’s
Future, eds. Peter Onuf and Robert M. S. McDonald (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2017).
25 Elizabeth Varon, Disunion: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics;
Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion;Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic

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Conscience; Wood, Before Garrison. For the colonial origins and long-term effectiveness of
Carolinian threats of disunion see Jonathan Mercantini, “‘Most Contemptible in the Union’:
South Carolina, Slavery, and the Constitution,” in Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the
International Slave Trade Bans, eds. David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2012), 35–51.
26 Varon, Disunion; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil; Mason, Slavery and Politics; Hammond, Slavery,
Freedom, and Expansion; Taylor, Internal Enemy; Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience; Wood,
Before Garrison; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution.
27 Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion; Hammond, “Mastery over Slaves, Sovereignty over
Slavery”; Mason, Slavery and Politics.

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 2
CLA S S, THE MARKE T R EVOL UT I ON,
AND URBANI Z AT I ON

Christopher Clark

Arguing for a protective tariff in 1843, Abraham Lincoln reflected on the goods of all kinds
imported from domestic and foreign sources that were available to the inhabitants of
Illinois. In 1851, the minister Horace Bushnell spoke of the rapidity of economic change
and “the complete revolution of domestic life and social manners” that accompanied the
“transition from mother and daughter power to water and steam-power.”1 They were
addressing profound changes that had occurred in the preceding decades: the nation’s
demographic and territorial expansion; the growth of commerce and business institutions;
the development of new systems of production and transportation; and the expansion of
towns and cities. The United States between Independence and 1840 experienced not
only rapid population growth and the spread of European settlement, but also a significant
reorientation of production and wealth creation. In 1774, mean income per capita was
highest in the South and lowest in New England. By 1840 the regions’ relative position
had been reversed.2
Until recently, historians’ explanations of these changes focused on their most “modern”
characteristics: the pace of urbanization; the technical and organizational developments that
fostered an industrial revolution; and the role of new communications technologies. For
more than two decades from the mid-twentieth century an overarching interpretation of
the period as a “transportation revolution” gave prominence to the connections between
new technologies and progress.3 The emergence of capitalist industry and growing cities in
what had so recently been a predominantly rural society also fostered new class relation-
ships. Historians also tended to treat the other aspects of American economy and society as
comparatively backward or inert. Northern agriculture expanded, to be sure, but before
mechanization seemed not to be a cause of significant progress. Agriculture in the South,
by contrast, though it grew extensively and furnished America’s most valuable exports,
seemed wedded to the past, heavily reliant as it was on the bound labor of chattel slaves and
on a system of racial hierarchy. Settlement patterns, economic activity, and class appeared
sufficiently different between North and South as to explain the origins of the sectional
conflicts that would flare in the 1820s and 1830s and subsequently lead to civil war.4
Important reinterpretations of these patterns of explanation have, however, been
underway since the late 1970s, as technology-led causation gave place to a wider array of
demographic, economic, legal, and institutional developments. The emergence of a focus
on the Atlantic world, particularly in the eighteenth century, placed the economic cir-
cumstances faced by the American republic in a new international context.5 On the other

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 C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

hand, emphasis on the opening up of European settlement in the interior also led scholars
to address what could be called a “continental turn” in American economic activity.
Though U.S. transatlantic trade grew strongly in the first half of the nineteenth century,
the per capita value of overseas trade collapsed with Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807 and,
though it rose after 1815, did not regain its previous level before the Civil War. Social
and economic historians have therefore paid significant attention to the internal sources
of economic growth. The depiction of change between the 1790s and the 1840s as a
“market revolution” came about in this context.
***
Two conceptual shifts assisted this development. Historians had regarded nineteenth-
century economic changes largely as continuous with those of the colonial period. Now,
some suggested, the Revolution unleashed new conditions that led to the subsequent rapid
growth; for a period so-called “social” and “market” historians sparred over whether the
early nineteenth century experienced a transition to capitalism that set American develop-
ment on a new course.6 Focusing on rural regions or the links between town and country-
side, this debate fostered a new emphasis on rural societies as sources of innovation and
change, rather than merely passive receptors of “progress” imposed from urban centers or
overseas.Town and country together experienced profound and far-reaching consequences
from the growth and adaptation to new levels of production and exchange. Beginning with
Sean Wilentz and Charles Sellers in the early 1990s, historians started to label this experi-
ence as a “market revolution.” For Sellers, in particular, this could explain the political and
religious developments that characterized Jacksonian America, but for other historians the
concept also opened up possibilities for exploring a wide array of social and cultural
developments.7
These early arguments for a market revolution soon met with skepticism. Religious
historians criticized Sellers’s overly formulaic “culture war” between mainstream and
conservative or charismatic churches. Others argued that the market revolution concept
overlooked continuities from the colonial period in which some historians had discerned
a “consumer revolution,” or that the reorganization of labor and class relations, rather than
market activities as such, was what transformed the early republic’s economy.8 Daniel
Feller suggested that “market revolution” might describe any phase of historical change,
while Daniel Walker Howe argued that the period’s economic development was attribut-
able to a “communications revolution,” embracing trade, travel, transport, and print
culture.9 The weight of criticism might have banished the market revolution from schol-
arly discourse had it not been for the enthusiasm with which a younger generation of
historians seized on the concept as a framework for examining the rich cultural ramifica-
tions of a period of rapid change.10
To previous emphases on rural society these scholars have added various dimensions
that present the market revolution as a set of widely felt experiences. These include
attention to commoditization, to developments in finance as well as in production, to
the marginal or criminal undersides to economic change, and to the ways in which
legal changes and cultural activities in the public sphere worked over time to modify
revolutionary-era concepts of the common good. The “market revolution” came to fit
neatly with the emergence of a new “history of American capitalism” that is less concerned
with capitalism’s antecedents and challengers than with exploring its spread to seemingly

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 C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

every aspect of American life.11 It has even entailed a reinterpretation of plantation slavery
in the early republic. Recent studies have treated American slavery not as backward-
looking and pre-capitalist, but as integral to American capitalist development – perhaps,
according to some accounts, the key ingredient in the nation’s rapid economic growth.12
These new avenues of inquiry have also generated new perspectives on urbanization
and class relations. The reinterpretation of rural societies, both slave- and non-slave-
based, has called into question the assumption that city growth and city building were
the principal cutting-edges of the new economy: the “market revolution” helps put
urbanization in its place. Class divisions and their evolution look different, too, when the
focus widens from the important but traditional concern with male artisans and their
transformation into bosses and workers to the more complex patterns of change around
unskilled workers, race, and gender. The focus on finance and its ramifications has
addressed the fragility of the early American economy, with its vulnerability to booms
and slumps, and the personal consequences of success and failure. Above all, in a field
that has for long been attentive primarily to social and economic sources of change and
development, there is a new focus on the state, and on the shifting roles of government
and politics in the economy’s expansion.13
***
Older rural societies in North America faced two complementary circumstances that
fostered expansion: population growth and the search for fresh fertile land that could
replace regions whose soil had been exhausted by cultivation. Though both operated to
some degree throughout the original thirteen states, early republic developments accen-
tuated regional and sectional differences. Population grew rapidly. In the 1780s the rate of
growth was one of the fastest of any decade in American history. High fertility rates also
ensured that the population included an unusually large proportion of young people, itself
a likely generator of further expansion in the future. Settled farming districts in New
England and elsewhere experienced pressure on land as children succeeded to subdivided
portions of parental farms or sought new farmland in unsettled zones. Demographic pres-
sure was a key impetus behind movement to the frontier and the demand for land in
northern New England or west of the Appalachians.14 A further spur to the expansion of
settlement was the effect of cultivation on soil fertility. In certain regions, such as eastern
New England, the adaptation of English field husbandry techniques had produced a sus-
tainable form of agriculture, but where there was a heavy emphasis on export crops, such
as tobacco from the Chesapeake, soil exhaustion was a widespread concern, and this also
drove the search for fresh land in previously unsettled regions.15 Meanwhile, the distinc-
tion between regions where labor for farming was provided mainly by farm families and
neighbors, and those where hired, indentured, or enslaved labor was key to production,
also created differences in the ways local economies operated and pressed for new land to
expand onto.
Attention to these circumstances behind expansion and the search for land has served
as an underpinning to the concept of a market revolution. Rural developments were once
interpreted as consequences of ideas, practices, and demand penetrating the countryside
from seaboard towns or the Atlantic economy.16 Until the 1970s accounts of rural soci-
eties in the early republic emphasized continuity with the colonial past and the lack of

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any significant turning points in a trajectory that would eventually result in their incor-
poration into an industrialized, capitalist economy. Recent historians give more emphasis
to the ways in which rural regions themselves generated change, and helped actively to
shape their dealings with port towns, other regions, or overseas markets.17 A consequence
of the adaptation of farming communities to both internal and external pressures was a
deepening and enrichment of activities in the countryside. As Steven Stoll and Benjamin
Cohen have noted, efforts to improve fertilization and soil quality long predated the find-
ings of Justus Liebig or the international search for phosphates that began in the 1840s.
Farmers themselves inspired by necessity and by information circulating through the
press and local agricultural societies experimented with new materials or adjusted their
husbandry to make better use of livestock manure.18
The market revolution entailed increasing volumes of trade and traffic in the country-
side and between rural and urban areas; shifts in the intensity of households’ engagement
with wider markets; and new practices and disciplines that such changes subjected them
to.19 Recent scholarship reveals the complex nature of rural exchange relations that were
embedded in social networks and connections. Farming in many parts of the Northeast
was conducted with both market opportunities and local and family necessities in mind.
The northern countryside underwent an incremental adaptation to new consumption
patterns and to new opportunities for profit from crop or livestock raising.20 These were
fitted into household strategies and structural constraints on labor supply. Capital and
credit were obtained first from local and neighborhood connections and latterly also from
a growing array of outside sources, including merchants and early banks and insurance
companies. Studies of indebtedness and court cases suggest that there was no radical break
in patterns of neighborliness or local conflict as these changes occurred, except when
political crises or economic cycles put exceptional stress on the credit system. Indeed, at
times of economic stress, patterns of local exchange and production could help sustain
rural communities through crises.21 However, the personal stress that structural conditions
and periodic crises imposed on rural life did impel men and women to seek new ways of
doing things. Some took up new land and migrated to frontier regions. Some sought
occupations outside farming or in towns and cities, or at sea. Others attempted to intro-
duce new farming methods to their own land and neighborhoods. Family and local ties
could hinder as well as help: in the Hudson Valley, William Coventry reflected that “my
own Realations [i.e. relations, family members] is my worst Enimy in the world.” Those
with means could try to disentangle themselves from local credit relationships and obliga-
tions by seeking connections with new commercial and financial institutions, establishing
new patterns of network and trust from which kinship or other personal connections were
excluded or marginalized.22
***
Slave-based economies also developed powerful expansive dynamics.Though the American
Revolution initiated emancipation (mostly gradual) in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic
states, and formally excluded slavery from the Old Northwest, its aftermath witnessed a
massive expansion of the slave population that embedded slavery and its output ever more
deeply into southern culture and national politico-economic calculations. A brief flirtation
with slave manumission soon became overtaken by the opportunities for profit that

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applying slave labor to newly opened fertile land could afford. This has long been recog-
nized, but recent studies have challenged the conventional interpretation of southern
slavery as pre-modern or pre-industrial in character. Far from being an exception to a
modernizing national pattern or a throwback, pre-capitalist social formation, slavery
evinced sophistication, adaptability, modern business methods, and profound interconnec-
tions with the wider development of American capitalism.23 The massive expansion of
cotton cultivation, in particular, but also the emergence of new technical and managerial
methods in sugar production, and slaveholders’ adoption of sophisticated new financial
instruments, all point to the adaptability of the southern economy.24
Plantation regions’ close national and international ties gave them crucial roles in
broader capitalist development. Slave-grown cotton fed the textile industries of Western
Europe and the American Northeast. Demand for manufactured goods from slave-
plantation regions helped develop and sustain northern manufacturing. Commerce,
transatlantic shipping, and the financing of slave-grown production tied the plantation
zone strongly not only to regional ports and commercial centers such as Baltimore,
Charleston, and New Orleans, but also to New York, which would emerge as the leading
facilitator of the cotton business. In addition to these connections, slavery also underwrote
the development of business methods and institutions.

***
Demographic and social conditions in non-slave regions fostered economic development,
outmigration, and “westward expansion.” The combination of soil exhaustion, access
to coerced labor, and the lure of profits from plantation crops drove slave societies also to
expand into new regions. Joshua Rothman has argued that the Mississippi frontier, the
most active region for the extension of cotton cultivation in the 1820s and 1830s, was –
far from being a marginal zone – the “leading edge of the market revolution.”25 Since
well before the American Revolution the prospect of expanding settler colonialism into
and across the Appalachian mountains had generated opportunities for land speculation,
fostered European imperial rivalries, and governed – often violently – Native Americans’
encounters with Europeans. Though the revolutionary era altered terms for acquiring
land, by making first the Crown and then the federal government sole legitimate
purchasers of Indian land, it also opened up the trans-Appalachian west for potential
settlement.26
Recent scholarship has emphasized Native Americans’ actions to resist, forestall, or
negotiate in light of the massive pressure unleashed against them. The Iroquois, divided
in allegiance during the Revolution, negotiated a tenuous hold on some of their
territories in western New York and Upper Canada.27 But in the Ohio Country, after
four decades of efforts to resist white encroachments, the Shawnee and their allies were
forced into a final retreat by defeats in the 1812 War. Encounters between natives and
newcomers had always involved trading. As white settlement expanded, Native
Americans in various regions adapted to the market relations that grew up with it. But
the Cherokee and Choctaw, who adopted new farming or livestock-raising methods
on the southwestern frontier, would find their efforts to conform with Euro-American
practices little defense against demand for their lands and government-supported

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measures to remove them during the 1830s, driven as these were by the fierce expansionism
of the cotton-slave economy.28
The resale to settlers and plantation owners of land throughout trans-Appalachia marked
the creation of a powerful land market. Though in Kentucky and Tennessee this process
often produced overlapping claims and confused rights to ownership, north and west of the
Ohio River federal land policy of the 1780s created a survey system based on divisible
mile-square sections whose location (and hence ownership) could be precisely defined.

***
The survey system’s rigidity could be ill-adapted to environment or topography, but its
uniformity made it ideal for fostering land markets, because well-defined parcels and clear
chains of title made land easier to value and to convey. This in turn helped make land
usable as collateral for mortgages or other loans, so land and the expanding land market
would form a basis for the expansion of paper financial instruments whose importance
grew in the early nineteenth century. Land was regarded as good security because its
development potential and the prospect of demand from demographic expansion tended
to raise its market value. The systematic commoditization of territory that had only a
short time previously been possessed by Native Americans was one of the key aspects of
the market revolution.29
Indeed historians have recently paid particular attention to finance, to the instruments
by which business was conducted, and the evolving legal underpinnings to an expanding
commercial system.30 The financial system both facilitated capitalist expansion and was a
source of instability. Its roots were in rural and urban credit networks, in transatlantic
commercial dealings, and in the mechanisms of federal government funding established
in the early 1790s. The growth of banking and the circulation of banknotes fostered
market development with floods of liquidity; but poor regulation, fraud, mismanage-
ment, and counterfeiting all contributed to failures, uncertainty, and periodic business
crises.31 While some regions came to benefit from the imposition of self-regulation such
as that established by the Suffolk system in Massachusetts in the 1820s, certain states saw
their banks wiped out and legislatures determined to suppress banking altogether.32 For
new financial institutions such as insurance companies, investments in land mortgages
granted to farmers could be a hedge against insecurity.33 In addition to using the familiar
trading devices of bills of exchange and other instruments to obtain credit for their oper-
ations, plantation owners raised capital by mortgaging not just their land and fixed prop-
erty, but their slaves as well; securities based in some degree on property in slaves were
widely dispersed throughout the national and international financial system of the
1830s.34 Meanwhile the growing and highly significant internal slave trade in the South
marked a dimension of the market revolution not replicated in the North, as planters and
traders put their human property up in tens and hundreds of thousands for sale as com-
modities.35 Even such abstract properties as value and risk were becoming commoditized
by the 1830s and 1840s.36
Periodic booms and slumps came to affect wide areas of the economy. Small slumps
in the 1790s, the widespread dislocation of the 1807 Embargo and then the War of 1812,
a serious panic in 1819, smaller setbacks in the mid-1820s and early 1830s, and the pro-
longed depression touched off by the Panic of 1837 demonstrated the interdependence

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of different regions and economic sectors. Both domestic and international circum-
stances shaped these crises. They were usually preceded, for example, by booms in pur-
chases of federal land, fed by expectations of speculative gains in the land market that
were then undercut by reverses elsewhere. A recent study of the 1837 crisis by Jessica
Lepler emphasizes its multivariant character and widespread local and international
implications.37 Yet while scholars have understandably sought the causes of instability,
they have also reflected on sources of survival and regrowth. In New England, for
example, Richard Judd has noted “the complicated array of local exchanges” that char-
acterized rural life and “kept the economy afloat” during hard times.38 Among the links
that enabled economic activity to revive in response to transatlantic demand by the mid-
1840s were those provided through the plantation system, as slave-grown crops gener-
ated profits for planters, merchants, and shippers, and as demand for foodstuffs and
manufactures flowed back to the North.
***
Attention to early industrialization once focused on the technological and capital-intensive
developments, particularly in textiles, represented by large-scale factory operations such as
those built at Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1820s and 1830s, notable not least for employing
young women workers recruited from the New England countryside.39 In their scale, their
use of machinery, their use of large numbers of waged workers, and their business methods,
the mills of Lowell and similar towns prefigured characteristics of later nineteenth-century
American industry.40 But such examples were not typical of manufacturing in the early
republic, and historians have also explored the more diverse and geographically dispersed
aspects of America’s early manufactures. The exigencies of wartime and the interruption
of Atlantic trade during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were spurs to local
manufactures, but so too were the conditions of rural society that we have already noted.
Though slave plantations in the South supported home manufactures for their own use or,
increasingly, relied on importing their manufactured goods, many rural households
elsewhere made manufactures part of their strategies for addressing the constraints that
they faced.41
Increasing numbers of rural people took up craft production on a part-time or full-
time basis. Spinning and weaving in households grew in importance into the early
nineteenth century, and as factory textile production expanded, household producers at
first integrated their activities with these mechanized operations.42 When, by the 1830s,
factory-produced cloth finally dislodged domestic output, households took up other tasks
instead. Male workers developed older crafts such as blacksmithing, carpentry, millwork,
and leatherworking into part- or full-time businesses producing implements, tools, and
other wooden or metal goods such as wagons or parts for clocks.Women produced palm-
leaf hats, buttons, parts for boots and shoes, silk thread, and other goods, often as outworkers
for local merchants. Pockets of manufacturing grew up in many rural locations. Supplying
urban and distant markets, as well as their localities, craft producers adopted methods of
batch production that employed some division of labor; specialisms in particular products
often clustered together in towns or small villages.43 The close proximity of farming and
manufacturing in rural areas helped to satisfy the different labor demands of both. On
Hudson River Valley farms, Martin Bruegel has noted, a “reserve army” of the seasonal

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workers required at haying or harvest time was often drawn from the artisanal population
of the region.44
***
Except in a few cities and manufacturing towns, both North and South retained their
heavily rural characters into the 1830s and beyond. Even in the Northeast, the most urban-
ized region, 73 percent of the population was rural in 1840; everywhere else the average
proportion was 90 percent or higher. But the rise of manufacturing in the Northeast,
including that rooted in rural communities, altered the employment structure of several
states, giving more prominence to industrial and service work than remained the case in
the South. Population growth and the intensification of both farming and manufacturing
prompted a proliferation of material goods among prosperous and middling rural house-
holds and an emphasis on the acquisition of items that could indicate respectability.45 In
what David Jaffee has memorably called “the Village Enlightenment,” cultural institutions
sought to do for cultural capital and education what workshops and diversified farms were
doing for production. Printing shops and newspapers, social libraries, debating societies, the
Second Great Awakening’s array of new churches, and the creation of new educational
establishments altered the cultural milieu, particularly of northern towns and villages.
Schools and cultural institutions sought to disseminate virtuous habits by emulation, but
– as J. M. Opal has argued – this could quickly evolve into ambition or competitive indi-
vidualism. As more career paths outside farming opened up, particularly for young men,
rural people took the baggage of their education with them. Nicholas Marshall has argued
that this was as powerful a source of a fluid, mobile, individualistic culture and society as
any economic development.46 These cultural changes in rural and urban regions also con-
tributed to one of the period’s powerful demographic changes, the “fertility transition” that
saw average family sizes fall significantly within a few decades.47
The reevaluation of rural societies in the market revolution has also placed urban
developments in new contexts.48 The plantation system generated low urbanization rates
in most monocrop zones; up to 1840 the largest southern towns, such as Charleston and
New Orleans, lay at the region’s geographical margins where they linked the interior with
international markets. Charleston’s slow growth, when compared with New Orleans’s
rapid expansion, measured the relative decline of the old Lower South and the striking
development of the Mississippi Valley.49 In the Northeast and the emerging Midwest,
however, urbanization was more evenly spread across agricultural zones. New “central
villages” in New England towns, and the modest-sized market towns of Pennsylvania,
Western New York, and Ohio, represented forms of urbanization that emerged in
close symbiosis with rural agriculture and manufacturing.50 Meanwhile the connections
between trade and finance, and the power of transportation networks to direct trade to
locations where markets were large and varied, promoted established ports or the emer-
gence of new large urban centers on the geographical margins of northern regions as well.
All the leading port cities of the Northeast seaboard grew significantly, but New York
cemented its preeminent position with its location, transport connections, commercial and
financial services, and growing manufactures.51 While new urban centers across the
Midwest often served as channels facilitating new farming settlements, towns and cities in
established agricultural regions owed their relative success to their ability to draw on

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produce, labor, and skills from the surrounding countryside and to link these to the needs
of growing national and international markets.
Urbanization, in large and small centers, has long been prominent in studies of social
class and economic inequality.52 Scholars of early industrialization who had focused on
the emergence of factory wage-work in the Northeast found a European-style pattern of
proletarianization weakened by workers’ continuing connections with the countryside, by
the significance of gender in factory systems that relied considerably on women workers,
and by the growing number of immigrants from Europe from the 1830s onwards. Bruce
Laurie, Sean Wilentz and others, however, traced an important shift over time in the
organization of work in manufacturing. Trades, rural and urban, before the nineteenth
century had been organized in the households and workshops of skilled artisans, whose
apprentices might progress to the status of masters. With market growth and competition
this pattern was transformed, as masters with access to capital divided labor, routinized
tasks, and enlarged their businesses. Apprenticeship dwindled, and many skilled workers
became permanent employees without prospect of advancement. Class, rather than age,
skill, or seniority, now marked the distinction between bosses and workers. Particularly in
urban areas residential separation also began to mark class experience.53
Recent scholarship has modified this “artisan” model of class development. Marla Miller
has shown that artisan skill was not simply a male province, but shared by women too, albeit
in trades like tailoring that proved highly vulnerable to wage reductions and impoverish-
ment.54 Peter Way, Seth Rockman, and others have also noted the importance of unskilled
labor to antebellum class formation. Class and inequalities evolved not just around the
means of production but in patterns of inclusion and exclusion from access to economic
means, material goods, and cultural or political power.55 Even though in rural areas class
distinctions were unstable and complex, changes such as the institutionalization of poor
relief in poor farms or workhouses tended to segregate paupers from the communities that
had previously sheltered them.56
The growth of clerkships and other “white collar” occupations has also received
attention from historians. Some have stressed the anxiety that male clerks in large towns
generated as young men whose living arrangements, dress, and cultural preferences marked
them as liminal figures, outside conventional patterns of familial or social control.57 Others
have emphasized clerks’ pursuit of middle-class status, and their substitution of values of
efficiency and productivity for older aspirations to independence, suggesting that this
helped originate the classic American conflation of “middle” and “working” classes that
many Europeans regarded as distinct from one another.58 The growth and multiplicity of
towns and cities as commercial centers, with accompanying legal, financial, and governmental
functions, also fostered the emergence of strong regionally based elites, often similar in
character to one another, but each with their distinctive power-bases and networks of
cultural and political connections.
***
The historiography of class, urbanization, and the market revolution expanded from the
“new social history” of the 1970s, a field that was early criticized for its relative inattention
to politics.59 Many of the processes reviewed here – demographic changes, market expan-
sion, the imposition of market disciplines, and the role of “bottom-up” or entrepreneurial

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efforts to respond to social and economic changes – could indeed to some extent be
regarded as self-activating. But much recent scholarship, some of it self-consciously reviv-
ing the field of political economy, has addressed the multiple ways in which “private”
actions in the realm of economic change could be shaped by the actions of governments
or the structures of the state.60
The “consumer revolution” had originated in the colonial period, and did so in the
context of British mercantilism. American economic expansion from the late eighteenth
century also owed much to state action. Warfare and organization for it secured the clear-
ance of Native Americans from land that would be parceled out to white settlers. The
banking system originated in the Confederation government’s efforts to secure its own
funding; the reshaping of government finances and the national debt under the Constitution
forged powerful links between government, commerce, and land. Revenue from inter-
national trade and land sales supported government finance and secured its ties to the elite
groups that held the bulk of government debt.61 Taxation policy throughout the ante-
bellum period was calculated to secure the interests of powerful groups, particularly of
slaveholders.62 State charters directly formed early business corporations, the main channels
for amassing capital for large-scale manufacturing or infrastructure projects, and though by
the 1830s various states were moving towards general incorporation laws, the role of gov-
ernment as a passive ring-holder for economic activity did not diminish.63 Representation
in state and federal governments came strongly to feature members of the legal profession,
whose work in law offices and courthouses profoundly shaped the growth and operation
of business practices and the terms of economic activity. Conduct of trade and exchange in
the market revolution was increasingly governed by the precepts of contract law; as the
Progressive Era economist Richard T. Ely would note in 1914, “the state itself is the source
of contract, not the result.”64
But the role of the state was not stable, and its effects could be paradoxical. From the
Democratic-Republicans of the 1790s to the Jacksonian Democrats of the 1820s and
1830s, suspicion of government as an instrument of class privilege drove attempts to scale
down its power. Yet success at reducing the scope for elite privilege, while weakening
the power of governments, increasingly opened governments to pressure from private,
powerful interests.65 These included powerful figures and institutions in the commercial,
financial, and transportation sectors that were of growing importance to the economy, but
also the advocates of policies, such as those relating to tariffs or taxation, that bolstered the
growth and significance of plantation slavery. The constitutional compromises that pre-
served slavery at the end of the Revolution had instituted a tacit political consensus that
national policy should not interfere with it. Periodically, this consensus broke down, as in
the Missouri and Nullification crises, but it was subsequently restored. As the 1840s began,
the political silence that sustained slavery remained largely unbroken; even the immedi-
atist abolitionists who had loudly challenged it in the 1830s were divided and in retreat.
To most commentators, as to many present-day historians who stress the congruence
between slavery and capitalism and the close economic interdependence between North
and South, there seemed little reason to doubt that the consensus would continue. But it
was in fact soon to be shattered, over Texas, the Mexican War, and the expansion of settle-
ment in the West.66 The conflicts over those issues would reveal the deep fissures, not
between plantation slavery and industrial and financial capitalism, but between the two

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rural systems of labor that had emerged in the North and the South and which had
projected and sustained the market revolution.

Notes
1 A. Lincoln, “Address to the People of Illinois,” March 4, 1843, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), I; Horace Bushnell,
“The Age of Homespun,” [1851] in Work and Play (London, 1864), 48.
2 Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the
Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 17211 (2011).
3 George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951); Richard
D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York, 1976).
4 See, for example, John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2
vols. (Cambridge, UK, 1995–2008).
5 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic
Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, UK, 1995).
6 Differing interpretations that nevertheless agreed on the Revolution’s transforming effects
included Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s
(New York, 1984); and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New
York, 1992). Participants in the “social/market” debate included Michael Merrill, James A.
Henretta, and this author, on one hand, and Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a
Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992). See
also Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, VA, 1992).
7 Sean Wilentz, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848,” in Eric Foner, ed.,
The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian
America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991).
8 For critical appraisals of Sellers’s arguments, see Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds.,
The Market Revolution in America: Social, Cultural, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880
(Charlottesville, VA, 1996), to which this author contributed. Studies by Carole Shammas, The
Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, UK, 1990), Margaret E. Newell, From
Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, NY, 1998), and
T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence
(New York, 2004), indicated continuity between the colonial and early national periods.
9 Daniel Feller, “The Market Revolution Ate My Homework,” Reviews in American History 25,
no. 3 (1997): 408–415; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of
America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007).
10 See the comments by Cathy Matson, “A House of Many Mansions: Some Thoughts on the
Field of Economic History,” in Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives
and New Directions (University Park, PA, 2006), 1–70, and John Lauritz Larson, The Market
Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (Cambridge, UK,
2010), summarizing scholarship in the field up to that point.
11 Larson, The Market Revolution in America; see also Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books and
Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Stephen Mihm, A
Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge,
MA, 2007); and the essays in Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson, eds., Capitalism by
Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, 2015).
12 Of various works in this genre, cited below, the most prominent is Edward E. Baptist, The Half
Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014).
13 Among studies that discuss finance and the state, see the essays in Michael Zakim and Gary J.
Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century
America (Chicago, 2012); and Jeffrey Sklansky, “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the
History of Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 11, no. 1 (Spring
2014): 23–46.

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14 See, for example, David Jaffee, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and
Memory, 1630–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Richard Buel, Jr., ed., The Peopling of New Connecticut:
From the Land of Steady Habits to the Western Reserve (Hartford, CT, 2011).
15 Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT,
2004) indicates the sustainability of early New England husbandry; Avery O. Craven, Soil
Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (1925;
reprint ed. with introduction by Louis A. Ferleger, Columbia, SC, 2006) discusses the effects
of tobacco cultivation on soils.
16 Richard D. Brown, “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760–1820,”
Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (June 1974): 29–51.
17 Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca,
NY, 1990).
18 Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York,
2002); Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American
Countryside (New Haven, CT, 2009).
19 On trade in the countryside, see Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early
Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, 2008).
20 On the pursuit of both market objectives and family necessities, see Richard Lyman Bushman,
“Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998):
351–374. On local exchange relations, Daniel L. Vickers, “Competency and Competition:
Economic Culture in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 3–29; Clark, The
Roots of Rural Capitalism, ch. 3; Martin Bruegel, “The Social Relations of Farming in the Early
American Republic: A Microhistorical Approach,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (2006):
523–553.
21 Naomi Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American
Northeast,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003): 437–461; B. Zorina Khan,
“‘Justice of the Marketplace’: Legal Disputes and Economic Activity on America’s Northeastern
Frontier, 1700–1860,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 1–35.
22 Coventry quoted in Bruegel, “The Social Relations of Farming,” 530; Clark, The Roots of
Rural Capitalism, ch. 3; Christopher Clark, “The Ohio Country in the Political Economy of
Nation Building,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs, eds., The Center of a Great
Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic (Athens, OH, 2005), 146–165.
23 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, passim; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and
Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of
Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT, 2015).
24 On commodities and the conduct of production in the South, see Sven Beckert, Empire of
Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time,
Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); Richard Follett, The Sugar
Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1815–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2005). On
financial instruments in the slave economy, see Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and
War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York, 2014); Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine:
Mortgaging Human Property,” Journal of Southern History 76 (2010): 817–866; Richard
Holcombe Kilbourne, Jr., Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets: The Bank of the United States in
Mississippi, 1831–1852 (London, 2006).
25 Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age
of Jackson (Athens, GA, 2012).
26 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,
1650–1815 (Cambridge, UK, 1991).
27 Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American
Revolution (New York, 2006).
28 Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the
Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Alexandra Harmon, Colleen O’Neill, and Paul C.

44
 C LA S S, T HE MA R K ET R EVO L UTI O N, A ND U R BA NI Z AT I O N

Rosier, “Interwoven Economic Histories: American Indians in a Capitalist America,” Journal of

American History 98, no. 3 (December 2011): 698–722.
29 Charles E. Brooks, Frontier Settlement and Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase (Ithaca,
NY, 1996).
30 See Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command.
31 Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking
Collapse (New York, 2008); Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters.
32 Sklansky, “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn.”
33 Tamara Plakins Thornton, “‘A Great Machine’ or a ‘Beast of Prey’: A Boston Corporation and
Its Rural Debtors in the Age of Capitalist Transformation,” Journal of the Early Republic 27
(2007): 567–597.
34 Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine.”
35 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
36 Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
(Cambridge, MA, 2012).
37 Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial
Crisis (Cambridge, UK, 2013).
38 Richard W. Judd, review of Béatrice Craig, Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The
Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada [Toronto, 2009] in Agricultural History 85 (2011): 133.
39 Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell,
Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979); for the differently-organized Rhode Island or
family-system mills, see Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in
Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, UK, 1983).
40 Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge,
MA, 1987).
41 A. Glenn Crothers, “Agricultural Improvement and Technological Innovation in a Slave Society:
The Case of Early National Northern Virginia,” Agricultural History 75 (2001): 135–167; see also
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the
Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978).
42 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American
Myth (New York, 2001); Adrienne Hood, The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in
Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 2003); Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order.
43 Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England
Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1995).
44 Bruegel, “The Social Relations of Farming,” 542–543.
45 On consumption patterns, see Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle
Atlantic, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 577–624; David Jaffee, A New
Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia, 2010); Lori Merish,
Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(Durham, NC, 2000).
46 David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820,” William and Mary
Quarterly 47 (1990): 327–346; J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New
England (Philadelphia, 2008); Nicholas Marshall, “Rural Experience and the Development of
the Middle Class: The Power of Culture and Tangible Improvements,” American Nineteenth
Century History 8 (2007): 1–25.
47 Alexander James Field, “Economic and Demographic Determinants of Educational
Commitment: Massachusetts, 1855,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 439–460.
48 Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America (Minneapolis,
2005).
49 The population of New Orleans nearly quadrupled, to over 102,000, between 1820 and 1840
alone.
50 Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York, 1988); Diane Shaw, City
Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New Nineteenth Century City (Baltimore, 2004); Jay

45
 C HR I S TOP HER C L A R K

Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New
Haven, CT, 2009).
51 Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New
York, 1998).
52 Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia,
2003); Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park, PA, 2004).
53 Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989);
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class,
1788–1850 (New York, 1984); Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in
Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978).
54 Marla Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst, MA, 2006);
Marla Miller, Betsy Ross and the Making of America (New York, 2010).
55 Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780–1860
(Cambridge, UK, 1993); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early
Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009).
56 Gabriel J. Loiacono, “Economy and Isolation in Rhode Island Poorhouses, 1820–1850,” Rhode
Island History 65, no. 2 (September 2007): 30–47.
57 Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-
Century New York (New York, 1998); Michael Zakim, “The Business Clerk as Social
Revolutionary; Or, a Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes,” Journal of the Early Republic
26 (2006): 563–603.
58 Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chicago, 2003); Brian P. Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-
Century America (New York, 2011). On an emerging middle class in southern towns, see
Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC,
2005); and Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865
(Lexington, KY, 2006).
59 See Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” History Workshop
Journal 7, no. 1 (1979): 66–94.
60 Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and
Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence, KS, 2004).
61 Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867
(Chicago, 2014); Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and
Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
62 Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006).
63 Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century
America (Cambridge, UK, 2009); Tony A. Freyer, Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional
Conflict in Antebellum America (Charlottesville, VA, 1994).
64 Richard T. Ely, Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth (1914; reprint
ed., 2 vols., New York, 1922), II, 579.
65 Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the
1850s (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), chs. 5–7; Mike O’Connor, A Commercial Republic: America’s
Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (Lawrence, KS, 2014), 48–81.
66 Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1997).

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 3
“ FEMALE WO MEN O R
FEMININE L A DI ES ” 1
Gender and Women’s Rights before
the Antebellum Movement

Leigh Fought

To begin an essay on antebellum woman’s rights with the first explicitly woman’s rights
convention in Seneca Falls in 1848 would not only be a cliché but also limit the discussion
of woman’s rights to a single narrative. Although an exciting yarn, at once inspiring and
frustrating, the line running from Republican Motherhood to women’s prominence in the
antislavery movement through woman’s rights conventions of the 1850s and on toward
the woman’s suffrage movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century tells an ever
narrowing and distinctly white story that continues to owe plot points to its original
authors, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Women’s
historians have added complexity, nuance, and dissent, but the tale of the antebellum
woman’s rights movement remains largely homogeneous, a curious feature for its activists,
who trained in a movement addressing racial inequality, and a distinct liability as they
claimed to speak for all women.
Historians have followed several lines of inquiry in addressing the antebellum women’s
rights movement, addressing legal reform, abolition, and republican ideology, but all have
had to contend with gender. As theorist Joan Scott argued, “the concept of gender legiti-
mizes and constructs social relationships,” while “politics constructs gender and gender
constructs politics.”2 In other words, ideas about the proper behavior and place of women
in society influenced all institutions of power with the force of law, contemporary science,
medical practice, and social custom, and women’s behavior was policed, permitted, and
punished according to society’s ideals. Women, in turn, used these same ideals to influence
and alter those very same institutions. Yet, even as they resisted proscriptions for their
gender, women also internalized and deployed them in order to understand their place in
the world and their interactions with other people. Given the many factors that described
a woman’s life, from her race to her socioeconomic standing to the location of her home,
most women came to very different conclusions and formulated very different ideals about
their own gender. Therefore, if historian Elsa Barkley Brown was correct in contending
that “all women do not have the same gender,” then placing the origins of the movement
within the history of women’s gender can explain its particular make-up and limitations.3
By the time that a woman’s rights consciousness had produced activism in pursuit of legal,
social, and political change, the dominant ideology held up “True Womanhood” as the

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model for appropriate feminine behavior. Whether conforming to, critiquing, rejecting, or
excluded from this ideal, no woman could escape its cultural force. According to women’s
journals such as Godey’s Ladies Book (published 1830–1878), advice books such as Treatise on
Domestic Economy (1841), and the popular novels of the day, the “True Woman” confined
herself to the “private sphere” of the home. There, pioneering historian Barbara Welter
observed, she cultivated “the four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness, and domes-
ticity.”4 Writers on domesticity, like Catharine Beecher, attempted to subsume all women
through a presumed shared experience of motherhood, family, home, and all of their
attendant work.5 In reality, this was neither a practical model nor an accurate description
of most women’s lives, and the concept of a “true woman” implied its opposite, the “false”
or perhaps “deviant” woman. Even many conservative women chafed at the constraints of
the ideal. The “damned mob of scribbling women” writing sentimental fiction rejected
“submissiveness” in their heroines, but most women recognized their legally-enforced
dependence. Even proslavery, anti-woman’s rights essayist Louisa S. McCord conceded that
God had not “perhaps given to woman the most enviable place in his creation.”6
True womanhood came to fruition in the Jacksonian era but grew from an older ideol-
ogy of “separate spheres,” which divided the world into the public world of men and the
private sphere of women. This notion had formed by the late eighteenth century and
represented a new philosophy about relationships among classes of people. In the early
modern era, “spheres” had described a social rank, its occupants, and their appropriate
activities. The public sphere encompassed all of those duties related to the maintenance of
the state or society, while the private sphere concerned those related to the household and
family. That is, gender was different from spheres, and men and women performed dif-
ferent roles within all spheres. Although women were generally considered lesser versions
of men in terms of intelligence, strength, and morality, like men, they held both public
and private roles related to their social standing. Political theorists likened family to gov-
ernment, with both accepting hierarchy as inherent to society, government, and family.
As the king was head of state, so was the father head of household.7
In the century leading up to the revolutionary era, however, the configurations of public
sphere, private sphere, and gender shifted. New concepts about the social contract and
government by consent resulted in challenges to hierarchy. At the same time, reproductive
differences between men and women served as the bases for changing ideas about sexual
difference that extended beyond genitalia. Enlightenment theorists began to envision more
republican forms of government, but they defined the work of that government as explic-
itly male, thereby associating “public” with men. Child-bearing along with its attendant
responsibilities handicapped women’s ability to assume any responsibility away from the
household and thus made women more suited to the “private sphere.” In consigning
women to the “private sphere,” identified with the home, men could maintain patriarchal
authority over their household as something separate from the “public sphere” in which
they questioned hierarchy. Furthermore, by identifying each sphere as masculine or femi-
nine territory, theorists linked social roles to biology, and any trait or task assigned to one
or the other sphere became an immutable characteristic of men or women. “Once biology
became the marker not just of difference but also of inferiority,” historian Rosemarie
Zagarri argued, “women’s bodies provided a convenient explanation for excluding them
from the same rights and privileges that men enjoyed.”8 No longer considered imperfect

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versions of their male counterparts, women now found themselves described in binary
opposition to men. Men, for instance, had the capacity for reason, while women’s strength
was sentiment. With greater value placed on masculine features, women found themselves
still consigned to the lesser status.9
This metaphor of spheres was so powerful that, once identified by women’s historians
in the 1960s, it became the prevalent analytical tool for nearly three decades and still
influences historical inquiry. In using “separate spheres” to investigate the lives of women
between the American Revolution and the Civil War, however, historians began to
realize that most, if not all, women’s lives could not be understood through such a
limited binary. “‘Woman’s sphere’ is the trope carried too far,” concluded Carol Lasser
at a 1999 Society of Historians of the Early Republic symposium. After all, Lasser pointed
out, “we begin to understand gender as an unstable, vital, and fluid relation, not as the
enclosed space that has imprisoned our thinking.”10 Nineteenth-century women’s lives,
then, could not be accurately represented by the very ideas about gender with which
they had to contend because “woman’s sphere” neither included all women nor did it
leave room for the actual experiences of women. At best, as Julie Roy Jeffrey conceded,
the term could be invoked “to suggest the set of boundaries that were supposed to be
observed by middle-class women and to suggest the gender ideology the conservatives
proposed.”11 When considering women outside of the middle class, however, historians
had to address Brown’s observation that “being a woman is, in fact, not extractable
from the context in which one is a woman – that is, race, class, time, and place,” and to
treat the whole as a distinct experience rather than a set of variations.12
For instance, at the time in which “woman’s sphere” took shape, an ideology of race
similarly based on biological difference was also emerging to justify the enslavement of
Africans.13 Yet, historian Jennifer L. Morgan found, “the connection between African
women’s reproductive lives and their suitability for hard manual labor would link their
status with their bodies in a way distinct from but related to the biology of race.”14 From
their earliest observation by European men and their arrival in the British North American
colonies, non-white women were distinguished from white women in law, gendered
divisions of labor, and even in the ways that they mothered their children.15 While Anglo
and African women may have shared the same biology of sex, which differentiated them
from all males, the classification of black women as unlike white women gave them a
discrete gender.
Furthermore, in both the earlier and later iterations of public and private, masters did
not permit slaves to have privacy in any conception of the word. As “woman’s sphere”
became synonymous with “private sphere,” then enslaved women were further alienated
from the same category of gender as white women. The converse did not apply to enslaved
men. Although in the “public sphere” through their status as property and labor and
because they were denied privacy, African and African American men were depicted as
incapable of shouldering the responsibilities of self-government and therefore not within
the same male sphere as Anglo men. In other words, as this racial ideology developed as
part of a pro-slavery ideology, freedom did little to grant African Americans admittance
into the privileges and protections of their respective gender spheres. Consequently, by the
dawn of the nineteenth century, white Americans did not understand themselves as living
in a society with two races and two genders, but one with two races and four genders:

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white men, black men, white women, black women. This same process also applied to
Native Americans, immigrants, and residents of the territories acquired in the Mexican
War, with all non-white or non-Anglo genders described as deviant and therefore inferior.16
As historians began to incorporate intersectional analysis, they also liberated them-
selves from the nineteenth-century rhetorical division of public and private spheres. This
was not so easy a task. When Mary P. Ryan attempted to tack down a definition of
“public,” she discovered that in “the pragmatic practices of democracy, the public sphere
or realm splinters, inevitably and unregrettably, into more mundane and multiple politi-
cal spaces.”17 Thus, historians have offered various conceptualizations of those spaces.
Mary Kelley conceived of the public sphere as “the social space situated between the
institutions of the family and the nation state,” while Elizabeth Varon pointed out that
“public” encompassed physical spaces, publication, and “a grouping of citizens who, lit-
erally and figuratively, embodied ‘public opinion.’”18 Anne McClintock offered a similar
definition of “domesticity,” a concept almost synonymous with the private sphere.
Arguing that “domesticity denotes both a space (a geographic and architectural alignment)
and a social relation to power,” McClintock demonstrated that the imagery of enclosed
spaces associated with a sphere masked those social relationships, obscuring the ways that
ideas associated with the private sphere were actually integral parts of such public sphere
concerns as imperialism and class conflict.19 Historians looking at the public sphere also
turned to relationships and actions that did not fit neatly into the sphere dichotomy,
employing the concept of “civil society,” essentially a third sphere that overlapped the
other two. Mary Beth Norton described it as a place in which “citizens discuss and pos-
sibly try to influence public policy,” thereby becoming “state actors.”20 These civic con-
versations lay outside of direct, electoral politics and existed anywhere that people debated
about or acted upon the conditions that influenced their world. As neither public nor
private, nor male nor female, civic space could be used by people with little or no formal
power. This broader understanding of “public” then became the place of patriotic cele-
brations, slave rebellions, and ladies’ sewing circles; and it was also the place in which
women first articulated, developed, and advanced an idea of their rights.
The term “women’s rights” entered the American lexicon with the work of
Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a
popular work among elite women in the United States. Those American women recog-
nized that a new nation founded on republican principles required a new gender ideology
that would permit the concept and the reality of an active woman citizen. Although they
recognized inherent gender difference, they did not believe that those differences excluded
women from reason or natural rights. Elite American women melded this vision to their
aristocratic entitlement to a public role as both members of the propertied classes and as
intelligent, educated beings. They did not conceive of themselves as voters, but instead
argued for civil liberties, the right to be equal to men before the law, even in marriage.
Abigail Adams’s oft-repeated plea that her husband, John, “remember the ladies” drew
upon this consciousness that women had a vested interest in the creation of the new
nation. Women would be held to its laws and should thus be entitled to the attendant
rights and privileges. They asked for an independent legal identity, rather than burial in
their husbands’ through coverture. John rebuked Abigail as “saucy,” suggesting the
obstacles that women like her faced from men of their class, who were reluctant either to

50
 “ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

share power with their wives or to concede equality with a dependant whose property
and body they controlled.21
With few models and much resistance, elite women such as Judith Sargent Murray,
Mercy Otis Warren, and Susannah Rowson, working through the print culture, carved
a role for women as “republican mothers.” This ideal for gender argued that, because
women bore and raised the next generation of Americans, they served in the front lines,
tasked with raising virtuous citizens who would dispassionately exercise morality and
reason in governing the nation either directly or indirectly. As such, they themselves
should be, first, recognized as moral and rational and, second, allowed to cultivate their
morality and reason through education. Educated women could inform themselves about
events of national importance and thereby exercise judicious influence over their sons
and husbands. They would also teach their daughters to do the same. “The Republican
Mother integrated political values into her domestic life,” explained historian Linda
Kerber, and thus “the mother, and not the masses, came to be seen as the custodian of
civic morality.”22
“Influence” was the key concept in this new idea of women’s role. As Rosemarie
Zagarri pointed out, “when the term ‘influence’ was used in relation to men, it often
referred to the covert exercise of political power,” and proponents of this new ideology
meant their own use of the term to be understood that way. For women, however, this
sort of power generally carried with it the association of royal mistresses who swayed
monarchs through their sexual wiles, the very opposite of the moral and rational pressure
that proponents of this new ideology hoped to exert. Therefore, the association of female
political influence with a proper sexuality contained by motherhood legitimized women’s
interest in politics by stripping it of passion and, by extension, partisanship. The invocation
of motherhood politicized something most women considered inevitable, tied the
education of girls to the future of the nation, and justified a political role for women.23
This was not without consequences. Feminist theorist Judith Bennett noted that most
women in history have had to make “patriarchal bargains” when redefining contempo-
rary proscription on gender, and Republican Motherhood fit Bennett’s model of “patri-
archal equilibrium,” a process whereby women pay for gains in one area with losses in
another.24 As Clare Lyons discovered in her study on sexuality in revolutionary and early
national Philadelphia, “women were granted intellectual competency in exchange for the
acceptance of a new, inert female sexuality.”25 More importantly, as Carol Berkin pointed
out, “neither expanding women’s economic opportunities nor extending their legal rights
found a place in the woman question agenda.” Therefore, “the intellectuals who debated
the woman question narrowed rather than expanded woman’s sphere.”26 Republican
Motherhood may have carried cultural force, but no legal changes resulted to grant them
the right to property or their children. Women had a political role, but their citizenship
was indirect, predicated upon influence through sons and husbands, confined to their
homes, and tied to a particular type of sexual behavior.
Invoking a seemingly universal female experience of motherhood also masked the
new ideology’s singular application to white women who had developed Republican
Motherhood in response to their own class and race concerns. While the argument for
educating future mothers of future citizens theoretically benefited women outside of the
elite, whose capacity was not in question, only families with the economic luxury of

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sparing their daughters’ labor and the availability of publicly-supported schools could
fulfill that potential. Hostility toward black education shut free African American girls
out of all but a few northern classrooms, with doors opened to black boys much sooner
than to their sisters. Their lack of education was then used as a sign of inferior intelligence,
thereby reinforcing the existing racial ideology that associated black women with labor
rather than intellect and limited them to bodies without minds, Phillis Wheatley’s
renowned genius notwithstanding. In any case, the question of black male citizenship
was in limbo, so any construction of female citizenship that placed them auxiliary to their
husbands had no meaning for black women. Subsequently, community activism
prioritized black male citizenship and privileged the masculinity that would legitimize
it.27 For enslaved women, the entire discussion was moot. Thus, under Republican
Motherhood, white women reproduced citizens while black women reproduced labor
and, as slaves, property.
Tying female virtue to sexual behavior also became a tool by which to exclude non-
elite women from influence. Clare Lyons noted that women of the “rabble” in
Philadelphia included sexuality as part of their definition of freedom. “Sexual freedom,”
she argued, “symbolized women’s claims to individual independence and their assertions
of Lockean rights of self-determination.”28 This stood them in opposition to those who
insisted upon a more constrained sexuality that emphasized virginity before marriage,
celibacy outside of marriage, and monogamy within marriage, with miscegenation out
of the question. This dichotomous view of sexuality emphasized women’s control
over their own choices, reinforcing feminine free will; but, Republican Motherhood
framed the choices as good or bad, moral or immoral, virtuous or debauched. A woman
could choose to be chaste and therefore contribute to the health of the republic, or
she could choose to be lascivious and threaten the nation. One choice entitled her to
political influence, the other marginalized her.
Enslaved women were entirely disqualified from this choice. White masters and
mistresses defined their female slaves’ gender through labor and reproduction only,
stripped of the social and emotional contexts of family and motherhood. Without the
morality of that context, white masters and especially mistresses dumped all of their
anxieties about unrestrained sexuality onto their slaves. If Republican Mothers were the
embodiment of chaste, reasoned, virtue, then enslaved mothers were their lascivious,
unintelligent, immoral opposite. The credence of this idea grew along with the expansion
of slavery. Because these features justified their enslavement, they were tied to black
female gender rather than their status as slave and freedom from slavery did not liberate
them from this depiction. Equally troubling stereotypes plagued black men, and both
became reasons to exclude them from the blessings of liberty.29
As a result, African American sexual behavior worried black church leaders through-
out the nineteenth century. Ministers such as the Reverend Richard Allen, founder of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, exhorted their congregations to practice sexual
continence as part of a broader agenda of moral uplift that would prove African Americans’
civic virtue. This sort of argument resembled that of the white proponents of Republican
Motherhood in that citizenship had to be earned as a privilege through proper behavior
rather than being endowed by the Creator as a natural right. It also became a mark
distinguishing the aspiring black middle class from the working class.30 Rather than a

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capitulation to white norms, however, adoption of such gender ideals as Republican

Motherhood was part of a life lived in opposition to racist expectations about African
Americans and their families. For a black woman, then, Republican Motherhood entailed
liberation from a restrictive understanding of her gender as merely procreative but also an
acceptance of another definition that limited her to a particular type of sexuality and
power.
Indeed, as black women developed their own ideals of gender that included elements
of white womanhood, they founded black womanhood on freedom and self-determination
rather than motherhood and influence, although the former incorporated the latter. Self-
determination began with emancipation for themselves and for their children and families,
and grew through both property ownership and community building.31 The first freed
them from the control and abuses of masters and mistresses, and allowed them to make
decisions about most aspects of their lives. The second signified economic self-sufficiency.
The third usually took place within a church and situated them within a self-governing
society that both paralleled and was part of the larger process of creating the American
nation. Enslaved women developed a similar ideology of gender for themselves that
integrated both self-determination and community even when emancipation was not
possible. In her study of antebellum Virginia slave women, Brenda E. Stevenson found
that they seized “the prerogative of slave female principle, the protection and procreation
of black life in the face of white opposition.” 32
While bondswomen developed a gender consciousness of resistance and community,
free and white women developed one that insisted upon some form of recognition as
vested members of the American nation. The roles they created for themselves, however,
consistently contended with pressure to limit the very influence that lay at the heart of
their new-found political identity. Women’s presence at patriotic and political celebra-
tions served as potent symbols in legitimizing the festivities with virtue and nonpartisan-
ship embedded in the ideal of white femininity and their status as nonvoters. Yet, this
image of a disinterested but politically-engaged woman masked partisan sympathies that
ran as deeply as their husbands’ and fathers’. In one of the many ironies about the inter-
section of gender, class, and politics in early Washington, D.C., historian Catherine Allgor
observed that “women and men of political families handled the explosive issues of power
and politicking in a republican environment by cloaking the power in female garb and by
denial.” Hostesses from the president’s wife, Dolly Madison, to boarding house matrons
used the niceties of parties, teas, and dinners to facilitate the sort of partisan deal-making
necessary to a functioning government. In doing so, Allgor found, “middle-class and elite
women used a veil of respectability to work aggressively toward their political goals.”33
As partisan divisions deepened, women were accused of violating the bargain that
allowed them to emerge as political actors in the first place. Federalists and Republicans
alike had used white women’s support as evidence of their own rightful claim to national
leadership, granting women the free will to make a selection between the two parties. As
with sexual morality, however, there was a right and a wrong choice. One party’s good
wives and daughters were the other’s sluts and slatterns. By 1829, even a presidential
candidate’s wife was not off-limits as Andrew Jackson’s opponents portrayed his wife, the
pious Rachel, as a rough-hewn rube, the victim of seduction, and an adulteress.34 All
three traits indicated her moral weakness and inadequacy as a virtuous influence upon her

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husband, potentially the next president of the United States. When he did become
president, a new scandal erupted concerning Margaret Eaton, the widowed daughter of
a boarding house proprietor in Washington, D.C., and subsequently the wife of Jackson’s
Secretary of War, John Eaton. This “petticoat affair” laid bare the political influence of
Floride Calhoun, wife of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun. Their husbands’ opponents
represented the former as an uncouth adulterer and the latter as wielding illegitimate
power, each symbolizing the worst fears about women of their respective classes and each
representing the consequences of allowing women to hold any sway in politics.
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, partisanship was clearly part and parcel of
politics, and women could no more reserve their proclivities toward one party or another
than men could. Women, who were expected to police political division and mitigate its
destructive tendencies, implicitly received the blame for the erosion of a mythical unity
and consensus that had never existed in the first place. Thus, they were no longer entitled
to a place in the political landscape. Ironically, as men’s electoral power increased with
universal white male and limited black male suffrage, women’s decreased. In one oft-
cited New Jersey case, single, propertied, white women lost the right to vote at the same
time that it was gained by all free white men. If the legitimacy of the republic now rested
on the participation of all white men, then the political influence wielded by white
women was suspect and a threat to democracy, Floride Calhoun being a prime example.
The Jacksonian Democrats, for all of their idolization of representative government,
understood the Common Man as just that: a man. Rosemarie Zagarri labeled this two-
decade-long process a “Revolutionary Backlash,” hypothesizing that the mid-nineteenth-
century iteration of separate spheres “may actually have been a reaction against women’s
more extensive involvement in politics, a convenient way to explain and justify excluding
women from party politics and electoral activities.”35
Only when a second political party system emerged in the 1840s did women resume
their place at public, political gatherings, this time with explicit encouragement of their
party sympathies. Elizabeth Varon’s study of Virginia women demonstrated that they were
welcomed at Whig events. These new, “Whig women,” Varon argued, were both “par-
tisans who expressed their allegiance to the Whig Party, and mediators whose ‘disinterest-
edness’ enabled them to promote civic virtue, temper political passions, and focus public
affairs on the common good.” The latter qualities implicitly condemned Democratic
women in the mold of Rachel Jackson and Margaret Eaton, and the Democratic Party
soon re-learned the propagandistic power of visible feminine support. This newer vision
of women in politics, however, appeared within the context of “True Womanhood,” a
new development in the ideology of gender that simultaneously consigned women to
apolitical domesticity and provided them with the tools to engage in more complicated
political activism through social reform.36
Bearing many of the characteristics of Republican Motherhood, the ideology of
domesticity embedded in “True Womanhood” further entrenched the household as the
natural habitat of women and reaffirmed virtue as moral piety and sexual purity, while also
eliminating the political ramifications of feminine behavior. As a response to the market
revolution, domesticity married pre- and post-industrial divisions of labor, allowing its
precepts to be applied to both rural and urban women. Work deemed masculine moved
outside of the household and became invested with monetary value, while work defined

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 “ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

as feminine remained in the household. With the rise of wage labor outside of the home,
women’s labor in the home became literally de-valued, even when women paid other
women to perform it, although the work itself was integral to the functioning of the
household and, ultimately, the national economy.37
In cities, the products of women’s productive work could now be purchased and their
children’s labor was no longer integral to family survival, leading domesticity advocates to
urge women to focus on cultivating a warm, loving, and virtuous family life. Furthermore,
because the imagery of “separate spheres” trafficked in dichotomies, and because domestic-
ity further collapsed “feminine,” “private,” and “home,” woman’s sphere stood in marked
contrast to the “masculine,” “public,” and ultimately “foreign” sphere that men must domi-
nate. As keepers of the private sphere, women provided a safe haven for their husbands and
sons from the rough and tumble public world of wage labor, business, and politics. Because
this work was unpaid and connected to child-bearing, child-rearing, and traditional gender
divisions of labor, the proscriptive literature portrayed women as both biologically-suited
to domesticity and expected to enter in the spirit of a calling. Elite women, of course, could
afford to purchase or pay women to relieve some of the labor of this vocation.38
Women’s relative position to power, however, had not shifted much since their fore-
mothers created Republican Motherhood. The democratization of white male political
power and the emphasis on a competitive marketplace only reinforced the revolutionary
era contradiction in which men were equals in the public area but masters in their own
home. Retrenchment of slavery in southern states as the cotton market boomed intensi-
fied this hierarchy on plantations. Woman’s importance and power continued to lie in her
sway over the men in her household. Now, however, hostility toward women’s political
behavior and awareness of forces beyond the state readjusted the focus of women’s influ-
ence from politics to culture. Rather than pressuring men to become judicious political
actors, women should, as Nancy Cott observed, “fit men to pursue their worldly aims in
a regulated way.”39
Patriarchy, then, continued to inform men’s understanding of masculinity and thus
entitlement to natural rights. Only when husbands discovered that they could protect
some of their family’s wealth from an unstable economy by vesting their wives with the
power to own property did they agree to some change to separate estates. Those instances
were limited and far between. Only New York recognized married women’s right to
property, and then only after 1848. Because men relied upon women’s unpaid labor,
which could be coerced through women’s financial dependence, they had no impetus to
change the laws to grant women more independent economic or legal power.40
Furthermore, because patriarchal families were a coveted privilege held by white men,
specifically in the urban middle class, working-class, black, and enslaved men replicated
the pattern in their own struggle for national inclusion. For example, rather than embrace
working women as fellow laborers in a class-based struggle to affect the conditions of
factories, working-class men either construed them as victims in need of protection
or more useful to the labor movement as housewives who did not undercut men’s wages
or compete with them for jobs, and who supported the family’s economic health through
household economizing. While their analysis incorporated a view of class struggle that
extended beyond the workplace, their view of class followed the dominant division of
men’s and women’s work. As trade unions found traction in party politics, working

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women became less useful to working men’s goals. The black civil rights movement
followed a similar pattern, but its activists also struggled against an imposed racial ideology
that drew black men and women together as partners in resistance. As a result, black
women were much more welcome in the civil rights movement than white women were
in trade unions. Being a collective movement that relied upon the organizational skill of
women in antislavery organizations or churches, civil rights became a family writ large,
and the ideology that posited women as caretakers of the home expanded to incorporate
the community.41
A similar argument emerged among middle-class white women. Taking into consid-
eration Anne McClintock’s postulation that domesticity could refer to a place, a relation-
ship, and actions, then domesticity could empower a woman to domesticate the spaces
outside of her home, thus explaining Elizabeth Varon’s observation that “the doctrine of
separate spheres came to coexist with a countervailing conception of female civic duty.”
If a woman’s sphere could be understood as action as well as a place, then she could pre-
occupy herself with suitable feminine matters outside of her home or use her home as a
base for activism that extended into the outside world through mutual aid societies,
benevolence organizations, and reform movements. The wider the scope of their reform
vision, however, the more likely they were to challenge male prerogative, and permis-
sion to act in this civic sphere was predicated on joining their interests with the men of
their class. Thus, like Republican Motherhood, the point of view embedded in their
concern cloaked unequal power relationships and difference among women.42
Women outside of the middle class quite often defined themselves in opposition to
these gender expectations, even if some could see and even long for the privileges that went
with conformity. Working-class and black women continued to develop an ethos of
self-determination as part of their own ideal of gender. The young, single women who
entered the New England mills or moved to cities had escaped the authority of father
without entering the patriarchal relation of marriage. While their bosses assumed those
paternal roles to a degree, the young women understood the relationship as one of consent
and, through labor organization, sought to limit the extent of their employers’ control.43 As
the free black population expanded in the North through state-level emancipation, manu-
mission, and escape from bondage, women formed voluntary associations that addressed
the particular vulnerabilities of women in poverty, orphans, and deficits in education, as
well as supporting men’s organizations and the church as a whole. Their development of a
free, black female gender capitulated to certain points of patriarchy, such as the importance
of their influence rather than their leadership, because their lives as part of this community
were entwined with black men’s assertion of masculinity. Nevertheless, as white women
developed a consciousness through Enlightenment ideals that led to the antebellum empha-
sis on individualism, black women could never entirely separate themselves from their
connection to a larger body that faced racial oppression.44
Enslaved women, too, had developed a gender identity in opposition to the one
imposed upon them by their masters and mistresses. Whereas free black women used the
ideas connected to the domestic sphere as a weapon against racist assumptions about their
womanhood and families, bondswomen often found the physical space of that sphere
and its relationship to be the site of resistance. Slave mistresses may have complained to
their diaries about the ways that the hierarchy on which slavery rested also contributed

56
 “ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

to their own oppression, but they in no way sympathized with the black women around
them. Mistresses could violate the dictates of passivity to assume the mantle of mastery in
partnership with their husbands, and they did so with an un-ladylike zeal for violence.
The pervasiveness of control and abuse that characterized every space and relationship
connected with slavery led slave women to develop what Stephanie Camp has termed
“rival geographies” that incorporated previously understood modes of resistance, mainte-
nance of kinship networks, and seemingly feminine frivolities such as the décor of their
cabin and the style of their hair; and with the prevalence of rape, enslaved women used
sexual choice as a sign of self-assertion.45
That latter point exposed a problem in one of the most sympathetic and racially-
integrated reform movements of northern women. Abolition challenged the existing
ideologies surrounding race by recognizing African Americans’ capacity to be fully func-
tioning members of the republic, thereby erasing racial distinctions of gender. Women,
in fact, led the move toward racial integration in the movement through their own,
parallel organizations. In both organizing the movement and developing antislavery ideol-
ogy, black and white women transgressed many gender norms and challenged their
compatriots’ interpretation of citizenship. Black and white women gravitated toward
moral suasion tactics that returned them to a more explicitly political interpretation of
influence, and the challenge to patriarchy within the ranks of the American Anti-Slavery
Society became the origin of their own claim to more direct political engagement.46
Nevertheless, abolitionism was a largely white, northern, middle-class movement that,
with notable exceptions, proposed to speak for slaves. As such, abolitionist women filtered
what information they learned about the realities of slavery through their own lens of
domesticity and universal womanhood. Doing so produced such powerful propaganda as
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and introduced a heretofore absent gender
dimension to critiques of slavery. Yet, when speaking about rape, a form of violence
directed at women as women, they identified the crime as a violation of virtue first,
unintentionally shaming the victim as damaged goods. Enslaved women, on the other
hand, experienced rape as violence. Nor might antislavery women understand sexual
bargains that enslaved women might have to make in order to negotiate privileges and
protections for their family or to exercise self-determination in choices about their bodies.
Thus, former slaves, such as Harriet Jacobs, took not only the risk of a public voice but
also of exposing their experience to an audience that could only understand their sexual
history as one of deviance and dishonor rather than survival and resilience. The two –
indeed, three – groups of women might overlap in their concerns for freedom and in
representing a feminine experience as distinct from men’s, but the details of their separate
women’s experiences were so divergent that each understood her gender to be entirely
different from the others.
The leaders of the women’s rights movement emerged from the antislavery movement
bringing this disjuncture with them. In its first decade, they attempted to breach some of
the differences of class and race by building coalitions across those lines by addressing
property rights, equal wages, equal education, and, to a much lesser degree before 1865,
suffrage. Indeed, some black women found that they had more room to exercise leader-
ship and advance agendas in the woman’s rights movement than they did in the black
convention movement of the same years. Still, as the distance between the black civil

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rights and the women’s rights movements widened, black women understood the relation-
ship between gender and disfranchisement differently than white women, a difference that
multiplied with every variable that affected a woman’s distance from power. The collapse
of the American Equal Rights Association in 1867, which split the black male suffrage
movement from the woman’s rights movement and spawned the woman’s suffrage move-
ment, exposed the narrow definition of gender that white woman’s rights advocates had
assumed.47
The women’s rights movement, then, was implicitly founded on a construction of
gender that had evolved over the previous seventy-five years. Whereas men, over that
time, were granted ever more direct political power based on an idea of inherent, natural
right, women had to justify their entitlement to civil liberties through their performance
of an idealized gender role that could be assumed only by a narrow group of women.
Grounded in an argument for influence rather than suffrage, as Republican Mothers or
True Women, they had to adhere to a concept of virtue based in sexual behavior and
education that reinforced the exclusion of African Americans and working-class women.
Women outside of the elite and middle class developed their own conceptions of gender
that responded to the oppression in their lives. White woman’s rights activists were able
to delineate distinct issues affecting women as a class, and thereby appeal to women from
different constituencies. In shaping the movement, however, they rejected concerns that
they considered extraneous to their understanding of women’s rights, but that other
women could not separate from their own experiences of gender. These problems
continue to plague feminists and inform women’s relationship to the state into the twenty-
first century. In terms of gender history, The Women’s Rights Movement was actually A
Woman’s Rights Movement. After all, if all women do not share the same gender, then
all women do not share the same woman’s rights movement, and many women found
empowerment and civil recognition through other avenues. As historians of gender
explore the proposition that there are multiple genders, then so do they recognize that
there are multiple woman’s rights movements.

Notes
1 Jane Swisshelm quoted in Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2009), 224.
2 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, 5
(Dec. 1986): 1070.
3 Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s
History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, 2 (Summer 1992): 30.
4 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, 2, part
1 (Summer 1966): 151–174.
5 Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 98–100; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study
in American Domesticity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 158–163.
6 Lauren McCall, “‘Shall I Fetter Her Will?’ Literary Americans Confront Feminine Submission,”
Journal of the Early Republic 21, 1 (Spring 2001): 95–113; Louisa S. McCord, “Enfranchisement
of Women,” in Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, ed. Richard C. Lounsbury
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 108.
7 Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic
World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), xii–xiii, 70, 146; Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the

58
 “ F EMA L E WOMEN OR F E M I NI NE L A D I E S ”

Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 117–118.
8 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 169.
9 Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 164–167.
10 Carol Lasser, “Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion,” Journal of the Early
Republic 21, 1 (Spring 2001): 115–123. See also the other essays from that symposium: Michael
A. Morrison, John Lauritz Larson, Mary Kelly, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Laura McCall, Carol Lasser,
“Redefining Womanly Behavior in the Early Republic: Essays from a SHEAR Symposium,”
Journal of the Early Republic 21, 2 (Spring 2001): 71–123.
11 Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal
of the Early Republic 21, 1 (Spring 2001): 79–93.
12 Elsa Barkley Brown, “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s
History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, 2 (Summer 1992): 30; Catharine A.
MacKinnon, “Intersectionality as Method: A Note,” Signs 38, 4 (Summer 2013): 1019–1030.
13 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 363–364; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise
and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
14 Jennifer L. Morgan, “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies,
and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed.
Edward Baptist and Stephanie Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 47.
15 Morgan, “Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder,” 21–64.
16 Duncan J. Macleod, “Toward Caste,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution,
ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 217–
336; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(1988; 3rd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12–14, 90–94; Ann Little,
Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Anthony Mora, Border Dilemmas: Racial and
National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
141–49.
17 Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy in Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7.
18 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 2; Elizabeth Varon, We Mean to Be
Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998), 2.
19 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 34–36.
20 Norton, Separated by Their Sex, xii–xiii. On civic space or civil society, see also: Nancy Isenberg,
Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 8–9; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 2; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between
Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 5–13;
Ryan, Civic Wars, 1–18; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 2.
21 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 40–41; Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the
Struggle for America’s Independence (New York: Knopf, 2005), 157–158; Linda Kerber, Women of
the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1980), 222–224; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York,
1789–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 133–134.
22 Kerber, Women of the Republic, 11.
23 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 126, 127–130.
24 Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 72–81.
25 Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 3.

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26 Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 156.

27 Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and
Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 183–184; Graham
Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 217–223; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The
Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 30–35,
113–117.
28 Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 288.
29 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 94; Deborah Gray White, Aren’t I a Woman? Female
Slaves in the Plantation South (1985; revised, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 29–38.
30 Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 357; Richard A. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen,
the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press,
2008), 153–156.
31 Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom, 12–14.
32 Leslie M. Alexander, “The Challenge of Race: Rethinking the Position of Black Women in the
Field of Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16, 4 (2004): 50–60; Stephanie M. H.
Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage:
The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery
to the Present (1985; New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 11–42; Martha S. Jones, All Bound up
Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Brenda E. Stevenson, “Gender Conventions, Ideals,
and Identity among Antebellum Virginia Women,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and
Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996); White, Aren’t I a Woman?
33 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 82–88, 113–114; 124–136; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In
Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2000), 240–241; David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The
Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997), 232–233.
34 Allgor, Parlor Politics, 196–197; Norma Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election
of 1828,” Journal of American History 80, 3 (Dec. 1993): 890–918; Patricia Brady, A Being So
Gentle: The Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson (New York: Macmillan, 2011),
213–215; John F. Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s
White House (New York: Free Press, 1997).
35 Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash, 30–37, 135; Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 7.
36 Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 3–4; Ryan, Women in Public, 30–37.
37 Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the
Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994),
127–136; Natasha Kirsten Kraus, A New Type of Woman: Discursive Politics and Social Change in
Antebellum America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
38 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 63–100.
39 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 98.
40 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship, 172–186; Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The
Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1978), 42; Suzanne Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a
Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 55–86.
41 Thomas Dublin, Women at Work (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 200–202;
Carol Lasser, “Gender, Ideology, and Class in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic
10, 3 (Autumn 1990): 331–337; Stansell, City of Women, 136–41.

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42 Jones, All Bound up Together, 23–27, 101–108; McClintock, Imperial Leather, 34–36; Varon, We
Mean to Be Counted, 2; Valerie C. Cooper, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the
Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
43 Dublin, Women at Work, 89–96; Lasser, “Gender, Ideology, and Class in the Early Republic,”
331–337; Stansell, City of Women, 133–137.
44 Alexander, “The Challenge of Race,” 50–60; Jones, All Bound up Together, 23–67.
45 Camp, Closer to Freedom, passim; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 11–42; Glymph, Out of
the House of Bondage, 25–31; Stevenson, “Gender Conventions, Ideals, and Identity among
Antebellum Virginia Women,” 169–190; White, Aren’t I a Woman? passim.
46 Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery
Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism
and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984);
Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery
Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Beverly C. Tomek,
Pennsylvania Hall: A ‘Legal Lynching’ in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist
Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1994).
47 Jones, All Bound up Together, 119–149; Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence
of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1978); Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in
Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sally G. McMillen, Seneca
Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), 162–174.

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 4
RE LIGION AND R EF O R M I N
T H E EARLY AMER I C A N R EP UBL I C

John Fea

In 1822, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his friend, the noted physician Benjamin
Waterhouse, lamenting the irrationality of much of American religious life:

I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has
surrendered its creed and conscience to neither king nor priests, the genuine
doctrine of only one God is revived, and I trust that there is not a young man now
living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment. As a believer in progress he could not imagine
that traditional Christian beliefs – the Trinity, the deity and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
the inspiration of the Bible – would last very long under reason’s relentless assault.1
Jefferson could not have been more wrong. What he apparently did not realize from his
perch at Monticello was that he was living in an era of intense religiosity in the United
States. The evangelical revival that some historians call the Second Great Awakening was
stirring all around him. New religions, including Mormonism, Adventism, Spiritualism,
and various forms of New Thought and Transcendentalism, would soon diversify the
American religious landscape like never before. Ironically, Jefferson was partly to blame.
When he wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1786), and the framers of the
United States Constitution drafted the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment,
they could not have imagined the emergence of what historian Jon Butler has called an
“antebellum spiritual hothouse.” Without government support, denominations competed
for members and offered a brand of Protestantism that was attractive to a growing nation
of farmers moving to the frontier. Moreover, for those who stayed in the more mature
societies along the Atlantic seacoast, the religious fervor would inform attempts by middle-
class Protestants to build a Christian nation and Christianize the frontier through a series
of reform efforts and benevolent societies.2
During the nineteenth century the United States population experienced rapid growth,
but the rise in church attendance outpaced it. Tens of thousands of Americans found a
new relationship with God through evangelical revivals. They received Jesus Christ as
savior and rededicated themselves to a life of Christian service. Revivals occurred
sporadically, but forcefully, throughout the country. In the South and West religious
awakenings took place in camp meetings such as the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in
August 1801, where up to 25,000 people gathered together in the small frontier town to

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pray, fast, and listen to evangelistic sermons. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale
College, led a series of revivals on campus in the first two decades of the nineteenth
century. The revival fires ignited so often in western and central New York that Charles
Grandison Finney, one of the awakening’s chief promoters, called the region “the burned-
over district.” During the 1820 and 1830s Finney traveled to cities across the country
conducting revival meetings. He preached extemporaneously, urged men and women to
take control of their own salvation, and instituted new forms of revivalism such as the
“anxious bench,” a seat where those convicted by his preaching could receive prayer. In
1857–1858, the awakening sanctified the marketplace. The “Businessman’s Revival”
began through a series of noonday prayer meetings in New York City and quickly spread
to urban centers across the United States.3
New religious movements also found a place in this spiritual marketplace. Presbyterians
Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone set out to restore the spirit of the first-century
church. Their Restoration movement spread among people looking for a common-sense
approach to Protestantism that drew on the primitive faith they had read about in the
Acts of the Apostles. Joseph Smith founded the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, or
Mormons, after he received revelation from God through an encounter with angelic
beings that he believed added to the teachings of the Bible. Other Protestant groups, such
as the Seventh-Day Adventists, or Millerites, built their religious community around a
Saturday Sabbath and a belief in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Their leader,
William Miller, drew followers to his movement when he predicted that Christ would
return on October 22, 1844. There was a certain Protestant logic to this proliferation
of new denominations and religious movements. As men and women read the Bible
and interpreted it for themselves, they began to gather with other believers who read and
interpreted the Bible in the same way.4
Protestantism also made inroads among enslaved and free blacks in this period. In the
South, slaves forged their own understanding of Christianity, one that stressed joyous singing
and dancing and hope for freedom. These religious celebrations birthed a distinct African-
American Protestantism that is still with us today. Though slaveholders remained reluctant
to convert their slaves, many of them were attached to those Protestant denominations –
such as the Methodists and the Baptists – who preached more democratic forms of
Christianity and celebrated spiritual equality before God. Some churches in the South
opened their doors to slaves and free blacks, usually reserving seats in the balcony for them.
Free blacks also began to establish their own congregations and denominations. In
Philadelphia, Richard Allen was a popular Methodist preacher among the African-American
community. In 1793 he established the Bethel Church for Negro Methodists and eventually
organized a separate black denomination: the African Methodist Episcopal Church.5
Disestablishment also paved the way for rational religion and skepticism, a part of the
religious landscape that has recently drawn much attention from historians. Unitarians had
been a growing segment of New England culture since the late eighteenth century, but in
the decades following the Revolution they had permeated the region’s educated classes.
Their writings found their way into the curriculum at Harvard, where Henry Ware, a
Unitarian, was appointed Hollis professor of divinity in 1805. By the 1830s the
Transcendentalist movement challenged Unitarian authority in intellectual circles.
Triggered by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address in 1838, Transcendentalists

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questioned the important role that reason played in the liberal theology of the Unitarians
and defined belief in terms of subjective experience and romanticism. As the Unitarians and
Transcendentalists did battle for control of New England intellectual life, religious skepti-
cism gained popularity in the United States through the writings of Thomas Paine and
secularists who, like Thomas Jefferson and his followers, championed the separation of
church and state. Paine’s The Age of Reason, a scathing attack on traditional Christianity,
gained popularity among immigrants, the working class, and frontier settlers, particularly in
Kentucky and the Mississippi River Valley, who opposed attempts by eastern Calvinists to
forge a Christian nation. Many of these immigrants gravitated to the Democratic-
Republicans. The promoters of the Second Great Awakening understood their evangelical
revival in terms of opposition to what they perceived as the unorthodox faith of Unitarians,
Transcendentalists, secularists, skeptics, Paine, and Jeffersonians.6
Historians have understood religion in the early republic through several different
interpretive lenses, but two of these lenses – consumerism and democratization – have had
the most influence in the field. Some have suggested connections between the diverse and
free-wheeling religious culture made possible by disestablishment and the market revolu-
tion. As ordinary people adjusted to a free-market economy, they applied consumer habits
to their choice of churches. Though historians have shown that the links between
Christianity and consumerism date back to the colonial period, early nineteenth-century
religious developments such as the shift from Calvinism to a more free-will understanding
of salvation, the advent of capitalism, and the end of state-sponsored churches, set American
religion on a new path that is still with us today.7 Nathan Hatch, in his magisterial The
Democratization of American Christianity, relied heavily on the post-revolutionary theologi-
cal shift from Calvinism to free-will evangelicalism, although his interpretation is informed
less by the marketplace and more by the democratic political culture of the early nine-
teenth century. The most important historical actors in Hatch’s interpretations are frontier
Methodists and Baptists, two of the era’s fastest-growing denominations. Why did
Methodists and Baptists grow so quickly? According to Hatch, these groups challenged
the longstanding authority of older, more eastern-based denominations such as the
Presbyterians and Congregationalists by fusing a free-will theology (and a rejection of
Calvinist ideas of predestination) with the freedom that they, and the United States as a
whole, were experiencing in the political realm.8
As the revival fires burned and new forms of Protestantism and religious skepticism
emerged, and ordinary evangelicals became consumers and democrats, many middle-class
evangelicals set out to forge a Christian republic. Though the United States Constitution
made it clear that there would be no official state church or religious establishment in the
nation, Protestant parachurch organizations known as voluntary societies or “benevolent”
societies sought to create an unofficial moral establishment. Those touched by the Holy
Spirit during these revivals set out to be “salt and light” (Matthew 5:13–16) in the world
around them. They evangelized neighbors and strangers in the hopes of preparing their
souls for eternal life. But the practice of being a Christian witness in the world also
required converts – new and old, women and men – to address a host of social problems
that they believed to be undermining the moral fabric of American society. Middle-class
evangelicals, who had benefited the most from the burgeoning market economy, had the
wealth and the social prestige to forge such a moral republic. They applied the social

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requirements of their faith to fight poverty, drunkenness, sexual immorality, crime, the
disrespect of the Sabbath, and slavery, just to name a few of their causes. They promoted
Christian learning in Sunday schools and reached hundreds of thousands with the gospel
message through the distribution of the Bible and religious tracts. Fueled by the threats
of secularism and infidelity they formed what Lyman Beecher described as a “disciplined
moral militia.” In an address before the Charitable Society for the Education of Indigent
Pious Young Men for the Ministry of the Gospel, one of the dozens of benevolent societies
organized during this period, Beecher argued that the “integrity of the Union demands
special exertions to produce in the nation a more homogeneous character.” He called for
the “prevalence of pious, intelligent, enterprising ministers through the nation, at ratio of
one for 1000,” to “establish schools . . . and colleges, and habits, and institutions of
homogeneous influence” that would “lay the foundations of our empire upon a rock.”
Many who worked on behalf of these benevolent societies believed that their labors would
usher in the return of Jesus Christ. By 1837 there were 159 so-called “benevolent societies”
in the United States. Between 1789 and 1829 the nation’s thirteen largest societies – most
of them unaffiliated with a specific Protestant denomination – spent more than $2.8
million to promote a more Christian and moral nation. In the same period, the U.S.
government spent $3.6 million to build transportation and communication infrastructure
(roads, bridges, canals, etc.).9
Evangelicals concerned with the moral reform of American life concentrated much
effort on the religious education of children and young people through Sunday schools.
A recent study by digital historian Lincoln Mullen found that Luke 18:16 – “Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God” –
was the most cited Bible verse in nineteenth-century periodicals.10 Some of the earliest
Sunday schools in America were formed in the eighteenth century to provide biblical
instruction to the children of the urban poor. Children would gather in churches to sing
hymns, pray, read the Bible, and hear a short sermon. They were rewarded for regular
attendance and their hard work memorizing biblical passages. If records of enrollment in
Sunday school classes are any indication, the efforts of these schools were successful. By
1832 there were over 300,000 boys and girls attending Sunday schools in the United
States, or about 8 percent of the young people eligible to attend such classes. The numbers
were even higher in urban areas. For example, in the same year, close to 28 percent of
Philadelphia children were attending Sunday schools. Because these schools focused on
reading and writing, many of them drew large numbers of free blacks – both children and
adults. Starting in 1824 a benevolent organization called the American Sunday School
Union was formed to stimulate Sunday school attendance across denominations and
provide literature to schools operating around the country.11
Other reformers worked to counter America’s addition to alcoholic beverages. In the
mid-1820s Americans consumed about seven gallons of alcohol per person each year
(compared to 2.8 gallons in 1995). People drank whiskey for breakfast, lunch, and dinner
in the early republic, much in the way that they drink coffee or other caffeine-laced bev-
erages today. Alcoholic beverages were cheap (costing less than coffee or tea) and were
healthier than drinking water. Alcohol was blamed for its effect on families, young people,
crime, the strength (or weakness) of the American military, and poverty. In the first few
decades of the nineteenth century there were several local attempts – mostly in New

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England – to curb the destructive effects of alcohol on American life, but the movement
became national when Beecher published six sermons on temperance in 1827. For
Beecher, intemperance was “the sin of our land.” America’s alcohol problem was a moral
one, but it had eternal consequences. It would lead to behavior that would separate indi-
viduals from God. Beecher made a direct connection between the depravity of the culture
and the need for salvation – a fitting message in the midst of the Second Great Awakening.
He concluded that “ardent spirits” should be “banished” from the “list of lawful articles
of commerce, by a correct and efficient public sentiment.” In 1826, temperance advocates
formed the American Temperance Society to urge citizens to engage in total abstinence
from alcoholic beverages. By 1835, the Society could boast five thousand chapters and a
million members, making it the largest reform association in the United States.12
Other moral reformers focused on defending the Christian Sabbath. They worried how
the United States could remain pure before God when so many people labored on
Sundays, the God-appointed day on which Christians were to rest from their labors.
As the nation slowly turned to manufacturing and industry in the early decades of
the nineteenth century, and everyday life became more influenced by the demands of the
market, the temptation to add Sunday to the regular work-week was great. Many Christian
reformers wanted to make sure that the Christian character of the nation would not be
sacrificed in favor of the greed and materialism of the marketplace. Sabbath reform began
in earnest, however, when a group of Christian ministers and laymen decided to challenge
an 1810 law that required federal postal employees to work on Sunday. They argued that
every other federal agency but the post office was closed on Sunday, but 10,000 postal
clerks and mail handlers were forced to miss church services because they had to go to
work. Several reformers, including Beecher and Arthur Tappan (two men who seemed
to be somehow behind every major religious reform movement in America at this time),
formed the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath. Local
chapters were formed quickly throughout the country. These chapters published tracts,
organized pro-Sabbath rallies, and were the first to utilize petitions on a national level to
make their religious and political point. Soon the cause extended beyond the postal service
as Sabbatarians pushed for the Sunday closing of taverns, theaters, bakeries, offices, and
other places of business.13
The early nineteenth century also saw a revolution in print – newspapers, magazines,
books – that would be used to advance the idea that the United States was a Christian
nation. Some of the nation’s first American historians began to write and publish during
this period and they did not shy away from trying to discern the hand of God in American
history. Many of these historians believed that God had intervened on behalf of the
United States during the American Revolution and they wrote to remind Americans of
their spiritual heritage in the hopes of reforming society along Christian lines. Mercy Otis
Warren, in History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805),
was overtly providential in the way she told the story of the American past. She thought
that the overthrow of English dominion by a band of colonial soldiers, and the creation
of a government based on freedom, was so momentous that it could only be attributed
to a “superintending Providence.” Warren believed that the “religious and moral
character of Americans yet stands on a higher grade of excellence and purity, than that of
most of nations” and challenged her readers to live up to the gift of independence that

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God have given them. As the nineteenth century rolled on, George Bancroft published
his multivolume History of the United States: From the Discovery of the American Continent
(1834–1874). Bancroft was a Unitarian who, like Warren, also believed in the role of
God’s providence in shaping the American past. He thought that the United States was a
Christian nation established and sustained by God for the purpose of spreading liberty and
democracy to the world.14
God’s providence in American history was a dominant theme in school textbooks
during this period. Authors of these books employed providential history to teach students
how to be good citizens of a Christian republic. Charles Goodrich’s History of the United
States started with a brief lesson on history: “History displays the dealings of God with
mankind . . . It cultivates a sense of dependence on him; strengthens our confidence in
his benevolence; and impresses us with a conviction of his justice.” Noah Webster’s
History of the United States ends with an appendix titled “Advice to the Young.” He urged
students of American history to obey their parents, read the Bible, avoid sin, love their
neighbors, and disdain luxury. This blend of history and morality was considered a
foundational part of any good education. And then there was Mason Locke Weems. An
Episcopalian minister and traveling book salesman, Weems’s biography of George
Washington, The Life of Washington, ran through forty editions between 1799 and 1825.
The tales Weems told about Washington, including the story of him cutting down his
father’s cherry tree, were published over and over again. His stories were included in
more than twenty-five nineteenth-century schoolbooks, including the famous McGuffey’s
Eclectic Readers. Weems understood that if America was going to be a Christian and moral
nation it needed to be “fathered” by a Christian statesman.15
No other benevolent society took advantage of the rise of popular print culture like the
non-denominational American Bible Society. Founded in 1816 by Elias Boudinot, a
former president of the Continental Congress and one of the nation’s leading Christian
Federalists, the American Bible Society set out to place the text of the King James Bible,
“without note or comment,” in every American home. From its “Bible House” in New
York City, the American Bible Society employed steam-engine printing to produce cheap
Bibles fast. They dominated the Bible market in the early nineteenth century and presided
over 1,200 auxiliary Bible societies charged with the work of distribution. The founders of
the American Bible Society believed that the Bible was important for two interchangeable
reasons. First, it contained a salvific message that when accepted by faith alone would result
in eternal reward. Second, the message of the Bible was foundational to the success of the
American republic and the preservation of the United States as a Christian nation.16
Much of the grassroots effort behind the “benevolent empire” in the United States
came from evangelical women, prompting historian Anne Braude to conclude that
“Women’s History Is American Religious History.” Women dominated the membership
rolls of Protestant churches in nineteenth-century America. They joined benevolent
societies, and formed their own, as a means of expressing their faith in public life in a way
that was not available to them in the eighteenth century. Men believed women had a
natural capacity for charity work because their disposition was more tender and affectionate.
As one of the leaders of the American Bible Society put it, women were able “to soften
the severity of the male character and sympathize more fully” with those in need. Some
believed that women had an important role to play in the development of Protestant

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morality in the nation by training sons to exemplify a love for God and country. Such
“republican motherhood” gave women a part to play in the cultivation of a virtuous
republic and, as we will see below, provided an important incubator for more aggressive
women’s activism.17
Nineteenth-century Protestants often debated the finer points of biblical theology.
Virtually every denomination had their own schools, seminaries, and theologians for the
purpose of defending their specific reading of the Bible. But for many, Protestantism was
also defined for what it was not. Adherents to various denominations may have had their
theological and ecclesiastical differences, but they were united in the fact that they were
not Catholics. Their efforts at social reform and understanding of the United States as a
Christian nation reflected this belief. Anti-Catholicism in America had been around since
the founding of the British colonies in the seventeenth century, but it reached a fever pitch
when Irish and German immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers
between roughly 1830 and 1860. Beecher’s tract A Plea for the West discussed the dangers
of “popery” on the American frontier and drew upon longstanding fears that Catholic
beliefs were antithetical to Protestant liberty. Political parties such as the American Party
(or Know-Nothings) were formed by Protestants with the intent of keeping Catholic
immigrants out of the country. Movements to curb alcohol or distribute the King James
Bible and other Protestant literature were all carried on with this Catholic threat in mind.18
Historians of American reform movements have always acknowledged the powerful
role that religion played in these efforts, but it is only recently that postwar historians
have given agency to religious ideas as the primary force motivating the work of antebel-
lum reform. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s historians often argued that the religious
language of these reformers was little more than a cover for other, less religious, motiva-
tions. For example, the works by Clifford Stephen Griffin, Charles Foster, and, to a
limited extent, Timothy Smith, all argued that the early nineteenth-century benevolent
empire was propagated by middle-class men who wanted to use evangelical moral codes
to bring the passions of the working classes and immigrants under their control. According
to this “social control thesis,” religion was a tool to accomplish this task. The most influ-
ential work to adopt this approach was Paul Johnson’s The Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society
and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (1978). Johnson argued that the Second
Great Awakening in Rochester was used by the city’s middle-class capitalists and manu-
factures to instill moral order in their laborers for the purpose of enhancing their own
economic self-interests.19
The critics of the social control interpretation of antebellum reform movements
stressed the importance of ideas, particularly religious ideas, as motivating factors. While
this emphasis on ideas and systems of belief can be found as early as Ronald Walters’s
American Reformers: 1815–1860 (1978) and William McLoughlin’s Revivals, Awakenings,
and Reform (1978), it was presented most forcefully in Robert Abzug’s 1994 work Cosmos
Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. In response to the “material
reductionism” that he believed defined the historiography of antebellum reform, Abzug
suggested that reform movements in the early nineteenth century were driven by the
“cosmological thinking” of religious reformers. Abzug noted that reformers had a
religious world view that shaped their understanding of everyday life and chided historians
who did not take this cosmology seriously.20

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Even as historians such as Walters, McLoughlin, and Abzug took religion at face value
for the role that it played in reform movements, they were careful to note that the reli-
gious roots of these movements could be found in both the evangelicalism of the Second
Great Awakening and more rational, liberal, and skeptical manifestations of religious
belief. This was certainly the case with the antislavery movement and the women’s rights
movement.21
Evangelical and non-evangelical reformers often put aside theological differences and
came together in their conviction that slavery was a moral problem in a republic built on
the premise that “all men are equal” and the idea that equality was rooted in the belief that
natural rights came from God. William Lloyd Garrison (Baptist), Arthur and Lewis Tappan
(Congregationalists), Lucretia Mott (Quaker), and Theodore Parker (Transcendentalist) all
employed their religious convictions on behalf of the cause of emancipation. In 1833,
Garrison led the effort to create the American Anti-Slavery Society. Its mission was
grounded “upon the Declaration of our Independence, and upon the truths of Divine
Revelation.” Those affiliated with the American Anti-Slavery Society and the antislavery
cause generally carried out their work through itinerant lecturing, publications such as
Garrison’s The Liberator, and the distribution of abolitionist literature through the United
States Postal Service.
Recently historians have pointed to the Atlantic dimensions of the antislavery move-
ment in antebellum America. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, had a long tradition in
England of opposing slavery, and American abolitionists in the nineteenth century
worked closely with British abolitionists. Many American abolitionists, including William
Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott, came to embrace a belief in immediate emancipation
from their conversations with like-minded antislavery men and women working across
the Atlantic. In 1840, more than 500 abolitionists from France, England, and the United
States, including Garrison and women’s rights and antislavery advocate Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, gathered in London for the General Anti-Slavery Convention.22
It has long been a staple of American history survey courses to distinguish between the
varieties of antislavery ideas in antebellum America. Those who opposed slavery took several
approaches to ending the peculiar institution, from immediate emancipation to gradual
emancipation and colonization. These themes remain a staple in the historiography of anti-
slavery, but recently scholars have expanded these categories by focusing on the role of
women and black abolitionists. Women not only held leadership positions in the American
Anti-Slavery Society, but the organization also promoted women’s suffrage. Many members
of the Society, including Arthur Tappan, were not yet willing to embrace this progressive
stance and eventually left to form the American and Foreign Antislavery Society.23 Historians
of black abolitionism have shown how these champions of emancipation developed argu-
ments grounded in a host of intellectual, political, and religious traditions, correcting the
common stereotype that black abolitionists were simply motivated by what Manisha Sinha
has described as “the ideas of moral uplift and self-improvement” associated with the “white
middle class” or “Victorian and bourgeois values.” Recent scholarship has also given black
women abolitionists, such as Sojourner Truth, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, and Mary Ann
Shadd Cary, a central place in the history of the movement.24
As we have seen, there was much overlap between the abolitionist movement and the
women’s rights movement. The story of the fight for women’s rights in America continues

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to rely on an older historiography centered on “separate spheres” and the so-called “cult
of domesticity.”25 As the market revolution and industrialization transformed the early
republic, middle-class women occupied the private or domestic sphere of the home.
Women’s role in public life was limited by laws that gave men legal control over their
wives’ property, prevented them from exercising basic legal actions such as filing for
divorce and signing contracts, and forbade them to vote. Despite these limitations, women
in the early nineteenth century formed schools that emphasized equality and women’s
rights. Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and many others were active in antislavery and abolitionist
campaigns that compared the failure to grant rights to slaves with the failure to grant rights
to women. Like the abolitionist movement, the women’s rights movement drew heavily
upon a transatlantic community. Mott and Stanton were inspired to pursue the cause in
the United States by their observation of the proceedings of the 1840 General Anti-
Slavery Convention in London.
In 1848, Mott and Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York,
a gathering of men and women committed to women’s equality and voting rights. The
delegates of the convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments, a statement, written by
Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that put forward a series of
grievances and resolutions along these lines. It was signed by sixty-eight women and thirty-
two men. Though the women’s rights movement made few gains in the decades prior to
the Civil War, the legacy of Seneca Falls and the work of Mott, Stanton, and others would
go a long way toward gaining women’s voting rights in the early twentieth century.26
In the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, Americans proved to be
what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “a nation of joiners.”27 They not only joined a diverse
array of churches that allowed them to take control of their spiritual lives, but without a
state church or a powerful central government to promote religion, reform, and moral
order in society, middle-class Americans also turned to voluntary organizations such as
the American Bible Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the American
Sunday School Union to forge a virtuous republic, advocate for social justice, defend
equality, and forge a Christian nation. As historians of our current generation have taught
us, religion provided meaning and identity to Americans in a rapidly changing world,
while efforts at reform made sure that these changes would result in moral progress.

Notes
1 Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June 26, 1822, accessed at Founders Online,
http://founders.archives.gov/?q=Jefferson%20to%20Waterhouse%2C%20June%2026%2C%20
1822&s=1111311111&sa=&r=1&sr=. On Jefferson’s religious beliefs see Edwin Gaustad, Sworn
on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing
Co., 1996); Paul Conkin, “The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson,” in Jeffersonian Legacies,
ed. Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); Annette Gordon-Reed and
Peter Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 267–300.
2 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992).
3 Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990);
John Fitzmier, New England’s Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752–1817 (Bloomington:

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Indiana University Press, 1998), 23–78; Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the
Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1996); Kathryn Teresa
Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Chris Lehmann, The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the
Unmaking of the American Dream (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016), 70–123, 153–193.
4 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991); Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of the
Churches of Christ in America (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008); David
Rowe, God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
Publishing, 2008).
5 Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South, updated edition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop
Richard Allen, the AME, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press,
2009).
6 Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism:
A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). Recent scholarship on religious skepticism in
the early republic includes Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American
Republic (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012); Eric Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of
Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013); Christopher Grasso, “Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of
the American Revolution,” Journal of American History (June 2008), 43–68; John Lardas
Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures,
Machines, and Their Metaphors: Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality,
Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011). Sam Haselby has argued that secularism was a product of
the American frontier in the early republic. Frontier settlers rejected the attempts of eastern
elites to forge a Christian nation. See Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Haselby’s understanding of secularism is similar
to the definition put forth by Jacques Berlinerblau, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for
Religious Freedom (New York: Mariner Books, 2013). For an overview of recent literature on
secularism in the early American republic see Christopher Grasso, “The Religious and the
Secular in the Early American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Summer 2016),
359–388.
7 See, for example, Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of
America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1992); R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For assessments of this approach see Chris
Beneke, “The Free Market and the Founders’ Approach to Church-State Relations,” Journal of
Church and State 52 (Spring 2010), 323–352; and E. Brooks Holifield, “Why Are Americans So
Religious? The Limitations of Market Explanations,” in Religion and the Marketplace in the United
States, ed. Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, and Delef Junker (New York: Oxford University Press,
2015), 33–59. For the continued influence of the market on American Christianity see Lehmann
The Money Cult.
8 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity; also John Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm:
Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001). The most significant challenge to Hatch’s thesis has been Amanda Porterfield’s Conceived
in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012). Porterfield’s understanding of early American religion is more nuanced than Hatch’s
and more sensitive to change over time. She argues, contra Hatch, that the 1790s was a time of
religious doubt in America, not a season of democratic evangelical revival. Though Porterfield
does not deny the influence of the revivals in the early nineteenth century, she also points to

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short periods of skepticism that emerged in the first two decades of the century. For a nice
overview of Porterfield’s argument see Grasso, “The Religious and the Secular,” 371–372.
9 Beecher’s speech is quoted in Richard Lyle Power, “A Crusade to End Yankee Culture,
1820–1865,” New England Quarterly 13:4 (Dec. 1940), 638–639. Robert Abzug, Cosmos
Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994); John Fea, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016); Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front,
1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 121.
10 Lincoln Mullen, America’s Public Bible: Biblical Quotations in U.S. Newspapers, website, code, and
datasets (2016): http://americaspublicbible.org.
11 Anne Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988).
12 Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 79–105; Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil
War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 72–76; W. J. Rorabaugh, The
Alcohol Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
13 Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, 70–71; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Prelude to Abolitionism:
Sabbatarian Politics and the Rise of the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 58
(Sept. 1971), 328–330; Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from
Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 169–205; Abzug, Cosmos
Crumbling, 105–124.
14 Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 2
vols. (1805; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1989), 97, 641, 505, 686; Jonathan Tucker Boyd,
“This Holy Hieroglyph: Providence and Historical Consciousness in George Bancroft’s
Historiography” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1999). On the explosion of Christian
print see Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 125–133; David Paul Nord, Faith in
Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004); Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing,
Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004); John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction
(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), 9.
15 Charles A. Goodrich, History of the United States (Hartford: Barber & Robinson, 1826), 6; Noah
Webster, History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1832), 293–311; Mason
Locke Weems, The Life of Washington: A New Edition with Primary Documents, ed. Peter Onuf
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Francois Furstenburg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s
Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006), 123–126; Fea, Was
America Founded as a Christian Nation? 9–12.
16 Fea, The Bible Cause. The American Tract Society, a sister organization of the American Bible
Society founded in 1825, had a similar mission. See Karl Eric Valois, “To Revolutionize the
World: The American Tract Society and the Regeneration of the Republic, 1825–1877”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1994).
17 Anne Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious
History, ed. Thomas Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107; Mary
Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Anne Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New
York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Lori
Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th Century
United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and
Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
18 Lyman Beecher, “A Plea for the West,” 1835, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/
document/a-plea-for-the-west/ (accessed July 20, 2016).
19 Clifford Stephen Griffin, The Ferment of Reform, 1830–1860 (New York: Crowell Publishers,
1967); Foster, An Errand of Mercy; Timothy Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American
Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (New York: Peter Smith Publishers, 1957). By
the 1970s the social control thesis was supplemented by Donald Mathews’s seminal essay, “The

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Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process.” Mathews interpreted the revivals, and the
reforms that stemmed from them, as a social movement that brought meaning to people’s lives
through the strengthening of institutions, particularly Protestant denominations. Donald
Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An
Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21:1 (Spring 1969), 23–42; Paul Johnson, The Shopkeeper’s
Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang,
1978). For an overview of the historiography of antebellum reform see Glenn M. Harden,
“Men and Women of Their Own Kind: Historians and Antebellum Reform” (Ph.D. diss.,
George Mason University, 2000).
20 Ronald Walters, American Reformers: 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); William G.
McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978);
Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling. Another study that takes religious ideas seriously is Leo Hirrel,
Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1998). See also Harden, “Men and Women of Their Own Kind,” 131–139.
21 See, for example, Walters, American Reformers, 214; and Harden, “Men and Women of Their
Own Kind,” 106–108. Other benevolent movements, which are not treated in this essay, that
drew on evangelical and non-evangelical ideas include prison reform and what Abzug described
as the “body reforms” (the dietary reforms of Sylvester Graham being the most prominent).
Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 163–182.
22 W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and
Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Manisha Sinha, The
Slave’s Cause; A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
23 W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Bonds and Boundaries of Antislavery,” The Journal of the Civil War
Era 4 (March 2014), 85–105; Stacey Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists
in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Julie Roy Jeffrey,
The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery
Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2008).
24 See, for example, Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,”
in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick
McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: The New Press, 2006); Patrick Rael, Black Identity
and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002); David Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican:
The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002); Nell Irvin Painter, A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Melba Joyce
Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1994); Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and
Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
25 For an overview of this literature see Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds,
Women’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 75 (June
1988), 9–39.
26 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer
Stewart, eds., Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007); Boylan, Origins of Women’s Activism; Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and
Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013); Lori Ginzburg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The
Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, new edition (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999).
27 For a recent study on early national Americans as “joiners” see Johann Neem, Creating a Nation
of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008).

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 5
BORDE RLANDS A N D
C ULTURAL S UR V I V A L
Native Americans in the Early National Era

David A. Nichols

Twenty years ago, when historians wrote of Native Americans in the early United States,
they told a tragic but deterministic story of winners and losers. The War for American
Independence spread devastation through Indian country, scorching towns, uprooting
families, and splitting even distant Indian nations into factions. Almost immediately after
that war ended, the new American republic embarked on a course of continental expan-
sion and Indian expulsion. White Americans conquered two Indian confederacies in the
Old Northwest, took southeastern Indians’ lands by bribery and force, purchased the vast
province of Louisiana from a distracted Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded Florida, deported
over 90,000 Indians from the eastern United States to western reservations, winnowed
(inadvertently) the Plains and Pacific Northwest Indians with epidemic disease, colonized
Texas, and seized the Southwest in the Mexican War. Nineteenth-century American offi-
cials and historians would characterize this as a peaceful process of expansion into uninhab-
ited lands, whereby a divinely-favored republic pursued its destiny. Late twentieth-century
scholars took a less favorable view of white Americans’ intentions, but they still portrayed
the United States’ expansion as inevitable, and Indians’ resistance as doomed.1
Since the early 1990s, historians have begun replacing this narrative of inevitable decline
with a more contingent and complicated account. The past quarter-century of scholarship
has increasingly emphasized the ability of Native Americans to resist European and
American expansion, sometimes for decades on end. Historians, most now armed with the
methodology of ethnohistory – an interdisciplinary approach to indigenous history that
employs anthropological insights, linguistic evidence, and historical documents – have also
begun to look more closely at Indians’ cultural adaptability. Scholars ask what alterations
Indians made in their lifeways to address changing political and environmental circum-
stances, and how they continued to maintain ties to their past. In the United States, the
new American “empire of liberty,” Native Americans faced a dedicated and dangerous
adversary, but Indians themselves remained tough, intellectually agile, and, in many parts
of the continent, more politically powerful than the would-be masters of America.2
***
Since the great majority of Native Americans, prior to the twentieth century, could not
read or write, they appeared in the documentary record only through literate European
intermediaries. The Indians who left the biggest paper trails tended to live closest to
white settlements and outposts, in the shifting zone of contact that contemporary whites

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called “the frontier.” For most of the century following Frederick Jackson Turner’s
introduction of the frontier as a fruitful topic of scholarly inquiry, historians treated it as a
region where whites won and Indians lost. The former created new and dynamic societies,
the latter withered, retreated, or fought futilely against the Euro-American “advance.” As
late as 1981, Robert Berkhofer, Jr., in his essay on “The North American Frontier as
Process and Context,” argued that contact between Native Americans and whites always
unfolded the same way: indirect contacts (stories, diseases) preceded the arrival of explorers
and traders, who in turn prepared the way for missionaries, soldiers, and land agents, who
then subjugated and dispossessed peoples. Berkhofer, who understood that frontiers were
Indian homelands rather than empty wildernesses, also understood white Americans’
imperialist motives and the human cost of American expansion – but he focused on how
inevitably Indians paid that cost and whites collected it.3
Frontiers, however, did not always turn into violent zones of interethnic predation.
Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson made this point in their introduction to the
anthology in which Berkhofer’s essay appeared, observing that frontiers could become
relatively stable borderlands of intercultural contact. Ten years later, Richard White
expanded upon this observation in his powerful and influential study of Indian-white
relations in the Great Lakes region, The Middle Ground. In regions like the Lakes country
(or pays d’en haut), White argued, Indians and Europeans could develop a rough and
persistent balance of power with one another. Native peoples might find themselves
weakened by disease and warfare, but Europeans found their own strength attenuated
by distance, imperial distractions, and a demographic balance that often favored Indians
over whites. Both groups also wanted resources from one another – goods, military
services, land – but since neither could conquer the other by force, Europeans and
Indians had to develop more cooperative strategies. The diplomatic protocols, trading
rules, and “creative misunderstandings” regarding political power that the uneasy
neighbors evolved allowed these two very different groups to coexist; they constituted
White’s conceptual “middle ground.” Behind these rules, though, lay distrust and
barely-contained violence, which broke through the surface when new European
regimes came to power: when British soldiers replaced French magistrates in the 1760s,
and when American villagers replaced the British in the 1770s and 1780s. The social
equilibrium of the pays d’en haut, White argued, did not long survive the second of these
transitions. The new American nation-state that arose in the 1790s created a monocultural
social order in which only one polity (the United States) would make the rules. White’s
concept, however, proved irresistible to Native Americanists working in the early-
national era, who located “middle grounds” in other regions and contexts, analyzed
how much power Indians enjoyed there, and asked why these zones of encounter and
cooperation eventually came apart.4
White’s book generated its first major response in 1997, when Eric Hinderaker pub-
lished Elusive Empires, a study of the Ohio Valley during the same era covered by The
Middle Ground. Hinderaker argued that Indians’ and whites’ experiences as neighbors
depended very substantially on whites’ imperial motives. The French, Hinderaker
observed, didn’t just lack power compared to their successors; their imperial goal, to
extract furs and food from the region, differed from that of Anglo-Americans. New
France’s British conquerors wanted to turn Indians’ homelands into saleable real estate, but

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they could conceive of Indians having a place (if an unequal one) in a multiracial empire.
Americans could not; they associated freedom with small landholdings, and considered
Native American lifeways, particularly the communal ownership of land, unacceptably
retrograde. The extension of their “empire of liberty” into the Ohio Valley presaged the
end of an Indian presence there.5
A more geographically extensive, but equally gloomy view of Indian-white frontier
relations appeared in Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute’s Contact Points, a collection of
essays generated by a 1994 conference. The anthology borrowed Lamar and Thompson’s
description of frontiers as “contact zones,” but its essays on the revolutionary and early-
national period described those eras’ borderlands as zones of violent dispossession. In
their respective contributions, Stephen Aron contrasted the incompatible approaches
Shawnees and white Kentuckians took toward land and its animal inhabitants, Lucy
Murphy observed how easily a mining and trading frontier could collapse in fear and
violence, John Faragher described how American officials employed “uncontrollable”
white settlers to seize Indian land, and Andrew Cayton observed how the American
national government used the rites of the treaty ground to consolidate their military
conquest of the Old Northwest.6
One of the contributors to Contact Points, Stephen Aron, soon joined with Jeremy
Adelman in asking what made a frontier a stable contact zone, rather than a domain of
conquest and dispossession. In their 1999 essay “From Borderlands to Borders,” these
two scholars argued that one could best describe the eighteenth-century Ohio-Great
Lakes region with the terminology developed by Herbert Bolton: as a “borderland.” The
fundamental characteristic of such regions, which in Aron and Adelman’s study included
Spanish Missouri and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Texas, was the absence of a
single bureaucratic state able to establish a monopoly of political power. Often, several
nation-states competed for control of these regions, a competition that allowed Native
peoples to seek allies and resources from the competitors, “playing them off” against one
another. Borderlands turned into “bordered lands” as one imperial power, the United
States, persuaded other nation-states to withdraw from a particular zone and established
a monopoly of sovereignty and a preponderance of military power.7
Whether studying a “middle ground,” “borderland,” or “contact zone,” scholars in
the 1990s agreed that the rise of the United States proved very bad news for Native
Americans, who experienced racial hatred, increasing violence, loss of land, and loss of
power. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several scholars modified or
challenged this view of deteriorating Indian power. Alan Taylor observed that even in
Aron and Adelman’s “bordered lands,” indigenous peoples retained agency and
maneuverability. After the American Revolution, Britain and the United States expended
much effort turning the country around Lake Ontario into a “divided ground,” using
international treaties, Indian land sales, and domestic laws to establish their authority. Yet
in the face of this consolidation of power, the Iroquois still fought for their autonomy.
By proposing a security barrier of white leaseholders, creating a new homeland in Upper
Canada, and negotiating with the U.S. government or (in the Canadian Iroquois’ case)
with the French Republic, the Oneidas, Mohawks and Senecas sought to “manage,
rather than entirely to block, the process of [white] settlement.” In the end, New York
and the United States had to use products of the old “middle ground,” gifts of food and

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aid and bicultural mediators like French trader Peter Panet, to cozen or maneuver the Six
Nations into surrendering their land.8
The Iroquois had suffered devastating losses during the War for American Independence,
in which they lost forty towns to General John Sullivan’s 1779 invasion. Where Native
peoples did not directly experience the destructive force of imperial warfare, they could
preserve their autonomy far longer than did the Iroquois. Kathleen DuVal’s The Native
Ground argued that in borderlands more removed from the zone of white settlement,
Indians didn’t need to accommodate whites’ demands. These “borderlands” were actually
regions where Native Americans called the shots. In the eighteenth- and early nine-
teenth-century Arkansas Valley, the Osages and Quapaws and eastern emigrant groups
(like the Chickasaws) obliged white officials to follow their diplomatic and commercial
rules, and held the balance of power into the 1800s. When the United States wanted to
expand its influence into Arkansas, it had to do so through Native actors, like the Cherokee
emigrants whom American officials supported in their war against the Osages. Ned
Blackhawk’s concurrently-published monograph Violence over the Land, studying the Great
Basin region from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, agreed with White,
Faragher, Murphy, and DuVal that borderlands could become violent. However, Native
peoples could turn this to their advantage. The Utes, one of Blackhawk’s focal nations,
made violence a mode of production, exchanging Shoshone and Paiute war captives for
Spanish trade goods. Nor did a violent borderland always remain thus: in the nineteenth
century the Shoshones peacefully incorporated Anglo-American fur traders into their
economic network, and the Utes accommodated rather than fought the first American
soldiers to arrive in Colorado. Only with the arrival of Mormon settlers did the Great
Basin Indians face a group whom they could not accommodate or intimidate.9
Pekka Hämäläinen, in his magisterial Comanche Empire, went further than DuVal and
Blackhawk, arguing that powerful Native American groups could not only partner with
European empires or oblige local whites to accommodate them, but could in some cases
turn Euro-American provinces into their own colonies. The Comanches, a populous
nation of horse-and-bison nomads, dominated the south-central part of the continent
until the 1850s, in part by extracting tribute from the Spanish and Mexican provinces of
New Mexico and Texas, in part by intensive raiding into northern Mexico, in part by
building a trade network that extended into the central Great Plains. (Comancheria also
projected considerable “soft power”: other Indian nations and whites voluntarily moved
into the region and adopted the Comanches’ language and style of dress.) Comanche
power did not decline until environmental stress and disease weakened the nation in the
1840s and 1850s.10
Discussing the same region, Brian DeLay observed that the Comanches, Kiowas, and
Utes not only exercised considerable power in the southwestern “borderland,” but also
could exert a profound influence on relations between the Euro-American empires that
bordered them. After making peace with the Plains Indian nations on their eastern flank,
the southern Plains and Great Basin nations began in the 1840s an intensifying series of
raids into Mexico, some of which came within 150 miles of Mexico City. These raids,
which DeLay called the “War of a Thousand Deserts,” yielded a rich haul of livestock
and captives. They also weakened the Mexican nation-state, destroying its border settle-
ments, diverting its army, and undermining its government’s legitimacy. This weakness

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proved invaluable to the neighboring United States in the war of 1846–48: Mexico put
up a valiant fight against the skillfully-led and better-equipped American army, but in
the end the Republic could not win a two-front war against both norteamericanos and
Comanches.11
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner conceived of the American frontier as the cutting
edge of white American civilization. In 1981 Robert Berkhofer, reflecting a broader
scholarly consensus, described frontiers as regions where, over and over again, agents of
American expansion defeated Native American resistance. By 2008, however, thanks to
White and DuVal and Hämäläinen and their peers, the historical profession had inverted
its original perception of frontiers and borderlands: they were now places where Indians
called the shots, where Native empires arose, and from which Indians could subordinate
or even break neighboring Euro-American republics.
***
Another preconception historians have increasingly sought to upend concerns the role of
cultural change and the continuity of present and past in nineteenth-century Native
American life. From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, scholars portrayed Indians’ adop-
tion of European customs and lifeways as divisive and destructive. European religion pro-
duced internal political conflict, trade led to dependency and alcoholism, and adoption of
whites’ customs made Native leaders more susceptible to foreign control. Mid-century
historian Arrell Gibson presented an extreme version of this viewpoint in The Chickasaws,
which characterized cultural change as the snake in that nation’s garden. Chickasaw men
and women became “enraptured by insidious European ways and things,” which
“debauch[ed] and displace[d]” their old lives, “corrupt[ed]” and corroded their honorable
institutions, and set them on the path to subjugation.12
Gibson’s view of cultural change strongly resembled that of Tenskwatawa, Neolin,
and other Native American prophets of the early-modern era, who viewed all things
European as spiritual poisons and urged their kinsmen to return to the old ways.
However, as Gregory Dowd argued in his pathbreaking book A Spirited Resistance,
these “nativist” holy men had much in common with the Indian “accommodationists”
(Dowd’s term) who embraced the whites’ lifeways. Both factions recognized that their
nations had grown weak and needed to revive their spiritual and political power. Both
urged their kinsmen to embrace change, which, as Patricia Limerick observed, had
been the one actual constant in Native American life. And both developed innovative
programs of renewal based in part on colonial examples. Accommodationists favored
the adoption of European material culture, commercial farming, and, in the Southeast,
chattel slavery. Nativists proposed a general purge of non-Indian influences from
Native American life, and preached the common origin and interests of Indians, a sep-
arate race with united interests. Dowd’s sympathy lay with the nativists, insofar as their
“struggle for unity” comprised his book’s main narrative, but he acknowledged that
they were no more “traditionalist” than their accommodationist adversaries. Their
belief in a single creator god, call for pan-tribal unity, and rejection of established insti-
tutions like polygyny or medicine bundles demonstrated the nativists’ innovative,
rather than conservative, nature, their desire to make radical changes to the present by
returning to an imagined past.13

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In the aftermath of the American Revolution the nativist movement received its most
effective leaders from, and gathered its strongest following within, the Shawnee and
Creek nations, respectively. The Shawnees birthed the influential war captain Blue Jacket
and the eminent nativists Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, while the Creeks’ Red Stick
movement engendered a regional civil war and a bloody American invasion of the Deep
South in 1813–14. Not coincidentally, these two Indian nations and their internal strug-
gles have attracted much attention from scholars, particularly after Dowd underscored the
broader significance of their nativist insurgencies. John Sugden, in his biography of Blue
Jacket, observed that one can easily overstate the Shawnees’ nativist-accommodationist
divide: some of that nation’s leaders emulated the nativists by organizing armed opposi-
tion to American expansion, while at the same time adopting Anglo-American habits and
properties, like the well-appointed house and slaves Blue Jacket owned. More recently,
Adam Jortner argued that nativist leaders had much in common with white Americans:
the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, by his account, pursued a political goal similar to the
Americans, namely the creation of a separate Indian nation-state with an autonomous
economy. “Nativists” didn’t always reject Euro-American institutions, and “accommo-
dationists” weren’t always so accommodating toward whites.14
Other Shawnee histories have focused on that nation’s ability simultaneously to retain
its established customs and beliefs while appearing to bend to the winds of change. Colin
Calloway, who in his 1995 book on Indians in the Revolution had emphasized the dev-
astating legacy of that event, focused in a later work on the Shawnees’ physical and cultural
survival. The former Calloway attributed to that nation’s willingness to migrate, to become
what one eighteenth-century British official called “the greatest travelers in America,”
settling and re-settling from Georgia to the Ohio Valley to northern Mexico. The latter
he ascribed to the Shawnees’ determination to retain old religious customs while selec-
tively adopting elements of white American culture, such as livestock-raising. Meanwhile,
Stephen Warren found a strong link between the Shawnees’ conservation of older lifeways
and their decentralized political structure. Shawnee traditionalists could preserve older
customs, like commercial hunting or the seasonal Bread Dances, in the autonomous towns
they dominated, and could move those communities if white interlopers or reform-
minded chiefs threatened them. Even after the U.S. government tried to consolidate
the Shawnees in eastern Kansas, and acculturated leaders tried to create a unified tribal
government, the nation remained split into separate polities, as it remains today.15
The Shawnees enjoyed a longstanding connection to the Creek confederacy of
present-day Alabama and Georgia. A Shawnee community resided in Creek country for
more than a century, and from the 1790s to the 1810s Creek and Shawnee warriors
fought alongside each other against American settlers. Despite their numbers and power,
the Creeks drew comparatively little attention from twentieth-century historians, over-
shadowed as they were in the historical record by their more literate and bureaucratic
Cherokee neighbors. This neglect ended in the 1990s, thanks in large part to the influ-
ence of historians Michael Green and Kathryn Braund, and several scholars probed the
extent of socio-cultural change in the nineteenth-century Creek nation. Claudio Saunt
identified the introduction of a market economy into Creek country as the main driver
of change, noting how the deerskin trade and commercial agriculture concentrated prop-
erty and power in the hands of a mestizo (biracial) elite. The Red Stick movement arose

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in response to this disruption of intra-ethnic solidarity, but as Joel Martin observed in

Sacred Revolt, the Red Sticks used a methodology of revival just as disruptive as any
European technology or institution, a set of dances and rites and pilgrimages that acted as
a mass “ceremony of collective initiation.” As among the Shawnees, both the Creeks’
accommodationists and their nativists, in Saunt and Martin’s telling, sought revolutionary
change.16
Other scholars, notably anthropologist Robbie Ethridge, drew attention instead to the
Creeks’ ability to manage and absorb revolutionary change. In Creek Country, a “thick
description” of Creek social geography based on the writings of agent Benjamin Hawkins
(1798), Ethridge attributed the confederacy’s embrace of diversity to its multiplicity of
clans and towns. The Creeks absorbed people from different ethnic groups by accepting
them as separate but confederated communities. She also argued that a market economy
generally strengthened ties between different families and groups, insofar as Creek men
and women adapted the market to their “frontier-exchange economy,” trading clothing
and food and other subsistence goods rather than accumulating wealth or debt. Andrew
Frank seconded Ethridge’s overall assessment in his study of Anglophone whites who
settled in the Creek nation. Frank observed that Creeks encouraged long-term white
male residents to marry Creek women, and that they considered the children of these
marriages fully Indian, since the Creeks practiced matrilineal descent. Biracial Creeks then
served as diplomatic and cultural intermediaries, helping introduce their full-blooded
kinsmen to European lifeways or negotiate with the American government.17
The Creeks and Shawnees represented only two of the historic Native American
groups whom scholars have credited with the ability to manage change, peacefully absorb
new people and ideas, and retain at the same time their older culture. Historians have
often considered the Cherokees, who in the 1820s adopted their own written language
and constitutional government, exemplars of cultural revolution. In 1998, however,
Theda Perdue argued that at least half of the Cherokee population – the female half –
remained culturally conservative. Prior to the American Revolution, she noted, Cherokee
men and women led separate economic lives (hunting and farming, respectively), deter-
mined by their gendered spiritual power. Separation did not imply inequality for women,
however. The Cherokees’ matrilineality gave women authority over land use, clan venge-
ance, and the disposition of war captives. The Cherokees’ adoption of Euro-American
“civilization” in the early nineteenth century theoretically mandated the abolition of clan
vengeance, the adoption of patrilineal rules of descent, and the movement of men into
farming, all changes that would curtail women’s power. In practice, however, the major-
ity of Cherokees resisted so dramatic a change in gender roles. Women continued to
practice horticulture, and men “farmed” by purchasing slaves to work the fields for them;
meanwhile, most Cherokees continued to look to women, rather than the more patriar-
chal National Council, for advice on land use and blood vengeance. To borrow the ter-
minology of Noam Chomsky, gender constituted a “deep structure” of culture that
Cherokees and other Indians were slow to change, even as they adopted some of the
technological “vocabulary” of Euro-Americans.18
The persistence of traditional lifeways, and the management of change, played an
increasingly important role in scholarship about other Native American nations.
Elsewhere in the Southeast, James Carson described how the Choctaw incorporated

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elements of Euro-American culture (like cattle and cotton cultivation) through the use
of language, another cultural deep structure, making new plants, animals, and practices
familiar by assigning them old and recognizable Choctaw names. Christina Snyder, in a
brilliant synthetic overview of slavery in the Southeast from the Mississippian era (ca.
900–1500 CE) to Removal, acknowledged that southeastern Indians’ adoption of
African-American slavery did represent a significant change from their previous enslave-
ment of war captives, insofar as slaves now became a racially distinct caste. (In a study of
Choctaw and Chickasaw slavery published three years later, Barbara Krauthamer
observed that acculturated Indian masters also now used slaves as capital goods, freely
exchanging them for land, livestock, and other means of production.) Among the
Seminoles of Florida, however, African-American slaves lived as tributaries in separate
villages under the protection of war captains, whose patron–client relationship, according
to Snyder, resembled old Mississippian “social and political” hierarchies.19
Among the oft-beleaguered Indians of the Northeast, meanwhile, Daniel Mandell,
Karim Tiro, and Cary Miller found an equally energetic struggle to hold onto the past.
Mandell, studying the remnant Algonquians of southern New England, found that in the
nineteenth century they maintained their separate identity by hanging onto reservations
where they could periodically gather, and living in communities where they could insulate
themselves from the capitalist marketplace. Tiro, in his book on the Oneida nation of
Iroquois, observed that well after Americans assumed they had vanished into the white
mainstream, the People of the Standing Stone retained their traditional gender roles
(similar to the Cherokees’), maintained their belief in witchcraft and healers, and continued
to make a living through hunting and basket making. And Miller argued that the Ojibwas
of the northern Lakes preserved an unbroken link to their past through their political
institutions, through the chiefs (or ogimaag) who represented and guided the Ojibwas’
communities, and pre-Columbian institutions like the midiwiwin (medicine society) that
valorized and legitimized spiritual leaders.20
This assiduously maintained continuity with the past concurrently became an interest
of ethnohistorians studying western Indian nations, as for instance Ned Blackhawk.
Another specialist on the Southwest, James Brooks, devoted his magisterial book Captives
and Cousins to the persistence of one particular Native American institution in New
Mexico and its borderlands: slavery. Like the southeastern Indians examined by Snyder,
the pre-Columbian Utes, Navajos, Comanches, and other southwestern Indians enslaved
captives for labor or to serve as symbols of male military prowess. During the colonial era,
they adapted slavery to the demands of the European market and interethnic diplomacy,
selling captives to the Spanish for ransom (or as servants) and employing them as inter-
mediaries with their original Indian or European kinfolk. This new, multivalent system
of slavery endured not only through the colonial era, but deep into the nineteenth
century, well after first Mexico and then the United States took over New Mexico. The
Southwest remained a region that Euro-Americans could disrupt but not easily change
without the active cooperation of Native peoples. Even in western regions where
Europeans brought devastating and immediate change, like eighteenth-century California,
Indians continued to exercise historical agency and choice. Steven Hackel, in his study of
California’s missions, did not downplay the crises that province’s Native peoples endured:
an ecological shock to their food supply, and epidemic diseases that scythed down

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thousands of Indians who joined the missions. Yet despite these wrenching changes and
the severe discipline of the missions, which one European visitor compared to West
Indian plantations, Indian converts retained some power, as secular Spanish officials
appointed Native American men as alcaldes (mayors) and counselors and organized them
into local militias. They also preserved some of their old cultural forms, like prayer poles
and marital gift exchanges, and blended them with the new religious regime.21
Elizabeth Fenn, however, counsels caution when we assume Indians could adapt to
all changes, or accumulate and hold power in western or interior regions. In the
eighteenth century the Mandans, the subject people of Fenn’s recent Encounters at the
Heart of the World, enjoyed a prosperous subsistence and maintained a trading network
that extended from New Mexico to Canada. In the nineteenth century, however, their
fortunes declined as American fur traders bypassed them, replacing the Mandans’ north–
south commercial axis with an east–west one connecting Saint Louis with the Rockies.
Those same traders also brought environmental stresses that weakened and nearly
destroyed the once-prosperous nation: rats which ate the Mandans’ food reserves, and
an 1837–38 smallpox outbreak that devastated an already-stressed people. Fenn
underscores a point that Richard White had made thirty years previously: the threats
that Indians faced came not merely from white soldiers and settlers, but also from
changes in trade patterns and environmental catastrophes. Most Native Americans lived
on a knife’s edge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That many balanced there
ably should not make us forget how easily uncontrollable circumstances could push
others into the abyss.22
***
One’s perspective on the history of Native North Americans depends, it seems, on the
structure of the basic research question one asks. Traditionally, historians have asked
“What did whites do to Indians?” The resulting scholarship has revealed much about
whites’ policies and attitudes, and about Native Americans’ struggles to keep their land
and sovereignty, but ultimately its foundational question demands a moral judgment, and
scholars have not rendered a merciful one. White Americans let greed and fear get the
better of them. Native Americans suffered and died. The moral assessment determines
the gloomy end.23
Over the past quarter-century, scholars have more frequently asked the question
“What did Indians do?” The answers their research has yielded tell a richer, more complex
story of survival and (to borrow Gerald Vizenor’s term) “survivance,” even of triumph.
Through force and negotiation, Indians governed the territory of their homelands and set
the terms of interaction with Euro-Americans. They enriched themselves through old
means (trading and raiding) and new, and met their white neighbors as allies or even
patrons, not inferiors. Most altered their lifeways in response to environmental changes
and new economic opportunities, but none completely abandoned the deeper structures
of their culture, the terminologies and ceremonies and social expectations that made
them unique. None simply became the passive recipients of a foreign power’s actions,
tragic victims of a more important nation’s story. They were instead the central characters
of their own distinct narratives, and of a continental story that stresses interaction,
continuity, and persistence.24

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Notes
1 Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (East Lansing, 1967);
Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American
Communities (Cambridge, 1995); Mary E. Young, “Let’s Hear It for the Losers,” Reviews in
American History 24 (Dec. 1996): 579–584; Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American
Expansion (New York, 2008).
2 On ethnohistory, see Patricia Galloway, Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing
Testimony, Constructing Narrative (Lincoln, 2006). Space considerations preclude my discussing
in this essay the interrelated issues of federal Indian policy and white attitudes toward Native
Americans, but I refer readers interested in these subjects to the following: Andrew Cayton,
“‘Separate Interests and the Nation State’: The Washington Administration and the Origins of
Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992):
39–67; and Andrew Cayton, “Radicals in the ‘Western World’: The Federalist Conquest of
Trans-Appalachian North America,” in The Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and
Barbara Oberg (Charlottesville, 1998), 77–96, both covering the Federalists’ preferential
investment of national power in the Northwest and Ohio Valley; Anthony F. C. Wallace,
Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1999), on the
tension between Enlightenment philosophy and land hunger in American policy-making;
Daniel Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’:
Hunters, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal
of the Early Republic 19 (Winter 1999): 601–629, on the ironic point that federal “civilization”
policy actually encouraged Indians to return to a subsistence-oriented, rather than a commercial,
economy; Andrew Isenberg, “The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin
Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808–1826,” Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (Fall 2001):
445–465, on the United States’ Indian factory system and its attempted commercial alliance
with Trans-Mississippi Indian nations; Tim Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern
Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens, GA, 2002), on the role that state-
level courts played in building a legal justification for Indian Removal; Thomas Ingersoll, To
Intermix with Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from the Earliest Times
to the Indian Removals (Albuquerque, 2005), on the relationship between Removal and white
Americans’ aversion to Indian-white intermarriage; Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How
Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2007), on essayists’ and political leaders’
creation of an “anti-Indian sublime” that intensified interracial hatred; Izumi Ishii, Bad Fruits of
the Civilized Tree: Alcohol and the Sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation (Lincoln, 2008), on the
Cherokees’ use of federal liquor prohibitions and “civilization” policy to bolster their own
legal sovereignty; Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and
Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA, 2009), on settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ struggle to
assert legal jurisdiction over frontier regions; Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations:
Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville, 2009), on Americans’
effort to isolate Indians from the “Westphalian system” of interstate relations; and Robert
Owens, Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-American Mind
(Norman, 2015), on the fears of pan-Indian “conspiracies” that led white officials to isolate and
coerce the Trans-Appalachian Indian nations.
3 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1953), 1–38; Ray Allen
Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (New York, 1966); Robert Berkhofer, Jr., “The North
American Frontier as Process and Context,” in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern
Africa Compared, ed. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (New Haven, 1981), 43–75.
4 Lamar and Thompson, “Comparative Frontier History,” in Lamar and Thompson, The Frontier
in History, 3–13; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991), quote p. x. See also the forum on this book that
appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 63 (Jan. 2006): 3–96. Pays d’en haut is French
for “upper country.” The term “borderlands” originated with Herbert Bolton, who in the early
twentieth century characterized Spanish-Indian relations in the Southwest as accommodative,

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focused on trade and alliance rather than conflict. See John Francis Bannon, ed., Bolton and the
Spanish Borderlands (Norman, 1964).
5 Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800
(Cambridge, 1997). Regarding the place of Native North Americans in the British empire see
Edward Countryman, “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the
Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 53 (April 1996): 342–362.
6 Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: ‘Rights in the Woods’ on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” Murphy,
“To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes
Region, 1760–1832,” Faragher, “‘More Motley Than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to
Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’
upon the ‘Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville,” all in Contact
Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew
Cayton and Fredrika Teute (Chapel Hill, 1998), 175–204, 270–303, 304–326, and 235–269,
respectively.
7 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June
1999): 814–841. Cf. Pekka Hämäläinen and John Wunder, “Of Lethal Places and Lethal
Essays,” American Historical Review (Oct. 1999): 1229–1234.
8 Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge,
MA, 2001), 189–236; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern
Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006), quote 404. On the British relationship
with the Upper Canadian (Grand River) Iroquois see also Timothy Willig, Restoring the Chain
of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783–1815 (Lincoln, 2008),
123–195.
9 Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent
(Philadelphia, 2006); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early
American West (Cambridge, MA, 2006). For the Sullivan expedition, see Joseph Fischer, A
Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July–September 1779 (Columbia,
SC, 1997).
10 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, 2008).
11 DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War (New Haven, 2008).
12 Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American
Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington, 1965); Arrell Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman,
1971), quotes 30, 37, 106; Richard White, Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and
Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, 1983); J. Leitch Wright, Jr.,
Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln, 1986).
13 Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New
York, 1987), 189; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian
Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, 1992).
14 John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln, 1999); Adam Jortner, The Gods of
Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (Oxford, 2012).
15 Colin Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York, 2007), quote 166; Stephen
Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870 (Urbana, 2005).
16 Jerry Clark, The Shawnee (Lexington, 1993), 14–15, 20–21; Michael Green, The Politics of
Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln, 1982); Kathryn E. Holland
Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln, 1993);
Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians
(Cambridge, 1999); Claudio Saunt, “Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the
Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 57 (Oct.
2000): 733–760; Joel Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston,
1991), quote 175.
17 Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill, 2003);
Andrew Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln,

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2005); and see also Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South
(Athens, GA, 2003). On Hawkins see Florette Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin
Hawkins, 1796–1816 (Norman, 1986). The term “frontier-exchange economy” comes from
Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill, 1992).
John Ellisor observes that the Creeks maintained their polyethnic society, and the network of
intermarried whites and sympathetic neighbors who supported it, until the Second Creek War
of 1834–36. John Ellisor, The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing
Frontier (Lincoln, 2010).
18 Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln, 1998).
Charles Joyner uses a similar model of acculturation – cultural “vocabulary” added to, without
replacing, “deep structures” – in Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community
(Urbana, 1984). On the comparative fluidity of gender roles in Ojibwa society, see Brenda J.
Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (New York,
2012).
19 James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Choctaws from Prehistory through Removal
(Lincoln, 1999); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in
Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2010), quote 233; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian
Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill, 2013).
On the choices eastern Indian leaders made regarding adaptation and cultural survival, see also
Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln, 2002).
20 Daniel Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880
(Baltimore, 2008); Karim Tiro, People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution
through the Era of Removal (Amherst, 2011); Cary Miller, Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760–
1845 (Lincoln, 2010).
21 James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community on the Southwest Borderlands
(Chapel Hill, 2002); Steven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-
Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, 2005); Jean-François de la
Pérouse, Life in a California Mission: Monterey in 1786 (Berkeley, 1989). Sociologist Thomas
Hall described the long-term resistance of the Southwest’s indigenous peoples to foreign
conquest, and the ability of local actors to determine their own political allegiances, in Social
Change in the Southwest, 1350–1880 (Lawrence, 1989).
22 Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York,
2014); White, Roots of Dependency, esp. 147–211.
23 Theda Perdue and Michael Green, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford,
2010), xv.
24 Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln, 2009). On the
integration of borderlands and Native American history into the new field of “continental
history,” see Alan Taylor, “Squaring the Circle: The Reach of Colonial America,” in American
History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011), 3–23.

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 Part II

ANTEBELLUM AMERICA
 6
INTERNATION A L T R A V EL ,
INTE LLEC TU A L L I F E,
AND GLOBAL I N F L UEN C ES
ON THE UNIT ED S T A T ES

Daniel Kilbride

Until very recently, the antebellum period would have seemed to be a singularly
unpromising one to look for global influences upon American culture. Scholarship and,
to a lesser extent, textbooks have left behind the old canard that the United States “turned
inward” after the War of 1812 in order to focus on internal economic, political, and
cultural development. Yet textbooks, in particular, have been slow to change their
content to reflect a burgeoning new literature on American overseas engagement in this
formative period. Chapters on the antebellum era still focus on economic developments
like the transportation or market “revolutions,” on the evolution of a distinct political
culture, and debates over chattel slavery.1 And, once in a while, the language of inwardness
pops up explicitly, sometimes in the most surprising places.2 Nevertheless, recent attention
to the embeddedness of the United States in all eras of its history within global commercial,
cultural, and population streams has changed how historians approach the antebellum
period for good, and for the better.3
To be sure, antebellum Americans gave historians good reason to think that the country
really had become self-absorbed in the decades after 1815. After over a quarter-century of
involvement in European wars, the Union embarked on a long period of peace with the
Old World (Mexicans and Native Americans would not be so fortunate). In the wake of
the contentious debates of the Federalist-Jeffersonian era over American policy vis-à-vis the
French Revolution, the United States eschewed direct involvement in European troubles.
As they saw it, those struggles were likely to stem from the usual causes – self-aggrandizing
dynasties or land-hungry states – in which the country had not the least interest. But the
United States would sit it out even when the stakes were high and worth fighting for.
Intervention was sure to foment internal division, and the relatively weak republic was sure
to devolve into the pawn of larger and more cynical powers. “Wherever the standard of
freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedic-
tions, and her prayers be,” explained Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821. “But
she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Besides, local and neighborhood
affairs proved more than capable of keeping Americans occupied. Territorial expansion,
transportation improvements, cultural development, Indian affairs, solving the riddle of
slavery within a democratic republic – with that ambitious domestic agenda, why did
Americans need to worry about what was going on in the rest of the world?4

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Moreover, in these years Americans developed an abrasive, chest-thumping brand of

patriotism that insisted on the exceptional nature of their national identity. “[W]e, the
American people, are the most independent, intelligent, moral and happy people on the
face of the earth” went a typical pronouncement in 1845. That swagger stemmed from
genuine pride in the nation’s accomplishments, but it also masked a gnawing sense of
insecurity vis-à-vis the European world, Great Britain in particular. Newly independent
Americans were certain that the republic would soon produce great accomplishments in
science, the arts, and philosophy. In The Vision of Columbus, Joel Barlow predicted that
the Old World, “Where men and science drew their ancient birth,/Shall soon behold,
on this enlighten’d coast,/Their fame transcended and their glory lost.” The republic’s
golden age of arts and science was slow to arrive, however, as the nation’s conservative
critics were quick to point out. Sydney Smith’s jeer – “Who reads an American book? or
goes to an American play?” – was only the best-known of many taunts hurled at the
United States from Europe in the early nineteenth century. The fact was that Americans
still looked to Europe as the seat of cultural legitimacy and craved its approval. So when
travelers like Frances Trollope, Frederic Marryat, and Basil Hall (to name only the most
infamous) underscored the differences between Americans’ self-image and the reality
they had created, it stung sharply.5
Literate Americans paid close attention to the views of European critics, most of
whom were British. Their peculiar blend of patriotism and insecurity – combined with
postcolonial anxieties and a powerful strain of Anglophobia – made Americans singularly
unable to engage these works with anything approaching coolness.6 To be fair, though,
many of these women and men visited the United States with an eye to doing their mite
to knock the cocksure young republic off its high horse. American and British writers
had traded blows, some couched as fictitious travel narratives, during the “Paper War” of
the 1810s, and the sniping continued for several decades more.7 Some Americans were
aware that their obsession with British opinion was an unattractive trait. “Why this
morbid anxiety about what is thought or said of you in England?” asked Richard Biddle
of his compatriots in 1830. That insight did not stop Biddle from writing a 150-page
pamphlet devoted entirely to a point-by-point refutation of Hall’s Travels in North
America. So self-awareness did not necessarily produce tranquility. Americans’ high
expectations for themselves, their hyper-patriotism, and the criticisms of foreign visitors
created an intense desire that foreigners validate their self-image. “It would seem as if,
doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes,”
observed Alexis de Tocqueville.8
Americans’ attention to the views of foreign travelers points to the oversized influence
of travel to mold public opinion in this period. Visitors to Europe frequently published
their letters and diaries upon returning to the United States, and newspapers and journals
often featured the letters of local women and men who reported on their overseas
adventures. News about foreign lands also came from other genres, such as missionary
magazines. These writings were enormously popular with the reading public. The
antebellum period witnessed the birth of the celebrity traveler, a figure who made his or
her living by publishing and lecturing about their time spent abroad.9 Bayard Taylor,
largely unknown today, was a household name in the antebellum period. Most of his
nearly sixty published works were travel accounts, beginning with Views a-Foot: or, Europe

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Seen with Knapsack and Staff, in 1846. Predictably, given Americans’ interests, Europe was
Taylor’s favorite destination, but he also wrote books about his visits to the Holy Land,
China, and Africa, among other places.10 Most of those who published accounts of their
travels were little-known even in their own day, however, and most of these texts made
little impression.11 Even so, the popularity of European travel underscores Americans’
powerful sense of connection to European civilization in the post-revolutionary decades.12
Not everybody was comfortable with the intensity of that connection and the allure of
European travel, which seemed to suggest the barrenness of American culture, a certain
lack of confidence in themselves as Americans, in this period. “It is for want of self-culture
that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its
fascination for all educated Americans,” Ralph Waldo Emerson charged.13 Emerson had
a point: Americans really did seem to act as if things were more authentic, more legitimate,
if they came from Europe. As a New Yorker explained to a traveling friend upon
presenting her with a long shopping list in the summer of 1844, “We on this side feel as
if everything was so much handsomer, and better, and desirable that comes from Paris.”14
Most Americans connected with Europe vicariously, through the writings of others,
but as the nineteenth century progressed, more and more women and men experienced
the Old World for themselves. Until the 1830s, probably no more than 2,000 Americans
traveled abroad in any given year. That number doubled in the 1830s and increased sig-
nificantly in the 1850s; the rate of growth in overseas travel outpaced the rate of popula-
tion growth. Even so, in the 1850s only 0.06 percent of Americans traveled abroad, most
of them visiting Europe. Even if the numbers remained small, that 0.06 percent rep-
resented a tripling of the percentage of Americans going abroad just thirty years before.
And, although travelers remained overwhelmingly white and privileged, women increas-
ingly made the Atlantic passage. From 1800 to 1860, women constituted 10–20 percent
of voyagers to Europe. But their share of travelers rose sharply in the late antebellum
period, perhaps accounting for 20 percent of passengers during the 1840s. As overseas
travelers, women did not achieve parity with men until after 1950.
The gradual rise in overseas travel (by far most of it directed to Europe) stemmed from
a variety of causes. Passenger fares remained more or less steady, but disposable income
among upper-middle-class and leisured Americans made even high fares affordable to
that rarified cohort.15 More importantly, long-distance travel became far more regularized,
accessible, and comfortable as the century progressed. It is no exaggeration to characterize
a trip to Europe before the 1830s as an adventure. George B. Putnam published the first
American guidebook in 1838, and British guides had appeared not long before then.16
Until then, travelers had to work everything out for themselves: find a ship, negotiate
with a captain for passage and board, endure the raw conditions of the Atlantic passage,
deal with customs agents, find lodging and, in short, arrange for all the large and small
details of their travels – all on their own (or with the assistance of overworked American
chargés d’affaires, if one could be found). It was an epic experience, one on which only the
stoutest of hearts would dare to embark.
In the 1830s, long-distance travel began to become commodified. Firms established
trans-oceanic lines with regular schedules and posted rates.17 Guidebooks, led by the
London publishing house of John Murray, became increasingly detailed, posting shipping,
carriage and, eventually, railroad schedules, hotel information, the locations and hours of

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important sites like museums and public buildings, and advice about passports and customs
troubles. Travel became less physically taxing as well. Although the golden age of steam
would come later in the nineteenth century, the regular ocean services did strive to
provide comfortable, if not luxurious, accommodations for their genteel clientele. And
the steamships – noisy, smoky, and prone to breakdowns as they were – enjoyed the éclat
of modernity and, over time, became something resembling floating palaces. As one
international traveler observed, “in a steamship are combined the highest results of
modern science, and the last achievements of modern art . . . she is at the same time a
ship, a machine, and a hotel.”18
Americans went abroad for a variety of reasons, but nearly all of them, including
business travelers, made at least some room for tourism. An overseas journey was likely to
be a once-in-a-lifetime event even for those who could afford it. Because this experience
was so singular, women and men were very likely to write about it – in letters to friends
and family back home, and in private journals, to preserve the moment for revisiting later
in life. Besides being a mundane record of paintings appreciated, castles visited, and
mountains climbed, these writings also reflected the chief diversion of nineteenth-century
travelers: the comparison and contrast of national characters. “The manners, customs, and
opinions . . . of nations and individuals, without doubt, claim our first attention,” wrote
John Eustace, the author of an Italian travelogue popular with Americans.19 Travelers were
interested in comparing national characters not merely because it was a cultural imperative,
but because they saw themselves as occupying a liminal position vis-à-vis the Old World
– simultaneously apart from and in opposition to its vices but also part of its civilization.20
Nineteenth-century Americans were never able to reconcile this tension between
exceptionalism and embeddedness, a failure which goes far to explaining the conflicted
quality of early American culture. Until recently, historians have heard voices like John
O’Sullivan declaring “We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of
avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena, and for our
history,” far more clearly than those belonging to individuals like the Cincinnati lawyer
Isaac Appleton Jewett, who wrote “There is much of query among travelling Americans,
as to what of Europe might profitably be conveyed across the Atlantic.”21
Jewett’s comment points to the special role of travel in defining the porous boundary
between American culture and the world outside. Although very few Americans relative
to the population of the United States went to Europe during this period, they enjoyed
an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. Travel – and, to a lesser extent,
reading and writing about it – allowed privileged Americans to “claim social and profes-
sional positions for themselves, to gratify their desires for pleasure and especially for pres-
tige, and to justify their privileges by demonstrating their superior taste and sensitivity,”
argues William W. Stowe. Emerson alluded to the quasi-religious nature of European
travel when he referred to its “idols,” and he was hardly alone. Via Eve Effingham, James
Fenimore Cooper articulated this religious sensibility when she labeled American Grand
Tourists “Hajjis”: those who have taken “the pilgrimage to Paris, instead of Mecca; and
the pilgrim must be an American instead of a Mohommedan.” Michael O’Brien said of
southerners that “The act of traveling acknowledged connection, but also was intended
to refine difference, and individuals decided for themselves where the emphasis should
lie.” 22 His conclusion stands for other Americans as well. Women and men may have

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decided for themselves at what point on the line between connection and difference they
came down, but the choice was never between engagement and disengagement. Given
the relative newness of the United States in the world community, Americans had to
decide how, not whether, they would be shaped by the world around them.23
Those decisions were conditioned by the peculiar circumstances of the United States’
position in the early nineteenth-century world. Culturally-engaged Americans were
part of a nation eager to take its place in the global community of states. That eagerness
made them cosmopolitan, open to appreciating and appropriating the riches of other
cultures.24 They were also imperial, aggressively and self-righteously expansionist.25 The
imperial nature of the United States was more obvious to outside observers than it was
to white Americans. As citizens of a republic born of an anti-imperial revolution, they
hesitated to label themselves as an empire, unless it was to employ the highly qualified,
self-congratulatory, and unintentionally ironic sobriquet “Empire of Liberty.”26 Finally,
Americans were also a postcolonial people. Historians have hesitated to apply that label,
perhaps because it is conventionally applied to subaltern populations and because
Americans have seemed so aggressively imperialist themselves.27 However, there is no
single model of postcolonial experience, and there is no reason a postcolonial society
cannot transition to become an imperial one. In any case, the postcolonial condition of
the United States injected an anxiousness into American society, a need to define its
place as a nation among nations and, most importantly, a deeply felt insecurity about
how its cultural productivity compared, and was seen to compare, with that of its peers
and competitors.28
The imperial, national, and postcolonial orientations of the United States shaped how
foreign influences shaped its culture, although they did so unevenly. Imperialism,
intertwined with a deep strain of racism, sharply circumscribed cosmopolitanism, as it
limited who Americans identified as their peers. Practically, Americans were only open
to influence from Europe and cultures derived from it, although even here was a hierarchy
bracketed by England at the top and Spain and the east toward the bottom. Vis-à-vis
Europe, the cosmopolitan, national, and postcolonial strains of national identity mingled
to create patterns of reception and resistance. Postcolonialism, for example, complicated
Americans’ reception of British culture, but it had no influence on their orientation
toward France, which was problematic for other reasons. The nationalizing impulse
created the broadest challenges to foreign influences because of the imperative to fashion
a distinct national identity free of the taint of the Old World’s corruptions. Few Americans,
even zealots like Noah Webster, were fundamentalists on this question.29 But even if
more were, isolating American culture from the outside was a practical impossibility.
Foreign influences shaped American culture in innumerable ways; it would be hard to
identify an important feature of American life that was not influenced in some way by the
outside world. Even political culture, perhaps the feature of American life foreign visitors
found most distinctive, was open to global influences. The point is not that voters took
foreign relations seriously – although they did – but that United States political culture
evolved out of its citizens’ sense of its place in global development. Americans’ ubiquitous
praise of the Union, for example, stemmed from their understanding of modern history,
often enhanced by travel. One southerner remarked that he drew from his travels in
Europe the conviction that “a man ought to travel to know how to love the Union and

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its institutions; that he must witness the empty parade and abject misery of other nations
before he can properly appreciate the happiness of his own.” This was precisely why
Andrew Jackson, in his proclamation against nullification, called South Carolinians’
attention to “our neighboring republics, every day suffering some new revolution or
contending with some new insurrection.” It could not but remind them, he believed, of
“the advantages and honor of the Union.” Likewise, as William Gienapp observed,
Americans “nurtured a deep-seated hatred of anything that smacked of aristocracy.”
Jeffersonians had needled their Federalist rivals with being real or closeted aristocrats.
Antebellum Democrats gleefully carried on this tradition, making it their mission to tar
their Whig adversaries with the same brush. Pro-Union and anti-aristocratic rhetorics
were staples of antebellum political discourse that grew out of the lessons Americans drew
from their engagement with the outside world.30
Although widespread consensus prevailed on the evils of aristocracy and the merits of
the Union, Americans more often disagreed on what attention to the outside world was
teaching them. They mocked aristocracy, but divided sharply over a closely related
matter, the appropriateness of gentility in a democratic republic. Gentility (alternately
known as cultivation, refinement, and respectability) embraced a set of behaviors that
marked the possessor as someone of elevated taste, personal merit, and social distinction.
This code of behavior emerged in early modern European courts. It would seem to have
been anti-American by definition. Could the manners and morals of aristocratic Europe
be reconciled with those of a democratic republic? Many Americans, for good reason,
were skeptical. “Refinement did not grow naturally from [Americans’] own upbringing
and culture,” notes Richard L. Bushman. “It came from outside, the rightful property of
another people. It often seemed like a contrivance and imposition, and how could it be
otherwise when gentility was first devised for courtiers and brought to culmination at
Versailles?”31
In fact, some features of refinement were widely reviled as un-American. Elite finishing
schools for young women came in for special censure, since their curriculum, heavy on
“ornamental” subjects like French language and literature, dancing, and musical instrument-
ation, was so clearly irrelevant to the lives of all but a tiny fraction of women. At the same
time, however, rejecting gentility whole cloth was simply unthinkable. As a middle class
– professionals, commercial farmers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and the like – developed in
the early nineteenth century, these women and men struggled to adapt their material and
moral lives to accommodate their increasingly ample means. Refinement, the code of
gentle people, was there for the taking, but the European code had to be reconciled with
American conditions. Existing English guides, most notoriously the letters of Philip
Dormer, Lord Chesterfield, were, in their unapologetic embrace of elitism and debauchery,
clearly inappropriate for American life. As a means of social differentiation, gentility pro-
voked critics among those whom it attempted to leave behind. Working-class women and
men especially resented the efforts of newly “respectable” people to stigmatize their ways
of life.32 But this was an argument about the boundaries of an American brand of gentility,
not an existential one about its legitimacy. The Astor Place Riots of 1849, which pitted the
working-class fans of American actor Edwin Forrest against the “codfish aristocracy” sup-
porters of Englishman William Charles Macready, after all centered on interpretations of
Shakespeare (Macbeth, in this case), not whether Shakespeare ought to be staged in America

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at all.33 American gentility as it developed in the early nineteenth century was democratic,
in the sense that it was open to those who could learn its mysteries and afford its accoutre-
ments, and also respectable, in the sense that it diminished the worldliness of the aristocratic
code by adding features like piety, industry, and modesty to the mix of qualities that made
a person genteel.
The trouble came in drawing the line that separated appropriate from inappropriate
expressions of genteel behavior, and it was here that travelers and travel writers had
standing that other Americans lacked. As people who had visited Europe, the source of
refinement, travelers had credibility on this issue. Also, they had seen their compatriots
act in ways unbefitting a republican citizenry. In condemning certain behaviors but not
refinement as a whole, travelers helped reconcile republicanism and urbanity. Americans
abroad were shocked to see their compatriots competing for tickets to exclusive balls and
other affairs, soliciting invitations to aristocratic dinner parties, and even seeking to be
presented at court. When the U.S. minister to Paris, Albert Gallatin, asked Virginian
William C. Preston to help him sift through the avalanche of applications from Americans
seeking entry into a ball in 1815, he could not hide his disgust at their “indecent and
unrepublican eagerness to get into an aristocratic party.” Preston concluded that
Americans harbored a “rapturous and romantic regard’ for nobility despite their republican
airs. On the opposite extreme, Americans also condemned disrespect for royals and
aristocrats, an affectation every bit as objectionable as servility. By the antebellum period,
Americans no longer looked on aristocratic Europe as the existential threat it had been in
Napoleonic times. It was possible, they concluded, to borrow selectively from the code
of gentility without compromising their identity as republicans.34
Most Americans knew that they suffered a gentility gap vis-à-vis the Old World, so they
were comfortable in deferring to Europeans on this score. Not so with other issues, most
especially the advance of liberty throughout the globe. They paid close attention to news
about struggles for national determination, republican government, and human rights in
Europe and elsewhere. These events shaped American national identity by compelling
reflection about America’s role in the world, although the extreme divisiveness caused by
the wars of the 1789 French Revolution probably moderated Americans’ enthusiasm for
foreign entanglements. Yet, nationalist and republican movements in Europe and the
Americas occurred frequently enough to ensure that no consensus on the country’s orien-
tation to revolutionary movements could solidify. Should Americans, as Adams argued,
merely exemplify self-government to the world, or should they actively encourage its
success? Perhaps no other issue more than this one exposes the hollowness of the dichot-
omy sometimes drawn between isolation and cosmopolitanism in early American history.
Even the most zealous American exceptionalists, the Young Americans of the 1840s and
1850s, insisted on the centrality of the United States in the contemporary world.35
There is a large and diverse literature on Americans’ engagement with revolutionary
movements, most especially the Revolutions of 1848, but most of it concludes that atten-
tion to these developments reinforced American exceptionalism. Not surprisingly,
Americans expected other peoples to follow their revolutionary model, which they assumed
was normative. But Americans had, by the 1830s, fashioned a very selective collective
memory of the American Revolution. It became very conservative and respectable, short
on violence, terror, civil unrest, violations of civil liberties, and other unpleasantness. The

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difficulties other peoples experienced in achieving independence and establishing self-

government spawned a paradoxical suspicion: as Philipp Ziesche writes, “Americans have
concluded that other nations are inherently incapable of following the American model and
that the perceived failure of foreign revolutions stems from not following that model closely
enough.”36
The argument that attention to struggles for freedom and independence across the
world buttressed American exceptionalism has been overstated. Consider the common
observation that Americans tended to interpret foreign events in their own terms, flatten-
ing out local conditions, and establishing a narrow standard of “acceptable” revolutionary
ends and means. The point is not that Americans did not do those things, but that they
are not narrowly applicable to Americans. As Don Doyle shows in his global history of
the American Civil War, foreign observers had very little understanding of the myriad
causes of the sectional conflict and the complex issues confronting the Lincoln adminis-
tration. The most idealistic puzzled over what they saw as the Union’s “failure” to take
the first opportunity to end slavery. Few understood the constitutional arguments for and
against secession and the limitations on presidential power.37 This confusion stemmed
from a number of causes, chief among them the difficulty of understanding a complex
foreign situation with deep historical roots. The same conditions confronted Americans
observing progressive movements across the globe.
These movements influenced American culture in diverse ways. The common pattern
was for the public to respond to news of a revolution with widespread enthusiasm that
transformed over time to cynicism or disappointment, confirming Americans’ sense of
national exceptionalism. That outline, however, disguises a messier reality. The 1848
Revolutions, extensively covered in the popular press, are especially instructive here.
The pattern held, especially when the revolution in France, ever the focus of Americans’
attentions, devolved into the bloody “June Days” and into the Second Empire. Yet many
Americans, especially those on the ground, cautioned their compatriots to be patient
with the progress of European self-government. Progress came in fits and starts, they
cautioned; republicanism would, in its own time, take root in Europe. These observers
were arguing against an absolutist conception of American exceptionalism. The United
States might be distinctive for the time being, but as progress made its way across the
globe it would become a republican nation amidst a community of republican nations.
Americans drew other lessons. Southern hotheads in the wake of debates about the
Wilmot Proviso drew back from glib disunionist talk when they saw what happened to
“secessionist” movements like Kossuth’s Hungary. Kossuth’s 1851–52 visit to the United
States prompted the most sophisticated debate about American intervention in world
affairs since Henry Clay’s appeal for supporting the Greeks in 1824.38 The Revolutions
challenged American reformers to examine their complacency toward disenfranchised
groups and the limited scope of their tactics. It showed northerners that slavery limited
their global influence by making it easy for reactionaries to taunt them as hypocrites.
And, not least, it made unionists realize the global stakes of the Civil War. At risk was the
fate of equality itself, the “electric cord,” Lincoln said, binding “the hearts of patriotic
and liberty-loving men together . . . throughout the world.”39
The 1848 Revolutions were not the only occasion when international pressure forced
Americans to reflect on slavery and race in critical ways. As the borders of the

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once-ubiquitous institution of chattel slavery closed around the United States, Americans
were forced out of their complacency about its future. In the revolutionary era, the
notion that slavery was a necessary evil coexisted with a vague sense that it would,
somehow, fade away and vanish in the course of time. Slavery disappeared in the western
hemisphere through metropolitan legislation, slave rebellion, and nationalist revolution,
but the controversy over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819–20 made it
clear that slavery in the United States was an expanding, thriving institution. Western
civilization was reaching a consensus on the immorality of African slavery at the same
time that it was becoming more entrenched than ever in the U.S. South. Foreign opinion
forced slaveholders to defend themselves and their institution in new and creative ways
at the same time it influenced internal critics of what was becoming known as the “peculiar
institution,” who were deeply engaged in an international antislavery movement.
The same visitors who criticized Americans for their chest-thumping nationalism,
vulgarity, and lack of high culture also singled out slavery for censure. Many of these
criticisms could be dismissed as simple anti-Americanism, but others cut deeply. Like
Americans generally, southerners read the novels of Charles Dickens and greeted him
warmly during his 1842 tour of the United States. And like their compatriots, they
were hurt by the publication of American Notes for General Circulation. Dickens ranked
slavery highly among his indictments of American life. He was disgusted both by the
economic blight of the slave South and the offensiveness of proslavery ideology.
Frances Anne Kemble’s criticisms of slavery also hit southerners hard. She married the
Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, without, she later claimed, knowing that he was the
owner of a large Georgia plantation. Her unsparing exposé of the contradictions
between proslavery platitudes and the realities of planation life could not be dismissed
as casually as could the criticisms of more obviously anti-American visitors.40 These
accounts, and others like those by Harriet Martineau, threatened southerners’ self-
image as respectable people – women and men in the mainstream of western civiliza-
tion who happened to be the owners of roughly four million enslaved human beings.
They had to be answered.
Southerners were as engaged as other Americans in the transatlantic literary market-
place. They became increasingly intolerant toward criticisms of slavery, especially in the
South itself, but southerners did not wall themselves off from contemporary intellectual
currents to protect themselves from antislavery sentiment.41 Instead, the region’s thinkers
responded by repackaging slavery so that it might be seen as of a piece with the progres-
sive spirit of the age. William Holcombe insisted, “African slavery is no retrograde move-
ment, no discord in the harmony of nature, no violation of elemental justice, no infraction
of immutable laws, human or divine – but an integral link in the grand progressive evo-
lution of human society as an indissoluble whole.”42 After securing passage of the 1833
law abolishing slavery, most British abolitionists turned their attention to the United
States, the world’s largest slaveholding society.43 That attention impelled southerners to
defend slavery in terms meaningful to Victorian sensibilities. James Henry Hammond,
responding to charges made by the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, acknowledged
that the slaveowner was as a moral agent “responsible to the world” for his or her slaves.
It was abolitionist agitation that forced slaveholders to control their property through “the
power of fear” instead of “their affections and pride”; whenever possible, owners strived

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to advance the moral and material well-being of their property. Slaveholders were human-
itarians, standing “in the broadest light of the knowledge, civilization and improvement
of the age.”44
That slavery benefited Africans by rescuing them from barbarism to be raised up in the
light of Christianity and western civilization may have been the most widely held plank
of the proslavery argument. Some went further, arguing that slavery was part of God’s
providential design to redeem Africa. The Dark Continent, having supplied savages to
the New World’s plantations, would be civilized and Christianized by their Americanized
descendants. International pressure also constrained southerners in how far they could go
to advocate for slavery. When, in the 1850s, some radicals began agitating for the reo-
pening of the Atlantic slave trade, they were quickly shouted down by those who under-
stood that such a course would make the South a pariah in the Christian world.
Southern-born African missionaries led the charge. South Carolinian J. Leighton Wilson,
a Presbyterian, and Georgia-born Baptist Thomas Jefferson Bowen used their travels in
Africa to show that the demand for slaves produced untold suffering that gave the lie
to the proslavery claim that the trade saved lives by sparing war captives. Others made
the case that reopening the slave trade would cross a moral line that would obliterate the
South’s moral credibility. As Rev. John Adger insisted, the slavery controversy “has
[been] from the first and still is a moral conflict. We lose strength whenever we abandon
the ground of justice and truth.” The knowledge that the world was watching acted as a
brake on the South’s drive to expand their slave empire by any means available.45
Slavery’s critics had a different relationship to foreign opinion. Historians have only
recently begun teasing out the transatlantic networks of antislavery cooperation, but it is
clear that American abolitionists were far more open to making positive use of foreign
influence than their slaveholding opponents. Both radical and moderate antislavery
activists in the American Anti-Slavery Society and the American Colonization Society,
respectively, were eager to reach out to their British counterparts for support, resources,
and ideas. The popularity and success of abolition in Britain stood in marked contrast to
the marginal position of radicals in the United States; the moral support of British friends
was especially important to the Garrisonian wing of American antislavery. But activists
across the spectrum, whether they sought to end slavery via moral suasion or political
action, learned much from Britons about means to reach, measure, and manipulate public
opinion, exert pressure on the government, and fight racist caricatures of Africans.46
Black abolitionists owed even more than their white colleagues to the support they
received in Europe, since the relative lack of prejudice they encountered there posed
such a refreshing contrast to the United States. Both white and black activists shamed
their compatriots by reminding them that Europeans had abolished slavery and treated
people of color with dignity, in contrast with supposedly liberty-loving Americans. “I
went to England, Monarchial England, to get rid of Democratic Slavery, and I must
confess that, at the very threshold, I was satisfied that I had gone to the right place,”
teased Frederick Douglass with his characteristic brio upon his return to the United States
in 1847. Although it must have been extremely satisfying for abolitionists to poke
Americans with their hypocrisy, it is likely that, as a tactic to advance the cause, it back-
fired. Douglass’s language was perfectly pitched to stoke the flames of American
Anglophobia. His rhetoric alienated the very people who needed to hear his message that

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racism was a foundational element of American exceptionalism every bit as much as

liberty and equality. In fact, despite their cosmopolitan airs – The Liberator’s masthead
read “Our Country is the World – Our Countrymen are Mankind” – abolitionists were
hardly immune from patriotic feelings.47 In his return speech Douglass had mildly rebuked
his friend William Lloyd Garrison for supposing that he was happy to return to his
“native country,” a statement that revealed the racial privilege that cleaved a gulf between
the most well-meaning white abolitionists and their black colleagues.48
Exposure to Europe and to European abolitionists gave American activists a broader
perspective on the means and ends available to them. But it was access to another part of
the world – Africa – that stirred the antislavery pot in quite different ways. Antebellum
Americans acquired information about Africa chiefly from three sources: colonists and
colonization activists; missionaries; and explorers. The American Colonization Society
had established Liberia on the western coast of Africa in 1822, thirty-five years after
Britain had founded the neighboring colony of Sierra Leone as a refuge for poor people
of color in Britain’s African diaspora. Colonizationists were a diverse bunch, but those
who were sincerely antislavery (as opposed to those who just wanted to rid the country
of troublesome freed slaves) reasoned that entrenched racism would forever prevent
black Americans from achieving equality in the United States. They could only pursue
the American dream, ironically, by leaving for somewhere where they could govern
themselves free from white interference. But the great majority of free African Americans
absolutely refused to consider leaving their homeland.49 To induce migration, the colo-
nizationist press put out a relentlessly sunny picture of African life. Garrisonians and like-
minded abolitionists who insisted on the moral imperative of immediate emancipation
and the necessity of integrating freed people into the fabric of American life had no use
for the colonizationists’ rendering of Africa. To deter colonization and emigration, they
fashioned their own caricature of the continent that stressed its deadly disease environ-
ment, tropical lassitude, and savage inhabitants.50 Missionaries, many of whom developed
an antipathy towards colonizationist schemes and who sympathized, to varying degrees,
with abolition, developed a more complex and sympathetic portrait. Seeking the
Christianization and “redemption” of the continent, they ministered to the natives, not
colonists. They also wished to trumpet the glory of the missionary enterprise, and so their
accounts combined an unsparing assessment of the physical challenges presented by Africa
with a sympathetic, humanizing account of its people. Altogether, these literatures placed
African people in the foreground. Missionaries, especially those with antislavery sympa-
thies, presented readers with empathetic renderings of African peoples that challenged
the racial stereotypes that undergirded support for the maintenance of slavery.51
These literatures intersected with others that informed American thinking about race.
Racism pervaded white society in both the North and South, but as an intellectual con-
struct racism stemmed from a vigorous international conversation between racial theorists
and other authorities across the western world.52 Americans could, with credibility, claim
a special expertise in the emerging field of racial science, but the so-called “American
School” of ethnology emerged within a vigorous transatlantic conversation about the
biological roots of race and other kinds of difference. As Reginald Horsman observes,
when Arthur de Gobineau published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in
1854, “he was summarizing and amplifying more than a half a century of ideas on race.”

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In just a couple of years, Darwin’s Origin of Species would propel that conversation forward
in completely new ways.53 What was more interesting, however, was the ways in which
international engagement challenged American racism. Racialist thinking was becoming
so conventional and popularized in the 1840s that writers were even beginning to divide
Europeans into distinct racial types. Some of them even attributed the outcomes of the
1848 Revolutions to the racial flaws of European peoples. Americans abroad were quick
to condemn those assessments. They admonished their compatriots at home of their
responsibility to support peoples fighting for republicanism and self-government regard-
less of their complexion.54
The most controversial challenges to racialist thinking contradicted American attitudes
toward Africans. Given how embedded anti-black racism was in American culture, these
critics made only limited progress, but what is remarkable is that they made any at all. The
essential ingredient in these reassessments was exposure to flesh-and-blood Africans.
The ordeal of the Amistad captives provided one of the first occasions for this reassessment.
As their case wound its way through the courts, abolitionists helped the rebels become
popular culture sensations. Dramatic presentations, engravings, newspaper articles, sermons,
and other media about the captives spread widely throughout the North. These accounts,
which were mainly sympathetic, contradicted conventional understandings of Africans as
lazy, shiftless, savage, and cowardly beings.55 As the Amistad faded in American cultural
memory, the accounts of African explorers filled the gap. Particularly with the publication
of David Livingstone’s hugely popular Adventures and Missionary Travels in 1857, American
readers met native Africans who were barely recognizable to a people whose notions of
Africans came from proslavery propaganda and minstrel shows. To be sure, accounts like
Livingstone’s (and also those of Americans J. Leighton Wilson and Thomas Jefferson
Bowen) competed with “dark Africa” accounts that confirmed Anglo-Americans’ most
lurid prejudices toward African peoples.56 But the immense credibility possessed by these
explorer-missionaries won them considerable attention in the popular press. Readers were
simply shocked by what they read. One critic enthused: “We have thought so contemp-
tuously of the black race and their land, that the facts here published, attesting the claims
of Africa to respect and study, come upon the world like a new revelation.” The reception
of these and other accounts of African travel reveals a seam of anti-racist sentiment that is
all but unexplored in this era’s historical literature.57
Clearly, Americans did not need to travel to engage with and be influenced by the
world outside their borders. Nevertheless travel endowed those with the leisure and
wealth to engage in it a credibility that their compatriots lacked. Attention was paid to
visitors to the United States and Americans abroad all out of proportion to their numbers
or representativeness. Whether contact with the world came in the comfort of one’s
parlor or through travel, the issue for Americans was never whether to engage with other
peoples, but how to do so. It is simply not the case that Americans were divided “between
sharply opposed conceptions of the process of nation building – pitting cultural inde-
pendence against global interdependence; exceptionalist isolationism against expansive or
expansionist outreach.”58 Cultural independence, to the extent that it was sought at all,
was pursued as a means to engage with other peoples as a peer, not as an alternative to
engagement. Even the development of a distinctive brand of American national identity
speaks to Americans’ commitment to participate in an Atlantic, and eventually global,

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network of cultural exchange; disinterest in nationalism truly would have marked the
United States as exceptional in the mid-nineteenth century.59 All parts of the globe did
not influence the United States equally, or in the same way. As the westernmost outpost
of western civilization, Americans were particularly keen to influence, and be influenced
by, Europe. Other parts of the world, notably Africa and Asia, were, insofar as Americans
were able to see them through the haze of prejudice and misinformation, negative exam-
ples – models of what Americans should avoid rather than what they should become. For
antebellum Americans no less than for ourselves, isolation was neither desirable nor
attainable.

Notes
1 For example, David Emory Shi and George Brown Tindall’s America: A Narrative History, brief
10th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), chs. 8 and 9 (“The Emergence of a Market
Economy” and “Nationalism and Sectionalism”), 286–345.
2 As in the subheading “Looking Inward, 1815–1860” to chapter 5 (“Developing a Continental
Market) of Lawrence A. Peskin and Edmund F. Wehrle, America and the World: Culture,
Commerce, Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 95.
3 Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Significance of the ‘Global Turn’ for the Early American Republic:
Globalization in the Age of Nation Building,” Journal of the Early Republic 31:1 (Spring 2011),
1–37; see also the special issue “Whither the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24:2
(Summer 2004), and in particular the essay by Andrés Reséndez, “Continental Possessions –
Three Deepening Trends,” pp. 160–166. For recent works that globalize U.S. history, see
Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since
1776 (New York: Mariner Books, 1998); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s
Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation:
United States History in Global Perspective since 1789, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015); Carl J. Guarneri, America in the World: United States History in Global Context (Boston:
McGraw-Hill Education, 2007); Lawrence A. Peskin and Edmund F. Wehrle, America and the
World: Culture, Commerce, Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); and –
the strongest evidence of all – a U.S. history survey text by Michael Schaller et al., American
Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The
trade press, too, is active – witness the attention devoted to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A
Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014) and Don Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations: An
International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
4 “Mr. Adams’ Oration: Address Delivered at the Request of a Committee of the Citizens of
Washington, on the Occasion of Reading the Declaration of Independence, on the Fourth of
July, 1821,” Niles Weekly Register n.s. 21:8 (July 12, 1821), 331; on Adams, see Charles Edel,
Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014); James Traub, John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit (New York:
Basic Books, 2016).
5 Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus; A Poem in Nine Books (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin,
1787), 203; “America,” Edinburgh Review 33:65 (January 1820), 79; Ian Tyrrell, “American
Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96:4 (October
1991), 1031–1055.
6 Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York
City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1984); Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–
1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); also useful is Kariann Akemi
Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013).

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7 Jennifer Clark, “Poisoned Pens: The Anglo-American Relationship and the Paper War,”
Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 6 (2002), 45–68; Herbert G. Eldridge,
“The Paper War between England and America: The Inchiquin Episode,” Journal of American
Studies 16 (April 1982), 49–68; Joseph Eaton, The Anglo-American Paper War: Debates about the
New Republic, 1800–1825 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
8 An American [Robert Biddle], A Review of Captain Basil Hall’s Travels in North America, in the
Years 1827 and 1828, 2nd ed. (London: R.J. Kennett, 1830), 5; Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 2:225.
Hall wrote that in no other country but the United States “does there exist such an excessive,
and universal sensitiveness as to the opinions entertained of them by the English.” Basil Hall,
Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1829),
1:14.
9 Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading
Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Larzer Ziff, Return Passages: Great American
Travel Writing, 1780–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
10 Views a-Foot: or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846); A
Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile
(New York: G.P. Putnam, 1854); A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 (New
York: G.P. Putnam, 1855); The Lands of the Saracen; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily,
and Spain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1855). Taylor is a surprisingly understudied figure,
considering his influence and popularity. See Liam Corley, Bayard Taylor: Determined Dreamer
of America’s Rise, 1825–1878 (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2014).
11 See Harold Frederick Smith, American Travellers Abroad: A Bibliography of Accounts Published
before 1900, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999); and Alfred Bendixen, “American
Travel Books about Europe before the Civil War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel
Writing, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 103–126. Ann Douglas has dismissed many of the travel “sketches” published in this
period as dispensable works indicative of the general enfeeblement of American popular culture
in this period: The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Noonday Press, 1998), 237–
238; see also William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5–7.
12 Unlike literary critics and anthropologists, historians have been somewhat reluctant to study
travel as a cultural practice or to examine the experiences of Americans abroad. Important
exceptions include Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson
to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Daniel Kilbride, Being American in
Europe, 1750–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Philip Rahv, Discovery
of Europe: The Story of the American Experience in the Old World (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday,
1960); Mary Suzanne Schriber, Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); and Christopher Mulvey, Transatlantic
Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the colonial period, see Julie Flavell, When London Was
Capital of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan
Patriots: Americans in France in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2010). More has been written about the post-Civil War era, when the pace of overseas travel
increased dramatically. For a recent, breezy example see Nancy L. Green, The Other Americans
in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2014). For a more extensive discussion of this literature, including works on Americans in
specific countries, see the “Essay on Sources” in Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 215–222.
13 “Self Reliance,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II: Essays: First Series, ed.
Joseph Slater (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 46.
Emerson would of course exploit that “fascination” in several of his own works, most notably
English Traits (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1856).
14 Mrs. Samuel Jaudon to Harriet Colles, July 14, 1844, in Emily Johnston De Forest, ed., James
Colles, 1788–1883: Life & Letters (New York: privately printed, 1926), 203. On the élan of

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Europe see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York:
Vintage, 1997); and Maurie McInnis, In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740–
1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).
15 Brandon DuPont, Alka Gandhi, and Thomas Weiss, “The Long-Term Rise in Overseas Travel
by Americans, 1820–2000,” Economic History Review 65:1 (2012), 144–167; and, on women,
the more detailed report by the same authors, “The American Invasion of Europe: The Long
Term Rise in Overseas Travel, 1820–2000,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working
Paper, No. 13977 (May 2008), 17–18 and table 1, p. 54. On estimates of travel to Europe
before 1820, see Susan Lindsey Lively, “Going Home: Americans in Britain, 1740–1776”
(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996), 5; and Julie M. Flavell and Gordon Hay, “Using
Capture-Recapture Methods to Reconstruct the American Population in London,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 32 (Summer 2001), 37–53.
16 [George P. Putnam], The Tourist in Europe: A Concise Summary of the Various Routes, Objects of
Interest . . . (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838); another American-authored guide of this
period was Roswell Park, A Hand-Book for American Travellers in Europe, Collated from Best
Authorities . . ., 2 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1853).
17 On these developments see Will Mackintosh, “‘Ticketed Through’: The Commodification of
Travel in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 23:1 (Spring 2012), 61–89.
Also, Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915
(New York: William Morrow, 1997); and Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries
of European Travel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).
18 James Freeman Clarke, Eleven Weeks in Europe; and What May Be Seen in that Time (Boston:
Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 326. On conditions aboard packets and steamships, see
Stephen Fox, Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships
(New York: HarperCollins, 2003), part one.
19 John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour through Italy, in the year 1802, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: M.
Carey, 1816), 1:38. See also Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and
France, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Silvana Patriarca,
“Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,” American
Historical Review 110:2 (April 2005), 380–408.
20 Nicely captured in studies by David S. Reynolds, especially Waking Giant: America in the Age of
Jackson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 175–308; and Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural
Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996).
21 John O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” United States Democratic Review 6:23
(November 1839), 427; Isaac Appleton Jewett, Passages in Foreign Travel, 2 vols. (Boston:
Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1838), 2:225.
22 Stowe, Going Abroad, 15; James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found (1838; New York: Hurd
and Houghton, 1871), 45. Cooper also acknowledged the enhanced cultural authority of
Americans who had been abroad when Grace Van Cortlandt reflects vis-à-vis her cousin Eve
that she “was so sensitive on the subject of the opinion of one who had seen so much of
Europe” (5); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South,
1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 1:210.
23 On the fragility of the Union in the geopolitics of the post-revolutionary era see James E.
Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse
of the Spanish Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
24 Cosmopolitanism is an understudied subject, but see Tom F. Wright, ed., The Cosmopolitan
Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2013).
25 On the merits of describing U.S. thought and behavior as “imperial” rather than labeling the
U.S. an empire, see Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United
States in the World,” American Historical Review 116:5 (December 2011), 1348–1391.
26 Douglas R. Egerton, “The Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis,
and Peter S. Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic

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(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 309–330; Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, eds.,
Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2015); Eugene S. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists: The U.S. Navy and
Liberia, 1819–1845,” Journal of the Early Republic 31:1 (Spring 2011), 107–134; Elizabeth Cobbs
Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). In general,
historians have been far more comfortable characterizing the pre-Civil War United States as an
empire than were contemporaries. See Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics
of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Ann Laura Stoler,
ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), 23–67; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an
American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2010); Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The
British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011); Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2001); Andy Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American
Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest
Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone
and Liberia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Lawrence C. Howard, American
Involvement in Africa South of the Sahara, 1800–1860 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1988).
William Appleman Williams pioneered the interpretation that the United States had, since its
inception, been an expansionist empire. See J. A. Thompson, “William Appleman Williams
and the ‘American Empire’,” Journal of American Studies 7:1 (April 1973), 91–104.
27 In establishing this national-imperial-postcolonial triad, with the addition of cosmopolitanism,
I am following the lead of Michael O’Brien, who applied it to the American South in Conjectures
of Order 1:2–7. The model is broadly applicable to the post-revolutionary United States in
general. On postcolonialism, see, among very many works, Ania Loombia, Colonialism/
Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin,
eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge, 2002); and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Hellen Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006). Both Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, and
especially Yokota, Unbecoming British, assess this period of U.S. history in postcolonial terms.
28 A. A. Phillips, apropos Australia, called this insecurity the “cultural cringe.” A. A. Phillips on
the Cultural Cringe (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006); Yokota, Unbecoming
British.
29 On Webster see Jill Lepore, A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United
States (New York: Vintage, 2002).
30 Letters from Three Continents, By M., The Arkansas Correspondent of the Louisville Journal (New
York: D. Appleton & Co., 1851), 17; James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages
and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, Vol. 2, 1817–1833 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1896–99), 654; William E. Gienapp, “The Republican Party and the Slave
Power,” in Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery
in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1986), 51. On the meaning of the Union, see also Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 2.
31 Bushman, Refinement of America, 298. Like honor, a related concept, it has taken some time for
historians to begin to integrate the concept of gentility into their interpretations of nineteenth-
century American culture. Earlier works included John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility:
Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Noonday Press, 1990); and Karen
Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America,
1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). More recently, see C. Dallett Hemphill,
Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University

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Press, 1999); Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the
Virginia Springs 1790–1860 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Charlene M.
Boyer Lewis, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Thomas A. Chambers, Drinking the
Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Daniel Kilbride, An American Aristocracy: Southern
Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006);
William Kauffman Scarborough, The Allstons of Chicora Wood: Wealth, Honor, and Gentility in
the South Carolina Lowcountry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Marise
Bachand, “Gendered Mobility and the Geography of Respectability in Charleston and New
Orleans, 1790–1861,” Journal of Southern History 81:1 (February 2015), 41–78; Jacqueline
Barbara Carr, “Marketing Gentility: Boston’s Businesswomen, 1780–1830,” New England
Quarterly 82:1 (March 2009), 25–55; and Jennifer L. Goloboy, “The Early American Middle
Class,” Journal of the Early Republic 25:4 (Winter 2005), 534–545.
32 A story well told in Paul Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (New York: Hill and Wang,
2003).
33 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 63–69.
34 Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1933), 59–60. See also Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 107–115.
35 There is a very large literature on responses to the French Revolution of 1789. For recent
works, particularly those featuring the views of American travelers, see Rachel Hope Cleves,
The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots; William L. Chew III, “Life
Before Fodor and Frommer: Americans in Paris from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy
Adams,” French History 18 (2004), 25–49; and Matthew Rainbow Hale, “‘Many Who
Wandered in Darkness’: The Contest over American National Identity, 1795–1798,” Early
American Studies 1:1 (Spring 2003), 127–175.
36 Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 169; this argument has most recently been made by Timothy
Mason Roberts in Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). See also Charles Downer Hazen,
Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964);
Merle Curti, “The Impact of the Revolutions of 1848 on American Thought,” Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society 93 (1949), 209–215; Eugene N. Curtis, “American Opinion of
the French Nineteenth-Century Revolutions,” American Historical Review 29 (January 1924),
249–270.
37 Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New
York: Basic Books, 2015).
38 “On the Greek Revolution, In the House of Representatives, January 20, 1824,” in Daniel
Mallory, comp., The Life and Speeches of the Hon. Henry Clay, 2 vols. (New York: Robert P.
Bixby, 1843), 1:432–439.
39 Lincoln quoted in Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words
(New York: Vintage, 2006), 203. On the influences of the 1848 Revolutions on Americans
see Roberts, Distant Revolutions; and Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 126–134.
40 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall,
1842); Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed.
John A. Scott (1863; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Jonathan Daniel Wells,
“Charles Dickens, the American South, and the Transatlantic Debate over Slavery,” Slavery &
Abolition 36:1 (2015), 1–25; Catherine Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2000).
41 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; New York: Vintage Books, 1991), popularized the
idea of the Old South as a place dominated by anti-intellectualism, emotion, and prejudice.
The much more sophisticated early work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

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suggested that the South’s commitment to the retrograde institution of chattel slavery made it
suspicious, if not hostile, to new ideas. In later scholarship, they balanced an acknowledgment
that southerners engaged to the intellectual currents of their age with their longstanding view
that the South stood at loggerheads with the spirit of the age. For their mature view, see
Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and
Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
see also Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Michael O’Brien, “On the Mind of the
Old South and Its Accessibility,” in Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual
History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 19–37; Cornelius A. van Minnen and
Manfred Berg, eds., The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); L. Diane Barnes, Brian
Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in
the Age of Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); on southern efforts to suppress
abolitionist sentiment, see Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South
(New York: Harper and Row, 1964); A. Glenn Crothers, Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth:
The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730–1865 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2012).
42 William H. Holcombe, “The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the
South,” Southern Literary Messenger 32:2 (February 1861), 84.
43 Sam W. Haynes, “Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas: The Quest for National
Security,” in Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire:
American Antebellum Exceptionalism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 115–
145; Matthew Mason, “A World Safe for Modernity: Antebellum Proslavery Intellectuals
Confront Great Britain,” in Barnes et al., The Old South’s Modern Worlds, 47–65; Elizabeth
Kelly Gray, “Whisper to Him the Word ‘India’: Transatlantic Critics and American Slavery,
1830–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 28:3 (Fall 2008), 379–406.
44 Gov. Hammond’s Letters on Southern Slavery, Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, the English Abolitionist
(Charleston: Walker and Burke, 1845), 23; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Slavery and the Principle of
Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South,” Journal of Social History 24:2 (Winter
1990), 299–315; Margaret Nicola Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of
Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); John Patrick Daly, When
Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002); Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery
and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Bertram Wyatt-
Brown, “Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Intellectual and the Proslavery Argument,” in J.
Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in
Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 27–49.
45 John Bailey Adger, “The Revival of the Slave Trade,” Southern Presbyterian Review 11:1 (1859),
116; J. Leighton Wilson, “The Foreign Slave Trade. – Can It Be Revived without Violating
the Most Sacred Principles of Honor, Humanity, and Religion?” Southern Presbyterian Review
12 (1860), 491–512; Thomas Jefferson Bowen, Central Africa: Adventures and Missionary Labors
in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa, from 1849 to 1856 (Charleston: Southern Baptist
Publication Society, 1857). On Wilson, see Erskine Clarke, By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-
Century Atlantic Odyssey (New York: Basic Books, 2013); O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 1:178–
181. A good case study on how international opinion constrained proslavery activism is made
by Yonatan Eyal, “A Romantic Realist: George Nicholas Sanders and the Dilemmas of
Southern International Engagement,” Journal of Southern History 78:1 (February 2012), 107–30;
also, Miles Smith IV, “From Savannah to Vienna: William Henry Stiles, the Revolutions of
1848, and Southern Conceptions of Order,” American Nineteenth Century History 14:1 (2013),
27–51.
46 W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Democracy: Garrisonian Abolitionists and
Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); on colonizationists,

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see Everill, Abolition and Empire; Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black
Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Floyd J.
Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1975); Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the
Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
47 “Country, Conscience, and the Anti-Slavery Cause: An Address Delivered in New York, New
York, on 11 May 1847,” in John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick
Douglass Papers, Ser. 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 2, 1847–54 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982), 59–60. McDaniel, The Problem of Slavery; Kilbride, Being American in
Europe, 154–165; Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass
and Transatlantic Reform (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).
48 John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
49 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Everill, Abolition and Empire.
50 Daniel Kilbride, “What Did Africa Mean to Frederick Douglass?” Slavery & Abolition 36:1
(2015), 40–62; James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–
2005 (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
51 Joseph Yannielli, “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity
in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010), 979–1000. On sunny
accounts typical of colonization literature, see Clarke, By the Rivers of Water, 191–208.
52 Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–
1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); David R. Roediger, The Wages of
Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Routledge, 1991);
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and
the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998); Robert Singerman, “The Jew as a Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American
Anti-Semitism,” in David A. Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1986), 103–128; Dale K. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and
Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Noel Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For critiques of this
literature, see Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor
and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 3–32; Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New
History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 (2002), 154–173.
53 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2; also Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the
Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002); William Ragan Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America,
1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian
Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
54 David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Richard C. Rohrs, “American Critics of
the French Revolution of 1848,” Journal of the Early Republic 14 (Autumn 1994), 359–377;
Roberts, Distant Revolutions; and Paola Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian
Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005);
Kilbride, Being American in Europe, 128–132.
55 Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York:
Viking, 2012); Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on
American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Iyunolu
Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United
States and Sierra Leone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

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56 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; Including a Sketch of Sixteen
Years’ Residence in the Interior of Africa . . . (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858); J. Leighton
Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1856); Bowen, Central Africa. On the tradition of “dark Africa” literature, see Michael
McCarthy, Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1983); Howard, American Involvement in Africa South of the Sahara; Jeanette Eileen Jones, In
Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and
Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
57 “Book Notes,” North American and United States Gazette, February 5, 1859, p. 2 col. 6.
58 Peter Gibian, “The Lyceum as Contact Zone: Bayard Taylor’s Lectures on Foreign Travel,” in
Wright, The Cosmopolitan Lyceum, 168.
59 Dorothy Ross, “‘Are We a Nation?’ The Conjuncture of Nationhood and Race in the United
States, 1850–1876,” Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005), 327–360.

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 7
PARTY POLI T I C S A N D
THE SEC TION A L C R I S I S
A Twenty-Year Renaissance in the
Study of Antebellum Political History

Frank Towers

From history’s inception as a professional discipline in the United States, leading practi-
tioners have criticized historians of politics for privileging high-level partisan competition
over more complicated and inclusive accounts that connect society to American democ-
racy’s formal arenas of elections and government. In 1911, Frederick Jackson Turner
warned that “the political historian handling his subject in isolation is certain to miss
fundamental facts and relations in his treatment of a given age or nation.” By the 1940s,
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., seemed frustrated that such advice had been ignored. “Politics is a
phenomenon of society and can be properly understood only in terms of society,” he
wrote. “This statement is obviously a commonplace, yet it is one whose full implications
have been explored only intermittently and capriciously by the writers of political history.”
In the 1960s, Lee Benson, a pioneer of what became known as the “new political history,”
advocated adopting social science techniques because “historical method, as developed to
date, cannot satisfy the demands made upon it by researchers interested in mass behavior
. . .”1 As evidenced by the persistence of these critiques, the tendency to treat politics as a
world apart from American society proved difficult to remedy.
By the 1990s, scholars surveying the field believed this long sought after breakthrough
had finally arrived. Mark Leff announced that, “the amalgamation of political and social
history is already well advanced.”2 Eric Foner declared “the old presidential synthesis –
which understood the evolution of American society chiefly via presidential elections and
administrations – is dead (and not lamented). And ‘politics’ now means more than the
activities of party leaders.”3 Although heartened by recent changes, others thought more
work needed to be done. Dan Feller advised historians “to surmount some of the concep-
tual barriers between social and political history by broadening our definition of ‘political’
beyond partisan activity.”4 Sean Wilentz wrote, “the job of reconnecting the pieces – and
especially of recombining social and political history – has only just begun.”5 Finally, it
seemed, historians were calling for a political history that fully integrated the world of
elections and government with society around them.
By 2016, historians could claim victory in the long campaign to bridge the divide
between society and politics. Having refused “the false choice between a political history
of elections and legislative battles on the one hand, and a social and cultural history

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sensitive to minority marginal perspectives on the other,” the study of antebellum

political history has opened up to a wider range of methods, topics, and interpretations
such that, as Sean Wilentz said in a more recent essay, it “makes more sense to speak of
American political histories, rather than of American political history per se.”6 Although
this state of affairs will frustrate students seeking to quickly classify major themes and
debates, that cost is offset by the closer engagement between political history and the
general scholarship of the antebellum period. That engagement challenges historians of
politics to read broadly in their period and make connections between seemingly
disparate fields of study.
Understanding how historians today study antebellum politics requires a detour into
what the 1990s historians of politics were reacting against, namely the American version
of the “new political history,” which rose to prominence in the 1960s.7 As Benson had
urged, the new political history borrowed social science methods, particularly the behav-
iorist approach to voting that looked for the underlying, normative patterns, or systems,
that informed the short-term drama of particular elections.8 Quantification of mass data
on voters, abetted by new computerized analysis, provided a rigorous, thoroughly scien-
tific means for discovering these patterns. By correlating long runs of voting returns with
the social characteristics of the electorate as revealed through public records, especially the
federal census, new political historians provided a much more complete picture of the
electorate than had prior scholarship.
The new political history matters for understanding the present state of the field
because some of its findings have served as the point of departure for current trends.
Beyond its methodological contributions, the new political history advanced three
important interpretations of antebellum politics. First, these scholars delineated a “second
party system” of stable competition between Whigs and Democrats that replaced an
earlier Jeffersonian v. Federalist era and would be followed by a third system of Republican
v. Democratic contestation. Second, the second party system inaugurated the “party
period” that lasted until the 1890s and was characterized by high voter turnout, unprec-
edented public engagement with electoral politics, and powerful political parties that
supplemented the capabilities of a relatively weak national government. From both of
these claims, historians of the sectional conflict built a third argument about the timing
of the Civil War. Because parties acted as stabilizers of national government, when they
collapsed, as the Whigs did in the 1850s, the process of voter realignment opened the
door for new, destabilizing parties grounded in sectional as opposed to national affiliations
to push the country into disunion and war.
The first of these contributions, the second party system, treated party loyalty as
remarkably stable and rooted in deep social identities rather than momentary conflicts.
Evidence for these patterns came from vote returns for Whigs and Democrats that
despite fluctuation in the winners of particular elections exhibited consistent bases
of support among constituencies defined by common social characteristics such as ethni-
city and religion that corresponded to broad themes in each party’s policies. Although
region and economic class mattered, the more primary identities of culture and faith
applied across the country. Those deep patterns undercut claims made by traditional
political historians for the significance of dramatic legislative confrontations or outsized
personalities.9

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A corollary to the party systems thesis was the “party period” explanation of nineteenth-
century elections and government, which held that “the types of parties formed in the
1830s and the patterns of partisan voting and partisan policymaking that stabilized by the
1840s endured for the rest of the century.”10 Led by Walter Dean Burnham, historians
noted a spike in the rate of voter turnout in the 1830s that remained high until the
1890s.11 High participation was one of several indicators of the important role played by
parties in American life. “With the full establishment of the second party system,” wrote
one historian, “campaigns were characterized by appeals to the common man, mass
meetings, parades, celebrations, and intense enthusiasm . . . In structure and ideology,
American politics had been democratized.” Party identity rivaled other deep attachments
like faith or ethnicity such that “political life formed the very essence of the pre-Civil
War generation’s experience.”12 Parties not only provided a worldview for organizing
public life, they also gave “cohesion to national politics and a measure of standardization
to governmental forms and processes throughout the federal system.”13 As the organizers
of policy and de facto managers of government appointments, parties provided “procedural
unity” for an otherwise weak central government and thereby acted as crucial supplements
to the state itself.14
The concept of the second party system managed to define the terms of debate such
that critics of the ethno-cultural interpretation of antebellum voting ended up reinforcing
the premise of a unique period of major party competition grounded in enduring voter
identities. New political history claims for ethnic and religious identities as the basis for
partisan attachments flew in the face of Progressive era scholars’ arguments that econom-
ics, especially banks, and slavery drove party conflict. Agreeing that the Progressives sim-
plified politics by reading present-day economic rationality into the past, early critics of
the new political history drew on a range of influences such as neo-Marxism, French
Annales history, and cultural anthropology. Despite their differences these intellectual
schools shared an interest in comparing cultures outside of older imperialist hierarchies in
order to emphasize the internal coherence, or logic, of the myriad systems of ideas that
human communities have created across time and space.15
Applied to antebellum America, scholars used these tools to study partisan rhetoric as
an expression of a historically distinct worldview, or political culture, that may seem
“paranoid” to modern readers, but was perfectly logical to nineteenth-century voters and
office seekers. The most significant finding of this research was republicanism, the
ideological legacy of the Revolution. At its simplest, republicanism conceived of liberty
as the goal of government, viewed power and its corrupting influence as liberty’s foe, and
conceived of a government by and for the people as the best guard against tyranny.
Judging where and how power threatened the people’s freedom became the basis for
broad cleavages in political thought that shaped the party system.16
Although sometimes aimed at showing the limits of voter studies, historians soon found
ways to match political culture with election data. In general, Whigs and later Republicans
supported Protestant moral reform, economic development via government-directed
internal improvements, and the rule of law over majority will. Those policies attracted
native-born, evangelical Protestants and middle-class strivers seeking to profit in the
growing market economy. On the other side, Democrats advocated for a broad definition
of liberty that resisted moral legislation on questions like Sabbath observance. Like Whigs,

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Democrats supported capitalism but they opposed national-scale investments in banks

and transportation that could privilege wealthy insiders at the expense of ordinary farmers
and shopkeepers. That perspective fed Democrats’ exaltation of the common (white)
man against enemies above, such as the Bank of the United States, and below, like the
Five Civilized Tribes of the southeast. Democratic ideology drew votes from small
farmers and artisans left out of the main currents of capitalist growth, as well as immigrants,
non-evangelicals, and a majority of southern slaveholders.17
This research into the underlying sources of stability and change in the party system
informed a related argument about the timing of the Civil War. Whigs and Democrats
competed nationally because their battles over economics and culture pertained every-
where and, therefore, kept at bay those who sought to divide politics geographically
according to pro- and antislavery majorities in the opposing sections. In 1846, a big
event, the Mexican War, reintroduced conflict over slavery’s extension, but even then
old loyalties died slowly, fading because of new cultural issues as well as gridlock over
slavery’s expansion. The breakdown of stable, cross-sectional party competition opened
a vacuum filled by the free-soil Republicans in the North and the militantly proslavery
wing of the Democratic Party in the South, each of which viewed leaders of the other
section as threats to liberty. Once politicians turned to sectional issues to mobilize sup-
porters, disunion became inevitable. In this way the second party system’s rise and
fall became a widely accepted explanation for the timing of the Civil War if not its
fundamental causes.18
In the past twenty years, each of the new political history’s main tenets – party systems,
the party period, and Civil War timing – has come in for sustained criticism, and its quanti-
tative methods have fallen out of use. The combination of direct rebuttal, on the one hand,
and a self-conscious turn away from older sources and subject matter, on the other, explains
a great deal about three important developments in the study of antebellum politics: the
collapse of any meaningful boundary between the early (Jeffersonian) and later (Jacksonian)
eras; a broader definition of politics oriented around civil society that has shined a light on
the politics of the disenfranchised; and renewed attention to the dominance of slavery as the
driver of political conflict throughout the period.
The first of these trends is a growing recognition of the continuity between politics
before and after the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, the standard dividing line in
second party system and party period narratives. A jumping off point for this critique has
been the new political history’s case for a surge in voter turnout beginning in the 1830s,
a statistical claim that informs cultural arguments about the significance of parties in
American life. Historians working on the early 1800s have found a much higher rate of
participation than claimed in earlier studies that labeled the earlier era a time of low
engagement, “deferential-participant politics.”19 High points in early national voter
turnout matched or exceeded the peaks of the Whig v. Democratic era. Whereas the
second party system’s highest turnouts occurred in presidential contests – topping out at
80 percent in 1840 – the earlier era’s highs happened in races for state or local office and
non-partisan ballot questions.20 Greater rates of voter participation before 1828 along
with indications that voters took more interest in local questions than national ones cast
doubt on the arguments that Whigs and Democrats were either the first to mobilize
popular support or agents of democratization.21

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Furthermore, despite party period claims that mass parties first appeared in the 1830s,
recent research has shown that Jeffersonians and Federalists used most of the later era’s
partisan strategies, such as preaching loyalty to party rather than individuals, mobilizing
voters through press and public gatherings, and using bureaucratic organizations to
coordinate campaigns and discipline rogue activists. Meanwhile, to the extent that
Jackson’s Democrats departed from old norms, they often did so in ways that curtailed
rights grounded in customs, such as replacing a “localist” tradition in southern courts
with a more rigid language of individual rights that left women, slaves, and other
vulnerable members of southern society with fewer claims on the legal system. In fact,
the growth of institutionalized parties may have discouraged mass participation in ways
that went beyond simply casting ballots. As Reeve Huston argues “Jacksonianism . . .
appears to be as much a containment and redirection of popular democratic aspirations as a
fulfillment of them.”22
Another challenge for the party period turnout model is the size of the electorate.
Most high turnout arguments take the U.S. census decennial population reports as their
baseline for determining how many eligible voters lived in a given district. Decennial
returns are difficult to use for fast-growing states that added new counties and witnessed
explosive growth within the ten-year snapshots of the census. Moreover, census takers
tended to undercount the total population – conservative estimates put the total under-
count at 10 percent – with the largest number of missing entries occurring among the
poor, nonwhite, and highly transient. Were the uncounted included in census estimates,
not only would the base of eligible voters increase (and the rate of turnout therefore
decrease), but the undemocratic character of eligibility rules would be magnified by
showing that an even larger number of adult Americans could not vote.23
Even if historians stick with inflated census numbers, all American women and a sizable
proportion of men still lacked the franchise. Where new political historians emphasized
the expansion of voting rights to propertyless white men in the early Republic, subsequent
scholars have paid more attention to the majority of adult Americans who remained dis-
enfranchised. For example, in the 1840 presidential election 80 percent of those eligible to
vote did so but they made up only 34 percent of the adult population, a much lower figure
than today’s total voting age turnout rates which regularly surpass 50 percent or more in
presidential contests. As Jean Baker put it, “How could a society that arrested Susan B.
Anthony and Virginia Minor for the classic behavior of inclusion – voting – be valued as
the best in our political history?”24
Where the new political history treated casting a ballot as the ultimate expression of
democratic involvement,25 subsequent studies have questioned voting’s significance as an
indicator of political engagement. Exploring the legacy of revolutionary mistrust of
“factions” and popular criticism of partisan politics as disreputable, Glenn Altschuler and
Stuart Blumin found that many Americans were not engaged partisans at all and their
attitudes ranged from indifference to outright hostility. They pointed to numerous
examples of voter fraud and electoral coercion that literary figures like Walt Whitman
criticized and humbug showman P. T. Barnum admired.26 Antipartyism, the popular
hostility to partisan politics, constituted “a parallel framework of nonpartisan belief and
experience [that] coexisted alongside, and interacted with, partisan politics throughout
the party period, helping to shape third party eruptions and American political thought.”

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Longer studies by Mark Voss-Hubbard and Ronald Formisano uncovered the effectiveness
of antiparty rhetoric in fueling successful third party challenges throughout the nineteenth
century.27
Antipartyism informed not only third party challenges but major party ideology as
well. Especially problematic for the party period thesis was the Whigs’ ambivalence
towards partisan politics. Stitched together from the very different threads of the National
Republican Party, the Anti-Masonic Party of the northeast, and John C. Calhoun’s
nullifiers in the Lower South, Whigs shared a common antipathy to the party-above-
principle style of Jacksonian Democrats and they only reluctantly adopted the mass
mobilization tactics of their opponents.28
Furthermore, the Whigs’ brief twenty-year lifespan was far from stable. Single-issue
challengers like the North’s antislavery Liberty Party and the anti-immigrant American
Republican Party cut into their support in the 1840s, as did the Lower South’s contests
between Southern Rights and Union tickets in 1851.29 In the mid-1850s new challengers
– the Know Nothings and the Republicans – capitalized on Whig weakness to topple the
party once and for all.30
Meanwhile, other scholars have challenged the interpretation of the Democratic Party’s
origins as a means for creating an equilibrium between national parties that would subsume
sectional loyalties, a scheme often attributed to New York’s Martin Van Buren as a remedy
to the dangerous sectional conflict exhibited during the Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821.31
Looking at party development in Illinois, Gerald Leonard found that “a Van-Burenite
avant garde” defended the formation of institutionalized parties as “a conservative defense
of traditional antiparty constitutionalism – the proposed party was to be a party of the
whole sovereign democracy, not just a part of it . . .”32 John Brooke comes to a similar
conclusion in his study of Van Buren’s home county of Columbia, New York. Brooke
argues that Van Buren promoted regular procedures and institutional loyalty in order to
conserve the revolutionary triumph of democracy over an aristocracy that had used the
state to further its privileges. As such, Democrats inherited the Jeffersonian creation of a
“party to monitor the exercise of power and protect the people’s rights.” They viewed
Whigs as “part of a vast conspiracy to subvert the sovereign consent of the people.”33 The
case can be made that neither Whigs nor Democrats regarded their foes as a loyal opposition
necessary to democracy’s survival.
This new appreciation for the instability of pre-Civil War politics has shifted attention
to election violence. Discounted by the new political history as an aberration that
occurred rarely and had little impact,34 recent studies have shown that “violence in and
around the polls was not rare” and could change the outcome of the vote. The late
antebellum era experienced at least 72 election riots that resulted in 110 deaths and many
more injuries. In the mid-1850s Know Nothing Party election mobs drove away enough
Democratic voters to tip the balance of elections in a few cities, most notably Baltimore.
A study of South Carolina concludes that “paramilitarism and violence had been integral
to the grassroots practice of proslavery politics since the 1830s and was a regular and
recurring feature thereafter . . . limiting the boundaries of discourse and silencing dissent.”
In his study of election practices Richard Bensel observed that, “although popular voting
is the quintessential characteristic of a democratic political system, the polling place, in
nineteenth-century America, was one of the less democratic sites in the nation.”35 For

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other scholars, rioting at the polls was simply the rowdy excess of a highly engaged
electorate, a kind of rough edge on the vibrant civic culture of Tocquevillian America.
According to Mary Ryan, for example, “a riot was not so much the breakdown of the
democratic process as its conduct by other means.” Commenting on the everyday
rowdyism of elections, Jon Grinspan finds a connection between youthful interest in
violent competitions and voting. Rather than discouraging participation, polling place
fights attracted the attention of competitive-minded young men.36
Common to these competing interpretations of political violence is their focus on the
polling place and voting. Antebellum voting was a public act regulated as much by
the contesting parties as by the state. Polling places were often located in a privately
owned facility such as a tavern or meeting hall. There, voters handed a printed ballot to
an election judge after passing through a crowd of interested onlookers. Such a setting
gave voting cultural significance beyond its instrumental role in choosing candidates. The
ability to successfully cast a ballot marked the voter as a member in good standing of
the community of citizens, whereas the inability to vote powerfully reinforced the lack
of full citizenship for the disenfranchised.37
Election violence could break out when partisan crowds tried to intimidate rival voters
who then fought back. Inevitably these conflicts tied into the question of social order and
overlapped with other forms of collective violence such as proslavery intimidation of
suspected abolitionists, riots by urban fire companies and tavern gangs, and honor-driven
confrontations between individual men. In these cases the perpetrators used violence to
establish their dominance in the social life of particular neighborhoods that extended to
polling places and electoral contests. Whether evidence of anti-democratic coercion or a
rowdy but engaged electorate, the prevalence of political violence challenges an
impression of antebellum voting as an individualistic act governed by rational choice.38
As some scholars revised the party period thesis about popular participation, another
group cast doubt on its view of parties as vital supplements to a weak national govern-
ment. Variously labeled the “new institutionalism,” “policy history,” and “political
economy,” these studies focused on the state itself and its role in creating paths for polit-
ical development that reached beyond any specific electoral campaign. Scholarship
advancing the “weak state” interpretation of antebellum government emerged during the
Cold War as part of an effort to identify what made America “exceptional” to the totali-
tarian systems of Europe. It was during the 1950s that historians such as Louis Hartz and
Daniel Boorstin elevated to the status of a prophet Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the
1830s argued that democracy had freed America from the tyranny of the state only to
oppress it by the force of public opinion.39 This case for America’s limited government
continued in the new political history’s focus on parties and voters to the neglect of gov-
ernance, and in political culture studies of republican ideology, which pitted state power
against the people’s liberty. Although they agree “that antistatism shaped the structure of
the federal government,” historians who argue for a stronger state presence in the nine-
teenth century argue that “the result was not simply a state that was weak by European
standards . . . but a state that commanded significant political strength in numerous policy
domains and one that substantially influenced American life.”40
Among its achievements, the early American government made possible the capitalist
expansion that ironically extolled the individual entrepreneur as its guiding force. As

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Richard John observes, “In the United States, no less than in France, Germany, or Great
Britain, big government preceded big business.” John’s history of the U.S. postal service
illustrates this point. The postal system created a federally-run communications network
staffed by federal employees that spread literacy, news, and nationalism. Similarly, John
Larson showed how political demands on the state stimulated public works, such as the
National Road and the Erie Canal, that facilitated trade and migration into the interior.
Whereas early projects had been state-directed, a spate of bankruptcies and corruption
scandals abetted anti-statist arguments against federally-directed improvements so that by
the time of the railroad boom in the 1840s private actors controlled transportation
projects albeit with the bulk of funds still coming from government in the form of land
grants and loans.41
In these and other realms, the distinctive feature of American government was not its
weakness but instead its diffusion among a dizzying mix of local, state, and federal
authorities and private and semi-private agencies (publicly chartered banks, for example).
By delegating and doubling governmental powers to innumerable lower-level actors the
American state increased its ability to carry out policy even as it decreased the unitary
power of its central government. As William Novak has argued, this “infrastructural
capacity” helps to explain the paradox of a country that prides itself on limited government
moving in short order to dominate the continent and later the world. Party politics
mattered in this history – for example, anti-statist Democrats killed the Bank of the
United States – but particular changes in party power could not overthrow the long-term
path set in the 1790s of federal power quietly asserting itself throughout the economy and
society.42
In summary, the concept of a second party system, and its corollary of a party period
of high voter engagement, has been challenged, if not replaced, by an argument for
continuity between the early and later eras of pre-Civil War political history and a dramat-
ically revised interpretation of the place of party in antebellum democracy. Recent schol-
arship has found continuity in terms of party organization, fluctuating voter participation,
and partisans’ reluctance to accept their rivals as a legitimate opposition. Furthermore,
studies of antipartyism and election violence have called into question the depth of voter
loyalty to parties as well as the orderliness of the democratic process. Finally, new studies
of governmental institutions have cast doubt on the claim for parties as critical supplements
to a weak American state. As such, these disparate studies, most of them launched as
responses to arguments dating from the new political history, mark a significant intellec-
tual departure from the standard narratives that reigned in the latter third of the twentieth
century.
Whereas the foregoing studies correspond to a model of critique and revision of older
scholarship, an equally significant vein of recent writing has bypassed those debates by
redefining the subject matter of political history beyond the confines of voters, parties,
and legislatures. Building on work already underway in the 1980s, historians have
developed a much more complete understanding of how disenfranchised Americans acted
politically and how their history redefines the boundaries of the political. Historians of
nineteenth-century women have led this drive for “a more inclusive definition of politics
than is usually offered.” For example, Paula Baker advocated “a relatively broad”
understanding of politics that could “include any action, formal or informal, taken to

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affect the course or behavior of government or the community.”43 Studies of women’s

political activity fit with scholarship that has dismantled the concept of “separate spheres”
– the bourgeois rhetorical designation of a masculine public of work and politics and a
feminine private sphere of home and family – as in any way an accurate description of
lived reality.44 In the 1980s a wave of studies explored antebellum women’s work in
reform, voting rights, and the basic definitions of citizenship.45 From this opening,
historians have found abundant evidence that despite being denied the vote,46 women
made their voices heard in politics through several different means. A relatively small
number were active partisans who wrote extensively about party politics and influenced
party decision-making in their capacity as advisors and power brokers. Some attended
partisan gatherings as passive symbols of a particular candidate or party’s virtue. In the
middle, thousands of women, most of them white and middle-class, used petitions and
voluntary associations to influence public policy.47
To bring these female political activists into political history, historians have turned to
the public sphere, a “transparent domain of information, association, and conversation
. . .” that “mediates between private life in all its forms and the governing polity.” Unlike
formal government with its sharp boundaries on participation and power, the more
diffuse public sphere brings into political history the conflicts raging in antebellum
society, often with people denied the vote at their center because every American could
participate in the street corner debates, petition campaigns, parades, speeches, and
boycotts that shaped public life. Describing the potential of this new subject matter,
Mary Ryan said “the public was no more than an invitation to imagine a historical plane
of commonality and connection that did not pulverize differences, where power was
recognized without erasing the less powerful.”48
The diffuse network of community organizations that undergirded public sphere
debates emerged out of a battle over the legitimacy of voluntary associations, corporations,
and other privately organized entities engaged in public action. Understood by the
revolutionary generation as potential competitors to the state, legislators tried to suppress
them in the 1790s and early 1800s, but when they were voted out of office these same
political actors turned to voluntary associations to combat their opponents in government.49
By the 1840s, the ability to organize for public action through voluntary association had
become a favored vehicle for Americans either disengaged from the parties and/or denied
the right to vote and hold office. Instead of resorting to federalism’s checks and balances,
these activists appealed to the public’s moral sensibility. These “moral minorities,” as
Kyle Volk terms them, “propagated a pluralistic conception of democracy in which the
protection of minority rights was essential to the preservation of moral freedom, cultural
diversity, and social equality.” To do so, however, required disenfranchised Americans to
fight a public discourse that treated their civil society contributions as “social” rather than
“political.” Nancy Isenberg argues that women who made their voices heard on questions
ranging from the Mexican War to suffrage rights fought a battle over “the meaning of
civil society” in which “feminists sought to justify women’s political equality and their
public presence.”50
Women’s political activism necessarily brought debates about gender identity into
partisan contests. As Daniel Howe states, the Whigs’ “ties to evangelical reform movements
like temperance and an intimation of their faith in the moral influence of women on

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men” made them the beneficiaries of this surge in women’s political activism and imbued
their campaigns with a more egalitarian message than the Democrats, an ironic twist on
1830s campaign rhetoric that promoted the Democrats as the party of the common man
(but not woman).51 Taking this analysis forward to the 1850s, other historians have argued
that “Democrats and Republicans positioned themselves within a larger cultural debate
then being waged over the wisdom of changes their constituents were making (or resisting)
in their own family practices and gender roles.”52 Democrats weaved into their policy
positions a cultural defense of a man’s right to be sovereign within his home, free from
outside interference, whereas Republicans advocated for the ameliorative power of the
state to make families more virtuous through a connection to moral reform programs,
either private or state-sponsored.53 Historians also found in abolitionist rhetoric a rich vein
of gendered metaphors used to attack slavery, often under the lead of female activists who
argued that “slavery desecrated domesticity.”54
Applied to the coming of the Civil War, the battle between reform-minded support-
ers of the domestic family, a view more popular in the North, and traditionalist advocates
of patriarchal household relations, who were more prevalent in the South, mapped onto
the sectional division over slavery. These competing gender ideologies made the Civil
War readable as a “crisis in gender.” Looking at the South Carolina Low Country,
ground zero for the secession movement, Stephanie McCurry found a patriarchal world-
view that stood “in distinct contrast to bourgeois gender ideology” of the North. Such
an understanding of their identity as men and women made nonslaveholding South
Carolina whites receptive to proslavery extremism “on the common ground of gender.”55
In the same way that these studies of gender have broken open the definition of politics,
histories of African Americans, most of whom whether free or enslaved could neither vote
nor hold public office, have also pushed beyond the formal world of elections and
government.56 In his study of black politics in the rural South, Steven Hahn proposes a
“broad understanding of politics that is relational and historical, and that encompasses
collective struggles for what might be termed socially meaningful power. Which is to say
that the appropriate conceptual universe of study must be determined by a specific social
and historical context.” These guidelines inform Hahn’s new interpretation of slave
politics. The enslaved used such seemingly apolitical means as family organization, rumor,
and flight to push for self-rule apart from white interference, a drive for a separate nation
that contrasts with more conventional narratives of the black freedom struggle that
foreground the quest for inclusion in a nation originally restricted to white men.57
Although not always in agreement with Hahn’s argument about nationalism, other
historians have shown the importance of African-American politics for shaping both big
questions about citizenship and slavery as well as narrower ones about specific party
battles and elections. In his study of Boston’s African-American community, Stephen
Kantrowitz investigates an almost metaphysical quest for a “citizenship of the heart” in
which African Americans “infused the word ‘citizen’ with meaning beyond a common
set of rights and obligations.” Similarly, rather than focus on the fight for equal rights
before the law, Patrick Rael looked at how “black northerners cofabricated with other
Americans the political racial discourse of the public sphere.” Mobilizing through their
own voluntary associations, African Americans advanced a “black protest ideology”
against white supremacist denigration, but found that the price of entry into a common

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discourse ended up reinforcing other hierarchies of gender, class, and “Western

civilization” that blunted the potential for fuller liberation.58
Meanwhile, battles between runaway slaves and their pursuers along the sectional
border helped to polarize opinion on both sides. Across the late antebellum South
politicians and voters turned rumors of slave revolt, often pushed by the enslaved, into a
rationale for choosing the hardline proslavery wing of the Democrats over more moderate,
and pro-Union, elements of the opposition. In 1856, fears of combative slaves in
Kentucky and Tennessee drove nervous border state moderates to vote for Buchanan.
Three years later, “slaves’ aspirations for freedom and white electoral politics converged”
in John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The raid and its
aftermath, in which Republicans became suspect of aiding the rising, “ended the
possibility of an alliance between Virginia’s Opposition and sympathetic Northerners in
a ‘United Opposition’” to southern fire eaters who increasingly preached disunion as the
only way to preserve slavery. The next summer, a series of fires in and around Dallas,
Texas, set off another panic over slave rebellions, helping to solidify Lower South support
for southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge’s presidential candidacy and then for
secession following Lincoln’s victory.59
Although a less obvious place to look for politics beyond the franchise, the links
between the antebellum public sphere and the formal world of diplomacy and statecraft
have yielded new insights into foreign influences on American politics. Indigenous
Americans have provided the most complicated example of the transnational dynamic.
Some peoples, most notably the southeastern Indians forcibly deported to the West by
Andrew Jackson, exercised a fragile dual sovereignty that gave them a voice in state politics
and won allies at the federal level. For the Cherokee, some of whom had the vote, working
within the American public sphere made sense as a way to advance their claims. Others,
like the Comanche of the Plains, lived outside of U.S. control and ignored its political
structures in pursuit of their own national aims. As Brian DeLay has shown, indigenous
politics played a critical role in weakening the power of the Mexican state and opening the
way for U.S. conquest in 1846. 60
European connections have also drawn attention from historians interested in the
transnational history of politics. Longstanding antipathy to Great Britain shaped public
policy and entered into electoral contests. Events such as the Revolutions of 1848 pro-
vided a point of reference for Americans contemplating the pros and cons of national
self-liberation. The flood of immigrants arriving between 1845 and 1854 brought not
only fears of foreign influence that gave rise to the Know Nothing Party, but also a cadre
of radical immigrant activists who invigorated the antislavery cause in America. And
numerous American political activists corresponded with European counterparts, visited
their countries, and brought them to America to advance causes that cut across national
boundaries.61
These histories of the disenfranchised, public discourse, and transnational influences
have shown that the larger public sphere in which much of this history took place can
better connect social identities and divisions to questions about the distribution of power
and governance than can a narrower focus on formal parties and eligible voters. In this
way the last two decades of scholarship have met the timeworn call for a history of
politics that fully engages society.

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A final break from political history as it was practiced from the 1960s to the 1990s has
been in relation to slavery. Not only have the enslaved been shown as political actors in
their own right, but conflict over slavery has reemerged as the dominant force driving
antebellum politics. Although earlier scholarship recognized slavery’s significance in the
sectional conflict, it did so within a political culture framework that made the case for
other factors, most notably party system equilibrium and the autonomous impact of
ethno-cultural conflicts on its collapse.
As noted above, that narrative emphasized sectional divergence ending in a clash of
northern and southern civilizations in the Civil War. In the urbanizing northeast, so the
story went, a rising middle class increasingly viewed home and work as separate spheres
and from that division developed new awareness of the need to protect the vulnerable,
be they their own children or slaves in the South. Meanwhile a retrograde South remained
rural and committed to a different version of household relationships that privileged male
mastery over dependents above all else, even profits. The second party system forestalled
conflict because its cross-sectional parties managed to compromise on sectional issues.
When it fell apart in the 1850s, as much a result of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing
Party as renewed sectional agitation, the last national institutions turned sectional and
disunion became inevitable.62
Although elements of this argument continue to inform recent political histories – for
example, arguments about gendered political cultures draw on this juxtaposition of modern
and traditional families – for the most part, historians have jettisoned this teleological view
of Civil War causation and dramatically revised slavery’s place in antebellum politics and
society. Slavery now appears as the spearhead of nineteenth-century American capitalism
rather than its rearguard, and studies of slaveholders emphasize their vast wealth, political
influence, and global connections, all factors that help explain their dominance of American
political economy into the 1850s.63 Studies of the Constitution and antebellum courts
have shown how American law protected property rights in slaves at the expense of other
claims, such as the universality of liberty announced in the Declaration of Independence.
Thereafter, slaveholders and their political representatives prevented the federal government
from exercising key powers to tax personal property (slaves) or regulate interstate
commerce (the domestic slave trade).64
As early as the 1787 Constitutional Convention, friends and foes of slavery recognized
that slaveholders’ ability to use government in defense of their interests would be the
primary struggle in national politics. In the North, slaveholders relied on “doughface”
allies, primarily in the Democratic Party, to prevent what by the 1790s was an already
robust antislavery movement that fully engaged partisan politics and criticized the “slave
power” for stifling free-labor opportunities long before Republicans would ride that
argument to victory.65
Rather than an emerging middle class that connected domestic ideology to the evils
of slavery, the opposition to slavery now seems to have been driven primarily by those
most directly harmed by the institution: first and foremost, African Americans, and,
secondarily, poor white farmers and workers threatened by competition with the products
of slave labor if not competition with enslaved workers themselves. Challenging
arguments that racism dominated white workers’ politics regarding slavery, Bruce Laurie
has recently shown that “there was no single working-class position on slavery; rather

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workers exhibited diverse views from proslavery to antislavery to abolitionist, with the
weight shifting toward the second two over time.” In these studies, natural rights
arguments and a defense of democracy from tyranny outweighed the rhetoric of middle-
class domesticity.66
From this revised picture of antislavery as older, more politically engaged, and the early
source of ideas that animated the Republican Party in the 1850s, historians have moved
the abolitionists from the periphery to the center of northern politics. In her innovative
study of the discourse of disunion, a prime example of how public sphere debates impacted
formal political processes, Elizabeth Varon traces the dialectic between the “incisive and
trenchant . . . political analyses” of “radical abolitionists” and proslavery politicians who
made abolitionists better known by working “relentlessly to keep them front and center
in the slavery debates.” By 1858 immediate abolitionist ideas had been mainstreamed by
Republican Party leaders who described disunion “as a cataclysmic collision” and a
“secular vision of deliverance.”67 Similarly, James Oakes has shown the centrality of
abolitionists like Frederick Douglass to the Republican cause. Referring to the title of his
most recent study, Oakes explains, “the scorpion’s sting was the radical policy, borrowed
from the abolitionist movement, adopted in principle by the Republican Party in the
1850s, and substantially implemented during the first year of the Civil War.”68 Meanwhile
some scholars have taken the Republican critique further to argue that northern Democrats
were, in fact, tools of the South. According to Michael Landis, the Democratic Party
“banner may have read freedom, equality, and democracy, but the reality was an organization
dedicated to slavery, concentrated wealth in the form of land and slaves, and antidemocratic
minority rule.”69
For the South, historians’ new appreciation for slavery’s modernity has undermined
familiar arguments that the section’s politics were governed by an ancient ethic of honor
and that tensions within the section could largely be explained as a contest between
forward-looking townsmen and industrious small farmers, more dominant in the Upper
South, versus the tradition-bound planter elite and their retainers who reigned in the
Lower South.70
The turn toward transnational and comparative history has helped to recast the slave-
holders from defensive-minded parochialists to aggressive imperialists fully enmeshed in
battles for international commercial and political supremacy. As scholars have demon-
strated, under the Virginia dynasty, early national presidents acquired new territories for
slavery, flushed out pockets of free black resistance on the border, and pursued the growing
cotton trade with Europe. In the 1840s slaveholders responded to the threat of British
emancipation in the Caribbean and Mexican instability by pressing for Texas’s annexation,
an aggressive act that led to the acquisition of even more slave territory in the Mexican
War. This pattern of slaveholder dominance in foreign policy met with growing resistance
in the North and in the next decade provoked the all-out battles over slavery in the
territories.71
Studies of the southern middle class have found that domestic ideology and bourgeois
family values had plenty of adherents among white southern Democrats, including seces-
sionists.72 Other scholars have highlighted the power of slaveholders in party and govern-
ment and their willingness to subvert democratic principles if it protected their overriding
goal of protecting and expanding slavery. For example, when, in 1850, Californians

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rejected slavery in their new state constitution, southern politicians began abandoning
their earlier unconditional support for local self-government (a version of state’s rights) in
favor of federal protection for slavery in the territories as a constitutional defense of prop-
erty rights. And within California proslavery forces used every trick at their disposal,
including violence, to forestall Republican control of the state. Similarly, during the
secession crisis proslavery leaders showed little hesitation in coercing nonslaveholding
whites to back their cause, as illustrated in histories of the South Carolina upcountry and
northern Alabama.73
Scholarship that emphasizes polarization over slavery has a counterpoint in literature
on Civil War causation that highlights contingency and the war’s avoidability. Among
the most influential of these works is Edward Ayers’s 2003 history of nearby counties in
Pennsylvania and Virginia. Slavery is central to this history but instead of creating a stark
divide, the institution “connected the North and South. Its dark threads were woven
through Unionism as well as secession.” Giving credence to compromise proposals that
would have moved ahead with earlier settlements on slavery’s territorial status, Ayers
argues that “left to themselves the white people of the border would never have descended
into such conflict.”74 Aside from its claims for contingency, Ayers’s analysis of slavery in
American politics fits with the case for seeing slavery as a national, as opposed to sectional
institution that spread its tendrils into the public life of the free states and the political
alliances of its elected representatives. This perspective on slavery fits with Hahn’s advice
that treating “slavery as national” allows historians “to think more fully about slavery,
emancipation, and, eventually, the Civil War not so much as manifestations of funda-
mentally antagonistic forms of social and productive organization or of ‘irrepressible con-
flicts’ between a ‘free-labor North’ and a ‘slave-labor South,’ but rather as central aspects
of American state formation . . .”75
Hahn’s recommendation speaks to the ways that the transformation of political history
in the last two decades has made possible a new perspective on the sectional conflict.
Bringing together histories of the founding era with the later antebellum decades shows
continuities between an early, intense battle over slavery’s expansion that shaped later
developments. Paying attention to the public sphere activism of the disenfranchised has
shown the importance of antislavery to the larger world of politics and its influence on
the policies of elected leaders. Meanwhile studies of political economy have shown
slavery’s reach into the courts and federal administration as well as its advanced place in
the capitalist economy itself.
It would be convenient to end the essay on this summary of what changes have been
made to study of antebellum politics since the mid-1990s, but that would distort the
actual output of political history in our time and leave students wondering why they find
a steady flow of books that continue the traditional focus on political leaders and big
events. For example, in light of the foregoing it may be surprising to know that the last
two books on late antebellum politics to win the Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to the
best books in U.S. history, were a history of the Democratic Party and a study of Abraham
Lincoln’s views on slavery, authored by Sean Wilentz and Eric Foner, both of whom
earlier in their careers wrote on the need for political historians to broaden their focus.76
Their recent success in writing about “high” or “formal” politics should indicate the
continued value of studying leaders and elections.

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In addition to Wilentz and Foner there is an array of other fresh approaches to elite
politics, such as Rachel Shelden’s study of interpersonal friendships among congressmen
living in Washington’s boarding houses, or William Dusinberre’s study of President
James K. Polk’s double career as a politician and slaveholder, or Amy Greenberg’s
close-up look at the leaders involved in the Mexican War who prevented a postwar
settlement that would have annexed all of Mexico.77 Each of these books turns to familiar
sources and methods to reconsider key questions in antebellum politics – the power of
party in congressional policy-making, the place of slavery in government, and character
of the Mexican War. Others, following Ayers’s lead, have emphasized contingency in
their close readings of Washington decision-making between Lincoln’s election and the
firing on Fort Sumter six months later.78 Students will find a score of other works that
revisit subjects that would have seemed old-fashioned even in the 1960s, but which
remain vital to understanding democracy before the Civil War.79
In conclusion, the study of past politics has been transformed in the past twenty years.
New methods, new subject matter, and new interpretations abound. At the same time an
appreciation for earlier work and narrative forms persists. Rather than argue for a new
synthesis or a more integrated approach to this now diverse field, it is perhaps better to
celebrate the coexistence of antebellum America’s many “political histories.”

Notes
1 Frederick Jackson Turner, “Social Forces in American History,” The American Historical Review
16:2 (1911), 217–233, 231; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Need for a Cultural Comprehension
of Political Behavior,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 72:2 (1948), 180–
198, 180; Lee Benson, “An Approach to the Scientific Study of Past Public Opinion,” The
Public Opinion Quarterly 31:4 (Winter, 1967–1968), 520–567, 527.
2 Mark H. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” The American Historical Review 100:3 (June
1995), 829–853, 852.
3 Eric Foner, “Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition,” in Eric Foner, ed., The New
American History. Revised and Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997),
xi.
4 Dan Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” Journal of the Early Republic
10 (Summer 1990), 135–161, 158.
5 Sean Wilentz, “Society, Politics and the Market Revolution,” in Foner, The New American
History, 62.
6 Seth Rockman, “Jacksonian America,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History
Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 53; Sean Wilentz, “American Political
Histories,” OAH Magazine of History 21:2 (April 2007), 23–27, 23.
7 The term “new political history” has been used to describe several distinct intellectual schools.
For example, in English historiography it refers to linguistic and cultural analysis. See Dror
Wahrman, “The New Political History: A Review Essay,” Social History 21:3 (Oct. 1996),
343–354.
8 Robert A. Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to
a Successful Protest,” The American Political Science Review 55:4 (Dec. 1961), 763–772.
9 Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); William Nisbet Chambers and Walter
Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967); Paul Kleppner et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981). For case studies see Lee Benson, The Concept of

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Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961);
Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (New
York: Macmillan, 1970); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan,
1827–1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); William G. Shade, Banks or No
Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1972).
10 Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of
Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3.
11 Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836–1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955);
Walter Dean Burnham, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” American
Political Science Review 59 (1965), 7–28.
12 William E. Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything,” in Stephen E. Maizlisch and
John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860 (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 1982), 15, 66.
13 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American Nation State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 25
(quotation). Also see Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in
the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Joel H. Silbey, The
American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
14 Richard L. McCormick, “The Party Period and Public Life: An Exploratory Hypothesis,”
Journal of American History 66:2 (Sept. 1979), 279–298, 287.
15 For frequently cited examples from these trends see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of
Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974); Natalie Zemon Davis,
Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975);
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Also see James
W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical
Review 117:3 (June 2012), 746–771.
16 Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978; repr. New York: W.W. Norton and
Co., 1983), 6; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of
American History 79:12 (June 1992), 11–38, 11. Also see the essays in Joyce Appleby, ed.,
“Republicanism in the History and Historiography of the United States,” American Quarterly
37 (Fall 1985); Robert E. Shallhope, “Republicanism, Liberalism, and Democracy: Political
Culture in the Early Republic,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102 (Jan. 1993),
99–152.
17 Notable examples of this work include Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology
of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Mills
Thornton, III, Power and Politics in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978); William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of
Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Daniel Walker
Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979);
Baker, Affairs of Party; John Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the
United States, 1837–1846 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983); Harry L. Watson, Liberty
and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Lacy K. Ford,
The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988). A helpful guide to this thesis is Marc Kruman, “The Second
American Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism,” The Journal
of the Early Republic 12:4 (Winter 1992), 509–537.
18 Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party,
1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant
Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989); Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension,
and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over

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Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
19 Ronald P. Formisano, “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture,
1789–1840,” The American Political Science Review 68:2 (June 1974), 473–487.
20 See “Introduction” and “Appendix 1: U.S. Election Turnout, 1820–1825,” in Daniel Peart,
Era of Experimentation: American Political Practices in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2014), Kindle edition. Also see Jeffrey L. Paisley, The First Presidential Contest:
1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013),
383–388; John Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the
Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 330–332; Donald J.
Ratcliffe, The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio, 1818–1828
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 9–11.
21 Jeffrey L. Paisley, “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory
Democracy in the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey L. Paisley, Andrew W. Robertson,
and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches in American Political History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 47, 49; Reeve Huston, “Rethinking
the Origins of Partisan Democracy in the United States, 1795–1840,” in Daniel Peart and
Adam I. P. Smith, eds., Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution
to the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
22 For an overview of this literature see Reeve Huston, “Rethinking 1828: The Emergence of
Competing Democracies in the United States,” in Emmanuelle Avril and Johann N. Neem, eds.,
Democracy, Participation, and Contestation: Civil Society, Governance and the Future of Liberal Democracy
(New York: Routledge, 2015), quoted on p. 15. Also see Graham Peck, “Was There a Second
Party System? Illinois as a Case Study in Antebellum Politics,” in Peart and Smith, Practicing
Democracy; Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of
Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
23 For a recent look at these questions and full data on eligibility and turnout see Walter Dean
Burnham, “Triumphs and Travails in the Study of American Voting Participation Rates,
1778–2006,” The Journal of the Historical Society 7:4 (Dec. 2007), 505–604. Also see Kenneth
Winkle, “The U.S. Census as a Source in Political History,” Social Science History 15:4 (Winter
1991), 565–577; Donald J. Ratcliffe, “Voter Turnout in Early Ohio,” Journal of the Early
Republic 7:3 (Autumn 1987), 223–251, 228–231; Gerald Ginsburg, “Computing Antebellum
Turnout: Methods and Models,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16:4 (Spring 1986),
579–611; Ray M. Shortridge, “Estimating Voter Participation,” in Jerome M. Clubb, William
H. Flannigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, eds., Analyzing Electoral History: A Guide to the Study of
American Voting Behavior (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), 137–152.
24 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev.
ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 2. Population and eligibility estimates calculated from data
in Burnham, “Triumphs and Travails,” 584–585, and United States, Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Department of
Commerce, 1975), 15–19. In 1840 presidential voters comprised only 18 percent of the total
population, a large share of whom were under twenty-one years of age. For current turnout
rates see Michael McDonald, The United States Election Project, online database at www.
electproject.org/home/voter-turnout (accessed August 27, 2016). Jean Harvey Baker, “Politics,
Paradigms, and Public Culture,” Journal of American History 84:3 (Dec. 1997), 894–899, 895.
25 Baker, Affairs of Party, 267. Also see Silbey, American Political Nation, 141.
26 Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the
Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 10, 79, 84, 153.
27 Mark Voss-Hubbard, “The ‘Third Party Tradition’ Reconsidered: Third Parties and American
Public Life, 1830–1900,” Journal of American History 86:1 (June 1999), 121–150, 124 (quotation);
Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil
War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Ronald P. Formisano, For the People:
American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008).

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28 Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of
the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32.
29 Reinhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the
United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
30 David Mayhew, Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002), 61.
31 For an influential statement of this case see Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The
Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969), ch. 6. Also see Lynn L. Marshall, “The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,”
American Historical Review 72:2 (1967), 445–468; Michael Wallace, “Changing Concepts of
Party in the United States: New York, 1815–1828,” American Historical Review 74:2 (Dec.
1968), 453–491; John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic:
Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 326–327. For a recent restatement
of this thesis see Jeffrey S. Selinger, Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in
the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 84.
32 Gerald Leonard, The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional
Development in Jacksonian Illinois (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 11.
Also see Robert E. Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot: Political Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 111, 147.
33 Brooke, Columbia Rising, 340, 449, 451; Kathleen D. McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy
and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 123,
192.
34 Howard W. Allen and Kay Warren Allen, “Vote Fraud and Data Validity,” in Clubb et al.,
Analyzing Electoral History, 153–193, esp. 179. Also see Silbey, American Political Nation, 148;
Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything,” 26; Gary W. Cox and J. Morgan Kousser,
“Turnout and Rural Corruption: New York as a Test Case,” American Journal of Political Science
25 (Nov. 1981), 669–687; and Walter Dean Burnham, “Comment on Bensel: ‘But the
Bumblebee Flies Anyway, Doesn’t It?’” Studies in American Political Development 17 (Spring
2003), 28–33.
35 David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 184; Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 123–124; Stephen A. West, From Yeoman
to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2008), 47; Christopher Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity,
Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
130; Richard Frank Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Law, Identity
and the Polling Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8, 290 (quotations).
36 Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 131; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The
19th-Century New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the
World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001), 295; Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank
Riot, 52; Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics
Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2016), Kindle edition, ch. 1.
37 Bensel, American Ballot Box, ch. 2.
38 Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department and the Nineteenth Century
City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 94; Grimsted, American Mobbing; Olsen,
Political Culture and Secession, 147.
39 Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953);
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since
the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955).
40 William J. Novak, “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review 113:3
(June 2008), 752–772, 755–756; Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins

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of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003); Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic
Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003), 4.
41 Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and
the Making of the Democratic Party,” in Jacobs et al., The Democratic Experiment, 56; Richard
R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995); John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public
Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2001).
42 Novak, “Myth of the Weak American State,” 764–770; Brian Balogh, A Government out of
Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 279. For an example of path dependency see Gautham Rao, “The
Early American State ‘In Action’: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–1860,” in James T.
Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer, eds., Boundaries of the State in U.S. History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
43 Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–
1920,” American Historical Review 89:3 (June 1984), 620–647, 622.
44 A landmark study is Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1860
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). For an overview see the introduction to
Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson, Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).
45 Ryan, Women in Public; Lori D. Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics,
and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1984); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women,
Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1981); Ellen Carol Dubois Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an
Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
46 Between 1776 and 1807 New Jersey allowed propertied women to vote. See Judith Apter
Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Woman’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–
1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12:2 (Summer 1992): 159–193, esp. 160.
47 Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in
Antebellum New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 50–63;
Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 86. Also see Elizabeth R. Varon, We
Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998); John F. Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex
in Andrew Jackson’s White House (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997);
Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a
Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
48 Brooke, Columbia Rising, 4–5; Ryan, Civic Wars, 4. Also see Baker, “Politics, Paradigms, and
Public Culture,” 899. An influential starting point for this scholarship is Craig J. Calhoun,
Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston: MIT Press, 1992).
49 Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship and
Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Johann
N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
50 Kyle G. Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 6–7; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 66, 71.
51 Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 82. Quotations in Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God
Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press,

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2007), 190, 848. Also see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party
Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),
13–14.
52 Michael Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7.
53 Rebecca Edwards, “Domesticity Versus Manhood Rights: Republicans, Democrats and
‘Family Values’ Politics, 1856–1896,” in Jacobs et al., The Democratic Experiment, 176, 186. Also
see Nichole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the
Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Melanie Susan
Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2001); Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2001); Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum
America Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12.
54 Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists of the Old Northwest (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 48. Also see Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent
Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women and the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and
Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7.
55 Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the
Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 70, 128, 225. Also see Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender:
Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
56 An older vein of historiography has explored African-American engagement with partisan
politics. See, for example, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery Political Parties,” an
essay written in 1941 by Charles H. Wesley, reprinted in John R. McKivigan, ed., Abolitionism
and American Politics and Government (New York: Garland, 1999), 160–202. Also see Benjamin
Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
57 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to
the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2. Also see Steven
Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009).
58 Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic,
1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012), 6, 9; Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in
the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 10.
59 Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010); Douglas R. Egerton, “The Slaves’ Election: Frémont, Freedom,
and the Slave Conspiracies of 1856,” Civil War History 61:1 (March 2015), 35–63, 63; William
A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2003), 189; Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic
of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
60 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Brian
DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
61 Andre M. Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist
Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Timothy Mason Roberts,
Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2009); Jay Sexton, “Anglophobia in Nineteenth-Century Elections, Politics
and Diplomacy,” in Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., America at the Ballot Box: Elections
and Political History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Caleb W. McDaniel,
The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
62 For critiques of this perspective see Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on
the South and Southern History (New York: Norton, 2005), 131–144; Bruce Laurie, “Workers,

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Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective,” Labor: Studies in Working

Class Histories of the Americas 5:4 (Winter 2008), 17–55; Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History,
and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War’s Causes, 1861–2011,” Journal of the
Civil War Era 1:2 (June 2011), 237–264.
63 For an overview see Sven Beckert et al., “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of
American History 101:2 (2014), 503–536; and Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery:
Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,’’ Journal of Southern
History 75 (Aug. 2009), 627–650. For a critique of this scholarship that surveys its findings see
John J. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies 2:2 (Fall 2015), 281–304.
64 Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s
Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s
Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); George van
Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce
Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
65 Leonard Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early
American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); John Craig
Hammond, Slavery, Freedom and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2007); and Matthew Mason and John Craig Hammond, eds., Contesting
Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2011).
66 Bruce Laurie, “Workers, Abolitionists, and the Historians: A Historiographical Perspective,”
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5:4 (2008), 17–55, 53 (quotation). For a
synthesis of recent scholarship on antislavery politics see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A
History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 461–499. Also see James Oliver
Horton and Louise E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern
Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Goodman, Of One
Blood: Abolitionism and the Origin of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998); James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the
Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, 2003);
Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of
Woman’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005); Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the
Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); McDaniel, The
Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery.
67 Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 15, 319–320.
68 James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2014), 18. Also see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass,
Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); and
James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2013).
69 Michael Todd Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional
Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 3.
70 For an influential example of this interpretation see William W. Freehling, The Road to
Disunion, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990–2007).
71 Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Matthew Pratt Gutterl, American

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Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2008); Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis
of American Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Brian Schoen, The
Fragile Fabric of the Union: The Cotton South, Federal Politics, and the Atlantic World, 1783–1861
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
72 John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of
the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois:
Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006);
Frank Towers, “Navigating ‘the Muddy Stream of Party Politics’: Sectional Politics and the
Southern Bourgeoisie,” in Jonathan Wells and Jennifer R. Green, eds., The Southern Middle
Class in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011),
180–201.
73 Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil
War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Christopher Childers, The Failure of
Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2012); Leonard Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming
of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007); West, From Yeoman to Redneck; Margaret Storey,
Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2004).
74 Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–
1863 (New York: Norton, 2003), xix–xx, 187. Also see Adam I. P. Smith, “Beyond the
Realignment Synthesis: The 1860 Election Reconsidered,” in Davies and Zelizer, America at
the Ballot Box.
75 Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, 14–15.
76 Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2005); Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2010).
77 William Dusinberre, Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James K. Polk (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Rachel A. Shelden, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life,
and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Amy
S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New
York: Knopf, 2012).
78 Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York: Viking,
2007), 236; Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to
Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 6; William J. Cooper, We
Have the War upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861 (New York:
Knopf, 2012); David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2011). For a critique of this scholarship see James L. Huston, “Did the Tug
Have to Come? A Critique of New Revisionism of the Secession Winter,” Civil War History
62:3 (Sept. 2016), 247–283.
79 Nichole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2004); Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery
and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michael
Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008); Douglas R. Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election
That Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). For a valuable traditional
documentary editing project see the multivolume Papers of Andrew Jackson edited by Daniel
Feller and published by the University of Tennessee Press.

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 8
LITE RATU R E A N D
C ULTURE DUR I N G T HE
AME RIC AN RE N A I S S A N C E

John Ernest

The literary period known as the American Renaissance isn’t what it used to be, though
perhaps scholars are getting closer to understanding what it actually was. Now generally
considered to cover virtually the whole of the antebellum era, the title American
Renaissance, as applied to literature, was first used to characterize the five-year period
from 1850 to 1855, and it was used to refer to the interrelated work of five writers, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Walt Whitman.1 This first and immensely influential characterization was the work of
F. O. Matthiessen, whose monumental study of this short period of imaginative writing,
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, was published
in 1941. So successful was Matthiessen in making his case that one hardly even thinks to
ask whether there was something that would be deservingly remembered as an American
Renaissance. Rather, the questions raised over time about Matthiessen’s formulation of
the period have been about the length of this momentous development in American
cultural and literary history and the credentials of the writers who should be included as
vital exemplars of this flowering of American letters. In time, though, more substantial
challenges emerged, but even then, the term American Renaissance proved durable.
Books and articles gave us “the American Renaissance Reconsidered,” directed us to
“The Other American Renaissance,” took us “South of the American Renaissance,”
reconstituted the American Renaissance, rewrote the American Renaissance, even
questioned “What American Renaissance?” and eventually called out in resistance, “Death
to the American Renaissance.” But the thing just wouldn’t die.2
The main title of Matthiessen’s book, a title to which he himself was not particularly
committed, has been extended far beyond Matthiessen’s intentions, but the title still honors
Matthiessen’s work in that it continues to mark a significant development in American
intellectual and literary history.3 Authors have been added to Matthiessen’s original list of
five extraordinary literary lights, and the Renaissance has been extended far beyond the
five-year span which initially sparked Matthiessen’s interest. One might wonder, of course,
how far you can expand a period of literary achievement, and how fully you can populate
it, and still have it operate as a remarkable Renaissance, but the term has held, even when it
has been used simply to characterize the antebellum period broadly, from the 1830s to the
Civil War, with some writers even slipping in beyond the war. In all cases, of course,
Matthiessen’s authority was both acknowledged and challenged, and his influential book

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was taken as the door one needed to either open, widen, or break down – all of which
actions would result in one entering, in effect, either as friend or foe, the literary and ideo-
logical realm Matthiessen identified as the American Renaissance, there to rearrange the
furniture and reset the agenda. So numerous were the extensions of or challenges to
Matthiessen’s authority in the 1980s, in fact, that in 1991 Michael J. Colacurcio published
a review essay titled “The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” one of the best considera-
tions available both of Matthiessen’s book and of the numerous books and articles it either
inspired or provoked.4
In this essay, I want to explore the literary landscape of the American Renaissance by
following Matthiessen’s map, but I want to suggest that what is most striking about
Matthiessen’s book is that his map didn’t lead him to different terrain. I want to look at
the American Renaissance that Matthiessen didn’t see but should have, and I want to
suggest that what makes this period so illuminating is ultimately its resistance to a stable
framework for literary assessment. The decade or so preceding the Civil War was one in
which the very possibility of stable discourse and sound philosophy was threatened, a time
when language was contorted beyond the breaking point in support of an incoherent
culture – a time, in short, when the creative possibilities of literary expression were most
needed, since all other forms of expression were well in the process of being thoroughly
corrupted. Why did so many works of “imaginative vitality,” to borrow Matthiessen’s
phrase, emerge during the decade (or decades, depending on who is defining the period)
before the Civil War?5 The answer, I suggest, is that more mundane forms of expression
were rendered meaningless. From Supreme Court decisions to regional debates to the
wonders of Walden Pond, public discourse, from philosophical declarations to legal
applications, was so corrupted by the political divisions, the racial fictions, and the
gendered assumptions of the time that imaginative vitality, by both oppressors and
oppressed, was the only currency with any significant power of purchase in the land.
Small wonder, then, that so many writers responded to the challenge with imagination
and force. When reality itself can’t be trusted, literature’s ability to create imaginative
worlds becomes especially valuable – and when language loses its hold on meaning, the
ability to get at meaning through creative rhetorical manipulations is in high demand.
***
It is important to remember that Matthiessen’s primary contribution was to impose order,
a unified literary program with a clear set of philosophical priorities, on what had been a
cacophony of voices. “Matthiessen’s striking evocation of a complex ‘moment’ of
emergent literary greatness quite evidently created,” Colacurcio observes,

in the space formerly occupied by an assortment of variously interesting but oddly

motivated and generically peculiar writers, a full-blown literary “period,” with a
rationale (or at least a diagram of relation) so compelling it has come to seem
inevitable: a fact of intellectual nature rather than a convenience of literary study.6

Most of the debates, at times even battles, that have followed have had to do with how the
significant relations of the past might be diagramed, and to what purposes – but the idea
of the period, however broadened in time or stretched in philosophical reach, has

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remained. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Matthiessen’s formulations have been
subjected to the natural forces of the critical ecosystem. When a number of scholars
challenged Matthiessen’s ideological tendencies and brought new literary theories to bear
upon the literature of the period, Frederick C. Crews responded with a famously annoyed
characterization of such “new Americanists,” and the result was, eventually, a series of
books edited by one of Matthiessen’s challengers called “New Americanists” – and in the
passing of time, Crews’s review was itself reviewed, in a review essay titled “Imagining
Authorship in America: ‘Whose American Renaissance?’ Revisited,” published in American
Literary History, a journal formed in 1989 partly to revitalize a field represented most
prominently by the rather staid journal American Literature, which for years had seemed to
be grounded firmly in Matthiessen’s 1940s, and which itself was redesigned and revitalized
at roughly the same time.7 Yet another story of reevaluation and dispersals extends from
one of the studies included in Crews’s review, and one of which he largely approved,
David S. Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age
of Emerson and Melville. As the title suggests, Reynolds’s book largely maintains Matthiessen’s
pantheon of great authors, but Reynolds looks to the immense and varied field of popular
writing of the time, demonstrating that such writings often proved remarkably influential
for writers like Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, to which
Matthiessenian list Reynolds adds Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe. Critiqued,
extended, attacked, and continually renewed, Matthiessen’s concept of an American
Renaissance is a center that has largely held against the centrifugal force of both methods
and texts to be considered and adopted.
Let’s begin by taking seriously the heart of Matthiessen’s argument – that those works
he associated with the American Renaissance are important for what they reveal about
U.S. cultural history (and perhaps about the role of literature in guiding or explaining
U.S. cultural history). Establishing the framework for his study, Matthiessen observes,
“The one common denominator of my five writers, uniting even Hawthorne and
Whitman, was their devotion to the possibilities of democracy.”8 This seems a fair
statement about Matthiessen’s five writers, and it is certainly a compelling consideration
when announcing an “American Renaissance” rather than an outgrowth of a significant
development in global literary history. And when I call this the heart of Matthiessen’s
argument, I do so advisedly. Matthiessen’s preface – the short essay that has defined the
terms of almost every challenge to the authority of his book – ends with an affecting
story, one worth quoting at length:

I have kept in mind the demands made on the scholar by Louis Sullivan, who
found a great stimulus for his architecture in the functionalism of Whitman. “If,
as I hold,” Sullivan wrote, “true scholarship is of the highest usefulness because
it implies the possession and application of the highest type of thought,
imagination, and sympathy, his works must so reflect his scholarship as to prove
that it has drawn him toward his people, not away from them; that his scholarship
has been used as a means toward attaining their end, hence his. That his
scholarship has been applied for the good and the enlightenment of all the
people, not for the pampering of a class. His works must prove, in short (and the
burden of proof is on him), that he is a citizen, not a lackey, a true exponent of

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democracy, not a tool of the most insidious form of anarchy . . . In a democracy

there can be but one fundamental test of citizenship, namely: “Are you using
such gifts as you possess for or against the people?” These standards are the
inevitable and right extension of Emerson’s demands in The American Scholar.
The ensuing volume has value only to the extent that it comes anywhere near
measuring up to them.9

It’s worth considering the possibility that Matthiessen was entirely sincere in ending
his preface, and launching his study, with this dedication to the possibilities of democracy.
He turned to these writers as if to identify the key to national possibilities, and he
approached his study as if to prove himself worthy of handling that key. Later scholars
would note that Matthiessen’s particular brand of democratic faith was shaped by cold
war ideological undercurrents, but it would be dangerous to claim that the scholars of any
era can be free of their own era’s ideological dynamics, so we need to think carefully
about how to engage in the ideological dynamics of Matthiessen’s analysis.
To say this is to acknowledge that Matthiessen is invested in the writers he studies, to
the extent of identifying with them. But what is particularly interesting about his approach
is not simply that he acknowledges this identification, this influence, but that he claims to
influence the writers in turn. “Works of art,” he states, “can be best perceived if we do
not approach them only through the influences that shaped them, but if we also make use
of what we inevitably bring from our own lives.”10 He lingers over this point to emphasize
the dual trajectories of influence, forward and back, sketching out a simple but significant
point about the dynamics of historical study. So the question of democratic commitment
opens, in this way, to a question of literary greatness. Does the literature of the past inspire
us to live up to the promise of democracy? And is our inspired response rewarded when
we focus it on the literature of the past? Lesser literature, one can imagine Matthiessen
saying, might provoke great thoughts – but, once provoked, can the literature sustain and
reward the attention of the inspired citizen-scholar? Considering that question can lead
us, in turn, to Matthiessen’s understanding of how such authors are shaped. “An artist’s
use of language,” he asserts, “is the most sensitive index to cultural history, since a man
can articulate only what he is, and what he has been made by the society of which he is a
willing or an unwilling part.”11 The question is not only where great literature comes
from, but where great writers come from – and Matthiessen’s American Renaissance is,
then, a time which so shaped its artists as to lead to a compact period of particularly
visionary democratic literature.
What is interesting, though, is that the period that produced what Matthiessen
envisioned as visionary testaments to the power of democracy was a period marked by
sectional and racial divisions and crises, a time when the nation’s denial of its founding
ideals was especially pronounced. The decade began with the Compromise of 1850, an
attempt to resolve sectional conflicts that served largely to heighten them. The
Compromise included an updated and strengthened Fugitive Slave Act – an act which,
many northerners argued, required all American citizens to become slave catchers. The
law placed the issue of runaway slaves under federal jurisdiction, allowing federal
commissioners to force citizens to aid in the recapture of those slaves who reached the
North while also denying fugitive slaves trial by jury or the right to testify on their own

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behalf. The Compromise of 1850 was followed by other measures that added to the
violations of African-American rights and civil security. In 1854, Congress approved
the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed voting citizens of those regions (and the vote
was, of course, restricted) to determine themselves whether their territory would enter
the Union as a slave or a free state. This act led to increased violence in the territories,
and contributed to the formation of the Republican Party as an antislavery political force.
In 1857, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford,
in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that African Americans had no rights
which white Americans were obligated to respect. The political and ideological debates
that followed this decision helped to further define the already sharp divisions that were
leading the nation towards open conflict. When John Brown led his group of black and
white soldiers in the raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, what had long been an open if
localized war became sharply focused. John Brown became a white martyr to a cause that
had, by this time, a long history of soldiers and martyrs. In that year, the Anglo-African
Magazine, an African-American publication in New York, published the public reports
of an early revolutionary with those of a later one, placing Nat Turner next to John
Brown, black militancy next to white, and called for Americans to recognize the inevitable
struggle ahead and to decide what role they would play in that struggle. The time had
come, argued many, to complete the still-unfinished work of the American Revolution.
Thus narrated, the story of this consequential period in American history still speaks
heroically, if only conditionally, about the promise of democracy – that is, if the martyred
John Brown should find his Battle Hymn, and the second American Revolution should
be realized – but it also speaks of the systemic attempt to deny that promise, at least so far
as black Americans were concerned. And that is a story, and a constituency, that Matthiessen
almost entirely avoids, beyond noting that he could have written a book called The Age of
Fourier which would have treated “all the radical movements of the period,” stressing “the
fact that 1852 witnessed not only the appearance of Pierre but of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”12 But
there is a strong case to make for considering the 1850s to be the decade when the ideo-
logical contradictions required for racial exclusion and the sectional divisions grounded in
the system of slavery came to a point, the decade when black America, enslaved and free,
started to become a visible and pressing presence on the national stage. Understood in
such terms, the American Renaissance would still be a period grounded in the 1850s that
extends backwards, to at least 1830, and forward, to and beyond the Civil War. Indeed,
one of Matthiessen’s primary claims about his chosen writers applies with even greater
justice to those African-American writers diligently (and eloquently) working for the
abolition of slavery and the recognition of human rights. Matthiessen said of his writers,
“They felt that it was incumbent upon their generation to give fulfillment to the potenti-
alities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate with America’s poli-
tical opportunity.”13 Can it be that any of our canonical writers have a better claim to this
grand mission than, say, Frederick Douglass, or than Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other
women who drafted and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a document based on the
Declaration of Independence, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848? An American
Renaissance defined by such writers would still be decidedly a moment in U.S. intellec-
tual history that would influence virtually all that follows, and it has proven to be a period
very much shaped by the perspectives we bring to it.

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But reenvisioning the American Renaissance in such terms is not merely a matter of
supplementing Matthiessen’s work, adding to his list of authors, questioning his ideological
allegiances, and pressing against his emphasis on symbolism and other literary devices. It
might be envisioned as a matter of considering Frederick Douglass as the guiding light of
this period, rather than Ralph Waldo Emerson, but even that would not quite do the
period justice. I have in mind, instead, an approach to literary history inspired by Mary
Helen Washington’s provocative Presidential Address to the American Studies Association
on October 29, 1997, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies if You
Put African American Studies at the Center?”14 Similarly, what happens when we place
African-American history at the center of American history through the antebellum years
and from that perspective construct an understanding of literary history? What happens if
we endeavor not merely to rearrange, recontextualize, or enlarge Matthiessen’s literary
temple, but to reconstruct it from the ground up? What if we attempt to piece together
an understanding of the American Renaissance that helps us to understand not an
idealized but an actual American history, one in which African-American and white
women writers were particularly savvy contributors?
For a great many scholars and enthusiasts of American literary history, the response to
such an approach is likely to be, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.” To be sure, the
complaint would not be a matter of including African-American writers in our
understanding of literary history. The complaint would be registered on the grounds of
literary quality, with Matthiessen leading the charge. Of the various points Matthiessen
makes in setting up his argument and method for American Renaissance, the one on which
he is most forceful is his insistence that the literary critic’s “chief responsibility” in the
consideration of books is to “evaluate them in accordance with the enduring requirements
for great art.”15 The critic’s greatest obligation, Matthiessen insists, “is to examine an
author’s resources of language and of genres, in a word, to be preoccupied with form.”16
For many, this consideration places women’s literature, by far the most popular literature
of this period, out of the running for inclusion in the significant works of the American
Renaissance, and it certainly eliminates almost all African-American writers, male and
female. What Matthiessen and others have looked for in great literature are works that
show the greatness of the culture and/or the time by transcending that culture and those
times. With rare exceptions – Jane Tompkins, most powerfully – most of the debates
about or expansions of Matthiessen’s gallery of great writers have generally shared his
understanding of “the enduring requirements for great art” and have found certain groups
of writers, with rare exceptions, lacking.
Even beyond battles over the American Renaissance, the artistic merits of early
African-American literature have long been a subject of considerable debate. Scholars
have regularly pronounced, sometimes in print and often in conversation, William
Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) a bad novel or Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) a subliter-
ary text, and have barely noticed the dozens of texts that have thus far not received the
level of critical attention enjoyed by Brown, Wilson, and a relative handful of other
African-American writers of this time. For many readers of even those texts that have
been accepted into the canon, what makes the early writers representative of African
Americans generally are the conditions under which they lived – and what makes them
remarkable is that they reached a level of achievement that meets the standards of those

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who enjoyed the benefits of education and a privileged life. As John Reilly observed
long ago,

Despite other variety, the most prevalent assumption among those who think
about Afro-American literary history – whether in articles, books, or classroom
presentations – is that the success of literature can be discerned in its utility as
social documentation, an assumption to which is sometimes joined severe judg-
ment of works composed, it is presumed, before Afro-American authors had the
option to choose art over combative writing. In other words, works of literature
are dissolved into their referents.17

One result has been an approach to African-American literary history that has focused on
the development of literary talent as measured by increasingly recognizable achievements
in established genres, a romantic narrative of African-American writers who have endured
considerable oppression but still have persevered in their literary ambitions until their
achievements were established, sometime in the late twentieth century, beyond all reason-
able doubt. Another result has been an approach to literary history that has focused on an
imagined progression from necessarily political writing in the nineteenth century (antislav-
ery publications, for example) to increasingly more “universal” themes grounded in black
history and experience. It is hardly surprising, after all, that early anthologies of African-
American literature offered only a brief sampling of nineteenth-century publications, that
the percentage of African-American writers in American literature anthologies today
increases as the volume nears the present, or that even recent anthologies of African-
American literature struggle to represent, in their subdivisions and other organizational
schema, the difficult tension between the political and the aesthetic that has been the
hallmark of African-American literature.
But when considering such dismissals of early African-American literature, as well as
similar dismissals of nineteenth-century white women’s literature, it is good to remember
that we are operating in a critical tradition that has been so largely defined by a study that
associates literary greatness with the promise of democracy and that measures scholarship
itself by the “one fundamental test of citizenship, namely: Are you using such gifts as you
possess for or against the people?” Certainly, writings by white women and by African-
American women and men meet that standard, and do so more powerfully and successfully
than does the work of any number of canonical American writers. There is good reason,
in other words, to conceptualize the American Renaissance as an age in which the
national character and the promise of democracy were being exposed in the period’s
most powerful and influential literature – with a broad and historically-informed
understanding of what constitutes power and influence in literary and cultural history. It
was a time when women were refining the means for negotiating their restricted social
positions and for asserting their moral authority on the national stage through their
writings, and a time when African Americans were working to preserve the very possibility
of national character through their creative use of the disruptive and restorative potential
of literary discourse.
For my money, the defining statements of the time come not from Emerson, Melville,
Hawthorne, Thoreau, or Whitman, but from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick

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Douglass. Published first in serial form from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852 in an
antislavery newspaper, The National Era, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in book
form on March 20, 1852 and was an immediate sensation. The first edition of 5,000 was
sold out within two days; within a year, over 300,000 had been sold, and by the end of
the decade over one million copies, in various editions and translated into more than
fifteen languages, had been sold internationally, with actual readership extending far
beyond sales. Such success was unprecedented. As Joy Jordan-Lake has observed, “few
books have had more impact upon the history of the United States” than did Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, and “few have evoked such powerful emotional responses – and few
continue, scores of years later, to do so.”18 At both the actual and the symbolic center of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the transplanted white northerner Miss Ophelia is the recipient of a
brief but revealing lecture from her slaveholding cousin Augustine St. Clare, who
explains,

Planters, who have money to make by it, – clergymen, who have planters to
please, – politicians who want to rule by it, – may warp and bend language and
ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press
nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service; but after all,
neither they nor the world believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the
devil, that’s the short of it; and to my mind, it’s a pretty respectable specimen of
what he can do in his own line.19

In a nation demonstrably fond of its own mythology, one even capable of producing
visionary literature devoted to “the promise of democracy,” it is certainly worth noting
the extent to which theology, the Constitution, the legal system, the economic system,
and social manners were all implicated in the corrupting priorities of the system of slavery
– from virtually insane legal distinctions and processes to convenient cultural fictions for
justifying economic and cultural dominance and social status. And what follows from this
corrupting process? Douglass responds in his most famous oration, his response to an
invitation to speak in Rochester, New York, with an address presented in Corinthian Hall
on July 5, 1852 – a speech that transforms the fourth of July from a day for celebrating
liberty to a day that reveals to the slave, “more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”20 Unlike Stowe’s novel, Douglass’s
“What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July” would be recognized as a great literary
achievement by anyone, regardless of their approach to literature – but it was preeminently
a speech about the corruption not only of all principle but of language itself, and therefore
a speech that argued for the primary American responsibility to call things by their proper
names: “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham,
your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”21
These two statements – the first in one of the nineteenth century’s most demonstrably
influential novels, and the second in one of the nineteenth century’s most powerful
orations, both in 1852 – identify the true character of the age that we would eventually
come to celebrate as the American Renaissance. If it was a period that saw a stunning
flowering of literary art, it was also a period that saw one of history’s great philosophical
crises. A nation that had identified itself as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, a nation

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founded on and devoted to the written word, a nation that proudly proclaimed certain
philosophical principles as its raison d’être, was also a nation that engaged in the systematic
violation of reason, principle, and discursive stability, a nation overseeing the breakdown
of all meaning precisely because it had claimed for itself the challenge of the meaningful
articulation of the purpose of human progress. The representatives of the dominant
culture in the nineteenth century committed what amounts to a collective act of suicide,
destroying the ideals, the religious and political institutions, and even the language to
which they claimed devotion and on which they based their identity. The mix of
economic crises and opportunities, the demographic changes that came with national
expansion and increased social mobility, the fertile ground for utopian schemes and new
religions, the development of printing technologies and print distribution methods, and
the complex matrix of relations and tensions engendered by the economic, theological,
and scientific requirements for the system of slavery all contributed to the development
of a powerfully incoherent country accustomed to insisting on its preeminent coherence.
Small wonder, then, that the literature of this period variously reflects and responds to
this crisis. Even the writers Matthiessen identifies lead one in this direction: the Melville
who wrote “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and especially The Confidence-Man; the
Hawthorne who arguably embedded a murder mystery into his novel of a failed utopian
experiment, The Blithedale Romance; the Whitman who emerges as much from the social
terrain of Melville’s Confidence-Man as from Emerson’s Poet; the Emerson who wanders
through the existential crisis of “Experience”; and the Thoreau who looks for philosophical
purity by distancing himself from the always-encroaching world, and finds only a tenuous
solace. These and other writers draw one into a powerfully threatening time – not one
that speaks of the promise of democracy so much as philosophical and social chaos, the
democracy that emerges from disorder.
And it is exactly this situation that complicates the question of artistic assessment.
Writers operated within the turbulent dynamics of this period, and their tools included the
corrupted discourse and loaded social constructs of the time. Thus it is that some of the
most powerful responses to Matthiessen have been by scholars who have insisted on dif-
ferent measures for assessing literary value. Particularly since the 1980s, feminist scholars
have challenged the dismissal of the most popular literature of this period, writings by
white women – often by way of a deeply historicist approach to nineteenth-century
American literary history. Jane Tompkins, for example, in her groundbreaking study
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), simply
turned the tables on traditional standards of literary merit by way of an “embrace of the
conventional” that led her “to value everything that criticism had taught me to despise:
the stereotyped character, the sensational plot, the trite expression.”22 Tompkins observes
that “stereotypes are the instantly recognizable representatives of overlapping racial, sexual,
national, ethnic, economic, social, political, and religious categories; they convey enor-
mous amounts of cultural information in an extremely condensed form” (xvi). Indeed,
Tompkins argues, “as the telegraphic expression of complex clusters of value, stereotyped
characters are essential to popularly successful narrative.”23 It is a compelling argument, one
capable of transforming one’s reading of a great number of literary works, and perhaps of
addressing the inability of scholars, still today, to bridge the divide between immensely
popular and academically respected writings.

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Tompkins’s primary example supports her case powerfully. Often dismissed for its
sentimentalism and its stock characters, no novel more fully exemplifies the force of the
literary dynamics that Tompkins studies than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and no other novel
manages to present characters and plot lines that so fully serve the “multilayered represent-
ative function” which for Tompkins and many others defines the nineteenth-century
American literary landscape. Indeed, Stowe’s reliance on convention and stereotypes
helped her place her novel at the center of the national stage. A good part of what distin-
guishes this novel is that Stowe represents struggles over slavery and the integrity of the
white Christian republic by way of characters who represented the various cultural types
that had come to inhabit the American social and literary landscape: earthy, inscrutable
blacks, white southerners troubled by slavery, white southerners who aggressively defend
both slavery and the South, white northerners who assume the moral superiority of the
North, antislavery Quakers, and submissive, loyal, and pious slaves. Troubling these cate-
gories and driving both the novel’s plot and its moral trajectory are various characters who
do not quite fit into their assigned or assumed racial categories – a white southerner
who is described as a “non-sequitur,” light-complexioned African Americans who give
voice to national ideals, and a U.S. Senator whose views on slavery are transformed by
the very story that Stowe relates in the novel. The novel, in effect, explores a culture being
changed by slavery – and as slave traders rise to the level of gentlemen and the most fully
realized Christian characters die before the novel’s conclusion, Stowe asks her readers, in
effect, where they fit into this new world.24
While many readers rightly observe that Stowe, at her best, largely deals in what histo-
rian George M. Fredrickson has called “romantic racialism” – the idealization of the black
race as more spiritual, more emotional, and even more feminine (in accordance with
gender stereotypes of the century) than the Anglo-Saxon race – the novel’s movement
from stereotypes to non-sequiturs captures well the challenge faced by African-American
writers of the time.25 African Americans regularly found themselves reduced to stereotypes
and caricatures, bound within the narrative borders of the few stories white America was
prepared to tell or hear about them, and their challenge was to develop approaches to
telling a more complex truth in a culture that maintained strict controls over allowable
evidence, witnesses, and conclusions. I have in mind here Dwight McBride’s important
meditation on this question in Impossible Witnesses, in which he explores “the rhetorical
markers that constitute the terrain of abolitionist discourse” and locates autobiographical
performance within the “discursive terrain” of the transatlantic antislavery movement.26
McBride asks, “What does it mean for a slave to bear witness to, or to tell the ‘truth’ about,
slavery?”; and he answers that, since abolitionist discourse “produced the occasion for
bearing witness,” it regularly prepared audiences for “an experience that had already been
theorized and prophesied.”27 “In this way,” McBride observes, “the slave serves as a kind
of fulfillment of the prophecy of abolitionist discourse . . . Before the slave ever speaks, we
know the slave; we know what his or her experience is, and we know how to read that
experience.”28 Or as Frances Smith Foster puts it, “while white abolitionists were eager to
privilege the authenticity of black writers’ descriptions of slavery, it was only insofar as
their descriptions confirmed what white readers had already accepted as true.”29
African-American writers, then, needed to work through the stories readers were
prepared to understand to get at the stories that needed to be told. Put a different way,

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they needed to work with corrupted discourse to get at truth. One might well apply to
early African-American literature generally what William Andrews identifies as a
distinctive feature of African-American autobiographies published from 1760 to 1810:
narrative “seams or cuts” that appear “when facts are revealed – made tellable – in a way
subversive to the text,” moments when “the presence of colorless white screens is
deconstructed long enough for the absence to call attention to itself and demand a creative
hearing for the silences in the text.”30 Gradually, scholars seem to be making the turn
away from simply defending the apparent roughness of nineteenth-century African-
American autobiographical writings to exploring their often strategic seams and their
crafted silences. But scholars are only beginning to appreciate the extent to which African-
American writers worked as cultural editors, turning an incoherent world back on itself.
In Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and William Wells Brown’s Clotel, for example, we have two
texts that mix freely the conventions of fiction and autobiography. The blending of voices
and techniques, and the mix of conventions associated with established forms of writing,
guide readers into a world of noisy contentions, and the identity of the narrator (indeed,
even the cultural self-positioning that the author achieves by way of the narrative) is
revealed largely through a deafening mix of voices. As Frances Smith Foster observes in
her groundbreaking study of antebellum slave narratives, “Writers had long discovered
that elements of mimesis, romance, history, and myth could be combined in ways which
far exceeded the advantages offered by any one structure. The slave narrators, likewise,
created a form which was an amalgam of traditional and innovative techniques.”31 A great
deal of African-American writing of this period simply doesn’t fit into the generic
categories often used to assess (and, ultimately, dismiss) this body of literature. Instead, this
body of literature argues for the need to deconstruct, to disorient, to reveal through
crafted silences, to expose through jarring juxtapositions. In his novella The Heroic Slave,
Frederick Douglass has his narrator promise his readers only a history constructed of
“glimpses” into a subject “covered with mystery” and “enveloped in darkness.” “Speaking
of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities,” the narrator states at the end of his
introductory comments, “we come before our readers.”32 African-American writers
regularly found that they could come before their readers in no other way.
Some of the most powerful literature of the period now known as the American
Renaissance engages in the messiness of history, and our best approach to this period is not
to single out a handful of writers who seem to be corresponding with one another from
their respective mountaintops but rather to take in the broad range of writings produced
during this turbulent time. In Impossible Witnesses, McBride notes that his research involves
“literary texts, political pamphlets, speeches, essays, newspaper articles, historical and
scholarly treatises on both the institution and the morality of slavery, and, of course, slave
narratives.”33 “This broad-ranging approach to understanding abolitionism,” McBride
asserts, “rather than assuming a hierarchy among these forms, is concerned with the
production of meaning that is possible when one considers the interplay of these forms
taken together in the terrain that is abolitionist discourse.”34 While I have argued that the
disputed terrain of slavery and “freedom” is the defining terrain of this period, I would
suggest as well that McBride’s advice can be extended to any social, political, philosophical,
and aesthetic concern of the time. The American Renaissance was, among other things, a
time of great developments, technological and otherwise, in printing, publishing, and

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distribution. If one is interested in what makes American literature of this time distinct –
and, indeed, if one is interested in following the transformation of “the literary” during
this period – one needs to consider a great number of publications.
When one does so, one is likely to appreciate why a great deal of literature that some
would be inclined to dismiss has stubbornly endured over the years, and one might well
emerge with an understanding of the American Renaissance as a glorious mess – a
literature that speaks for “the promise of democracy” by enacting rather than simply
representing that promise. Rather than telling a unified story, the literature of this time
speaks through its tensions, through the contending forces of multiple perspectives, of
fundamentally opposing assumptions, of diverging priorities, of warring truths. The
northern historical fiction of James Fenimore Cooper speaks with and against the southern
fiction of William Gilmore Simms; the crafted deceptions of Edgar Allen Poe work to
secure the racial assumptions that the strategic deceptions of William Wells Brown work
to expose. Fanny Fern’s leaves were as much a revolutionary force, in the newspaper
business, in the art of the personality-driven sketch, as were Walt Whitman’s leaves of
grass in poetry, though we have yet to appreciate the connection of Fern’s blogs to those
of our own time. Maria Stewart, William G. Allen, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster,
and John C. Calhoun all addressed the possibility of peculiarly American contributions to
the art of oratory (probably one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent genres in
both white American and African-American literary history), but they are seldom read
together – not even Stewart, Allen, and Douglass, all African-American orators. Melville’s
The Confidence-Man might be productively read not only with Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of
Grass but also with William and Ellen Crafts’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or
other narratives involving the escape from slavery through disguise and social performance.
Poetry of the period might be traced back to its original appearance in newspapers, there
to reflect and resist the press of surrounding articles and editorials, and the same could be
done with serial novels – all part of a reappraisal of the centrality of periodical culture,
including a consideration of the force of reprinted material freely adopted from other
periodicals in an age in which editors often played a much greater role than authors in
the creation of the period’s reading habits and aesthetic protocols and practices.35
As with representative government itself, this is a literary history that requires some
effort, beyond the acquisition of an aesthetic taste capable of distinguishing the upper
classes from the lower. And entering this period by way of white female and African-
American male and female writers is especially productive, as one will often find that the
literature one is accustomed to celebrating can be strangely limited in its power to capture
the problems, and therefore the promise, of this time. The embodiments of the nation’s
ideological contradictions, African-American writers led the way in the quest for a dis-
cursive and philosophical stability that remains the single most influential feature of the
literature that emerged from the period we still have reason to call the American
Renaissance. Accordingly, African-American written responses to the challenges of their
world provide us with a framework for understanding the vitality of this period, from the
great popularity of women’s literature to the formal experimentations of such writers as
Emerson, Melville, and Whitman. And when one witnesses the strategic use of conven-
tional plots in women’s writing – writing produced by those who were most subject to
the force of convention – one begins to understand why this literature was so eagerly and

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broadly embraced. And when one takes in the whole of the writings produced during
this time, from the seedy to the sermonic, from tales of adventure to slave narratives that
appealed to a sense of adventure to approach truths for which readers were wholly unpre-
pared, one finds a literature roughly as glorious as the history of American governance.
Not always an uplifting story, but one still strangely encouraging, at times even inspiring,
and sometimes unexpectedly sublime. Call it the American Renaissance; call it what you
will. It is a literary history unlike any other, and one still capable of instructing and inspir-
ing readers – all readers, regardless of race, gender, religion, or class.

Notes
1 Later the term American Renaissance was used to characterize the art and architecture of the
later decades of the century. More recently, the title has been appropriated by a white
supremacist website. I will be addressing only the American Renaissance that, still today, refers
to antebellum American literature and culture.
2 Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected
Papers from the English Institute, 1982–83 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985);
“The Other American Renaissance” is a chapter in Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The
Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
Thomas M. Allen, “South of the American Renaissance,” American Literary History 16.3 (2004),
496–508; Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics
of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Renée Bergland, “The Native
American Nineteenth Century: Rewriting the American Renaissance,” ESQ: A Journal of the
American Renaissance 52.1–2 (2006), 141–154; Charlene Avallone, “What American Renaissance?
The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse,” PMLA 112.5 (1997), 1102–1120; Russ
Castronovo, “Death to the American Renaissance: History, Heidegger, Poe,” ESQ: A Journal
of the American Renaissance 49.1–3 (2003), 179–192.
3 Ironically, though Matthiessen named an epoch, he was himself ambivalent about the name.
For the best review essay on Matthiessen, his influence, and his critics, see Michael Colacurcio’s
“The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” The New England Quarterly 64.3 (1991), 445–493.
Colacurcio notes that Matthiessen “grabbed a last-minute suggestion for a title and then
apologized for its inaccuracy” (458).
4 A review of just book-length studies that trade on the concept of the American Renaissance
assures one of its staying power for identifying an era, though the length, constituency, and
significant developments in that era vary widely, depending on which study you consult. Some
scholars seem to use the term in their titles as a familiar marking place, as if to operate in known
territory, while others take on the concept to add to or otherwise alter our understanding of
the American Renaissance. It is useful, then, to pause for a wide survey of works dealing with
the American Renaissance. In addition to those works already mentioned, some of the notable
examples of scholarship dealing with the American Renaissance are Lawrence Buell, Literary
Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1973); Robert D. Richardson, Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978); John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the
Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980); Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the
American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Donald E. Pease, Visionary
Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1987); Jeffrey Steele, The Representation of Self in the American Renaissance (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987); David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance:
The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988);
Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven:

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Yale University Press, 1988); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989); Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance
in the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); G. M. Goshgarian,
To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor
in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jerome Loving, Lost in
the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1993); Joyce W. Warren, ed., The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women
Writers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), which includes Joanne Dobson’s
essay, “The American Renaissance Reenvisioned”; Anne C. Rose, Voices of the Marketplace:
American Thought and Culture, 1830–1860 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), which
includes a chapter titled “American Renaissance”; Robin Grey, The Complicity of Imagination:
The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Timothy B. Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A
Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000); Arthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and Technology in the
American Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Robert E. Abrams,
Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature: Topographies of Skepticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the
Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which
includes an introduction titled “Transamerican Renaissance”; Joyce W. Warren, Women,
Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 2005), which includes a chapter titled “Economics and the American Renaissance
Women”; Bruce Mills, Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American
Renaissance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006); Larry J. Reynolds, Righteous
Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2011); Richard Hardack, Not Altogether Human: Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American
Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); and Martin Kevorkian, Writing
Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville after the American Renaissance (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
5 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), vii.
6 Colacurcio, “The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” 446.
7 Frederick C. Crews, “Whose American Renaissance?” New York Review of Books, October 27,
1988, 68–81. Crews was critical of those he termed “new Americanists,” a critique that one of
Crews’s targets, Donald Pease, took up in a 1990 essay titled “New Americanists: Revisionist
Interventions into the Canon,” published in boundary 2, 17.1 (Spring 1990), 1–37. Pease would
later become the editor of a book series published by Duke University Press titled New
Americanists. For an excellent account of such battles, and of their ongoing implications, see
Michael P. Kramer, “Imagining Authorship in America: ‘Whose American Renaissance?’
Revisited,” American Literary History 13.1 (Spring 2001), 108–125.
8 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, ix.
9 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xv–xvi.
10 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xiii.
11 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xv.
12 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, viii.
13 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xv.
14 Mary Helen Washington, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies if You
Put African American Studies at the Center? Presidential Address to the American Studies
Association, October 29, 1997,” American Quarterly 50.1 (March 1998), 1–23. I am aware that
I am not attending to the range of writings one should address from this period – for example,
Jewish American and Native American writers. As my argument will demonstrate, I am
suggesting the need for a framework that accounts for the full range of voices and developing
cultural traditions – in concert and tension with one another – though I focus in this essay only

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on African Americans and white women. But I would still suggest that the particular
contingencies of African-American writers at this time make for a compelling case to address
the possibilities of Washington’s question. It is worth noting, too, that renaissances abound, and
that different traditions might lead us to different points of entry into cultural history. The
Harlem Renaissance, for example, refers to works by black writers published in the early
twentieth century, though I would hold to my argument that the first renaissance of African-
American writing is to be discovered much sooner. Kenneth Lincoln’s 1983 book Native
American Renaissance addresses works published in the late twentieth century, and others have
followed his lead – for example, Alan R. Velie and A. Robert Lee, eds., The Native American
Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
2013).
15 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xi.
16 Matthiessen, American Renaissance, xi.
17 John M. Reilly, “History-Making Literature,” in Studies in Black American Literature, Volume
II: Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986), 89.
18 Joy Jordan-Lake, Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists
Respond to Stowe (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), xv.
19 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Elizabeth Ammons
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 193.
20 Frederick Douglass, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”, in Lift Every Voice: African
American Oratory, 1787–1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1998), 258.
21 Douglass, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?”, 265.
22 Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvi.
23 Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xvi.
24 It is worth noting that the character identified as a “non-sequitur,” Augustine St. Clare (Stowe,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 201), is the same character who presents the speech I’ve quoted above.
25 For George M. Fredrickson’s concept of romantic racialism, see chapter 4 of his essential study,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–
1914 (New York: Harper, 1971).
26 Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York:
New York University Press, 2001), 1.
27 McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 16, 5.
28 McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 5.
29 Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–
1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 82.
30 William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography,
1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 37.
31 Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives, 2nd
ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 82.
32 Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume
5 (supplementary volume), 1844–1860, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International
Publishers, 1975), 474.
33 McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 2.
34 McBride, Impossible Witnesses, 2–3.
35 I am grateful to Jim Casey for helping me appreciate the centrality of editors and editorial
practices in nineteenth-century literary and print culture.

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 9
CAPITALISM AND S L AV ERY
IN THE UNIT ED S TAT ES

Michael Zakim

I
The recent surge of interest in “capitalism and slavery” belongs, like other such scholarly
events, to a distinct cultural moment, this one born when the long-running focus
of American historians on the “problem of the color-line” was interrupted by their re-
discovery of the economy after the financial emergency of 2008.1 The result has been a
dramatic proliferation of conference papers, plenary roundtables, dissertation proposals,
and even review essays, all seeking to explore the inter-dynamics between one peculiarly
rapacious institution and another. Have these investigations changed our understanding of
racially-inscribed power, some will want to know. Have they complicated older assump-
tions regarding capitalism’s once-axiomatic relationship with liberal notions of personal
agency? What are we to make of an ancient labor practice, others will ask, located at the
heart of a system of wealth so closely identified with modernity and its creed of progress?
Is the slavery-capitalism question, what’s more, to be viewed in terms of the longue durée,
or as a volatile episode of world history born of crisis rather than continuity? All these
questions come in response to newly ambitious claims, not only about slavery’s role in the
development of capitalism in the United States, but about the essentially capitalist nature
of the slave system itself, claims that have excited a new generation of scholars eager to
reimagine the relationship between what are arguably the two definitive categories of the
nation’s history.
It is no surprise to find, then, that such questions have long engaged the attention of
observers of the American scene. Alexis de Tocqueville directly addressed the issue of
capitalism’s relationship with slavery, for instance, in the first volume of his Democracy in
America. Traveling down the Ohio River in 1831, Tocqueville became witness to two
separate versions of American civilization, as he reported. Gazing out upon the river’s
southern bank, he noted the listless presence of gangs of slaves attending half-deserted
fields in a landscape otherwise dominated by primeval forest. “One might say that society
had gone to sleep,” as Tocqueville summarily denounced the forlorn effects of the chattel
principle on human nature. Turning northward, he encountered a strikingly different
view, this one suffused by the tireless clamor of independent-minded citizens each raising
his own crops under the benevolent shelter of a well-appointed homestead. Surely, there
was no better testament to “the taste and industry” of free persons living in a republic.2
Such Manichaean comparisons between idle Southerners and busy Northerners,
already so clearly articulated by Tocqueville in the mid-1830s, became increasingly

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common in the years that followed, of course, developing into a zero-sum confrontation
between rival systems of labor, wealth, property, and privilege that begat dire slogans
regarding irrepressible conflict. “What is it that we hold most dear amongst us?” Lincoln
thus asked in rehearsing the free soil indictment of slavery’s retrograde presence in the
Union during a final campaign debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858. “Our own liberty
and prosperity,” came the self-evident reply. And what constituted the single greatest
threat to this vision of the nation’s material progress? “Slavery.”3
And, indeed, the banishment of slavery from the forward march of capitalism became
constitutive of that very capitalism in the industrial century, which is why this binary
emerged as the foundation of post-bellum consensus as well. “It was manufacturing and
mechanical resources and the granaries of the West,” the digest of the 1860 federal census
of manufactures, which was published in 1865, explained, that “enabled the republic to
arm, subsist, and pay immense armies, and create iron-clad fleets to meet the emergency.”
The South’s congenital want of the same rather than any shortfall of heroic effort, as the
report was careful to observe, preordained the triumph of the industrial future over an
agrarian past.4 That same post-hoc winner’s version of events eventually served as the
linchpin of scholarly consensus too. Variously embraced by Ulrich B. Phillips in his
Redemption-inflected account of the inherent limits on growth in a plantation economy,
by Charles Beard in his Progressive-driven narrative of the capture of the federal state by
industrial capital, or in Eugene Genovese’s emphatically Marxist description of the over-
throw of a planter elite by new forms of class wealth and power, all agreed that slavery had
devolved by the nineteenth century into a peculiar counterpoint to a distinct American
telos of “liberty and prosperity.” Industrial revolution, according to these histories, was
precisely that, a tumultuous assault on the country’s traditional political economy of
yeoman households and craft workshops, as well as slave plantations, that had been organ-
ized around an agrarian gestalt of use rights, corporatist obligation, and organic hierarchy.
The abolition of slavery, according to this view of events, largely unchallenged until
recently, was part of a more general dynamic of “creative destruction,” that which Joseph
Schumpeter famously ascribed to a modern capitalist economy which “can never be
stationary.”5

II
Nor were such assumptions regarding slavery’s fundamental incompatibility with capital-
ism restricted to those calling for its destruction. The vehement defense of the chattel
system mounted in the 1850s by the Southern ideologue and social theorist George
Fitzhugh drew on the very same opposition, albeit in inverted terms. Fitzhugh accordingly
decried the morally ruinous effects of the thorough-going competition incited by “free
society’s” febrile pursuit of a bargain at any price.6 And even the era’s champions of
Southern industrialization, who, in contrast to Fitzhugh, endorsed capital-intensive tech-
nologies and rational management techniques, did so in hopes of moving the slave economy
beyond its agricultural base, and that in order to halt the region’s growing dependence on
the industrial success of others. When a large, ornate steam engine built in a Montgomery
machine shop was put on display at New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of Industry in
1853, it consequently won enthusiastic notices. There was no better sign of an “active

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manufacturing spirit” finally taking hold in the South, a development further underscored
by the assortment of cloths and yarns shipped up to the Exposition from Southern mills.
Slavery seemed poised to diversify. Of course, the extraordinary attention devoted to this
rather meager demonstration of Southern art and artifice might lead some to the opposite
conclusion, namely, that visions of a modern industrial slave regime remained an ideo-
logical abstraction, at best, “showy, and very useless,” as Horace Greeley pronounced in
dismissing the Alabama-bred apparatus.7
Such arrested development informed a series of influential studies of the slave economy
published by Ulrich B. Phillips in the 1920s.8 Phillips presented a thesis more commonly
associated today with Eric Williams, whose Capitalism and Slavery, appearing on the eve
of the disintegration of the British empire in 1944, argued that the enslavement of
Africans constituted the driving force of a modern global economy after the sixteenth
century which eventually fell victim to its own success.9 As Phillips had already explained
two decades earlier, New World plantations functioned as the Archimedean lever of an
“industrial regime” that mass-produced staple goods destined for a transatlantic consor-
tium of merchants, manufacturers, and consumers. This promoted the planter into a
veritable “captain of industry,” in Phillips’s terms, avidly optimizing his return on invest-
ment and utilizing year-round labor to do so while keeping a methodical account of the
ensuing expenditures and receipts. His success is what transformed a “rough common-
wealth . . . into a most productive factory,” underwriting the whole colonial project,
which would thus become dominated by these landed enterprises. Family freeholds could
not hope to compete with the economies of scale realized on the plantation, whose effi-
ciencies were also favorably compared by Phillips to the wasteful system of sharecropping
that dominated Southern agriculture after emancipation.10
This business model also proved highly effective in reproducing itself. Selling staples to
voracious world markets whose demand only kept growing in response to the increasing
supply, the American plantation complex expanded without interruption. Whenever the
soil’s fertility began its invariable decline, pushing up the cost of production – and, first and
foremost, the cost of slave labor – planters set out to conquer new territory, where they
reinitiated the same pattern of development all over again. The American slave economy
consequently generated a perpetual frontier, a political geography that should not, however,
be confused with the democratic panegyrics of Frederick Jackson Turner, who airbrushed
slavery out of his 1893 account of the contribution of the pioneering ethos to American
individualism, apparently assuming that slavery and freedom constituted antithetical systems
of belief as well as material practice.11
The plantation’s “striking repetition of process,” Phillips further argued, revealed how
“conservatism and progress are not essentially antagonistic.” The slave South, that is to say,
presented an alternative path of economic development, one that did not result in social
dislocation or the fetishization of the new so endemic to both industrial economy and
liberal polity. “The plantation system was in most cases not only the beginning of the
development, but its end as well,” Phillips observed of this most dynamic stasis in which
“the system led normally to nothing else.”12 That was also its undoing, however, for the
cost of slavery’s immensely profitable perpetuum mobile was a structural inelasticity, or
“decadence,” that resulted in a condition of constant overproduction, characteristic of the
monopolistic nature of staple production, which then only deepened after the ascension

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of King Cotton to sovereign status in the nineteenth century. As a consequence, the

American slave economy was never able to create new forms of capital, or new sources of
wealth, or new uses for labor, which exacerbated its dependence on economies that did,
turning slavery into something of a living anachronism. Once succeeding generations of
slaves were acculturated to European practices, furthermore, becoming transformed into a
disciplined laboring class, there was no longer any reason to keep them as chattel, as
Phillips also noted of the escalating irrationality of the whole system. Its vehement aboli-
tion in the midst of the nineteenth century was a clear corroboration of this self-defeating
dynamic.13
Civil War, as such, hastened the inevitable, which was also the basic assumption of
Charles and Mary Beard’s magisterial Rise of American Civilization, whose chapter on “the
Second American Revolution” presented a variation on the theme of slavery’s incom-
mensurability with capitalist modernity.14 The antebellum South, the Beards adjudged
from the vantage point of Fordist ascendancy in the 1920s, was trapped in a losing battle
against the census returns, a struggle against “accumulating industrial capital . . . expanding
railway systems, and widening acres tilled by free farmers.” There was no place for a tra-
ditional landed aristocracy in such an inexorable march of economic growth and techno-
logical innovation. Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores might “command the world,”
as Senator Hammond of South Carolina confidently decreed on the eve of secession, but
that command was restricted to the world of yesterday.15
Entrenched elites never surrender power on their own accord, the Beards further
contended. Roman patricians, French clericals, English nobles – all were consigned to
the dustbin of history by the violent opposition of new social and economic forces. The
same was true of the United States. “What do you propose, gentlemen of the Free-Soil
party?” as the Beards quoted Jefferson Davis in a bitter confrontation with his opponents
on the Senate floor in 1860. “Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not
at all . . . It is not humanity that influences you . . . It is that you may have a majority in
the Congress of the United States and convert the Government into an engine of north-
ern aggrandizement.”16 That aggrandizement was meant to buttress a coalition of indus-
trialists, farmers, and mechanics bound together in a program of high tariffs and home
markets, united in opposition to Democratic Party policies “offering nothing to capital-
ism but capitulation.”17 The Party of Lincoln, in contrast, identified the nation’s Manifest
Destiny with an integrated market system that turned all citizens into utility maximizers
with their eyes on a boundless future. Antislavery promulgations of “free soil, free labor,
and free men” were, as such, largely indifferent to the fate of the slaves, as Jefferson Davis
contended, and Eric Foner has since explained in greater detail. The United States was
the reserve of “white men,” Lincoln confirmed, a nation where every “Hans, Baptiste,
and Patrick” could strike out on his own in unhindered pursuit of happiness in an
economy uniquely poised to satisfy their material ambitions. That is why the “so-called
Civil War” is better understood as a “Second American Revolution,” a revolutionary
class war that reconstituted property and wealth in the restless image of industrial capital.18
Eugene Genovese’s Political Economy of Slavery, which was first published in 1965,
presented the same irrepressible conflict between landed and industrial wealth while at
once injecting it with a new level of nuance and complexity.19 The South was not an
agrarian relic fighting a rearguard action against industrial revolution, Genovese insisted.

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Nor was it, however, a modern production economy driven by the inveterate flux of
market supply and demand. Antebellum slavery belied any such single, or singular,
definition because it constituted a distinctly pre-industrial form of social and material life
that nevertheless functioned as the pillar of Western industrialization, the source of
essential goods and capital for a new kind of production regime. This structural duality
informed Genovese’s well-known description of American slavery as “in but not of
capitalism,” a consciously otiose formulation deployed to convey one “of the greatest
anomalies in the history of capitalism.”20 Southern banks, for example, channeled
enormous sums of cash and credit in financing more of the same – more land and more
slaves – instead of encouraging change and innovation. Even when new technologies
were the object of investment, they, too, were put into the direct service of the existing
order. Ambitious development schemes such as railroad building were accordingly
undertaken in order to reinforce old forms of economy, which then deepened the
inability of planters to adjust to the fluctuations of the world market. Their land and
slaves constituted particular kinds of assets that could not be opportunistically alienated in
response to the rise and fall of cotton prices, exposing slaveowners to enormous risks
without recourse to alternative investments. Manufacturing, for instance, was rarely an
option in a plantation system that depressed local consumer demand while draining
Southern wealth off to Northern businesses, much to the consternation of regional
patriots. The same dearth of liquidity stymied agrarian reform as well. Wherever a
program of agricultural improvement took hold, Genovese argued, citing Maryland as a
prime example, the requisite fertilizers, livestock, and machinery were financed by the
sale of slaves and a corresponding shift to the employment of free labor.
But there was nothing anachronistic, or irrational, in the consistent refusal of planters
to abandon their slaves in favor of temporarily more efficient avenues of capital
accumulation. That was because slaveholders subscribed to a commercial logic that
diverged from the instrumentalities of industrial economy. “It is difficult to believe that
a regional ruling class of resident planters,” Genovese explained,

whose lives had been formed by a social relation based on the theoretical assertion
of absolute power over other human beings and by pretensions to community
lordship, could blithely dispense with the very foundations of their social and
psychological existence merely in response to a balance sheet of profit and loss.21

That “ideology of the master class” was no epiphenomenon, Genovese thus argued, since
property rights, labor relations, and the exigencies of profit-making are all shaped as
much by cultural logic as vice versa. Certainly, the economy does not follow an exogenous
path of autonomous development paved by natural laws transcending time and place.
This understanding of the interplay between the moral and material spheres of existence
also allowed Genovese to strip race of its essentialist status and present the dominion of
white over black as a form of class exploitation particularly suited to New World slave
regimes. Racial hierarchy, as Genovese explained with great dialectical drama, and
considerable pathos as well, in his magnum opus, Roll Jordan, Roll, anchored a powerful
paternalistic form of social control in which neither master nor slave “could express the
simplest human feelings without reference to the other,” an especially intimate system of

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class rule that struck a marked contrast to the anonymity of the wage nexus increasingly
prevalent in the North.22 Command over one’s work force was as much an end as a
means in the South, in other words, which meant that slavery was not simply dedicated
to maximizing profits but to maximizing the planter’s power and prestige. That is why
recurrent financial crises, structural inefficiencies, and even gnawing anxieties over the
decline of cotton culture never drove Southern capitalists to free-labor solutions. Indeed,
these would have constituted a distinctly “bourgeois” response to their problem. Slave
society, in contrast, sought explicitly political solutions, which mostly meant the conquest
of new territory, even at the risk of alienating Americans living outside the South.23
A more recent account of slavery’s immanent failure to industrialize is to be found
in Sean Adams’s Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in
Antebellum America, which strives to explain why bituminous coal that was mined
in Virginia achieved a 2.4 percent market share while Pennsylvania’s less convenient
anthracite was supplying 78 percent of the nation’s needs by 1860.24 Adams, too, ascribes
this great divergence to irreconcilable forms of political economy. This does not mean that
the absence of a coal industry in Virginia is to be attributed to the putative unsuitability of
slave labor to non-agricultural production. The cause lay, rather, in Virginia’s political
traditions, and, more particularly, in a system of government founded on notions of cor-
porate privilege designed to undergird planter control. While all citizens of a republic
enjoyed common civic rights, for instance, that was not true of property. Human chattel
comprised an especially important form of property in slave society, requiring special pro-
tections. “We have a greater interest in the common stake, and ought to possess an author-
ity in proportion to that interest, and adequate to its protection,” as a planter spokesman
explained in justifying Virginia’s rotten borough system.25 And, indeed, disproportionate
representation in the state’s General Assembly proved most effective in obstructing devel-
opment projects or electoral reforms that might threaten existing property arrangements
that were based on large-scale agriculture and high land values. This was not because slave-
holders were culturally or ideologically hostile to commercial growth or technological
innovation. Railroad mileage, for instance, quadrupled in Virginia over the decade prior to
the Civil War. But such a modern transportation infrastructure was built to serve the plan-
tation economy and bring its crops to market. By the same token, toll structures that would
facilitate the movement of coal were consistently voted down by legislators because they
would shift public resources from tidewater and piedmont counties to western mining
districts that were also politically suspect – not without reason – as insufficiently loyal to the
slave regime.
The control enjoyed by established elites over government in Virginia was especially
pronounced when compared to the situation in neighboring Pennsylvania, where intense
partisan conflict and interest-driven politics, anathema to the oligarchical exigencies of
slave society, had become the organizing principles of public life. This spirit of competition
spawned massive corruption, “logrolling,” and a state bureaucracy that all proved vital to
the development of industrial capitalism – Adams has little use for neo-classical catechisms
regarding market efficiencies – as “new men” thereby gained access to Pennsylvania’s
ruling institutions. A program of innovative business legislation followed which included
geological surveys, subsidies for fresh technologies, and state-financed capitalization of
high-risk ventures. Republican notions of a static commonwealth anchored in social

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deference were jettisoned in favor of a different model of politics which located the general
interest in the dynamic pursuit of wealth by self-serving, autonomous citizens.26 That same
operating system eventually arrived to Virginia’s coalfields after the war, Adams observes,
brought by Pennsylvania mining companies which proceeded to extract enormous mineral
deposits in exchange for woefully little compensation. The antebellum planter regime was
thus replaced by the no less imperious rule of limited-liability corporations that enjoyed
their own post-agrarian forms of special privilege. These had little in common with the
traditional priorities of a slave economy, but proved no less effective in channeling wealth
and power into the hands of the wealthy and powerful.

III
Free-soil truisms regarding the irrepressible conflict between capitalism and slavery have,
as such, found a long afterlife in historical scholarship. That version of events did not go
entirely unchallenged, however. The sharpest dissent was formulated by the disciples of
a rigorous positivism known as cliometrics, a creed that rested on data culled from the
rather limited antebellum statistical record. The best known of these studies is Time on
the Cross, written by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman and published in 1974.27 The
work’s evocative title belied its exclusively quantitative focus, which was better reflected
in the book’s subtitle, The Economics of American Negro Slavery. True to that promise,
Engerman and Fogel, who was awarded a Nobel prize in economic science in 1993,
presented a high-functioning plantation system in which both master and slave rationally
pursued their own “best economic interests.” Their respective efforts were transposed by
the cotton economy into unrivaled levels of productivity (“35 percent” higher than any-
thing achieved by Northern farmers during the same period), spectacular rates of growth,
and relatively little exploitation, as measured by the ratio of income expropriated by the
owners of capital, again in comparison to the wages paid by Northern industrialists to
their hired laborers.28 All the numbers added up to an unmistakable conclusion, namely,
that slavery constituted a leading sector – and authentic component – of American mate-
rial progress in a period of industrial growth.
The economic viability of slavery, so clearly manifested in its profitability, which
was a function, in turn, of its tireless maximization of utilities, rested on a “wide-rang-
ing system of rewards” made available to workers. These included bonuses, land grants,
profit sharing, and a significant occupational mobility that all strangely summoned
George Fitzhugh’s contemporary pro-slavery rhetoric invoking the “happiest” labor-
ing class in the world.29 At the same time, econometrics shared a growing predilection
on the part of scholars and the public alike to assign greater political agency to subaltern
populations long marginalized by the reigning power structure. This was not the stuff
of working-class struggles or of demands for racial equality that animated so much of
the social history being written “from the bottom up” after the 1960s, however.30 Time
on the Cross, rather, drew on micro-economic models of incentive pay and rational
choice theory that were to be traced back to Adam Smith, via Frederick Winslow
Taylor, and up to Reaganism’s “rediscovery of the market.” Fogel and Engerman were
inspired, in other words, by a post-New Deal vision of economy that identified market
success with moral outcomes.31 And while it would be preposterous to rehearse popular

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slogans equating free markets with free men in the context of chattel slavery, Time on
the Cross nevertheless argued that the slaves’ lot – as evidenced in their diet, the quality
of housing, family life, the relative absence of violence (including an explicit argument
concerning the infrequency of sexual assault), and, most of all, the slave’s own subjec-
tive sense of self-worth – was made sufferable by their owners’ own enlightened focus
on the bottom line.
Time on the Cross subsequently integrated the American slave into a universe of cost
benefit regressions, marginal income rates, and occupational mobility. Whatever else that
might have shaped life on the plantation was adamantly bracketed. Certainly, any
“ideology of the master class” proved immaterial to the syllogisms of profit and loss,
which is what provoked Francesco Boldizzoni to complain in The Poverty of Clio about
the tautological quality of the kind of “economic history” practiced by Fogel and
Engerman, whose field of vision is restricted to enumerated data that can be integrated
into quantitative models of market performance. As a result, the object of analysis ends
up dictating the very terms of analysis, becoming trapped in a hopeless loop of causation.
The problem, as Gavin Wright similarly observes in Slavery and American Economic
Development, a volume that neatly summarizes the corpus of his own scholarship on the
subject, is that utilitarian paradigms of pain and pleasure do not always match the decidedly
illiberal calculus required to control a captive labor force.32
No one has more assiduously explored the illiberal structure of slave control than
Edward Baptist, whose unflinching account of the rape, terror, and torture that com-
prised the foundations of the Cotton Kingdom rivals the most vehement abolitionist
literature of its day.33 There is no trace of slave agency in Baptist’s The Half Has Never
Been Told, which, if anything, conjures earlier comparisons, most notably presented in
1959 by Stanley Elkins in his Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual
Life, of Southern plantations and German concentration camps, twin sites of modern
unfreedom, In contrast to Elkins, however, Baptist does not consider the antebellum
“slave labor camp” to have been an aberration in the annals of progress. It operated,
rather, at the heart of a rationalizing world, becoming an essential component in “the
making of American capitalism.”34
Baptist’s subject is America’s “second slavery,” a system “exponentially greater in eco-
nomic power than the first,” which took root on the country’s southwestern frontier.35
There was nothing static about this economy, whose success rested on the intense
exploitation of material and human resources that turned the Mississippi Valley into an
incontrovertible scene of creative destruction driven by the rush of slaveholders after
profit. They demonstrated great entrepreneurial initiative in optimizing the productive
potential of their labor force while also striving to capture a growing market share
for their product at the expense of any competitors who remained mired in outmoded
technologies or inefficient management strategies. Such efforts explain why the real price
of cotton kept falling even while world demand continued to rise. Seventeenth-
century patterns of territorial expansion into virgin lands thus proved irrelevant in the
nineteenth-century Southwest, where cotton planters applied a distinctly novel business
model far more suited to industrial modernity than to a colonial bailiwick, having become
enthusiastic subscribers to the era’s post-Malthusian zeitgeist of unconstrained growth in
a world shorn of natural limits.36

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At the same time, the technical basis of this dramatic industrialization had little in
common with the fly shuttles of Northern mills or the McCormick reapers harvesting
western grains. Mass production in the plantation economy rested on its own distinctive
technologies, foremost among these being the “whipping machine,” Baptist’s bitterly
ironic nomenclature for the “innovation in violence” that served as the foundation of
second slavery’s unprecedented gains in productivity. “The whip was as important to
making cotton grow as sunshine and rain,” Baptist thus declares. And despite its decidedly
pre-modern provenance – even though the newly improved version of plaited cowhide
adopted in the Mississippi Valley was apparently more brutal, and efficient, than the “cat-
o’-nine tails” traditionally wielded in the Chesapeake – the whip became a critical means
for rationalizing plantation labor, calibrating work rhythms, establishing uniform quotas,
and forcing slaves themselves to continually invent ever more cost-effective methods of
picking cotton, and that in order to avoid a whipping. Torture, “practiced with . . . order,
regularity, and system,” as Baptist quotes a contemporary source, consequently played an
integral role in speeding up the production process of world capitalism’s most valuable
commodity.37
Nor does Baptist just ascribe innovative labor practices to slavery. He also positions the
Southern economy at the vanguard of financial invention, at the vertex of a vast globalized
network of money, credit, debt, and securitization. The fact is, raw cotton fibers would
never have yielded so much marginal value without being integrated into an extensive
system of commercial instruments. Bills of exchange issued by a British trading house, for
example, became the means for a New Orleans factor to purchase raw cotton from
Louisiana plantations. The bales were shipped to Liverpool and purchased there by
brokers who redeemed the original bills, encouraging the American seller to draw on
their own accounts with drafts that could then circulate in the South as cash for facilitating
the exchange of goods and persons. All this private paper was augmented by state
initiatives that guaranteed the equity of Southern banks specializing in loans to slaveholders,
who mortgaged their slaves in return. The subsequent debts were collateralized for sale
in London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, and even in Boston, where investors
had little inkling that their 5 percent per annum earnings comprised the tranched bodies
of so many human beings.38
Walter Johnson is another persistent critic of older orthodoxies expounding the puta-
tive backwardness of America’s slave economy. In a detailed examination of “life inside
the antebellum slave market,” Soul by Soul, Johnson documents the plantation’s embrace
of the instrumentalities of industrial-age business.39 Infinite appropriation became the
guiding ethos of a cotton-growing industry that constituted the acme of commodifica-
tion, wedding persons and property together into expanding circuits of commercial
exchange. That development rested on the wholesale abstraction of economic relations,
rendered into a price system and credit network capable of bridging the seasonal and
spatial discrepancies of globalized trade. Brokerage firms and transportation depots, buying
and selling seasons, formal guarantees of ownership titles, the mass circulation of timely
business information, state-sponsored buyer protection laws, price convergence, and the
conscious “packaging” of goods for sale, which included breaking up families into more
convenient retail lots – all were features of a slave economy that could not, it seems, be
described as anything but capitalist.

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Johnson has recently expanded his investigation of “the greatest economic boom the
world had ever seen” in a study called River of Dark Dreams.40 Like Edward Baptist’s
second slavery, this takes place in the flush landscape of the lower Mississippi Valley, a
region that became flooded by giant flows of capital once it was pacified by the federal
government in the early years of the nineteenth century. The territory was divided into
parcels of family freeholds, a Jeffersonian program for yeoman independence that, in fact,
undermined any such possibility. That is because the value of free labor could not keep
up with the value of land. A republic of householders was subsequently transformed into
a slaveocracy, and the Southwest into a “disciplinary acrostic” of cotton plants broken
down by seed, speed, and market grade, as well as slave bodies further fractured by nom-
inators of acre and bale.41 The output of all this fieldwork was then consummated in a
“Steamboat Sublime” which boosted the velocity of market transactions while dramati-
cally reducing the attendant costs. Steam power on the Mississippi, Johnson even avers,
proved far more central to the modern American economy than its application to factory
production in Lowell.42
River of Dark Dreams recounts a familiar story of land speculation, fueled by the rising
value of slave labor resting on cotton’s spectacular profitability, to then ambitiously argue
that antebellum slavery effectively strove to reorient the whole political geography of the
United States. The domestic slave trade that sent cotton hands “down the river” to labor
on western plantations might seem part of an emerging matrix of continental exchange.
In fact, with a price structure driven by global ratios of value, the American slave market
operated as a vital branch of the world economy. “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia
and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or
Africa and carry them there?” Johnson quotes a contemporary advocate of commerce’s
trans-national logistics. Slavery not only pushed commodification to its limits, in other
words, but in so doing undermined existing notions of nationhood, replacing them with
an “economy unmediated by the territorial sovereignty of the United States.” That
process is best known today as globalization, by which we usually refer to capital’s eclipse
of the nation-state as the primary “site” of political dominion. Johnson finds this dynamic
already at work in the middle of the nineteenth century as he follows Southern slavery
far offshore, to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Africa, propelled by the system’s chronic “over-
accumulations” of land and slaves in search of the perennial quick fix of imperial
expansion.43

IV
River of Dark Dreams thus concludes by underscoring Eugene Genovese’s earlier depiction
of the structural imperatives pushing slavery to reproduce itself at any cost. Walter Johnson
does not believe, however, that this made slavery any less “of” capitalism. He stakes the
opposite claim, in fact, and it is that view of the slave South as a moment of high eco-
nomic rationalism – manifest in instrumental reason, expanding markets, consistent pro-
ductivity gains, commercial infrastructures, administrative bureaucracies, and patterns of
mass consumption – which seems to have become the new orthodoxy. This is an impres-
sive catalogue of capitalist praxis.44 It is also a highly schematic one that casts the southern
United States into a fully developed market society while doing the same for other parts
of the transatlantic slave economy such as Cuba, Hispaniola, and Brazil. Such a broadened

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panorama, reaching from “Liverpool to Louisiana,” thus serves to flatten the varieties of
Atlantic society into an inclusive tent of universal truck and barter, reproducing the mar-
ket’s own abstractions and inflating capitalism itself into something of a floating signifier
largely detached from historical context. Accounting technologies are a good example of
this catholic perspective on events, having recently emerged as a synechdoche of the
plantation’s purported adherence to a modern, rationalized gesellschaft. An Italian inven-
tion of the late Renaissance, book-keeping has been applied to a great variety of eco-
nomic arrangements ever since, ranging from sixteenth-century joint stock companies
and eighteenth-century rural book credit to nineteenth-century railroad corporations, as
well as cotton production.45 But does this systematic transcription of exchange values
always represent the same material reality, the same constellation of market rules and
property rights purportedly constitutive of a transcendent form of exchange economy?
Or is the history of accounting, in fact, revealing of the opposite, namely, the great variety
of forms of commercial intercourse over the centuries that should, in turn, force us to
qualify our own use of “capitalism” as a singular rubric? A similar set of questions also
suggests itself in regards to the economic significance of steam power, for instance, whose
discrete techno-logic would nevertheless seem to be dependent on the social context of
its uses. Steam-driven facilitation of trade between distant points in space was realized in
a transportation infrastructure that linked New Orleans with Europe rather than its own
hinterland, as Johnson argues. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, and even New York, the
effect was largely reversed. Even steam, in other words, that singular icon of industrial
revolution, proves to be a highly contingent, and inconsistent, event, providing further
evidence of capitalism’s own contingency and plasticity.46
Any consequent effort to historicize the peculiarities and particularities of antebellum
slavery should begin with Steven Hahn’s Roots of Southern Populism, which addresses the
widespread disaffection of the region’s farmers from the developing market economy.47
These “miserable, non-descript cumbrer[s] of the soil, scratching from the land here
and there for a subsistence, living from hand to mouth,” as a representative view from the
black belt summarily ridiculed this majority of white Southerners, devoted themselves to
a way of life consciously divorced from the plantation complex and its profit principles.48
Settling in the social and geographic periphery of the cotton kingdom – in Upcountry
Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, western Virginia and North Carolina, eastern Tennessee,
and southeastern Mississippi – these yeomen represented a “distinct socioeconomic forma-
tion,” Hahn tells us, deeply suspicious of progress and its multifarious development
projects such as railroad building, which was not only controlled by distant concentrations
of wealth but threatened to annex the Upcountry’s household economy to distant markets,
a process well underway in the North and West. Such commercial progress would subvert
the agrarian traditions that anchored this Southern life, organized as it was around common
resources supplying the practical means for grazing and foraging, and hunting and fishing,
guaranteeing each family’s material subsistence and undergirding the fixed patriarchal
social order within which that subsistence was embedded. While the slave South thus
begat a highly cosmopolitan class of moneyed planters, the region proved to be no less
home to a zealously parochial majority wholly disinclined to take part in the greatest
economic boom the world had ever seen.49

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This was no contradiction, Hahn argues. In fact, the South’s two separate economies
politically complemented each other. Yeoman opposition to industrial development,
together with demands for local autonomy and direct control over the means of their
livelihood, were respected because the globalized plantation had no use for either the labor
or the business, but only the loyalty of this population, which was, in turn, granted
significant independence. Planters accordingly expressed little material or ideological
interest in promoting a capitalist transformation of the countryside, in marked distinction
to the general spread of commercial relations in the North. Indeed, any such claims
regarding the market’s universality would have precipitated a dangerous confrontation
between the South’s two main classes of citizens, consequently threatening the political
hegemony of the planters.50
And so, while “rates of capital turnover,” “secondary multiplier effects,” and “sub-
sidiary feedback processes,” not to mention “the efficiency of the markets,” became
increasingly relevant to slaveowners, Hahn effectively asks if the South could actually
be considered a market society at all, one in which civic life is governed by the same
fluid, fungible conditions that underwrite commodity exchange.51 Certainly, the market
system’s intrinsic abstractions and alienations could hardly be said to have overtaken the
South, which is why recent studies of Southern capitalism have consistently bracketed
the lives of most white citizens living there, again, in contrast to histories of Northern
capitalism that emphasize the steady colonization of all of social life by commodity rela-
tions. Slavery, Hahn therefore concludes in setting the stage for the postbellum Populist
revolt against those railroads and banks which succeeded the slaveowning class and aggres-
sively integrated the Upcountry into the nation’s commercial networks, “provided eco-
nomic, social, and cultural space for independent, non-market-oriented freeholders.”52
That is why hundreds of thousands of these non-slaveholders marched off to war in 1861,
determined to defend a chattel system in which they had no direct stake.
This last point is particularly noteworthy since arguments identifying slavery with
modern capitalism have very little to say about war or abolition. And yet, by replacing
older teleologies of irrepressible conflict with counterclaims emphasizing slavery’s industrial
character, it becomes incumbent on scholars to explain why the “capitalism-slavery-
empire” nexus did, nevertheless, implode. The question is not, as it once was, about
whether slavery was too primitive to be integrated into industrializing divisions of labor
but, rather, why it ceased to play any role at all in that system. Why did the reorganization
of the American economy on the basis of wage labor, domestic consumer markets, machine
technologies, urbanization, commercialized family farming, escalating class conflict, an
activist state, and axioms of universal progress also entail the violent destruction of slavery
in the United States? In the past, that coincidence informed facile conclusions regarding
slavery’s anomalous relationship with the modern economy, and with modernity more
generally. Today, however, instead of slavery serving as a historical anomaly, the Civil
War does, leaving us clueless as to why the peculiar institution clashed so disastrously with
“free society,” and why antislavery shibboleths about a “house divided” acquired such
powerful resonance by the 1850s.
What did contemporaries mean when they compared “Southern people” to “Northern
people,” for instance, categories that seemed to infer the existence of two separate
societies?53 In consciously rejecting older narratives, recent scholarship stubbornly refuses

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to attribute those distinctions to rival systems of labor. Indeed, such dichotomies have
given way to the opposite view, namely, an emphasis on the continuum of labor relations
– and relations of exploitation – in antebellum America. If capitalism is understood to be
a social order that privileges those citizens who employ their capital to generate more
capital, and use their property and the labor they command in doing so, then this
definition seems to apply in equal measure to New England cotton mills and Mississippi
cotton plantations.54 It is of little consequence if labor is purchased under terms which
hide the expropriation of marginal value by employers within a formal wage contract,
thus facilitating a modern liberal rhetoric equating free men with free markets, or whether
the laborer himself is owned outright, and nothing is hidden. And yet, below this level
of abstract analogy, such distinctions seemed to have mattered a lot. The systemic brutality
of the Mississippi Valley’s “second slavery” left its own working class with a severely
narrow range of options for shaping the conditions of their employment, so to speak. In
those same years, the capitalist reinvention of production practices in Northern factories
and sweatshops provoked a powerful outburst of political resistance on the part of laboring
men and women, who consequently organized trades unions (and strike funds), mutual
associations, newspapers, political parties, cooperatives, neighborhood societies, legal
defense funds, and even their own banks in battling the efforts of employers to extend
their property rights to the work process itself. These steps were undertaken, moreover,
in the name of an egalitarianism many believed to be both within their rights and within
their grasp.55
Relations of production in the industrializing North, Christopher Tomlins has conse-
quently argued in Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic, were irrevocably
detached from the vested right of anyone to personally “order, control and direct” the
work of others.56 Such patriarchal authority, long considered essential for inducing one
person to labor on behalf of another, was overturned by a “free labor” ideology that priv-
ileged the autonomous will of every individual. The former remained slavery’s ontology,
of course. But outside the South, as labor historians of a previous generation repeatedly
showed, the common law relationship between master and servant was reestablished on
the basis of contract, whose formal legalisms replaced coercion with consent, increasingly
expressed in terms of cash. Of course, that “new employment relation” was not as free of
constraint as it pretended to be. Tomlins reminds us that restrictions on personal move-
ment (through residency requirements governing the franchise), vagrancy statutes making
it illegal not to work, curbs on entry into various professions (by means of licensing prac-
tices), the criminalization of collective bargaining, and legal penalties for laborers who
violated the terms of their employment contracts were just some of the measures now
adopted for reinstituting the power of property-owners in an age of common men.57
Were these comparable to the mechanisms of social control practiced on the plantation?
Karl Marx, who harbored little sympathy for the employer class, believed not, and
accordingly insisted that “free labor” was no empty slogan. Since capitalism’s producing
classes belonged “neither to an owner nor to the soil,” he argued, novel structures of
prerogative and power had to be developed. In practical terms, this meant that a hired
laborer could “leave the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses,
and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit.” Such fluidity had no precedent in
the history of work, and that was because this element of contingency – or what has since

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evolved into our notorious “flex-time” – was necessary for doing business in the radically
fungible conditions of the new economy. This raises a fundamental question about the
capitalist reorganization of society that was entirely irrelevant in the South, namely, how
did the free negotiation between buyers and sellers of labor power, based as it was on
market symmetry, equality before the law, and mutual consent (for otherwise the contract
would be void), nevertheless allow power to accrue to some rather than to others? Here
was the rub – or the profit margin – as Marx noted in what remains the best definition
of industrial class relations to this day: “The worker, whose only source of income is the
sale of his labour-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class,
unless he gives up his own existence.” Wage earners might no longer be beholden to this
or that master, in other words, but, for that very reason, they are entirely beholden to a
master class of capitalists exclusively positioned to give someone a job and, as such,
control his fate.58
The employers of free labor thereby assumed their place as a new American ruling
class, not by regular recourse to violence but by explicitly embracing the conditions of
freedom. Coercion assumed a structurally neutral and largely invisible form in this order
of things. Slavery, on the other hand, had no such use for invisibility. To that end, Walter
Johnson quotes from Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, which was published in
1853. “It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of
the slaves can be heard from dark until bed time,” as Northup invoked the spectacle
of discipline on the plantation. Such a “ceremonial of punishment,” as Michel Foucault
denoted the corporate, corporeal quality of social control before such cruel and unusual
practices were repudiated by liberal opinion, served as a foundation of planter rule.59 The
same brutish methods were deployed when slaveholders converted “black hunger into
white supremacy” by personally distributing meat rations to the quarters, for instance, in
another raw, intimate application of power over the bodies of others, offering another
stark contrast to the machinations of the cash nexus by which “individuals do the desir-
able things without anyone having to tell them what to do,” as Frederick Hayek once
described the importance of the price system in maintaining public order in market
society.60 Certainly, capitalist democracies cannot rely on systematic torture and continue
to congratulate themselves on the progressive nature of their institutions, which also
explains why the whip became the focus of so much moral outrage in the antebellum
North. Solomon Northup’s memoir of his captivity in the South was, as such, con-
sciously designed to appeal to that emergent humanitarian sensibility, written in a trope
that Karen Haltunnen has perspicaciously characterized as a “pornography of pain” that,
in fact, informed the whole genre of slave narrative. Mass-circulated tales of the chattel
system’s brutal realities contributed to the self-fashioning needs of a cohering American
bourgeoisie seeking to distance itself from such arbitrary violence, thus recasting this
venerable American institution into an atavistic affront to the civilizing process.61
For that reason, the whip was eclipsed in public discourse by an even more naked
violation of modern selfhood, the practice of slave breeding, which is the subject of a
riveting essay by Amy Dru Stanley exploring the “moral differences between wealth
creation in the South and the North.”62 Instead of situating slavery at the center of
American industrial progress, Stanley asks how it came to be excluded in the first place.
How was slavery implausibly – but effectively – redefined as an alien presence in a

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republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal? Antebellum debates over the breeding of slaves were at the heart of that abolitionist
effort, which is why Fogel and Engerman devoted an entire chapter of Time on the Cross
to debunking “the myth of slave-breeding,” and why Edward Baptist argues that the
practice was immanent to the capitalist logic of accumulation. Rather than determining
the relative validity of these rival allegations, Stanley explains why the question incited so
much controversy to begin with.
Slaves produced two kinds of assets: staple cotton (or sugar, or tobacco, or rice) and
more slaves. This elementary calculus had informed plantation economics since the late
eighteenth century. However, it acquired a powerfully new cultural resonance in the
industrial century. Thaddeus Stevens gave voice to that view when he compared
Pennsylvania farmers to Virginia planters and noted how the latter “must devote their
time to selecting and grooming the most lusty sires and the most fruitful wenches, to
supply the slave barracoons of the South!” William Ellery Channing, author of the coun-
try’s best-selling guide to individualism, Self-Culture, mobilized the same moralizing
lexicon in denouncing the “unfeeling cupidity” so widespread in a society of slavehold-
ers, and then comparing it to the “influence of love” which reigned in free society
and functioned as the spiritual counterpart to contractualism’s free will.63 Channing and
Stevens were both engaged in drafting a horrific indictment of Southern civilization,
contending that since the reproduction of slaves was a signal imperative of the plantation
economy, the very creation of human life – the exclusive prerogative of God everywhere
else in Christiandom – had emerged as no more than a market variable in the South.
Slave society was not only saturated in sin, it followed, but was utterly, profoundly
beholden to the profit motive.
Did the breeding of human beings for commercial gain constitute the acme of capital-
ist logic, or its antithesis? The answer was far from obvious.64 Northern condemnation of
slavery’s sexual licentiousness, Stanley argues, drew upon an implicit acknowledgement
of that ambiguity, for it recognized the dangers endemic to a market economy that lib-
erated personal ambitions and appetites. At the same time, recognition of these dangers
underlined market society’s very ability to overcome them. A social system resting on
self-interest and the conflicts that invariably followed, liberals anxiously understood,
required a modern “spirit of capitalism,” as Max Weber famously contended, a rational
self-mastery able to check appetites without sacrificing ambitions. Allusions to the inborn
debauchery of the Southern planter became a way to mark those boundaries, a reflexive
affirmation of free society’s unique capacity to police its own libido. “Freedom is the
only certain cure for the evils of Freedom,” as one popular lecturer characteristically pro-
claimed at Boston’s Mercantile Library in 1849. Lincoln referred to the same when he
explained to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield that America would stand or fall
by “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” Slavery, according to these critics,
was incapable of any such self-government, for neither the slave nor his owner enjoyed
moral sovereignty over their lives. They were victims, rather, each in his own way, of
a rapacious greed immanent to a decadent kingdom of whoredom that intrinsically
wed love to gold. Only when these values were strictly divorced from each other could
capitalism develop into a viable model of social order, able to protect society from the
commodity’s indefatigable promiscuity, which otherwise knew no bounds.65

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A similar juxtaposition between bourgeois propriety and the brutish nature of prop-
erty relations on the plantation informs Mark Tushnet’s study of The American Law
of Slavery.66 Slavery, as Tushnet contends, comprised a “total” system of social organiza-
tion, to be contrasted with the “partial,” or fragmented, quality of interaction that was
intrinsic to industrial life.67 Such fragmentation was effected by the labor market, where
it was no longer possible to purchase the whole laborer but only a portion of his or her
labor power, thus leaving non-essential, or non-economic, aspects of life outside the
reach of either the state or one’s employer, ensconced, instead, in an autonomous realm
of private individuality. The slave experienced no such autonomy, of course, nor any
guarantees of his individuality whatsoever. The highly idiosyncratic rule of one’s master
was the only law the slave knew, one wholly infused by the former’s personality and
private sentiment.68
Tushnet explores the implications of this deeply embedded paternalism by revisiting a
well-known decision handed down by the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1829 that
overturned John Mann’s conviction for assault and battery. Mann was originally put on
trial for shooting and wounding a slave named Lydia, whom Mann had hired from her
owner, during a purported escape attempt. Lydia’s injuries had obvious economic reper-
cussions, both for her owner and for Mann, since they impaired her ability to work. The
court could thus have upheld Mann’s conviction and, in so doing, bolster the protection
of slave property under lease, helping to regulate a growing sector of the Southern slave
economy. But there were far more pressing matters at stake for Southern courts than such
commercial utilities, the most critical being the protection of the status of white men.
This goal extended far beyond any business concerns. “The power of the master must be
absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect,” Judge Ruffin therefore decreed in
distinguishing that power from any other form of social authority or personal preroga-
tive.69 Even parental control over children was different, for while filial obedience was no
less anchored in organic hierarchy, children were nonetheless raised in order to assume a
place among society’s freemen. “With slavery it is far otherwise,” Ruffin continued
in justifying the court’s decision to exonerate Mann from any responsibility for having
shot Lydia.

[The slave] is to labor upon a principle of natural duty [by which he] surrenders
his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the
consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing
else which can operate to produce the effect.70

The needs of government in a slave system thus transcended commercial logic. Indeed,
they needed to be protected from commercial logic, which would otherwise separate
racial power out from property rights, a fracturing of patriarchal prerogative increasingly
evident in the disintegration of the household economy in the North.71 The dominion of
white men over slaves was incontrovertible, in other words, lying outside those principles
of contract – whether social or commercial – which turned everything into a subject of
negotiation.72
Although not directly concerned with the cultural apparatus of modern personhood
or the legal abstractions of racial control, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global

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History presents a narrative of slavery and capitalism that pivots around this same opposition
– or, in more historical terms, transition – from autocratic coercion to liberal consent and
the consequent development of new methods for organizing both labor and capital.73
The global history of cotton begins with the emergence of a system of “war capitalism,”
Beckert’s fresh version of the older, more opaque notion of “primitive accumulation,”
by which the violent seizure of land and labor in Asia, Africa, and America was carried
out on behalf of European venture capitalists.74 This early incarnation of capitalism
became the basis of a trade economy dedicated to wealth accumulation that was founded
on violence rather than contract, on massive expropriations rather than property rights,
and on the personal dominion of masters instead of the rule of law. With the active
support of military-fiscal states newly capable of projecting power over great distances,
European mercantilists muscled their way into existing circuits of peasant production and
distribution around the globe. Those efforts rearranged the world’s economy after the
sixteenth century – if they did not, in fact, invent that economy – by tying Liverpool,
Alsace, Dacca, the Mississippi Valley, and the West Indies together into an expansive
matrix of profiteering.
“The beating heart of this new system was slavery,” Beckert writes, which proved as
central to the ascendancy of the West as the more familiar explanations of technological
innovation, cultural proclivity, and geographical advantage.75 When the bulk of cotton
cultivation was eventually transferred from Asia to the Western hemisphere, where it came
under the direct control of European planters, millions of African slaves accordingly
followed. They were subject to a production regime whose dramatic gains in output were
based on an intensification of violence. The very success of this “military-cotton complex”
would also push capitalism beyond its early war footing, so to speak.76 The shortened
production chain by which British merchants supplied cotton fibers grown on British-
owned plantations to British textile manufacturers setting up shop in England encouraged
new uses for capital, most notably in the form of mechanization – spinning jennies, water
frames, and a self-acting mule that combined the actions of both – and the cotton mill,
which not only housed this array of new apparatuses but growing numbers of hired laborers
as well. The resulting economies of scale, together with the administrative and legal support
of the state, effected a steady fall in prices, allowing British manufacturers to undersell the
rest of the world’s cloth producers. This is when factory-made cottons from Manchester
came to dominate those regions of Asia and Africa that had served as the principal source
of fabrics for European merchants during the previous period of the history of cotton.
Modern capitalism was born, then, of a close collaboration between the lords of the
loom and lords of the lash, a “diversity of . . . forms” that proved to be the system’s defin-
ing trait.77 That diversity also became the source of structural divergence, however. The
manufacture of cotton cloth, in contrast to the production of cotton plants, engendered
an economy that not only employed free rather than slave labor, but embraced a far more
dynamic material culture. Societies organized on the basis of war capitalism, in contrast,
were unable to generate new forms of capital. Egypt’s failure to create a wage labor
system or a domestic consumer market was a case in point. So was Brazil’s. The reasons
are familiar by now. Slaveholders mobilized considerable political influence in order to
protect a highly profitable status quo of staple crop production for world markets, tying
capital up in agricultural commodities and the ancillary slave trade. In Cuba, for instance,

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war capitalism was extremely effective in organizing enormous numbers of chattel labor
but utterly incapable of building a single cotton mill.78 This was no less true of the slave
regime in the United States, where the plantation system dominated the capital, labor,
and entrepreneurial resources of the South, inhibiting the development of domestic
markets, settlement of the region by free-labor immigrants, and the integration of yeoman
farmers into commercial relations. How telling it was, Beckert recounts, that De Bow’s
Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States, published in 1852, sold six times
more copies in the free than the slave states.79
In fact, war capitalism developed a distinct variant in the United States due to the
unique access of its planter class to a virtually unrestricted supply of land, labor, and capital,
and to that class’s unrivalled influence over the federal government. The United States
proved to be exceptional, too, because there was no other place in the world where both
free and slave labor systems were so firmly established within the same polity. This was a
recipe for disaster – or civil war – Beckert contends, for no sovereign state could possibly
satisfy the incongruous demands that resulted. Pressures grew in the North, for example,
to redirect fixed capital investments away from labor and into the expansion of plant and
equipment. The results were not restricted to the sphere of production, but effected
considerable change in the political and legal order, which was reestablished on free
competition and social flux, that which made industrial revolution so revolutionary. This
included novel methods for subduing a restive working class without enslaving it,
principally by extending the franchise to landless day laborers and so ensuring their loyalty
to the regime. Methods of government on the plantation, meanwhile, remained far more
deferential, and personal, in a structure less suited to the dynamic quality of modern
capitalist praxis but critical for maintaining order in slave society.
The outbreak of civil war thus led some to observe that “events themselves drive to
the . . . emancipation of the slaves,” as Marx wrote as early as 1861. Armed confrontation
between North and South – between industrial capitalism and war capitalism – signaled
a clash between two forms of social life that “can no longer live peacefully side by side
on the North American continent.”80 Beckert’s epic narrative underscores that view,
long embraced by scholars of capitalism who consider the abolition of slavery to be
another chapter in the history of an especially volatile economic system that keeps
upending and then reinventing itself. Indeed, the history of capitalism reveals just how
much the Southern economy diverged from modern industrial practice, and how much
the end of slavery was as integral to that history as slavery’s earlier rise. This is no
contradiction, of course, but testament to the unrelenting dialectics of a permanent
revolution that continues to this day.

Notes
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989; orig. 1903), 1.
2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1969; orig. 1835), 345–346. In more explicit terms: “The convenience of being served by
slaves renders whites indolent, and the fertility of the land, from which one reaps abundant
harvests with little effort, favors this disposition.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Letters from America,
ed. Frederick Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 245. Also see “Slavery vs.
Manufacturing,” Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine 18 (March 1848).

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3 October 15, 1858 (Alton, Illinois), in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Robert W. Johannsen
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 316.
4 Manufactures of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1865), vi.
5 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1950), 83. See, too, Stanley I. Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge
Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth
Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010).
6 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris,
1854), esp. 34–79.
7 Scientific American, June 28, 1851; September 24, 1853, 13; Greeley quoted in Robert C. Post,
“Reflections of American Science and Technology at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition
of 1853,” Journal of American Studies 17:3 (1983), 343–344.
8 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South: Selected Essays in Economic and Social
History, ed. Eugene Genovese (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968).
9 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
10 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 20, 103, 66–68.
11 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 20. “When American history comes to be rightly
viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.” Frederick J. Turner, The
Significance of the Frontier in American History (Chicago: American Historical Association, 1893),
217. See, too, Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1975).
12 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 248.
13 Phillips, The Slave Economy of the Old South, 87. The South was bound to fall into a Malthusian
trap once all its lands were under cultivation, the antebellum political economist George
Tucker wrote. The price of labor would then begin to collapse. “This may be called the
euthanasia of the institution, as it will be abolished with the consent of the master no less than
. . . the slave.” George Tucker, Progress of the Population (New York, 1843), 109–110.
14 Charles Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1934;
orig. 1927).
15 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 54–55.
16 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 5–6.
17 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 30.
18 Beard and Beard, Rise of American Civilization, 53; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men:
The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970); October 15, 1858 (Alton, Illinois), in Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 316. See, too, Barrington
Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the
Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
19 Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the
Slave South, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
20 Eugene D. Genovese, “The Janus Face of Merchant Capital,” in Eugene D. Genovese and
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and
Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 16; Genovese, Political
Economy of Slavery, 36.
21 Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 41.
22 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1972), 3.
23 Only in industrial society did society become embedded in the economy, as Karl Polanyi
famously argued. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of
Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957; orig. 1944).
24 Sean Patrick Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in
Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 3.
25 Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth, 99. For the specific character of “slave society,”
see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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26 John Majewski also compares the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania in A House Dividing:
Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2000), and reaches similar conclusions, though by insisting that the success of northern industry
was to be attributed to the absence of the state in the economy. On the clash between “static”
and “dynamic” forms of property in the early decades of industrial revolution, see Willard
Hurst, “Release of Energy,” in Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century
United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956).
27 Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Similar methods are to be found in Alfred H. Conrad and John
R. Meyer, The Economics of Slavery and Other Econometric History (Chicago: Aldine, 1964).
28 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 4–5.
29 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 148–149; and see Robert W. Fogel, Slavery Debates:
1952–1990 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 24–48; see, for instance,
George Fitzhugh, “The Blessings of Slavery” (1857).
30 Most famously, E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971).
31 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 41–76.
See, too, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
32 Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011), 16; Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 8–9; and Gavin Wright, Political Economy of the
Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1978). See, too, Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time
on the Cross (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).
“The one great thing we have going for us is the premise that individuals act rationally in
trying to satisfy their preferences. That is an incredibly powerful tool, because you can model
it.” Charles Schultz, former president of the American Economic Association, in 1985, quoted
in Paul Hirsch, Stuart Michaels, and Ray Friedman, “Clean Models vs. Dirty Hands: Why
Economics Is Different from Sociology,” in Structures of Capital: The Social Organization of the
Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39. On the tautologies of economists
more generally, see Melvin W. Reder, Economics: The Culture of a Controversial Science (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999); Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Musiesa, and Lucia Siu, eds.,
Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2008).
33 Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
(New York: Basic Books, 2014).
34 Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1959). See, too, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
35 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 49.
36 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 112–113.
37 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 117, 121, 120 (whips), 140.
38 See, too, Edward Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human
Beings, and the Panic of 1837,” in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes
Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011).
39 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
40 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
41 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 49, 167, 249–250.
42 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 73, 6.

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43 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 401, 11, 12.

44 For instance, Robin Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,
1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997). For a good overview, see Anthony Kaye, “The Second
Slavery,” Journal of Southern History 75:3 (Aug. 2009).
45 Eve Chiapello, “Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism,” Critical Perspectives on
Accounting 18 (2007).
46 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 294–295; Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port: 1815–
1860 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939).
47 Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the
Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
48 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 402.
49 Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 21, 36.
50 On the commercialization of Northern agriculture since the eighteenth century, see Winifred
Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural
Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Martin Bruegel, Farm,
Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002).
51 On “market society,” see Polanyi, Great Transformation.
52 Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 84. Slave society left much of its commercial logics and
logistics on the margins – and overseas – reminiscent of ancient and medieval institutions of
trade. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American
Thought: 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
53 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 399.
54 Seth Rockman, “Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy
of Early America: Achievements and New Directions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2005); Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery
Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (2004).
55 For instance, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
56 Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), Judge Shaw quoted on 225.
57 Tomlins, Law, Labor and Ideology. See, too, Christopher L. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law,
Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012); Robert J. Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in
English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991).
58 Karl Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital” (1849), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected
Works (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 72–94. Adam Smith was in general
agreement. See An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University
of Chicago Pres, 1976), book 1, ch. VIII (“Of the Wages of Labour”). On the relationship
between constitutional democracy and civic inequality, see, too, Karl Marx, “On the Jewish
Question” (1843), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York:
Norton, 1978), 26–52.
59 Northup quoted in Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 171; Michel Foucault, Discipline and
Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 8.
60 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 171, 187; Frederick Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in
Society,” American Economic Review 35 (Sept. 1945), 527.
61 Karen Haltunnen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,”
The American Historical Review 100:2 (April 1995); Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins
of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism
and Abolitionism as a Problem of Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California, 1992),
105–160. More generally, Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2005; orig. 1930). And see Richard Henry Dana, Two
Years Before the Mast (1840):

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The man writhed under the pain, until he could endure it no longer, when he called
out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us – “Oh, Jesus
Christ, oh, Jesus Christ!”
“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain. “He can’t help you. Call on Captain
T –. He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”
At these words, which I never shall forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no
longer. Disgusted, sick, and horror-struck, I turned away and leaned over the rail, and
looked down into the water.
62 Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery,
Capitalism, and Personhood,” in Zakim and Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command, 125.
63 Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” 123, 132. “The people had no significance as
individuals, but formed a mass, a machine, to be wielded at pleasure by their lords.” William
Ellery Channing, Self-Culture (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1839), 124.
64 “In as far as one pays with money one is completely finished with any object just as fundamentally
as when one has paid for satisfaction from a prostitute.” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of
Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1990),
376–377. On the relationship between the demimonde and capitalism, see, too, Charles
Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Steven Soderbergh, dir., The Girlfriend
Experience (2009).
65 Daniel N. Haskell, An Address Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association (Boston:
Dutton and Wentworth, 1848); Lincoln in Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self:
Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 142–
143. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (New York: Norton,
1972). See, too, Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the
Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Weber,
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; William Sanger, The History of Prostitution (New
York, 1850).
66 Mark Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 1810–1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
67 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 6.
68 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 30–37.
69 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 60.
70 Tushnet, American Law of Slavery, 60.
71 Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 352–359. Generally, Mary Ryan,
Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
72 Roy Kreitner, Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007); William James Booth, Households: On the Moral Architecture of
the Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 140–146.
73 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
74 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 29–54. More generally, Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of
Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1964); Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from
Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1985).
75 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 94, 37.
76 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 104.
77 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 172.
78 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 168–170.
79 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 170–171, 129.
80 Published in Die Presse, November 7, 1861, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War
in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1961), 81–82.

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 Part III

THE CIVIL WAR ERA

 10
SE C ESSIO N A N D
THE ONSE T OF C I V I L W A R

Rachel A. Shelden

I
The five months stretching from Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his
call for 75,000 troops to face down the Confederate rebellion in April 1861 are among
the most critical and consequential in U.S. history. These months – sometimes called
“the Secession Winter” – comprised a unique historical moment when 31.5 million
Americans were faced with the same set of choices about the future of their democratic
experiment. As their political system failed them, communities across the country
mobilized toward a civil war that would transform a nation, costing the lives of more
than 750,000 men and formally freeing four million African Americans from enslavement.1
Although Americans’ decisions during these fraught months are critical for under-
standing the mid-nineteenth century, scholars have given less attention to them. In part
this is because the Secession Winter is a unique historiographical moment – a five-month
pivot – between two of the most contested and consequential questions in nineteenth-
century historical literature: (1) What caused the Civil War? and (2) Why did men choose
to fight the Civil War? These two questions have produced thousands of monographs
investigating nearly every imaginable detail of the sectional conflict. Their answers are
both simple and complex. On the one hand, historians universally agree that, at base, the
Civil War was about slavery and white supremacy. No serious scholar would dispute that
Confederates seceded to protect slavery and that their armies fought for a nation built on
the principles of white supremacy. On the other hand, significant disagreements remain
regarding both the nature of sectional discord and of the war itself. Scholars still spar over
critical questions such as whether war was inevitable, what the Republican Party intended
to accomplish, why so many southern yeomen were committed to the Confederate
cause, what northern soldiers were fighting for, and many others.
Compared with several generations of sectional discord and four deadly years of fight-
ing, the transition from ideological conflict to bloodshed often seems like it happened
overnight. Yet, understanding why this transition happened so swiftly can tell us much
about the nature of both the sectionalism that preceded it and the war that came.
Ultimately, the Secession Winter illuminates two fundamental features of American
society in the Civil War era. First, Americans understood the prospect of disunion as a
fundamentally political problem; secession was, at its core, a political act of separation from
the existing federal structure. Throughout the Secession Winter, therefore, men and
women throughout the northern and southern states looked to federal politicians for

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answers. Yet, the political system could not solve the sectional conflict or prevent war; the
dispute over slavery had made Americans’ dual commitment to the Union and to state
rights irreconcilable.2
Second, as the political system failed them, Americans looked to their communities to
help guide their decisions about secession, support, and enlistment. As David Potter has
thoughtfully explained, nineteenth-century Americans had a variety of loyalties, ranging
from region, state, and locality to religious denomination, economic standing, gender,
and race.3 Yet loyalties were not simply internal commitments; rather, they represented
real communities of neighbors, friends, and other likeminded Americans. As the Secession
Winter progressed, communities – not just individuals – made the fateful decisions to
fight or defend disunion. In essence, Americans who had previously relied on the polit-
ical system to solve the problem of slavery, turned toward their friends and neighbors to
help guide them through the sectional crisis.

II
For most American communities in November 1860, the possibility of dissolving the
Union was agonizingly difficult. Since at least the Constitutional Convention of 1787,
both Northerners and Southerners expressed fears that the democratic experiment would
fail and the Union would cease to exist. Slavery was often, if not always, the cause of this
fear. Talk of disunion had intensified following the annexation of Texas in 1846, as a
result of increasing conflict over slavery’s protection and expansion. At each moment of
crisis that followed, federal politicians worked to prevent secession, primarily by assuag-
ing slaveholders’ concerns. By the late 1850s, white and black Northerners looked at
these political compromises with frustration. Tired of catering to slaveholders, white
Northerners increasingly supported antislavery political representatives in these years.
Yet, most northern communities were committed to making their Union free, not
destroying its very existence. At the same time, most white Southerners valued their
place in the Union as long as the federal government protected their right to slavery.4
A small group of southern whites welcomed the prospect of disunion, however. These
men, generally known as the Fire Eaters, had long argued that white Southerners were
better off forming a new nation explicitly committed to the principles of slavery and white
supremacy. As historian Eric Walther has explained, Fire Eaters such as Edmund Ruffin of
Virginia, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, and South Carolinian Robert Barnwell
Rhett actively pushed for secession from the United States for at least a decade.5 Yet, the
Fire Eater community typically had faced a resistant public as long as white Southerners
believed slavery was secure. The events of late 1860 would present the Fire Eaters with a
unique moment to mobilize for separation. As the presidential election approached, this
community of disunionists worked cautiously to build support for secession.
For Fire Eaters, Abraham Lincoln’s election as the Sixteenth President of the
United States on November 6, 1860, was the culmination of months of intense political
maneuvering. During the preceding summer, fortune brought the 1860 Democratic
Party National Convention to Charleston, South Carolina, a hotbed of Fire Eater activity.
There, proseparation men worked to disrupt the selection of a single Democratic
candidate. A divided Democracy, Fire Eaters reasoned, would propel a Republican into

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the White House and convince fellow white Southerners that it was time to leave the
Union. Many Southerners were particularly fearful of an antislavery president by the
summer of 1860 as a result of recent developments; among other factors, whites were still
shaken by John Brown’s infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry and the publication of southern-
born Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South. The former portended a
violent overthrow of the peculiar institution, while the latter upset white solidarity by
arguing that slavery compromised non-slaveholders’ economic and social well-being.6
With this background in mind, separationists helped to engineer a walkout of southern
delegates from the Democratic convention, practically ensuring a split between two
candidates. Ultimately a mostly northern branch of the party nominated Stephen Douglas
of Illinois, while southern Democrats chose Vice President John C. Breckinridge of
Kentucky as their nominee.7
The Democratic rupture created a crowded presidential field that also included the
Republican Lincoln and Constitutional Unionist John Bell of Tennessee. With two
northern and two southern candidates, the election featured two largely sectional contests.
Made up of mostly border-state men and former Whigs, Bell’s party offered few specifics,
instead declaring a commitment to “no political principle other than the Constitution of
the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws.” Still, he
particularly appealed to border-state Southerners who had supported anti-Democratic
candidates earlier in the decade.8 A specifically northern party, Republican support
during the election featured marching companies of young men called “Wide Awakes,”
who paraded through northern and border-state cities and cajoled Lincoln supporters to
the polls in November. Partially as a result of their efforts and the crowded presidential
field, voter turnout in the 1860 election reached its highest levels since the founding of
the republic: 81.2 percent of eligible Americans cast ballots.9
Lincoln ultimately captured the Electoral College by a wide margin, winning 180 elec-
toral votes entirely from northern and western states. Even a united Democracy would not
have received enough electoral votes to best Lincoln.10 The election spelled triumph for
the Fire Eaters. They expected a Republican president-elect would spread fear throughout
the slaveholding states. Southern white communities knew that the Republican platform
had specifically called for a ban on slavery in the territories and Republican political
representatives had adopted antislavery, anti-slaveholder rhetoric in Congress.11
South Carolina found itself consumed with separationist rhetoric by the second week
in November and the Palmetto State became a natural starting point for a white southern
movement toward secession. Historians disagree as to why that state had radicalized so
greatly by 1860. “The Problem of South Carolina,” as historian James Banner famously
called it, has been traced to black majorities in the state’s low-country counties, the lack
of a stable two-party system in the state, and an increasing fear of an abolitionist invasion
in the wake of John Brown’s raid.12 Regardless of the origins of South Carolina radicalism,
by 1860 communities across the Palmetto State had shown a readiness for separation.
Members of the planter class increasingly believed their aristocratic lifestyle was under fire
from radical abolitionists while, at the same time, yeomen understood their interests lay
with the state’s large slaveholding farmers.13
Still, Fire Eaters did not want to force the issue of secession prematurely. South
Carolinians, in particular, had learned from their failed efforts to rally other southern

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states during the nullification controversy of the 1830s and more recent attempts at
separation in the early 1850s.14 Many disunionist leaders wanted to be sure that other
members of the Lower South community – Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Texas – would follow South Carolina’s lead in declaring secession.15 As
William Freehling argues, migration and contingency brought the assurances that South
Carolinians needed. Half of the adult population of South Carolina had dispersed into
other Lower South states by 1860, bringing radicalism to their new destinations. Perhaps
more important was the communication between pro-separation leaders in South
Carolina and Georgia in early November. With tacit assurances that Georgia would
follow South Carolina’s lead, Fire Eaters in the Palmetto State felt confident that their
moment had arrived.16
On December 20, 1860, representatives at South Carolina’s state convention quickly
declared secession from the United States. Members of the convention clearly articulated
why they pursued separation. “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union,”
the secession ordinance stipulated, “and all the States north of that line have united in the
election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions
and purposes are hostile to slavery.”17 Now it was up to communities in Washington and
across the slaveholding states to react to the news.

III
By early December, federal politicians had already begun to address the problem of dis-
union head on. Lawmakers gathered in Washington, D.C. for the start of the second
session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, hoping to stop initial moves toward southern sepa-
ration. At first glance, the politicians who gathered in the capital city seemed to have a
good chance of staving off secession. After all, political moderates had been successful in
preventing movements toward disunion at other tense moments, most notably during the
Missouri Crisis of 1820 and in negotiations over the Compromise of 1850.18
Outgoing President James Buchanan was the first of the Washington community to
weigh in on the issue of secession during his fourth message to Congress on December
3, 1860. Yet, Buchanan’s words were confusing to people in both the northern and
southern states. The president denied that any state could leave the Union constitutionally
but, at the same time, he also denied that the federal government had any power to stop
secession or coerce a state to remain.19 This mixed message, along with other pro-South
behavior during the Secession Winter, has led many historians to hold Buchanan at least
partially responsible for the crisis. Some, such as Jean Baker, view his actions in these
critical months as borderline treasonous. From this perspective, Buchanan made matters
worse in the succeeding weeks in his handling of federal property in South Carolina; he
conceded control of Fort Moultrie to the secessionists in late December, and he refused
to retaliate in early January when South Carolinians fired at The Star of the West, a
merchant vessel sent from New York to supply Fort Sumter. When no further violence
followed, the Buchanan administration was relieved, while many northern communities
felt humiliated.20 Other scholars see more continuity between Buchanan’s early efforts at
moderation and the actions Lincoln took when he assumed the presidency in March and
in early April. Historians such as Kenneth Stampp have argued that Buchanan acted

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honorably during the crisis, emphasizing his second message to Congress in early January,
in which the outgoing president defended the right of the federal government to enforce
the laws.21
Buchanan was not the only member of the Washington community looking for polit-
ical compromise, however. In both the Senate and the House of Representatives, moder-
ates tried to bolster the chances for reconciliation in special committees. In the House,
moderates formed a Committee of Thirty-Three (with one member from each state)
under the chairmanship of Ohioan Thomas Corwin, while the Senate fashioned a
Committee of Thirteen, which included several prominent leaders such as Jefferson Davis
of Mississippi, New Yorker William Henry Seward, and John J. Crittenden of Kentucky.
Crittenden – who famously succeeded the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay in office –
was responsible for the most promising plan: the “Crittenden Compromise” featured an
extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, among other pacifying
measures. But the adoption of the Crittenden Compromise in the Committee of Thirteen
was likely doomed from the start; at its creation, committee members had agreed that both
Republicans and southern Democrats would have to sign on to a compromise proposal to
send it to the full body of the Senate. Crittenden could not get enough support on either
side and, as a result, the proposal stalled in committee. In mid-January, Davis and the other
members from the Lower South states said their goodbyes and departed Washington to
join their home state communities.22
Because they failed to compromise (or perhaps because they tried), Washington’s pol-
iticians have taken the brunt of responsibility for the failure of Union. Since the 1930s,
one popular explanation for why the Civil War came in 1861 has focused on a “blunder-
ing generation” of politicians who caved to the radicals on both sides. Although few
historians still subscribe to the “needless war” sentiment behind the original blundering
generation scholarship, modern revisionists continue to blame federal politicians for
heightening sectional tension.23 Several scholars have also held congressional Republicans
responsible for the failure to compromise in December and early January, stressing their
unwillingness to agree to Crittenden’s measures or to work toward conciliating
Southerners.24
Whether a congressional compromise would have halted the move toward secession in
the Lower South, however, remains an open question. Lower South congressmen certainly
would have had great difficulty in eradicating the secession movements of their home
states. The insularity of the capital’s social community had led politicians to greatly
underestimate the secessionist fervor that had been bubbling back home since Lincoln’s
victory. By the time these men departed Washington, Lower South men and women had
already set their sights on secession; the movement for separation was well underway. In
essence, the political system could not contain grassroots secessionist fervor by January.25

IV
In fact, Lower South communities had been weighing the problem of a Republican pres-
idency since at least October 1860. Talk of disunion ratcheted up amid South Carolina’s
declaration and Congress’s failure to act. By early 1861, each of the Lower South states
had called for secession conventions to consider the possibility of separation and had gone

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through the process of selecting delegates. Candidate platforms typically fell into two
groups. On one side were “separate state secessionists” who generally advocated immedi-
ate secession. On the other were “cooperationists,” whose attitudes toward the crisis
ranged from outright unionism to a preference for acting as a unified southern coalition.
Although cooperationists made up a significant portion of the delegations, separationists
held a majority. In January and early February, state secession conventions in Georgia,
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas joined South Carolina in voting to
withdraw from the Union.26
Whites in these states acted quickly and decisively, even while their Upper South
brethren dawdled and initially rejected disunion. What made these communities so
anxious to separate following Lincoln’s election? A number of historians convincingly
emphasize the role of antiparty, anti-establishment frustration. For example, in his impor-
tant study of Alabama, J. Mills Thornton points to a growing mistrust of the political elite
among Alabamians, who looked to southern separatism as a way to prevent Republicans
from gaining political dominance. As Thornton explains, Southerners feared that
Republicans would “enslave” them politically and ideologically, taking away their equal
stake in American society. Other studies of Lower South communities point to problems
of economic development and fear of abolitionism and nativism, among other destabiliz-
ing factors that influenced southern politics. In essence, Lower South communities
already believed that, by the end of 1860, the political system had failed them. White
men in Lower South states then used their secession conventions to firmly reject the
existing national political structure.27
Slaveholder communities tended to be overrepresented in these secession conventions,
but non-slaveholders were no less committed to disunion. Although scholars agree that
racial subjugation was at the heart of Lower South secession movements, explanations
abound for how communities of non-slaveholders became so deeply invested in a nation
built on slavery. Just as political historians emphasize the shared commitment to white
liberty and antipartyism, other scholars have pointed to cultural and economic reasons for
communal ties between plantation owners and poorer whites. In these works, southern
whites were bound together by pro-slavery religious doctrine, patriarchal gender
dynamics, or a shared economic system. The varying emphases in these studies are more
about degree than difference; many consider a number of cultural and economic factors
that helped to shape the relationship between slaveholder and non-slaveholder. The real
divide among these historians is the extent to which antebellum southern communities
shared cultural and economic norms with their northern brethren. While some point to
similar cultural and economic systems in the North and South, others emphasize vast
differences between the communities in these states.28
Yet, slavery made the crucial difference. Regardless of their methodological angle,
scholars would agree that secession had popular support in the Lower South because of a
perceived threat to racial hierarchy. Communities of white Southerners – both slave-
holders and yeomen – had to evaluate their commitment to the Union against concerns
about the future of slavery with a Republican president in office. After consulting friends
and neighbors, some white Lower South communities did resist the move toward disun-
ion and ultimately reject secession.29 But, by 1861, a majority of Lower South white men

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from all social classes were motivated by a belief that slavery was better protected outside
the Union.30
During these months, African American communities throughout the Lower South
watched the actions of their white enslavers with interest. Enslaved Southerners faced the
Secession Winter in a variety of ways, unsure of how the crisis would influence their
bondage. As W. E. B. Du Bois explained in his masterful Black Reconstruction in America,
each member of these enslaved communities would “wait, look and listen and try to see
where his interest lay.” Particularly in areas far from the northern border or coast, black
communities may have looked toward disunion with circumspection, concerned that
disunion could bring a worse fate.31 At the same time, other enslaved groups saw the
secession crisis as an opportunity to create fear and panic among their enslavers. Some
actively influenced the course of secession during those fraught months, using the specter
of slave rebellion and mass desertion to affect white political behavior.32 Free black
communities were no less attentive to events around them. Free peoples in places like
New Orleans cautiously monitored white efforts toward secession and some worked to
induce southern panic.33
As southern communities of color weighed the impact of secession, newly-elected
Lower South delegates gathered in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, with the
charged purpose of creating a Confederate government.34 Although many southern
whites had expressed an anti-party, anti-political sentiment in November and December,
they overwhelmingly returned the established southern political community to positions
of power in Montgomery. Much of the Fire Eater community that had so ignited the
push toward secession was kept out of the deliberations and resulting Confederate
structure.35 Delegates quickly elected Jefferson Davis and Georgian Alexander Stephens
as their provisional president and vice president. The body also constructed an explicitly
pro-slavery Confederate Constitution that otherwise closely resembled the U.S.
Constitution. The seven Lower South states adopted the new governing document in
early March.36
Throughout these months, Confederate officials waged a campaign to bring white
communities in the remaining slaveholding states into the new nation. They hoped to
persuade not only the Middle South states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Arkansas – but also the Border South – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. To
garner support in these areas, many secession commissioners echoed the new vice presi-
dent’s words on March 21, 1861 that the “cornerstone” of the new Confederate nation
was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordina-
tion to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”37 Initially, efforts to bring in
the other slaveholding states failed as state conventions rejected the prospect of secession
in Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware in February.38 Noting this hesitancy
among their closest geographic neighbors, communities that remained in the Union
began to evaluate how they would respond to the Lower South.

V
Northern communities responded to secessionist movements in the early months of 1861
in a variety of ways. Some wrote to their representatives expressing a desire to let southern

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states go peacefully. Others hoped to broker sectional compromise. Still others were
ready to use force to bring the states back into the Union. Because of the political nature
of secession, many looked to the new administration for guidance and leadership. Yet,
from his headquarters in Springfield, Lincoln was largely silent during the winter. He
refused requests to conciliate white Southerners and he left compromise efforts in the
hands of Congress and the outgoing president. Historians have debated the efficacy of
Lincoln’s silence during this period.39 Still, most would agree that his silence stemmed
from two sources. First, Lincoln had a misguided belief that most white Southerners were
ardent unionists, who would ultimately reject secession. In addition to southern whites’
long history of idle disunion threats, Lincoln likely believed in southern unionism because
of his personal experience with Southerners. His relationship with the Washington
community, in particular, indicated that southern politicians would be willing to work
with antislavery Northerners.40
Second, Lincoln was unwavering in his commitment to the Republican Party, both its
political structure and its ultimate goals. Exactly what those goals were, however, has been
the subject of substantial debate among historians. Much of this scholarly disagreement
focuses on the origins of the Republican political organization and its electoral appeals
throughout the 1850s. Some historians have pointed to the role of ethnocultural issues,
such as nativism and temperance, that helped bring disparate politicians into the Republican
fold. Others argue that its members were deeply committed to antislavery activism,
highlighting Republican rhetoric promoting “free labor” ideology and “free soil” in the
territories. This disagreement may hinge primarily on locality and scale. In the 1860
election, some local Republicans likely appealed to their individual communities’ interests
in tariffs, sabbatarian laws, or immigrant restrictions, while others boasted a commitment
to northern wage labor or halting the expansion of slavery. On a national level (and
certainly in the slaveholding states), Republicans were known for their antislavery position.
Opposition to slavery and its extension westward was the core ideology upon which the
party was built. Thus, even after the Lower South seceded, Republicans risked abandoning
their organizing principle by compromising on slavery.41
Outside of the Republican leadership, white and black communities throughout the
North grappled with how (or whether) to meet the disunion threat. As Nicole Etcheson
has shown in her study of Putnam County, Indiana, one northern locale could contain a
wide range of reactions among its various communities. Many Northerners were torn
between a love for the Union and a fear of a brutal civil war. When weighing this choice,
white men and women in some northern communities expressed the preference for
separation over violence. Several northern newspapers carried the message of caution and
inaction over war. Among the most famous proponents of “peaceable secession” was the
fiery editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, though his motives were not
always clear. A few northern Democrats also railed against the possibility of federal
coercion of the seceded states, preferring separation to bloodshed. On the other side of
the political spectrum, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison seemed poised to let
southern states go in peace, having long described the Union as “a covenant with death.”42
Although they were similarly committed to black freedom, some abolitionists
expressed a willingness to forcefully keep the slave states in the Union, regardless of the
violent consequences. In these early months, several members of the black abolitionist

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community saw the possibilities for what the Civil War became: a vehicle for emancipa-
tion. As a result, some free blacks actively encouraged a call to arms, hoping that disunion
would bring an end to federal protection of slavery in the southern states. Others, like
Frederick Douglass, were more cautious, fearing that the secession crisis would not nec-
essarily produce a war to end slavery.43
Yet, most white communities in the North were more concerned with the Union than
the plight of enslaved peoples in the seceding states. Believing that the Union represented
a unique commitment to liberty, equality, and nation, these white Northerners feared that
secession meant the end of majority rule and the end of the democratic experiment more
generally.44 Still, because they had constantly been taunted with the threat of secession
throughout the antebellum era, these men and women expected that a political settlement
would and could be reached. As a result, Northerners urged their leaders to find some sort
of compromise. Some state politicians, including most Democrats and men who had been
active in the Constitutional Union Party, called for conciliation and drafted resolutions for
peace. The New York City banking community and others with significant financial
interests in the slave economy were similarly eager for a peaceful settlement, sending des-
perate pleas to Lincoln and congressional representatives to appease the South. Northerners
who preferred some form of compromise convened during these months in a variety of
cross-sectional peace meetings. In February, for example, workingmen’s groups from
states along the border met in Philadelphia while many northern states sent delegates to a
Peace Convention in Washington, D.C. In the latter case, the Virginia legislature had
called peace delegates together with the hope of finding a political solution to the crisis.
After several weeks of negotiation, the body produced a compromise proposal that closely
resembled the Crittenden Compromise.45
After spending much of the winter in Springfield, Lincoln arrived in Washington just
as the Peace Conference was finishing its work. The pro-compromise men submitted
their final draft to Congress, which was wrapping up its session in early March, hoping for
a last-minute gesture to Lower South whites. Once again, Republicans rejected the deal
as a violation of northern rights and a subversion of their party platform. Ultimately, two-
thirds majorities in both Houses passed a last-ditch effort for peace by way of the “Corwin
Amendment,” the original proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This
political compromise, a product of the House Committee of Thirty-Three, prevented any
amendment to the Constitution that would “abolish or interfere with” slavery. Lincoln
gave tacit endorsement to this proposal, but without addressing the expansion of slavery
into the federal territories it had little impact on the new Confederate states.46
Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, also did not convince the
Confederate communities to return. The new president showed a desire to maintain
peace, once again promising that he would not “interfere with the institution of Slavery
in the States that it exists.”47 Yet, white secessionists showed no signs of relenting, instead
insisting that the Lincoln administration surrender federal property in their new national
territory. Like Buchanan before him, Lincoln was faced with the prospect of hostilities at
Fort Sumter almost immediately upon taking office. Over the next six weeks, he
determined that he must re-supply the fort and any violent reaction from Confederates
would be taken as a declaration of war.48 When a relief expedition arrived in early April,
Confederates responded with gunfire. After a two-day bombardment, Major Robert

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Anderson surrendered to Confederate officers on April 14. The following day, Lincoln
called for 75,000 troops to “re-possess the forts, places, and property which have been
seized from the Union.”49 This call to arms would have a deep impact on white
communities in the slaveholding states that remained in the Union up to this point.

VI
Much like their northern counterparts, Upper South white communities had gone
through a variety of reactions to secessionist movements and the failure to find political
compromise. While some had immediately pushed for disunion, many preached caution
and, in pockets throughout the Upper South, white communities declared their uncondi-
tional unionism in the face of Lower South separatism. In early 1861, legislatures in both
the Middle South states – North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas – and the
Border South – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri – had rejected the political
movement for secession. The majority of white communities there were committed, if
tenuously, to maintaining peace. Why did the Upper South hesitate? Historians have
posited several theories for what made these communities different from their Lower
South counterparts. The relative strength of Upper South slavery has provided evidence
for two very different perspectives. Some have suggested that slaveholders in these com-
munities waited because they were less committed to the peculiar institution than their
Lower South counterparts. Other scholars offer the more convincing argument that Upper
South whites proceeded cautiously because they were deeply invested in slaveholding.
Proximity to the North and U.S. federal fugitive slave laws made slaveholders unsure of
which side would better protect slavery.50
The political system also played a crucial role in separating white communities in the
Upper and Lower South. While two-party politics had largely disappeared in the Lower
South by the time of Lincoln’s election, communities in the Upper South still held healthy
party differences. As Daniel Crofts has shown, white unionists in the Middle South states
used these varied political alignments to defeat the secession advocates throughout the
early months of 1861.51 Yet, even as the political system provided unionist communities
with temporary victories, the crisis continued as long as uncertainty about the status of the
new Confederacy remained; many Upper South white communities disapproved of
reunion by force. And so, like their northern counterparts, these men looked to their
representatives to find a political solution to the crisis. Political failures in the Peace
Convention and Congress were disappointing, but not necessarily decisive. It was Lincoln’s
call for troops that ultimately swayed Upper South white communities. In April and May,
white majorities in the Middle South states reversed course and voted to join their
counterparts in the Lower South in seceding from the Union.52
The new Confederacy benefited tremendously from the addition of Middle South
communities, which provided crucial resources such as iron and grain, horses and mules,
and meat as well as manpower. Confederates were less successful in recruiting the Border
South, however, which would have added even more by way of men and materiel.
Maryland’s proximity to Washington, D.C., and the extensive rivers in Kentucky would
have been particularly useful to the budding pro-slavery nation. The fate of these Border
South states remained in flux at the end of the Secession Winter, and almost a year into

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the war.53 Lincoln was ultimately able to retain white communities in these states because
they believed the Union protected their investment in slavery and, particularly, racial
superiority.54
Yet, losing these states was a real risk for the Lincoln administration, as the divide
between slave and free had played out at various points along the border for much of
the antebellum era. Scholars disagree about the extent of this pre-war tension. For example,
Stanley Harrold has argued that close proximity of pro- and antislavery forces along the
border often had a radicalizing effect on Border South communities, propelling the United
States toward disunion. Edward Ayers has taken a contrary view that proximity to the
border created a more moderate outlook on sectionalism in these communities in the late
1850s. The debate may depend most of all on particular localities, however. Staunton,
Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky, for example, likely faced the Secession Winter quite
differently. Even the individual white communities within these towns may have tended
toward varying degrees of moderation or radicalism.55
When border communities did radicalize, it could lead to outright violence, and
nowhere more spectacularly than in the western territories. When the Secession
Winter arrived, many white communities in these areas had been engaged in hostili-
ties both with other whites and with Native American communities in the region for
at least a decade. Based on their experiences throughout the antebellum era, white,
black, and native peoples could expect few political solutions to regional tensions. In
these fraught months, communities often had to make choices for survival, rather than
ideological commitment.56 The varying experiences along the border and in the west
also help to explain why white communities in these areas did not always follow the
wishes of their state conventions; some Middle South men and women rejected seces-
sion and some in the Border South promoted it. In East Tennessee and Western
Virginia, for example, whites rejected the Confederate call and chose to remain loyal
to the Union. Conversely, there were secessionists in Kentucky who professed loyalty
to the Confederate nation.57
Enslaved communities were similarly unwilling to simply follow the wishes of their
Upper South enslavers. Following Virginia’s declaration of secession, large numbers of
black men and women throughout the state began rushing toward Union lines. While
some remained cautious about the Lincoln administration’s intentions, the flow of African
Americans to Union territory from April 1861 onward helped shape the course of the
conflict to come. With their help, the failed political system of the secession era would be
rebuilt.58

Notes
1 For the view that “Secession Winter” begins in October 1860, see Shearer Davis Bowman, At
the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010), 4.
2 A number of historians have tracked nineteenth-century Americans’ commitment to the
federal Union. Although some scholars dispute that Northerners fought primarily for Union
during the war, most would acknowledge the prevalence of Union rhetoric throughout both
the northern and southern states in the antebellum period. This commitment to Union is
demonstrable, in part, by how often Americans talked about “disunion” as an ominous

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prospect. Elizabeth Varon explains the overwhelming fear of breaking up the Union in
Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008). Gary Gallagher makes a similar point in The Union War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 46–50. Kenneth Stampp’s essay, “The Concept of a
Perpetual Union,” remains an important resource for explaining how many Americans began
to see the Union as unbreakable in the decades following the Nullification Crisis of 1833. See
Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” Journal of American History 65 (June 1978),
5–33.
Americans in both northern and southern states were committed to the power of state rights,
particularly when it served their sectional interests. One prominent example of northern com-
mitment to state rights was the reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the biggest expan-
sion of federal power in the antebellum era. While ex-Confederates often sought to portray
Republicans as a nationalistic party, as Eric Foner has explained, Republican radicals “vigor-
ously” defended the rights of states in the wake of the 1850 Act. See Foner, Free Soil, Free
Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970), 134–138. Southerners, by contrast, advocated for a strong federal gov-
ernment in order to secure their property in slaves, turning to state sovereignty arguments for
the protection of slavery only in the wake of the secession crisis. For an excellent explanation
of this nuanced position see Arthur Bestor, “State Sovereignty and Slavery: A Reinterpretation
of Proslavery Constitutional Doctrine,” Illinois Historical Society Journal 64 (1961), 117–180.
William W. Freehling makes a similar point in “Reviving State Rights,” in Gary W. Gallagher
and Rachel A. Shelden, eds., A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
American Political History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 112–125.
3 David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” American Historical
Review 67:4 (July 1962), 924–950, especially 946–950.
4 For the long history of fear of disunion see Varon, Disunion! Michael Woods argues that there
was a strong emotional component to the idea of Union, which was sometimes described as “a
confederacy of the heart.” This emotional description also allowed for an argument against the
continuing affective ties of unionism by those who preferred disunion. See Woods, Emotional
and Sectional Conflict in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 16,
21–31.
5 Historians are still unsure where the term “Fire Eater” came from but, according to Eric
Walther, “it was used as early as 1851 indiscriminately by both northerners and southerners to
condemn anyone believed to be too far out of the political mainstream.” Walther draws the
distinction between the Fire Eaters, who advocated southern independence, and southern
radicals who “promoted southern interests but did not necessarily advocate secession.” Eric
Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 2. Walther
borrows his definition of Fire Eater from Avery Craven in Edmund Ruffin, Southerner: A Study
in Secession (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1932). Although some historians have
examined individual Fire Eaters, Walther’s volume remains the single best treatment of them as
a group. His book effectively explains that Fire Eaters varied in background and interests, but
were not “outsiders” as historians such as William Barney and John McCardell had previously
argued. See Walther, Fire-Eaters, 7; William Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and
Mississippi in 1860 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); and John McCardell, The
Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1979).
6 For the role of John Brown’s raid see David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1976), 356–384; and William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion, Volume
II: Secessionists Triumphant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 205–221. For the
importance of Helper’s book see George M. Frederickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical
Perspectives on Slavery, Race, and Social Inequality (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 1988), 28–53; and Freehling, Road II, 246–268. For a useful discussion of both see
Edward L. Ayers and Carolyn R. Martin, eds., America on the Eve of the Civil War (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2010).

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7 The best description of the 1860 Democratic National Convention remains Roy F. Nichols,
The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan Company, 1948), 288–305.
Nichols drew heavily upon the convention reporting of Murat Halstead, a political
correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial: Halstead’s A History of the National Political
Conventions of the Current Presidential Campaign (Columbus, OH: Follett, Foster, & Co., 1860).
Nichols’s book illustrates the contingencies behind the breakup of the Democratic Party and,
ultimately, southern secession. Also see Douglas Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas,
Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury Press,
2010), 64–81; Douglas G. Gardner, “‘An Inscrutable Election?’ The Historiography of the
Election of 1860,” in A. James Fuller, ed., The Election of 1860 Reconsidered (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2013), 245–264; and Freehling, Road II, 288–322.
8 “Constitutional Union Party Platform of 1860,” American Presidency Project, www.
presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29571. Little has been written on the Constitutional Union
Party, in part because of its short existence and roots in Whig and Know-Nothing politics.
Two good exceptions include Peter B. Knupfer, The Union as It Is: Constitutional Unionism and
Sectional Compromise, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and,
more recently, A. James Fuller, “The Last True Whig: John Bell and the Politics of Compromise
in 1860,” in Fuller, The Election of 1860 Reconsidered, 103–139.
9 On the Wide Awake movement see Jon Grinspan, “‘Young Men for War’: Wide Awakes and
Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History 96 (Sept. 2009), 357–378;
and Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal,
and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2016).
10 Breckinridge received 72 electoral votes, with Bell capturing 39, and the remaining 12 going
to Douglas. The southern Democratic candidate won 44 percent of the vote in slaveholding
states, with Bell winning almost 40 percent. About 16 percent of the vote went to Douglas and
Lincoln in slaveholding states. See “Election of 1860” at the American Presidency Project,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1860; Freehling, Road II, 339.
11 Among other sections devoted to the subject of slavery, the Republican platform argued in its
ninth resolution that “The normal condition of the territory of the United States is that of
freedom.” See “Republican Party Platform of 1860,” at the American Presidency Project,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29620. For Republican rhetoric against slaveholders as
the “Slave Power” see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern
Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 1–11.
12 James Banner, “The Problem of South Carolina,” in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds.,
The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 60. For an excellent
overview of the literature on South Carolina see James Haw, “‘The Problem of South Carolina’
Reexamined: A Review Essay,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 107:1 (Jan. 2006), 9–25.
For the role of black majorities see Freehling, Road to Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay,
1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 214–216. Banner emphasizes the
importance of a one-party system in “The Problem,” 61–66, and Kenneth Greenberg echoes
this focus on political organization in describing the influence of virtual representation in South
Carolina in “Representation and the Isolation of South Carolina,” Journal of American History
64 (Dec. 1977), 723–743. For the increasing fear of abolitionist influence see Steven Channing,
Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 57.
13 Scholars are divided over why poorer farmers would have been willing to support a push toward
secession that was rooted in planter ideology and benefits. Lacy Ford and Stephanie McCurry
both show that yeomen had developed a shared culture with the planter class in South Carolina.
While Ford emphasizes a white insistence on “country republicanism” that necessarily united
big and small farmers in republican and racial heritage, McCurry demonstrates that yeomen and
planters had a common cultural commitment to the oppression of dependents, including both
slaves and women. See Lacy Ford, The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina
Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 50–51; Stephanie McCurry,
Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the

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Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35–36,
296–302. Other scholars have argued that South Carolina was inherently un-democratic and
ultimately unique in the antebellum South. In particular, Manisha Sinha has argued that the
South Carolina planter class exerted outsized political power that, in the words of W. E. B. Du
Bois, “emasculated American democracy” and led to an ideology of separatism. See Sinha, The
Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1–7. William Freehling similarly emphasizes the role
of a powerful planter aristocracy in Road I. He argues that South Carolina planters saw themselves
as part of a superior culture. See Road I, 221–222, 230–252; and Road II, 354–362.
14 Ford, Origins, 120–121; Freehling, Road II, 385; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War:
The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1965), 357–360; Richard Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and
the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 185–198.
15 The phrase “Lower South” describes the seven states that initially seceded from the Union and
formed a Confederate government (South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Texas). While scholars have divvied up the slaveholding states into a number of
different categorizations, I have used William Freehling’s designations in The South vs. The
South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 19 (which includes a useful map). Freehling refers to the four states that
seceded following Lincoln’s call for 75,000 troops in April as the “Middle South” (North
Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas) and the states that remained in the Union as the
“Border South” (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri). In various places throughout
this essay I have also followed Daniel Crofts’s lead in combining these latter two categories as
the “Upper South” in contrast with the Lower South states. See Crofts, Reluctant Confederates:
Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1989), xv.
16 For the dispersion of South Carolinians in the Lower South see Freehling, Road II, 363.
Freehling suggests that, among other important contingencies, the completion of the Charleston
and Savannah Railroad on November 1, 1860 was a tipping point in sending both states toward
secession. Railroad executives and politicians celebrated in Savannah and Charleston on
November 2 and 9, leading to mutual support for the disunionist cause. Road II, 406–420,
423–426.
17 “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South
Carolina from the Federal Union,” Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.
edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.
18 For the political maneuvering behind the Missouri Crisis see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath
God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 147–160; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), 218–253.
19 “Fourth Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” December 3, 1860, at the
American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29501.
20 For historians who find Buchanan at least partially culpable for the crisis, see for example Jean
Harvey Baker, James Buchanan (New York: Times Books, 2004), 121, 125, 137–138, 141–142;
and William Freehling in “A Conversation with William W. Freehling and Michael F. Holt,
September 19, 2008,” in John W. Quist and Michael Birkner, eds., James Buchanan and the
Coming of the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 238–240. Buchanan
had initially showed himself even more sympathetic to the secessionists when a South Carolina
delegation came to Washington to negotiate over the forts. Buchanan was swayed, in large
part, because of the departure of southern members of his cabinet (including Georgian Howell
Cobb, Virginian John Floyd, and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi) and the growing influence
of the remaining Northerners. See Baker, James Buchanan, 130–136; Potter, Impending Crisis,
535–543.
21 Kenneth M. Stampp, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Robert Johannsen, et al., “The Presidency of
James Buchanan: A Reassessment,” in Michael J. Birkner, ed., James Buchanan and the Political

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Crisis of the 1850s (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1996), 194–196. Stampp calls
Buchanan’s behavior “first-rate during the secession crisis” (196). Also see Stampp, And the
War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1950), 46–47; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil
War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 125–127; and William J. Cooper, We Have the War
Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860–April 1861 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2012), 32–42, 118–120. Russell McClintock argues that Buchanan was “more in touch than
his fellow Northerners with the daunting complexity of the situation,” in Lincoln and the
Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2008), 68.
22 December 18, 1860, Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., 114. For a detailed discussion
of the Kentuckian’s motives and maneuvering over the Crittenden Compromise see Albert
Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for Union (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1974), 373–405.
23 James G. Randall coined the phrase in “The Blundering Generation,” The Mississippi Valley
Historical Review 27:1 (June 1940), 3–28. Randall, Avery Craven, and others saw the carnage of
the Civil War as “needless” in large part because they believed slavery was on the road to
extinction. See Craven, The Repressible Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1939). Contemporaries of Randall and Craven who critiqued the original “blundering
generation” argument – typically known as “fundamentalists” – emphasized the fundamental
split over slavery as the primary cause of sectional difficulty. For a useful summary of both the
revisionist scholarship and its limits see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Causes of the Civil War:
A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review 16 (Oct. 1949), 969–981.
Modern revisionists who focus on the coming of the war have generally moved away from
the “needless war” theory. This revised approach relies on research from the 1970s that
demonstrates slavery likely would have survived for many generations. For the efficiency and
adaptability of slave labor see Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The
Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: Little Brown, & Co., 1974); and Robert Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1989). For an example of historians who still emphasize the responsibility of a “blundering
generation” of politicians for the onset of civil war, see Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of
the 1850s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). Some recent scholarship of the war itself has
trended back (though not entirely) toward the original concerns about wartime brutality and
the lasting physical and psychological toll that fighting took on Americans. For a useful
summary of this other strand of revisionism see Yael A. Sternhell, “Revisionism Reinvented?
The Antiwar Turn in Civil War Scholarship,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3:2 (June 2013),
239–256.
24 While many historians believe congressional Republicans were responsible for killing the
compromise efforts, they disagree as to why Northerners rejected Crittenden’s proposals and
others. In his first book, David Potter argued that Republicans misunderstood the degree of
southern disunionism, believing that such talk was emblematic of the kind of threats that their
pro-slavery colleagues had been making for years. Alternatively, Kenneth Stampp heralded
Republican refusals to compromise, arguing that they were appropriately committed to the
party’s antislavery principles at the expense of reconciliation in 1860. See David M. Potter,
Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 238–248;
Stampp, And the War Came, 1–3, 9–12. Potter and Stampp directly addressed one another’s
arguments in George Herman Knoles, ed., The Crisis of Union, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 90–113.
Recent scholarship remains divided over the intentions of and blame to be laid on Republicans
for a failure to compromise in late December and January. William Cooper argues, for example,
that Republicans were intractable in compromise negotiations (and not always for the purest
antislavery reasons). See Cooper, We Have the War, 52–53, 60–63. Scholars such as James Oakes
and Bruce Levine follow in the footsteps of Kenneth Stampp in promoting the heroism of
Republican unwillingness to compromise on the issue of expansion. See James Oakes, Freedom

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National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 2013), 73–74; Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social
Revolution That Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013), 44–47. Levine argues
that Southerners were primarily responsible for the failure of compromise, arguing that these men
found Crittenden’s proposal “insufficiently conciliatory” (emphasis Levine’s), p. 46. Russell
McClintock echoes some of Potter’s themes of misunderstanding the disunionist threat in Lincoln
and the Decision, 80–84, 94–95, 117–122.
25 As I have argued, federal politicians were not the primary leaders of the secession movement;
they followed the actions of their local communities back home. See Rachel A. Shelden,
Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 4–5, 7, 172.
26 The best study of the secession conventions remains Ralph A. Wooster, The Secession Conventions
of the South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Historians have debated both the
meaning of the word “cooperationist” and the extent to which these men were represented in
the Lower South conventions. In part this controversy hinges on the question of whether a
majority of Lower South whites actually favored secession. The lack of party affiliation and the
haziness of the word “cooperationist” complicates delegate counts. For an overview of these
historiographical discussions see Potter, Impending Crisis, 495–502, especially 498n32.
27 J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978), xix–xx, 451–454. Other historians who have
highlighted the role of anti-partyism and a focus on white liberty include John M. Sacher, A
Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in
Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000); and Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum
Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). Carey’s book provides a persuasive
counterpoint to Michael P. Johnson’s study of Georgia, which argues that although slaveholders
were outnumbered three to two in the state, they forced non-slaveholders into secession
through a political coup. See Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
For the role of economic factors in Lower South politics see Thornton, Politics and Power;
William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1974). For the emphasis on nativism and abolitionism see Walter
L. Buenger, Secession and the Union in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984). For a
useful overview of several state studies of secession see James Tice Moore, “Secession and the
States: A Review Essay,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography XCIV (1986), 60–76.
28 A sampling of excellent work on the shared culture of antebellum southern whites demonstrates
that scholars remain divided on the issue of difference between North and South. For an
overview of the argument that the North and South were two distinctive societies (or even
civilizations) see James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look
at an Old Question,” Civil War History 29:3 (Dec. 2004), 230–244. For an alternative view that
emphasizes similarities between North and South, with slavery as the important difference, see
Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?”
The American Historical Review 85:5 (Dec. 1980), 1119–1149.
For the role of pro-slavery Christianity see C. C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation:
Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War (Macon: Mercer University Press,
1985); Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993); and Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism
in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). While Goen points
to a belief among Southerners that their religion was distinctive, Carwardine emphasizes the
shared importance of Evangelical Protestants in antebellum political culture and Snay argues
that southern clergy shared critical theological commonalities with their northern
counterparts.
For the importance of patriarchal gender dynamics see Lee Ann Whites, The Civil War as a
Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995);

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Laura Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Sarah N. Roth, Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular
Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Whites argues that yeomen were
“empower[ed]” by a patriarchal dominance over their wives in a manner that echoed slavery,
while Edwards shows that the southern family relied on women for perceived independence.
Roth’s work illustrates that while women in the North and South might have disagreed about
slavery, they shared and perpetuated common racial stereotypes.
For the emphasis on a shared economic system see Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy
of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Random House,
1961); and Eugene Genovese, “Yeomen Farmers in a Slaveholders’ Democracy,” Agricultural
History 49:2 (April 1975), 331–342; and modern works such as Calvin Schermerhorn, The
Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2015). Genovese argues that slavery destabilized and stunted southern economic growth
but, unaware of the outside world, yeomen “either aspired to become slaveholders or to live
as marginal farmers under the limited protection of their stronger neighbors” (“Yeomen
Farmers,” 338). Schermerhorn sees poorer whites as inherently enmeshed in a capitalist slave
system through activities ranging from banking to slave trading, which ultimately tied them to
the broader northern and Atlantic World economy.
29 For communities in the Lower South that resisted secession see for example Margaret M.
Storey, “Civil War Unionists and the Political Culture of Loyalty in Alabama, 1860–1861,”
Journal of Southern History 69:1 (Feb. 2003), 71–106; Paul Horton, “Submitting to the ‘Shadow
of Slavery’: The Secession Crisis and Civil War in Alabama’s Lawrence County,” Civil War
History 44:2 (June 1998), 111–136; and David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and
Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).
30 Scholarship on the southern middle class and urban poor inherently undermined previous
notions of a distinctive binary planter-yeoman southern economy. See, for example, Jonathan
Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004); Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); and Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R.
Green, eds., The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2011).
31 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk
Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and Co., 1935; New York: Free Press, 1998), 57; citations refer to the Free Press
edition. For the caution with which slaves approached secession see Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields,
et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Ser. 1, Vol. 1: The Destruction
of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9. For the varied experiences of
enslaved peoples depending upon region, economic unit, and other factors, see Berlin, Fields,
et al., Freedom, 4; Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974). As these titles demonstrate, much of the excellent
scholarship of enslaved communities in this era focuses either on the war itself or more generally
across the antebellum period. Still, such work suggests a similar pattern of circumspection
during the Secession Winter.
32 For the ways in which enslaved peoples mobilized their communities to fight their enslavers
both in the antebellum period and during the war, see, for example, Steven Hahn, A Nation
Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of
Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 55–114. William
Barney has called secession “the slaves’ revenge,” arguing that the various individual acts and
expressions of humanity that enslaved peoples engaged in, helped to precipitate their enslavers’
“suicidal” mission to create a new nation. See Barney, “Rush to Disaster: Secession and the
Slaves’ Revenge,” in Robert J. Cook et al., Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 10–11.
33 See Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1975), 343–380.

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34 Initial meetings in Montgomery did not include Texas. Although the Texas convention
approved secession by a three-to-one margin on February 1, 1861, the unionist governor, Sam
Houston, tried to prevent the state from joining the Confederacy. See James Marten, Texas
Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856–1874 (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1990), 40–43; and Walter L. Buenger, “Texas and the Riddle of Secession,” The
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87:2 (Oct. 1983), 151–182.
35 Men who had previously served as representatives in U.S. state or federal positions quickly
dominated the Confederate federal political structure. At its lowest mark, one-third of the
Confederacy’s federal political positions fell to men who had previously served in the U.S.
Congress. See Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate
Congress (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972), 24–25; and Ezra J. Warner and
W. Buck Yearns, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1975), 290–292. For the exclusion of the Fire Eater community and the
moderate nature of the Montgomery Convention see Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate
Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 45–57; William C. Davis, “A
Government of Our Own”: The Making of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1994), 8–30; and George Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against
Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 39–63.
36 The Confederates adjusted several provisions of the U.S. Constitution to further suit their
proclivities, but the most striking parts of the document feature the explicit right to enslave
African Americans, for example in Article I, Section 9 (4), preventing any law “denying or
impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” See “Constitution of the Confederate States:
March 11, 1861,” Yale Law School Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/
csa_csa.asp. Stephanie McCurry concludes that the unique and explicit pro-slavery language
was emblematic of the anti-democratic nature of the Confederacy. See McCurry, Confederate
Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010).
37 Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, Before,
During, and Since the War (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1886), 717–729. For a terrific
overview of the racial appeals that secession commissioners made to the remaining slaveholding
states see Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes
of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
38 Potter, Impending Crisis, 505–510.
39 For examples of historians who take a critical perspective of Lincoln’s silence see McClintock,
Lincoln and the Decision, 49–53; and Cooper, We Have the War, 31–33. For those who see
Lincoln’s behavior more favorably see Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), I:702–703; and Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect:
Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2008), 114–147.
40 For the long history of idle disunion threats see Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 1–19. Potter
argues that Lincoln’s understanding was part of a general “Republican incredulity” (see p. 17).
Elizabeth Varon argues that disunion was part of a cultural language among all Americans in
the antebellum era, as a prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program. See Varon,
Disunion! 6–14. For the importance of Lincoln’s experience with the Washington community
in regard to his secession-crisis behavior see Shelden, Washington Brotherhood, 188–189.
41 For historians who emphasize ethnocultural issues see William Gienapp, The Origins of the
Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Holt, Political Crisis;
and Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics before the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For those who argue that the party was born of
and sustained by antislavery principles alone see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Tyler
Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and, more recently, Oakes, Freedom National.
42 Nicole Etcheson, A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2011), 46–49. For an overview of northern newspaper editorials see
Howard C. Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century

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for the American Historical Association, 1942); and Daniel W. Crofts, “And the War Came,”
in Lacy K. Ford., ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011), 191. For Greeley’s role see David M. Potter, “Horace Greeley and Peaceable
Secession,” Journal of Southern History 7:2 (May 1941), 145–159; James M. McPherson, Abraham
Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 113–130;
and Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis
of Free Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 160–164. Tuchinsky neatly summarizes
the various interpretations of Greeley’s comments. Among the most prominent voices of the
anti-coercion movement was New York City Mayor Fernando Wood, a prominent Democrat.
Wood also briefly advocated an idea of multiple confederacies, encouraging the secession of
New York. See Jerome Mushkat, Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 1990), 110–113. For the preference of some abolitionists for disunion see
George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union (New
York: Harper & Row, 1965), 56–60; and W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the
Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2013), 212–216. The abolitionist Garrison proclaimed the Union as a
“covenant with death” in describing the federal government’s relationship to slavery. See
McDaniel, Problem, 216; and Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition
of Slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 313.
43 James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted during the War
for the Union, reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2003), 10–18; and David W. Blight, Frederick
Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1989), 59–79.
44 On the equivalence of Union with liberty, equality, and nation see Gallagher, The Union War,
46–49; Varon, Disunion! 4–5.
45 For the efforts of Democrats and Constitutional Unionists see Nichols, Disruption, 450–459,
476–479, 484–491; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision, 152–158; and Stampp, And the War
Came, 208–210. As Stampp points out, losing southern Democrats to a new Confederacy could
only weaken their political organization (see p. 209). For the desperate pleas of the financial
sector see Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the
American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 94–97. For
various pro-compromise movements throughout the North and particularly the labor meeting
in Philadelphia see J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (New
York: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 9–10. For an overview of the Peace Convention see Robert Gray
Gunderson, Old Gentleman’s Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1961).
46 On consideration of the Peace Convention measures and passage of the Corwin amendment
see Daniel W. Crofts, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the
Struggle to Save the Union (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and Potter,
Impending Crisis, 550–552. For the importance of western expansion of slavery as a critical
political issue see Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest
Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
and Christopher Childers, The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the
Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).
47 “First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln,” March 4, 1861, Yale Law School Avalon
Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp.
48 Although David Potter once argued that Lincoln still clamored for peace and reunion even as
he ordered Sumter re-supplied, most scholars agree that the new president had abandoned any
such hope at least by early April. See Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 315–375; Stampp, And the
War Came, 179–203; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 285–288, 295–296. James McPherson
neatly summarizes these different positions in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War
Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 272n78.
49 Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress,” in Roy P. Basler,
ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1953), 4:331–333.

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50 For the argument that Upper South whites were less committed to slavery see Potter, Impending
Crisis, 504–506; and Freehling, The South vs. The South, 18–25, 42–43. For the counter-
argument see Andrew J. Torget, “Unions of Slavery: Slavery, Politics, and Secession in the
Valley of Virginia,” in Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget, eds.,
Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2006), 9–34; and Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War
in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), xix–xx.
51 Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, xvi–xxi. Also see Holt, Political Crisis, 230–240, 248–259; and
James M. Woods, Rebellion and Realignment: Arkansas’s Road to Secession (Fayetteville: University
of Arkansas Press, 1987), 113–132.
52 Virginia’s secession convention, which had voted to reject disunion earlier in the spring,
remained in session at the time of Lincoln’s call for volunteers and quickly reconsidered, passing
an ordinance of secession on April 17. A majority of white Virginia residents approved the
ordinance in a popular referendum on May 23. Arkansas and North Carolina similarly assembled
secession conventions that overwhelmingly voted for separation on May 6 and 20, respectively.
Tennessee’s state legislature bypassed a secession convention and submitted a “Declaration of
Independence” from the Union to popular referendum, which was approved on June 8. See
McPherson, Battle Cry, 278–284.
53 McPherson, Battle Cry, 284; William C. Harris, Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 7.
54 There are several excellent studies of the Border South in the Civil War era. While scholars
emphasize different cultural and economic factors that influenced Border South whites, a
sampling shows that issues of slavery and race were at the heart of white motivations. See Luke
E. Harlow, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014); Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation,
and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2012); Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the
Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Michael D. Robinson, “Fulcrum
of the Union: The Border South and the Secession Crisis, 1859–1861” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana
State University, 2013).
55 See Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Ayers, Presence. Ayers focuses on communities in
Pennsylvania and Virginia. Harrold looks at several Border South areas; Louisville plays a large
role in the book.
56 For western border tensions among whites and natives see for example Jeremy Neely, The
Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2007). Much more work is needed on the experience of native
peoples during the secession crisis.
57 For a good overview of white anti-Confederate activity see Freehling, The South vs. The South,
47–82. There are a number of useful studies of unionism in the new Confederate states. See
Robert T. McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Town in the American Civil War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla
Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
Richard O. Curry, A House Divided (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964); and
Barton A. Myers, Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014). For pro-Confederates in the Union states see, for example,
Lowell Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975).
58 See Berlin, Fields, et al., Freedom.

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 11
WARTIME MI L I T A R Y
MOBILIZATION , BUS I N ES S ,
AND TEC HN OL O G Y

Mark R. Wilson

Civil War history is often thought of as a field dominated by traditional military histories,
focused on battles, generals, and soldiers fighting in the field.1 However, there is a long,
proud tradition of studying the sinews of the Civil War, defined broadly, to include subjects
such as the mobilization of men and women (as soldiers and civilian war workers), wartime
political economies, technology, and business. Before the Civil War centennial of the early
1960s, these subjects had already been investigated by many talented historians, including
Wesley Mitchell, Fred Shannon, Frank Vandiver, Ella Lonn, Mary Massey, Charles
Ramsdell, Richard Todd, Robert Bruce, William Hesseltine, and Russell Weigley.2
This early work was supplemented and challenged, during the later twentieth century,
by dozens of new studies. By the 1990s, researchers starting new projects in this area
(myself included) had the enormous advantage of being able to consult two heroic
synthetic surveys of Union and Confederate mobilization, by Richard Bensel and Paul
Koistinen. Their surveys showed that by the end of the twentieth century, there were
already hundreds of high-quality studies that demanded the attention of historians of
Civil War mobilization, technology, and business.3
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have continued to learn more about
these subjects. In this short essay, I concentrate on this newer work, dividing the discussion
into two parts. In the first part, I point to areas in which advances in our knowledge seem
to have been most dramatic. These areas include the Civil War’s environmental history, the
history of disease and medicine, and intellectual property. Then, in the second part of
the essay, I offer a brief overview of areas in which advances have been less revolutionary,
but nonetheless important. Among these areas are the mobilization of military manpower
and women on the home front; finance and trade; and the wartime experiences of business
firms and business communities. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I suggest a few areas that still
merit further study, even after a century and a half of valuable scholarship.

Recent Leaps: Works on the Environment, Disease

and Medicine, and Intellectual Property
Although the early twenty-first century has seen the appearance of all sorts of valuable
scholarship on the Civil War, a handful of areas stand out as ones in which there have
been giant leaps. These include histories focused on the environment and physical space;

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disease (and death) and medicine; and intellectual property (including patents). In each of
these three areas, the quality and depth of our knowledge was far superior by the mid-
2010s than it had been just a decade and a half before.
Although environmental historians may have been somewhat slow to tackle the Civil
War, in recent years we have seen an outburst of new work focused on landscape and
nature. Much of this new work was surveyed in a 2012 review essay by Lisa Brady,4 whose
own book, published in the same year, offered an innovative discussion of how Civil War
armies attempted to transform the landscape and alter “nature.”5 This high-concept, newer
work, informed by the vibrant field of environmental history, transcended and comple-
mented more traditional discussions of military alterations of the landscape, such as the
new studies of field fortifications published by the prolific Earl J. Hess.6
By emphasizing the physical destructiveness of the Civil War, some of this new
environmental history became entangled in a growing, sometimes contentious debate
about the extent to which the 1861–65 conflict should be seen as an especially ruinous
or otherwise “total” war. In Ruin Nation, published in 2012, Megan Kate Nelson
emphasized the wartime destruction of forests and southern property, as well as human
bodies.7 This account fit with others that highlighted the suffering of the South, including
new work by Joan Cashin, describing civilians left hungry by ravenous armies on both
sides.8 But this high-destructiveness interpretation clashed with other new works, such as
those by Mark Neely and Paul Paskoff, who suggested that the extent of physical ruin
was relatively low. This interpretive debate about destruction was connected to an even
broader controversy, about the extent to which the Civil War was comparable to the
“total” wars of the twentieth century.9
Related to the new interest in environmental history was a new emphasis on the Civil
War’s effects on human experiences of time and space. Military and civilian uses of time-
keeping technologies, along with changes in people’s consciousness of time, were discussed
in an innovative 2005 book by Cheryl Wells, building on previous work by Mark M.
Smith.10 According to Wells, modern timekeeping technologies such as mechanical clocks
and watches were less useful during the war than we might imagine. Battles and wounded
soldiers both caused irregular and constant crises, which could not be addressed using
regular clock time. A few years later, Smith published a new study, focused on the sensory
history of the war: how Americans saw it, tasted it, heard it, and smelled it.11 Like Wells,
Smith described a chaotic war, in which many modern technologies proved inadequate.
Instead, many soldiers and civilians experienced visual confusion, stench, and hunger. A
similar emphasis on the physical environment and space-time appeared in creative new
studies on the Confederate and Union home fronts, which depicted people in near-
constant motion, rather than remaining still, in stable home towns.12
The interest in people moving through physical space extended also to new studies of
military transportation. Railroads in the Civil War have been studied at length, but in an
important new contribution, William Thomas used a combination of cultural history and
digital special analysis to tell us more. Thomas offered new evidence to suggest the
importance of railroads in Civil War campaigns, in which some generals adopted a
“railroad strategy.”13 Perhaps inevitably, the newer work on this subject, like many
studies of wartime rail operations before it, tended to overemphasize the importance of
railroads. Civil War armies did a lot of traveling using muscle power. This side of the war

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was illuminated in a 2008 book by Ann Norton Greene, which reminded us of the
importance of horse (and mule) power.14
The new environmental histories of the Civil War became an important part of a
larger explosion of work on disease, death, and medical care. In her 2013 book on the
war’s environmental history, Kathryn Meier emphasized soldiers’ struggles to stay healthy,
as they lived outdoors, fighting insects and disease.15 Mosquito-borne diseases such as
malaria and yellow fever were not just widespread, as Andrew Bell argued in a valuable
2010 book, but had the power to affect the operations of armies.16 Disease, not combat,
was the number one killer of Civil War soldiers. The mass death of the 1860s was the main
subject of one of the most celebrated new works on the Civil War era, by Drew Faust.17
The deadliness of the conflict now seems more impressive than ever, thanks to a major
article by J. David Hacker, published in 2011. Using a simple statistical analysis of
microlevel samples of U.S. Census data, Hacker concluded that the best estimate of the
number of deaths caused by the Civil War is around 750,000 – about 20 percent more
than the traditional figure, used by historians for generations, of 620,000.18
Joining the new work on disease and death were many excellent new studies of
medicine and health care. Two impressive surveys of the subject, by Margaret Humphreys
and Shauna Devine, both suggested that the Civil War years boosted medical professionalism
and science-based medicine, as doctors and nurses shared their knowledge of anatomy,
surgery, and disinfection.19 Several other new works taught us about the wartime medical
experiences of African Americans, who suffered from the prejudices of health providers,
but also demanded better service and came out of the war prepared to build their own
medical practices and health care systems.20 And the early twenty-first century brought
also a great deal of new information about the history of Civil War amputation, and
amputees.21
As thousands of new amputees demanded better prosthetics, dozens of businesses and
inventors responded, with new products, many of them patented. This was one important
part of the broader history of innovation and intellectual property in the Civil War, a
subject that was discussed at length in several new works. Among the most notable were
studies published by Ross Thomson and Zorina Khan, both of whom used careful
quantitative analysis of patent records to show that the Civil War inspired some bursts of
innovation in particular fields (such as prosthetics and weapons), but certainly did not
cause an overall jump in technological innovation. Peace, they suggested, was better than
war, when it came to innovation.22

Less Dramatic But Still Significant Steps: New Work on

the Mobilization of Women and Men, War Economies,
Business Firms and Business Communities
As the previous section has suggested, the new work on Civil War medicine, intellectual
property, and the environment was truly explosive: by the 2010s, we thought of those
subjects in entirely different ways than we had done just a couple of decades before. In
most other areas, by contrast, the development of our knowledge was less revolutionary,
if not insignificant. In part this was because there was already decades’ worth of strong
work to build upon. Certainly, the new work of the early twenty-first century taught

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us more about the mobilization of civilians and soldiers, about economic mobilization
in the Confederacy and the Union, and about the business history of the war. But for
the most part, even the best of this new work caused only incremental gains to our
knowledge.
We might make one exception to the above general rule, by recognizing the excellence
and originality of recent new histories of women in the Union and Confederacy. New
studies by Judith Giesberg and Stephanie McCurry, in particular, forced us to reassess our
understanding of women as political actors on the Civil War home fronts. They described
women’s energetic responses to the highly intrusive wartime states, which demanded huge
personal and economic sacrifices. On both home fronts, women demanded that wartime
states not just take, but give and protect. Although their success in this wartime political
project was mixed, their encounter with powerful state authorities in the 1860s likely
shaped American politics for generations to come.23
Also valuable, if less truly original, was the growing body of work on the mobilization
of military manpower. Here the highlights included two new, deeply-researched studies
of Virginia, by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Joseph Glatthaar, who both concluded that in
the Confederate armies, wealthier men, including slaveowners, were well represented.24
Much of this new work seemed to suggest that morale among Confederate males, if not
females, remained rather high, until late in the war.25 However, this interpretation was
challenged by new research on the prevalence of desertion – the flip side of the
extraordinarily high enlistment rates among white southern men.26
New research on manpower mobilization in the North tended to focus on the local
level. As new studies by Russell Johnson and Rachel Shelden (and others) suggested,
while state and national politics were important, it was largely at the local level that north-
erners grappled with the complexities of manpower recruitment. Here, the draft was an
important factor, but the vast majority of soldiers were not draftees, but “volunteers,”
who, after the first few months of the conflict, were able to claim a variety of substantial
monetary bounties and bonuses, along with their regular pay.27 Meanwhile, other works
added to our knowledge of different aspects of the military manpower story, including the
mobilization of sailors;28 of foreign-born non-citizens;29 and of African Americans.30
Finally, several newer studies emphasized the importance of regular (professional) military
officers, on both sides of the conflict.31
On the subject of Union and Confederate war economies, historians continued to
debate the basics. Michael Bonner claimed that we should understand the South’s wartime
political economy as an example of “expedient corporatism,”32 whereas John Majewski
seemed to favor one of the more traditional interpretative frames, pointing to emergency
state socialism, built on antebellum precedents.33 Other new works reminded us of both
sides’ practice of seizing the property of persons alleged to be disloyal.34 But perhaps the
most interesting element of the newer work on this subject was the suggestion that
the Union and Confederate styles of war economy were not all that different. This was the
conclusion that seemed to come from a combined reading of my own book and one by
Chad Morgan, which together suggested that both sides, North and South, supplied their
armies using complex combinations of state-run factories, imports, and private (for-profit)
merchants and manufacturers. Military supply officers, including quartermasters and
commissaries, emerged as the leading managers of the national war economies, as they

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simultaneously expanded their own in-house production facilities and their orders from
contractors.35
Generally speaking, the war was a disaster for businesses in the Confederacy, and
not bad for those in the Union. War finance in the South was a failure. Europeans
refused to extend much credit to the Confederacy, which ended up relying heavily on
money creation to pay for the war. This caused very high inflation, which made it
difficult to do business of any kind, besides being hard on consumers and workers.
Meanwhile, the United States managed a much more successful war finance effort,
using a combination of borrowing (via bond issues) and new income taxes. The U.S.
Congress made important new strides in the direction of a more nationally coordi-
nated banking and monetary system, by providing for new nationally chartered banks
and paper money (greenbacks). The Union’s solid war finance scheme bolstered
private capital markets, including hundreds of existing banks, which continued to
extend essential credit to merchants and manufacturers in wartime, just as they had
been doing in peacetime. Although the Union did suffer from inflation, among other
problems, military contractors and other firms in the North experienced the war years
as a time during which it remained possible to do reasonably regular business, some-
times with the possibility of substantial profit. Behind the lines in the Confederacy,
generally speaking, this was not the case.36
The micro-level business history of the Civil War remains thin, in part because the
documentary record is so poor. Some historians have attempted to get around this
problem by attempting to reconstruct the Civil War experiences of a handful of firms that
have endured over two centuries.37 There have been some valuable new studies of
individual companies, including two railroads: the Charleston & Savannah, and the
Pennsylvania.38 However, much of the most important work on the war’s business history
has continued to come in the form of studies of communities of businesses, and their
leaders. New York City merchants and manufacturers were described by Sven Beckert,
who argued that the Civil War helped bring them together. More recently, Scott Marler
provided a rich account of the very different experiences of New Orleans merchants,
who suffered greatly from being on the losing side of the war, and from the Union
military occupation of their city.39 A related story of the business nightmares endured by
pro-Confederate firms was offered by Mark Geiger, in a fascinating legal-economic
history of Missouri bankers.40 Also provocative was an essay by Sean Adams, focused on
Pennsylvania, which pointed to a wartime increase in incorporations, especially in the oil
and mining industries.41
Perhaps the most notable new contributions to our knowledge of the war’s economic
history were those that discussed trade and finance. The global cotton trade, immediately
before the war and during it, was described at length in important books by Brian Schoen
and Sven Beckert.42 Other historians added to our understanding of wartime tariff policies
and the conflict’s impact – which could be surprisingly limited in many areas – on
European and global trade.43 There was valuable new work on illegal or illicit “contra-
band” trading, as well as blockade-running.44 And Nicholas Parrillo’s important new study
on long-run transformations of American governance reminded us that during the Civil
War, privateering was still the rule: even U.S. Navy officers received much of their
compensation in the form of captured prizes, rather than salaries.45

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Closely related to the work on transatlantic trade were new studies of the Union and
Confederate efforts to secure financing overseas.46 Meanwhile, other historians expanded
our knowledge of domestic war finance.47 Most notable in this field were new histories
of the greenback, introduced during the Civil War by the Union. In a new book on
Reconstruction-era regional political struggles over the greenback, Nicholas Barreyre
rejuvenated an area of study that had been relatively dormant for fifty years, following
the works of Robert Sharkey and Irwin Unger.48 Meanwhile, Michael Caires, building
on work by Stephen Mihm, offered an important new account of the Civil War green-
back, and its antebellum antecedents.49 Although these subjects were far from unknown
to students of Civil War history, these new contributions of the early twenty-first
century were remarkably original and valuable.

Conclusions
Given the abundance of solid work on the history of Civil War mobilization, business,
and technology, it is hard to predict how the field will develop over the next several
decades. In this brief conclusion, I offer a few tentative suggestions.
One area that will certainly see major growth in the near future is the history of
technology in the Civil War era. As noted above, one small aspect of this subject,
regarding intellectual property, has been well-studied in recent years. So too have a
handful of other special topics, such as ironclad warships.50 Academic historians have
done too little to discuss the uses of military technologies on the battlefield. One exception
is Earl Hess, who has recently challenged those who believe that state-of-the-art rifles
made much difference in battle.51 However, it appears that we will soon have valuable
new surveys of technology in the Civil War.52 Those aspiring to contribute to this subfield
will be able to draw on those new works; they may also benefit from doing more to
appreciate the contributions of buffs, antiquarians, and reenactors, who have built up a
great deal of knowledge about the war’s material culture.53
The war’s labor history also seems to call out for more attention. To be sure, dozens
of books and articles have already told us a great deal about war workers, North and
South. But this seems to be a thin area of Civil War history. We still need to know more
about the lives and contributions of the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and
children of all ethnicities, whose labor allowed the Union and Confederate armies to
function. In particular, it would seem that the workers who traveled with the armed
forces, including thousands of teamsters, laundresses, and blacksmiths, should have their
stories better told, perhaps in part through some of the kind of military archival sources
that we have already used to document the work of the men with the guns.
Given that transnational and global history is already becoming traditional, we should
expect to see more studies that explore more of the global connections that helped to
shape the Civil War. As noted above, we already know a good deal about the international
cotton trade. However, we know far less about the wartime transnational histories of key
northern exports and imports, including wheat, coffee, and rubber. This is not just a
matter of economic history, but concerns the material lives of the Civil War armies as
well. Union soldiers were provided with huge amounts of coffee, and large numbers of
rubber blankets. Where did the coffee and rubber come from? Seeking answers to such
questions might provide us with some interesting new histories.

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Finally, we would benefit from more comparative histories, looking not just at one
side of the conflict, but at both sides at once. Such comparisons were offered a generation
ago by the heroic synthetic works of Bensel and Koistinen; they were also provided,
using a narrower regional frame, in the pioneering digital and print work of Edward
Ayers.54 But all in all, little has been done on this score. As suggested above, we have
valuable works on the New York City and Philadelphia business communities, and on
the New Orleans merchants. In the future, we should have more comparative business
histories, so that we can better understand what was similar, and what different, about
North and South. Similarly, we have recently learned much more about women, and
about military-industrial mobilization, on the Union and Confederate home fronts, but
via separate monographs. Perhaps the next generation of scholars will begin to disrespect
the traditional regional divide, and thus offer us a new set of original histories of the
sinews of Civil War.

Notes
1 For an argument that the field has never been monopolized by traditional military history, see
Earl J. Hess, “Where Do We Stand? A Critical Assessment of Civil War Studies in the
Sesquicentennial Era,” Civil War History 60, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 371–403.
2 Wesley Clair Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic
Consequences of Their Issue, 1862–65 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903); Fred A.
Shannon, The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cleveland: Arthur
H. Clark, 1928); Frank Everson Vandiver, Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate
Ordnance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952); Ella Lonn, Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy
(New York: W. Neale, 1933); Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1952); Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern
Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944); Richard Cecil Todd,
Confederate Finance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1954); Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the
Tools of War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956); William Best Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War
Governors (New York: Knopf, 1948); Russell Frank Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union
Army: A Biography of M.C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
3 Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America,
1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul A. C. Koistinen, Beating
Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1996). My own short bibliographical survey of the field as it stood
circa 2000 appeared in the notes and essay on sources in Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil
War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2006), 241–293.
4 Lisa M. Brady, “From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War
Environmental History,” Civil War History 58, no. 3 (Sept. 2012): 305–321; see also Matthew
M. Stith, “‘The Deplorable Condition of the Country’: Nature, Society, and War on the
Trans-Mississippi Frontier,” Civil War History 58, no. 3 (Sept. 2012): 322–347.
5 Lisa M. Brady, War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes
during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
6 Earl J. Hess, Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Earl J. Hess, In the Trenches of Petersburg:
Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2009).
7 Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2012).

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8 Joan E. Cashin, “Hungry People in the South: Civilians, Armies, and the Food Supply,” in
Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen Berry (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2011), 160–175.
9 Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007); Paul F. Paskoff, “Measures of War: A Quantitative Examination of the
Civil War’s Destructiveness in the Confederacy,” Civil War History 54, no. 1 (March 2008):
35–62; Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, “Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The
End of an Outdated ‘Master Narrative’,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (Sept. 2011):
394–408.
10 Cheryl A. Wells, Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865 (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2005).
11 Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
12 Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Yael A. Sternhall, Routes of War: The World of
Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Wendy
Hamand Venet, A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014).
13 William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals
and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011).
14 Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008); Wilson, Business of Civil War.
15 Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862
Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
16 Andrew McIlwaine Bell, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American
Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
17 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York:
Knopf, 2008).
18 J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4
(Dec. 2011): 307–348. For an article suggesting that the wartime deaths were not especially
shocking to people of the mid-nineteenth century, who were accustomed to high death rates,
see Nicholas Marshall, “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil
War Era 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 3–27. For a thoughtful response by Hacker to the Marshall
article, see J. David Hacker, “Has the Demographic Impact of Civil War Deaths Been
Exaggerated?” Civil War History 60, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 453–458.
19 Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War
and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
20 Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Gretchen Long, Doctoring Freedom: The
Politics of African-American Medical Care (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012);
Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and
Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
21 Guy R. Hasegawa, Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply
Artificial Limbs (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); Brian Craig Miller,
Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
22 Ross Thomson, “The Continuity of Innovation: The Civil War Experience,” Enterprise &
Society 11, no. 1 (March 2010): 128–165; Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical
Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009); B. Zorina Khan, “The Impact of War on Resource Allocation:
‘Creative Destruction,’ Patenting, and the American Civil War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 46, no. 3 (Winter 2016): 315–353. See also H. Jackson Knight, Confederate Invention:

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The Story of the Confederate States Patent Office and Its Inventors (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2011); Guy R. Hasegawa, Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the
American Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015).
23 Giesberg, Army at Home; Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the
Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); LeeAnn Whites, “Forty
Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the Civil War on
the Western Border,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (March 2011): 56–78. The research
by Giesberg and McCurry was deeper and more innovative than that used by most studies of
the wartime home fronts, including newer ones, such as Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
24 Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Joseph T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From
Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008); Joseph T. Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of
Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
25 Bradley R. Clampitt, The Confederate Heartland: Military and Civilian Morale in the Western
Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).
26 Mark A. Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
27 Russell L. Johnson, Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial
Society in a Northern City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Jennifer L. Weber,
Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006); Michael T. Smith, The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011); Rachel A. Shelden, “Measures for a
‘Speedy Conclusion’: A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism,” Civil War
History 55, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 469–498; Steven J. Ramold, Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View
the Northern Home Front (New York: New York University Press, 2013); William C. Harris,
Lincoln and the Union Governors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013); Timothy
Justin Orr, “Cities at War: Union Army Mobilization in the Urban Northeast, 1861–1865”
(Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2010).
28 Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004).
29 Paul Quigley, “Civil War Conscription and the International Boundaries of Citizenship,”
Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (Sept. 2014): 373–397.
30 Bob Luke and John David Smith, Soldiering for Freedom: How the Union Army Recruited, Trained,
and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Bruce
C. Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
31 Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Mark A. Smith, Engineering Security:
The Corps of Engineers and Third System Defense Policy, 1815–1861 (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2009); Robert G. Angevine, The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and
Technology in Nineteenth Century America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004);
Wilson, Business of Civil War. See also Samuel J. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army
Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013).
32 Michael Brem Bonner, “Expedient Corporatism in Confederate Political Economy,” Civil
War History 56, no. 1 (March 2010): 33–65.
33 John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
34 Daniel W. Hamilton, The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the
Confederacy during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Rodney J.
Steward, “Confederate Menace: Sequestration on the North Carolina Home Front,” in Berry,
Weirding the War, 54–70.

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35 Chad Morgan, Planters’ Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2005).
36 These generalizations are nothing new. For some relatively recent works that discuss these
themes, see Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State,
1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 178–221; Franklin Noll, “The
United States Monopolization of Bank Note Production: Politics, Government, and the
Greenback, 1862–1878,” American Nineteenth Century History 13, no. 1 (March 2012): 15–43;
John A. James and David F. Weiman, “The National Banking Acts and the Transformation of
New York City Banking during the Civil War Era,” Journal of Economic History 71, no. 2 (June
2011): 338–362; Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil
War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Heather Cox Richardson, The
Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
37 James M. Schmidt, Lincoln’s Labels: America’s Best-Known Brands and the Civil War (Roseville,
MN: Edinborough Press, 2009).
38 H. David Stone, Jr., Vital Rails: The Charleston & Savannah Railroad and the Civil War in Coastal
South Carolina (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Albert J. Churella, The
Pennsylvania Railroad, Vol. I: Building an Empire, 1846–1917 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 284–325.
39 Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American
Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Scott P. Marler, “‘An
Abiding Faith in Cotton’: The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860–1862,”
Civil War History 54, no. 3 (Sept. 2008): 247–276; Scott P. Marler, The Merchants’ Capital: New
Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
40 Mark W. Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
41 Sean Patrick Adams, “Soulless Monsters and Iron Horses: The Civil War, Industrial Change,
and American Capitalism,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-
Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 249–276.
42 Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the
Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton:
A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
43 Marc-William Pelen, “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the
Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 1 (March 2013):
35–61; Niels Eichhorn, “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Case for
Peace during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 61, no. 2 (June 2015): 138–172.
44 David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Samuel Negus, “A Notorious Nest of
Offence: Neutrals, Belligerents, and Union Jails in Civil War Blockade Running,” Civil War
History 56, no. 4 (Dec. 2010): 350–385; Jarret Ruminski, “‘Tradyville’: The Contraband Trade
and the Problem of Loyalty in Civil War Mississippi,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 4 (Dec.
2012): 511–537.
45 Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government,
1780–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
46 Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–
1873 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jane Flaherty, The Revenue Imperative
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).
47 Robert J. Cook, Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American
Republic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).
48 Nicolas Barreyre, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

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49 Michael T. Caires, “The Greenback Union: The Politics and Law of American Money in the
Civil War Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2014); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of
Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007). On the same subject, see also Bensel, Yankee Leviathan.
50 David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000); William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and
Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Harold Holzer and
Tim Mulligan, eds., The Battle of Hampton Roads: New Perspectives on the USS Monitor and CSS
Virginia (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); Spencer C. Tucker, Blue and Gray
Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006); Robert E. Sheridan, Iron
from the Deep: The Discovery and Recovery of the USS Monitor (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
2004); Carl D. Park, Ironclad Down: The USS Merrimack-CSS Virginia from Construction to
Destruction (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007); Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron: The American
Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008); Myron J.
Smith, Tinclads in the Civil War: Union Light-Draught Gunboat Operations on Western Waters
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); Kurt Hackemer, The U.S. Navy and the Origins of the
Military-Industrial Complex, 1847–1883 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001).
51 Earl J. Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2008). The U.S. Army-run factory at Springfield, MA that was the most
important designer of the rifle musket still deserves more study. However, see Kevin R. Spiker,
Erskine S. Allin, Director of the U.S. Armory in Springfield, Massachusetts: Inventing and Manufacturing
the New Weapons That Won the Civil War (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2014).
52 Thomas F. Army, Jr., Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2016); Barton C. Hacker, ed., Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the
American Civil War (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2016); R. Douglas Hurt, Food and
Agriculture during the Civil War (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016).
53 To cite just one example, Craig L. Barry and David C. Burt, Suppliers to the Confederacy: British
Imported Arms and Accoutrements (Atgen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 2012).
54 Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American
Civil War, the Eve of War (New York: Norton, 2000); Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine
Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: Norton, 2003).

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THE C ONFE DER A C Y O N T HE
B ATTLEFIELD AND HO ME F R O N T

Paul D. Escott

It is an exciting time to study the Confederacy. Digitization is putting more and more
primary sources at the fingertips of any researcher with access to the internet. New tools
such as social network analysis are opening unfamiliar perspectives on the past.
Collaboration on a common research project is taking place through the internet among
many different people, professors and students.1 The opportunities are not limited to the
products of technology but are substantive and interpretive as well. Despite a continued
outpouring of research on all aspects of Confederate history, little is settled. Well-
conceived and splendidly executed studies point in different or opposite directions.
Scholarly progress has opened up new areas of disagreement and put new questions on
the table. The current state of the field invites ambitious works that aim to replace
contradictions with understanding and convert puzzles into insights.
Some historians may find this surprising, even a little bizarre. Those whose fields of
study cover many centuries can be excused for aiming good-natured gibes at historians of
the Confederacy. A government that lasted only four years, they may reasonably claim,
should be well understood by now. But in fact questions continue to arise regarding
many issues of fundamental importance. This essay will discuss the challenges in contem-
porary Confederate historiography that are concerned with the following: political
leadership and the nature of the Confederate polity; morale, disaffection, and commit-
ment among the Confederacy’s white population; the actions and aims of the Confederacy’s
enslaved black population; the rebellious South’s military strategy and history; and what
can be learned from closer attention to the war’s impact on the Confederacy’s physical
and social environments.

Political Leadership and the Confederate Polity

A little more than one hundred years ago, Nathaniel Stephenson, writing in the American
Historical Review, expressed amazement and confusion over the behavior of the Confederate
Congress. Its Journals masked a “tragic study in historical psychology,” a “dilatoriness” that
was “a psychological mystery.” The Confederate Congress showed a remarkably
“uncertain knowledge of its own mind,” and “its vacillation forms an amazing spectacle.”
Stephenson was describing the inability of Congress to act on the idea of arming the
slaves, this during a period of four months in which “the wave of fire which was Sherman’s
advance moved steadily toward Richmond!” When “desperate remedies” truly were
required, the legislators chose instead to fiddle “while Rome was burning.”2

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Surprising behavior from the Confederacy’s national legislature was not confined to
the closing months of the war. In 1863 Georgia’s Senator Herschel Johnson confessed, “I
am amazed at the lightness with which State sovereignty & constitutional obligation are
treated by influential members of Congress – those too, who in former days were Sticklers
upon those points.”3 Perhaps emergency conditions required some compromises of
principle when a new nation was fighting for its life. But what is one to make of two
additional, contradictory facts? Confederate congressmen favored unbridled patriotic
rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric that declared that no sacrifice for the goal of independence
could ever be too great. Yet as Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer and others
have shown, the willingness to support necessary but strong measures evaporated in
precisely those parts of the South that remained under Confederate control. Areas
comprising the Confederate heartland, free from Union menace, steadily withdrew their
support from the administration’s proposals, a fact that forced Jefferson Davis to depend
ever more heavily on the votes of congressmen who could not go home and had nothing
to lose. As early as October 1862 the government controlled only 63.2 percent of the
Confederacy’s congressional districts, and that percentage had fallen to 52.8 percent by
February 1864 and 33.9 percent by March 1865.4 Without the support Davis obtained
from those districts, the Confederacy surely would have expired more quickly.
The political conundrums are broader than the behavior of Congress. Was the political
ideology of the slave South undergoing a fundamental change? Were Confederate leaders
fundamentally opposed to parties or merely reluctant in time of war to appear disloyal by
organizing an opposition? Were their fundamental values changing? Throughout the
sectional crisis both the democratic values of Jacksonian democracy and the racial ideology
of herrenvolk democracy had lauded the common man. The status of the ordinary non-
slaveholder, declared John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and others, was uniquely elevated
and depended upon slavery. Yet studies by Michael Johnson, Wallace Hettle, and
Stephanie McCurry document that the Confederacy was moving in a very different
ideological direction. Distrust of the common man and a pronounced preference for
aristocracy were growing. Setting themselves against basic American values and some
powerful directions of western thought, the leaders of the Confederacy aimed to create a
reactionary, aristocratic republic based on slavery and controlled by white male
slaveholders.5 How fundamental was this change to the southern polity?
The same question has been asked – but never completely answered – in regard to
states’ rights. What did it mean that decades of incensed protests about states’ rights swiftly
gave way to what one scholar called the creation of a central-government “leviathan”? The
Confederacy saw a succession of powerful measures from the central government and the
explosive growth of a bureaucracy whose size soon exceeded that of the North when
compared to population. Was states’ rights merely “the armor that encased [slavery]”?6 It
also is true that the South’s rebel government imposed an unprecedented level of control
over the daily lives of citizens. Regulations, impressments, and laws like the tax-in-kind
reached deep into the social fabric. There was good reason, as Mark Neely has shown,
why Jefferson Davis ceased to boast about the Confederacy’s respect for individual freedom
and constitutional liberty: military incarcerations by the Confederacy were approximately
as great, and as arbitrary, as those under Abraham Lincoln’s government.7 Did Confederate
leaders believe in liberty or in social control, as dictated by a slaveholding elite?

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Why was there so much criticism, maneuvering, and backbiting among the elite?
Confederate diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut noted, only two weeks after Jefferson Davis
took office, that “Men are willing to risk an injury to our cause, if they may in so doing
hurt Jeff Davis.” Why did the Confederate government in Richmond encounter so
much opposition from the states and their governors? What motivated a man like Joseph
E. Brown of Georgia to castigate an absolutely essential measure, conscription, by
declaring, “No act of the government of the United States prior to the secession of
Georgia struck a blow at constitutional liberty, so fell, as has been stricken by the
conscription acts.” Was localism a way of life, a principle, or a by-product of what James
Henry Hammond dubbed “Big-Man-Meism”? How did narrowly provincial thinking
coexist with growing hatred of the Yankees and a shared desire for national independence?8
Recent publications have raised another question regarding the desire for independence.
For years, scholars tended to view southern politicians as on the defensive, both
psychologically and politically, during the sectional crisis. Although they often responded
to perceived threats in an overly aggressive manner that damaged their interests, their
mindset seemed basically defensive. Work by historians like Edward Rugemer has turned
this picture on its head.9 At least some of the southern elite confidently saw their system
of plantation slavery as the wave of the future. The emancipation of slaves in the
Caribbean had led to a decline in the production of export crops, as freed people fled
from oppressive plantation labor and turned to family farming wherever possible. The
future prosperity of the Atlantic world, therefore, would depend on slavery in the South,
Cuba, and Brazil. Only slave-based agriculture could supply the needs of the industrializing
world. To what extent was this assured and expansive mindset a fundamental part of the
Confederate project? Computer-aided analysis, on a large scale, of data in newspapers and
magazines, combined with thorough study of leaders’ papers, could provide the answer.
Scholars have not found the key that would convincingly open the door to understand-
ing all these intellectual mysteries. Assuredly, there are multiple factors involved in the
behavior and motivations of the Confederacy’s political elite. Political shibboleths vied
with unforeseen realities. Personal ambitions ran up against elements of the national inter-
est. Local attachments and traditional habits of thinking competed with the collective
effort to create a nation. The human reflex to resist change worked against enthusiasm to
create a new, Confederate identity. Privation and suffering fed class resentments and dis-
illusion. Yet all the while anger at the Yankees grew and fostered a powerful unity and
Confederate identity, based on hostility to the foe. Where, among all these factors, was the
essence of southern-ness? What was the Confederate cause, how was it understood, and
how widely was it shared? These questions still challenge the best minds of scholars.

Morale, Disaffection, and Commitment –

the White Population
In recent decades a scholarly debate has been broadening over questions relating to
morale, disaffection, the sense of nationalism, and the degree of commitment to the
Confederate cause among white southerners. On the one hand, it is clear that all was not
well in the Confederacy. There was an enormous amount of discontent, complaint,
protest, and opposition among its citizenry. While those of modest means reacted against

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privation and the government’s failure to address their needs, many members of the elite
fiercely attacked the central government over its strong policies, expanding size, and
newly-exercised powers. Bitter cries from below about a “rich man’s war and a poor
man’s fight” competed with high-level anger and outrage over supposed invasions of state
sovereignty and the creation of a “centralized military despotism.” Studies by David
Williams (as sole author and with others), Mark Weitz, and Stephanie McCurry have
added important dimensions to claims made earlier by this author. Undeniably, there was
an elevated and important level of discontent within the Confederacy.10
On the other hand, several recent studies have focused on Confederates’ determina-
tion to fight on against the odds, even in extreme circumstances. A rebellion that was
difficult to put down had many determined adherents. Gary Gallagher focused on the
important role that Robert E. Lee’s army played, as both a revered popular symbol of
the cause and a source of encouragement and belief in victory. William Blair found
steadfastness and dedication among the citizens of Virginia, who took sustenance from
the Confederacy’s dogged resistance and struggle for independence. Jason Phillips
documented a strong though mistaken belief in victory, even in the last months of the
southern nation, among many Confederate troops. Two important recent works have
left the banner of a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” if not torn in two, at least
somewhat tattered. Joseph Glatthaar, with a truly impressive amount of carefully ana-
lyzed data, has shown that officers and men who came from the elite did their full share
of the fighting and sacrifice in Robert E. Lee’s army. Moving beyond Lee’s ranks, but
keeping the focus on Virginia’s troops, Aaron Sheehan-Dean has marshaled evidence
that rich and poor soldiers remained dedicated to the protection of home and family
against Union forces pursuing hard-war tactics and the emancipation of slaves.11 These
studies all add abundant and specific documentation to the undeniable fact that the
Confederacy fought on through four exceedingly difficult and exhausting years.
Granted, the Confederacy was a large and diverse aspiring nation, with millions of
citizens. In such a large collectivity there were bound to be many diverse points of view.
Yet, how can one explain the diversity of viewpoints, all based on legitimate evidence
from valuable studies?
Such contradictions call for additional studies designed to test possible explanations
and see the Confederacy whole. The contradictory layers making up the South’s collective
will need to be analyzed with attention to time, place, local circumstances, and situation-
specific sources of motivation. One dimension that demands attention is the way in
which physical location or differing on-the-ground experiences affected psychology and
morale. There may have been a marked difference between the interior and front-line
worlds of the Confederacy. Stephen Ash has alerted us to the different perspectives that
were fostered by life in occupied areas, in no-man’s-land, or in the “Confederate frontier”
where Federals “penetrated only sporadically.” It also is well known that in many wars
the infliction of suffering has often made victims more determined and hostile. Surely this
could apply to particular parts of the Confederacy. It might be especially relevant to the
experience of Virginians, those in the path of General Sherman in 1864 and 1865, and to
others who were under sustained Union assault in certain Confederate regions.12 For
those in safe interior positions – places where the Federal army was not a threat but
where demanding or unequal Confederate policies were a daily burden – the situation

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may well have seemed very different. For these southerners it may have been more
natural and logical to see the Confederate government as a source of irritation and
personal oppression – a government that was demanding much but failing in many of its
fundamental responsibilities.
Sources of motivation can be conceptualized as internal or external. Where and to
what extent were Confederates inspired by a desire for an independent southern culture
and nationality, and where or for whom did hatred of the enemy have the greatest impact
on Confederate loyalty? Perhaps aspirations for cultural independence and nationality
were associated with strong institutions, urban life, or heavy involvement in slaveholding.
The way a southerner experienced and reacted to the war may have differed between
rural and urban environments. These had very different access to news and channels of
communication, especially as the number of functioning newspapers plummeted. Unless
invasion threatened, a rural district probably was less informed about and less involved in
the war than one of the burgeoning cities housing Confederate offices or crammed with
refugees.
Governors and other state leaders did much to shape morale, for good or ill. An
ambitious politician like Joseph Brown of Georgia seemed more dedicated to his own
career than to any national cause. He discerned that he could build his personal popularity
by defending his people against the central government or by posing as a national patriot.
As the occasion suited, Brown did both, and his prominence always affected public
attitudes. It is important to analyze the actions of local leaders, and the changing attitudes
of different regions, in relation to events on the battlefield and controversies over
Confederate policies.

Actions and Aims of the Confederacy’s Black Population

Historians recognize that the actions of African Americans had a significant influence on
the Confederacy’s fate. Forming 40 percent of the population of the Confederacy, they
obviously had the potential to affect the war’s outcome. The vast majority were enslaved,
and there is virtually universal agreement that the slaves wanted to be free. Beyond these
points, however, there are major disagreements and the opportunity to make a defining
contribution.
Decades ago James Brewer demonstrated in The Confederate Negro that the rebellious
South used black labor in a multitude of ways to bolster its war effort. Pre-war boasts that
slaves would farm while white men fought gave way to impressment of slaves in support
of the armies. Tens of thousands of black southerners were forced to fell trees, build
fortifications, carry munitions, work as teamsters, tend the wounded, and serve the armies
in other ways, while the majority of slaves continued to labor on plantations. More
recently Stephen Ash has emphasized the scope of measures taken in the Confederacy to
keep the slave population under surveillance and control. Boys “as young as 16 had to
ride patrol,” the army intervened to reinforce the efforts of slaveholders and civil
authorities, and the “web of enforcement . . . ensnared thousands of black freedom-
seekers and returned them to bondage.” Due to such measures and the wartime labor
shortage, Ash concluded that “the typical black field hand probably worked even harder
during the war than before.”13

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More common are accounts that emphasize the steady dissolution of plantation
discipline and efficiency and the mounting difficulties that southern women experienced
when they tried to manage or discipline slaves. Complaints to their soldier husbands were
frequent, and the more closely Union armies threatened, the greater were the liberties
taken by the slaves. Slaveholders who had the means often tried to move their labor force
to areas distant from military operations. Those who could not do so were disappointed
in the results. Early in 1863 a harassed and despairing overseer in eastern North Carolina
wrote to his wealthy employer, “I have had to wearke Evry skiam [scheme] to keep them
hear . . . have gived off hogs and Cattle to Each family . . . the[re] are no Dependance in
no nigro when the weard freedom is given.”14
A long line of important scholarly works assigns a major role to slaves in the ultimate
defeat of the Confederacy. W. E. B. Du Bois described the “general strike” that debilitated
the Confederacy. Armstead Robinson devoted much of his professional life to elaborat-
ing the various ways in which active and passive resistance by the slaves damaged the
Confederacy. He argued that slavery “erode[d] the South from within” and became
the Confederacy’s “millstone.” More recently Steven Hahn has argued in The Political
Worlds of Slavery and Freedom that historians have failed to see the scope and true dimen-
sions of slaves’ resistance in the Confederate South. He maintains that their actions
amounted to a “revolt” or “rebellion” or “insurrection” that scholars have failed to credit.
Instead of being pre-political in their thoughts or seeking to join the dominant society, the
slaves waged war against the white system in pursuit of different aims and values.15
By contrast, William Freehling, another distinguished historian, has reached a very
different conclusion. Freehling perceives the slaves as eager to gain freedom and ready to
damage the Confederacy but shrewd in their assessment of both southern and northern
whites. Rather than acting prematurely or taking excessive risks while whites remained
in control, the slaves bided their time. When opportunities presented themselves in the
South, they proved ready to act. But they also chose their actions with an awareness that
northern whites feared racial upheaval and would be ready to suppress a slave insurrection.
Likening the action of the slaves to the non-violent protest that dominated the twentieth
century’s Civil Rights Movement, Freehling credits the slaves with initiatives that were
finely calibrated to gain acceptance from the Union’s public and policy makers.16
To resolve these differing interpretations, a more detailed and comprehensive approach
is needed. The experiences of slaves in the wartime Confederacy were extremely varied,
both by place and time. The movements of the Union army determined where it would
be easiest to escape from slavery and where the North would use “contrabands” most
heavily or recruit the most soldiers. The needs of the battlefield determined where the
Confederacy was most likely to impress slaves for support of its armies. Both these patterns
changed over time. Similarly, slaves who lived in areas close to Union army operations had
a very different experience from those who remained under Confederate control deep in
an unthreatened region. The ability of slaveholders, or of the state or central government,
to control slaves also changed as the Confederacy grew weaker. Attention to the many
different circumstances in which African American slaves found themselves will help to
clarify the overall picture.
More attention is needed to identify the political ideas of the slaves.17 Keen observers
of their owners and other whites, the slaves (or at least many of them) had developed a

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solid understanding of American political values and practices. They acted with political
intent and forethought. It is possible to discern their politics from their actions and from
statements they made during the war, or immediately after. Petitions drawn up in 1865
and coming from Kentucky and the Carolinas, for example, prove that the political
knowledge of the Confederacy’s African Americans was quite sophisticated.18 Closer
attention to their actions should yield new understanding.
Both the Union and Confederate governments generated helpful documents. The
Freedmen and Southern Society Project, originally directed by Ira Berlin, has opened a
wealth of primary sources to researchers. Valuable studies have already been published
regarding those who joined the U.S. army and those who worked or suffered on aban-
doned plantations and in contraband camps.19 But it also should be possible to assemble
information from non-governmental, southern sources. The Visualizing Emancipation
project at the University of Richmond has presented a model for wide collaboration in
research on fugitive slaves.20 Individual historians as well as students engaged in class pro-
jects have contributed data drawn from newspaper ads about runaway slaves. Following
a standard format for information, these researchers together construct a large database.
From the pooled information, it becomes possible to map the travels of runaway slaves
and to answer many other questions. Who became a fugitive and why? What was the
gender balance among fugitives? How often and where did family groups predominate?
What factors determined the timing of flights? How far did runaways travel, and how
often were they caught?
Scholars should not view April 1865 as an impermeable boundary and neglect
connections to the immediate postwar period. Heather Williams has poignantly reminded
us that no such boundary existed for the thousands of freed people who sought to reunite
families once the fighting stopped.21 It is important to know where black veterans settled
once the war ended and what kind of reception they received in white society and in the
black community. In a rapidly evolving postwar political situation, we know that southern
blacks promptly petitioned for their rights or for federal protection and sought to improve
their position. What role did former soldiers play in those events, and how did they
interact with leaders who had enjoyed education or been free before the war? Community
studies focusing on where freed people settled immediately after the war could shed
considerable light on the nature of that much-debated concept – plantation paternalism.

The Rebellious South’s Military Strategy and History

No part of the history of the Confederacy has attracted more devoted and detailed interest
than military history. The general public loves biographies of commanders, whether out-
standing or flawed, and scholars produce thoughtful studies of men and campaigns. It is
easy to understand the human factors that attract so much interest in military history. The
spectacle of ordinary men displaying extraordinary courage, and the personalities of
powerful commanders, account for much of the broad and sustained interest.22 But the
reasons to pursue military history surpass its inherent drama.
Applying the concerns and methods of social history to military studies has had
enormous benefits. Few have illustrated its potential more impressively than Joseph
Glatthaar. In a series of studies he shed new light on Sherman’s army, the interaction of

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black soldiers and their white officers, and most recently General Lee’s army.23 This last,
impressive study will serve as a model to inspire other works. The potential of social
history also can be applied with profit to studies of communities and their soldiers – how
recruitment reflected social structure and relations of power, how the absence or death of
soldiers affected the social network they left behind, and how military service changed
social reality for those who returned and for their community. Some promising studies,
including a comparative perspective, are underway.24
There is also another approach whose breadth and potential explanatory power offers
many attractions: the study of strategy and issues related to high-level leadership. Some
of the most interesting questions related to the Confederacy’s battlefield successes and
ultimate defeat have been raised in recent years by such studies. Fruitful debate is
underway on questions such as these: What was the Confederacy’s strategy? What plan
was most likely to achieve success for a cause that was badly outnumbered in population
and material resources? How well did Jefferson Davis and his generals perform? Were
fundamental military principles followed or violated, and why? How well were the
Confederacy’s resources marshaled and employed?
Donald Stoker recently has asserted that strategy won the Civil War.25 His perspective
also supports sharp analysis by Steven Woodworth on the fundamentals of Confederate
strategy. Jefferson Davis’s basic strategy – an “offensive defense” – signified a fundament-
ally defensive posture married to a willingness to attack the enemy when favorable oppor-
tunities presented themselves. Such a strategy was consistent both with the Confederacy’s
claim that it wanted only to be left alone and with accepted ideas of defense. Baron Carl
von Clausewitz, the distinguished Prussian theorist, had declared that “The defensive form
of war is not a simple shield, but a shield made up of well-directed blows.”26 But both
Stoker and Woodworth question whether Davis and Lee, the Confederacy’s greatest
general, were completely in agreement on this strategy.
Lee was simultaneously the most audacious, aggressive southern commander and a
strategist whose long-range assessment of the South’s prospects was fundamentally
pessimistic. Jefferson Davis seemed to believe throughout the war that the Confederacy
could prevail – gain its independence – simply by refusing to give up, by outlasting its foe.
That was, essentially, what the American patriots had done in their eighteenth-century
Revolution. Lee, by contrast, was much more impressed with the disparity in strength
and resources. He appears to have believed that the South’s best chance lay in one or more
stunning victories that would convince a shaken North to make peace before its superior
resources could exhaust the South. In June of 1863 Lee skillfully and tactfully urged Davis
to encourage peace sentiment in the North, an effort that could accompany his invasion
of Pennsylvania. As Lee began that thrust deep into Union territory he declared, “if
successful, [we] will secure our independence and win the war.” Woodworth highlights
the tension in these two approaches. Stoker concludes that the Confederacy did not truly
have a consistent strategy of “offensive-defense.”27
In a long war the North’s supremacy in vital resources would weigh ever more heavily
against an increasingly depleted South. Perhaps Lee was right in thinking that a decisive,
shocking victory that came sooner rather than later offered the best chance for
independence. But it is impossible to say with certainty how the North would have
reacted to such a defeat. Moreover, war weariness so afflicted the North in the summer

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of 1864 that Lincoln anticipated defeat in his bid for reelection. That fact led Stoker to
fault Jefferson Davis for instructing General John Bell Hood to attack Sherman outside
Atlanta. With a different strategy, Hood “might have kept Atlanta in the South’s hands
until the election. But Davis had dictated otherwise . . . It was a critical and perhaps even
fatal miscalculation.”28
Stoker also questioned whether Confederate goals were merely defensive, without
designs of gaining territory.29 The appeal that Lee made to Marylanders and the fact that
Bragg carried 15,000 rifles into Kentucky prove that Confederates hoped that southerners
from the Border might join them. The southern interest in detaching states of the
Northwest, where economic activity in the past had found an outlet in New Orleans,
also suggests a less than defensive posture. But did these hopes amount to settled war
aims?
After ten months of war Jefferson Davis admitted that the Confederacy could not
successfully defend every part of its extended borders. His admission raises a fundamental
question: did the southern government disperse its forces too much, violating the basic
principle that concentration of forces brings success? On this point popular politics col-
lided with military strategy. Confederates, in every part of the new nation, expected and
frequently demanded that their government protect them behind secure borders. To
ordinary citizens – on whom the armies depended – defense of their homes and neigh-
borhoods often was the first priority. “Keeping the army in the field,” observed Mark
Weitz, “meant keeping the Union out of the South.” Moreover, a “Fabian strategy,”
wrote Donald Stoker, “particularly one necessitating the temporary abandonment [of
Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas] . . . would erode the South’s ability to
fight.” Holding territory meant retaining scarce human and material resources.30 At one
point Stoker commented favorably on a plan by Braxton Bragg, who urged that the
South defend only its core (north of Florida and east of the Mississippi). Yet the govern-
ment’s options were limited, politically. In that vein Charles Roland has argued, against
the view of J. F. C. Fuller, that abandoning the Upper South to concentrate forces near
Chattanooga would have “undone the Confederacy without a battle.”31 The debate is far
from settled.
Intrinsically related to these issues is the South’s departmental system. Through four
years of war, Davis repeatedly modified the definition of his military departments. The
system’s underlying assumptions, however, remained the same. A commander who
headed a department was responsible for the security of his area and empowered to
command all forces within it. This kind of military shield could give confidence to citi-
zens within a department. Yet Davis also insisted that the departments must aid each
other as circumstances required, something that their commanders increasingly refused to
do. It is this author’s impression that the departmental system worked reasonably well in
the early days of the war. Further analysis is needed for the changes made as the war
progressed. Did the Confederacy keep too many troops on garrison duty in the Carolinas,
Georgia, and Florida? Should it have drawn on that region for reinforcements needed
elsewhere? Those states represented the core of the government’s remaining available
resources, and their representatives in Congress were refusing to vote for necessary but
strong measures as the war dragged on. Could troops have been sent elsewhere without
dire consequences?32

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Other significant questions revolve around what Thomas Connelly long ago called the
“politics of command.” Relations between Davis and his Secretary of War, on the one
hand, and several generals with important commands, on the other, often were strained.
This was especially evident in regard to Joseph Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. How
much of this problem was attributable to Davis and how much to the personalities of his
generals? How many mistakes should be laid at Davis’s door? To what extent did the
Confederate Congress inject itself into decision-making in order to promote favorites and
take a swipe at Davis? The ties between Joseph Johnston and Senator Lewis Wigfall, a
fierce critic of Davis, raise this question, as does the ability of P. G. T. Beauregard to corral
support from fifty-nine congressmen arguing for his reassignment to a major post.33
Finally, the ability of many brave men in the Confederate armies to fight on, despite
increasingly despairing conditions, merits further exploration. Was it due only to what is
now called “group cohesion?”34 Was their dedication bolstered by rumor and selective
analysis of news, or was it due to a belief in invincibility that Jason Phillips described in
Diehard Rebels?35 How many were motivated by a strong sense of nationalism?
When, on the other hand, did the core of military dedication suffer a fatal, debilitating
blow, and why? Civilian morale and battlefield strength were closely related and must be
studied together. Did an irreversible process set in during the summer of 1863? Had the
certainty of a long war plus suffering on the home front combined by then to create an
ever-growing stream of desertions? Surely this occurred before September 1864, when
Davis admitted that two-thirds of southern soldiers were absent. Stoker added that by this
point absenteeism had reached 49 percent in the army of Tennessee and 60 percent in the
army of Northern Virginia. “In another speech Davis said there were a quarter of a
million deserters ‘on the books of the war department.’”36 James Chesnut, who was in
charge of South Carolina’s local defense against Sherman’s army, acknowledged that the
will to resist had disappeared. The Palmetto State “was shamefully and unnecessarily lost,”
he lamented. “We had time, opportunity and means to destroy him. But there was wholly
wanting the energy and ability required by the occasion.”37

The Confederacy’s Physical and Social Environments38

Scholars are turning their attention to the environmental history of the Civil War, broadly
considered. Such an environmental focus sees human beings and the natural world as one.
Civilians and soldiers, including all their movements and actions, and the surrounding
environment form an interconnected, constantly changing system whose elements affect
each other. This is a new perspective for the Civil War era, though pioneering scholars
have brought this vision to other periods of U.S. history.
In recent years some historians have used an acute sensitivity to the environment to
reveal what life was like in those years. New attention has been given to the sights, smells,
and sensations experienced by soldiers and civilians as war changed their lives and physical
worlds.39 To date most environmental works on the Civil War era have focused on the
impacts of specific battles, human reactions to war’s devastations, and the realities of
disease and suffering. The importance of disease, which wartime movement did so much
to increase, is evident in the death toll of soldiers. Dysentery and other illnesses were a far
greater threat to life than enemy bullets. Disease also ravaged many of the contraband

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camps.40 But the agenda for future projects goes beyond these themes and is both large
and intriguing.
The war moved human populations, altered human interactions, created new disease
environments that affected people and animals, and affected human use of the land.
Influences were reciprocal. Battles and the movement of armies impacted the land, but
weather, landforms, and rivers powerfully affected soldiers and regiments. Battles could
turn on extremes of temperature or drought or torrential rains. When men went to war,
they altered the battlefield and partially denuded the human environment from which they
came. The transformation of environments took place both in and beyond the path of
armies. With fewer men cultivating fields, there were smaller crops, debilitated social and
commercial networks, and diminished capacity to respond to nature’s challenges. Attention
to these themes can yield insights in what we might call the primary environmental locale
– where human beings and nature were directly affecting each other in dramatic ways. In
addition, a broadly environmental approach is highly relevant to the secondary realms –
where community processes, economic activities, and assumptions or attitudes changed
due to change in people’s activities and surroundings.
To take one obvious example, the food supply of the South was hostage to a host of
environmental factors connected to the war. Secession cut commercial links and disrupted
trade patterns on which southerners had long depended. Armies of invasion or defense
destroyed crops, seized livestock and other animals, spread disease, and often left behind
carnage and corpses. Natural forces, such as storms, droughts, molds, or blights, affected
the nutrients available to civilians and soldiers. In turn hunger and privation created panic
and disaffection at home, while they influenced the movement of armies, whose weak-
ened men had to go into battle. Shortages of food on the home front could (and did)
threaten governments, erode civilian support, or force changes in policy.
The longer-term effects of changes in agriculture and livestock were important to indi-
viduals’ life fortunes, to economic activity, and even to the social structure of local com-
munities. The enormous loss of livestock impoverished large portions of the South’s
common people – affecting their economic standing as severely as the loss of wealth in
slaves shocked the planter elite.41 Moreover, the events of the war spread disease among
farm animals, with long-lasting effects. Because it was costly or difficult to replenish animal
stocks, families suffered and a shift to commercial agriculture began to seem more appeal-
ing. Even legal traditions such as the open range – so important to small farmers – began
to change. Erin Mauldin has shown that efforts to close the open range gained strength
due to the persistence of hog cholera.42
When historians look more closely at specific communities, especially those in the
path of armies, it is likely that they will see a wide scope of environmental effects. Just as
environmental change affected the land, it altered human interactions. Economic activities
had to adjust to losses, shortages, and new realities. Death and disease altered personal
relationships, affected families, and brought new attitudes and different ways of looking
at things. Subtle but important changes in psychology and behavior could be long-lasting.
Environmental history – defined broadly – may bring a new understanding of how
intimately and extensively the Civil War shaped the decades that followed.
Taken together, the issues discussed in this essay make up an intriguing and challenging
agenda for study of the Confederacy. Both the home front and the battlefield invite

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major new works by ambitious scholars. Mysteries that attracted scholars like Nathaniel
Stephenson more than one hundred years ago remain unsolved, while important new
questions have arisen from modern investigations. Understanding the complex nature of
the South is vital to our knowledge of all of American history, and the Confederate years
are a window onto a society revealing itself amid the crisis and stress of war.

Notes
1 See the Visualizing Emancipation project at the University of Richmond: http://dsl.richmond.
edu/emancipation/. The collaborative nature of this project was described at the November
2014 meeting of the Southern Historical Association.
2 Nathaniel W. Stephenson, “The Question of Arming the Slaves,” American Historical Review
18, no. 2 (Jan. 1913), 299–300, 302, 295, 301, 302.
3 Herschel V. Johnson to Alexander H. Stephens, December 29, 1863, in Bell I. Wiley Papers,
Special Collections, Woodruff Library, Emory University.
4 Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer, The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972); Kenneth Martis, The Historical Atlas of the
Congresses of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994),
117, 32, 34. (Percentages were calculated by this author from Martis’s data.)
5 George Rable, The Confederate Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
George Fredrickson, White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Michael P.
Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977);
Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Stephanie
McCurry, Confederate Reckoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
6 Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Macon
(Georgia) Telegraph, January 6, 1865.
7 Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1970); Mark Neely, Southern Rights (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1999); Paul D. Escott, Military Necessity (Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International,
2006).
8 Quotations from Paul D. Escott, After Secession (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1978), 62, 85; and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper
& Row, 1979), 140.
9 For example, see Rugemer’s essay in David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, eds., The Civil War
as Global Conflict (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014). Thomas Schoonover,
in “Napoleon Is Coming! Maximilian Is Coming!” in Robert E. May, ed., The Union, the
Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), reveals why
the assumptions of southern leaders were mistaken.
10 For example, see Escott, After Secession; Escott, Military Necessity; David Williams, Bitterly
Divided (New York: New Press, 2008); David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David
Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Mark
Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); McCurry,
Confederate Reckoning.
11 For example, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997); William A. Blair, Virginia’s Private War (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998); Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Joseph
Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army (New York: Free Press, 2008); Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Why
Confederates Fought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
12 See, for example, Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); and Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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13 James Brewer, The Confederate Negro (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969); Jaime Martinez,
Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2013); Stephen V. Ash, The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2010), 8, 10, 11, 22.
14 George Spruill to Josiah Collins III, in Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 62.
15 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963);
Armstead Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2005), 9, 4; Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 112–114.
16 William W. Freehling, The South vs. The South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
part 3.
17 A study underway by Susan O’Donovan promises fresh, valuable insights here.
18 See, for example, “Address by a Convention of Black North Carolinians . . .” in Sidney
Andrews, The South Since the War (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 128–130; Howard Fast,
Freedom Road, new edition with documents and introduction by Eric Foner (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 265–267; Freedmen and Southern Society Project, online at www.
freedmen.umd.edu/Roxborough.
19 Six of a projected nine volumes have been published by the Freedmen and Southern Society
Project, now headed by Leslie Rowland. See also Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012); and a forthcoming study by Thavolia Glymph.
20 See the Visualizing Emancipation project at the University of Richmond: http://dsl.richmond.
edu/emancipation/.
21 Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost
in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
22 Tony Horwitz’s book, Confederates in the Attic (New York: Pantheon, 1998), suggests that
nostalgia for a simpler time when individual heroism mattered helps to account for this
popularity.
23 See Glaathaar’s The March to the Sea and Beyond (New York: New York University Press,
1985); Forged in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1990); and General Lee’s Army.
24 Judkin Browning is at work on a study comparing two regiments, one from Michigan and one
from North Carolina, that met at Gettysburg. He focuses on the long-term effects of war on
the soldiers and their home communities.
25 Donald Stoker, The Grand Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.
26 Steven Woodworth, Davis and Lee at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995),
especially ch. 6; Clausewitz quoted in Paul D. Escott, The Confederacy (Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2010), 26.
27 Woodworth, Davis and Lee at War; Escott, The Confederacy, 75; Stoker, The Grand Design, 280.
28 Stoker, The Grand Design, 378.
29 Stoker, The Grand Design, 186–188.
30 Weitz, More Damning than Slaughter, 27; Stoker, The Grand Design, 213.
31 Stoker, The Grand Design, 120; essay by Charles Roland in Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas
E. Schott, eds., Lee and His Generals (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 21–22.
32 Charles Roland faults the Confederate high command for keeping too many troops on garrison
duty in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. In the latter half of the war those troops actually
outnumbered the Union forces disposed against them, whereas Confederate armies desperately
needed reinforcement elsewhere. See Roland’s essay in Hewitt and Schott, Lee and His Generals,
31.
33 Escott, Military Necessity, 21, 51–53, 153.
34 The U.S. military today uses that terminology to refer to the social and experiential factors that
work to unite the soldiers in a fighting unit.
35 Phillips, Diehard Rebels, 2 and passim.
36 Stoker, The Grand Design, 389. He adds that by April 1865 “three-quarters of the men in Lee’s
and Johnston’s armies were at home when they were supposed to be in the ranks.”

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37 Quoted in Escott, The Confederacy, 122.

38 The author thanks Judkin Browning for sharing information about an important project in
environmental history that he and Timothy Silver are undertaking.
39 Mark Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
40 Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Kathryn Shively
Meier, Nature’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Margaret
Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Downs,
Sick from Freedom.
41 Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The Antebellum Southern Herdsman: A
Reinterpretation,” The Journal of Southern History 41, no. 2 (May 1975).
42 Erin Stewart Mauldin, “The Stockman’s War: Hog Cholera, Agricultural Reform, and the
Fight to Maintain the Commons during the Civil War Ear,” paper presented at the meeting of
the Society for Civil War Historians, June 12–14, 2014.

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 13
P OLITIC S AND C I V I L L I BERT I ES
ON THE UNION HOME F R O N T

Joel H. Silbey

Opposition to the American government’s wartime policies appeared before and during
every armed conflict from the Revolution to the Middle Eastern episodes of the 1990s
and early 2000s.1 In the Revolutionary War, Tories loyal to Britain engaged in vicious,
often bloody, confrontations against supporters of the colonists’ revolution. In the War
of 1812, New England Federalists strongly opposed the Madison Administration for its
policies that had brought on the war, to the point where the dissenters threatened the
secession of their states from the Union. In the years after the 1812 conflict, national
political parties became increasingly important organizers and energizers of the nation’s
political conflicts. These parties stressed different perspectives about the role of govern-
ment and over the critical issues that were always present.
Their differing commitments became an important element of political conflict during
the war with Mexico when the Whig Party challenged the Democratic President James K.
Polk’s actions which, they argued, had brought the nation into an immoral war against a
weak neighbor. A young Whig congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, made a name
for himself because of his angry speeches against what his party colleagues disdained as
“Mister Polk’s war,” as well as other Administration policies.2 When the Civil War began,
therefore, whatever the hopes of northern leaders that there would be unity behind their
efforts to restore the seceded states to the Union, including through military action, a vig-
orous dissent emerged against President Lincoln and his colleagues. The dissenters argued
that there was much to oppose. The war had introduced an unprecedented increase in the
reach and authority of the federal government that, as the opposition Democrats saw it,
went far beyond what the Constitution allowed. As a result, they fought a bitter political
battle against the Administration, at first because of what they argued were its misguided
moves that had led to the war, then its behavior during the conflict that they claimed
severely threatened American liberties, and, finally, against its misguided and revolutionary
policies about slavery and the reach of the federal government’s power. There was a steady
drumbeat of criticism, often harsh, even hysterical, from legislators in local party speeches,
in newspaper editorials, and on the campaign trail during wartime election contests. Their
reactions (and those of the Republicans in response) reflected long-held outlooks about the
role and power of government, especially at the federal level.
At first, the Democrats – the minority party nationally for the first time in many years
– held back from an aggressive resistance to Lincoln’s policies and followed a cautious
approach, with many party leaders largely advocating a stance of what one of them

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called to “sink the partisan in the patriot.”3 There were early signs of resistance due to
actions by the Administration, but whatever the original challenges, while often intense
and angry, they were fragmented, localized and intermittent. When the Lincoln gov-
ernment moved to arrest Maryland legislators in 1861 because of their efforts to impede
Union troops passing through their state on their way to defend Washington, there
were protests from some Democrats against this attack on civil liberties and signal of the
Administration’s intention to move harshly against dissent – moves that Democrats
argued went beyond their constitutional power. A veteran party congressman, Clement
Vallandigham of Ohio, who had sought conciliation and compromise with the seceding
states in 1860–1861, tried to unify the impulses against the Administration, but even as
he laid out what was to become part of the Democratic argument against the federal
government’s increased reach, his early attempts did not arouse the party masses (or
others).4
Party leaders remained divided over what their stance should be, particularly what
was acceptable in the face of military necessity. The so-called War Democrats committed
themselves to support Lincoln’s policies to bring the South back in, even by the use of
force. At the other end of the spectrum, those like Vallandigham and Connecticut’s
former governor Thomas Seymour wanted nothing to do with the war and the actions
that occurred because of it. Seymour joined Vallandigham in making a name for himself
as a dissenter early in the war as he articulated an unending opposition, including any
attempt to subdue the South by war, and by expressing his fears of what the war would
do to Americans’ rights and liberties.5 In the middle remained a large group of Democrats
committed to the Union but not ready as yet to support the Lincoln Administration’s
war policies. At the outset of the war, party dissenters needed a defining issue to increase
their ranks.
In 1862 and early 1863, after a year and more of a frustrating war that had seen a series
of Union military setbacks and no sign of finding a way to end the conflict, Vallandigham
and other dissenters’ efforts became more formidable as new issues provided ammunition
for a vigorous and widespread resistance. Historians have identified the stronghold of the
growing dissent to be in the Middle Western states, especially in Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois. But it existed elsewhere as well, in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania,
in particular. Democratic newspaper editors joined Vallandigham in angrily denouncing
what was occurring. Wilbur Story of the Chicago Times and Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy of
the (Wisconsin) LaCrosse Democrat became notorious as leading assailers of the war and
the Administration’s policies. Local Democratic leaders, such as Fernando Wood, the
mayor of New York City, joined in as well, as did his brother Benjamin, the editor of
the New York Daily News. Daniel Voorhees, a congressman from Indiana, provided
another strong voice against the Administration and its policies from the early days of the
war. Democratic meetings and nominating conventions began denouncing the assault on
American liberties. Vallandigham made a formidable case against the Republicans in his
“Address of Democratic Members of the House of Representatives of the United States
to the Democracy of the United States” issued in 1862, widely reprinted in Democratic
newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet.6
The essence of the case they made against the Lincoln Administration was clear cut in
their own minds as the war advanced. As Congress passed bills to buttress the North’s war

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efforts, many Democratic dissenters, like Vallandigham, Voorhees, Seymour, and their
colleagues, believed that the Administration’s behavior was due to its partisan goals and
not primarily due to the needs of the country at war. The Pennsylvania Democratic
leader Edwin M. Stanton (soon to be a member of Lincoln’s cabinet) referred to the
“imbecility” of the Administration and argued it was clearly on too partisan a path in its
policies and behavior to be capable of restoring the Union.7 In a partisan nation such was
to be expected, if regretted and improper. Of course, the Democrats believed that they,
too, were taking a political position in response, one based on their traditional ideology
and commitments going back to the days of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.
As the dissenters viewed what was going on, their beliefs were confirmed. All around
them they saw what they considered to be frightening evidence of the overthrow of the
people’s liberty as a result of the Administration’s actions. Besides its general impulse to
corrupt the Constitution’s limits on the power of the national government, their fears
were confirmed, in their eyes, by the second suspension of habeas corpus, militia laws to
guide the states in their efforts to recruit troops, legislation that allowed the federal
government to seize the property of those who it deemed threatened the war effort, and
to punish them as individuals, the imposition of martial law, military arrests of civilians,
and trials of the civilians arrested by military courts. At the same time Republican
governors in several states (such as Oliver Morton in Indiana) used their powers to
hamstring dissent within their borders.8
The Administration’s second suspension of habeas corpus in late 1862, this time encom-
passing the entire country although Lincoln’s original suspension (limited to Maryland)
had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Taney in
Ex-Parte Merryman – a ruling ignored by Lincoln – as well as the increasing involvement
of the army in civilian affairs, and the creation of new taxes to finance the war, including
on people’s income, confirmed that Lincoln and his associates were creating a centralized
and consolidated government which was leading the nation into tyranny. To the
Democrats the questionable actions of the Administration were becoming commonplace
whatever its argument that what they were doing was based on the necessities forced on
them in wartime and the need to save the Union. Rather, the Democrats argued, the
Administration was determined to centralize all power and force people to conform to
their determination.9
The early angry and often fragmented opposition was further catalyzed by the
Administration’s institution of conscription in 1862, establishing a system to draft into
the military those deemed eligible (originally males between the ages of 18 and 35, later
18 and 45) in order to fill up the army’s ranks, and second, by the Lincoln Administration’s
adoption of slave emancipation policies. In the first case the government realized that its
reliance on America’s volunteer tradition to raise armies was inadequate to deal with the
country’s current conflict. This act did not solve the problem since its management was left
in state hands who did a poor job in carrying out its purposes. The federal government
relied on the deeply imbedded notion of the volunteer state to carry out its mandates.
Originally, what little administrative apparatus there was depended heavily on local bodies
that were largely ad hoc, not systematic. Many were called to report but refused to appear,
or disappeared when searched for. Their local communities could not, or did not, do
anything most of the time to rectify the problem.10

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In the following year, Congress passed the Enrollment Act establishing a much more
elaborate conscription machinery within the War Department involving the Provost
Marshal General of the army as the organizer and manager of the draft at the state and local
level. Under him, assistant provost marshals were appointed in each state, as well as the
counties within them, to supervise conscription. Under them were enrolling officers at
the local level, making up, in each jurisdiction, a system of government presence rarely
seen before. This act (like the first attempt) had many loopholes allowing people to avoid
serving by paying a commutation fee, or by hiring a substitute to go in their place. Such
provisions hardly favored poorer males, either native or immigrant, and caused enormous
tension as well as a great deal of evasion and overt resistance against the enrolling officers.
The point was that the government’s attempts to conscript people provoked a strong
backlash and resistance that often turned quite violent.11
In the second instance, despite its limited application which left most slaves outside its
provisions still bound to their masters, Democrats saw conclusive proof that the Abolitionist
wing of the Republican Party had taken over the Lincoln Administration. The longstanding
Democratic charge against the Republicans as determined to end slavery in the nation
whatever the Constitution allowed, was proving to be true. Their intentions were further
underlined by the Administration coming to the decision, after much hesitancy, to begin
to enlist former slaves as soldiers.
They simply did not accept the need for the extensive enlargement of federal power
that challenged their traditional basic beliefs and freedoms. Dissenters underscored their
commitment to a limited federal power on the home front and believed Lincoln’s actions
to be unconstitutional. As the historian Harold Hyman has summed up, the Democratic
dissenters were ideologically united by “an idiom of antipathy to martial ways . . . of
obeisance to the Bill of Rights . . . and a quest for static federalism racially ordered.”12
That was their bedrock as they forcefully began to challenge the Administration’s actions.
By the middle of 1862 the opposition was in full roar. Whether well organized and
centrally directed (as Republicans charged) or not, there was certainly a great deal of
challenging – in print and orally, and by overt actions. As the government reacted and
began to act against its dissenting opponents, questions arose as to the legitimacy of the
actions it began to take against the resistance. The United States Constitution defined
treason in a very limited way. It consisted of overt acts against the government during time
of war attested to by at least two observers of the activity.13
Those government officials engaged in dealing with the issue took a much broader
approach, however. Unacceptable dissent was resistance to the government’s efforts to
fight the war, whether spoken or written, and not limited only to specific actions. The
record began to show many arbitrary actions supported by no clear or precise rules, but
dictated, rather, by the outlook and preferences of those in charge in different commu-
nities throughout the North. And under the terms of the second Confiscation Act the
federal government could imprison people for treason. Nor were the authorities very
fastidious about those they arrested. Union generals such as Ambrose Burnside in
command in Ohio, and John Adams Dix, a leading pre-war New York Democrat, now
commanding troops in the northeastern states, were infamous among Democrats for their
vigorous suppression of dissenting speakers and newspapers in the areas they controlled
and President Lincoln’s apparent agreement with what they were doing.

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Democrats added other matters to the list of Administration outrages as well: its removal
of a portion of the state of Virginia in order to create the new state of West Virginia
without the consent of the state of which it was part, despite what the Constitution
required; the imposition of taxes, including, eventually, a levy on income, in order to pay
for the war; and parts of the old Whig activist agenda such as a protective tariff, federally
financed internal improvements, and a national bank. Clearly all of this was government
overreach, as the Democrats saw the situation. Their newspapers intensified their angry
resistance to what was occurring, and party leaders pushed hard to prevent the repression
and social changes underway. Editors of party newspapers from New York City to the
Middle West – in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and elsewhere – fueled the flames through
their denunciations, scare stories, and angry warnings of the threat of an emerging
dictatorship. The substance of their arguments did not vary much but the level of their
anger grew as both the Administration’s policies continued and their repressive actions
against dissent intensified.14
While government actions were often confusing and contradictory because of the
absence of clear lines of authority, or a structure adequate to meet the pressures of wartime,
Democrats saw all of the further expansion of central power underway as a threat to their
rights and liberties. The Lincoln Administration’s policies confirmed their claims that the
government was acting in a partisan manner to put across the Republican agenda, not
behaving in a nonpartisan manner as it should in wartime. Their language grew more
extreme, often filled with violent expressions and warnings. Clement Vallandigham, who
the Ohio legislature gerrymandered out of his congressional seat, kept up his fiery attacks
against the Administration on the stump in Ohio and elsewhere. “I see more of barbarism
and sin, a thousand times,” he argued, “in the continuance of the war, the dissolution of
the Union, the breakup of the government, and the enslavement of the white race by
debt & taxes and arbitrary power.” He and his fellow Democrats summed up their message
and their intention under the oft-repeated slogan “the Constitution as it is, the Union as
it was.”15
The Democrats’ charges fueled the election campaigns that occurred at some level in
every year of the war. Party leaders used the issues raised by the war and the presence of
dissent and, to be sure, the actions of an aggressive and unremitting Republican policy
machine, to call on voters to come with them in their battle to restore constitutional
authority. The issue was clear – how far could the Constitution be stretched in wartime
and how far could dissent be tolerated in reaction? The division over these was clear cut
from the first: on one side the Democratic notion that dissent was necessary in the face of
a tyrannical government; on the other side, the Republicans were equally committed to
the notion that such dissent would be disastrous during a war to save the Union and,
therefore, the Bill of Rights could be constrained due to the emergency that the nation
faced.

An “Insurrection” against the Government

As they developed their arguments and challenges to the Administration’s actions, the
Democrats made important gains in congressional and state elections in 1862 in which
they focused their campaign on Lincoln’s war policies. They gained thirty-five seats in
the House of Representatives, won governorships in several crucial states, especially New

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York, and took control of state legislatures in others. Although far from being the North’s
dominant party electorally – Republicans not only controlled the presidency and both
houses of Congress as well as most state governors in the Union – the Democrats were
making progress. (Thomas Seymour was barely defeated in his run for the governor’s
chair in Connecticut by a very narrow margin in a state that had become more Republican
in recent years.) What remained unclear was how far the Democrats’ electoral rebound
would go.
While most opponents of the Administration’s war policies continued to engage in
organized political activities, working within the traditional organs of government to
express their anger, fighting elections, continuing their advocacy, and their resistance in
Congress and state legislatures, the continued weakness of their position led many dis-
senters to move beyond the formal political process that they still found unresponsive and
much more frustrating than the nation deserved. They demanded more vigorous reac-
tions beyond unfriendly newspaper stories, stump speeches, and challenges on the floor
of Congress. Despite the hesitancy of some Democratic leaders about encouraging pro-
tests outside the formal political system, opposition spilled over into a number of fright-
ening riots and mob challenges in several cities that threatened the carrying out of
government policies that the Republicans deemed necessary and proper to win the war
and preserve the Union. There had been some of these outbursts earlier but now they
were becoming more widespread.
The Enrollment Act of 1863 led to a more vigorous and widespread federal effort than
earlier, which led, in turn, to a shift to more confrontational and violent attempts to
disrupt the actions mandated by the act. As Jennifer Weber has suggested, “the Enrollment
Act changed the nature of dissent in the North. Until the law passed armed opposition
to the war was scattered and generally weak.”16 But once the stakes had become higher
for many potential draftees, they and their neighbors responded. As noted, under the act
the federal government introduced procedures and institutions to register those eligible,
and call them to report when chosen, and mandated that federal troops would join local
authorities to enforce the procedures if necessary.
As a consequence of the uproar against the act, the draft itself was effectively disrupted
in several places, in small towns, rural areas, and in large cities such as New York and
Boston, by civilian resistance and the aid given to draft evaders by their neighbors. Riots
led to a great deal of property destruction and loss of life. Resisters harassed, threatened,
and subjected those running the draft to violent attacks. Despite the decision to use the
army to carry out the law, there were never enough troops to enforce the process, or find
deserters, or arrest people for abetting resistance, especially in already hostile areas.
Republican newspaper offices were burned down, federal enrolling officers charged with
running the draft in towns, large and small, were prevented from carrying out their work,
some were even killed, their enrolling sites destroyed, all, the rioters said, in the name of
ending government tyranny and the war that had brought it to America.
The most dramatic and destructive of these events was the New York City draft riots
in the summer of 1863. During the four days of mob action, there was destruction of
many buildings, many by fire, including the Colored Orphan Asylum; looting by the
participants turned into attacks on black residents, including lynchings, in what one his-
torian has called “a full fledged race riot.” More than one hundred people were killed.

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The rioting was not brought under control until Union troops sent from the battle lines
in Virginia arrived in large enough numbers to put down the assaults. There were similar
anti-draft riots and destruction in other cities including Boston and Vallandigham’s home
town of Dayton, as well as in many smaller communities. The government postponed
the draft for almost two months as a result.17
Beyond the rioting, there were other violent confrontations, for example, persistent
open armed battles in the border state of Missouri where guerrilla warfare occurred
between supporters and opponents of the war. One historian has called all of these violent
actions an “insurrection.”18 Republican newspapers and speeches agreed, charging that
these attacks were the result of the dissenters’ advocacy. Lincoln supporters added to the
violence as they were egged on to break up anti-draft meetings – and vigorously did so.
What underlay the opposition and the violence that had become an important aspect
of it? Historians have identified a range of elements that led some Americans to become
dissenters. They point out that there were many tensions existing in American society
that played out in the home front confrontation about the war. Rioters, in addition to
their hatred of forced partisan conscription and the bloody racism that permeated their
actions, were also reacting to a range of economic difficulties, bank failures and an agri-
cultural depression among them, that severely hurt many. They were also affected by
what one historian refers to as the underling defeatism fostered by the frustration of a
stalemated, never-ending war, with all the hardships it fostered. The apparent futility of
the conflict and its destructiveness filled Democratic newspapers and became a mainstay
of the position of many editors. The prevailing question ‘can the Confederacy ever be
beaten?’ became widespread in dissenting quarters with many believing that the answer
was no. In sum, people were frightened, under economic and other pressures amidst a
never-ending war that was being fought for the wrong reasons and on behalf of the
wrong people. The rioters joined other dissenters (such as those who were of southern
origin) in believing that the leaders of the war effort were seeking to change America by
bloodshed and repressive activities.19

“A Fire in the Rear”

The Republican response to the Democratic challenge was obviously hostile and intolerant
of their arguments, coupled with a determination to continue the Administration’s policies
and aims and to find ways of undercutting the Democratic surge. As the war progressed,
Republican leaders saw many indicators of real dangers to the Union’s efforts to defeat the
threat the country faced. Like the Democrats they did not trust their opponents. It was easy
enough for the Administration’s supporters to argue that all of these events were caused by
Democratic conspirators against the government. There were enough indications for
Republicans to see the danger of continued dissent – in speech or in print, as well as from
the activities of those they saw as traitors, adding up to what the President called a “fire in
the rear.” Republicans especially denounced Vallandigham, the particular thorn in the
Administration’s side. They became more and more convinced that he was engaging in
acts of treason, conspiring with others like himself to break up the Union. Early on they
labeled the dissenters as Copperheads (poisonous snakes that attacked without warning)
and butternuts (the color of the Confederate army’s uniform). As William Blair has written,

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“Unionists had no vocabulary beyond the word ‘treason’ to describe and respond to the
enormity of what was happening.”20
At the outset of the dissenters’ assault there was no effective, well thought out structure
to deal with the problem that the Administration perceived. What emerged as this dissent
grew was anything but the “Constitution as it is,” rather, a haphazard system of local
government institutions determined to use their power to hamper opposition and run the
draft with little guidance from the Administration. These local officials kept up surveil-
lance on those that they considered to be threats, closed down opposition meetings, har-
assed the opposition press, went after army deserters, and generally worked to hamper and
limit the home front resistance to the war effort.
But all of this continued to be done without much guidance or agreement. Who was
to define dissent, and once defined, how was it to be policed? In 1861 and 1862 various
government agencies – a Senate committee, the State Department, and later the War
Department – employed federal marshals to find and arrest dissenters. Soldiers, under
orders from local commanders, arrested those who for some reason were considered
treasonous. They were joined by local military tribunals that became the arbiters of what
speech was acceptable. Troops were all over the electoral landscape, at Democratic meet-
ings throughout the campaign and, most of all, at the polls on election day, all of which
became a massive bone of contention.
Beyond the military involvement, postmasters were allowed to open the mail of
allegedly suspicious people, choosing their targets due to the reports by their neighbors,
often followed by arrests for their actions, or for preventive reasons. These people were
then brought before civil courts, where most were discharged from custody, but only
after delays and each taking a public oath of loyalty to the Union – an oath that became
more demanding over time. Others arrested, however, were not released. Like other
government actions these were not necessarily concerted efforts directed from above.
But they happened nevertheless. The arrest of Vallandigham for violating Burnside’s
Order Number 18 which forbade “the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy”
became notorious because of Burnside’s overreach. He had fanned the flames to a high
pitch.21
What the two sides were contesting was what, if any, were the acceptable limits of
dissent against government policy during wartime? What was the proper way to dissent
– if any? Rioting and civic unrest were not new in America but their appearance now had
raised the obvious question, could a war be successfully prosecuted if there was a constant
“fire in the rear”? In Lincoln’s construct, the answer was no. In order to save the Union
the President sometimes had to do things that were unacceptable in peace time. The
Union came first.22 Most Republicans were convinced that the Democratic opposition
was improper and dangerous. They responded by delegitimizing their opponents in their
propaganda – and activities. They believed the rumors that were always rife in party
newspapers, which they elevated into political charges against their opponents. They
accepted that Democratic-led secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle
and its successors, the Order of American Knights and the Order of the Sons of Liberty,
were dangerously dedicated to undermining the war effort and working hard to do so.
Government supporters also believed the rumors of an organized northwest conspiracy
that sought to separate the states of the Middle West from the Union and government

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tyranny. When the rebel officer John Hunt Morgan led his Confederate raiders into
Ohio, the press and party leaders argued that he was aided by dissenting Democrats.
Although President Lincoln ultimately stepped in and took a more cautious position
to prevent matters from getting out of hand, including ordering that Vallandigham not
be jailed but sent into the Confederacy instead, and ordered the reopening of the closed
Democratic newspapers in New York City, his less aggressive actions did not alleviate the
opposition’s fears or stop the war supporters from continuing to try to thwart written and
spoken opposition. In 1863 matters came to a head when Ohio Democrats nominated
Vallandigham (who was now in Canada to meet, Republicans believed, Confederate
agents to plan further mischief) as their candidate for governor. The ensuing campaign
became what one historian has labeled “a referendum on the war.” On election day
the voters largely dashed the Democrats’ glimmer of hope as a result of their surge in the
elections of 1862. The Republicans won the Ohio governorship, as well as defeating
other Democrats for numerous state offices there and elsewhere in that year. Lincoln
telegraphed the Republican governor of Ohio when Vallandigham’s loss became clear:
“Glory to God in the highest; Ohio has saved the Union.”23
Nevertheless, dissent continued despite the rout of the Democrats. Lincoln understood
that only success in the war would keep the people behind him and his policies and, as the
election season got underway in 1864, he saw only defeat in the upcoming contest given
the war situation. The Union army’s victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in mid-1863,
followed by other triumphs, seemed to alter the complexion of the conflict. The
Democrats lost much of the political ground they had gained. But their anger, frustration,
and determination remained and they came back strongly as the war began to go badly
again for the Union in the first half of 1864. The bloody battles that occurred as General
Grant opened an unrelenting offensive south of Washington soon became bogged down
in the face of stubborn Confederate resistance. The apparent setbacks increased the gloom,
the fears, and the challenges to the Lincoln Administration. The dissenters’ arsenal of
pamphlets, newspaper editorials and speeches against the government grew more and
more bitter, and, as the Republicans responded, continued to be shaped and defined by
the now well-established rhetoric of treason versus tyranny. The dissenters’ racist anger
against the Administration was stoked by the increasing enlistment of freed slaves into the
Union army. The suppression of dissenting newspapers and the arrest of outspoken oppo-
nents confirmed to Democrats that the nation was well along on the course toward
tyranny. Democratic spokesmen particularly denounced the way that the Lincoln
Administration dealt with elections, corrupting them by doing everything they could to
get out a favorable Republican vote in new and illegal ways: having the army give fur-
loughs to soldiers who were likely to be Republican supporters, allowing them to go
home on election day in order to vote; setting up voting operations in the field under
circumstances in which anti-Republican voters would be under punitive pressure applied
by their officers and other soldiers who had no hesitation in coercing those that they
feared would not otherwise support the Administration.
As a result, such prominent Democratic leaders as New York’s Horatio Seymour, no
Copperhead, who had accepted the necessity of the war in order to restore the Union,
now railed against the Administration’s tyranny that he saw and denounced its emanci-
pation policy in the harshest terms before a great rally of Democrats in Albany, New

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York’s capital. August Belmont, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee,
summed up what was at stake in his opening speech to the party convention in New
York City: “four years of misrule by a sectional, fanatical and corrupt party, have brought
our country to the very verge of ruin.”24
Reflecting the realities of the war and its effect on party politics, the Democratic con-
vention proceeded to yoke General George McClellan, clearly a supporter of the war, as
its presidential candidate, with a prominent peace Democrat, congressman George
Pendleton of Ohio, as his vice presidential running mate, and agreed on a platform that
familiarly opened by stressing Democratic conservatism and resistance to tyranny. After
affirming their party’s “unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitution,” the
convention’s drafting committee then went on to say

that this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people,
that after four years the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the
pretense of military necessity of a war power higher than the Constitution, the
Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and
private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essen-
tially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that
immediate efforts for a cessation of hostilities . . . to the end that, at the earliest
practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of
the States.25

The Democrats had opted for an immediate ending of the war.

Republican newspapers, pamphlets, and speeches at rallies focused on the so-called
peace plank to foment anger against their treasonous “Copperhead” opponents – once
again ignoring the Constitution’s definition of treason as an “overt act” attested to by two
witnesses – something the Democratic platform did not encompass. The familiar opposing
notions held by the parties descended into even further angry, often extreme, challenges
to the legitimacy of the other side. There was always material to build up into conspiracies
as Republicans read Democratic newspapers, or saw the difficulties of raising troops
through the draft. As one Democratic newspaper argued when the draft was instituted,
“all who wished to be butchered will please step forward. All others will please stay at
home and defy old Abe.”26
The Republicans had a field day spreading the Democratic comments widely in
assaulting “the Coward’s convention.” Although McClellan refused to support the peace
plank in the platform, to the Republicans the Democrats had become the party of “Dixie,
Davis and the Devil,” an insult spread widely in their campaign oratory. Secretary of
State William H. Seward added to the din, making a speech during the campaign against
Democratic behavior, reiterating that they were “the allies of treason.” Rumors of secret
conspiratorial societies organized by Democrats continued to be blown up into a major
threat that would explode at any moment unless the government acted. The climate was
clearly infested with what one historian has referred to as “the paranoia of political
discourse in wartime.”27
The Republican strategy was effective. Lincoln, running as the candidate of the Union
Party – a change in nomenclature to indicate their commitment and that many Democrats

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supported him – won a second term. The victory was helped by soldier voting (many had
been given furloughs allowing them to return home and vote, others voted at polling
places set up at army camps in the field). The presence of troops at many of the polling
places allowed them to note who voted for whom and sometimes limit who was allowed
to participate. Still, it is also noteworthy that Democratic strength in the total electorate
was impressive. Despite their label as cowardly and treasonous, with their antiwar aura,
and the Republican manipulation of the soldier vote, McClellan and Pendleton received
45 percent of the total popular vote, doing better than the Democrats had done in many
states four years before. They did not do as well in the number of seats won in Congress
and in state-level contests. And they only won the electoral votes of three states. They had
been rebuked but not broken.
The election was the last gasp of widespread political confrontation over the war. In
the aftermath, the political firestorms quieted as the war began to wind down toward a
Union victory. By then, the President was having more difficulties with members of his
own party than from the dissenters. Many Democrats remained recalcitrant but with the
Lincoln Administration firmly ensconced there was something of a backing off by both
sides as they prepared to face the end of the war and what would follow.

“Conservatives and Constitutionalists” or

“A Peace Movement That Imperiled the Union”?
Historians disagree about the impact of dissent on the Union’s efforts during the war. The
heated charges and claims offered by each side against the other in this bitter confrontation
are clear enough. In the war’s aftermath there was a long tradition of writers about these
events taking the side of the government, emphasizing the Democrats’ misbehavior and
being charitable toward the actions of the Lincoln Administration toward dissenters –
originally championed in the generations after the Civil War and given scholarly sanction
in the works of scholars such as George Fort Milton and Wood Gray in the 1930s, followed
by many others, who pointed out that there was much less harshness toward dissenters and
less disregard of legal rights occurred than has been suggested.28
But how true is this positive position? While much is clouded by the hysteria,
propaganda, and the lack of surviving records, some estimates have been made that
about 13,000 civilians were imprisoned, many less than the dissenters suggested (most
more likely to have been arrested for what they advocated in speeches and print rather
than for their actions). In evaluating the extent and force of the draft, while it remained
a running sore, these writers have found a lot more noise from the challengers but much
less harshness against them than the latter usually argued. The Lincoln Administration
reacted pragmatically to the opposition to conscription and worked to reduce the
number of those called to serve. Casualties in riots against the draft were more limited
than the noise and confusion suggested at the time. And behind it all was the
Administration’s continuing argument that what was done was more necessary than the
dissenters argued.
Beginning in the 1960s, the historian Frank Klement sharply criticized this dominant
perspective when he began to produce an impressive number of books on the subject
including a biography of Vallandigham, an analysis of the secret societies, and a study

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of the Copperheads in the Middle West. In addition, he published an array of articles on

the subject (many of them brought together in a volume called Lincoln’s Critics), all
challenging the dominant antidissenter historiography. His voice became a clear defense
of the dissenters and the limits of their effect on the war. He argued that they were
neither pro-Confederate, seditionists, nor traitors, but rather Americans fearful of the rise
of restrictive government even in wartime. They believed that they were right and
American liberties were endangered due to the actions of the Administration and its
agents. The dissenters, Klement suggested, were “conservatives and constitutionalists
destined to oppose the Lincoln Administration with words and votes and court cases, not
revolution.”29 He emphasized that the Republicans greatly exaggerated the matter, that
most of the claims about organized secret societies and a national network of subversive
activists were overblown and inaccurate. Dissenters were relatively small in number,
largely disorganized, with mixed motives for their attitudes, including their ethnic fears
and despair about their economic situation in the confusion of war, as well as their
partisan loyalties and the southern heritage of many of them. They were not much of a
threat except in the fevered brows of their political opponents.
From the beginning of Klement’s efforts, other historians challenged his findings and
repeated and underscored their belief that the dissenters were more disruptive and dan-
gerous than his suggestion of the relative lack of danger from their activities. Instead,
these critics emphasized that the Lincoln Administration’s repressive acts were limited in
number and effect, with most of the arbitrary force applied occurring in the border states.
Mark Neely, in a series of books and articles, suggests, first, that the claims of the
Administration’s denial of civil liberties were exaggerated by the dissenters, and the dis-
ruptions that the latter caused by their political assaults were very damaging to the Union’s
war effort. He also suggested that Lincoln’s policies “had been aimed at dangerous
Confederate sympathizers . . . at bridge burners in Missouri and at the legion of draft
dodgers throughout the land. All along the policy threatened freedom of speech and the
press but only incidentally.”30
In rebuttal, other historians may agree that Lincoln’s defenders have a case but argue
that in the political atmosphere of the time the actions against dissent loomed very large
in the eyes of the President’s opponents whether they were Copperheads or more prudent
members of the Democratic Party. They pointed out that much repression, either by
government agents, troops, or local citizens intent on crushing whatever dissent existed,
also took place beyond border areas in states such as Ohio, Indiana, and others. Further,
William Blair argues, the system established to deal with internal threats “encouraged rash
actions, quick arrests based on slim charges against behavior that had not yet become
treasonous,” with a “pronounced proclivity to bend the Constitution to suit the emer-
gency” by the Lincoln Administration.31 Whatever its extent and intensity, it was enough
to fuel a political issue that tied such action in with the other excesses of the Administration.
As such the actions against political dissent were always a major political reality. The
actions of Union soldiers and their commanders loomed large to those either under the
gun or who challenged the Administration without committing treasonous acts or taking
action against the war effort.
Mark Neely also noted that the Democratic Party was a loyal opposition – if not every
party adherent was.

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If their rhetoric was calculated to goad Republicans, it also played a legitimate

role in preserving civil liberties in wartime America . . . a role crucial to a
democratic country involved in war. They helped keep the army and the
Republicans honest. They helped prevent the U.S. army from an increasing
reliance on military arrests, trials and other activities. Their protests about
political abuse of the internal security system forced Abraham Lincoln, in his
habeas corpus proclamation . . . to disclaim any attempt to interfere with the
electoral process.32

Most recently Jennifer Weber and Stephen Towne have made the strongest reitera-
tion of the early argument about the dangers to the Union’s war effort inherent in the
dissenters’ advocacy. Weber has little good to say about the latter and their activities. To
her, they were reckless, obstructive, and divisive, provoking much debilitating confron-
tation at the community level. She argues that antiwar sentiment was vigorous enough
to be effective against the war effort. It was strong enough to lead to the deep divisions
and disruptive violence which certainly weakened carrying out the draft. She refers,
in sum, to “the chaos behind the Union lines” due to the riots, and other violence in
1863.33
Stephen E. Towne has also sharply criticized Klement and his followers’ conclusions
by arguing that the secret societies and organized plots against the war were realities. His
exhaustive study of the network of Union spies, soldiers and others organized by
department generals and other officials sent to uncover threats to the nation due to
dissenters’ activities, based on the massive surviving records, supports this description.
The thousands of agents sent out looking for dangerous activities reported back how
numerous and well organized the challengers were and how ready they were to act
against the Union. Towne takes the reports seriously and finds strong evidence of a wide
range of conspiracies to disrupt the Union war effort, secret plots to free Confederate
prisoners, and other attempts to aid and abet Confederate raids into the Union, justifying
the arrests and trials that followed. (Many of the latter occurred just before the election
of 1864 – to the delight of Republican politicians.) He concludes that “this hidden army
[of investigators] played a significant part in defending the United States from widespread
conspiracy in the North during the American Civil War.”34
Since much of what was reported was based on rumors, overheard conversations, and
perhaps vivid imaginations, it is worth asking, about the evidence used, are these reports
suggestive, but not conclusive? Towne believes the investigators’ reports to be accurate
about what they uncovered even though verification of their accuracy in the tensions and
hysteria of the time is not always present. There is no doubt that the rabble-rousing
activities by Democrat politicians and editors in the hot-house atmosphere of wartime
were part of a violent scene in many parts of the North, and certainly unhelpful to the
Union cause. On the other side of the equation, as noted above, even those scholars who
believe that the dissenters went too far in their rhetoric and activities acknowledge that
they had something of a case against the Lincoln Administration. Jennifer Weber points
out that the dissenters’ opposition to some of the government’s activities was useful against
an Administration that had gone too far. In his classic study of the Civil War era, James
McPherson also takes a middle viewpoint and joins with Neely and Weber in seeing some

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usefulness in the dissenters’ behavior in their establishing their case against Administration
excess.35 At the same time, it can also be pointed out that the dissenters were not guilty of
many of the things they were charged with, for example, their treasonous activities; and
that, in the case of the often raucous dissent, no matter how light the hand of the
government may have been, it was far beyond what Americans were accustomed to.
Criticisms of the various conclusions about the dissenters’ efforts continue to appear.
Several recent studies of local areas during the war differ about the impact and effectiveness
of the dissenters’ actions. For example, Robert Sandow is closer to Klement’s findings in
his study of western Pennsylvania, while Matthew Warshauer aligns himself with those
who challenge Klement; the title of Warshauer’s 2013 essay says it all: “Copperheads in
Connecticut: A Peace Movement That Imperiled the Union.”36 The debate over the
threat to the Union from the dissenters, therefore, continues.
In the years after the Civil War, echoes of the domestic battles of 1861–1865 continued
to resonate in American politics for a generation and more. The Republicans continually
waved the “bloody shirt” of treason against the Democrats in election campaigns to
remind everyone of the latter’s anti-Union position during a war for the nation’s survival.
The Democrats continued to defend themselves or, as the nation entered a new era,
changed the subject as much as they could.

Notes
1 See Samuel Eliot Morison et al., Dissent in Three American Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1970).
2 Lincoln’s assaults on President Polk and his policies are well covered in the two excellent
recent biographies of him: David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995);
and Michael L. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008). See also Donald Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1957).
3 Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 39–41.
4 On Vallandigham see Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the
Civil War (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1970); and James L. Vallandigham, ed.,
The Record of Honorable C.L. Vallandigham on Abolition, the Union and the Civil War (Columbus,
OH, 1863).
5 See Joanna Cowden, “The Politics of Dissent: Civil War Democrats in Connecticut,” New
England Quarterly 56 (Dec. 1983), 538–554.
6 Klement, Limits of Dissent, 97–98 and passim; Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns, Secret Political
Societies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1984); and Frank L. Klement, Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads of the North, ed. Steven K.
Rogstad (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 1999).
7 See Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New
York: Knopf, 1962), for evidence of Stanton’s anger toward, and disdain for, Lincoln, because
of his vacillation and his party colleagues’ pursuit of political advantage.
8 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, chs. 2 and 3.
9 Phillip Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994).
10 Useful studies of the draft as fact and as controversy are Eugene Murdock, One Million Men:
The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971); and
Eugene Murdock, Patriotism Limited, 1862–1865 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press,
1967).
11 See Murdock, One Million Men.

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12 Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War on the Constitution (New
York: Knopf, 1973), 77.
13 The full language of Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution reads: “Treason against the
United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies,
giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony
of two witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in Open Court.”
14 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 60.
15 Vallandigham, Record of Vallandigham, 189.
16 Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 103.
17 Weber, Copperheads, 109; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance in
Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1974).
18 Weber, Copperheads, 203.
19 Klement, Limits of Dissent; Klement, Lincoln’s Critics, esp. 43–92; Weber, Copperheads, 198.
20 William A. Blair, With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 36.
21 Burnside’s directive continues with the statement that “Treason, expressed or implied, will not
be tolerated in this department” and those guilty of such will be immediately arrested.
22 Weber, Copperheads, 198. See also James M. McPherson, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the
Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 216.
23 Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. II; Weber, Copperheads, 120.
24 Allan Nevins, The War for the Union (New York: Scribners, 1960), vol. II, 302; Silbey, A
Respectable Minority, 130.
25 The platform is most conveniently reprinted in Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson’s
standard work, National Party Platforms, 1840–1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966).
26 Nevins, War for the Union, vol. II, 389.
27 Silbey, A Respectable Minority, 167; New York Evening Post, August 2, 1864; Mark E. Neely, The
Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 2–3; Adam I. P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 162.
28 George Fort Milton, Lincoln and the Fifth Column (New York: Vanguard Press, 1942); Wood
Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: Viking, 1942).
29 Klement, Lincoln’s Critics, 23; among other studies influenced by Vallandigham’s argument see
G. R. Tredway, Democratic Opposition to the Lincoln Administration in Indiana (Indianapolis:
Indiana Historical Bureau, 1973); Hubert Wubben, Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement
(Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980).
30 Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 67.
31 Blair, With Malice Towards Some, 127, 192.
32 Neely, Fate of Liberty, 209.
33 Weber, Copperheads, 117.
34 Stephen E. Towne, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in
America’s Heartland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 306.
35 Weber, Copperheads, 217; James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 448–449.
36 Both Warshauer’s essay and Robert M. Sandow, “Damnable Treason or Party Organs?
Democratic Secret Societies in Pennsylvania,” are in Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas
Smith, eds., This Distracted and Anarchical People (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013),
42–59 and 60–80 respectively.

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W AGING WAR, CON DUC T I N G
DIPLOMA C Y
Leadership and the American Civil War

Brooks D. Simpson

The American Civil War is perhaps the most studied of the wars fought by the United
States, and it retains a secure hold on both scholarly interest and the popular imagination.
That said, rarely do students of the conflict integrate the military, naval, and diplomatic
fronts into a larger narrative that reflects the multiple fronts where the Union and the
Confederacy waged war. Yet military events affected diplomatic circumstances, which in
turn often focused on issues related to the conduct of the naval war, especially the Union
blockade. Nor could one overlook the ever-present discussion about whether Great
Britain and France would recognize the Confederacy, followed by possible mediation to
settle the conflict or even intervention to secure southern independence. Essential to the
triumph of the United States was the cooperation of military and naval forces on the rivers
in the western theater and on the coastlines and shores of the eastern theater. On land, at
sea, and at the negotiating table, leaders battled to achieve their objectives in a struggle
that proved most sanguinary.
All too often examinations of leadership are reduced to biographical studies of prominent
individuals, an exercise that complicates the effort to understand the role leadership played
in military and naval operations as well as diplomatic negotiations. To be sure, biographies
offer detailed descriptions and deeper understandings of who did what, why, and how,
even if at times biographers fall prey to the notion of ranking their subject against his peers,
especially in the military realm. A review of the most prominent of these works would
consume far too much time and space. Rather, one might turn to exploring military,
naval, and diplomatic leadership in a broader, larger sense in terms of what leaders faced in
waging war and negotiating settlements.
At first glance, for example, it would seem inevitable that scholars would focus on
various generals in an effort to describe how and why one side won while the other lost.
To do so, indeed, suggests that people matter in shaping the outcome of events, and that
the result of the conflict was neither preordained nor inevitable. Else why should we
study people who were simply the tools of larger and uncontrollable historical forces? Yet
we should nevertheless approach the subject cautiously. All too often studies of Civil War
high command devolve into biographies of individual commanders and accounts of
major battles or campaigns. This is understandable given the ready readership and pre-
dictable debates that shape such studies. Was Ulysses S. Grant a butcher (or a drunk)? Was
Robert E. Lee the prisoner of a bloodlust that proved far too costly? Should we conclude

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that William T. Sherman was little more than a wild-eyed arsonist whose extreme rhet-
oric barely concealed an unbalanced mind that fantasized about terrorism? Why was
George B. McClellan so problematic, and exactly what was Joseph E. Johnston’s problem?
That so many studies of Civil War generals endlessly revisit the same themes suggests that
biography alone cannot quite address the issue.
Nor should we limit the definition of military leadership to those individuals who
happen to be wearing uniforms – the generals, admirals, and others who were in command
of soldiers and sailors. Of the two commanders-in-chief, Jefferson Davis possessed far
more military experience than did his counterpart in Washington, Abraham Lincoln, but
it remains unclear whether such experience proved advantageous in his attempt to
conduct the Confederate war. Much has been made of Lincoln’s talents as a natural
strategist, a masterful handler of generals, and as someone who balanced military and
political needs in his military appointments, as highly favorable studies by T. Harry
Williams and James McPherson argue. Yet Lincoln could meddle in the affairs of his
generals to the point that he may have helped create the complicated climate in which
the Army of the Potomac operated in the eastern theater, while in the West his instincts
nearly led to Ulysses S. Grant’s undoing in the early stages of the Vicksburg campaign.1
When it came to civil subordinates, moreover, Lincoln appeared to have the advantage
over Davis. To be sure, most people find much fault with Simon Cameron’s administration
of the War Department in the conflict’s first year, but his successor, Edwin M. Stanton,
has usually received much praise for his work on behalf of the Union war effort. William
Marvel’s recent biography paints a darker portrait of Stanton that is worth considering, at
least in part.2 Historians accord Gideon Welles high marks for his administration of naval
affairs, but then they also say the same of Stephen Mallory’s struggles to make do with the
Confederate naval effort by supporting technological advances and making the best out of
very little. Given the continual turnover in the office of Secretary of War for the
Confederates, it is much more difficult to assess how well that office functioned: part of
the problem was that Davis was often his own secretary of war.
In assessing military leadership during the Civil War, one must first consider the chal-
lenges both sides faced in framing and implementing a successful military strategy. For the
Confederates, victory was predicated upon survival, putting up a determined defense of
the Confederate homeland, and promoting northern war-weariness while sustaining
Confederate morale, in part by considering the possibility of offensive operations and even
invasions of enemy territory. Robert E. Lee stressed the latter approach, believing that
Confederate defensive victories alone failed to elevate Confederate morale or depress
Union support for very long. Yet offensive operations and aggressive fighting proved
costly in manpower and materiel. In contrast, Union generals looked to eliminate enemy
resistance altogether. Over time this concept expanded beyond enemy military forces to
include Confederate infrastructure, logistics, and civilian morale, as well as a decision to
strike at the institution of slavery itself. That last decision had mixed consequences: while
striking at slavery and welcoming the help of African Americans as soldiers and laborers
weakened the Confederacy’s material ability to resist, it also intensified Confederate resist-
ance by striking at the very heart of the southern social, economic, and political order.
Some generals shrank away from supporting that decision, while others, led by Ulysses S.
Grant, supported it. It would be left to Grant and his key subordinate William T. Sherman

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to wage war with a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Yet in a war that
aimed not to destroy the South but to destroy Confederate independence while reestab-
lishing the foundation for sectional reconciliation, Union commanders faced as daunting
a task as did their opposite numbers in gray.3
Such responsibilities seem in retrospect to be nearly overwhelming, calling for men
of exceptional ability to assume the responsibility for such a momentous burden. Yet
Americans went to war in 1861 having very little previous military experience. Although
most commanding generals on both sides shared a common educational experience at the
United States Military Academy at West Point, that institution’s curriculum was designed
to train engineers, not combat commanders: cadets spent more time learning French than
they did about the means and ends of military action. Moreover, although many of the men
who served in high military position during the Civil War could claim to have seen combat
during the Mexican American War, only a handful had ever commanded a thousand men
in combat, let alone ten thousand.4
In short, while many of the generals who commanded armies had professional military
training, that training was in some ways suspect, in other ways outdated. Experience
proved a great teacher, especially on the Union side. The ranking Confederate generals
at the beginning of the conflict were (with the exception of the fallen Albert Sydney
Johnston) still in charge as the war drew to a close, while the Union high command of
1861 had given way entirely to a new team during the last year of the war, a team whose
members, including Grant, Sherman, George G. Meade, George H. Thomas, and Phil
Sheridan, had worked their way up the chain of command, mastering one level at a time
as they learned through experience. It could be a costly education, and not everyone
passed the course: indeed, some of the earliest students thought to be the brightest,
including McClellan and Don Carlos Buell, were not around at the end, while others,
notably William S. Rosecrans, briefly burned brightly before burning out.
One might well claim that nothing succeeds like success, especially success seasoned
with a little luck. Yet, a general’s ability to direct his forces on the battlefield while
remaining cool and focused in itself does not explain what made a general successful.
Indeed, one of the challenges present in studies of military leadership during the American
Civil War is found in addressing the tension between tactical skill and strategic result.
Some Civil War battles featured rather adroit applications of the tactical art, where generals
handled their forces on the battlefield skillfully. Robert E. Lee’s admirers can point to
Second Manassas and especially Chancellorsville as great triumphs brought about through
skillful maneuver followed by devastating attacks. However, Lee found it difficult to take
advantage of the opportunities provided by such triumphs. They still proved costly in
terms of casualties; the Confederate triumph could be attributed in part to the incompetence
of the foe’s military leadership; and in the end Lee could not transform battlefield success
into strategic advantage.
Decisive battlefield triumphs were few and far between during the Civil War, and it
proved even more challenging to take advantage of the result to secure strategic success.
The exceptions highlight why this was normally the case. Take the battle of Nashville,
where George H. Thomas delivered what came close to a knockout blow against John
Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee. Given that Hood’s army had been badly damaged at
Franklin, the Confederates struggled unsuccessfully to put up much of a sustained fight;

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even as they left the field, the Federals proved unable to mount a successful pursuit that
would have finished the job. While Hood’s army never again fought effectively as an
organization, significant portions of it rejoined other Confederate forces, so the notion
that it was destroyed at Nashville is overwrought. While Thomas deserved plaudits for his
performance, especially given the fact that his superior, Ulysses S. Grant, was fast losing
patience with him, the victory itself was not a sign of particular military skill, let alone
genius. Thomas drove off an army already largely shattered.
Or take Chickamauga, where Thomas’s performance as a defensive commander
deservedly earned him the title “the Rock of Chickamauga.” In one of the bloodiest
battles of the Civil War, fortune smiled on the Confederates when a massive Rebel
assault hit a portion of the Union line that had just been weakened as the result of an
unseemly command snafu. Even then, just as at Gettysburg on July 2 several months
before, the Confederate attackers soon found themselves facing a stubborn defense that
checked the butternut drive. Luck, misfortune, and a significant disparity in the ability of
army and corps commanders could result in dramatic battlefield successes or lead to what
seemed to be disastrous reverses, but the long-term result rested on how such battles
affected the operational plan that reflected strategic priorities.
Lee understood this all too well. In December 1862 his army fended off Federal
assaults at Fredericksburg, inflicting significant losses in one of the most one-sided battles
of the conflict. Five months later, fortunes smiled on Confederate arms again at
Chancellorsville, which some have called Lee’s greatest victory despite the loss of trusted
corps commander Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Yet Lee realized that these victories
meant little in the larger scheme of things, for the Union’s Army of the Potomac would
rest, repair itself, be reinforced, and then resume operations. Both in 1862 and 1863 he
sought to break that strategic stalemate by going northwards across the Potomac. Neither
effort ended well.5
Some generals sought to avoid battle altogether, for different reasons. George B.
McClellan believed that the entire fate of the republic hinged on one great climactic
battle, to be fought by him, and thus preferred not to seek combat until he believed that
the odds of victory were overwhelmingly in his favor. Thus, while he skillfully
maneuvered the Army of the Potomac down to the James River and then up to the gates
of Richmond in 1862, he never felt ready to strike what he believed would be the final
blow. It did not hurt that his opponent, Joseph E. Johnston, preferred retreating to
advancing, for basically the same reason. William S. Rosecrans showed great ability in the
summer of 1863 when he forced Braxton Bragg out of central Tennessee in the oft-
overlooked Tullahoma campaign, although that achievement was overshadowed when
he barely held on to Chattanooga after Bragg defeated him at Chickamauga. Stonewall
Jackson outmarched rather than outfought his foe in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862.
Finally, William T. Sherman, at best a mediocre battlefield tactician, is best known for his
willingness to maneuver, as in the Atlanta campaign of 1864 (where again Joseph Johnston
proved a willing dance partner) and in his marches from Atlanta to the sea and through
the Carolinas.
Thus, what made a Civil War general a success as a military leader was not simply his
skill on the battlefield: most battles were slugfests that left both sides bloodied and
exhausted, and often it was the general who first moved on (and where he moved) that

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determined whether the result was a victory or a defeat. Rarely did commanders conduct
successful pursuits, in part because preparations for such an action had to take place before
battle was joined in the first place. Rather, it was the general who could weave together
battles in pursuit of a successful campaign who often prevailed. This was true of Jackson in
the Valley, and it was true of Lee from the defense of Richmond through Second Manassas,
and, to a lesser extent, his invasion of Maryland and the capture of the Union garrison at
Harper’s Ferry, an achievement often overshadowed by the carnage at Antietam.
The general most adept at making battles serve the purpose of his campaigns, however,
was Ulysses S. Grant. During both the Vicksburg and the Overland campaigns Grant
managed to fight battles that served the purposes of his overall operation. During the
Vicksburg campaign his success was obvious: in less than four weeks after crossing
the Mississippi River Grant’s men fought and won five battles, captured the state capital at
Jackson, and drove the Confederates into Vicksburg, commencing a siege that resulted in
the surrender of some 30,000 Confederates on July 4, 1863. Less appreciated but in several
ways just as effective was Grant’s Virginia campaign against Lee in the spring of 1864, in
which Grant, undeterred by battlefield setbacks, stalemates, and draws, made his way
southward to lay siege to Richmond and Petersburg, pinning Lee to the defense of the
Confederate capital and nullifying Lee’s ability to launch a telling counterstroke that would
restore Confederate fortunes. Grant, like Lee, proved a master of the operational art of
conducting campaigns. Other Civil War generals showed glimpses of such talent, but only
Grant and Lee proved able to sustain a high level of achievement across multiple campaigns.
Three aspects of military leadership have received short shrift in the literature, although
they were critical to the outcome of the war. First was a commander’s ability to form an
administrative staff that he could utilize to get the job done on the march and in camp as
well as on the battlefield. Not all generals had sufficient staff officers to perform these
duties, including Robert E. Lee, who had a handful of personal aides as well as a small
staff. Given Lee’s penchant to issue orders and then let events unfold, this was particularly
unfortunate. At the other end of the spectrum was Grant, who added to an already
growing staff structure when he came east in overall charge of the Union armies in 1864.
Grant’s staff officers helped plan operations; they played key roles in laying the groundwork
for important moves, most notably the crossing of the James River in June; and they
served as Grant’s eyes, ears, and occasionally mouth when it came to supervising the
actions of corps commanders to ensure that Grant’s orders were followed. At the same
time George G. Meade’s staff proved able to manage the affairs of the Army of the
Potomac. We know the most about these three staffs, although bookshelves groan with
the accumulated recollections of staff officers, in which the author tended to celebrate the
accomplishments of his commander in a format that provided prime fodder for biographers
of commanders.6
Nor do scholars pay much attention to the logistical challenges of command. Yet the
problems of supplying an army with food, uniforms, and armaments, however boring
they might be to the untried eye, were an essential part of Civil War command; so too
was the determination to sever the foe’s supply lines, whether by surrounding the enemy
(Grant at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg, Lee at Harper’s Ferry), threatening lines of
supply (Bragg versus Rosecrans at Chattanooga), or slicing rail connections (Jackson at
Second Manassas, Grant at Petersburg, and Sherman at Atlanta).7

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Finally, scholars tend to overlook the extent to which command remains a team
concept, with a command system’s health and effectiveness a measure of how well
superiors and subordinates work together. There is very little work on how corps
commanders performed, although one can always remember Douglas Southall Freeman’s
magisterial Lee’s Lieutenants as pointing the way for such studies.8
Just as a successful Civil War general had to see beyond the battlefield when it came
to military operations, so too did one need to grasp the importance of civil-military
operations and public opinion in the American context. Simply put, a general’s success
depended in part on how well he worked with his civil superiors and accepted the
constraints and conditions of political circumstances. Of all the Confederate commanders,
only Robert E. Lee managed to forge a constructive relationship with his civil superior,
Jefferson Davis; both Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard spent much of the
war arguing with the Confederate president. On the Union side, McClellan’s relationship
with Lincoln quickly deteriorated, while the prickly egos of Don Carlos Buell and
Rosecrans hampered their careers. Some generals, like Joseph Hooker, enjoyed playing
politics, while others, including George G. Meade, found themselves victimized by
political infighting; a few generals, notably George H. Thomas, refused to play the game
altogether, then wondered why they did not get what they felt they deserved. For all his
talk about despising politics and politicians, William T. Sherman was well-connected
politically through his father-in-law, the classic elder statesman, and his brother, a senator
from Ohio. Again, however, it was Grant who set the standard. Not only did he benefit
from the services of his hometown congressman, Elihu B. Washburne, but he forged a
relationship with Lincoln that was grounded in his understanding of the challenges
Lincoln faced.9
The ability to understand the political dimensions of the conflict separated able gen-
erals from their less capable counterparts. Here again Grant, Lee, and Sherman excelled
in understanding what was needed from them to advance the war effort. Other generals
were also able to make the connection between political goals and military means, but
they were out of sync with the course of affairs. Foremost in this category was George
McClellan. As Ethan Rafuse reminds us in McClellan’s War, the general sought to wage
a limited war precisely because he embraced the conservative goal of reunion and recon-
ciliation. To escalate the conflict, especially when it came to slavery, promised to com-
plicate that process, embittering the Confederate enemy. It was not that McClellan
misunderstood the relationship between means and ends, but that he resisted the shift
in government policy, one brought about in part by his inability to achieve a decisive
battlefield victory.10
In short, Civil War military leaders may be the subjects of many a book, but Civil War
military leadership remains seriously understudied and underappreciated. We need to
know much more about how someone went about the process of exercising command,
whether that meant planning operations, dealing with civil superiors, forging cooperative
bonds with subordinates, supplying one’s army, gathering and interpreting intelligence,
or maintaining both morale among the men and a good image in the press – all matters
critical to military success. Such studies will allow us to make far more discerning
assessments and promote more careful analysis of just how well generals performed during
the conflict.

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Studies of land operations dominate Civil War military history, yet one cannot account
for Union triumph without taking into account the war on the rivers and off the coast of
the Confederacy. Simply put, it was the combined operations featuring cooperation
between armies and naval squadrons and flotillas that proved critical in penetrating the
Confederacy along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and in gaining control of
the Mississippi River. The ability of Union armies to move men and supply forces along
the Virginia coast was essential to the military planning of George McClellan and Ulysses
S. Grant in Virginia, while Union amphibious landings along the coast of the Carolinas
afforded other opportunities for success throughout the conflict. Squadrons patrolling
the Confederate coastline eventually formed an effective blockade that reduced what the
Confederacy could import to support its struggle for independence, although scholars
differ over exactly how important the blockade’s contribution was to the final result.11
In contrast, the Confederacy struggled to mount a significant naval effort. Its gunboats
along western waters proved little more than a nuisance, while forts along rivers usually
offered little more resistance unless they were ideally situated to contest Union naval
advances, as was the case at Fort Donelson. Elsewhere the Rebels fell far short of match-
ing their foes when it came to constructing ironclads: in many ways the March 1862
effort of its first ironclad, the CSS Virginia, proved to be the high water mark of that
endeavor. Nor did experiments to build a submarine produce a telling counterpunch in
Confederate efforts to smash through the blockade squadrons. Rather, the Confederates
were reduced to creating or improving upon preexisting coastal defenses and damaging
Union trade through the deployment of commerce raiders, most famously the CSS
Alabama. Meanwhile, blockade runners sought to evade Union squadrons, with mixed
results.
To a large extent, the naval war was asymmetrical. The attention paid to duels such as
those between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia or the USS Kearsarge and the CSS
Alabama obscures the fact that there were no fleet versus fleet operations, despite the
efforts of the Confederates to defend their ports, their coasts, and their rivers with vessels,
mines, and forts. Larger operations were beyond Confederate capacity; whatever real
chance the Rebels had was dependent on their ability to purchase British-built vessels to
conduct operations. Such circumstances led to a significant difference in the quality of
naval leadership. While one may argue as to whether Union generals were superior to
their Confederate counterparts, when it came to naval commanders, the advantage clearly
lay with the Union, with David G. Farragut winning the most renown. Moreover, in
several instances it was the ability of Union army and navy officers to work together that
led to critical Union successes, especially in the western theater. The United States made
far better use of combined operations than did their opponents.12
Finally, most people overlook the degree to which Civil War diplomacy was directly
related to issues of military strategy. Yet military operations and diplomatic relations were
intimately intertwined. Had Confederate diplomacy succeeded in securing British and
French recognition followed by intervention should the Union pass up an offer to
mediate the conflict based on Confederate independence, it would have been far more
difficult to subdue the rebellion, and any victory would have come at a greater cost.
Union diplomats in turn worked hard to minimize European support for the Confederacy.
Unable to prevent French intervention in Mexico while the war was being fought,

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nevertheless the Union diplomats, buoyed in part by Union military successes, proved
able to prevent recognition and intervention, as well as some of the more extreme forms
of British assistance to the Confederacy.13
The goals of Confederate diplomacy were simple to understand, but difficult to
achieve. In pursuit of independence, Confederate diplomats sought the support of Great
Britain and France. Ideally, this support would take the form of not only recognition of
the Confederacy’s status as an independent nation but also a commitment to intervene in
support of that objective. Surely the Confederacy’s chances of victory would increase
significantly if it could count on the Royal Navy as well as British and French land forces
to augment their own military and naval strength, as well as a possible trade war closing
European ports to United States trade while opening them to King Cotton. The blockade
would be hard to maintain, Confederates reasoned, in the face of British naval power,
and the resulting flow of military goods would enhance the Confederacy’s ability to fend
off Union advances on land: should the British see fit to open up a new front of operations
by deploying ground forces in Canada, so much the better.
In pursuing these objectives, Confederate leadership relied on several assumptions.
First was the notion that it would benefit British and French interests to see a weakened
United States emerge from the conflict. Second was the belief that the dependence of the
British and French economies (especially the former) on a continuous supply of raw
cotton grown in the American South would eventually force their hand when it came to
the questions of recognition and intervention. Such was the thinking behind the 1861
decision of the Confederate government to cease cotton exports to Europe to make the
world understand its dependence on Confederate cotton. That this decision did not con-
sider the fact that a booming cotton trade in the years prior to the war meant that European
warehouses were already filled with a surplus of bales seemed at the moment a minor
obstacle; that the decision to halt cotton exports came at the very time that the Union
blockade was ill-prepared to intercept such trade (and would be better-prepared as time
passed) proved unfortunate.14
However, the best service performed by Confederate diplomats in 1861 was when its
ministers to England and France were seized by a Union naval vessel under the command
of Captain Charles Wilkes. That John Slidell, who was headed to France, and James
Mason, who looked forward to arriving in London, were aboard a British mail packet,
the Trent, when Wilkes seized the vessel proved fortunate for their cause, for an outraged
Great Britain chose to confront the United States over the issue. It did not help matters
that Americans initially celebrated the capture of the Confederate diplomats: Britain
dispatched troops to Canada and considered preparing for war. Only the decision of
Lincoln and Seward to back down in the face of a British ultimatum by asserting that
Wilkes acted on his own and not under orders defused the situation.
During 1862, as Confederate military fortunes in the eastern theater improved with
the elevation of Robert E. Lee to command the Army of Northern Virginia, prospects
improved for some form of British intervention. French leaders seemed content to follow
Britain’s lead, suggesting that their bark was worse than their bite. However, despite
apparent sympathy for the Confederate cause among several British leaders, led by
William Gladstone, it soon became clear that recognition and an offer to mediate would
follow concrete evidence of Confederate triumph – in short, the British would not tip

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the scales but wait until they were tipped in favor of Confederate independence. Although
Confederate offensive operations in the summer and fall of 1862, notably Lee’s decision
to invade Maryland, were undertaken in part as an effort to persuade the British of immi-
nent Confederate success, setbacks in Maryland, Kentucky, and Mississippi deterred
British authorities from escalating the conflict. Even predictions that the Emancipation
Proclamation would inspire slave rebellions, thus giving grounds for Britain to intervene
on humanitarian grounds to prevent a bloody race war, proved more impassioned
than practical. Although there would be renewed calls for recognition, mediation, and
intervention in the late spring and early summer of 1863, Union military victories soon
dampened whatever enthusiasm remained to undertake such provocative measures.
In truth, British interests were not necessarily well-served by efforts to support the
Confederacy. After all, while importing southern cotton was important to the English
economy, so was trade for foodstuffs and finished items with the northern United States.
War would necessarily disrupt that trade: better to seek alternative sources of cotton,
including Egypt, as well as secure through trade some of the increasing amounts of cotton
that had fallen into Union hands. Moreover, by 1864 European affairs began to look more
challenging, enough so to demand one’s closer attention. It would not do to continue to
bicker with the United States when there were events closer to home that demanded
immediate attention. Thus, United States minister Charles Francis Adams warned British
authorities that the so-called Laird rams being constructed in Liverpool should never make
it to Confederate hands, for otherwise the United States would be entitled to treat it as an
act of war. Union diplomats in Paris, led by John Bigelow, also proved successful in
reminding the French that the Confederacy should not be allowed to secure vessels built
in French ports. Aside from Duncan Kenner’s desperate mission during the last months of
the war that offered emancipation in exchange for European support, the Confederacy
soon realized that to anticipate European intervention in the absence of decisive battlefield
triumphs was to engage in wishful thinking. Kenner learned that whatever enthusiasm the
French displayed for the idea was tempered by the determination that France would follow
England’s lead, one shaped by more pragmatic considerations, including the realization that
Confederate defeat was imminent.
Kenner’s last gasp came on the eve of the triumph of Union military arms. That
success took form in the surrender of the Confederacy’s major field armies, commencing
with Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court
House on a Sunday afternoon in April. After four long years of fighting, the Union was
restored, although without the institution of slavery that had done so much to rend the
republic in the first place. How that came about can be understood if we look more
carefully at the leadership of both sides as they battled each other for victory on the
battlefield, on the water, and at the negotiating table.

Notes
1 T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Knopf, 1952); James M. McPherson,
Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008); David
Work, Lincoln’s Political Generals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Thomas J.
Goss, The War within the Union High Command: Politics and Generalship during the Civil War
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

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2 William Marvel, Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin M. Stanton (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2015).
3 Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Carol Reardon, With a Sword in One
Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
4 See William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784–1861
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), and James L. Morrison, Jr., “The Best School in
the World”: West Point, the Pre-Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1986).
5 On Lee, see Joseph L. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern
Strategy, 1861–1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998); and Ethan S. Rafuse,
Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863–1865 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2008).
6 See R. Steven Jones, The Right Hand of Command: Use and Disuse of Personal Staffs in the Civil
War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000).
7 For a suggestive study that touches on organization and supply, see Edward Hagerman, The
American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
8 See Stephen R. Taaffe, Commanding the Army of the Potomac (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2006); Ethan S. Rafuse, ed., Corps Commanders in Blue: Union Major Generals in the Civil
War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Steven E. Woodworth, ed.,
Grant’s Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); and
Steven E. Woodworth, ed., Grant’s Lieutenants: From Chattanooga to Appomattox (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2008).
9 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Partners in Command: The Relationship between Leaders in the Civil War (New
York: Free Press, 1994) remains the standard overview of how generals, admirals, and civilian
leaders worked together; see also Steven E. Woodworth, Lee and Davis at War (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1995); Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The
Failure of Confederate Command in the West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); and
Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction,
1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
10 Ethan S. Rafuse, McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
11 On combined operations, see Rowena Reed, Combined Operations in the Civil War (Annapolis:
United States Naval Institute, 1978); and Craig L. Symonds, ed., Union Combined Operations in
the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); William H. Roberts, Now for the
Contest: Coastal and Oceanic Naval Operations in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2004); James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies,
1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
12 Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
13 Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) is the current standard synthesis; Don
H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New
York: Basic Books, 2015) takes a broader view of the international struggle.
14 Charles M. Hubbard, The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1998).

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 15
AFRIC AN AMER I C A N S
AND E MANCI P A T I ON
IN THE C IV I L W A R

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Prelude
Barely a month into the Civil War, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend
transformed a war for Union into a war for emancipation. Baker, Mallory, and Townsend,
all enslaved men, abandoned the Confederate fortifications for which their labor had been
requisitioned, and presented themselves to Union officials at Fort Monroe. The United
States army remained, as it had been at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, a defender of the pro-
slavery status quo, but the Union commander at Fort Monroe, Benjamin Butler, saw an
opportunity to weaken his enemy. He accepted the men into his camp and refused to
surrender them when a Confederate official appeared the following day. Butler labeled
the men “contraband of war” – a legal definition that applied to property seized from an
enemy that could be put to military use – and created the term of art used by Union
commanders who refused to send escaping slaves back to their masters.1 Butler was no
saint. He frankly admitted that his order allowed him to “take all that property which
constituted the wealth of that state, and furnished the means by which the war is
prosecuted.” By continuing to regard enslaved people as “property” Butler appeared to
do little on behalf of slaves themselves, but he also recognized that if by his order “human
beings were brought to the free enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
such objection might not require much consideration.”2
Butler’s decision and the ensuing history of how the U.S. army treated escaping slaves
has generated a huge amount of new writing on the end of slavery in America. For many
decades, research on emancipation in the U.S. focused on the efforts made by abolitionists
(largely white).3 When historians concerned themselves with the moment of emancipa-
tion itself, they usually ascribed determinative power to Abraham Lincoln, embodied
physically in the memorials of Lincoln breaking the shackles of kneeling slaves.4 Thanks
largely to the work generated by Ira Berlin and his colleagues and students at the University
of Maryland’s “Freedmen and Southern Society Project” (FSSP), that historical gaze is
now focused on enslaved people and the U.S. army with whose assistance they made
emancipation a reality during the Civil War.5 Although historians of the Abolitionist
Movement and scholars of comparative emancipation tend to frame the story over decades,
this essay will follow the lead of the FSSP and Civil War scholars by concentrating largely
on the wartime processes that led to the final end of slavery in the U.S.

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Regardless of Butler’s intentions, the motives of Baker, Mallory, and Townsend

appear quite clear. They risked their lives fleeing a fort filled with armed Confederate
soldiers dedicated to defending slavery and they entered an uncertain situation within
Union lines. Only after January 1, 1863 was the Union army officially committed to
emancipation. Before that, the reactions of commanders varied by region, time, place,
and individual temperament. But the inconsistency and sometimes outright hostility of
Union forces failed to deter enslaved people. Alone, in families, or in small groups, slaves
seized opportunities to pursue their freedom. By the end of the war, nearly one-seventh
of all the slaves in the South (about 500,000 people) had fled their masters in search of
freedom. Compared to antebellum slave rebellions, the largest of which involved a few
hundred people, this was a tidal wave for liberty, overwhelming slavery’s defenses in
communities across the South.6 W. E. B. Du Bois first advanced this interpretation,
referring to the actions of enslaved people during the Civil War as the “General Strike.”
The idea of the Civil War as a slave rebellion had been advanced most forcefully in recent
years by Steven Hahn and Stephanie McCurry. Regardless of how it is characterized, the
exodus of this many people as well as the general pressures of war destabilized slavery for
all of those who remained behind. This was precisely the situation that white southerners
had seceded to avert. Instead of the slow death of slavery at the hands of a Republican
president, the Civil War shattered the institution with a speed and thoroughness that
shocked Americans and others around the world.
Given the scale of the change involved – slavery had been the norm in British North
America since the early seventeenth century and a century earlier if Spanish America is
included – it should come as little surprise that historians do not agree about how to
explain the end of slavery. They disagree about why, where, and how it happened. They
disagree about who ended slavery and they disagree about the results. This essay proposes
answers to these questions – why emancipation became a Union war policy, how the
process unfolded across the South, and what happened as a result – and, in the process,
addresses the contrasting explanations historians offer for each of them.

Why Did Slavery End?

Given the nearly universal sanction against slavery in the modern world, it may be
tempting to imagine that slavery’s end was inevitable. As late as 1860, white southerners
(and slaveholders in Brazil and Cuba) did not think so. Instead, their public and private
correspondence reflected confidence that they enjoyed the favor of God, presiding
over an institution that brought social order, economic success, and political stability.
That position of confidence – derived from what historians call the “pro-slavery
defense” – emerged in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s in response to the critique of
slavery issued by abolitionists and the continuous resistance to slavery manifested by
enslaved people.7 Given the investment that white southerners had in slavery it should
not surprise us that they rallied to defend the institution. More puzzling for many
modern readers is that many white northerners shared, if not the pro-slavery defense, a
thorough agnosticism on the issue. With few African Americans in their communities
and often with deep economic reliance on slave-labor-produced goods, most white
northerners entered the Civil War with no intention of disrupting slavery. For them,

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restoring the Union was the only cause for war.8 This position prevailed in the North
for at least the first year and a half of the conflict. Enslaved people faced the physical
challenge of escaping their bondage and the political challenge of changing white
northern attitudes about the practice.
The political conflict and flux of antebellum America produced deep divisions within
the public about the relationship of slavery to the war. As Eric Foner and others have
shown, the new Republican Party had built itself, in significant measure, on opposition to
the expansion of slavery in the western territories.9 But opposing slavery’s growth into new
space was not the same as supporting its abolition in existing states. Conservatives in the
Republican Party, many of whom had recently abandoned the Democratic Party, may
have supported abolishing slavery eventually but they expected southern states to take the
lead, as northern states had done after the Revolution. Many of them also hoped some
scheme of colonization would accompany the end of slavery to ensure that black labor did
not corrupt the mostly white North or West. A substantial body of moderate Republicans
believed slavery did not belong anywhere in the United States but they too wanted the
process to follow constitutional procedures. This important swing group tilted toward con-
servatives early in the war and radicals later. This latter caucus – a minority of Republicans
at the war’s start – were outright abolitionists. Men like Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson
in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives collaborated with a
well-organized abolitionist movement to steer policy toward emancipation from the war’s
opening moments. Members of this wing of the party were much less concerned with
constitutional protection of southern states during the war and sanctioned an increasingly
hard stance against slavery and the South. James Oakes has worked in recent years to resus-
citate the reputation of this group, arguing that their influence on the course of the war was
decisive.10 Democrats, who in the North maintained an active political opposition, ada-
mantly opposed emancipation and obstructed abolitionist officers whenever they could.
Making emancipation a Union policy required hard work. As the next section will
show, U.S. policy evolved over time in response to the persistent efforts of enslaved
people, such as those described above. The short answer to why the North endorsed
emancipation is that it had to. Despite tremendous military efforts in 1861 and 1862,
Confederate resistance continued. In order to defeat the Confederacy, Lincoln recog-
nized that he needed to incapacitate the economic foundation of the South. Ending
Confederates’ ability to fight meant disrupting the slave economy and a policy that
empowered enslaved people to seek their freedom did exactly that. The manpower
balance could be further tipped to the Union’s advantage if those enslaved men who
escaped fought in northern armies. As difficult as it has been to explain why the Union
army endorsed emancipation (and historians remain conflicted about the reasons), this is
not the same thing as explaining the end of slavery in the U.S. That process involved
much more than military policy. It drew, first and foremost, on the actions of enslaved
people themselves who disrupted slaveholders’ power during the war. It also drew on the
efforts of abolitionists in the North who convinced a majority of the public to support
this sea change in American life.
No one waged a stronger rhetorical campaign toward this end than Frederick Douglass,
the leading black abolitionist in the U.S., and a newspaper editor. From the war’s begin-
ning, he argued that the Union cause required emancipation. To accomplish this, he

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framed the country’s enemy as “slaveholders and their rebel minions” and celebrated the
loyalty of enslaved people. “Fire must be met with water,” Douglass wrote, “darkness
with light, and war for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction
of slavery.”11 Many northerners, Lincoln among them, believed that secession did destroy
liberty but they believed that was because it denied the outcome of a lawful election.
Douglass’s challenge was to convince white northerners that slavery by itself corrupted
American liberty.12 Although Douglass helped shift northern attitudes toward slavery and
African Americans over the course of the war, he failed in his larger campaign. White
northerners’ support for emancipation relied on its strategic advantages not the philosoph-
ical incompatibility of slavery and democracy. Even when finally enacted, northern war
policy emancipated individual slaves, it did not abolish slavery as a practice in the U.S.
The full abolition of slavery required a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
passed in January 1865.13

How Did Slavery End?

One way to answer the question of how slavery ended in the United States is to track where
it ended. That end arrived unevenly, coming first in those places where Union and
Confederate armies met and extending out in unpredictable ripples. The older interpreta-
tion that emancipation was essentially delivered as a gift by benevolent Union army officers
has given way to a more dynamic vision that emphasizes the agency of enslaved people
who pursued their freedom.14 As some reluctant secessionists had feared, slavery survived
longer in the Union than out of it. Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware (three of the four
slaveholding states that remained in the Union through the war) took independent state
action outlawing slavery late in the war, but Kentucky refused and slaves there only
enjoyed freedom after the Thirteenth Amendment took effect in late 1865. Slavery in the
Confederate South proved more vulnerable. As Benjamin Butler recognized during his
time at Fort Monroe, enslaved people represented a resource that the Confederacy desper-
ately needed if it was to win the war. The population disparity between North and South
produced a manpower advantage of five to two for the North. In order for the Confederacy
to field armies large enough to resist the United States, every slave would need to be
mobilized, either producing food and supplies for the war effort or in more active roles
supporting the army itself. This necessity transformed enslaved people into a fifth column
within the Confederacy and they exploited that position, aiding the Union effort and
seizing opportunities for freedom wherever they appeared.
Butler’s “contraband order” inaugurated the Union’s use of emancipation as a war
measure, but few Union commanders followed his revolutionary precedent. Many of the
Union’s general officers in 1861 were regular army men, conservative Democrats like
Irvin McDowell and George McClellan, who opposed emancipation and tried to avoid
interfering with southern property, human or otherwise. Confederate officers did not
have that luxury and they initiated a policy of impressing slaves that surprised and angered
southern slaveholders. As Jaime Martinez persuasively shows, despite the complaints of
slaveholders, the Confederate state succeeded in mobilizing the labor of thousands of
enslaved people.15 This finding presses on readers one of the many ironies of the conflict
– that slavery served as both an asset and a vulnerability for the Confederacy. When
McClellan’s Army of the Potomac arrived in April of 1862 at Fort Monroe, Confederate

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General John Bankhead Magruder impressed 1,300 slaves from plantations along the
York-James peninsula. These slaves were pressed into service building a line of fortifica-
tions to retard McClellan’s advance toward Richmond. The slaves labored within sight
of Union positions and every night during the campaign some of them fled to the safety
of northern lines. As Glenn Brasher has shown in his recent study, McClellan refused to
sanction anything like Butler’s expansive proclamation but his army nonetheless became
an emancipation machine.16 Southern slavery relied on violence and vigilance.17 Every
night across the antebellum South slave patrols fanned out to catch or deter runaways.
With 100,000 Union soldiers advancing through the Virginia countryside, the physical
apparatus sustaining slavery collapsed, and thousands of enslaved Virginians seized the
chance to escape. This was emancipation by friction. Without intending to, the Union
army eroded the infrastructure that made slavery possible. This process repeated itself
along the Mississippi and other southern rivers wherever Union troops appeared in 1862.
The 500,000 enslaved people who gained their freedom during the war by seeking
refuge with Union armies represented the spearhead in the killing stroke against slavery.
What happened to the three and a half million enslaved people who remained trapped
behind Confederate lines? In a handful of places, slaveowners were able to maintain
control as they had before the war. But because of the multi-pronged Union invasion of
the South, it was hard to find places untouched by the impact of the war. Union gunboats
traversed the rivers of the region while armies marched down its roads. After the enact-
ment of the Emancipation Proclamation, Union officers sent detachments of men off the
main army to liberate enslaved people.18 In 1864, many of these raids were led by recently
enslaved men who escaped, enlisted in the Union army, and guided squads through their
old neighborhoods. Even if Union soldiers never appeared, news of the war did.
Slaveholders tried to keep information from slaves, and whites at all levels spread misinfor-
mation about what invading Yankees would do to enslaved people, but the reality found
its way through regardless. Enslaved people understood that Confederates wanted to per-
petuate slavery and the Union wanted to end it. This knowledge gave them an incentive
to help Union soldiers when they appeared in their midst. It also transformed the land-
scape within households and on farms and in factories. Wherever slaves labored in the
South they did so under less supervision than in the antebellum era. This gave them
the confidence to take actions they could not have before the war.19 Sometimes this new
environment created more uncertainty and more danger. Thavolia Glymph shows how
plantation mistresses resisted every effort made by the enslaved women who worked under
them to achieve independence.20 But throughout the South, enslaved people upset the
traditional dynamic of slavery, asserting their new power by breaking tools, work stop-
pages, planting food crops instead of cotton, demanding wages, driving out violent over-
seers, and leading outright insurrections. The many important volumes produced by the
Freedmen and Southern Society Project, especially The Destruction of Slavery, detail this
process in all its drama, contingency, and hope.21
Abolitionists in the North rejoiced when they read reports of slaves escaping slavery.
Some moved south to aid the process, usually operating within the newly established
“Freemen’s Aid Societies” that followed in the wake of the army’s movement. Black and
white abolitionists moved into abandoned plantation homes or army tents and advocated
fair treatment for the freedpeople.22 Probably the most important task they undertook was

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teaching literacy, the demand for which was insatiable among freedpeople.23 Even mod-
erate Republicans were moved by the efforts enslaved people took to free themselves and
to aid the Union cause. As a result, Congress inched toward emancipation, passing two
Confiscation Acts that gave army commanders the right to seize slaves belonging to dis-
loyal and then even loyal slaveholders. Both acts sanctioned what was already underway in
the South as Union officers refused to return runaway slaves. Congress abolished slavery
in the District of Columbia and outlawed it in federal territories, acts impossible to take if
southern Democrats had remained in their seats. White northerners accepted and some-
times celebrated these new policies, which promised to help end the war, punish the
slaveholders who had started it, and remake the South.
The pressure put upon the administration by the relentless exodus of enslaved people
forced the administration to act. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln decided to support
emancipation, in part to assert some control over the process. To the dismay of radicals
and abolitionists, at first he encouraged only moderate measures – hoping state govern-
ments would lead the way, offering compensation to owners, encouraging a slow process,
and, most perniciously, advocating the old idea of colonization.24 Slaveholding Unionists
in Missouri and Kentucky (the largest slaveholding states that remained in the Union)
refused to budge and, after the Union’s victory at Antietam in September, Lincoln
announced the Emancipation Proclamation. He asserted the measure was an “act of
justice” “authorized under the constitution” and “upon military necessity.” Although it
applied only to those places in active rebellion (exempting both Union states and places
occupied by the northern army), it freed the slaves of all owners, regardless of their national
loyalty. Ever since September 22, 1862, people have disputed why Lincoln issued the
proclamation that he did. Historians of diplomacy argue that Lincoln’s main motive was
blocking Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy.25 Historians of Lincoln
and presidential power emphasize his own words and compelling military necessity.26
Historians of slavery emphasize the active role taken by enslaved people who made eman-
cipation a pressing issue in the first place.27 All these explanations contain an element of
truth, but, as this essay has tried to suggest, the sequence of those causes came at different
times. Notwithstanding abolitionists’ important calls to end slavery, enslaved people were
the ones who seized the initiative and made emancipation something that the administra-
tion could not ignore.
Despite the wealth of studies over the last two decades, research into the process of
American emancipation shows no signs of slowing down. New areas to investigate and
new ways of framing studies appear continuously. For instance, because Union army plan-
ners targeted southern cities for conquest and occupation, these spaces actually experi-
enced less disruption than the Confederate countryside.28 The haphazard Union experiment
with emancipation meant that slavery’s end in rural places was less consistent and deliber-
ately managed and this diversity has drawn the attention of scholars.29 Urban places have
drawn less study, an oversight that has diminished our understanding of the process and
meaning of emancipation.30 Of greater concern, from a historiographical perspective, is
that too many emancipation studies grew out of the literature on slavery and as a result
remain divorced from the war itself, though recent work shows the possibility of integrat-
ing these fields. Perhaps the most exciting new work in emancipation concerns scholars’
efforts to situate the end of slavery in the U.S. in relation to other slave powers in the

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hemisphere and around the world. Brazil and Cuba were the only other slave republics in
the West and residents of both countries watched the U.S. Civil War with great interest.
As historians of these countries have shown, emancipation in the U.S. required that
Brazilians and Cubans follow suit, but slaveholders there hoped to avoid the fate of
American southerners.31 The precedents to American emancipation in the British and
French Caribbean informed how participants in the Civil War perceived their own expe-
riences and have provided historians with important points of comparison.32 Older studies
by Peter Kolchin and Shearer Davis Bowman emphasized comparative slavery more than
comparative emancipation but they pointed the way toward the modern movement to
assess the similarities and differences between the U.S. experience and other places.33

What Happened as a Result of Emancipation?

Those people who freed themselves by fleeing to Union lines met an uncertain fate. In the
early days of the war, some found themselves returned as soon as someone entered camp to
claim them. Even if those masters could not afford to lose the labor they still imposed the
harsh penalties meted out to runaways in the antebellum era – whippings, disfigurement,
and other bodily mutilations intended to humiliate and prevent another escape attempt.
Abolitionist-leaning officers refused to turn over runaways precisely to avoid such out-
comes, but until the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, different
commanders adopted different strategies. Adding to the uncertainty, Confederates spread
rumors that Union armies killed or enslaved the black people who reached their lines. All
this inconsistency only complicated the calculus faced by enslaved people when deciding to
stay or flee. And when runaways reached Union lines that offered them sanctuary the long-
term treatment was often little better than their previous life on plantations.
Because the army was intended to be mobile, commanders did not want to carry
refugees with them, especially the women and children who often fled slavery together.34
The improvised response by the Union army was to establish what came to be called
“contraband camps,” usually along the line of march near major urban centers around
the South. Like other refugee institutions, these camps were intended to be temporary.
They were poorly built, underfunded, and compromised by the paternalistic and racist
attitudes of their managers. Housing, food, and medical care were substandard at best.35
Although the material conditions may have been atrocious and their status as citizens
uncertain, enslaved people kept coming. The variety of impediments failed to deter
people. By 1864, for instance, 31,654 freedpeople lived in camps in northeastern North
Carolina and southeastern Virginia.36 Contraband camps have recently come under
more scrutiny, with forthcoming work by Chandra Manning and Amy Murrell Taylor
that promises to expand how we understand the process of emancipation as it happened
in these places.37
The effects of emancipation on black communities and people across the South varied
enormously, particularly because of the complicating effects of gender. While African
American women and children filled the contraband camps, African American men
increasingly joined the military. The Second Confiscation Act first authorized the enlist-
ment of black men into the U.S. army and, in conjunction with the Emancipation
Proclamation, Lincoln committed to drawing these men into military service. Organized

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separately from white recruits in a new branch, the United States Colored Troops
(USCT), by war’s end 180,000 black men had worn the Union blue. There is a long
history of writing on these men, beginning with the efforts of black historians in the nine-
teenth century such as Joseph Wilson and George Washington Williams.38 Modern
scholarship has broadened and deepened our understanding of their service. Many of
these soldiers were free men of color residing in the North who volunteered, while others
were former slaves who, having detached themselves from their southern masters, saw
military service as a route to full citizenship.39 Just as military leaders hampered their own
interests by mistreating black people in contraband camps, they alienated USCT soldiers
with poor treatment and poor management.40 Black soldiers were paid less than whites,
received worse equipment, were poorly officered, and too often sent into dangerous posi-
tions without full support. Nonetheless, just as with wartime escapes from slavery, black
men kept enlisting and kept performing admirably in military service. The 166 USCT
regiment composed almost 10 percent of the total Union forces. Importantly, these men
enlisted in 1863 and 1864 when Union recruits were scarce in northern communities.
They were also exceptionally committed to winning the war for the Union with both
reunion and emancipation intact as war policies. By examining the complex and often
unintended consequences of tying black manhood to martial violence, Carole Emberton
has issued one of the strongest dissenting notes against the longstanding idea that military
service enabled black men to claim a place of citizenship.41
While few would deny that full meaningful citizenship remained elusive for African
Americans after the Civil War, historians have shifted away from the skeptical position
adopted by some historians of the New South who stress continuities between the two
eras.42 Instead, historians now view emancipation as a monumental yet contingent process
that created a new world with new expectations and possibilities albeit within the political
and economic parameters of the old. Positive and negative outcomes existed simultaneously.
The geographic diffusion of black soldiers around the South disrupted family lives (because
black soldiers enlisted later in the war they remained in uniform after most white soldiers
had returned to homes in the North) but that experience gave them a worldliness that few
people of any race had before the Civil War. Their movement began the process of
building a truly national African American community.
In order for freedpeople to securely start their new lives, emancipation had to be
made permanent. Lincoln understood this when he signed the Emancipation
Proclamation, which, because it was an executive order, never carried the approval of
Congress and could, some claimed, expire at the end of the war. To ensure the final end
of slavery, Lincoln and other Republicans aggressively promoted a constitutional amend-
ment abolishing slavery in the U.S.43 While wartime emancipation operated piecemeal
by freeing those enslaved people who came within the purview of the Union army, the
Thirteenth Amendment abolished the institution of slavery itself. Michael Vorenberg has
clearly analyzed the amendment’s history, especially the crucial issues of what authority
Congress claimed to revise the Constitution and what the meaning of that revision
would be, both for the freedpeople and the Constitution itself. The radical Republican
Charles Sumner, for instance, proposed a Thirteenth Amendment that “declared all
people ‘equal before the law.’”44 Moderate Republicans and Democrats rejected that
broad language and forced a narrower compromise measure. Even this revision failed to

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satisfy border state conservatives who opposed the measure, but northern public opinion
had turned so completely against slavery that the amendment passed Congress in early
1865. Ratification took longer. Most northern states moved quickly but the seceded
states had to be pressured into ratifying the measure. Kentucky, the last remaining Union
slave state, refused. As a result, slavery ended officially in the U.S. only on December 18,
when Secretary of State William Seward confirmed its ratification. Partly as a result of
the compromises adopted to secure its passage, the Thirteenth Amendment proved
insufficient to protect the rights of freedpeople, necessitating two more amendments that
together form one of the war’s most important legacies in American life. In previous
decades, the constitutional debate over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was
largely the purview of Reconstruction and legal historians, but these measures, which
granted full citizenship to African Americans and the franchise to black men, clearly
belong to the history of emancipation as well.
For a long time, studies of emancipation, like studies of the Civil War, possessed clear
chronological boundaries. That phase is over. Influenced by the prolonged American wars
of the early twenty-first century and by a recognition that emancipation’s military, consti-
tutional, and social dimensions unfolded over decades not years, historians have turned
their attention to the problem of how people transition from wartime to peacetime.
Recent studies of emancipation usually start in the antebellum era and continue into
Reconstruction.45 Most scholars regard this as an analytical improvement – we have aban-
doned artificial boundaries between “eras” that once made sense to historians but would
have baffled historical actors. Such an approach does run the risk of flattening out the
momentous change and the contingency of the era. One reason for this shift lies in the
influence of the Maryland School, where scholars working under the direction of Ira
Berlin and others have emphasized class concerns. These scholars emphasize that black
men and women remained laborers, whether by force under slavery or necessity under the
poverty of the postwar South.46 This emphasis on work is undeniably important but it has
obscured research on the cultural experience of the war for blacks, although that too is
being remedied with studies of religion, family life, and education that all root themselves
in the process of emancipation.47

Assessing Emancipation
The terrible crimes of the Jim Crow era and the long half-life of violent and institution-
alized racism in the U.S. offer a counterpoint to the nineteenth-century historians’ insist-
ence that the Civil War and emancipation changed the world irrevocably. But for
historians writing in the full flush of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s and 1980s
and seeking the roots of a positive history of the African American community, the Civil
War era was a logical period to study. Even with their emphasis on the continuing injus-
tices of the black working experience in the U.S., authors of the Maryland School cele-
brate the autonomy that emancipation granted black people over their lives. Nearly all of
the many excellent histories of black life in the postwar era ground their analysis in the
forces unleashed by emancipation.48 Even though those histories are, by necessity, south-
ern history (a significant majority of black Americans continued to live in southern states
until well into the twentieth century), they are also written as American history. In his

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second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of “American slavery [as] one of those
offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having contin-
ued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both
North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”
Lincoln knew, as historians now show in their work, that slavery and emancipation were
American experiences.

Notes
1 Kate Masur, “‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and
the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History 93 (March
2007): 1050–1084.
2 Benjamin Butler to Simon Cameron, July 30, 1861, in Private and Official Correspondence of
General Benjamin Butler, Vol. 1, ed. Jessie Ames Marshall (Norwood, MA: Plimpton Press,
1917), 188.
3 Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition 1831–1841 (1906; New York: Haskell House,
1968; Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1939; Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959); Gilbert H. Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse
1830–44 (1933; Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973).
4 The revisionist approach includes new and more critical interpretations of the statuary
surrounding slavery and emancipation and how these have informed modern views of the
experience. Kirk Sandage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in
Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
5 The FSSP publishing project began with Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland,
eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, Series II (Book 1): The Black
Military Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and has continued through
many volumes.
6 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (repr. Cleveland: Meridian
Books, 1962); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South
from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Steven
Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009); Stephanie McCurry Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
7 Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (repr. Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); and Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of
Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
8 Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
9 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republic
Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
10 James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York:
Norton, 2014); and James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United
States, 1861–1865 (New York: Norton, 2013).
11 Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861.
12 David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1989).
13 The best single history of the adoption of the amendment is Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom:
The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
14 Edward L. Ayers and Scott Nesbitt, “Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American
South,” Journal of the Civil War Era (January 2001): 3–22.
15 Jaime Martinez, Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2013).

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16 Glenn D. Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and
the Fight for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); James Marten, “A
Feeling of Restless Anxiety: Loyalty and Race in the Peninsula Campaign and Beyond,” in The
Richmond Campaign, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000), 121–152.
17 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
18 Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course
of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2008).
19 Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the
Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); David Williams,
I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
20 Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
21 Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds.,
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Series I, Volume I: The Destruction
of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
22 James McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and
Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for
Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).
23 Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
24 Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010).
25 Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
26 Philip Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994).
27 William A. Blair and Karen Fisher Younger, eds., Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation
Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
28 Stephen Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South 1861–1865
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
29 Susan E. O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007).
30 Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington,
D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); William Link, Atlanta, Cradle of
the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2013); and Michael Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in
Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).
31 Robert E. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972); Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York: Atheneum,
1972); and Rebecca Jarvis Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–
1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
32 Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American
Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Matthew P. Guterl, American
Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008).
33 Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987); Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century US
Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Enrico del Lago,
William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Peter Kolchin, “Reexamining Southern
Emancipation in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Southern History 81 (Feb. 2015): 7–40.
34 Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

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35 Jim Down, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and
Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
36 Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).
37 Chandra Manning, “Working for Citizenship in Civil War Contraband Camps,” Journal of the
Civil War Era 4 (June 2014): 172–204.
38 Joseph T. Wilson The Black Phalanx (1887; Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1890); George
Washington Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865
(1887; New York: Harper, 1888).
39 Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956;
repr. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987); John David Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue:
African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002); Richard Reid, Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The
Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
40 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers
(New York: Free Press, 1990).
41 Carole Emberton, “Only Murder Makes Men: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,”
Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (June 2012): 369–393; and Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption:
Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014).
42 Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983); and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–
1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
43 Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010),
312.
44 Vorenberg, Final Freedom, 51.
45 O’Donovan, Becoming Free; Masur, An Example for All the Land; John Rodrigue, Reconstruction
in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
46 O’Donovan, Becoming Free; Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields.
47 Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Williams, Self-Taught; Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom
Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865–1900 (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2000), 39–40, 51; Nancy D. Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the
Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).
48 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of
Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie,
Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia: 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South
Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leslie A. Schwalm, A
Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997).

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 16
LAW, THE SUPR EME C OUR T ,
AND THE C ONS T I T UT I ON ,
1840–1 8 8 0

Timothy S. Huebner

The history of law and the Constitution during the middle decades of the nineteenth century
mirrored the extraordinary changes of the era. Economic expansion, war and emancipation,
and postwar reconstruction shaped and responded to constitutional developments brought
about by all three branches of the national government. During the antebellum era, the U.S.
Supreme Court promoted economic growth and solidified slaveholders’ rights. During
wartime President Abraham Lincoln exercised extraordinary executive power in order to
preserve the Union and initiate emancipation. And after the war, Congress took the lead in
amending the Constitution to end slavery, guarantee black citizenship and civil rights, and
protect against discrimination in voting. All of these revolutionary changes occurred within
the context of the American Constitution’s unique commitment to the separation of powers,
federalism, and popular participation in government. Ultimately, although the enforcement
of these new constitutional guarantees proved uneven, the period witnessed a stunning
transformation in the nation’s constitutional discourse, from upholding the rights of slave-
holders to protecting the rights of the formerly enslaved. This essay traces the broad outlines
of the history of American constitutionalism during the era of sectional conflict, while also
laying out possibilities for further historical investigation.1

The Antebellum Era

During the pre-Civil War era, the U.S. Supreme Court figured prominently in the
nation’s constitutional development. The work of the Court reflected the jurisprudential
substance and style of the chief justice, Roger B. Taney of Maryland. A controversial
political figure, who, as acting secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson,
had carried out the task of removing the deposits from the Second Bank of the United
States, Taney took his seat on the Court in 1837 and soon shed his reputation as a
political hack. He emerged as a moderate jurist, who took the constitutional text, legal
precedent, and social consequences carefully into account when deciding cases.2 An
“instrumentalist” who possessed an “awareness that the impact of a decision extended far
beyond the case before” him, Taney embodied the style of antebellum American judges,
who often formulated new legal doctrines in order to accommodate changing social
conditions.3 Remarkably, despite being one of the Court’s most significant figures, Taney
remains one of its least studied.4

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In three substantive areas – contracts, commerce, and admiralty law – the Taney
Court issued significant rulings that both shaped and responded to the nation’s expand-
ing economy. On the matter of contracts, Taney wrote the landmark opinion in Charles
River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), in which he resolved the question of whether a
corporation charter issued by a state contained an implied monopoly. The majority
rejected the notion of an implied monopoly and held in favor of the new (and toll-free)
Warren Bridge, which threatened the business of the established (and toll-operated)
Charles River Bridge.5 Were the Court to decide otherwise, Taney believed, economic
progress would come to a halt. Railroad companies that had been established along the
same lines as turnpikes would have been subjected to lawsuits challenging their right to
interfere with these supposedly implied contracts. The opinion thus exhibited Jacksonian
opposition to monopoly power, support for new investment and technological advance-
ment, and a commitment to promoting the welfare of “the community,” a common
refrain among state judges at the time. Although Justice Joseph Story dissented, arguing
for the protection of the implied rights of property owners, Taney’s opinion reflected the
spirit of the age.
If Charles River Bridge had a Jacksonian cast, the Taney Court’s decisions on commer-
cial regulation were more overtly pragmatic. As the nation’s economy expanded, Taney
and his colleagues struggled to define the specific parameters of national and state regu-
latory authority. In New York v. Miln (1837), the Court upheld a law requiring informa-
tion about income and occupation on passengers entering the port of New York as a
valid exercise of a state’s police power. But deference to state legislation did not thereafter
necessarily become the rule. In the License Cases (1847), a series of disputes involving
taxation and regulation of spirituous liquor, the Court again upheld the legislation in
question, but two years later in the Passenger Cases (1849) the justices invalidated laws
enacted by New York and Massachusetts that would have taxed incoming passengers.6
Deeply divided on the question of how much authority states possessed over commercial
regulation – in part because of the implications that these cases might have held for the
regulation of slavery – the justices formulated no coherent doctrine in these decisions.
Not until Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), in an opinion by Justice Benjamin Curtis,
did the Taney Court agree that areas requiring national uniformity would be the exclu-
sive domain of Congress, while other matters of commercial regulation would be the
purview of states.7
The Court, meanwhile, provided a more nationalistic solution to the question of the
admiralty jurisdiction of federal courts. For many years the Court had operated under a
Marshall-era precedent that restricted federal jurisdiction to those waters within the ebb
and flow of the tide.8 But by the 1840s, the completion of the Erie Canal triggered a
rapid expansion of steamboat traffic on the Great Lakes and the nation’s rivers, so that half
the total tonnage of steamboat cargo was in this western traffic, rather than along the
eastern seaboard. With increasing numbers of cases burdening state courts, in 1845
Congress extended admiralty jurisdiction to federally-licensed vessels employed in
interstate commerce on the Great Lakes and connecting waterways. In Genesee Chief v.
Fitzhugh (1851), in an opinion written by Taney, the Court upheld the 1845 statute,
overturned precedent, and held that all public navigable waters came within the admiralty
and maritime jurisdiction of the federal courts.9 The Taney Court thus proved Jacksonian

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in some decisions, nationalistic in others, and for the most part steered a moderate – and
popular – course on matters pertaining to economic development. All of these decisions
reflected the Taney Court’s sensitivity to political realities and changing social conditions.10
Slavery cases posed a more difficult political challenge. Initially, the Taney Court
treaded more cautiously in a series of cases involving slavery – consistently upholding the
rights of slaveholders, but issuing relatively narrow decisions that promoted unity among
the justices. In Groves v. Slaughter (1841), for example, the Court avoided constitutional
questions pertaining to the commerce power and slavery and ruled only on the 1832
provision of the Mississippi constitution that was being challenged. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania
(1842), moreover, the Court attempted to focus upon that which all could agree – that
the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional – a point which the Court reiterated in
Jones v. Van Zandt (1847) and again in Moore v. Illinois (1852). In Strader v. Graham (1851),
finally, the Court denied that it had any jurisdiction to hear the case of a group of
sojourning slave musicians, who claimed that their time in Ohio had caused them to be
free men. Although differences existed among the justices on the question of the
implications that the commerce power had for slavery, in general the justices agreed that
states retained tremendous latitude in dealing with slavery and that the one major federal
law dealing with the institution – the Fugitive Slave Act – lay clearly within the bounds
of the Constitution. In contrast to its decisions on economic development, the justices
reached near unanimity in slavery cases, as the votes among the justices were 5–2 (Groves),
8–1 (Prigg), 9–0 (Van Zandt), 8–1 (Moore), and 9–0 (Strader). In these “minimalist”
opinions, the Court – sensitive to the larger questions and perhaps to unintended
consequences – refrained from addressing broad issues or issuing sweeping decisions.11
Still, the Court affirmed the rights of slaveholders in the South, as well as the right to
reclaim fugitives in the North. None of these decisions generated much public controversy
or opposition, as most Americans at the time – North and South – recognized state
control over slavery in the South and accepted the premise that the Constitution protected
slaveholders’ rights to reclaim fugitive slaves in the North. By the mid-1850s, in fact, the
Taney Court possessed a reputation for moderation and fairness. As R. Kent Newmyer
puts it, “Had the Taney Court rested on its laurels in 1856, it would have surely gone
down as one of the most popular and effective courts in our history.”12
The Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) represented a watershed in the
history of American constitutional law and politics.13 Taney and his colleagues had a choice:
to follow their pattern in slavery cases and exercise caution, or to follow their pattern in
other decisions and attempt to resolve the larger constitutional and social question. After an
initial consensus in favor of a minimalist ruling broke down, Taney opted for the latter
course. For more than a decade, the nation’s political leaders had debated the scope of the
rights of slaveholders, including the extent of the right to reclaim fugitive slaves in the
North and the right to take slaves into federal territories in the West. Anti-slavery constitu-
tionalists, led by Salmon P. Chase and, later, Frederick Douglass, contended that the
Constitution, because it had never actually used the word “slavery,” did not lend itself to
the pro-slavery interpretation that southerners (and Garrisonian abolitionists) asserted.14
The growing intensity of these debates during the 1850s – as well as a real or perceived
pressure to “resolve” these questions, once and for all – surely contributed to the Court’s
approach in the Dred Scott case.15

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Taney’s opinion, widely regarded as the “opinion of the Court,” contained two signif-
icant points of law. First, Taney held that African Americans, whether slave or free, had
not been included in the political community at the time of the founding; therefore, he
reasoned, neither they nor their descendants were citizens of a state within the meaning of
the Constitution. Taney claimed, in the most infamous lines in Supreme Court history,
that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, “had no rights which the white man
was bound to respect.” These words, Mark Graber shows, remained within the antebel-
lum constitutional mainstream and in keeping with most state courts’ pronouncements on
black citizenship.16 More significant within the context of the political and constitutional
debate of the time was Taney’s other holding: that Congress had no power to prohibit
slavery in federal territories. This conclusion rested, first, on a narrow view of congres-
sional power under the Territories Clause. Based on this clause, Congress had enacted a
series of measures pertaining to slavery in territories, including the Missouri Compromise
and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Taney put forth an unorthodox and dubious interpretation
of the clause, arguing that it applied only to those territories that were part of the United
States at the time of the drafting of the Constitution. Having restricted congressional
power, Taney held that slaveholding in federal territories was a constitutional right. In
order to make this point, Taney claimed that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause
prohibited Congress from interfering with slavery in the territories, because to do so vio-
lated the property rights of slaveholders who settled there. An act of Congress that
attempted to restrict this right, he asserted, “could hardly be dignified with the name of
due process of law.”17 By making this argument, Taney not only relied on the Fifth
Amendment, he also seemed to inject higher law principles into the Constitution – in
effect, holding that certain fundamental rights lay beyond the reach of congressional regu-
lation. Slaves were no different than any other form of property, Taney concluded, and
the rights of such property holders required constitutional protection. Taney also relied
upon both the Slave Trade Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. The former established
“the right to traffic in [slave property], like an ordinary article of merchandise and prop-
erty,” while the latter also affirmed slaveholders’ rights.18 In Taney’s estimation, Congress
could do nothing to interfere with the rights of slaveholders in federal territories, and
because slaveholding was constitutionally protected, neither could a territorial legislature.
One line succinctly captured Taney’s view: “[T]he right of property in a slave is distinctly
and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”19
Taney’s opinion was a pro-slavery tour de force. Dismissing the advocates of anti-slavery
constitutionalism, Taney held that blacks lacked citizenship and possessed “no rights.” At
the same time, Taney affirmed the idea that slaveholders had a right to take their slave
property into the territories. Taney’s opinion was thus as definitive as it was all-
encompassing: “no rights” for blacks, whether slave or free, absolute rights for white
slaveholders in the territories. It is worth noting that in its nearly seventy-year history to
that point, the Supreme Court had never struck down a federal law as violating a
constitutional right. The Dred Scott case was the first time that it did so – in order to
protect the property rights of slaveholders. In the ongoing political dispute over the
extension of slavery, Taney’s opinion constituted a clear victory for the South. Although
one scholar, Austin Allen, has shown that a variety of doctrinal disputes among the justices,
some of which had nothing to do with slavery, helped to produce the decision, the end

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result remained the same: the Court stood unabashedly with slaveholders, and given the
politics of the late 1850s this was what mattered.20 Six other justices, although they differed
in some respects in their reasoning, agreed with most of Taney’s conclusions.21 Justices
John McLean and Benjamin Curtis, two anti-slavery northerners, dissented. Both argued
for the constitutionality of congressional legislation on slavery in the territories and
attacked Taney’s rejection of black citizenship. Curtis’s dissent made the compelling point
that, before the adoption of the Constitution, five states recognized blacks as citizens and
even granted them the right of suffrage, evidence that contradicted Taney’s claim that
blacks could not be counted as members of the political community at the time of the
founding. Soon after the announcement of the decision, a disagreement between Taney
and Curtis over the timing of the release of the dissent prompted Curtis’s resignation. It
was a bitter postscript to a deeply polarizing legal dispute, both for the Court and the
country.22
Rather than resolving the sectional political debate over slavery, the Court’s decision
demonstrated the dangers of an overbearing judiciary while eliminating the possibility of
political compromise. Taney’s opinion struck at the heart of the Republican Party, which
had been founded during the mid-1850s to oppose the extension of slavery, and former
congressman Abraham Lincoln soon made his name in Illinois politics by opposing the
decision. His debates with Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas in 1858 allowed for a
thorough consideration of the constitutional issues in the northern states, while simultane-
ously boosting Lincoln’s national political fortunes. The Supreme Court doubled-down
on its pro-slavery stance the following year, when in Ableman v. Booth (1859) the justices
unanimously ruled that the Wisconsin Supreme Court could not hinder the enforcement
of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in that state. In 1860, attacking the Court for what he
believed was its misinterpretation of the founders’ Constitution, Lincoln won the nomi-
nation of the Republican Party for president. He then defeated Douglas and two other
candidates in the general election, after having won every northern free state. With south-
ern slave states united behind the Court’s decisions protecting slaveholders’ rights, and an
incoming president who seemed to oppose those rights (in the territories, at least), south-
erners turned to secession. Clearly, the Court played a key role in the national political
debate culminating in secession.
Despite its significance, the Taney Court has received surprisingly little scholarly atten-
tion. We still have few studies of the Court’s major decisions pertaining to economic
development and only a handful of biographical studies of the justices from this era.23 In
the past forty years, almost all of the scholarship on the Taney Court has focused on slavery
and the Dred Scott decision. While Allen traces a doctrinal connection between the Taney
Court’s decisions on the slavery issue and corporations, his important study downplays the
crucial political context of the 1850s.24 Building on Allen’s insights, we need more studies
of the Court’s constitutional record with regard to economic issues, as well as more
research that links doctrinal developments to political context – and that does so by taking
a long view of the Court’s work. Examining how the Taney Court defined and under-
stood such broad concepts as the Bill of Rights, executive power, and the judicial role, for
example, will not only open new avenues of investigation, it will also help historians make
more sense of its rulings regarding antebellum slaves and slaveholders, as well as its place
in the sectional conflict and Civil War.

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The Civil War

War raised a host of legal and constitutional questions, starting with secession itself. Most
white southerners viewed disunion as an appropriate legal response, in the spirit of the
Declaration of Independence, against possible threats to slaveholders’ rights. Lincoln and
most northerners, in contrast, believed they had compelling reasons to oppose secession
and, acting in the tradition of Andrew Jackson during the crisis over the tariff and nullifi-
cation, Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union. Describing secession in his first inaugural
address as “the essence of anarchy,” the new president appealed to established traditions
of constitutionalism and the rule of law.25 Lincoln, as a lawyer who had thought deeply
about the Constitution and his oath to preserve it, believed he had no choice but to take
an uncompromising stance against the rebellion.26 Most northerners agreed with him. On
the day after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln took immediate steps to raise an army and
blockade southern ports, and in the weeks to follow, the president authorized the suspen-
sion of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus along a military line between Philadelphia
and Washington, D.C. If Taney and the Supreme Court proved the most important
constitutional actors of the antebellum era, President Lincoln would dominate the nation’s
constitutional development in wartime.
Lincoln’s suspension of the writ became the first major constitutional dispute of his
presidency. No precedent existed in American history for a president to take such action.
Originating in English common law centuries before, habeas corpus literally meant “you
have the body,” and the writ served as a legal order to bring a person before a court. In
practical terms, the writ ensured that no one could be detained without cause. Suspension
of the writ meant that one would not have protection against detention. Because of the
fundamental nature of this right, the American founders had exalted habeas corpus by
placing it in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, in the list of restrictions on the
powers of Congress.27 Within a month of the order, a legal challenge to Lincoln’s actions
came to Taney. Despite his overt sympathy for the Confederate cause, after the outbreak
of war the aging chief justice remained on the bench, and he heard the case in his
capacity as a federal circuit judge in Maryland.28 John Merryman, a Baltimore County
farmer, had allegedly burned bridges and cut telegraph wires in the aftermath of the riots.
Arrested at his home and detained at Fort McHenry, Merryman petitioned for a writ of
habeas corpus. Taney responded in a twenty-page opinion, blasting Lincoln’s suspension
of the writ. Drawing upon history, precedent, common law, and the constitutional text,
Taney argued that the president lacked the authority to take such action. Only Congress
had the power to do so, he contended, and any person arrested by a military officer
should be turned over to civil authorities, rather than be subject to military trial. In the
chief justice’s view, the president possessed the power neither to suspend the writ nor to
authorize arrests. Individual liberty, in Taney’s view, was paramount. “The fifth article
of the amendments to the Constitution expressly provides that no person ‘shall be
deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’ – that is, judicial
process,” Taney wrote.29 Emphasizing this idea, Taney mentioned the Fifth Amendment
four times in the opinion, nearly as often as he did the portion of the constitutional text
that specifically dealt with habeas corpus. Initially ignoring the opinion, Lincoln eventually
responded by framing the suspension not as a “rights” question but as a matter of national

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survival. “Are all the laws but one [habeas corpus] to go unexecuted,” he famously asked,
“and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” The confrontation
between the president and the chief justice captured the longstanding American tension
over the relationship between liberty and power.30 Taney attempted to protect individual
rights, while Lincoln used executive power to preserve the republic in order to, in his
view, advance the larger cause of liberty.31
A few years later, as the president’s northern Democratic opponents leveled heavy crit-
icism at the president for suspending the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoning draft
evaders, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Lincoln’s blockade of
Confederate ports. Under the 1861 order, later affirmed by Congress, a variety of suits
involving naval seizures of contraband came before the Court. The disputes raised the
issue of the powers of the president and Congress during wartime, as well as the nature of
the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy. Because these matters were very
much intertwined, the Prize Cases, as the cases were known collectively, posed a potential
political minefield for the president. Existing rules of international and prize law implied
that Lincoln’s authority to wage war as commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces
depended upon the sovereignty of the Confederacy, which the Lincoln Administration
refused to recognize. Conversely, a ruling that the war constituted a mere domestic insur-
rection threatened the president’s power under law to blockade southern ports. By this
time, Lincoln had appointed three justices to the Court, and in March 1863 – with all
three of Lincoln’s appointees voting with the majority – the Court upheld the blockade in
a 5–4 decision.32 Justice Robert Grier held that the existence of war constituted a matter
of fact rather than law, and the fact of war gave tremendous latitude to the president when
it came to exercising his powers.33 As commander-in-chief, the president could legiti-
mately exercise those powers in the face of a crisis like the one that the nation confronted
after Fort Sumter. Although acknowledging that only Congress could declare war, the
majority concluded that a president had no choice in such a situation but to take measures
such as those taken by Lincoln. The decision in the Prize Cases constituted an important
victory for Lincoln and a pivotal ruling in the development of presidential war powers. By
granting the executive wide authority to act as commander-in-chief and by refusing to
acknowledge the sovereignty of the Confederacy, the outcome could not have been more
favorable to the Lincoln Administration.34
The most important constitutional question of the age – emancipation – never came
before the Supreme Court. Instead, responding to Republican rumblings in Congress and
black activism on the ground, Lincoln again exercised extraordinary executive power. At
the outset of the war, the Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, the Constitution’s ambiguity about
regulating slavery in general, and the northern public’s general belief in white supremacy
seemed to make any interference with slavery extremely unlikely. But wartime develop-
ments – including some African Americans’ attempts to seek freedom behind Union
military lines – changed the political situation while also offering a constitutional rationale
for emancipation. In May 1861, just after the war began, Union General Benjamin Butler
had refused to return escaped slaves seeking haven at Fortress Monroe in Virginia to their
owner. General Butler, who was also a lawyer, claimed the slaves as “contraband of war.”
The idea stuck. In the ensuing weeks, escaping slaves streamed into U.S. forts and camps,
and in July the administration seemed to express support for this “contraband” policy.

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In August, Congress passed the Confiscation Act, which provided that any slaves being
used by the Confederate military were liable to federal seizure, just like vessels on the high
seas. In essence, Congress attempted to apply the principles of international law to
America’s civil war.35 Although Lincoln expressed doubts about both the constitutional
and political soundness of the legislation, the president signed the bill into law. Major
strides toward emancipation followed in early 1862, when Union military successes in the
West coincided with legislation abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital and in federal
territories, areas over which Congress believed it had unquestioned authority to regulate
slavery. In abolishing slavery in the territories, Congress and the president for the first time
directly challenged the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott.
While Lincoln and his fellow Republicans agreed that they possessed legal authority
over slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories, they did not see eye-to-eye on
the issue of confiscating slaves held by Confederates. Radical Republicans asserted
congressional authority in the area by passing the Second Confiscation Act, which held
that all slaves held by Confederates and their supporters – whether having escaped to
Union lines or found in newly occupied Union territory – “shall be deemed captives of
war, and shall be forever free of their servitude and not again held as slaves.”36 It also
explicitly repealed the fugitive slave law for all slaveowners engaged in rebellion and
authorized the president to employ black troops. These were significant steps, and although
Lincoln agreed with the spirit behind the legislation, he questioned its constitutionality
and feared that it would not survive a challenge before Taney’s Supreme Court. Again,
the president signed the Second Confiscation Act into law, but only reluctantly.
Lincoln became convinced that only a presidential proclamation could legally liberate
slaves in the Confederacy. Presenting the idea of a presidential proclamation on
emancipation to his cabinet in July, Lincoln delayed until the Union had achieved a
military victory. On September 22, 1862, after the bloody Union triumph at the battle
of Antietam, the president issued a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.37 Legalistic
in tone, the language was clear and direct. The document asserted Lincoln’s constitutional
authority as commander-in-chief during a time of rebellion against the government, and
it proclaimed freedom 100 days hence for enslaved African Americans in areas “the
people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States.” Perhaps the most striking
passage of the proclamation was the pledge to use military power to “recognize and
maintain the freedom of such persons” and to “do no act or acts to repress such persons,
or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”38 In essence, this
provision signaled to enslaved African Americans that the military would support any
attempt that they themselves made to throw off the yoke of slavery.
The decisive move against slavery came in the final Emancipation Proclamation, issued
January 1, 1863. Describing emancipation as a “fit and necessary war measure,” the final
version listed all of the areas still in rebellion against the United States and announced that,
in these places, slaves were “henceforth and forever free.” The four slaveholding Border
States that had remained loyal to the Union were exempt, as were all of the parishes sur-
rounding New Orleans that were under federal occupation, as well as the entire state of
Tennessee. This fact led many at the time to charge that Lincoln had freed only those
slaves over whom he had no direct control. In legal terms, though, Lincoln conceived of
the situation in precisely the opposite way: he believed he only had authority over those

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slaves in areas in rebellion, meaning still controlled by the Rebels. Moreover, just because
these areas were exempted from the Proclamation did not mean that slavery remained
undisturbed there, for slavery had already begun disintegrating in these areas at the first
sign of Union military incursion. Lincoln’s Proclamation put the Confederacy on notice
that the Union army would act as a liberating force, as it repeated the Preliminary
Proclamation’s promise “to recognize and maintain the freedom” of all enslaved persons
in the Confederate states. From this point on, as James Oakes shows, the Union military
adopted the policy of “enticement,” the idea that Union troops could deliberately entice
enslaved African Americans to Union lines in order to emancipate them.39 The final
Proclamation also provided for the use of black soldiers in the United States army and
navy. This too proved a revolutionary step, as it signaled to southern slaves that leaving
their masters could result in a direct opportunity to engage in the fight against slavery. In
a broader sense, the Emancipation Proclamation ended discussion of compensation and
colonization as conditions for emancipation, and it undermined the Court’s pro-slavery
jurisprudence, thus transforming the decades-old debate over slavery. Although Lincoln
remained concerned about a constitutional challenge to the Proclamation and wondered
whether the measure could apply in peacetime, the boldness of the Proclamation – com-
bined with Union military victories – meant that forces seemed to be working inexorably
toward the total abolition of slavery.40
Clearly, Lincoln pushed executive power to its limits. The suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus, the blockade of Confederate ports, and the emancipation of the enslaved
were unprecedented executive actions, igniting criticism from both Lincoln’s contempo-
raries and, to a lesser extent, from subsequent constitutional scholars. But in all three
instances the president had an institutional accomplice in a Republican Congress that
approved of executive actions, a fact not lost on historians. While scholars concede that
Taney made valid constitutional arguments in the Merryman case, for example, they are
quick to point to congressional approval, as well as the nature of the crisis Lincoln faced,
in justifying the president’s actions.41 To be sure, an anti-Lincoln tradition in American
historiography remains alive. Some African American scholars have argued that Lincoln
ought to be viewed more as the white supremacist-in-chief than as the “Great
Emancipator,” while libertarians have criticized the sixteenth president for excesses in
exercising executive power and in creating a national regulatory state.42 Nevertheless, the
vast majority of historians still consider Lincoln America’s greatest president, one who
acted with moral – and constitutional – authority to preserve the Union and emancipate
the enslaved.43 The fact that Lincoln allowed a presidential election to occur in 1864,
in the midst of a civil war, moreover, Herman Belz convincingly concludes, should put
to rest any charge that Lincoln acted as a “dictator.”44 Ironically, while historians have
long debated Lincoln’s exercise of executive power, recent trends in the study of eman-
cipation downplay the president’s role. Most new studies emphasize African American
agency in bringing about the end of slavery, while Oakes’s examination of congressional
Republicans portrays the legislative branch as the driving force behind the advent of
freedom. Still, the Constitution and the constraints that it imposed upon the president
and Congress remain a vital part of the story of emancipation, and historians should con-
sider investigating further the extent to which the black activism of the era also reflected
American constitutional values and practices.45

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The Reconstruction Era

The constitutional significance of the Reconstruction Era surpassed that of the Civil
War. Three constitutional amendments passed in less than four and a half years, making
Reconstruction the most creative era of constitution making in American history, apart
from the founding. The first of these amendments, the Thirteenth, ended slavery. Lincoln
had justified the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure, and once the war had
concluded Lincoln could not be certain of its legal status. Even if the Proclamation con-
tinued in force, it had exempted areas already under Union occupation and had excluded
the loyal Border States. Believing an amendment absolutely necessary, Lincoln assumed
a key role in its passage in the House of Representatives, and in January 1865 the amend-
ment secured the necessary two-thirds majority by just two votes. Succinctly written and
patterned after the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that had banned slavery north of the
Ohio River, the first section of the amendment prohibited slavery. The second section
added an enforcement clause, which, in effect, for the first time added a new enumerated
power to those possessed by Congress.46 After Lincoln’s death in April 1865, President
Andrew Johnson, a Unionist Democrat from Tennessee, proclaimed the Thirteenth
Amendment the centerpiece of his reconstruction policy and in December 1865 presided
over its final ratification.47
Despite his enthusiasm for the abolition amendment, Johnson subsequently became
embroiled in a deep dispute with the Republican Congress over the country’s post-
abolition future. With the southern states having acceded to the end of slavery, Johnson
believed that a revolution had been accomplished – that the southern rebellion had
failed and the root cause of the rebellion, slavery, had been destroyed. But Republicans
favored the ratification of another constitutional amendment that would reform the
South by disabling the southern “Slave Power” and protecting blacks’ civil rights. In
summer 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment passed both houses of Congress, but south-
ern states, with Johnson leading the charge, refused to ratify the measure.48 The stale-
mate set off a two-year-long constitutional struggle. The Republican Congress enacted
a series of Reconstruction Acts that placed the former Confederate states under military
rule and mandated the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the drafting
of new state constitutions, as preconditions for readmission to the Union. At the same
time, Congress impeached Johnson for attempting to thwart its reconstruction plans.
When it eventually passed in summer 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment held poten-
tially revolutionary implications. Writing into the Constitution the principle that all
born on American soil are “citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they
reside,” the amendment represented a profound shift from antebellum notions of citizen-
ship. Under Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship now bestowed
rights. “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its juris-
diction the equal protection of the laws,” Section One read. Representative John
Bingham of Ohio, one of the drafters of the amendment, argued that “privileges and
immunities” included all of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.49 However these rights
would be defined, the key to the Fourteenth Amendment was that it protected rights

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against infringement by the states, thus overturning the black codes that southern states
had enacted after the war and forever altering the relationship between the national gov-
ernment and the states. Other sections of the amendment dealt more specifically with
reconstruction. Section Two overturned the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause and
indirectly ordered states to allow black males of age to vote. If the states did not do so,
their numbers of representatives would be reduced proportionally.50 Section Three
banned Rebel officeholders from again holding office, while Section Four provided that
no debts incurred in support of the rebellion would be paid and that “no claim for the
loss or emancipation of any slave” would be recognized. Finally, like the Thirteenth
Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment included an enforcement clause.
The Fifteenth Amendment soon followed. From the conventions of free blacks who
had assembled in the antebellum North to Frederick Douglass’s 1865 admonition that
“slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot,” African Americans had long
argued for full political rights, and they continued to agitate on the question during the
postwar period.51 White violence against newly-enfranchised black voters in the 1868
elections, moreover, made ensuring the right of black suffrage in the southern states a top
Republican priority. Still, congressional Republicans were divided about pushing for
black suffrage outside of the South, as many northern states had rejected the idea in state
referendums immediately after the war, and adherence to traditional notions of federal-
ism worked against national interference in an area that had always been the purview of
states. Humanitarian and political considerations converged in 1869, though, when
Republicans agreed on language for an amendment that fell short of guaranteeing an
affirmative right to vote: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude.”52 With the support of the incoming president, Ulysses
S. Grant, the amendment won ratification in March 1870, thus capping an extraordinary
period of constitutional change. Afterward, Congress enacted far-reaching legislation to
enforce the postwar amendments and meet the challenge of southern violence.
If Congress had taken the lead in amending the Constitution, it would take executive
and judicial action to ensure the protection of the rights of African Americans. Beginning
in 1871, the Grant Administration engaged in a sincere and at times successful six-year-
long effort to prosecute perpetrators of white violence. Often with the aid of cavalry, the
federal government rounded up suspects, gathered evidence, issued indictments, and
brought cases to trial in federal courts. During 1871, the federal courts handled 314
criminal cases brought by the Department of Justice under the Enforcement Acts, with
128 resulting in convictions, and by 1873 the number of cases rose to 1,304 with 469
convictions. In South Carolina, the trials of Ku Klux Klansmen resulted in a highly
publicized round of prosecutions, while nationwide the 1872 elections were largely free
of violence.53 The Supreme Court, meanwhile, issued an opinion in the Slaughterhouse
Cases (1873), which, while offering a relatively narrow interpretation of federally protected
privileges and immunities, nevertheless affirmed that the purpose of the Fourteenth
Amendment was to protect the rights of the formerly enslaved. Despite the progress made
in enforcement, white violence against African Americans continued. The worst episode
came on Easter Sunday in April 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where white terrorists fought
to take control of the local government, murdering and burning perhaps as many as

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150 African Americans in a two-hour battle on the courthouse grounds. While the Grant
Administration moved ahead to prosecute the perpetrators, a financial depression hit that
year, making the costs of continued federal intervention in southern affairs – financial and
political – increasingly apparent.
Subsequent years witnessed an uneven record of executive enforcement of these con-
stitutional guarantees, along with a series of Supreme Court decisions that reflected the
tension between protecting African Americans’ hard-won rights and respecting state
authority. In the Colfax case, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court
avoided the question of whether the rights in question were federally protected under the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and instead issued a narrow ruling that focused
on flaws in the indictments of the defendants. In United States v. Reese (1876), a case
involving municipal election inspectors in Lexington, Kentucky, who had allegedly
refused to accept the vote of an African American, the Court focused on invalidating
two sections of the Enforcement Act that it deemed too broad. In both instances, the
defendants went free.54
The role of the Supreme Court in Reconstruction has been a favorite topic among
constitutional historians. Decades ago, Michael Les Benedict argued that the Court under
Chief Justice Morrison Waite adhered to a state-centered nationalism that allowed for
some judicial protection of blacks’ rights. More recently, Pamela Brandwein builds on
Benedict’s insights. In contrast to those who posit a simple declension narrative – that the
Court abandoned African Americans – Brandwein shows that the Court’s record during
the late nineteenth century was far more nuanced and accommodating of black rights,
particularly political and civil rights.55 If the justices at times engaged in formalistic reason-
ing and deferred to state power, as in Cruikshank and Reese, federal enforcement did not
come to an abrupt end. The Justice Department under Republican presidents James A.
Garfield and Chester Arthur during the 1880s sought more convictions on average under
the Enforcement Act than Grant had during the last two years of his presidency, and the
Supreme Court issued important decisions striking down a state law prohibiting black
jury service, upholding congressional control over federal elections, and affirming the
constitutionality of the Enforcement Act.56 If black political rights – voting, jury service,
officeholding – depended on federal enforcement through the courts, black “social
rights,” as they were called at the time, quickly faded. Always the most controversial and
the least secure, the right of African Americans to associate in society with whites had
been written into the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned racial discrimination in
public accommodations. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court overturned
the law, holding that Congress did not have the power to enact such legislation, the first
clear and unequivocal defeat for the rights of African Americans in the Supreme Court.57
Even if the Supreme Court did not always affirm the rights of African Americans,
taking the long view shows the profound change that occurred in American constitu-
tional and political discourse. During the antebellum era, the Supreme Court promoted
economic development while affirming the rights of slaveholders. But the Court’s Dred
Scott decision, by attempting to resolve the national debate over slavery through an abso-
lute affirmation of slaveholders’ rights, brought about a constitutional crisis. The election
of a Republican president, the secession of most of the southern slaveholding states, and
a bloody civil war transformed the American constitutional order. Lincoln exercised

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unprecedented power in wartime, especially in bringing about the end of slavery.

Emancipation then brought to the forefront the rights claims of African Americans, whose
lives witnessed a constitutional revolution in the form of the ratification of three constitu-
tional amendments.58 One scholar, Laura F. Edwards, takes the idea of a revolutionized
popular notion of rights even further, arguing that war changed the relationship between
the people and their government. As the federal government expanded rights during
Reconstruction, in Edwards’s telling, African Americans, women, and working people all
attempted to give their own meaning to the rights revolution, as they sought to expand
the meanings of the Reconstruction amendments into a broad new vision for society.59
Ultimately, although the enforcement of these new constitutional guarantees proved
uneven, the post-Civil War era realized a stunning transformation in the nation’s consti-
tutional and political discourse, from upholding the rights of slaveholders to offering new
visions of constitutional equality.

Notes
1 In general, the legal and constitutional development of the United States have been treated as
separate fields of inquiry, as only a handful of important synthetic works, such as Kermit L.
Hall, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (New York, 1989) and Laura F. Edwards, A
Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New York, 2015), attempt
to consider these subjects together. This essay focuses on U.S. constitutional history, a field that
includes the interaction among the various branches of government as well as popular under-
standings of constitutional values. For a fuller exploration of the themes outlined in this essay,
as well as a description of the nineteenth century as exemplifying a “culture of constitutional-
ism,” see Timothy S. Huebner, Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism
(Lawrence, KS, 2016).
2 President Jackson initially appointed Taney to a vacancy on the Court in 1835, but the Senate
killed the nomination by indefinitely postponing it and even tried to reduce the Court’s size,
in order to eliminate the vacancy altogether. But when Chief Justice John Marshall died at the
end of 1835, the determined Jackson nominated Taney for the chief position. By March 1836
when the Senate took up the nomination, the make-up of the Senate had changed, and Taney
won confirmation, 29 to 15. On Taney’s nomination, see Henry J. Abraham, Justices, Presidents,
and Senators: A History of the U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Clinton
(Lanham, MD, 1999), 74–76; Timothy S. Huebner, Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy
(Santa Barbara, CA, 2003), 8–9.
3 Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1977),
2.
4 There has not been a solid biographical treatment of Taney since Carl B. Swisher’s Roger B.
Taney (New York, 1936). James F. Simon’s dual biography, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney
(New York, 2006), is the closest thing we have to a recent biographical study of the chief
justice.
5 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 36 U.S. 420 (1837).
6 License Cases, 46 U.S. 504, 579.
7 Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia, 53 U.S. 299 (1852).
8 The Thomas Jefferson, 23 U.S. 428 (1825).
9 Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh, 53 U.S. 443, 454 (1851). Taney proceeded to demonstrate how the
distinction had been formulated in the first place. In England, he explained, nearly every
navigable stream and river fell within the ebb and flow of the tide. Because tidewaters
and navigable waters were synonymous, English admiralty jurisdiction was confined to “public
navigable waters,” rather than private waters. The same applied to the United States at the time

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of the founding. But years of legal debate about the nature of admiralty law only confused the
issue. “[T]he public character of the river was in process of time lost sight of, and the jurisdiction
of the admiralty treated as if it was limited by the tide,” he wrote. “The description of a public
navigable river was substituted in the place of the thing intended to be described.”
10 Surprisingly little has been written about the Taney Court and economic issues. See Stanley I.
Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (Philadelphia, 1971); and,
more recently, Tony Allan Freyer, The Passenger Cases and the Commerce Clause: Immigrants,
Blacks, and States’ Rights in Antebellum America (Lawrence, KS, 2014). See also Huebner, Taney
Court, 115–128, 142–155; R. Kent Newmyer, The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney,
2nd ed. (Wheeling, IL, 2006), 89–117. For a classic interpretation, see Felix Frankfurter, The
Commerce Clause under Marshall, Taney, and Waite (Chapel Hill, NC, 1937).
11 Cass R. Sunstein, One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court (Cambridge,
MA, 2001); Groves v. Slaughter, 40 U.S. 449 (1841); Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842);
Jones v. Van Zandt, 46 U.S. 215 (1847); Moore v. Illinois, 55 U.S. 13 (1852); Strader v. Graham,
51 U.S. 82 (1851). On slavery and the Taney Court, see Earl M. Maltz, Slavery and the Supreme
Court, 1825–1861 (Lawrence, KS, 2009); and H. Robert Baker, Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery,
the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution (Lawrence, KS, 2012).
12 One biographical sketch at the time described Taney as having “a reputation beyond reproach
or the breath of calumny, a purity of life that no man can assail, a frank, independent, manly
uprightness of conduct which knows no guile.” George Van Santvoord, Sketches of the Lives and
Judicial Services of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 1854),
533. The Monthly Law Reporter, which included a review of Van Santvoord’s book, agreed with
this laudatory assessment of Taney. See “The Chief Justices of the United States,” The Monthly
Law Reporter (Nov. 1854), 370–372. Newmyer, The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney,
118.
13 The literature on Dred Scott v. Sandford is enormous, but the most important works are Don E.
Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York,
1978); Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (New York,
1997); Earl M. Maltz, Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery (Lawrence, KS, 2007); Mark A.
Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, 2006); Austin Allen, The
Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837–1857 (Athens,
GA, 2006). For Dred Scott as a watershed in the broader context of American constitutional
politics, see, in particular, Huebner, Liberty and Union, 88–96.
14 Contemporary scholars have continued this debate, with most historians, interestingly, arguing
that the Constitution was an unquestionably pro-slavery pact. See especially Paul Finkelman,
Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY, 2001), 3–36; and
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2010).
Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s
Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 15–48, argues that the Constitution was neutral on the
subject of slavery. An older tradition took a more favorable view of the founders. See William
Freehling “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77 (1972), 81–93.
Recently, Sean Wilentz has begun reviving this traditional interpretation of the anti-slavery
founding fathers. For a short summary of his view, see Wilentz, “Lincoln and Douglass Had It
Right,” New York Times, September 16, 2015, A27.
15 Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney, 100.
16 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 407 (1857); Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional
Evil, 28–30. Lincoln made clear that he “never ha[d] complained especially of the Dred Scott
decision because it held that a negro could not be a citizen,” in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953), 299, 179, as quoted in Graber,
Dred Scott, 32. Strikingly absent from the mainstream national debate over slavery was a
discussion of the rights of black people. Few argued for absolute racial equality under the
Constitution or the law. Lincoln, in fact, stayed away from this issue as much as he could in his
debates with Stephen Douglas and referred only to the basic right – which he believed lay in

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the Declaration of Independence – that a person could not be owned by another person. Even
as late as March 1861 in his first inaugural address, Lincoln encapsulated the sectional conflict
neither in terms of black rights, the existence of slavery in the South, nor even the enforcement
of the fugitive slave law. Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address – Final Text, March 4, 1861,” in
Basler, Collected Works, vol. 4, 263–265.
17 60 U.S. 393, 450. The Fifth Amendment states that no person could “be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
18 60 U.S. 393, 450, 451.
19 60 U.S. 393, 451. Taney’s point about territorial legislatures was a significant one, for this was
the supposed compromise position articulated in Congress by Democrats led by Stephen
Douglas. Taney’s holding put Douglas in an awkward position in his debates with Lincoln, as
Taney’s opinion represented pro-slavery extremism.
20 See Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case; and Austin Allen, “Rethinking Dred Scott: New
Context for an Old Case,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 82 (2007), 141–176.
21 One justice, the firebrand Virginian Peter V. Daniel, went farther than Taney, even arguing
that “the property of the master in his slave” held an exalted position, as “the only private
property which the Constitution has specifically recognized.” 60 U.S. 393, 490. The decision
represented a significant change in Taney’s own opinions on the subject. As a young lawyer in
Maryland nearly four decades before, Taney had expressed anti-slavery sentiments, opposed a
pro-slavery resolution in the state senate during the Missouri crisis, and liberated nearly all of
his own slaves. But by 1857, Taney’s view had changed dramatically. See Timothy S. Huebner,
“Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking Beyond – and Before – Dred Scott,” Journal of
American History 97 (2010), 1–22.
22 For a brilliant explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott dissents in Supreme Court
history, see Melvin I. Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court’s History and
the Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue (New York, 2015), 69–81.
23 On the Taney Court in general, see Huebner, Taney Court; Newmyer, Supreme Court under
Marshall and Taney. Apart from Joseph Story, we still know relatively little about the other
justices on the Taney Court. Stuart Streichler offers a compelling examination of Curtis, Justice
Curtis and the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism (Charlottesville, VA,
2005), and biographies of Justices John McKinley and Phillip Barbour have recently appeared,
but there have been no major studies of McLean, James Wayne, or John Catron for decades.
See Steven P. Brown, John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old
Southwest (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2012); William S. Belko, Phillip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian
America: An Old Republican in King Andrew’s Court (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2016).
24 Allen, Origins of the Dred Scott Case.
25 Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address – Final Text,” 269. See Phillip S. Paludan’s classic essay,
“The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order,” American Historical Review
77 (1972), 1013–1034.
26 On Lincoln’s constitutionalism, see especially Mackubin Thomas Owens, “Abraham Lincoln
as Practical Constitutional Lawyer,” in Roger Billings and Frank J. Williams, eds., Abraham
Lincoln, Esq.: The Legal Career of America’s Greatest President (Lexington, KY, 2010), 205–227;
and Herman Belz, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era
(New York, 1998), 72–100.
27 In essence, it was one of the few “rights” written into the original Constitution, before the
addition of the Bill of Rights. “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be
suspended,” the text reads, “unless in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may
require it.” Only under specific circumstances, “rebellion or invasion,” could Congress take
such a step, and at the time that Lincoln asked his attorney general to look into the matter,
Congress had never before done so. A president had certainly never done so. The leading
constitutional scholar of the early nineteenth century, Justice Joseph Story, had concluded that
only Congress possessed any power relative to suspension of the writ.

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28 Although there has been some confusion among scholars about whether it was a federal circuit
court opinion or a Supreme Court decision written “in chambers,” Jonathan W. White
convincingly concludes that Taney wrote the opinion as a circuit judge, but that he attempted
to lend more weight to the opinion by indicating that he wrote it as chief justice. See White,
Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman (Baton Rouge, LA,
2011), 40–42.
29 Ex parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144, 149.
30 Lincoln, “Message to Congress,” July 4, 1861, in Basler, Collected Works, vol. 4, 430. Although
Merrryman was indicted for treason, the charges against him were later dropped and he was
eventually released. The case has generated a fair amount of recent scholarship. See White,
Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War; Brian McGinty, The Body of John Merryman:
Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus (Cambridge, MA, 2011); James A.
Dueholm, “Lincoln’s Suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus: An Historical and Constitutional
Analysis,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 29 (2008), 47–66; Arthur T. Downey, “The
Conflict between the Chief Justice and the Chief Executive: Ex Parte Merryman,” Journal of
Supreme Court History 31 (2006), 262–278. See also, for the showdown as an example of the
divergent constitutional visions of Lincoln and Taney, Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney,
177–198; and Timothy S. Huebner, “Lincoln versus Taney: Liberty, Power, and the Clash of
the Constitutional Titans,” Albany Government Law Review 3 (2010), 615–643. For a discussion
of this dispute in the larger context of the history of the federal courts of the time, see Peter
Charles Hoffer, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, and N. E. H. Hull, The Federal Courts: An Essential
History (New York, 2016), 148–166.
31 Lincoln believed that the suspension served the greater purpose of preserving the Union, and
in the same message he described the Union cause as synonymous with the larger cause of
liberty. “On the side of the Union,” he argued “it is a struggle for maintaining in the world
that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men
– to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to
afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.” “Message to Congress,” 430,
438.
32 A few months into his presidency, Lincoln confronted three vacancies on the high court. One
existed before he took office, another resulted from the death of Justice John McLean in March
1861, and a third seat opened up after the April resignation of Justice John A. Campbell, who
after secession returned to Alabama. Republicans saw a prime opportunity to reshape the
judiciary, and most supported a reorganization of the federal circuits as a means of achieving
this goal. Because members of the Supreme Court also served as federal circuit court judges,
rearrangement of the circuits would affect the make-up of the Court, as justices typically came
from the circuits that they represented. Proposals to redraw circuit lines focused on redistributing
the nation’s population into nine relatively equal circuits based on the results of the census.
Such a plan would also, not coincidentally, increase the number of northern circuits and reduce
the number in the South. In January 1862 Lincoln appointed Noah H. Swayne of Ohio to take
the seat that had been held by the deceased McLean (another Ohio native), and in July,
Congress enacted legislation regarding the circuits. Under the new law, the first three circuits
remained the same as before. The other six circuits, however, looked vastly different, with all
of the slaveholding states consolidated into three circuits, rather than five. Two circuits that had
been composed entirely of slave states thus disappeared, allowing Lincoln to appoint an Iowan,
Justice Samuel Miller, for one seat, and an Illinois native, Lincoln’s old friend David Davis, for
the other. With these appointments, the Supreme Court again was composed of nine justices,
three of whom were Republicans who owed their seats to Lincoln. Congress added a tenth
justice in March 1863 to serve the western circuit that included California and Oregon, to
which Lincoln appointed Stephen J. Field, a leading California jurist. This marked the first of
three adjustments to the size of the Court enacted by Congress between 1863 and 1869. In
1866, just after the war ended, Congress enacted legislation reducing the Court’s size by
attrition to seven, thereby preventing President Johnson from nominating any justices. Three

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years later, with Johnson out of office, Congress returned the size of the Court to nine justices.
See Brian McGinty, Lincoln and the Court (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 92–117; Huebner, Taney
Court, 23–29.
33 Grier had been appointed by Democratic President James K. Polk in 1846.
34 Prize Cases, 67 U.S. 635 (1863). The Prize Cases have generated little recent historical
scholarship, but see McGinty, Lincoln and the Court, 118–143.
35 See, on the constitutional and legal rationale for emancipation, Edwards, Legal History of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, 64–89; and Kate Masur, “‘Rare Phenomenon of Philological
Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,”
Journal of American History 93 (2007), 1050–1084.
36 Act of July 17, 1862, ch. 195, 12 Stat. 591.
37 Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Limits of Constitutional Change,” Supreme
Court Review (2008), 349–387, makes the point that Lincoln needed a constitutional framework,
political support, and a military victory in order to move ahead with a proclamation. By
September 1862, Lincoln had all three.
38 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862, in Basler, Collected Works, vol.
5, 435.
39 James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New
York, 2014), 367–376.
40 The Lincoln Administration went beyond emancipation, taking subtle aim at white supremacy.
A November 1862 opinion written by Attorney General Bates argued for the citizenship of
free black men born in the United States, and the1863 Lieber Code, a list of rules of warfare,
included a color-blind clause with regard to prisoners of war. On the Lieber Code, see John
Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York, 2012).
41 Simon, for example, finds “much to admire” in Taney’s opinion, but he ends up criticizing
Taney for ignoring the immediate circumstances of the rebellion. Simon, Lincoln and Chief
Justice Taney, 193.
42 Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago, 2000); Thomas
DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary
War (New York, 2002); Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A
History of the American Civil War (Chicago, 1996). See also Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore:
Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York, 1962).
43 Recent studies include Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
(New York, 1992); Daniel Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution (Chicago, 2004); and Dennis Bowman,
Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security (Baton Rouge,
LA, 2011), all of which, in the final analysis, exonerate Lincoln of charges of executive
overreach. For the most compelling defenses of Lincoln on emancipation and the expansion of
national power, respectively, see Phillip Shaw Paludan, “Lincoln and Negro Slavery: I Haven’t
Got Time for the Pain,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27 (2006), 1–23; and James
M. McPherson, “Liberty and Power in the Second American Revolution,” in Abraham Lincoln
and the Second American Revolution (New York, 1991), 131–152. Although not discussed in this
essay, it should be noted the Confederate President Jefferson Davis confronted similar issues.
On the Confederacy, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of
Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville, VA, 1999); and Huebner, Liberty and Union,
249–284.
44 Belz, Abraham Lincoln, 17–43.
45 Huebner portrays African American activism as a form of constitutionalism – “black constitu-
tionalism” – that played a critical role in overthrowing the antebellum pro-slavery order. See
Huebner, Liberty and Union, 297–305, 320–324.
46 Section One of the amendment reads as follows: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” On the Thirteenth Amendment,

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see Leonard L. Richards, Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment (Chicago,
2015); and Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the
Thirteenth Amendment (New York, 2001).
47 “The adoption of the amendment reunites us beyond all power of disruption,” Johnson wrote.
“It heals the wound that is still imperfectly closed: it removes slavery, the element which has
so long perplexed and divided the country; it makes of us once more a united people, renewed
and strengthened, bound more than ever to mutual affection and support.” “Message of the
President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of
the First Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress,” December 4, 1865, in Paul H. Bergeron,
ed., The Papers of Andrew Johnson (Knoxville, TN, 1991), vol. 9, 472.
48 Ironically, Johnson’s home state of Tennessee, where Radical Governor William G. Brownlow
held sway, was the one exception. Tennessee ratified the amendment in July 1866.
49 In making this argument, Bingham in effect hoped to overturn Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243
(1833), a Supreme Court decision that had held that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights did
not apply to the states.
50 From the perspective of northern Republicans, black voting had to be written into this portion
of the Fourteenth Amendment. By abolishing the Three-Fifths Clause, the amendment increased
the South’s political representation in Congress. In order to thwart the old Slave Power that
had long held sway in the South, Section Two thus conditioned this increase in representatives
in Congress on the extension of suffrage to black men.
51 Frederick Douglass, “The Need for Continued Anti-Slavery Work, Speech at the Thirty-
Second Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, May 10, 1865,” in Phillip S.
Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (1950; repr. Chicago, 1999), 578.
52 A second section repeated word-for-word the enforcement clauses that had been included in
the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Particularly because Republicans on the East and
the West coasts wanted to allow states to continue to limit the voting rights of groups such as
the Irish and the Chinese, the most far-reaching proposal for the Fifteenth Amendment – an
affirmatively-worded version – was practically doomed from the start. William Gillette, The
Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore, 1965), remains the best
account of this story.
53 Huebner, Liberty and Union, 389–398. Grant and enforcement is an understudied topic, but see
Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens,
GA, 1997); Robert Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, the
Department of Justice, and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 (New York, 1985); Everett Swinney,
“Enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History 28 (1962), 202–
218; and Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872
(Athens, GA, 1996). Timothy S. Huebner, “Emory Speer and Federal Enforcement of the
Rights of African Americans, 1880–1910,” American Journal of Legal History 55 (2015), 34–63,
takes the story beyond the traditional boundaries of Reconstruction.
54 United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 545 (1876); United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876). See
also Robert M. Goldman, Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the Vote in Reese & Cruikshank
(Lawrence, KS, 2001).
55 Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court,” Supreme
Court Review (1978), 39–79; Pamela Brandwein, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction
(Ann Arbor, MI, 2014). See also Paul Kens, The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874–
1888 (Columbia, SC, 2010); Ronald M. Labbe and Jonathan Lurie, The Slaughterhouse Cases:
Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment (Lawrence, KS, 2003); Michael A.
Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the
Reconstruction Era (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003).
56 Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880); Ex parte Siebold 100 U.S. 371 (1880); Ex parte
Yarbrough 110 U.S. 651 (1884). Historians need to know more about all of these cases.
57 Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

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58 For decades, beginning in the late eighteenth century, free blacks in the North had asserted
their rights as men and as Americans, and African Americans continually advocated an agenda
of freedom – not just emancipation, but the full panoply of rights under the Declaration of
Independence. When emancipation came, it came largely because of their persistent efforts in
pushing this agenda. These continued attempts to claim America’s heritage of liberty – I call it
“black constitutionalism” – helped to create a new discourse of rights. For an elaboration of
this argument, see Huebner, Liberty and Union.
59 Edwards, Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

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 Part IV

AMERICA IN THE LATE

NINETEENTH AND EARLY
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
 17
WOMEN’S RIGHTS A N D G EN DER
IDEOLOGY, 1 8 4 8 – 1 8 9 0

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

The image of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention has long dominated understanding of the
emergence of an official women’s rights movement in the United States. The sentimental
story of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – having met eight years prior at a
world antislavery convention in which antislavery men barred antislavery women from
the main floor – collaborating to launch a movement offers a coherent, even poetic,
origins narrative. Stanton herself solidified it in her History of Woman Suffrage:

As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm
down Great Queen Street that night . . . a missionary work for the emancipation
of woman in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ was then and there
inaugurated.”1

In her foundational 1959 work, Eleanor Flexner complicated this narrative, describing
the reform work of the 1820s and 1830s. But Seneca Falls still loomed large.

The way had been opened, and there were workers here and there hewing away
at prejudice and law; but they were scattered and isolated from one another . . .
What was needed now was a sharp impetus – leadership and, above all, a
program. These were to be the achievement of the Seneca Falls convention . . .
from which the inception of the woman’s rights movement in the United States
is commonly dated.2

The resulting “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” a clever repurposing of the

Declaration of Independence, declared women – like men – created equal. Though
suffrage would come to dominate post-Civil War women’s rights activism, in 1848 its
denial was just one (admittedly, the most controversial) of eighteen grievances.
Appealing for both story and simplicity, this narrative still dominates our understand-
ing of women’s rights in the years after 1848.3 In recent decades historians have moved
away from it, instead describing a multifaceted women’s rights movement. Nancy Hewitt
argues that we should think of the 1848 moment not as a beginning but as a culmination,
a “critical moment when certain strains of women’s rights ideology and activism crystal-
lized.”4 Describing alternate visions by African American women focused on ownership
of body, Irish immigrant women focused on employment, and American Indian loss of
matrilineal heritage, she writes, “Clearly, woman’s rights were born in multiple arenas,

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defined in myriad ways, and advocated by diverse groups of ‘American’ women.”5 Her
work and that of others challenges historians at the present to displace middle-class and
elite white women as the story of women’s rights. Lori Ginzberg’s work on an 1846
petition for women’s rights also challenges an easy, one-convention origins story.6
All of this marks the present as an exciting moment in women’s history. This essay
offers historical and historiographical coverage of women’s rights after 1848.7 Against a
backdrop of nineteenth-century gender ideology, antebellum and Civil War-era women’s
rights work culminated in debate over the Fifteenth Amendment. Out of it, two
sometimes-competing women’s national rights organizations emerged, with a vision
tightly focused on suffrage. In addition, myriad groups of women envisioned a “woman’s
rights” that was not solely defined by gaining the franchise.

From Seneca Falls to the Civil War

In a “stunning” text, the Declaration of Sentiments offered eighteen grievances, ranging
from franchise to civil and legal position to lack of education to male claims to “the
prerogative of Jehovah himself . . . [and] his right to assign for her a sphere of action,
when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”8 After women’s rights enthusiasts
convened the first National Convention for Women’s Rights in Worcester, Massachusetts,
in 1850, national meetings were annually convened. In 1851, Lucy Stone outlined her
vision of women’s rights. “The present state of things,” she noted, “grows out of the idea
that woman is to live solely as a companion for man.”9 Ernestine Rose seconded, “Let us
first obtain ourselves . . . Give us ourselves and all that belongs to us will follow.”10 At
conventions, reformers spoke on such topics as dress reform, marriage laws, suffrage,
education, and the lack of economic opportunity for women.11 The press paid attention
to the small movement, Sylvia Hoffert notes: even negative press depicting reformers as
crowing hens allowed “a movement with little money, no permanent organization, and
no official newspaper of its own out of obscurity by bringing it to the attention of a
national audience and thereby inadvertently helped to incorporate women more
completely into public life.”12
Scholars emphasize the transatlantic nature of the development of women’s rights
ideology. Reformers’ shared antislavery heritage provided a link between emerging
suffrage movements in Britain and the United States.13 Additionally, they shared ideas.
Both Mott and Martha Wright kept a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the
Rights of Woman on prominent display in their homes, with Wright saying it was “to shock
guests.”14 Bonnie Anderson has examined how women in the United States, France,
Great Britain, and Germany advocated for revisions to marriage and divorce laws; in them
she has found a “loosely knit, international women’s movement, the first ever created.”15
Early on, African American women challenged white activists to broaden their under-
standing of who their nascent movement served and to look beyond the “decidedly
middle-class version of women’s grievances” they had offered in 1848.16 At Akron in 1851,
former slave and activist Sojourner Truth had proclaimed, “ar’n’t I a woman?”17 Martha
Jones traces how debate over the “woman question” – what rights women should enjoy,
especially public ones – was ever-present in African American public culture from 1832
until the turn of the century.18 African American suffragists such as Harriet Forten Purvis

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and Sarah Redmond participated in 1850s conventions, with Purvis and her sister
Margarette Forten partially responsible for organizing the 1854 convention in Philadelphia.19
By the mid-1850s, Stanton had joined forces with Susan B. Anthony. Their partnership
was one of the most important of the nineteenth century. Lisa Tetrault writes, “Anthony
not only helped Stanton carve out time to write; she pushed her to do so. Stanton penned
the manifestoes and, together, with Anthony’s consummate organizing skill, they delivered
them.”20 In 1854 Stanton addressed the New York legislature, and in 1860, the Second
New York State Married Women’s Property Act passed, giving wives the right to sell and
own property, control wages, and have access to children after separation or divorce.21
Stanton spoke in 1860 at the tenth annual Women’s Rights Convention and went further,
calling for liberalization of divorce law and describing marriage as “a mere legal contract.”22
Much agitation at the convention resulted, and the press was equally scandalized, with the
New York Tribune calling the idea “‘simply shocking.’”23

The Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideological

Context for Women’s Rights
In 1860, abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared, “She is either exactly like man, – exactly like
him, teetotally like him, – and if she is, then a ballot-box based upon brains belongs to her
as well as him: or she is different, and then I do not know how to vote for her.”24 While
Phillips’s audience may have been sympathetic, the majority of the American public was
not. Nancy Isenberg flatly states, “Equality remained a concept that somehow did not apply
to women.”25 The notion of an independent female citizen had been fraught with danger
since the Revolution, with both Rosemarie Zagarri and Lori Ginzberg describing a process
in which “the exclusion of women, as women, from formal political life was made
explicit.”26 In the nineteenth century, a prescriptive (if not lived) separate spheres ideology
evolved, proclaiming that men and women were fundamentally different and thus naturally
suited for different domains of life: men lived in the public sphere, one made of work and
politics, while naturally maternal women belonged to the private sphere of home and
family. Barbara Welter’s seminal 1966 article described the four pillars of what she termed
“the cult of true womanhood”: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.27
Godey’s Lady’s Book, begun in 1830, reflected antebellum understanding of women’s
domestic realm. One story from a January 1851 issue featured the story of Catherine
Grant, a woman whose “moral strength of character” and “unvarying love and constancy”
helped domesticate her husband Willis. Along with the story went an illustrated plate,
titled “The Constant,” which showed domestic scenes. At the center was pictured a
young wife and mother next to a cradle, with husband looking fondly upon both wife
and baby.28 Such stories like this showed the domestic power of wives and mothers.
Historian Sara Evans reports, “The problem of female citizenship was solved by endowing
domesticity itself with political meaning.”29
Scholars concur that domestic ideology did provide some opportunities, both through
rhetorical exaltation of women’s ability to be moral arbiters and through real access
to education, work as schoolteachers, and to quasi-public work as reformers.30 Christine
Stansell notes, “In the North, though, the fight against slavery gave cover to feminist
organizing, giving women space to gather in the interstices of antislavery clamor,
away from withering scrutiny.”31 At the same time, separate spheres doctrine and the

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nineteenth-century glorification of the home were clearly, and fundamentally, restrictive

to American women.32 African American, Mexican American, and Native American
women could not access the privileges that domestic ideology afforded and instead were,
as the century went on, increasingly judged upon their ability to make homes. Domesticity,
Jane Simonsen has noted, was “used by the white middle class to uphold its power in a
diversifying and expansionist nation.”33 Additionally, if women attempted to navigate
a world outside the private sphere they were denounced as “unnatural”: acts of inde-
pendence were not seen as legitimate or valid unless they were couched from a stance of
dependency. The way in which Amelia Bloomer and other dress reformers were mocked
for abandoning long dresses for pantaloons is just one example.34
At the same time, ideas about the family and marriage were changing, too, offering
new norms particularly for middle-class, white women. In the early nineteenth century,
scholars concur that new romantic ideals of companionate marriage and marital choice
emerged and that marriage became “a union of love, based on the attraction of
opposites.”35 Antislavery and women’s rights reformers in particular became concerned
about creating families in line with their values, with Lucy Stone taking the bold stance
of keeping her name upon her marriage.36 Some pushed even more radical notions. Mary
Gove Nichols published a book in 1854 that “argued forcefully against traditional
monogamy and in favor of freedom of affections in love relations.”37 Communitarian and
utopian experiments such as the Shakers and Oneida Community also offered new
visions of marriage and sexuality. Ann Braude has argued that Spiritualism, too, provided
a radical foundation for suffrage.38
These radicals were by definition outliers. But ideas of companionate marriage took
hold and shaped conversations about the rights of women – as did new access to contra-
ception. Paulina Wright and a handful of others lectured on women’s health and repro-
ductive anatomy, while Nichols advocated that women deserved the right “to decide
whether she will have children and to choose the time for having them.”39 Antebellum
speakers advised on the use of abstinence and rhythm as well as douching, using a sponge,
condoms, and abortion, while remedies for “blocked menses” doubled as abortifacients.
But contraception was not necessarily envisioned as part of “women’s rights.” Stanton
and other reformers advocated what they came to call voluntary motherhood, which to
them did not rely on contraception but instead a woman’s right to refuse sex to her
husband. Though when we hear Matilda Jocelyn Gage’s proclamation that “Woman
must first of all be held as having a right to herself” we might assume she advocated con-
traception, instead she meant voluntary motherhood.40 Due to a combination of volun-
tary motherhood, changing notions of marriage, and what Linda Gordon describes as a
“thriving” market in birth control (despite the rhetoric of voluntary motherhood), the
century saw a remarkable decline in fertility, from 7.04 children on average in 1800 to
3.56 children on average in 1900.41

The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,

and a Crisis for Women’s Rights Activists
The Civil War was a watershed moment for women. For African Americans, it offered
the opportunity for self-emancipation, and southern slaves fled to Union lines. For white
women, the Civil War demanded new roles. Women in both North and South took part

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in voluntary associations. In the North, Sanitary Commission workers moved outside of

the private sphere, and by war’s end, Mary Walker, clad in jacket and slacks, served as a
surgeon to soldiers.42 Women’s association work, in turn, helped create a new postwar
vision of what women could be and do, giving way to new benevolent and moral reform
work, such as the re-invigorated temperance movement.43 Anti-abolitionist northerners
and proslavery southerners alike had conflated fears of abolition and women’s rights
reformers in the decade prior to the war. Describing the war’s many disruptions, historian
LeeAnn Whites refers to a “crisis in gender,” particularly in the South.44 Stephanie
McCurry argues that during the war, white women, like slaves, became a political force
to be reckoned with, “a salient new constituency in Confederate political life.”45
This said, for the most part the war’s end brought what Elizabeth Leonard describes as
“the predictable return of prewar notions about gender and proper behavior.”46 Elite
white women in the South – never at the forefront of women’s rights agitation to begin
with – retreated to prewar gender conventions, seeing this as critical to maintaining white
supremacy.47 Thavolia Glymph powerfully describes elite women’s “horrified glimpses of
the new order” and a world upside down.48 But the world remained a new one, one in
which African American women sought to carve out life on their own terms.49
During the war itself, women’s rights activists had been politically active, hoping to
shape Union war aims. Stanton, Anthony, and Stone had formed the Women’s National
Loyal League, ultimately submitting over 250,000 signatures to Congress to urge Lincoln
to adopt abolition of slavery as a war aim.50 The year after the war – with much discussion
of black suffrage in the air – Mott, Stone, Stanton, and Anthony formed the American
Equal Rights Association (AERA) in order to support voting rights for both blacks and
women. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper had urged members of its 1866 founding conven-
tion to remember that the rights of black men, black women, and white women were all
“bound up together.”51 At war’s end, though, white activists were more than disappointed:
the Civil War amendments consciously drew a “sharp line” between race and sex, with the
proposed Fifteenth Amendment extending the franchise to African American men but
not to women. Amy Dru Stanley reports, “Emancipation turned the slaveholders’ world
upside down, but the bonds of marriage remained intact.”52 Expectations of apolitical
domesticity remained the standard, north and south.
Although some such as Lucy Stone urged passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, others
– notably, Stanton and Anthony – lobbied against it. Ellen Dubois explains their
viewpoint: “From a feminist perspective . . . this exclusively masculine definition of
democracy was a step backward for freedom.”53 Ultimately, white women’s rights leaders
reached an impasse, splitting over whether to support the Fifteenth Amendment despite
its omission of woman suffrage. Events in Kansas furthered tensions. In 1867, the Kansas
legislature put forward two referendums, one for woman suffrage and one for African
American suffrage. Lack of Republican support for the former led Stanton and Anthony
to travel to Kansas, and to the shock of many they aligned themselves with George Train,
a racist, race-baiting Democrat who favored woman suffrage.
In 1869, Frederick Douglass publicly rebuked the pair, and scholars since have debated
the role of racism in their mindset and opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. Often,
scholars divide postbellum suffragists into two camps: those who were principled and
fought only for justice and those who compromised their pursuit of justice with racism

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and nativism in the name of expediency.54 Rebecca Mead cautions us against a “falsely
reductive,” too-neat dichotomy, saying that many activists acted in the name of both
expediency and justice.55 The justice-expediency argument also overlooks the very
personal nature of some of the racism – that is, that personal viewpoints were expressed
because they were believed, not just because they were expedient means to win supporters
to the cause. Christine Stansell argues that “it was the caste system of sexual privilege that
was appalling, not black manhood suffrage per se: the replacement of the white man’s
democracy with an ‘aristocracy of sex.’” Yet Stansell concedes the ugliness of the fight:
“it is also true that this was the moment when Elizabeth Cady Stanton exploded with
racist and nativist gibes, inveighing in public and private against ignorant degraded Negro
and foreign men who got to vote instead of noble ‘Anglo-Saxon’ educated women.”56
The issue remains heavily contested. Ann Gordon, editor of the magisterial Stanton
and Anthony papers project at Rutgers, argues that Stanton’s “luster as an advocate of
women’s voting rights is dimming under the close scrutiny of intellectual and cultural
historians focused on her racial constructions.”57 Universal suffrage, she argues, remained
critical to Stanton. Faye Dudden is more critical, opening her recent monograph not
with Seneca Falls but with a description of a Revolution piece in which Stanton “dipped
her pen into a tincture of white racism and sketched a reference to a nightmarish figure,
the black racist.”58 Stanton biographer Lori Ginzberg, too, notes that Stanton drew

upon a powerful sense of her own class and cultural superiority. And she seems
to have been deaf to how her rhetoric – as well as her assertion, contrary to
evidence, that women faced “the hostility everywhere of black men themselves,”
– both undermined her most principled claims and deepened the coming schism
with old colleagues and friends.59

A Divided, Multifaceted Movement, 1869–1890

Due in large part to the fight over the Fifteenth Amendment, the American Equal Rights
Association collapsed. Two competing associations formed in the wake of its demise.
Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA),
while Stone and husband Henry Blackwell formed the American Woman Suffrage
Association (AWSA) and founded the Woman’s Journal. The AWSA focused on campaigns
for suffrage at the state level, while the NWSA pushed for a national amendment: in less
than two years, Anthony lectured 148 times (in 140 towns) on what they described as the
Sixteenth Amendment.60 Despite their differences, Jean Baker notes,

if its support of the Fifteenth Amendment, its inclusion of men, and its base in
Boston differentiated the American from its rival, the National, in its approach
to getting the vote, the American depended on the same techniques. Outsiders
often had trouble distinguishing between the two.61

Both organizations, too, Baker acknowledges, were largely middle-class and white, and

as time went on, neither made an effort to appeal to black and working-class
women. Both lobbied the legislative committees in state and territorial

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legislatures. Both organized public meetings, county conventions, and lectures;

both held money-raising festivals and bazaars. And for twenty-two years both
resisted a merger.62

This was costly, Baker and others assert, due to resulting duplication of efforts and the
lack of efficiency, particularly given that the movement was “numerically small and
organizationally limited.”63
As part of their factional struggle, suffragists turned to their own history. In a compelling
work, Lisa Tetrault traces the memory-creation of the late nineteenth century: it was
only then, she asserts, that Seneca Falls emerged as an origins story.64 As late as 1870,
Stanton had dated the origins of the American movement to the 1850 national convention,
but now, a new origins story was adopted, with Stanton’s demand for suffrage (rather
than the other resolutions in the “Declaration of Sentiments”) at its forefront. Like Nancy
Isenberg, Tetrault places Stanton and Anthony, particularly through their authorship of
History of Woman Suffrage, at the center of this myth-making. “They built the Seneca Falls
mythology piece by piece – sometimes unconsciously, if nevertheless deliberately – to
market their particular agenda for women’s rights and also to insist upon women’s place
in national memory.”65
Narrowed focus on suffrage marked much of the movement from 1870 onward.66
Carol Faulkner describes how in January 1869, Lucretia Mott “presided over the first
women’s suffrage (as opposed to women’s rights) convention.”67 Though publications like
the Woman’s Journal and Anthony’s speeches would highlight multiplicity of aims, the
overall institutional push was towards suffrage.68 From 1869 until 1920, Jean Baker argues,
“the expansive intentions of nineteenth-century feminists disappeared into narrower,
mostly local service projects that had little impact on the status of women . . . the time-
consuming work of suffrage campaigns made attention to other causes impossible.”69
Out of Stanton and Anthony’s NWSA and the focus on suffrage came the “New
Departure,” a strategy based upon a novel argument: women did not need to argue that
the vote be given to them because they already had it. The citizenship, equal protection,
and due process guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment were given to all citizens, and
women as people were citizens, entitled to the franchise. Victoria Woodhull appeared
before the House Judiciary Committee to make the case.70 Adopting the strategy, women
– ranging from two elderly sisters in Connecticut to the Grimkés and fifty others in
Boston to 200 black women dressed in men’s clothing in North Carolina – attempted to
vote in the years leading up to the 1872 presidential election.71 Mary Olney Brown wrote
to Frederick Douglass to argue specifically that African American women, too, were
included, this time in the Fifteenth Amendment.72 Ellen Dubois notes the radical nature
of this strategy: like the upstate New York petitioners of 1846, the New Departurists
boldly claimed a right they insisted was already – naturally – theirs.73
Two court cases quickly dashed their hopes. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), the Supreme
Court rejected Illinois lawyer Myra Bradwell’s application for admission to the bar,
denying that the Constitution gave married women the right to employment. Two
years later, the justices turned down Virginia Minor’s claim that voting was a right of
citizenship. Two years after Susan B. Anthony had been put on trial for voting in a
presidential election – a “signal that Republicans were ready to dispose of the New

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Departure” – Minor v. Happersett (1875) marked its end, though Belva Lockwood would
run for president in 1884 and 1888.74 In response, suffragists protested the next year, the
centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Lucy Stone urged women to celebrate
the 4th of July as a “chance for moral protest . . . for before another hundred years it must
surely be that the growth of public sentiment will sweep away all distinctions based solely
on sex.”75 Anthony and others “pirated press passes to gain entry to the main events and
to present a Declaration of Rights of Women,” signed by hundreds of women.76
Suffragists found some solace by looking west. After the Civil War, suffrage referen-
dums had been held in five states, and by 1892 four western states – Wyoming, Idaho,
Colorado, and Utah – had approved universal suffrage.77 A founding generation of
western suffragists made some gains in what Rebecca Mead describes as its frontier
period; concerned about their lacking political and economic rights, western activists
established regional networks.78 Summer 1871 saw Anthony and Stanton traveling west
to witness suffrage in action in Wyoming and Utah. The West was no feminist utopia,
however. Mead acknowledges that, as in the East, racism marred the movement’s ideals.
She describes how California suffragist Anna Ferry Smith, a labor radical, invoked
anti-Chinese sentiment to bolster support.
As much as the national institutional histories matter, there was not a singular woman’s
rights, or even a singular women’s suffrage, movement in the late nineteenth century.
Lisa Tetrault writes, “It was, however, more accurately a collection of movements, goals,
strategies, and leaders,” and she describes postwar suffrage as “a diverse and uncontrol-
lable social movement.”79 Rebecca Mead draws attention to working-class women’s
place in postwar suffrage. “In the past, historians neglected working-class support for
woman suffrage,” she writes, “because middle-class suffragists perpetuated the false
assumption that urban, immigrant populations were consistently hostile.”80 Leonora
Barry’s work to organize female workers with the Knights of Labor offers a useful
example of working-class suffrage work.81 In Breadwinners, Lara Vapnek suggests that
scholars need to look at efforts to win economic equality alongside suffrage, writing that
working women engaged in an “equally intense, if less well-documented struggle to win
full economic equality.”82
African American women, too, laid out a postwar definition of women’s rights. In
1876 women in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church effectively gained the right
to vote and hold office.83 And such change was also recognized by those focusing on
white women’s political power: at an 1874 NWSA convention, Anthony and Stanton
proposed that the rights of churchwomen be included in their list of demands.84 Though
the majority of African American women did not have much opportunity to participate
in organized suffrage activities, Mary Ann Cary, Frances Harper, and others did.85 Harper
argued at the AWSA convention in 1873 that women of color needed the vote even
more than white women.86 In 1880, Cary organized the Colored Women’s Progressive
Franchise Association in Washington, D.C.87 At times African American groups could
work in interracial alliance with white women, but this was far from always the case.
Bettye Collier-Thomas describes how Harper – an educated, refined woman in positions
of leadership – was “in some ways disturbing” to women such as Stanton and Mott.88 And
while Truth was courted by some white suffragists, Harper, whose rhetoric was more
“barbed,” was not.89

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For many feminist historians, there is a disappointment with the late nineteenth-cen-
tury shift, not only with its racist and nativist bent, but with the movement towards a
more conservative suffrage fight. This proves especially true once woman suffrage
received an endorsement from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Frances
Willard in 1884.90 Dubois chalks up suffragists’ acquiescence to sheer defeat: during the
New Departure, women attempted to “march into power directly” – and were soundly
defeated.91 Christine Stansell describes how “temperance softened and domesticated
women’s suffrage by ladening the issue with religiosity and maternal moralism. It was not
because of women’s natural rights but because of their motherly virtues that they deserved
political rights.”92 She continues, “The suffrage movement did, unquestionably, incorpo-
rate a broader spectrum of opinion than it did before the Civil War. Such is the definition
of coalition, but such is also the stuff of frustration for intellectuals.”93
To early women’s rights activists like Stanton, suffrage was never intended to be con-
servative or based upon women’s special gender proclivities. Dubois notes that early
suffrage radicals saw it as “the capstone of women’s emancipation,” and Ginzberg reminds
readers that for Stanton, the vote was never “a sufficient end in itself.”94 Instead, it stood
for her broader vision of a “world that no one, then or now, could truly imagine: one
that separated sex from reproduction, that saw women in positions of power, that denied
biblical teachings about women’s subordination to men, and that challenged men’s rule
of their households.”95 Nancy Isenberg, too, argues that early conventions’ pursuit of
entitlement to rights, national citizenship, and equality under the law were radical in
nature: they were “contest[ing] the meaning of ‘consent of the governed’” and making
claims that were nothing less than “revolutionary.”96

Conclusions, New Directions, and Possibilities

By the time temperance adherents adopted the cause of woman suffrage, the Stanton/
Anthony and Stone factions were nearly reconciled. In 1890, they came together in the
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and a new generation of
women’s rights activists (including Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch) would
soon take the helm. In many (often frustrating) ways, our knowledge of that generation’s
achievement – the Nineteenth Amendment – has continued to shape our search for women’s
rights in the nineteenth century. Is there a way to incorporate broader conceptions of
what women’s rights entailed?
Re-imagining history, Nancy Hewitt reminds us, is no easy task. But she challenges
historians to “recast” the narrative nonetheless, by better including

the meaning of women’s rights for African American, American Indian, Mexican
American, immigrant, and white working-class women; by highlighting the entire
range of issues addressed by early women’s rights advocates, whatever their back-
ground; by recognizing the ways that international events – the Mexican-American
War, revolutions in Europe, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and the
Wars of 1898 – shaped the early U.S. women’s movement; and by reframing the
suffrage movement through the lens of racial, ethnic, class, regional, and ideological
differences at the local and state as well as national level.97

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Alison Sneider’s recent Suffragists in an Imperial Age is a perfect example of the kind of
work Hewitt advocates.98
The biographical turn in women’s history also offers new arenas and ways in which
women’s rights histories can be reimagined.99 The list of biographies of figures, famous
and otherwise, is ever-growing, with one winning a recent Pulitzer.100 And historians are
completing more biographical projects. Patricia Cline Cohen’s forthcoming work on
Mary Nichols Gove, for instance, promises to correct how women such as Gove were
marginalized from the mainstream women’s rights movement – in their own day and in
our recasting of that day in the historical record. To Gove, Cohen argues, the right of
self-ownership was the salient aspect of women’s rights.101 New study of figures such as
Gove might offer new ways to search for discussion of self-ownership, personhood, and
citizenship claims across the field as a whole, and offer perhaps a way to integrate various
women’s rights constituencies. In a recent work, Alison Parker looks at the shared beliefs
of such reformers as Fanny Wright, Harper, Willard, and Mary Church Terrell, particu-
larly their belief in the obligation of the federal government “to legislate for women’s
political and social reform goals.”102
Are there “more complicated, racially egalitarian” histories of early feminism such as
Carol Faulkner has found in the biography of Lucretia Mott?103 What kind of women’s
rights were imaginable, to reformers and radicals as well as the broader population? And
where do ideas of citizenship and nation fit in? I am still awed by Lori Ginzberg’s 1846
upstate New York petitioners, ordinary women who did the astounding work of claiming
rights for women as “natural rights.”

Notes
1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. I (New York: Fowler & Wells,
1881), 61–62.
2 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed.
(1959; Cambridge: Belknap, 1975), 71. Keith Melder also emphasizes the importance of this
moment in The Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1800–1850
(New York: Schocken, 1977).
3 Sally McMillen’s recent Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009) was the first book on women’s history in a series on pivotal
moments in American history. Seneca Falls also looms large in Flexner, Century of Struggle;
Ellen Carol Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement
in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Elisabeth Griffith, In Her
Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). For
another consideration of Seneca Falls, see Vivian Rose et al., “Seneca Falls Remembered: A
Roundtable on Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s
Rights Convention,” Public Historian 21 (Spring 1999): 11–47.
4 Nancy Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a ‘Master’ Narrative in U.S.
Women’s History,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 21. In a new preface to her pathbreaking
Feminism and Suffrage (1978), Ellen Dubois notes, “Decisions about where to start and where
to stop are crucial in giving shape to the history one chooses to examine and interpret” (7).
5 Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?” 25.
6 Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
7 Many prominent women’s rights activists (most especially, Stanton and Anthony) are the
subject of a host of biographies. It is not possible in the constraints of this essay to discuss

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the rich historiographical field, but I encourage interested readers to seek out these
historiographies as well.
8 Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 58. “Declaration of Sentiments,” as quoted in McMillen, Seneca Falls
and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, 237–239.
9 “Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, held at Worcester, October Fifteenth and
16th, 1851” (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1852).
10 Quoted in Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 64.
11 Not all women’s rights reformers had the same priorities. Ginzberg notes, “For Anthony,
economic opportunity and true independence required political equality and the rest would
follow. The issues of marriage, divorce, child rearing, and religion, all of which would
increasingly absorb Stanton’s time and attention, struck her friend as secondary and certainly
irrelevant to her own experience.” Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 79.
12 Sylvia Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 94.
13 Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on
Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,” American Journal of Political Science
48 (Oct. 2004), 707–722; Sandra Stanley Holton, “‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,”
American Historical Review 99 (Oct. 1994), 1112–1137; Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer
Stewart, eds., Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Perspectives on Abolition and Woman’s Rights
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
14 Sherry H. Penney and James D. Livingston, A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and
Women’s Rights (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 68.
15 Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2. See also Maggie McFadden, Golden Cables of
Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2014); Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s
Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
16 Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 65.
17 Mrs. F. D. Gage, “Sojourner Truth,” Herald of Progress (New York), May 16, 1863: 3. On
Truth, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton,
1996); Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2009). Rosalyn Terborg-Penn notes that Truth spoke over the objections of some white
women at the meeting. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote,
1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 16.
18 Martha Jones, All Bound up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture,
1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 71.
19 Terborg-Penn notes, “African Americans may not all have been driven to attend the gathering
because they identified chiefly with the white feminist agenda. Perhaps people of color came
to the convention as abolitionists with an agenda focused on helping Black people, including
Black females.” Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 17. See also
Willi Coleman, “Architects of a Vision: Black Women and Their Antebellum Quest for
Political and Social Equality,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann
Gordon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
20 Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 8. The indefatigable Ann Gordon has
worked to gather and make accessible the papers of Anthony and Stanton, allowing us to
chronicle their incredible partnership. For her reflections on this project, see Ann Gordon,
“Who Replaces Stanton, Anthony, and Stone?” Public Historian 21 (Spring 1999): 35–40.
21 For broad history, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in
Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). By 1860, fourteen states
had passed property rights law. Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 41.

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22 Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century
America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 159. See also Ellen Dubois,
“‘The Pivot of the Marriage Relation’: Stanton’s Analysis of Women’s Subordination in
Marriage,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Dubois and Richard
Cándida Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 89.
23 Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006), 67.
24 As quoted in Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1998), xi.
25 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, xii.
26 Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, 31. Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in
the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
27 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966):
151–174. In recent years, scholars have challenged the concept of separate spheres. See, for
example, Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” Journal of American
History 75 (June 1988): 9–39; Alison Parker and Stephanie Cole, eds., Women and the Unstable
State in Nineteenth-Century America (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000);
Carol Lasser, “Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion,” Journal of the Early
Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 115–123; Mary Kelley, “Beyond the Boundaries,” Journal of the Early
Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 73–78; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist
Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 79–93; Cathy
Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies
Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
28 Alice B. Neal, “The Constant, or the Anniversary Present,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 42 (1851): 65.
29 Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press,
1997), 57. See also Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, Modern Motherhood: An American History (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 31.
30 Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-
Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
31 Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise, 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2011),
72. On women and politics, see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American
Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Melanie Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2001).
32 Wendy Gamber refers to the mid-nineteenth century as the golden age of the home. Wendy
Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007), 2. See also Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-
Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
33 Jane Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American
West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3. See also Melissa
Ryan, “Others and Origins: Nineteenth Century Suffragists and the ‘Indian Problem,’” in
Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, ed. Christine Ridarsky and Mary Huth
(Rochester: University of Rochester, 2012), 117–144.
34 Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons and Power: Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001). Vivian Gornick chronicles the anguish that
mockery inspired in Lucy Stone and others. Gornick, Solitude of Self, 72–74.
35 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the
Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 4.
36 Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in 19th Century America (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Faye Dudden describes the Stone-Blackwell
marriage as “a highly publicized experiment in the new, more equal marital relationship that
the women’s movement promoted.” Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman
Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 6.

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37 Patricia Cline Cohen, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols: A
Radical Critique of Monogamy in the 1850s,” Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2014) 34:1.
38 Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd
ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
39 Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994), 127.
40 Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New
York: New York University Press, 2005), 74. Linda Gordon identifies it as the first of three
major movements in the development of modern reproductive politics, and cautions that we
should not dismiss it. “It expressed exactly the emphasis on choice, freedom, and autonomy for
women around which the women’s rights movement was unified.” Linda Gordon, The Moral
Property of Woman: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2002), 4.
41 Gordon, Moral Property of Woman, 22. She adds that “the right of the wife unilaterally to refuse
her husband” was “at the heart of voluntary motherhood.” It was a key substantive demand in
the mid-19th-century, when both law and practice made sexual submission to her husband a
wife’s duty. A woman’s right to refuse was the fundamental condition of birth control – and of
her independence and personal integrity” (61). See also Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An
Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1860,” Signs 4 (Winter 1978): 219–236.
42 For more on the effects of the Civil War upon American women, see, for example, Catherine
Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the
Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996); Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Judith Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood:
The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 2000); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation
Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Wendy Hamand Venet,
Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia, 1991).
43 Elizabeth Leonard, “Mary Walker, Mary Surratt, and Some Thoughts on Gender in the Civil
War,” in Clinton and Silber, Battle Scars, 110.
44 LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. ch. 1.
45 Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 151.
46 Leonard, “Mary Walker, Mary Surratt, and Some Thoughts on Gender in the Civil War,” 107.
47 Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
48 Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 215. See also Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household:
Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995).
49 Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage; Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s
Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Hannah
Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the
Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
50 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 82; Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets.
51 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 22. See also C. C. O’Brien, “‘The White Women All Go for Sex’:
Frances Harper on Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Reconstruction South,” African American
Review 43 (Winter 2009): 605–620; Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth,
Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle
for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42–55.

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52 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of
Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57–58, 59.
53 Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in
America, 1848–1869, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 175.
54 Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1981).
55 Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–
1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 5.
56 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 92. Importantly, Stansell criticizes Stanton for her inability to dwell
in the “region of facts” of postwar anti-black violence instead of abstract principle (91). Though
at the heart of her work is a story of the achievement of an independent women’s movement,
Ellen Dubois, too, concedes, “The position Stanton and Anthony took against the Fifteenth
Amendment reveals . . . [that] their objections to the amendment were simultaneously feminist
and racist.” Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 174. For another take on the split, see Andrea Kerr,
“White Women’s Rights, Black Men’s Wrongs: Free Love, Blackmail, and the Formation of
the American Woman Suffrage Association,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the
Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press,
1995), 61–79. For Stanton’s relationship with black reformers, see Elisabeth Griffin, In Her
Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For
a provocative examination of the nature of the original feminist project and the racial legacy it
has bestowed to American women, see Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial
Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a
helpful discussion of citizenship and exclusionary rhetoric and practices, see Evelyn Nakano
Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. 18–55.
57 Ann Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote: On Account of Race or Sex,” in Dubois and
Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker, 111–127.
58 Dudden, Fighting Chance, 3. Dudden argues, though, that we need to take seriously Stanton
and Anthony’s belief that they had a “fighting chance” to win suffrage and not just assume they
were ahead of their time, as she says Eleanor Flexner did. For a very useful historiographic
overview, see Fighting Chance, 3–12. For another take on the postwar, in which expansionism
was brought in, see also Alison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the
Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 3–18.
59 Lori Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
2009), 122.
60 Gornick, Solitude of Self, 105.
61 Jean Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Macmillan, 2006), 42. Other
scholars see more distinction, positioning the AWSA as more conservative than its counterpart.
Ann Gordon argues, “The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) swam with the
political tide, rarely working directly for passage of the sixteenth amendment after 1871 when
to do so required opposing the new respectability of states’ rights. Founded at the instigation
of Lucy Stone a few months later in 1869 than the National, the American pursued an idea that
local and partial suffrage victories would build popular support for women’s political
participation and enable women to pyramid their power from school district to township to
municipality to state and, eventually, to gain full voting rights. Political equality for women
need not disturb constitutional relations or upset local political practice.” Ann Gordon,
“Woman Suffrage (Not Universal Suffrage) by Federal Amendment,” in Votes for Women! The
Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 11.
62 Baker, Sisters, 42.
63 Baker, Sisters, 43.
64 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 4
65 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 9. See also Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. In
the History, the AWSA was largely overlooked, and Anthony famously referred to the “narrow

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pig-headedness” of Stone for not responding to her requests for information. McMillen, Seneca
Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement, 223. See also Sally McMillen, Lucy Stone:
An Unapologetic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 222; Ginzberg, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, 153–158.
66 For a good overview, see Gordon, “Woman Suffrage by Federal Amendment,” 3–24.
67 Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century
America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 195. Faulkner also describes
Stanton’s polemical eulogies for Mott, where she argued both for suffrage and to uphold
NWSA as chief guarantor of it (215).
68 Jean Baker describes how Anthony’s 1877 lecture, “Homes of Single Women,” “articulated
the radical position that marriage must not define the female existence.” Baker, Sisters, 62. For
discussion of contents of the Woman’s Journal, see McMillen, Lucy Stone, 192–193.
69 Jean Baker, “Getting Right with Woman’s Suffrage.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive
Era 5 (Jan. 2006), 7.
70 Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in
Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
71 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 101.
72 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” in
One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler
(Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1995), 141.
73 Ellen Dubois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance
in the 1870s,” in Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote, 81–98.
74 Dubois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands,” 94. See also Norma Basch, “Reconstructing
Female Citizenship: Minor v. Happersett,” in The Constitution, Law, and American Life: Critical
Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Experience, ed. Donald Nieman (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1992), 52–66. For broad context, see Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and
the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). On Lockwood, see Jill Norgren,
Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York: New York University Press,
2007).
75 Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. II, 1861–1876 (New York:
Fowler & Wells, 1882), 830.
76 Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Women’s Rights
Convention (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 227. Her final chapter, “The Road
from Seneca Falls, 1848–1982,” is especially useful.
77 Scholars debate the reasons why suffrage succeeded faster in the West. Rebecca Mead ascribes
it to “the unsettled state of regional politics, the complex nature of western race relations, broad
alliances between suffragists and farmer-labor-progressive reformers, and sophisticated activism
by western women.” Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 1. For another perspective, see Beverly
Beeton, Women Vote in the West: The Woman Suffrage Movement, 1869–1896 (New York:
Garland, 1986).
78 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 34.
79 Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls, 47, 53.
80 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 9.
81 On Barry, see Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the
Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (1983): 323–339. See also Flexner,
Century of Struggle.
82 Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence (Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 2009), 1. See also Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning
Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ann Schofield, “Rebel
Girls and Union Maids: The Woman Question in the Journals of the AFL and IWW, 1905–
1920,” Feminist Studies 9 (Summer 1983): 335–358.
83 Jones, All Bound up Together, 135.

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84 Jones, All Bound up Together, 141. This is not to say that Jones portrays white and black
women as in any sort of easy alliance. African American women, she writes, “insisted that an
intersectional analysis, one that simultaneously took up race and gender, was required.”
85 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn finds evidence of women of color in both the AWSA and NWSA.
She adds, too, that not all black women agreed with a single goal of suffrage. Terborg-Penn,
African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 42, 48–49.
86 Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” in African American Women and the
Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann Gordon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 54–55.
87 Terborg-Penn, “African American Women and the Suffrage Movement,” 142. See also Jane
Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
88 Collier-Thomas, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” 57. See also Alison Parker, “Frances
Watkins Harper and the Search for Women’s Interracial Alliances,” in Ridarsky and Huth,
Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, 145–171.
89 Nell Irvin Painter, “Voices of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the
Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean
Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42–55. Painter describes the creation of
a “new symbolic Truth – the Stanton-Anthony suffragist. The Stanton-Anthony Truth
tended first and last toward women . . . Since . . . Harper would not separate the woman in
her identity from the black, she disappeared from the Stanton-Anthony history” (53).
90 For a discussion of how Willard substituted a “feminism of fear” for one based on equal
rights, see Suzanne Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United
States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). See also Carolyn de
Swarte Gifford, “Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s
Conversion to Woman Suffrage,” in Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote, 117–133.
91 Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 83. She also equates it to modern feminism: “Here in the post-
Civil War years, we can see proponents of women’s rights as they move from universal to
particularistic arguments, providing us with the Gilded Age equivalent of the shift from
‘equality’ to ‘difference’ in the feminism of our own time.” Dubois, “Taking the Law into
Our Own Hands,” 82. See also Ellen Dubois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers:
Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution,” Journal of American
History 74 (Dec. 1987): 836–862.
92 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 114. For an intriguing discussion of temperance as “maternal
feminism” (in comparison to “equal rights feminism”), see Janet Giele, Two Paths to Women’s
Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1995). See also Holly Berkley Fletcher, Gender and the American Temperance
Movement of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008); Ruth Bordin, Woman and
Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1982); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and
Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981).
93 Stansell, Feminist Promise, 117.
94 Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage, 40; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 64.
95 Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 67.
96 Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, 21.
97 Hewitt, “From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?” 16.
98 Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age. She argues that “the story of woman suffrage is at once
a history of women, but also one of racial conflict, states’ rights, federal power, and the
meaning of citizenship in the new Union” (5).
99 See, for example, the excellent roundtable in the American Historical Review from June 2009,
especially articles by women’s historians Lois Banner and Alice Kessler-Harris. Alice Kessler-
Harris, “Why Biography?” American Historical Review 114 (June 2009): 625–630; Lois Banner,
“Biography as History,” American Historical Review 114 (June 2009): 579–586.
100 Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2014).
While biographies of famous figures such as Stanton, Stone, and Anthony continue to appear,

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other biographies will help uncover less-known women – and perhaps recast our understanding
of how early reformers defined “women’s rights.” See, for example, Marilyn Blackwell and
Kristen Oertel, Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2010).
101 Cohen, “‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols,” 6.
102 Alison Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the
State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 8.
103 Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy, 216.

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 18
R ACE, C RIME , AND S EG R EG A T I O N

Vivien Miller

During the late hours of July 23, 1900, an altercation between three white police officers
and a well-dressed but armed black man named Robert Charles took place in New
Orleans. Charles shot at these officers, and more of their colleagues a few hours later. By
dawn on July 24, he had killed two police officers, including the local precinct captain,
and wounded at least one other. He evaded capture for four days as mobs of “Negro
hating” whites repeatedly sought violent and bloody revenge, killing at least six African
Americans and wounding seventy. Tipped off as to Charles’s whereabouts on July 27,
police officers, state militia, and thousands of mainly white armed citizens and onlookers
quickly surrounded the building. With his back against the wall and no possibility of
survival, Charles continued to fire from the besieged building in an “intentionally symbolic
act of violent resistance,” shooting twenty-four people before he was killed.1
The wider context for this extraordinary spree killing of twenty-seven whites, includ-
ing seven police officers, by a lone black gunman was the 1898 codification of black
disfranchisement and racial segregation in Louisiana; economic unrest and growing racial
animosity in the city over jobs; white criticisms of African American behavior, specifi-
cally a lack of deference to whites, particularly in public spaces; the pervasiveness of racial
violence in late nineteenth-century southern society; and the failure of increasingly lily-
white police forces and courts to protect African Americans. Charles’s disillusionment
with these conditions led him and many others to the black homeland messages of the
International Migration Society and African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry M.
Turner of Atlanta.2 Yet, in July 1900 he also embodied the powerlessness, alienation, and
resentments of a generation of young black men across the South, born out of slavery but
condemned to second-class citizenship, and who were frequently harassed by police,
criticized by politicians, and demonized in white newspapers. Many routinely carried
cheap and readily available handguns for self-defense, and were prepared to use them.3
Not only did the granting of civil and political rights to former slaves in the aftermath
of the Civil War fundamentally alter the relationship between the individual and the state,
but newly-freed men and women exercised their new rights to bring complaints against
whites and other blacks to the Freedman’s Bureau and local courts. The steady flow of
domestic, divorce, and sexual violence charges from black and lower-class white women
in the late 1860s and early 1870s for example shows their willingness to seek redress, even
where the courts were generally unsympathetic or passed lenient sentences.4 Further,
during Reconstruction, black police, jurors, and legislators, and a select number of black

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attorneys, served in jurisdictions across the southern region, and the last restrictions on
African American testimony in court were removed.5 However, control of criminal justice
– Justices of the Peace or magistrates, police and sheriffs, juries and judges – remained at
the center of post-emancipation social, political, and economic conflicts, particularly as the
end of Reconstruction brought changes to the composition of courts, and as black law-
makers and law enforcers were voted out of office.6 Crime and punishment were also
important components of the wider political economy of the late nineteenth-century
South, especially as instruments of racial, gender, and labor control.7 And, from the late
1860s to the early 1900s, the defeat of Republican governments, the disfranchisement,
segregation, and exclusion of African Americans, and the restoration then maintenance of
Democratic Party political power were to be achieved by violence, fraud, and intimida-
tion as well as the expansion of criminal penalties for African Americans and lower-class
whites.8 By the late 1890s, acts of resistance to disfranchisement and segregation, such as
refusing to sit in a “colored-only” railroad car, were also criminal acts.9
This chapter explores the incidence of crimes against the person and property,
including homicide, rape, larceny, and arson, the creation of new miscegenation and
sexual violence offenses, and summary justice in the South during the last third of the
nineteenth century. The laws governing criminal offenses were generally written in race-
neutral terms but offenders encountered systems of laws and punishments that were
increasingly subjective in their application, particularly following the reestablishment of
white Democratic political dominance. One historian of the period notes that while
urban lower-class blacks

were subject to the kinds of discrimination faced by poor people in general, they
also suffered because of racial bias. A higher percentage were arrested and
convicted of crimes and their sentences were more severe than those of whites
charged with comparable offenses. At no time during the interval from arrest to
punishment was it forgotten that the individual was black.10

Nevertheless, local and state criminal justice systems continued to evolve, from
Presidential then Radical Reconstruction to the economic and political crises of the late
1880s and early 1890s. We find therefore that there was no single timetable for customary
or de jure disfranchisement and racial segregation, but considerable variation across coun-
ties, towns, and cities in the sixteen states within the southern region. The motivations
for black and white criminal actions, as well as popular and legislative responses towards
these, also continued to shift throughout the postwar decades.11 At the same time, the
exclusion of African Americans, from police forces and juries for example, was becoming
the regional norm by the turn of the century. In the 1870s African American men had
served as police officers in many cities across the South, and continued to do so in
Memphis, Jacksonville, and New Orleans for example even after the end of Reconstruction.
They did so amid growing white hostility to their presence and powers. Virtually all
black police officers had disappeared by 1910.12
Consequently, this discussion moves across and between several different historio-
graphical debates, including: the emergence of the New South, the origins and timing of
de jure racial segregation, the role of local and state, and federal appellate criminal justice
systems in sanctioning segregation and a two-tier system of crime and punishment for

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white and non-white southerners, the development of the “modern” police, the explo-
sion of vigilante violence and lynching aimed primarily at African Americans in the late
1880s and 1890s, and causation theories for southern violence and criminal activity.13 The
discussion also draws on important broad-brush analyses such as Roth’s work on homi-
cide patterns as well as local or micro studies that reveal more of the complexities of the
incidence and treatment of crimes against persons and property and the roles of the courts
and prison systems to discipline and punish.
Traditionally, crimes against the person and property were subsumed within the larger
category of “southern violence” along with lynching, vigilantism, and riots. By the early
1970s, cultural influences such as enduring frontier conditions, elevated rates of gun own-
ership, a persistent tradition of honor, and high levels of religiosity, as well as white south-
erners’ inability to come to terms with their mid-nineteenth-century history of defeat and
occupation, and sectional suspicion of national government, were often used to explain
the region’s violent past and present. Social scientists also highlighted the impact of struc-
tural factors such as poverty, educational inequality, and political exclusion.14 A gradual
uncoupling of law and order, policing, and de jure criminal activity from extra-legal forms
occurred from the late 1970s. In his bold analysis of urban conditions and race relations in
five state capitals undergoing tremendous population growth and economic development
in the post-emancipation decades, Rabinowitz charted the burgeoning and vibrant black
urban communities but also the early evolution of the color line.15 In his seminal study of
nineteenth-century crime and justice, anchored in case studies of one urban and two rural
Georgia counties, Ayers explored the impact of the national market economy on southern
crime, control, and punishment, particularly the rise of predominately black prison pop-
ulations and the adoption of convict leasing.16 Yet, as these works also show, the symbi-
otic relationship between the expanding criminal and penal apparatus in every southern
state in the decades after the Civil War and continued support from individuals and com-
munities for nightriding, vigilantism, lynching, and other extra-legal methods remains
central to our historical understanding of race, gender, class, and injustice in the late
nineteenth century.17
Over the past twenty-five years the expanding scholarship on southern crime and pun-
ishment, including local and state as well as regional studies, has provided more nuanced
understandings of criminal activity, victimization, and social order. At the same time,
overall knowledge of “ordinary” crimes of murder, robbery, burglary, and assault in dif-
ferent states, of the work of police, sheriffs, and constables, and even of lynching still
remains rather patchy.18 We do know that definitions of crime and regimes of punishment
in different jurisdictions were also being shaped by black resistance to and lower-class
white disregard for state-imposed segregation and disfranchisement in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, as well as elite white concerns. In addition, prosecutions and
punishments were intrinsically gendered. Women were victims, witnesses, and defend-
ants; they did not preside over trials, serve on juries, or police their neighborhoods.
Further, the law was a masculine, public profession, and legal elites generally comprised
middle- or upper-middle-class, educated white men, as there were few African American
practitioners.19
Using local and state studies to make regional generalizations can be very problematic,
but it is possible to discern important changes to homicide patterns in the post-emancipation

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decades. By the turn of the century, the South had surpassed the Southwest as the most
homicidal region in the United States, although it was not as homicidal as it had been in
the wake of Confederate defeat.20 In a period of widespread disorder, vigilante terror, and
legal uncertainties, bands of white men roamed rural areas attacking African Americans as
they worked, and in their homes at night. They stole food, clothing, weapons, and land,
prevented night-time travel and black assembly, and deliberately assaulted freedwomen.
Rosen views the rape of black women as part of an orchestrated campaign of sexual
aggression in the South in the 1860s and 1870s, to undermine patriarchal power and bring
dishonor to black families.21 The aggressive and homicidal activities of the Klan and other
groups in the late 1860s before rigorous federal enforcement legislation came into force in
the spring of 1871, and as white public support declined, were fueled by political
impotence, racial prejudice, economic desperation, and claims of honor.22
The decline in regional homicide rates from the mid-1870s to the late 1880s in both
urban and rural areas paralleled the defeat of Radical Reconstruction and resumption of
conservative white male Democratic Party rule.23 For example, the post-1877 mean
homicide rate in Louisiana’s rural counties fell from 89 to 35 people per 100,000 of
population, and from 35 to 25 per 100,000 in New Orleans; in Georgia’s post-1872
mountain counties the rate fell from 53 to 12 per 100,000, and from 24 to 16 per 100,000
in plantation counties. Whites were killing fewer African Americans as well as fewer
fellow whites, but black homicide rates did not fall as dramatically. In fact, in New Orleans,
the black homicide rate increased from 11 to 30 per 100,000 as the toxic combination of
anger, powerlessness, hyper-masculinity, and honor (defined in terms of self-respect, self-
worth, and reputation) spurred violent intra-racial responses to slights, insults, and
disparaging comments, as well as domestic killings.24 Similarly, of the forty-two homicides
recorded by the Savannah coroner between 1895 and 1898, twenty-eight of the victims
were black and fourteen were white, all but four of the whites had been killed by other
whites, and all but five of the blacks by other blacks.25 At the same time, southern cities
continued to experience high levels of personal violence that included numerous riots and
massacres, as in Savannah, Georgia (1868), Danville, Virginia (1884), and Wilmington,
North Carolina (1898), as well as other forms of communal action.26 For example, around
200 African Americans in Atlanta fought police officers after they had clubbed a black man
accused of pushing a white woman off the sidewalk in 1881.27
Nieman’s rural and small-town case study of Washington County, Texas, from 1868 to
1884 demonstrates that Republican political success ensured black electoral influence that
in turn made juries and judges more responsive and justice less inequitable. For example,
one-quarter of the deputies appointed by the four white Republican sheriffs elected
between 1870 and 1884 were freedmen, black participation on juries was common,
intra-racial crimes were taken seriously, and African American defendants were generally
“less likely to be subject to capricious indictment.”28 Nevertheless, more blacks than
whites were charged with crimes against the person, and nearly 80 percent of African
Americans charged “had allegedly attacked members of their own race.”29 In murder
cases, African Americans were convicted at a higher rate than for whites (59 percent com-
pared to 35 percent) and received severer sentences. In cases of assault with intent to kill,
whites were more likely to be convicted of a lesser offence (especially if the victim was
black) and to receive a fine rather than a prison term.30 Similarly, in Warren County,

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Mississippi, African American participation in the legal system during Reconstruction also
ensured some degree of fairness for a very limited period. At least 50 percent of grand
jurors were black between 1870 and 1873. In these years, over 70 percent of prosecutions
for murder involved white victims and white defendants, while black-on-black crimes
accounted for 8 percent of all cases, but grand juries were still twice as likely to indict
when the murder victims were white.31 As Democratic rule was reestablished in both
counties, African American participation and indictments against whites both declined
noticeably.32
Even so, southern white homicide rates were still higher than in other regions, because
of partisan violence between Republicans and Democrats, honor conflicts (linked to the
preservation of rank and the respect of others, and concern for reputation and commu-
nity standing), and labor and domestic disputes. Further, when the federal government
determined to collect excise taxes from liquor distillers in the 1880s and 1890s, informers
and revenue agents were often targeted by bands of nightriders and whitecaps. Holmes
notes that informers, often other moonshiners who hoped to avoid prosecution, were
paid to reveal the location of their neighbor’s stills, “thereby contributing to a sense of
distrust within communities and giving rise to deadly feuds and vendettas.” In addition,
under the banner of “moral authoritarianism,” nightriders dispensed summary justice to
prostitutes, petty thieves, and wife-beaters in several coordinated raids on Dalton,
Georgia, for example, but also targeted local blacks who were deemed to have challenged
white supremacy. The involvement of law officers in these secret societies and participa-
tion in their activities underscored the blurring of formal law and justice and illegal but
community-approved sanctions, while the impossibility of securing convictions from
terrorized or sympathetic jurors highlighted the limitations of the formal justice system.33
The revenue wars continued to fuel white lawlessness, community feuds, and revenge
killings in northwestern Georgia and neighboring states in the 1890s and 1900s.34
Most historians agree that while African American thieves, burglars and other property
offenders were more readily pursued through the courts, incidence of black property
crime was increasing in the 1860s and early 1870s. The inability and/or unwillingness of
planters to pay wages to black workers and a reduction in plantation rations left freed
families destitute in the immediate aftermath of the war. Poverty and desperation encour-
aged theft and landowners sought to deter stealing through rigorous prosecution and
punishment.35 In his study of the Klan as “an instrument of agrarian repression” in 1868–
1871 Alabama, Fitzgerald suggests that because petty theft affected a wide cross-section of
the community, small-scale white farmers were key actors in the Klan crackdowns on
black thieves rather than this being a predominately planter-led labor-control exercise.36
On one occasion in 1868 Klansmen “held a crossroads trial of several suspected thieves
and gave one of them two hundred lashes.”37 In Louisiana, whites also avoided the courts
and used lynching to counter “African American criminality and resistance.”38 There is
evidence of black resistance. Smith’s study of two Black Belt counties in Georgia pits
arson as a “violent interracial protest, or form of revenge for the racism and poverty that
defined the region’s race relations,” particularly in the 1870s and 1880s. Black arsonists
attacked white-owned cotton gins, barns, stables, and storehouses, usually during the fall
and winter months after the harvest and as new sharecropping contracts were being
negotiated.39

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Arson accounted for a small percentage of black and white conviction rates in these
years. For example, in Florida, the majority of the prison population in the 1890s and
1900s had been convicted of breaking and entering, larceny, assault with intent to
murder, grand larceny, or murder.40 Across the region, larceny complaints reaching the
courts came from white planters as well as black offenders’ neighbors and workmates, and
involved a wide array of goods. Nieman found that three times as many blacks as whites
were indicted for property offences in Washington County, and the gap widened again
from the mid-1870s.41 Ayers found that seventeen times as many blacks as whites were
indicted for property offenses in Greensboro County, Georgia, between 1866 and 1879.
However, prosecution rates still fluctuated. Ayers attributed higher numbers of prosecu-
tions of African Americans for property crime in Chatham County, Georgia between
1872 and 1875 and increases in custodial sentences to larger changes in the urban economy
as jobs and wages contracted after the Panic of 1873. Similarly, Myers found that Georgia
penitentiary admissions rose and punishments increased in severity between 1873 and
1879 as cotton prices fell.42
Theft of crops and livestock was particularly acute, as such articles could be readily
converted into cash. Horse theft, for example, accounted for 20 percent of all property
crime indictments in Washington County, and freedmen accounted for 80 percent of
those charged.43 However, the “Negro chicken thief” remains the enduring racial trope of
the period. For white Democrats, he was evidence of the “failed masculinity” of the
freedman who could not provide for his family and was therefore unworthy of citizenship,
and of the inability of Republican governments to preserve law and order.44 One white
South Carolinian observed in 1877, “Whenever larceny, burglary, arson and similar
crimes are committed in the South, no one is suspected save negroes.”45 Curtain notes
that in the Black Belt, the association between African Americans and theft “grew so
strong as to damn an entire race.”46
Property laws were used to discipline and punish offenders but also to curtail black
political and economic independence and stymie consumer competition. White merchants
and landowners in Alabama secured legislation in 1874 that criminalized the black-
operated informal roadside markets and “deadfalls” or small stores patronized by black
agricultural workers and which offered better prices and credit arrangements than white-
owned counterparts.47 This lends support to Rabinowitz’s view that, “Rather than func-
tioning as a protector of Negroes, laws existed throughout most of the period to discipline
them.”48 Holloway identifies a region-wide push between 1874 and 1882 (preceded by
Florida in 1868) to use disfranchisement for minor property crimes to reduce African
American voting and restore Democratic Party dominance. Legislators in Mississippi and
Arkansas adjusted their penal codes so that misdemeanor property offenses were upgraded
to felonies, while state constitutions in Alabama and Virginia were amended so that grand
and petit larceny were included in expanded lists of dis-franchisable offenses.49 In Alabama,
for example, stealing part of a corn or cotton crop was defined as grand larceny (a felony)
and offenders could receive up to five years’ imprisonment at hard labor.50 In 1882
the South Carolina legislature added burglary, larceny, perjury, and forgery to the list of
felonies that would result in disfranchisement.51
The best known example is Mississippi’s 1876 “Pig Law” under which the value of
goods stolen for the offense of grand larceny was reduced from 25 to 10 dollars, and

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the theft of certain livestock valued at less than 10 dollars (including hogs and pigs) was
also grand rather than petit larceny, and thus conviction would result in a prison
sentence and felon disfranchisement.52 The laws were written in race-neutral terms but
their implementation was not, and on election days Democratic Party leaders worked
with local police and judges to ensure that the disfranchised, along with other African
American men who were deliberately and falsely accused of having criminal records,
could not vote.53 Several historians have identified vigorous prosecution of larceny and
other property offenses as a key driver of post-Reconstruction rising prison populations
and the expanding convict lease system. In the 1940s Wharton explicitly linked the
“Pig Law” to prisoner increases in Mississippi from the late 1870s, and subsequent
studies have repeated this.54 Oshinsky reports that, “Arrests shot up dramatically and
numbers of state convicts quadrupled from 272 in 1874 to 1,072 by 1877.”55 However,
Mancini has questioned both Wharton’s figures – which do not tally with the official
published prisoner counts – and the linear connection between the legislation and the
perceived outcome, particularly as the state prison population declined between 1877
and 1889.56
The leasing of convicts to private railroad companies, naval stores and turpentine
operators, farmers, and coal and later phosphate mining companies quickly became
embedded in the penal and disciplinary apparatus by the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the
political economies of most southern states. The labor of county and state prisoners was
sold to private contractors, and these men, women, and children were enslaved in vicious
and degrading conditions. Early exposés often highlighted the importance of race and
climate to explain the peculiarities of “backward” southern penal practices; later studies
have emphasized the similarities between antebellum slavery and convict leasing, and the
links between the emergence of the lease and the need for post-emancipation racial
control. Yet, convict leasing was more than just a functional replacement for antebellum
slavery; it was a key component in a wider network of unfree labor and debt peonage
systems. However, leasing enabled southern governments and private entrepreneurs to
embrace industrial transformation and infrastructural modernization at minimal cost while
perpetuating white supremacy and ensuring black (and to a lesser extent lower-class white)
labor control.57
Leased convicts were generally lower-class unskilled laborers, and they had been con-
victed of a wide range of offenses from murder and robbery to lewd and lascivious behav-
ior, bigamy, and fornication. In the last third of the nineteenth century, sexual and social
relations increasingly came under popular and judicial surveillance. The 1865 South
Carolina “Black Code” contained the first state law barring marriage between whites and
blacks, but additional state prohibitions appeared with the end of Radical Reconstruction.58
Intimate contacts between people of different races were still evident. For example, the
daughter of a wealthy Port Gibson (Mississippi) planter married Haskins Smith in July
1873, who was a state senator but also one of her father’s former slaves.59 Miscegenation
convictions were usually affirmed by state supreme courts, but not always because laws
prohibiting racial intermarriage necessitated clear statutory definitions of “Negro” and
other racial categories. One woman’s conviction for miscegenation was overturned by the
Virginia Supreme Court in 1877 because she did not have at least one-quarter of “Negro
blood” and therefore was not a “Negro” person.60

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There was strong opposition to interracial sex and marriage from both blacks and
whites. The former resented the abuse of black women by white men who continued to
exercise customary rights that had disappeared when slavery ended, and the perpetuation
of stereotypes of the inherently licentious black woman. White fears of “racial amalgama-
tion” or “miscegenation,” and of widespread venereal disease among non-whites, the
popularity of pseudo-scientific theories and calls for the preservation of white racial
purity, and growing hysteria over black male sexuality, spurred new sanctions.61 The
State of Alabama criminalized adultery and fornication in 1881; first-time offenders could
expect a fine of up to one hundred dollars and a six-month custodial sentence. The pen-
alties increased with each additional conviction. The same law also criminalized interra-
cial marriage, adultery, and fornication, offenses which were punishable by up to seven
years in prison. African American Tony Pace and Mary J. Cox, who was white, were
convicted of fornication and adultery in November 1881. Two years later the US
Supreme Court ruled that these laws did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment
and their convictions were upheld. Other southern states followed Alabama’s lead.
Maximum terms of imprisonment in their anti-miscegenation statutes ranged from six
months in Georgia to ten years in Florida, Mississippi, and North Carolina.62 Again, these
laws were ostensibly gender- and race-neutral but unions between black men and white
women were primarily targeted.63
The growing hysteria over black male sexuality also drove the lynching epidemic of
the early 1890s, where the murders of blacks by whites were routinely dismissed as
justifiable homicides, or committed “by persons unknown” despite evidence to the
contrary. However, Hill notes that in the early 1880s African Americans had yet to
become the primary targets of lynch mob violence, and that black mobs in the Mississippi
and Arkansas Delta occasionally engaged in intra-racial vigilantism in response to violent
crimes, often involving the murder and/or rape of young women and children by young
black male farm laborers, because the “white” criminal justice system failed to provide
redress for black victims and complainants.64 Between 1882 and 1930, at least 3,400
African Americans were killed by lynch mobs in the United States. Roth found that
lynching claimed the lives of at least 0.24 whites and 2.4 blacks per 100,000 adults per
year across the South in the 1890s.65 Again, the failures of the formal criminal justice
system were used to justify community actions. Whites criticized the formal legal system
for its inability to provide appropriate sanctions for black rapists or redress for white
female victims, but refused to acknowledge that those who participated in extra-legal
actions were lawbreakers and common criminals.
The 1890s saw the rise of “spectacle lynchings” where thousands watched the torture
and execution of African Americans accused of committing murder and/or rape against
white victims. These dramatic displays of white supremacist power were calculated to
reinforce black terror and submission.66 In April 1899, an itinerant black laborer, Sam
Hose, who had admitted killing a wealthy white resident of Newnan, Georgia with an
axe following a dispute over unpaid wages, but who was also accused of raping the man’s
wife, was killed, mutilated, and burned in front of approximately 2,000 whites.67 In the
same way that Robert Charles was characterized as the black monster in New Orleans’s
midst, Sam Hose epitomized the black beast rapist of the fin-de-siècle Deep South. United
States Senator and former governor of South Carolina, Benjamin Tillman, told his

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Washington colleagues, “When stern and sad-faced white men put to death a creature in
human form who has deflowered a white woman, they have avenged the greatest wrong,
the blackest crime.”68
Rape stereotypes were used to justify extra-legal violence as well as unfair treatment
within the legal system. Court records show that women were most likely to be raped by
a man from the same race and class background, and often by people they knew including
family members, neighbors, and employers. The refusal to take intra-racial rape as seriously
as black-on-white rape impacted on the reporting of offenses, as well as prosecution and
conviction rates. Edwards found that the race of the victim and attacker was critical in
determining the outcome of sexual assault cases in Granville County. African Americans
were more likely to be arrested and harsher sentences including capital punishment were
more likely to be imposed on black males if the victim was white.69 Thirty years later,
racial discrepancies in arrest and prosecution rates were still very evident. Between 1899
and 1905, Savannah police arrested fifteen black males for attempted rape, compared to
three white men, and 446 African Americans for “licentious conduct” compared to nine
whites.70 In sheriff’s offices and police stations, black female rape complainants faced an
uphill battle to have their claims taken seriously because it was assumed they were lying or
had consented to sexual violence, and if they did get to court, they were routinely subject
to vitriolic character assassinations. Further, black men who were convicted of raping
black women were usually given lesser sentences and had a greater chance of successful
clemency appeals.71
Newspaper reports reinforced popular views that there was a growing crime problem
from the late 1880s and 1890s.72 Many white southerners believed that “bad niggers”
including gangs, vagrants, and drunkards were responsible, and supported crackdowns
on black vagrants and public disorder. There were genuine offenders, and even some
famed black outlaws or “bad men” such as Harmon Murray of the “north Florida gang,”
but urban blacks found themselves targeted by police and Justices of the Peace.73 However,
Hair attributed much of the disorder in 1890s New Orleans to gangs of “white ruffians”
who provided muscle for the local Democratic Party machine.74 Regional homicide rates
had increased during the economically turbulent years as cotton prices fell, and as the
political power of conservative Democrats was threatened by agricultural protest movements
such as the Farmers’ and Colored Farmers’ Alliances, as well as Republican and Populist
Party challenges.75 For example, in the 1890s to early 1900s homicide rates rose from 12 to
23 per 100,000 in the Georgia mountain counties and from 16 to 30 per 100,000 in the
Piedmont plantation counties, from 27 to 71 per 100,000 in South Carolina, and from 125
to 800 per 100,000 in the upper Cumberland of Kentucky and Tennessee.76 By the late
1880s and early 1890s, control of criminal justice was once again at the center of larger
political battles.77 For example, in Orange County, east Texas, Populists and Republicans
controlled the courts, the sheriff’s office, and the county commissions in the 1890s, then in
1899–1900 “Democrats used every means at their disposal, including arson, lynching,
assassination, and armed assaults, to cripple the Populist and Republican leadership, to drive
blacks out of the county, and restore white rule.”78 Yet, black intra-racial murder rates
continued to rise too, which Roth attributes not to slavery or the failures of Reconstruction,
but to “the hopelessness and rage that the political disaster of the 1890s and 1900s
engendered.”79 One black Nashville resident complained,

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We cannot see why we should be watched more vigilantly by the police,

apprehended for smaller offenses, and condemned with less hesitation than are
the whites; why we are excluded almost invariably from serving on juries; why
we are subjected to the awful lynch law, a visitation so seldom happening to a
white man.80

The late nineteenth century was an important period of racial, legal, and penal transition
between the end of civil war and slavery and the completion of black disfranchisement
and racial segregation in communities across the South, but the end results were deeply
problematic for lower-class whites and particularly African Americans. These included
the use of racialized categories of offending, automatic presumptions of guilt when the
accused was non-white, the lack of equal protection under the laws for black men,
women, and children, and the use of punitive regimes of punishment to discipline petty
as well as serious offenses, all of which would endure through much of the twentieth
century also.

Notes
1 Five white police officers were dismissed from the New Orleans police force for cowardice
because of their conduct during this episode. For a full account of the case and a compelling
portrait of Mississippi-born Robert Charles, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert
Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (1976; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2008), quote at 150; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence, Black Response: From Reconstruction
to Montgomery (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 63; W. Fitzhugh Brundage,
“Foreword” to Carnival of Fury, xviii; Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence
and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
2 Randolph A. Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),
432; Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 194.
3 The hardening of racial attitudes in the late nineteenth century was clear in newspaper reporting
on Charles as a black monster. See excerpt from “Making of a Monster,” New Orleans Times-
Democrat, July 29, 1900, quoted in the opening credits of Hair, Carnival of Fury, vii. On
handguns, see also Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155.
4 Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-
Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 124–126; Christopher
Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–1880 (Urbana-
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 120–145; Laura F. Edwards, “Sexual Violence,
Gender, Reconstruction, and the Extension of Patriarchy in Granville County, North Carolina,”
North Carolina Historical Review 68 (1991): 237–260.
5 Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 36–37.
6 Mary Frances Berry, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the
Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of American History 78.3 (Dec. 1991): 835–856, at 836.
7 Recent historical studies of southern prisons in the nineteenth century include: Alex
Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South
(New York: Verso, 1996); Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the
American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); David M.
Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York:
Prentice Hall, 1997); Karen A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor

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in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998);
Martha A. Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1998); Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida’s
Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000); Mary Ellen Curtain, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2000); Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The
Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Random
House, 2008); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2010); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict
Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For analysis of
how this earlier period connects to the contemporary penal situation, see Alex Lichtenstein,
“Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the
Postwar Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102.1 (June 2015), 114.
8 See, for example, Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 157–159, 166–169.
9 Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896) began with an arrest in 1892 for a breach of Louisiana’s
law mandating racial segregation on its trains. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 144–145.
But black challenges to segregated transport date back further. See, for example, Waldrep,
Roots of Disorder, 148–149.
10 Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 43.
11 See, for example, Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War
Louisiana, 1866–1884 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000); Jane Dailey, “Deference
and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South: Manners and Massacres in Danville, Virginia,”
Journal of Southern History 63.3 (Aug. 1997): 553–590.
12 W. Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
14–18.
13 Pioneering studies in the longstanding historiography on the origins and timing of customary
and legal segregation, fluidity in early post-Reconstruction race relations, racial separation and
racial exclusion, and black and lower-class white disfranchisement, include: C. Vann
Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1951, 1971); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1955, 1966, 1974); C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and
Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); J. Morgan Kousser, The
Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–
1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Howard N. Rabinowitz, “From Exclusion
to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865–1890,” Journal of American History 63 (Sept.
1976): 325–350; Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South; Joel Williamson, The Crucible
of Race: Black-White Ethnic Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984); Ayers, The Promise of the New South; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender
and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), especially chs. 1 and 2. See also C. Vann
Woodward, “Review of Race Relations in the Urban South,” Journal of Southern History 44.3
(Aug. 1978): 476–478; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing
the Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75.3 (Dec. 1988): 842–856; C.
Vann Woodward, “Strange Career Critics: Long May They Persevere,” Journal of American
History 75.3 (Dec. 1988): 857–868; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “The Origins of a Poststructural
New South: A Review of Edward L. Ayers’s The Promise of the New South: Life After
Reconstruction,” Journal of Southern History 59.3 (Aug. 1993): 505–515.
14 Classic works on “southern violence” include H. C. Brearley, “The Pattern of Violence,” in
Culture in the South, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935),
678–692; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1941); Sheldon Hackney,
“Southern Violence,” in The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,
ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Praeger, 1969), 505–527; Raymond

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D. Gastil, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” American Sociological Review 36 (June
1971): 412–427; John S. Reed, “To Live – and Die – in Dixie: A Contribution to the Study of
Southern Violence,” Political Science Quarterly 86 (Sept. 1971): 429–443; John Shelton Reed,
The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books,
1972); Colin Loftin and Robert H. Hill, “Regional Subculture and Homicide: An Examination
of the Gastil-Hackney Thesis,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 714–724; Richard
Maxwell Brown, “Southern Violence – Regional Problem or National Nemesis? Legal Attitudes
Toward Southern Homicide in Historical Perspective,” Vanderbilt Law Review 32 (1979): 219–
233; M. Dwayne Smith and Robert N. Parker, “Types of Homicide and Variation in Regional
Rates,” Social Forces 59 (1980): 136–147; Steven F. Messner, “Regional and Racial Effects on
the Urban Homicide Rate: The Subculture of Violence Revisited,” American Journal of Sociology
88 (1983): 997–999. Later studies include Christopher G. Ellison, “An Eye for an Eye? A Note
on the Southern Subculture of Violence Thesis,” Social Forces 69 (1991): 1223–1239; Richard
E. Nesbitt and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder:
Colorado State University Press, 1996); Matthew R. Lee, William B. Bankston, Timothy C.
Hayes, and Shaun A. Thomas, “Revisiting the Southern Culture of Violence,” The Sociological
Quarterly 48.2 (Spring 2007): 253–275.
15 See Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, especially ch. 3 on “Justice.” The five state
capitals are Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville, Raleigh, and Richmond.
16 Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
17 See, for example, George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob
Rules, and ‘Legal Lynching’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Christopher
Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
18 See Michael J. Pfeifer, “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching: Collective Violence in
Reconstruction Louisiana,” Louisiana History 50.2 (Spring 2009): 189–201. The main study of
police in the South in the nineteenth century remains Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern
City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).
Historians have also rather neglected southern sheriffs. The only single state study is William
Warren Rogers and James M. Denham, Florida Sheriffs: A History, 1821–1945 (Tallahassee, FL:
Sentry Press, 2001). Additional sources for African American police, sheriffs, and other criminal
justice personnel during the Reconstruction period include: Dulaney, Black Police in America;
Howard N. Rabinowitz, ed., Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1982); Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during
Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Matthew Lynch,
Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA:
ABC-CLIO, 2012).
19 Berry, “Judging Morality,” 835–836; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 176; Laura F. Edwards,
“Women and the Law: Domestic Discord in North Carolina after the Civil War,” in Local
Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South, ed. Christopher Waldrep and
Donald G. Nieman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 125–154; Miller, Crime,
Sexual Violence, and Clemency, 79–80.
20 Roth, American Homicide, 387, 421.
21 Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of
Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009),
179–230. See also Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White
Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3
(1993): 402–417.
22 See also Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); George C. Rable, But There Was No
Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1984).

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23 There is an ongoing debate among criminologists, historians, geographers, and law academics
over the reliability of sources (such as police arrest records, coroner’s reports, county and city
death registers, and newspapers, which frequently use different recording criteria), how to
quantify and measure incidents of murder, manslaughter, vehicular homicide and so on, and
how to draw meaningful comparisons between different jurisdictions. See, for example, Eric H.
Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981); Douglas Lee Eckberg, “Estimates of Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Homicide Rates: An
Econometric Forecasting Approach,” Demography 32.1 (Feb. 1995): 1–16; Eric H. Monkkonen,
“Estimating the Accuracy of Historical Homicide Rates: New York City and Los Angeles,”
Social Science History 25.1 (2001): 53–66; Eric H. Monkkonen, “Homicide in New York, Los
Angeles, and Chicago,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92.3 (Spring 2002); Pieter
Spierenberg, “American Homicide, What Does Evidence Mean for Theories of Violence and
Society,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 15.2 (2011); Randolph Roth, “Yes
We Can: Working Together Toward a History of Homicide That is Empirically, Mathematically,
and Theoretically Sound,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies 15.2 (2011).
Roth’s seminal study of four centuries of homicide in British North America and the United
States skillfully confronts many of these challenges, but much work remains to be done in
examining homicide – and other offences – in counties and states across the region.
24 Roth, American Homicide, 411–414, 411n54, 414n61, 416, 432.
25 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 336n16.
26 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 162–163; Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the Postbellum
Urban South”; David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The
Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998).
27 Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 337; Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the
Postbellum Urban South,” 571.
28 Donald G. Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice: Washington County, Texas,
1868–1884,” Journal of Southern History 55.3 (Aug. 1989): 391–420, quote at 419.
29 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 407–408; Rabinowitz, Race Relations
in the Urban South, 45; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 231.
30 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 414.
31 Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 143; Karlos K. Hill, “Black Vigilantism: The Rise and Decline of
African American Lynch Mob Activity in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta, 1883–1923,”
Journal of African American History 95.1 (Winter 2010): 32–33.
32 A useful summary of southern law enforcement during Reconstruction is in James Campbell,
Crime and Punishment in African American History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 60–83.
33 William F. Holmes, “Moonshining and Collective Violence: Georgia, 1889–1895,” Journal of
American History 67.3 (Dec. 1980): 589–611.
34 Roth, American Homicide, 413, 422. See also Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners:
Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991).
35 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 405; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 161–
164, 169; Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 154; Mary Ellen Curtain, “‘Negro Thieves’ or
Enterprising Farmers? Markets, the Law and African American Community Regulation in
Alabama, 1866–1877,” Agricultural History 74.1 (Winter 2000): 23–24; Pippa Holloway, “‘A
Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote’: Disfranchisement for Larceny in the South, 1874–1890,”
Journal of Southern History 75.4 (Nov. 2009): 943, 956.
36 Michael W. Fitzgerald, “The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in
Reconstruction Alabama,” Agricultural History 71.2 (Spring 1997): 186–206.
37 Fitzgerald, “The Ku Klux Klan,” 192.
38 Pfeifer, “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching,” 201.
39 Albert C. Smith, “‘Southern Violence’ Reconsidered: Arson as Protest in Black-Belt Georgia,
1865–1910,” Journal of Southern History 51.4 (Nov. 1985): 527–564.

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40 Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency, 126.

41 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 402.
42 Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 172; Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, especially
ch. 5, “Admissions to the Penitentiary,” 81–120.
43 Nieman, “Black Political Power and Criminal Justice,” 405.
44 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 940, 958.
45 Quoted in Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 176.
46 Curtain, “‘Negro Thieves’ or Enterprising Farmers?” 33.
47 Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1985), 242–244.
48 Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 31. See also Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing,
and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History
Review 26 (Oct. 1982): 37–64.
49 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 931.
50 Perman, The Road to Redemption, 259–260.
51 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 945.
52 Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 57–58; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of
the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2014), 390.
53 Holloway, “‘A Chicken-Stealer Shall Lose His Vote,’” 961.
54 See, for example, Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 234–242; Perman, The Road to Redemption, 243;
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and
Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104; Stephen Cresswell, Rednecks,
Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877–1917 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2006), 46, 108.
55 David M. Oshinsky, ‘Worse Than Slavery’: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
(New York: Free Press, 1996), 40–41, 40n22.
56 The official figures are 375 convicts in 1874 rising to 1,003 in 1877; see Mancini, One Dies,
Get Another, 135–136.
57 Campbell, Crime and Punishment in African American History, 87–112; Vivien Miller, “‘A Perfect
Hell of Misery’: Real and Imagined Prison Lives in an ‘American Siberia,’” in Transnational
Penal Cultures: New Perspectives on Discipline, Punishment and Desistance, ed. Vivien Miller and
James Campbell (London: Routledge, 2015), 144–161.
58 Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 179. Not surprisingly, interracial intimate and sexual
relations had been a fact for centuries. For earlier observations on this, see, for example, Carter
G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” Journal of
Negro History 3.4 (Oct. 1918): 335–353.
59 Waldrep, Roots of Disorder, 154.
60 Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 181.
61 Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 152; Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 177–185.
62 Pace v. State, 69 Ala. 231 (1881); Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883). In Pace and Cox v. State
(1881), the Alabama appellate court affirmed the legality of imposing stricter penalties on
interracial fornication or adultery than on illicit intercourse between members of the same race,
pointing out that the penalties were applied equally to both races. See Bardaglio, Reconstructing
the Household, 185.
63 Anti-miscegenation laws were not exclusive to the South but integral to the national story of
racial lawmaking. See Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of
Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
64 Hill, “Black Vigilantism,” 27–28, 36–37. Hill notes that in 1884, for example, there were 160
white and 51 black lynch victims, but in 1892, 160 African Americans and 69 whites were

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lynched. He also estimates that 36 individuals were executed by black lynch mobs between the
1880s and 1920s.
65 Roth, American Homicide, 420, 426n85: “From 1889 to 1903, lynchings claimed the lives of 0.3
per 100,000 adults per year in Virginia, 0.7 per 100,000 in Kentucky, at least 0.8 per 100,000
in Texas, and 1 per 100,000 in the rest of the South.”
66 Hill, “Black Vigilantism,” 38–39.
67 For discussion of the Hose lynching see Shapiro, White Violence, Black Response, 63; Jennet
Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008); Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Cultures and Police Power after
Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Edwin T. Arnold, What Virtue
There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2009).
68 Quoted in Mary E. Odem, “Cultural Representations and Social Contexts of Rape in the
Early Twentieth Century,” in Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, ed.
Michael Bellesiles (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 364.
69 Edwards, “Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction,” 237–260.
70 Leslie K. Dunlap, “The Reform of Rape Law and the Problem of White Men: Age-of-
Consent Campaigns in the South, 1885–1910,” in Crossing Boundaries in North American History,
ed. Martha E. Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 357n38.
71 Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency, 175–216.
72 By the late nineteenth century, African Americans were considered more likely to commit
certain types of offenses compared to whites, including rape, burglary, theft, and arson. The
“Negro’s known tendency to crime” was also remarked upon, in large part because arrest and
prison data seemed to confirm these stereotypes. See Ratliff v. Beale, 74 Miss. 247 (1896);
Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898); Roland P. Falkner, “Prison Statistics of the United
States for 1888,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 1.7 (Sept. 1889): 7.
73 Billy Jaynes Chandler, “Harmon Murray: Black Desperado in Late Nineteenth-Century
Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 73.2 (Oct. 1994): 184–199. See also Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978); John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black
Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
74 Hair, Carnival of Fury, 83–84.
75 Roth, American Homicide, 418–420; Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 34–54; Woodward,
Origins of the New South, 150–174.
76 Roth, American Homicide, 420. White rates then began to decline modestly after 1900.
77 There is an extensive literature on lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
that examines changing patterns in relation to numbers of victims, geography or location,
economic and political challenges to Democratic Party rule, and particular triggers or catalysts.
See, for example, Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York, 1892);
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial
Violence,” in Powers of Desire, ed. Ann Snitow (New York: Monthly Press, 1983), 328–349; E.
M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, “The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Markets for
Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882–1930,” American Sociological Review 55 (Aug. 1990):
526–539; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death:
Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Michael J. Pfeifer,
Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2004); Bruce E. Baker, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871–1947
(London: Continuum, 2009); Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, Lynched: The Victims of
Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
78 Roth, American Homicide, 427.
79 Roth, American Homicide, 434.
80 Quoted in Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 59.

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 19
THE PARADO X OF T HE
BUSINE SS AND P O L I T I C A L
ECONOMY OF THE N EW S OUT H

Natalie J. Ring

When the Civil War ended, the nation faced many questions in the wake of region-wide
economic devastation, the collapse of the Confederacy as a governing body, and the
emancipation of four million former slaves. What sort of reconstruction process would
the South and the nation undergo? Who would run this new South? Would the planta-
tion system remain in effect even though slavery had been abolished? What was the status
of African Americans going to be and what rights would they enjoy? The executive and
legislative branches battled with each other over these issues until Congress seized control
through passage of the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, an action that divided the
South into five military districts and in many ways treated the region as a conquered land.
Congressional Reconstruction marked the nation’s first commitment to interracial
democracy. The subsequent passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the
flourishing of an indigenous black grassroots political movement, and the oversight of
Union troops turned southern politics inside out. Yet these revolutionary changes were
fleeting, owing to the incredible escalation of violence initiated by southern whites against
African Americans and their supporters, the lack of sustained commitment on the part of
the Republican Party, and the Compromise of 1876 which invariably led to the last
federal troops being pulled from the South. White southerners in control quickly redou-
bled their efforts through continued violence, rewrote their state constitutions, instituted
an oppressive system of sharecropping rooted in the use of the crop lien, and passed local
and state laws mandating segregation. This period, which southern whites referred to as
Redemption, ushered in a wave of white supremacy that did not begin to erode until the
middle of the twentieth century.
Of central concern to historians of the post-Civil War era has been the degree to
which the political economy of the South differed from the North during this period, the
nature of the rupture caused by the war and emancipation, and the distribution of polit-
ical power to shape the economy. The field of southern history, particularly as it pertains
to the region’s political economy, has long been concerned with questions of regional
distinctiveness, incorporating debates about continuity and discontinuity in the subtext.
This essay will engage with several aspects of the political economy of the New South,
with a particular focus on cotton. First, I begin by outlining the nature of the debate
over southern distinctiveness, in particular the role it played in setting the terms for
discussion about the region’s economy. I describe how academic interest in continuity or

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discontinuity between the political economy of the Old South and the New South has
been intrinsically tied to the question of distinctiveness. The concept of distinctiveness,
however, did not depend on the idea of continuity nor preclude one from arguing that
the Civil War marked a sharp break with what came before. Thus historians could argue
for both distinctiveness and discontinuity. Second, I explain how a late nineteenth-
century belief in what I call the paradox of poverty and progress – that the South para-
doxically seemed to be moving toward modernization while simultaneously remaining in
a state of backwardness – shaped historiography on the political economy of the South
with its fixation on the continuity–discontinuity and North–South binary. Indeed the
historical actors themselves struggled with this enigma as well. Third, I explain how there
are two ways to break free from the propensity to frame the history of the political
economy in the South in terms of the region’s agrarian rural characteristics as contrasted
with the North’s industrial modern features. One is to embrace the paradox itself, settling
for the idea that the New South displayed features of continuity and discontinuity. The
other option is to adopt a global perspective. Rather than looking at the relationship
between the South and the nation on a regional and national scale it is more fruitful to
expand the units of analysis. Locating southern history in a complex web of intersecting
regional, national, and global discourse, practices, and designs will illuminate more about
the postbellum political economy and return to the important work suggested by an
earlier group of scholars whose work has seemingly been forgotten.
The idea of southern difference in contrast with the North is a relatively old one. As
early as the eighteenth century both northerners and southerners drew attention to the
inherent differences between North and South. Thomas Jefferson made the celebrated
observation that the North could be described as “cool, sober, laborious, persevering,
independent, jealous of their own liberties and just to those of others, interested, chican-
ing, superstitious and hypocritical in their religion” and the South as “fiery, voluptuary,
indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those
of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of
the heart.”1 During the antebellum period countless American and foreign travelers to the
South perceived the region as a foreign land apart from the rest of the nation and wrote
extensively about southern decadence, backwardness, and indolence.2 In his work Free
Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Eric Foner demonstrates how in the 1850s the free labor ideol-
ogy of the Republican Party drew contrasts between the independent enterprising middle
class of the North and the impoverished lazy poor whites of the South.3 Reports of stag-
nancy and backwardness in the South lent credence to Republican assertions that slavery
impeded the development of democracy and posed a tremendous obstacle to national
growth. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries growing numbers of
Progressive reformers began to focus on the distinctive economic problems plaguing
the South, struggling to reconcile what they saw as the paradox of poverty and progress
– the persistence of southern regionalism in the face of national modernization.4
Questions about southern distinctiveness paralleled the professionalization of the dis-
cipline of history with the founding of the American Historical Association and the
Mississippi Valley Historical Association (which later became the Organization of
American Historians). As they drew the boundaries of the discipline, historians embraced
the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion between North and South, eager to move
away from the sectionalism of the past that had contributed to the Civil War and

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Reconstruction.5 But the question of southern distinctiveness as an explanation for the

past still had relevance in some quarters. For example, historians Charles and Mary Beard,
in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), described the Civil War as a conflict rooted in
contrasting economic systems and called it a “social cataclysm in which the capitalists,
laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national govern-
ment the planting aristocracy in the South,” making it an “irrepressible conflict.”6 Indeed,
the North–South binary – identification of a conflict between a rural, agrarian South
and the industrial, urban North – was a powerful construct that shaped the discipline of
southern history for generations to come.
In addition, the belief in southern distinctiveness influenced how historians understood
the question of continuity and change in the post-Civil War South. Charles and Mary
Beard argued for the existence of southern economic difference and underscored the sig-
nificance of discontinuity in the past. They were part of a group known as the “New
Historians” or “Progressive Historians,” who resisted the profession’s earlier commitment
to steadiness and continuity.7 Discontinuity, with its focus on class conflict and the exist-
ence of antagonistic economic systems, was the operative framework for Progressive his-
torians who saw the Civil War and Reconstruction as a monumental historical moment.
Yet it was possible to believe in southern distinctiveness and also embrace the idea of
continuity in the South over the course of the nineteenth century. The search for the
“central theme” in southern history led scholars such as U. B. Phillips (1928) to assert that
what made the South different was the conviction that the region “shall be and remain a
white man’s country,” and W. J. Cash (1941) to declare that the South differed from “the
general American norm” because of its continuity and homogeneity in thought across
time, particularly in its allegiance to what Cash called the “Savage Ideal.” Cash also noted
that despite evidence of industrialization, the ethos of the New South was no different
than the Old South and the region was “not quite a nation within a nation, but the next
thing to it.”8 In Phillips’s and Cash’s accounts, southern distinctiveness was presumed to
be the engine of continuity.
The argument for continuity between the Old South and the New South represented
a dominant consensus view of history that was not thoroughly challenged until C. Vann
Woodward wrote Origins of the New South (1951). Woodward adopted a Beardian analysis
and framed his argument around the northern industrial–southern agrarian binary.
Woodward argued that not only did the war mark a sharp rupture from what came
before but even in the postbellum era the South retained its distinctiveness. Thus discon-
tinuity and distinctiveness were not mutually exclusive. Woodward maintained that the
Reconstruction governments were pro-business from the beginning. When Reconstruction
ended in 1877 those in power retained their commercial focus. In fact, the process by
which southern white Democrats took control of their region was swift and set “the
lasting foundations in matters of race politics, economics, and law” in the modernizing
South. “Redemption was not a return of an old system nor the restoration of an old ruling
class,” Woodward insisted. “It was rather a new phase of the revolutionary process begun
in 1865.”9 A new group of southern middle-class industrialists reestablished power deci-
sively and reached out to northern capitalists in an effort to establish a unified economic
order. Woodward argued that the old planter class lost its political and economic status in
the postbellum South as an industrial bourgeoisie rose to the top.

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Yet this new group of industrialists in the postbellum South could not compete with
the wealth and power of northern industrialists. Indeed they found themselves, as
Woodward described, acting as “agents, retainers, and executives – rarely as principals.”10
Southern industrialists were committed to commercial progress but they were always sub-
ordinate to northern finance. For example, Woodward showed how the railway system in
the South was consolidated by northern robber barons. J. Pierpont Morgan initiated the
railway grab when he assumed control of 4,500 miles of rail under the Southern Railway
and then rapidly expanded to 7,500 miles.11 Other northerners took over the region’s
coalfields and the southern iron and steel industries. Northern textile mill operators
expanded their operations in the South, attracted by the region’s lower taxes, cheap labor,
and proximity to raw materials. In short, Woodward argued that the postbellum South
was a colonial economy, entirely separate from and completely subordinate to the national
economy.12 Thus although a new class of rising industrialists contributed to manufacturing
and industrial progress and the former planter aristocracy lost control, the South still suf-
fered from poverty and remained largely rural.
Part of the Woodward narrative about discontinuity and distinctiveness included a
description of how workers and farmers challenged the power of this new southern com-
mercially oriented class in the face of rising destitution. The South may have been making
industrial gains but the yeoman farmer’s status was in decline. Rather quickly the merchant
and the planter merged into one class and instituted a system that broke up large parcels of
land into smaller farms. Woodward explained how the crop lien system “was no respecter
of race or class” and operated as “the new evil” in the postbellum South.13 In order to
subsist, farmers raised cotton principally because it was a cash crop that would draw the
highest price on the market. In exchange for foodstuffs, farming implements, fertilizer, and
seed, landowners and merchants would issue crop liens whereby farmers’ future harvests
served as guaranteed collateral. If the market price of cotton was low or the yearly harvest
meager, farmers found themselves coming out of “settling time” owing more than their
crop was worth. Overproduction of the crop might satisfy the demand of manufacturers
since it lowered market prices and insured a steady supply. But low prices left the farmer
struggling to survive; thus the crop lien system carried the fundamental seeds of poverty
and debt.
Because of the declining advancement of the agrarian class, one could make the case
that the South in 1900 was hardly different from the South on the eve of the war. In 1860
scarcely 10 percent of the South’s population lived in urban areas, the region’s manufac-
turing output amounted to 10 percent, and the South held only 11 percent of the United
States’ manufacturing capital.14 New Orleans was the only southern city in the top largest
cities in the United States.15 Most of the South’s wealth came from land, slaves, and export
agriculture. The Northeast, however, was far more industrialized, with 36 percent of the
population residing in urban areas. The West followed with 16 percent and the Midwest
with 14 percent. In 1900, thirty-five years after the end of the war, seemingly not much
had changed. The region was only 18 percent urban with 10 percent of the population
laboring in manufacturing. The North, in comparison, had an urban population of 40
percent and 25 percent of its people in manufacturing jobs.16 At the turn of the twentieth
century the South still relied on a plantation system based on one-crop agriculture and
suffered from underdevelopment, rural poverty, and weak state governments with

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minimal central authority. The plight of the cotton grower looked bleak. A series of
depressions in the last decade of the nineteenth century hit southern farmers exceptionally
hard; combined with exorbitant interest rates and declining cotton prices they led to
heavy indebtedness and loss of land. Political agitation in the farmer class reached a zenith
with the development of the Populist Party which criticized a system that had produced
a large class of farmers powerless to extricate themselves from debt and unable to achieve
independent ownership. The new system of sharecropping and tenancy defined the
South’s distinctiveness for decades to come.17
Woodward’s book has done more than any other book to shape the ensuing debate
about the political economy of the New South, particularly deliberation over how back-
ward and impoverished the New South was in comparison to the industrial modernizing
North and whether this distinction implied continuity or not with the antebellum period.
Woodward’s story about class conflict and discontinuity was a challenge to the standard
consensus narrative that guided much of the history of the South as well as American
history up until that point. His thesis that the planter elite was replaced by a new southern
bourgeoisie that made an alliance with northern capitalists suggested a break with the Old
South, but Origins also explored the reasons why the New South remained impoverished
in spite of rapid industrialization. Economic historians took a particular interest in what
Woodward called “colonial agrarianism.”18 Gavin Wright agreed that southern back-
wardness and poverty were a defining feature of the New South in spite of the rise of a
new class of postwar landlords. However, Wright paid closer attention to the function of
the labor market than Woodward. Slaveholders’ wealth derived more from slaves than it
did from land, and after the war these planter-landlords invested their money in property
to be worked by cheap labor. Thus what made the South unique, Wright insisted, was the
development of a “separate regional labor market” isolated from the national and global
labor markets. In short, Wright explained, “the South was a low-wage region in a high-
wage country,” a system that insured “‘southern backwardness’ and ‘black poverty’”
would persist until the 1940s.19 Like Wright, economists Roger L. Ransom and Richard
Sutch sought to explain why the postbellum southern economy did so poorly in relation
to the rest of the nation, but they were also interested in focusing explicitly on the expe-
rience of African American farmers. Ransom and Sutch demonstrated through quantita-
tive methods that although newly emancipated black farmers had the power as free agents
to make contracts with landowners, the system of sharecropping and tenancy was incred-
ibly exploitative because merchants created “territorial monopolies.” For example, inter-
est rates in the 1880s ranged from 51.7 to 74.6 percent.20 The “one kind of freedom” that
Ransom and Sutch documented in their book was not much of a freedom at all, as black
farmers evolved into a landless peasantry kept in check by violence, lack of access to edu-
cation, and southern whites’ belief in the inferiority of the black race which was part of
the “legacy of slavery.” The economists, however, pointed out that emancipation was a
source of conflict “not because blacks were incapable of establishing their independence,
but because they asserted their independence and insisted upon institutional arrangements
more to their liking than those envisioned for them by whites.”21
One did not need to rely on an argument about discontinuity coupled with distinc-
tiveness, however, to explain why the South’s agrarian economy remained in a state of
backwardness and racial exploitation. Jonathan Weiner, Dwight Billings, and Jay R.

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Mandle made the case for the persistence of the planter class and the weakness of the
commercial class in the post-Civil War period, challenging Woodward’s assertion that a
new bourgeoisie assumed control in the New South. Although sharecropping and
tenancy replaced slavery, this group of historians declared planters had managed to hang
on to their capital, land, and political hegemony despite the turmoil of the Civil War.
Moreover, Weiner, Billings, and Mandle took a comparative approach and argued that
the southern postbellum political economy followed the “Prussian Road” model under-
taken in the German empire (a term coined by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin) whereby the agri-
cultural elite exercised power in a closed world reliant on the exploitation of new forms
of bound labor.22 As Weiner explains in his study of Alabama, the fact that laborers
remained tied to the land because of the crop lien system meant there were “reduced
incentives for the planters to mechanize agricultural production and modernize their
techniques.” The “reactionary agrarian elite” fostered a repressive and racially exploita-
tive system that was the antithesis of free-market capitalism as seen in the North.23 Much
like in the Prusso-German context, southern planters used the political system to their
advantage, keeping industrialization limited to undeveloped textile mills in marginal rural
towns. A belief in the continuity of the political economy meant that very little had
changed between Reconstruction and the period that followed, known as Redemption,
when white Democrats resumed control of their state legislatures. Historians who
embraced this perspective argued, first, that immediately after the war Radical Republicans
encouraged a free labor economy bound by the production of a single crop in a planta-
tion setting. This system entailed the use of intimidation and coercion. And second,
Redemption returned the planter elite to power and control of the political economy
wherein they established a system of sharecropping and debt peonage that exploited dis-
proportionately the former slaves. As a result, the merchant class did not thrive and
industrial wealth remained limited.
A decade after the studies arguing for planter persistence, another group of historians
entered the fray and came to Woodward’s defense, embracing his claims that the rupture
engendered by the Civil War led to the subsequent rise of a new bourgeoisie in the
South. David L. Carlton’s study of South Carolina textile mill towns explored how these
merchants and professionals “were but minor adjuncts to an economic structure domi-
nated by the slave plantation” until after the war when these boosters seized the oppor-
tunity to build mills and viewed towns as “their corporate property.”24 Lacy K. Ford
found a similar situation in South Carolina and argued that although the planter-elite had
not been entirely wiped out, their power was “circumscribed” in the face of the “rise of
a dynamic merchant class that turned Upcountry towns into pulsating nodules of eco-
nomic activity.”25 Don H. Doyle described parallel examples of significant industrializa-
tion initiated by “new men” in larger cities such as Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, and
Mobile, and Ronald Eller saw evidence of a strong merchant class in Appalachia.26 This
group of historians fell squarely in the camp advocating for discontinuity between the
Old South and the New South.
In some ways, C. Vann Woodward’s understanding of the New South captured certain
aspects of the philosophy of Henry W. Grady, an Atlanta journalist, who first used the
phrase “The New South” in 1873 in an editorial penned for the Atlanta Daily Herald.
New South ideologues championed industrialization, celebrated a gospel of progress,

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called for reconciliation between North and South, and propagated the myth that good-
will existed between the black and white races. They saw a clear break between the Old
South and the New South. In a speech given before the New England Club in New York
in 1886, Grady proclaimed, “the old South rested everything on slavery, agriculture,
unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth.” The New South,
on the other hand, whose “soul is stirred with the breath of a new life . . . She is thrilling
with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity.”27 Grady’s overwhelming opti-
mism about the progress of the South presaged Woodward’s argument that the new
industrial ethos of the South marked a break with the past. Woodward was not, however,
the first historian to borrow Henry Grady’s phrase the “New South.”
Holland Thompson, born in North Carolina the year before Grady issued his call in
New York for recognition of the New South, wrote a history of the region and period he
came of age in. His first manuscript traced the economic shift from “the cotton fields to
the cotton mills” in his home state and the new state of mind that accompanied rapid
industrialization of the South.28 In his second book Thompson described a “new South,
marked by a spirit of hopefulness, a belief in the future, and a desire to take a fuller part in
the life of the nation.”29 Despite his optimistic proclamation that a new and different South
was on the horizon Thompson also found himself questioning what, if anything, had
remained the same. Shortly before he published his optimistic manifesto on the industri-
alizing South, Thompson contributed to a collection honoring his advisor William A.
Dunning at Columbia University, and puzzled over the real nature of the New South.
The history professor at the City University of New York claimed that “much nonsense
had been written of the new South” and that although the New South was different in
tone and ideals, it appeared to be more of an outgrowth of the Old South and “not a new
and different civilization imposed from without.”30 Thompson argued that many had
misused the phrase the “New South,” and had written it as if it was “utterly unlike any-
thing that had existed before and involving a sharp break with the history and tradition of
the past.” Thompson stated that nothing could be more false because people did not easily
rid themselves of characteristics that had been developing for centuries.31 In his work he
strove to acknowledge the existence of a new industrial South but also highlight the exist-
ence of a region that had managed to retain the temperament of the aristocratic Old South.
Thompson wrestled with the question of continuity versus discontinuity and the fact the
South could be industrializing rapidly while retaining the vestiges of a planter aristocracy.
Woodward later described this as “the divided mind of the New South,” noting that
the new industrial class developed a nostalgic longing for the Old South, particularly in the
way it idealized the past through an allegiance to the Lost Cause.32
Thompson’s confidence in the New South’s ability to make great economic strides was
also destabilized by what he perceived to be the paradoxical nature of the New South. In
a festschrift for William A. Dunning, Thompson noted that the South “still insists upon
regarding itself as a distinct country.” Its insistence on clinging to the idea that it might be
what Cash later called a “nation within a nation” meant it was “a puzzling region, full of
contradictions and sharp contrasts.” As Thompson explained,

The population is predominantly rural, and yet industrialism is growing with

marvelous rapidity. The people are religious – for there is more Puritanism

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surviving in the South than anywhere else – and yet instances of lawlessness are
frequent. They are kindly, but occasional manifestations of cruelty shock the
world. They believe in race purity, and yet we see the mulatto. They are indi-
vidualists and yet, on occasion, they sink all considerations of personal comfort
and advantage.33

Thompson’s understanding of the paradoxical South – both modernizing at a rapid pace

while remaining in a state of backwardness – reflected the way in which historical observ-
ers at the time could believe the South was both regionally distinctive and universally
national. On one level, Thompson argued for both continuity and discontinuity. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social scientists, progressive reformers,
northern philanthropists, southern liberals, academicians, and self-proclaimed experts
writing about the “southern problem” also worked to address the paradox. To resolve
the contradiction of the simultaneous existence of progress and poverty, they focused
on the process of southern development and described the South as existing in a state of
conversion, moving through a prolonged period of readjustment.34
Perhaps the most pressing economic question that emerged out of the wreckage of the
Civil War was how the southern economy would evolve and maintain continued
production of cotton, the chief export of the United States. Whether cotton was the
South’s salvation or curse in the postbellum period could not easily be discerned. In their
study The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (1935), social scientists Charles S. Johnson, Edwin
R. Embree, and W. W. Alexander noted,

For more than a century, this greatest of economic assets has been also our
greatest social humiliation . . . Although adding a billion dollars annually to the
wealth of the world, the cotton farmers themselves are the most impoverished
and backward of any large group of producers in America.35

These incongruities in the paradox of cotton reflected a concern about the political
economy of the postbellum South and whether persistent poverty and economic
backwardness went hand-in-hand with progress and the development of national ideals.
The contradiction underscored the effort to determine whether the South was largely
agrarian or more industrial in nature and how easily the region could be pulled in line
with the nation’s capitalist principles. The idea of southern readjustment permitted room
for antithetical descriptions of the South since it incorporated the idea that the region
could be in a state of backwardness yet be improving simultaneously and moving along
the path of modernization.
On the one hand, New South ideologues and northern investors were highly
enthusiastic about the South’s prospects and celebrated the region’s abundant resources,
rapid industrial progress, and future growth. They often talked about the South’s
domination of the cotton market and the insatiable world demand for the crop; cotton
was viewed as indispensable to the financial well-being of the nation. Buoyant forecasts
also touted the cotton plant as the South’s greatest prospect for regional success and
economic greatness. Edwin Alderman, a reformer who was the president of the University
of Virginia, Tulane University, and the University of North Carolina, referred to cotton

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as a “stupendous God-made monopoly.”36 Henry W. Grady deemed cotton “gold from

the instant it puts forth its tiny shoot.”37 Arthur W. Page, the son of North Carolina
reformer Walter Hines Page, insisted that the cotton grower in the South was destined to
become the most prosperous farmer in the world and declared that the new cotton
kingdom growing over the ruins of the Old South would reach a level of wealth never
achieved before.38 Boosters viewed cotton as a civilizing agent given its ability to clothe
the world. Charles William Burkett and Clarence Hamilton Poe declared the plant “the
Handmaiden of Civilization” because while savage men and animals only searched for
food, more evolved men insisted on the symbols of civilization such as “clothing and
ornament.”39
On the other hand, economists, reformers, and social critics in the late nineteenth
century were apprehensive about the economic health of the region and wondered
whether New South cotton production would compare with that of the Old South.
They had reason to worry. In the 1890s a series of severe economic depressions, the
arrival of the boll weevil, and the ultimate failure of the Populist Party to make substantial
agricultural reforms began to undermine optimism. This group feared that regional eco-
nomic problems might ultimately weaken the national economy in its competition for
world markets because of the South’s connection to the international cotton market.
Some questioned the speculative nature of the cotton exchanges and the dangers of bar-
gaining in “fictional” cotton. The crop lien system posed another problem. In his book,
The Ills of the South, Charles H. Otken described the system as “vindictive in its subtile
[sic] sophistry” because it had “crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a
coarse species of servile slavery.”40 Professor D. D. Wallace of Woford College in South
Carolina simply called it the “vampire lien system.”41
Given the late nineteenth-century recognition of the paradox surrounding the political
economy of the postbellum South, the debate over continuity versus discontinuity is
more than just a historiographical tussle between competing camps of historians.
Postbellum Americans’ belief that the New South could simultaneously be making great
strides toward modernization yet remain in a state of economic backwardness – what I
call the paradox of progress and poverty – contributed to the historiographical tendency
to repeatedly seek a solution to the puzzle. Was the New South merely an extension of
the Old South? Was the New South agrarian or industrial in outlook? How backward
and impoverished was the New South in comparison to the industrial modernizing
North? More than one hundred years later these questions now feel misguided, or at the
very least stale.42 Like Holland Thompson, the first historian of the New South, perhaps
we should embrace the contradictions and declare that the political economy of the New
South exhibited simultaneous evidence of continuity and discontinuity. It is not an easy
resolution, however, if the historian’s inclination to want an answer to “either this or
that” often supersedes the flexibility of alternative frameworks. In addition, we are
conditioned to think about the South’s economic distinctiveness only when it is compared
to the North, or as Peter Kolchin labels it, the “un-South.”43
Another solution which frees us from the eternal agrarian-industrial and North-South
dichotomy is to consider postbellum southern economic development in a global context.
In recent years a new group of scholars have underscored the importance of examining the

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South’s political economy in a transnational context, particularly situating it in the longue

durée of the history of world capitalism or more generally in a global circulation of peoples,
reform practices, patterns of governance, and ideas such as social scientific theories and
racial ideologies.44 In his 2014 history of cotton Sven Beckert reminds us that previous
studies of the plant tend to focus on the local, state, and national level, but in point of fact
the development of a worldwide web of cotton, or what he refers to as the “empire of
cotton,” drew “seeming opposites together, turning them almost by alchemy into wealth:
slavery and free labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade, industrialization and
deindustrialization.”45 The history of the crop is integral to understanding of the dawn of
capitalism and the South was merely one small part of this “global empire of cotton.”
Andrew Zimmerman uses the story of Booker T. Washington’s collaboration with
German imperialists to establish a cotton program in Togo, Africa to explain how it
evolved into and reflected what he calls a “colonial political economy of the global
South.”46 The Germans were attracted to Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of indus-
trial education because both Germany and the United States underwent a shift from
bonded labor to free labor over the course of the nineteenth century – in 1807 with the
end of serfdom and in 1865 with the abolition of slavery. It is fashionable in some quarters
to consider this historiographical shift as “new” and claim that previous work on the polit-
ical economy of the nineteenth-century South has been too narrowly focused on the
regional or national level (particularly when compared to the North).
Yet I would argue that the latest attention to the political economy of the global South
is not so much a radical “new turn,” but a “U-turn,” reviving academic interest in com-
parative work on the nineteenth-century South initiated by a handful of historians as early
as the 1960s. Over the years the historiography on the political economy of the New
South has been occasionally punctuated by a more expansive view that adopts an interna-
tional lens. For example, the group of historians who argued for the persistence
of the planter class in the post-Civil War period situated their work in the context of
Prussia. At various moments some scholars situated the process of emancipation in a
transnational context by engaging in comparative economic analyses between different
post-emancipation societies such as those in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, Brazil, and
Russia.47 Over the course of the entire nineteenth century a small cadre of scholars study-
ing slavery, race relations, and segregation has drawn attention to the similarities and dif-
ferences between the South and such places as Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Historians made comparisons between slaves in the western hemisphere and Russian serfs,
untangled the tentacles of the transatlantic slave trade, juxtaposed American planters with
international planters, explored the links between various post-emancipation societies, and
equated South African apartheid with Jim Crow.48 Early comparative scholarship in the
post-consensus period left a lasting imprint on the field of southern history and challenged
significantly the traditional nation-state orientation of the history of the United States.
Thus, current scholarship addressing the global reach of the southern political economy
has merely reinvigorated an earlier academic interest in the transnational dimensions of
southern history.
Indeed, C. Vann Woodward, whose scholarship had more influence on the debate
over the nature of the postbellum southern political economy than any other book, must
be given credit for an international tip of the hat as well. He pushed historians of the South

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toward a transnational framework long before the first or second generation of “Global
South” scholars appeared. In his legendary collection of essays in The Burden of Southern
History, Woodward explained how southern history could be distinguished by the region’s
extended “un-American experience with poverty” and was distinctive precisely because it
“included large components of frustration, failure, and defeat.” Most important, he
asserted, that the region’s peculiar experience with poverty and ruin had more in common
with other places around the globe than it did with American tradition. “For from a
broader point of view,” Woodward reasoned, “it is not the South but America that is
unique among the peoples of the world.”49
Woodward’s assertion that the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction consti-
tuted a watershed moment in the political economy of the New South sparked decades of
scholarship focusing on the question of continuity or discontinuity and southern distinc-
tiveness. It appears the majority of historians found the allure of regionalism and national-
ism irresistible historical subjects. The paradox of progress and poverty often confined
historians to limited paths. But we must remember Woodward had shown interest in
studying the South from a comparative and global perspective as early as the late 1950s.
And a few adventurous scholars studying the postbellum southern political economy peri-
odically followed his path. For a time, it suggested a new direction for the field of southern
history. Recent historians who focus on what has been referred to as the Global South
often view themselves as forerunners of a new model for thinking about southern history,
one that is critical of the traditional historiography. They have seemingly forgotten about
this earlier body of scholarship, bottling old wine in new bottles for consumption by a new
generation. These historians of the political economy of the Global South have implied
their focus is groundbreaking since the discipline of history has been bound up with the
creation of the nation-state from the very beginning, circumscribing historians in a nation-
alist frame that considered the South as a distinctive region in an exceptional nation. But
we must remember that historians of the South did not entirely neglect the international
context advocated by Woodward almost sixty years ago. Future scholars studying the
political economy of the New South might find the global perspective a compelling
framework that is likely useful beyond its contemporary focus on cotton.

Notes
1 Thomas Jefferson to Marquis de Chastellux, September 2, 1785, Letters of Thomas Jefferson,
Avalon Project at Yale Law School, www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jefflett/let34.htm.
2 Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum
Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); John D. Cox, Traveling South: Travel
Narratives and the Construction of American Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005);
David Bertelson, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); and William R.
Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York:
G. Braziller, 1961).
3 See Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil
War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 40–72.
4 See Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
5 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Crisis and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 72–73.

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6 Novick, That Noble Dram, 235.

7 Novick, That Noble Dram, 93.
8 Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “The Central Theme in Southern History,” American Historical Review
34 (Oct. 1928): 30–43; W. J. Cash, with a new introduction by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The
Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), vii–viii, xlvii–xlviii. More than three
decades later Carl Degler published Place over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) in which he argued that the region’s
racism, poverty, agricultural economy, paucity of immigration, conservative religious outlook,
and violent proclivities all contributed to the continuity of southern difference. Degler linked
the antebellum South with the present-day South, sketching one unbroken linear historical
path. Thus, the historical legacy of continuity persisted.
9 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1951), 21–22.
10 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 292
11 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 292. Also see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism:
Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), for an explanation of how yeoman farmers were drawn into the market
and increasingly lost control of their land.
12 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 306.
13 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 179–180, 182, 184.
14 David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on
Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 20–21.
15 William A. Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region, combined volume
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 319.
16 Carlton and Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World, 22.
17 The historiography on the rise of sharecropping and tenancy as well as how these agricultural
changes inspired the Populist Party is vast. For examples see Roger L. Ransom and Richard
Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977); Harold Woodman, New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of
Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1995); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in the
Cotton Culture of Central Texas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Hahn, The
Roots of Southern Populism.
18 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 194.
19 Gavin Wright, Old South New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 7, 11; and Gavin Wright, “The Strange
Career of the New Southern Economic History,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982),
176.
20 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 130.
21 Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 22–39 (quotation at 39).
22 See Jonathan M. Weiner, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Dwight B. Billings, Planters and the Making of a “New
South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Jay R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free: The African American
Experience since the Civil War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979). The term the “Prussian
Road” has often been misattributed to Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
Other historians who have argued for continuity in the political economy are Degler, Place over
Time; Howard Rabinowitz, The First New South (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson,
1992).
23 Weiner, Social Origins of the New South, 108.
24 David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1982), 8–9.

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25 Lacy K. Ford, “Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the
South Carolina Upcountry, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 317.
26 Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–
1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Ronald D. Eller, Miners,
Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1982).
27 William A. Link and Susannah J. Link, eds., The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Documentary
Reader (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 22.
28 Holland Thompson, From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill: A Study of the Industrial Transition
in North Carolina (New York: Macmillan, 1906). This first book was based on his dissertation.
29 Holland Thompson, The New South: A Chronicle of Social and Industrial Evolution (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1919), 8.
30 Holland Thompson, “The New South, Economic and Social,” in J. W. Gardner, ed., Studies
in Southern History and Politics: Inscribed to William Archibald Dunning (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1914), 291, 293.
31 Thompson, New South, 1.
32 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 154–157.
33 Thompson, “The New South, Economic and Social,” 315.
34 For a history of this discourse see Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the
New Liberal State (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
35 Charles S. Johnson, Edwin R. Embree, and W. W. Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935).
36 Edwin A. Alderman, The Growing South: An Address Delivered before the Civic Forum in Carnegie
Hall, New York City, March 22, 1908 (New York: Civic Forum, 1908), 18.
37 Cited in Gilbert H. Collings, The Production of Cotton (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.,
1926), frontispiece.
38 Arthur W. Page, “The Cotton Growers,” World’s Work 11 (Jan. 1906): 7051, 7056, 7059. Also
see Walter Hines Page, “Cotton Again King,” World’s Work 8 (May 1904): 4793, for another
example about the South’s remarkable advancement.
39 Charles William Burkett and Clarence Hamilton Poe, Cotton: In Cultivation, Marketing,
Manufacture, and the Problems of the Cotton World (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), 8.
40 Charles H. Otken, The Ills of the South; or Related Causes Hostile to the General Prosperity of the
Southern People (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 10–11.
41 D. D. Wallace, “Southern Agriculture: Its Condition and Needs,” Popular Science Monthly 64
(Jan. 1904): 260.
42 I am not the first historian to suggest the continuity-discontinuity debate may no longer be
useful if thinking in strictly binary terms. Gavin Wright once said, “we know in advance that
we are not going to get satisfying answers.” See Wright, “The Strange Career of the New
Southern Economic History,” 165.
43 Peter Kolchin, “The South and the Un-South,” in A Sphinx on the American Land: The
Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2003), 7–38.
44 For examples of recent work on the global South, which tends to focus extensively on cotton,
see Andrew Zimmerman, “A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German
Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” American Historical
Review 110 (Dec. 2005): 1362–1389; Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T.
Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010); Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in
the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92 (Sept. 2005): 498–526; Sven Beckert,
“Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the
Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (Dec. 2004): 1405–1438; Sven
Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2014); Annette Cox,
“Imperial Illusions: The New South’s Campaign for Cotton Cloth,” Journal of Southern History

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80 (Aug. 2014): 605–650; Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, Global Perspectives on Industrial
Transformation in the American South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Erin
Elizabeth Clune, “From Light Copper to the Blackest and Lowest Type: Daniel Tompkins and
the Racial Order of the Global New South,” Journal of Southern History 76 (May 2010): 275–314;
Ring, The Problem South.
45 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, xix.
46 Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 1.
47 See Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy, with a new introduction by
Steven Hahn (1983; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Barbara J. Fields,
“The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World,” in Thavolia
Glymph et al., eds., Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy (College Station: Texas University
Press, 1985); Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in
Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (Feb. 1990): 75–98; and Kolchin, A
Sphinx on the American Land.
48 Some significant titles include David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Eugene D. Genovese, “The Treatment of Slaves in
Different Countries: Problems in the Application of the Comparative Method,” in Laura
Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery
and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Richard S.
Dunn, “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in
Virginia, 1799 to 1828,” William and Mary Quarterly 34 (Jan. 1977): 40–64; Peter Kolchin,
Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies”; Stanley Engerman, “Economic
Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and British West Indies,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 13 (Autumn 1982): 191–220; George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy:
A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981); John Whitson Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in
South Africa and the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
49 C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity,” in The Burden of Southern History,
3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 17–19, 188.

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 20
AMERIC AN LITER A R Y A N D
C ULTURAL H I S T O R Y I N
THE POST-C IVI L W A R ER A

Sarah E. Gardner

On October 30, 2010, The New York Times ran the first post in what would become its
enormously popular Disunion series. “It’s a bottomless treasure, this Civil War,” journalist
Tony Horowitz enthused, “much of it encrusted in myth or still unexplored. Which is
why,” he concluded, “it still claims our attention and remembrance.” The Times’s series
editors banked on Horowitz’s reading of the national zeitgeist. They were smart. Disunion
became “the most active series” in the paper’s Opinion section and its website received
“more than 35 million unique monthly visitors” during its run. Times’s editors designed
the series to offer “a multiplicity of perspectives,” calling upon esteemed scholars, journal-
ists, and Civil War buffs to contribute new perspectives, commentary, and assessment
of the war. Moreover, posts from readers in the comments section “added to the chorus of
new voices and brought to life, for hundreds of thousands of people, the catalytic,
near-catastrophic historic events that shaped our nation.”1
Coinciding with The Times’s Disunion series was a reinvigorated exploration by histo-
rians of the war’s influence on postbellum literary and cultural production. This scholarly
attention makes sense, not simply because of the war’s sesquicentennial. As historian K.
Stephen Prince has observed, questions about the defeated South – both as a region and
as a constitutive part of postwar America – dominated discussions in the late nineteenth
century.2 These recent studies tell us a great deal about preferred genres, the contours of
the arguments, and new developments in American letters and other forms of cultural
production. They also contribute to our understanding of the ways in which vested
postwar interests used narratives (of victory or defeat, of reunion or reconciliation, of
violence and recalcitrance) to frame the meanings and lessons of the war to distinct inter-
pretive communities.
These postwar discussions on the meaning of U.S. victory and Confederate defeat
would not have been possible without the tremendous expansion of print culture in the
late nineteenth century. In recent years, literary scholars and historians of the book have
documented the ways in which postbellum industrialization altered modes of production
and distribution, the influence of professionalization of the publishing industry, and the
role of print in advancing “a set of values that centered on [. . .] the middling classes, at
once explaining and manifesting what it meant to live in a bourgeois world.”3 Increasingly,
literary and cultural historians have begun to examine audience, moving away from the
text at the center and focusing instead on the reader or viewer. These works in particular

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help explain what texts and images carried cultural currency during the late nineteenth
century. Finally, scholars have turned their attention to the ways in which the marginalized,
disfranchised, and disparaged – both as producers and as consumers – turned to print
culture to challenge attempts at constructing a dominant narrative that championed a
certain set of values as it reviled others. This outpouring of scholarship in literary and
cultural history signals the health and vibrancy of the field. Scholars are asking new
questions of old sources, branching out from traditional methodologies and modes of
inquiry, and drawing on other disciplines to work through these issues. Taken together,
these new directions move us away from binaries that have long held us hostage and raise
questions that warrant continued exploration.
In the summer of 1865, American author John Trowbridge set out on the first of two
tours of the defeated Confederacy. “I saw the most noted battle-fields of the war,” he
prefaced his travelogue, published the following year. Cataloguing his broad and diverse
source base as well as his extensive and varied travels, Trowbridge articulated for his
readers a kind of objectivity that he professed informed his investigation. “I made
acquaintance with officers and soldiers of both sides,” he wrote.

I followed in the track of the destroying armies. I traveled by railroad, by

steamboat, by stage-coach, and by private conveyance; meeting and conversing
with all sorts of people, from high State officials to “low-down” whites and
negroes; endeavoring, at all times and at all places, to receive correct impressions
of the country, of its inhabitants, of the great contest of arms just closed, and of
the still greater contest of principles not yet terminated.

His account, he promised, would be free from “fictitious coloring,” exaggerations, and
embellishments, for the times demanded sober reflection. “[W]hat is now most desirable,
is not hypothesis or declamation,” Trowbridge had determined, “but the light of plain
facts upon the momentous question of the hour, which must be settled not according to
any political or sectional bias, but upon broad grounds of Truth and Eternal Right.”4
Trowbridge’s “question of the hour” has animated much of the literary and cultural
scholarship of the past decade. Indeed, the publication of David Blight’s influential study
Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory has encouraged a generation of
scholars interested in the ways in which postwar imperatives – racial justice and sectional
healing – often worked at cross-purposes. Challenging the argument, most forcefully artic-
ulated by Paul Buck at the war’s seventy-fifth anniversary, that the swiftness of political
reunification was an unequivocal good, Blight reminded readers that “sometimes reconcil-
iations have terrible costs.” Reunion, he observed, demanded the rejection of the emanci-
patory implications of Confederate defeat. Only the “resubjugation of [. . .] those [. . .]
whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage” could guarantee a quick and painless
reintegration of the former Confederate states back into the national fold. And that resub-
jugation could take place only if certain memories of the war’s meaning trumped others.
As Blight concluded, Race and Reunion tells “a story of how in American culture romance
triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory.”5
In recent years, Blight’s analytical framework has come under scrutiny. In particular,
scholars have challenged his reading of the erasure of the emancipationist vision from the

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national understanding of the war’s meaning. In a study of the culture of commemoration

among Civil War veterans, historian M. Keith Harris has warned against assuming shared
“racist sensibilities” led inexorably to Union veterans’ embracing a “white only” version
of U.S. victory. Rather, according to Harris, Union commemorations throughout the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “resonated with tributes to emancipation.”
“’Never forget,’ one veteran reminded his former comrades-in-arms, “that we fought for
Freedom and Union, and they for Slavery and Disunion; and that we stood for the right,
and they for the wrong.’” This sentiment was hardly exceptional, Harris has argued. At
meeting halls across the country, “triumphalist” accounts of Union victory similarly
emphasized the “disruption” of southern slavery. Equally important, Harris found little to
suggest that Union veterans changed their rhetoric when speaking in public or in private.
Harris thus concluded that Union veterans genuinely saw the war as not one merely to
preserve the Union but as one that made “‘the Union worth saving.’”6
According to historian Barbara A. Gannon, much of our misreading of the central place
emancipation occupied in Union veterans’ understanding of the war’s meaning stems from
hastily formed conclusions about the Grand Army of the Republic’s (GAR) membership.
To be sure, scholars have acknowledged African American veterans’ participation in the
GAR, but have noted ruefully that they were treated poorly by their erstwhile comrades-
in-arms, arguing “that this treatment was somehow connected to the national retreat from
black civil rights in the late nineteenth century.” Gannon has found this formulation sloppy.
Whatever we can say about the conflicts engendered by the creation of an interracial fra-
ternal organization in postbellum America, and we can say much, the erasure of the eman-
cipationist legacy of Union victory from veterans’ memory was not among them. “The
men who had paid the price,” Gannon has written, “the survivors of this horrific struggle
who later joined the GAR, did not forget the bondsmen and the blood they shed at their
side. Black and white veterans,” she continued, “were able to create and sustain an interra-
cial organization in a society rigidly divided on the color line because the northerners who
fought and lived remembered African Americans’ service in a war against slavery.”7
In making this point, Gannon stressed not only shared physical and psychological
suffering of white and African American Union veterans, but also their shared “spiritual
crisis,” namely, “the struggle to find some larger meaning for their suffering.” What
emerged was the articulation of a shared memory of the Civil War that Gannon terms
the “Won Cause,” an understanding of the war’s twin goals of Liberty and Union that
explicitly embraced emancipation. As she concludes, GAR members “interpreted the
horrific price paid by their generation as part of God’s plan to end slavery, quite literally
echoing the refrain: ‘As he died to make men holy, let me die to make men free.’” The
neo-Confederate vision of the “Lost Cause” might have gained ascendency at the turn
of the twentieth century, but the “Won Cause” dominated northern understanding of
the war’s meaning in the first few decades following Appomattox.8 Gannon, then, sug-
gests the importance of timing. The triumph of the “Lost Cause” narrative was never
assured, but our understanding of the ways in which it operated in the twentieth century
has encouraged us to read it back in time. The result, she suggests, greatly distorts the
cultural landscape of the decades immediately following Appomattox.
More than Blight’s reading of the erasure of the emancipationist vision of the Civil
War’s legacy has come under attack, however. Scholars have increasingly questioned

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Blight’s emphasis on reconciliation. Indeed, much of the recent literature has emphasized
the ways in which former combatants rejected the “bonds of fraternalism and mutual
glory.” Harris, for example, finds little evidence of Civil War veterans buying into the
reconciliation line, pithily summarized by Blight, that devotion to cause “made everyone
right, and no one truly wrong.”9 Historian Caroline E. Janney has argued a similar point.
Images that figured so prominently in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The Civil War, of
“white-bearded veterans of both sides happily shaking hands, marching alongside each
other,” powerfully suggest that the nation had reconciled. “Forgetting their past
differences,” Janney has written of the cultural work done by these photographs, former
combatants “agreed that there was no North, no South, only a United States of America.”10
Yet much in the written record works against such a reading. Surveying regimental
histories, personal memoirs and reminiscences, postwar prison narratives, and veterans’
magazines and newspapers, both Harris and Janney see instead implacable enemies who
refused in the decades following the war to acknowledge the legitimacy of the enemy’s
cause. Veterans did not oppose reconciliation but their willingness to “reach across the
bloody chasm” had strings attached. As Harris explained, their memories of the war shaped
the “terms of reconciliation.” Sectional healing could take place only if erstwhile enemies
“accepted their respective arguments – a scenario that seldom transpired.” In their refusal
to forget, Harris asserted, “veterans from both sides of the Potomac undermined the
broader reconciliatory message tacitly – often explicitly – endorsed by a nation.”11
For former Confederates, reconciliation hinged on northern recognition of the princi-
ples that undergirded secession, namely the right to resist federal authority. Moreover,
they continued to insist they were the true inheritors of the founding fathers’ legacy.
Harris readily concedes that most former Confederates “remained silent on the war and
returned to their peacetime pursuits.” But those who did enter the conversation about the
war’s meaning generally “accepted reunion and embraced reconciliation” but nonetheless
(and perhaps paradoxically) remained “unrepentant and unwilling to dismiss the issues that
had sustained their four-year Confederate war.” Equally important, they belonged to a
powerful network that wielded tremendous influence both in and out of the South. In
local, regional, and national venues former Confederates vindicated their position. They
might have suffered military defeat, but the ideological war continued.12
Not surprisingly, the Civil War veteran figured prominently in Gilded Age literature, as
recent studies have pointed out. Much has been made about the ways in which these
stories, sketches, and novels promote reconciliationist themes. A story that appeared in The
Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century aptly illustrates this point. In “The Little Faded
Flag,” by Edward L. White, a narrator from the appropriately named town of “Middleville”
escorts a French visitor, impressing upon him the strengths that distinguish the United
States from other nations. He forces his visitor to admit that the descendants of a revolt in
western France during the French Revolution hold on to century-old animosity. “You
don’t comprehend,” his visitor tries to explain, “how fierce, how implacable, how fero-
cious was the fighting in the war.” To the visitor, their lingering acrimony is justified.
“They still smart under the reciprocal wrongs inflicted, they still recall the gloating fiend-
ishness of their foes, and apart from any recollections of outrage, they rather make a point
of honor their inflexibility.” The visitor assumes those words could be equally true of
former Confederates and Unionists. But a trip to the town’s cemetery disabuses him of that

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notion, for there he sees a Confederate grave decorated with a Union Flag. The narrator
then recounts a recent reunion of Confederate and Union veterans that revealed their
shared sense of war’s horror and destruction had tempered their animosity. “‘All that
volcano of hatred is burned out of me,’” one veteran had confessed. The trip’s purpose
becomes patently clear to the French visitor, if not White’s readers. “I agree with you,” the
visitor admits. “I have seen nothing in America as wonderful as that little faded flag.”
The great European nations have art galleries and court balls, the narrator concludes, “[b]ut
that flag stands for the most wonderful thing the world has ever produced yet. Not for talk
about brotherhood, but for the real thing.”13
Yet cultural work wrought by fictional accounts of veterans in Gilded Age America is
more vexed than “The Little Faded Flag” might suggest. In a brief survey of novels and
short stories that comment explicitly on the reabsorption of Union veterans in postwar
society, Civil War historian James Marten has identified four recurring themes, each
suggesting the nation’s uncertainty about the proper place of these erstwhile combatants
in peacetime. In this sense, Marten has argued, the literature comments on lingering
debates “about the nature of volunteerism, the definition of ‘worthy’ veterans, and the
role of old soldiers in the nation’s politics.” This ambivalence might be “surprising,”
Marten has suggested, but not its persistence in American fiction, for authors presented
veterans as “civilians perceived them.” Seeing literature as a mirror that reflects abiding
and pressing cultural concerns, Marten thus finds the popularity of the veteran in Gilded
Age fiction as wholly expected and appropriate.14
The literature Marten examines presents the veteran as a problematic and contested
figure in late nineteenth-century America. Penned by prominent realists, local colorists,
and sentimentalists, including William Dean Howells, Thomas Nelson Page, Sarah Orne
Jewett, and Louisa May Alcott – all noncombatants – these tales “chronicle some of the
war’s negative long-term effects on veterans’ lives and hint at some of the friction that
emerged between civilians and veterans.” In some stories, former combatants emerge as
dependent, “pitiful creatures,” worthy perhaps of private charity “but not respect.” The
amputee who barely ekes out a living, the addict unable to cope with war’s traumas,
Confederate defeat, or peace all point to the difficulties veterans faced integrating into
postwar society.15 But even those who seemed physically and psychologically well bore
burdens. As Marten writes, “one does not have to be maimed or psychologically trauma-
tized to be haunted by despair, unfocused dissatisfaction, and uneasy relationships with
civilians and civilian life.” But because they manifested no outward signs of damage,
these characters were ignored, deemed irrelevant, their sacrifices and sufferings “almost
immediately forgotten by their communities.” Finally, Marten has noted the use of
veterans as a source of humor or parody, a point that remains largely undeveloped.16
The central cultural concern addressed by each of these stories, then, is the crisis of
masculinity. As the nation’s economy shifted away from a producerist to a corporatist
economy, from independent yeoman farmers to large-scale agribusinesses, definitions of
masculinity evolved as well. As Marten has pointed out, veterans’ service records did not
necessarily shield them from accusations of unmanliness. “Indeed,” Marten has written,
“the public discourse about crippled veterans, veteran tramps, and beggars, and pension
advocates who seemed to be demanding government handouts offered examples of how
not to be a man.” Much of the literature penned during the last two decades of the

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nineteenth century, then, offers examples of veterans who “fail to measure up.” Marten
concludes by suggesting that the Gilded Age’s evolving gender conventions “helped
articulate what was wrong with veterans.”17
Marten’s essay focuses almost exclusively on the post-Reconstruction era, when the
questions about veterans’ dependency on the state, fraud, and political corruption loomed
large.18 Literary scholar John A. Casey, Jr.’s broader examination of veteran literature
reveals additional tensions that confronted postwar America. Interested in the ways veter-
ans “understood themselves and their war experiences,” Casey has argued that their
postwar writings reveal a shift in the ways in which Americans viewed former combatants.
Until the Civil War, Casey has maintained, the term veteran simply connoted past military
service. What distinguished soldier from civilian then was “technical expertise”; what
distinguished one veteran from another was length of service. Antebellum readers and
writers therefore thought it possible for noncombatants to write convincingly about vet-
erans in the antebellum era, Casey argues, citing Washington Irving and Herman Melville
as two notable examples.19
The Civil War changed everything. Wartime service was no longer an event in a
combatant’s life; it was the defining event. Simply put, veterans saw the world differently
than noncombatants. Because veterans entered the postbellum literary marketplace vig-
orously and in unprecedented numbers, the Civil War signaled a “dividing point between
two distinct ways of writing about war.” Their belief that the status of veteran carried a
unique perspective on war meant that their concerns about the role of former combatants
in peacetime society often conflicted with those of civilians.20
Casey charts three phases of veteran reintegration, highlighting in each the particularities
of veterans’ concerns. The first chronicles army demobilization in the immediate postwar
period. In an effort to combat the “widespread belief circulating in newspapers and
popular periodicals [. . .] that former soldiers were victims of war in need of civilian
caretakers to nurse them back to health and normalcy,” writers such as John William
DeForest and John Esten Cooke display a kind of optimism about soldiers’ ability to
rejoin civilian society. Yet postwar realities challenge that optimism, exposing fault lines.
Underneath much of this writing, Casey has observed, is a sense of “growing [. . .]
disillusionment with the post-Civil War nation.”21
When self-defense failed, veterans turned increasingly to memory. Unable to find a
place in the postwar world, they retreated to memories of an idealized youth, an earlier
time that esteemed producerist values of independence, hard work, and thrift. With
visions of a prewar Eden, however, came memories of war’s traumas. “While searching
for succor in the past,” Casey has contended, “veterans dredged up long-buried psychic
wounds that threatened their health and, in some cases, their public legacies.” In this
sense, nostalgia failed veterans. War encourages soldiers to do bad things: killing, pillaging,
burning, drinking, whoring, and lying. War’s myriad traumas, then, were manifest. “The
visions of death and suffering, and of guilt at having violating strictly established social
norms and mores, threatened to both overshadow their idyllic images of the past as well
as harm their health and sanity.” Much of the literature published in the 1870s and 1880s,
such as Sherman’s Memoirs, Confederate Private Sam Watkins’s personal narrative
Company Aytch, and Union veteran Ambrose Bierce’s short stories, reveals the contested
and vexing nature of memory. More important, these works assert that war changes a

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soldier. To varying degrees, they stress that a gulf existed between civilian and veteran
that could not be bridged. In this sense, Confederate and Union veterans shared more in
common with one another than they did with their civilian countrymen and women.22
Veterans’ new claims and definitions of in-group status did not go unnoticed by
non-combatants. This third phase of literature concerned with veteran reintegration,
then, centers on social and cultural efforts to come to terms with veterans’ self-assertive-
ness. As Casey has discovered, this literature exposes “the growing resentment among
members of succeeding generations of middle-class white men toward the exclusionary
language espoused by Civil War veterans, and the burdens their unique self-conception
placed on American society.” Here, Casey’s and Marten’s analyses dovetail, for both
highlight controversy over pensions and the accusations of fraud and corruption. But
Casey also finds “figurative” burdens as well, noting “the constraints placed on young
men’s maturation by the rhetoric of singularity and sacredness attached to military service
in the Civil War.” According to Casey, understanding how an exclusionary rhetoric that
asserted “war made men” at the same time “denied young men a chance to find manhood
through a war of their own” gives us a new way to read Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of
Courage, “the quintessential work of Civil War fiction.”23
“The question of what the living owe the dead,” Casey has argued, “is central to the
healing process for any culture following war.”24 The more vexing question, this literature
suggests, is what to do with the living. And with that question, everyone – civilian and
former combatant, Unionist and former Confederate – had to come to terms.
For this reason, then, veterans were not alone in their refusal to abandon the principles
that undergirded the war efforts. Reconciliation’s resisters came from all quarters. Perhaps
not surprisingly, women’s organizations were even more resistant than veterans’ organi-
zations. As Janney has observed, “without the fraternal bonds of soldiering or political
and financial incentives,” members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the
Ladies’ Memorial Association, and a host of other organizations “found little reason to
commiserate with their counterparts across the Mason-Dixon Line.” Southern white
women in particular proved to be especially recalcitrant “in resisting the reconciliationist
gush.” Even Edward L. White, author of “The Little Faded Flag,” claimed as much.
“There is rancor yet,” his narrator explained to the French visitor, “mostly among the
Southern women, particularly those born since the war, or those whose families really
suffered least or whose men did not fight at all.” But White, who imagined shared suffer-
ing erased sectional animosity, saw white southern women’s recalcitrance as a “cult of
artificial rancor.” As Janney and others have pointed out, however, there was nothing
artificial about it. And, by the turn of the twentieth century, white southern women had
wielded tremendous influence over Civil War memory. “Under their watch,” Janney has
concluded, “the Lost Cause was ever so slowly beginning to overshadow the Union
Cause.”25
Together, these works stand as an important corrective. More emphatically than
Blight’s work, they remind readers that reunion and reconciliation are not coterminous
and that in the case of the post-Civil War era, the former did not depend on the latter.
Moreover, they highlight the ways in which the reconciliationist view has distorted
how we view the late nineteenth century. Jim Crow violence, disfranchisement, and
segregation might have coincided with a reconciliationist agenda, Harris reminds us,

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but the latter was never as total as Blight has suggested. The “powerful” yet comfortable
narrative that has emerged – one that pits “one-dimensional reconciliationists” against
the few hold-outs, the unreconstructed rebels and the bloody-shirt-waving Yankees –
lends itself to an easy acceptance of historical inevitability. The popularity of the
twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Burns’s Civil War documentary suggests, at least in
part, the comfort audiences take from this narrative. It also provides “a vantage point
from which to define and lament a moment forgotten in historical memory – a lost
chance for the nation to capitalize on Union victory.” But the past is rarely so neat and
tidy. What gets lost in this version, Harris contends, is the “tense, often vituperative
negotiation process of a nation’s formerly warring sections suddenly thrust back
together, each staking a claim to a reconciliationist spirit.”26
These works also remind us that memory and sentimentality are not coterminous.
Indeed, the two often work against each other. Recent studies on the ways in which the
Civil War transformed American literature make this point clear. As Randall Fuller has
cogently and elegantly demonstrated, the war destabilized the romantic worldview of the
nation’s most well-known writers, challenging their ability to pen stories, novels, and
poems as they had in the prewar era. Hawthorne, by way of example, had always been
able “to transmute history into romance, action into narrative.” The Civil War, however,
had shaken his confidence, threatened his resolve. To his editor, James T. Fields, “he
complained midway through the war that he found it impossible to write a ‘sunshiney’
book.”27
Although the leading figures of the American Renaissance might have found it difficult
to write in an earlier literary tradition, readers still craved the comfortably familiar. As
Fuller has noted, the “runaway bestseller” of 1868 was written by an unknown author,
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, titled The Gates Ajar. Like Melville, Whitman, and Bierce, Phelps
forced her readers to confront the war’s “wasting carnage.” Rather than write about
battlefields and hospitals, however, Phelps wrote about Heaven. In Phelps’s hands, Heaven
looks a lot like Earth. “The dead live in houses, in towns, amid forests of lindens and
elms,” Fuller has summarized, “just as they had while they were alive. In heaven,” he
continued, “there is no alteration of personalities, no changes in bodily form, no annihi-
lation of memory.” Phelps thus sensed, according to Fuller, “that her readers required
words of assurance, quiet discussion, conversation instead of conflict.”28
Phelps raised similar questions to those asked by the literati – “what could so much
death possibly mean? What did it say about humans that they could kill so profligately?
And how could a nation of wounded survivors regain its health and begin to live again?”
Phelps’s work resonated with American readers, Fuller explained, because it answered
“these thorny questions with a simple promise: the nation would be reunited one day – if
not in this world, then certainly in the next. It encouraged hope in a people,” he
continued, “who had been forced to forsake it.” Significantly, The Gates Ajar was second
only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the number of copies sold during the nineteenth century.
“If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel had helped to start the war,” Fuller quipped, “The
Gates Ajar helped its audience cope with the bewildering grief created by so much
destruction.”29
Finally, recent scholarship demonstrates that different interpretive communities had dif-
ferent and competing interests in the stories they told. The question is not whether

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reconciliation trumped recalcitrance or to what degree did erstwhile foes embrace a

reunion sentiment. Rather, the more important question asks what purpose did these
narratives that people told serve? To greater or lesser degrees, all of the works discussed
raise this issue, but none quite as fully or skillfully as Anne Sarah Rubin’s study of
the stories of Sherman’s March and K. Stephen Prince’s exploration of the reconstruction
of southern identity in the five decades after the Civil War. As Rubin points out, stories of
Sherman’s March “overlapped or contradicted each other.”30 The same certainly holds true
for stories about the South that circulated in the late nineteenth century.
Rubin examines different interpretive communities – Confederate civilians, Sherman’s
soldiers, African Americans, northern reporters – and the stories they told, each emphasiz-
ing and advancing particular strands of the narrative. She is uninterested in analyzing
which sets of stories were true or accurate. Nor is she interested in marshaling these stories
to demonstrate the ascendancy or limits of a reconciliationist spirit in the postwar era.
Instead, she highlights purposes the stories served, noting that even a single interpretive
community might have competing needs.
Rubin has noted that southern stories, for example, “tend to fall into one of two
genres, emphasizing either victimization at the hands of evil Yankees or the cleverness of
Southern whites in protecting themselves and their property from harm.” The first genre
“served the Lost Cause well,” Rubin points out, “allowing southern whites to feel a sense
of moral superiority toward their conquerors.” The second offered a kind of “salvation
story,” allowing white southerners to “recast the March from a story of domination and
devastation” to one that displayed their cunning, resourcefulness, and defiance against
Yankee invaders.31
Northern reporters, such as John Trowbridge, who toured the fallen Confederacy in
the immediate postwar period, had a different agenda. Rubin has observed that their
dispatches “minimize[d] the destruction that had been wreaked, as a way perhaps to
absolve Union soldiers of their guilt or make the March seem more justifiable and less
abjectly cruel.” Interested in the plight of the freedmen and women, these northern
travelers also used their narratives to “galvanize Northerners and perhaps the government
into taking action on the freedmen’s behalf.”32
Rubin’s approach points to a way out of the false binary set up by questions that focus
on reconciliation. Taken together, the important work of David Blight and Nina Silber on
the one hand and the newer scholarship that emphasizes the limits of the reunion frame-
work on the other suggest the coexistence of reconciliationist and anti-reconciliationist
sentiment in the late nineteenth century. They also suggest the impossibility of measuring
the degree to which either of these sentiments predominated. After all, “The Little Faded
Flag” appeared at the same time as the first published iteration of Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
diary. Which carried greater cultural currency? Rubin’s work, then, offers a different way
to examine the culture of the late nineteenth century. By looking at the purposes advanced
by various interpretive communities we can better appreciate the intersections of shared
interests as well as the fault lines that laid bare the very real divisions that continued to
threaten the nation at the close of the century.
Similarly, Prince examined the ways in which various northern interests crafted
stories about the postwar South in order to serve particular ends. Some stories, like those
told by northern travel writers who toured the region in the months immediately

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following Confederate surrender, highlighted the ways in which the South fell short of
northern ideals and expectations. Armed with all of the cultural baggage of the antebel-
lum era that exoticized and pathologized the South, these travelers entered the defeated
South with a powerful set of preconceived notions that emphasized southern exception-
alism. “If the North was orderly, industrious, and dynamic,” Prince wrote, “the South
must be untidy, lazy, and static. Since the South was violent, ignorant, and backward,”
he continued, “it stands to reason that the North represented enlightenment, education,
and progress.” Their dispatches, according to Prince, emphasized that political reunifi-
cation must be predicated on Yankeefying the South. Yet stories about Klan violence
that circulated in northern newspapers and pamphlets during the late 1860s and early
1870s suggested just how difficult that Yankeefication would be. As Prince has noted,
these stories about the Bloody South certainly reinforced “the case for a thorough – and
thoroughly northern – Reconstruction of the region.” But they also raised troubling
questions about whether that enterprise were even possible. Did persistent Klan vio-
lence signal the region was, in fact, “unreconstructable?” Ultimately, Prince concludes,
a particular version of the postwar South – one backed by New South boosters, south-
ern sentimentalists, and by northerners who increasingly doubted Reconstruction’s
efficacy, viability, and even desirability – triumphed. The political work of unraveling
Reconstruction, he argued, could not have occurred “without a contemporaneous
cultural retreat from Reconstruction.”33
Interpretive communities did not merely produce, however. They also consumed. As
Prince reminds us, audience matters. Readers, theater goers, lecture attendees, and
members of veteran and memorial associations were often part of different, at times
conflicting and at other times overlapping, interpretive communities. What they read in
The Atlantic might work against what they had heard at the local lyceum. The cultural
productions that Prince draws on were largely produced for and consumed by a northern
audience, for example. Yet, as Prince clarifies, that group was hardly monolithic.
“Working class Bostonians attending a minstrel show saw one depiction of the South;
patrician New Yorkers experienced another; Union veterans at a regimental reunion
witnessed a third.” A number of factors, then, including “class, geography, and political
affiliation shaped both the frequency with which northerners considered the South and
the cultural forms in which they encountered it.”34
Prince and Rubin both raise important questions that go largely unaddressed in their
works. Although sensitive to the production and dissemination of overlapping, competing,
conflicting, and reinforcing narratives, they are less attuned to the ways in which disparate
audiences received these stories. When Prince writes of a “popular” travelogue by
Edward King, The Great South (1875), for example, he pays particular attention to the
unflattering portrait King offers of the carpetbagger. “Such a characterization is entirely
out of keeping with the majority of King’s text,” Prince informs his readers. “This
overdrawn, rather unbelievable image [. . .] is culled straight from the southern
conservative anticarpetbagger playbook, and yet there it sits, presented as the gospel truth
for millions of curious Yankees to read.”35 What we do not know from reading Prince’s
book, however, is whether those Yankees did, in fact, read King, and, if so, what they
made of this editorializing that seemed so out of place with the rest of the narrative.
Those who work in reader response theory and reception studies, such as James L.

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Machor, offer valuable models for tackling these sorts of questions. At the very least, we
would do well to remember that nineteenth-century readers interpreted texts differently
than we do. Reviewers, to whom Prince turns when discussing the literature of Thomas
Nelson Page, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles Chesnutt,
provide part of the answer, but not a complete or definitive one.36
A little more than four and a half years after The New York Times began its Disunion
series, it ended as it began, with a panel discussion between David Blight, Ken Burns,
Adam Goodheart, and Jamie Malanowski, on the war’s meaning, consequences, and
legacies. One of the questions posed asked panelists to imagine the war’s bicentennial
commemoration. Burns offered the shortest and perhaps most noncommittal response of
the participants. “I believe that the Civil War’s centrality will never diminish as long
as the United States survives,” he opined. “Fifty years from now at the bicentennial, both
the academy and the wider public will marvel at how important the Civil War was and
is to almost every aspect of American life.” Goodheart was a bit more expansive but
essentially reached the same conclusion.

The stories, of 1861–65 will continue to enthrall and infuriate us, unite and
divide us. Certain episodes in history are like great books: They can be endlessly
read, reread, retold and reinterpreted. The ancient Greeks’ Iliad hasn’t gone stale
after more than a hundred generations, and there’s no reason to expect that our
“American Iliad” will do so after just another two.37

If their predictions prove accurate, we can expect a continuation of the exploration of the
war’s influence in the literary and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century. If the
current scholarly trajectory holds, we can expect increased interest in the intersections of
production, dissemination, and consumption of literary and cultural artifacts. Greater
attention to the workings of the literary marketplace and the ways in which disparate
audiences interpreted this outpouring of literary and cultural production promises to
enrich these discussions and illuminate new ways of understanding the late nineteenth
century.

Notes
1 The Times ran two editorials on October 30, 2010, that commented on the war’s sesquicentennial:
Tony Horowitz, “The 150-Year War,” www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31Horwitz.
html; and Jamie Malanowski, “Will Lincoln Prevail,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.
com/2010/10/30/will-lincoln-prevail/?_r=0, the first post in the Disunion series. See also
Press Release, Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, “Coinciding with the 150th Anniversary
of the Civil War,” no date.
2 K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–
1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 3.
3 Scott E. Casper, “Introduction,” in A History of the Book in America: The Industrial Book, 1840–
1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 4–5.
4 John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey through
the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), iii.
5 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 3–4; Paul S. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Boston:

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Little, Brown and Company, 1937). See, too, Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners
and the South: 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
6 M. Keith Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War
Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 90–91, 111–112.
7 Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the
Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 3, 5.
8 Gannon, The Won Cause, 7–8.
9 Blight, Race and Reunion, 4.
10 Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 3.
11 Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 6, 1.
12 Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 67–69, 71.
13 Edward L. White, “The Little Faded Flag,” The Atlantic Monthly 101 (May 1908): 637–638,
641, 644.
14 James Marten, “A Running Fight Against Their Fellow Men: Civil War Veterans in Gilded
Age Literature,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5 (Dec. 2015): 504–527, quotation at 504–505,
509.
15 Marten, “A Running Fight,” 510, 513.
16 Marten, “A Running Fight,” 515, 509.
17 Marten, “A Running Fight,” 510.
18 See also Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2012), 160–227.
19 John A. Casey, Jr., New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late-Nineteenth-Century
American Literature and Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1–16.
20 Casey, New Men, 5.
21 Casey, New Men, 12–13, 17–73.
22 Casey, New Men, 74–103, quotations at 13, 74.
23 Casey, New Men, 104–129, quotations at 14, 114.
24 Casey, New Men, 1.
25 Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 232–265, quotations at 7, 233, 235; White, “Little Faded
Flag,” 638.
26 Harris, Across the Bloody Chasm, 5.
27 Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 168. See also Stephen Cushman, Belligerent Muse: Five
Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2014).
28 Fuller, From Battlefields, 207–208.
29 Fuller, From Battlefields, 207, 209.
30 Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 5.
31 Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie, 46–47.
32 Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie, 155–156.
33 Prince, Stories of the South, 30–31, 67–78, 3.
34 Prince, Stories of the South, 4.
35 Prince, Stories of the South, 81.
36 See, for example, James L. Machor, Reading Fiction in Antebellum America: Informed Response and
Reception Histories, 1820–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
37 “Disunion: The Final Q&A,” The New York Times, 10 June 2015, http://opinionator.blogs.
nytimes.com/2015/06/10/disunion-the-final-q-a/#more-157330http://opinionator.blogs.
nytimes.com/2015/06/10/disunion-the-final-q-a/#more-157330.

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 21
INDUSTRIAL EMP I R E
The American Conquest of the West, 1845–1900

Andrew C. Isenberg

In 1845, the United States had only a tenuous hold on its western territories. Washington
asserted its sovereignty over the lands that it had acquired from France in the 1803
Louisiana Purchase, but its effective control over much of that region was limited.
Between 1812 and 1836, the United States had admitted into the Union three states from
the eastern margin of the Louisiana Purchase: Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. To the
west and northwest of that tier of states, however, was a vast region that in 1845 was titled
– unglamorously but accurately – the Unorganized Territory. Powerful, largely
autonomous native groups, notably the mounted, bison-hunting nomads of the Great
Plains, held sway in the region. To the south, Mexico controlled the territory between
the Great Plains and California, including the strategically important San Francisco Bay
(although, like the United States, Mexico ceded effective control over much of the
interior to native groups). To the northwest, the United States shared sovereignty over
the Puget Sound and Columbia River region with Great Britain, but the British were
truly in control. “If we ever did occupy Oregon,” one member of the House of
Representatives said in January 1845, “it is certain we do not occupy it now.”1
Beginning in 1845, however, the United States lurched into the North American
West, extending and solidifying its control across much of the continent. In short order,
the United States annexed the independent Republic of Texas (where expatriate
American settlers had earlier revolted and gained independence from Mexico) in 1845;
agreed to a treaty with Great Britain dividing the Oregon country in 1846; and, after
provoking a war with Mexico over the southern border of the newly-annexed Texas,
forced Mexico to cede the territory between Texas and the Pacific coast in 1848. For
good measure, the United States bullied Mexico into selling another slice of territory in
1853 and purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. Altogether, between 1845 and 1867,
the United States more than doubled its territory.
While before 1845 American control over its western territories had been insubstantial,
in the second half of the nineteenth century the United States forcefully asserted its
dominion over the West. The exploitation of natural resources – particularly precious
minerals – was the engine that drove the assertion of United States control over the West.
Beginning with the discovery of gold in California in 1848, a boom-and-bust pattern in
these newly-acquired territories rapidly emerged: mineral rushes spurred the in-migration

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of prospectors; the exploitation of other resources such as timber and pasturelands;

urbanization; industrial enterprise; and clashes between settlers and natives. That pattern,
established in California, was repeated in Colorado in the late 1850s and early 1860s;
Montana in the 1860s; and the Black Hills in the 1870s. To consolidate its hold on the
West, the United States Army followed in the wake of these mineral rushes, prosecuting
wars against the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, Blackfeet, Modocs, and Nez Perce, among
others. In the last years of the century, the federal government sided with mining
companies in quashing labor radicalism at the mines. Altogether, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, the United States transformed itself from a moderately-sized republic
to a continental empire.2
The rise of the American empire in the West corresponded with the emergence of the
American industrial economy. At mid-century, the United States economy was a laggard
in industrial production, but by the end of the century it was the most productive industrial
nation in the world. In 1850, the United States produced 8.4 million short tons of coal; by
1900 it produced 270 million, almost one-third of the coal in the world. In 1850, there
were 9,000 miles of railroad track in the entire United States. By 1900, there were over
180,000 miles, or more than 37 percent of the world’s rails. Altogether, the United States’
relative share of world manufacturing output rose from 7 percent in 1860 (when it ranked
behind Britain, France, China, and India), to 14 percent in 1880 (when it was second only
to Britain), to 24 percent in 1900 (by which time it had become the world leader).3
The emergence of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century as
both a continental empire and an industrial giant was not coincidental. The United
States’ conquest of the West consisted of a series of state-sponsored spasms of industrial
expansion. Following the Civil War, the federal government, possessed of a Whiggish
pro-development economic philosophy, encouraged the exploitation of natural resources
in the West, enacting a series of laws liberalizing access to minerals, timberlands, and
ranchlands. Capitalists rushed to exploit minerals: gold in California, Colorado, Montana,
and South Dakota; silver in Nevada and Arizona; coal in Colorado; and copper in a long
belt from Montana south through Utah to Arizona. Railroads, over-capitalized,
mismanaged, inefficient, and liberally subsidized by the federal government, facilitated
the exploitation of minerals as well as timber and cattle ranges in the West. Between 1866
and 1884, roughly five million Texas cattle were herded to railheads in Kansas to be
shipped to Chicago. Railroads helped to shift the center of the American timber industry
from the Upper Midwest to the Pacific Northwest. Seizing these resources provoked
violent conflicts between Indians and the U.S. Army. In short, the West between 1850
and 1900 was a federally-sponsored industrial empire.4
The industrial West had multiple origins. One starting point was in 1850, in Watertown,
New York, where Horace Greeley witnessed a portable steam engine in operation.
“Threshing will cease to be a manual and become a mechanized operation,” Greeley wrote,
“and this engine will be running on wheels and driving a scythe before it, or drawing a
plow behind it, in five years.”5 Greeley’s sense of the importance of the machine was accu-
rate, but it was not until the 1880s that the steam-powered thresher entered wide use in the
wheat fields of the West.6 Another beginning was in 1852, in St. Louis, Missouri, where
the first six miles of the Pacific Railroad, one of the first railroads west of the Mississippi
River, opened. Two years later, in Humboldt County, California, a lumber company

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constructed a twenty-mile-long rail line to haul redwood logs from the forest to its mill. By
1869, a transcontinental railroad linked Missouri and California. Though there was no
single technological origin to the industrial West, a primary impetus to western industrial-
ization came from the gold country of California. Within a few years of James Marshall’s
discovery of gold on the South Fork of the American River in California in January 1848,
prospectors had extracted the easiest and most obvious gold deposits using pans, picks, and
shovels. In 1852, to search more deeply for gold, the engineer Edward Mattison used pres-
surized water in a canvas hose to flush gold-bearing gravel into a long wooden sluice box.7
These technologies – hydraulic mining cannons, steam-power threshers, and railroads
– shared important similarities. They facilitated the shift away from independent producers,
with their scythes, drays, and shovels, and toward an economy dominated by capital and
characterized by industrial technology and wage-workers. “The machine, which is the
starting point of the industrial revolution,” Karl Marx wrote of this crucial transition,
“supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool.”8 Just as importantly, all of these
technologies facilitated the exploitation of natural resources. American industrialization
was heavily dependent on the exploitation of cheap natural resources. In all nineteenth-
century industrial economies, growth depended on the three so-called “factors of produc-
tion”: capital, labor, and natural resources. One of the remarkable aspects of the rapid
American industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century was that it was
accomplished despite a chronic shortage of the first two of these three ingredients of indus-
trial growth. Capital was notoriously scarce in nineteenth-century America; until World
War I, American industry depended largely on foreign investment. At the end of the nine-
teenth century approximately one-third of American investment capital came from Europe.
Likewise, labor was in short supply – a condition that largely accounts for the relatively
high wages and high levels of immigration to the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. By 1900, one-fifth of American wage-earners were immigrants.
The U.S. had an abundance of natural resources, however, particularly minerals and
timber. Plentiful resources combined with a chronic shortage of capital and labor to create
a peculiar imbalance in American industrial development: a heavy dependence on resource
exploitation. Beginning in the 1860s, American policy-makers enacted legislation that
opened the natural resources of the West to industrial use: a series of industrial versions of
the infamous Homestead Act, the 1862 law that made 160 acres of land available to settlers
for a small fee. Land grants to railroad companies beginning with the Pacific Railway Act
of 1862 (enacted just six weeks after the Homestead Act) and continuing into the 1870s
donated 131 million acres – 10 percent of the public domain – to railroad companies.
Those companies sold the land or exploited the resources on it in order to finance
construction. The Mineral Resources Act of 1866 made available mining lands for $5 per
acre. It was followed by the General Mining Law of 1872, which opened up the public
domain to mining claims for nominal fees. The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 opened up
forests and further mining lands on the public domain for $2.50 per acre. Through these
and other industrial versions of the Homestead Act, the federal government from the early
1860s until the last decade of the nineteenth century funneled natural resources in the
West into the private sector at well below the market rate. Until the last decade of
the nineteenth century, according to the legal historian Charles Wilkinson, federal timber,
minerals, and rangelands were “effectively open for the taking.”9

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The first intensive industrial exploitation of resources was in the gold country of
California. In the mid-1850s, industrialists developed hydraulic mining technologies to
take advantage of the minerals that state and federal laws made available to them. High-
pressure water cannons washed hillsides into sluices constructed to trap gold but let soil
and gravel wash away. Industrial technologies ordinarily require a substantial capital
investment, but the technology of hydraulic mining was relatively inexpensive: mining
companies impounded a river to create a reservoir; brought water from the reservoir to
the mines via ditches and flumes; and used gravity and a narrowing hose to create water
pressure.10
However inexpensive, hydraulic mining technology created extensive industrial pol-
lution. Hydraulic miners moved tons of earth and gravel to extract just a few ounces of
gold. They flushed those tons of debris into the streams that flowed out of the Sierra
Nevada. By the mid-1860s, debris from hydraulic gold mining had befouled numerous
rivers that drained into the Sacramento River, and ultimately into San Francisco Bay,
destroying both fish and farmland. By one estimate, between the mid-1850s and the early
1880s, hydraulic mining deposited 885 million cubic yards of debris in California rivers
– over three times the amount of earth moved to make way for the Panama Canal. Debris
piled up so high in the Bear and Yuba rivers that all but the tops of pine trees on the
banks were submerged. On the Yuba, debris piled up beneath twenty-foot-high tele-
graph poles until only the top four to six feet remained above the surface. Downstream,
debris filled river channels; the channel of the Yuba was filled so completely that by the
1870s the stream ran a mile away from its original course. Debris raised riverbeds, causing
spring floods to inundate farmlands with a watery mixture of sand and gravel that farmers
called “slickens.” The mixture was poisonous to humans, other animals, and soil. In
order to confine the waters of the spring floods, farmers raised levees alongside the rivers.
As new deposits of sediment accreted on the riverbeds, they raised the levees further. By
1878, stretches of the Bear River’s bed were actually higher than the surrounding country-
side: the waters of the river were held in place only by the artificial levee. Sediment
poured all the way to the mouth of the Sacramento River and beyond. Mining sediment
discolored the water of San Francisco Bay so extensively that in the 1870s it was visible
in the Golden Gate.11
Much of the debris that mining companies flushed downstream contained large
amounts of mercury. By the 1870s, California had become not only a leading producer
of gold, but mined one-third of the mercury in the world. Hydraulic miners coveted
mercury because it amalgamated with gold; adding large amounts of mercury to their
sluices allowed hydraulic miners to extract greater amounts of gold. (Hydraulic mining
was cheap and fast, but it was wasteful: before the introduction of mercury to the process,
about 20 percent of the gold that entered the top of a sluice was flushed out the bottom
with the rest of the debris.) Tons of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, found its way into
water supplies, fisheries, and human bodies in California in the nineteenth century.12
Gold and mercury mining transformed California into an industrial place. Industrial
capitalism has a greater demand for labor than other economic systems; a population surge
usually accompanies industrialization. Within a year of the discovery of gold in California
in 1848, 100,000 argonauts flooded into the gold country; by 1860 the population of the
state was 400,000. San Francisco grew from fewer than 1,000 inhabitants in 1848 to over

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50,000 by 1860, by which time it had become the fifteenth-largest city in the United
States. (For comparison’s sake, it had taken New York City almost two hundred years to
reach a population of 50,000.) Industry percolated into the agricultural sector: by the
1880s, heavily mechanized California wheat farms led the nation in production and
California’s profitable fruit farms were dependent on chemical pesticides.13 California pro-
duced almost $1 billion in gold between 1849 and 1874. Though most of that bullion was
exported from California, enough of it remained to spur other industry in the state;
California manufacturing excluding gold mining rose from a value of under $4 million in
1850 to $116 million in 1880.14
Between the 1860s and 1890s, hydraulic mining technology spread from California to
Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Hydraulic miners also
took the technology abroad, to Australia and British Columbia.15 Other mining technol-
ogies diffused throughout the West. Lode mining, unlike placer mining, required heavy
stamp machinery to crush rock. Railroads were largely responsible for expanding lode
mining throughout the interior West. Before the railroads, only the most valuable mines
could be profitably exploited. It was too expensive to ship heavy lode-mining machinery
to the mines, or to ship ore from the mines to smelters or stamp mills to process it. With
the expansion of railroads, however, lode mining spread from the Comstock region of
Nevada throughout the interior West. Likewise, the arrival of the Northern Pacific
Railroad to Butte, Montana, in 1881, made possible a shift from the exploitation of the
dwindling silver mines to copper.16
While the rise of electricity increased America’s appetite for copper, demand for
wood remained high through the end of the nineteenth century. The lumber industry,
the leading manufacturing sector in the United States in 1850, consumed hundreds of
millions of acres of forests in the nineteenth century, in an arc across the northern tier
of the United States. Before the Civil War, most of this lumbering took place in the
hardwood and white pine forests of the Northeast. In 1849, although New York
remained the leading lumber producer in the United States, production had started to
shift west to the white pines of the Great Lakes. Much of the lumber extracted from the
upper Great Lakes region after the Civil War found its way, by rail, to settlements in the
treeless Great Plains. Between 1860 and 1900, approximately ten million dwellings were
constructed in the United States, many of them in the prairies and plains. Railroads,
which needed wood for ties, bridges, and fuel, were another major consumer of timber.
In 1870, the American railroad industry consumed 195,000 acres of timber. That level
of consumption continued to rise, to 290,000 acres in 1880, 445,00 in 1890, 455,000 in
1900, and 620,000 in 1910, when the railroads consumed 10 percent of the lumber
produced in the United States.17
By the end of the nineteenth century, lumber production had shifted again, to the Far
West. In the 1850s, there were already dozens of mills in the Sierra Nevada, providing
lumber to the California gold country, the silver mines of Nevada, and to Salt Lake City.
By 1870, one-third of the trees in California had been cut. Even the most pessimistic
observers of this rapid deforestation assumed that the Coast Redwood – the tallest tree
species in the world that in 1850 covered two million acres along the Pacific between San
Francisco and the California–Oregon border – would be immune to logging. One forester
wrote in 1882, “The continual timber supply capacity of a redwood forest, under judicious

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care, is so prodigious as to be simply incalculable; none but a suicidal and utterly abandoned
infanticidal policy, wantonly and untiringly practical, can ever blot them out.”18 Yet by
the end of the nineteenth century, one-third of the redwoods – some as old as two
thousand years – had been destroyed.19
Initially, the redwoods were so large that they overawed existing logging technologies.
Just as hydraulic technology transformed gold mining into an industrial enterprise, steam
technology transformed logging. Steam engines that powered railroads to haul logs to the
mills and the saws at the mills vastly increased the productivity of redwood lumber
production. By 1874, Mendocino and Humboldt counties in the heart of the redwood
belt together produced over 40 percent of the lumber in California. The most important
technological innovation in the redwood forests, however, was the “donkey engine.”
A steam engine mounted on wooden skids, powering a winch with a long cable, the
donkey engine allowed loggers to snake logs from valleys and ravines; it made previously
inaccessible timber readily accessible. From California, the donkey engine moved north
to the Douglas fir forests of Oregon and California.20 In 1849, California produced 5,000
million board feet of lumber per year, Oregon about 17,000, and Washington about 4,000.
By 1899, California and Oregon each produced over 700,000 million board feet;
Washington produced as much as Oregon and California combined. Profligacy characterized
the consumption of timber. Between 1860 and 1910, over 150 million acres of forestlands
in the United States were cleared.21
As Americans lurched into the West to exploit minerals, timber, grazing lands, and
other resources, they came into conflict with Indians who sought to protect the natural
resources upon which they relied for subsistence. Violence between Indians and
Americans in the nineteenth-century West was, more often than not, a conflict over
access to resources.
Some of the most extensive violence was in California. Before Spanish colonization
of California in the late eighteenth century, California had been one of the most
densely-populated regions of North America, with roughly 300,000 native inhabitants.
The mission system reduced the native population precipitously, but at the time of the
discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848, at least 150,000 Indians
remained in California. Indians’ subsistence strategies centered on harvesting migrating
salmon from the Sacramento-San Joaquin and Klamath-Trinity river systems. After 1848,
those river systems were also where gold mining concentrated: in the gravel along the
banks and in the bottoms of shallow rivers where prospectors were able to pan for gold.
Hydraulic miners both diverted water from streams and flushed their debris into the
channels. Within a few years, diversion and pollution ruined many rivers for salmon. In
1878, the California Commissioners of Fisheries reported that mining had destroyed half
of the salmon habitat in the state.22
With both miners and Indians vying for control of the resources of the river valleys,
conflict often ensued. Some of the worst violence was in northern California, where the
natives, unlike those in the Central Valley, had little direct experience with colonists
prior to the gold rush. As early as 1851, Karoks clashed with miners on the Klamath
River. In 1852, northern miners formally adopted a code of reprisal against local Indians
that called for the destruction of villages in retaliation for theft, and the destruction of the
village and its inhabitants in retaliation for murder. If miners could not determine who

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had committed the alleged crimes, then they resolved to visit their vengeance upon the
closest Indian village. Miners’ violence against Indians in northern California culminated
in February 1860 with the massacre of more than eighty Wiyots at their village on Indian
Island in Humboldt Bay. The overall effect of this violence, in combination with disease
and famine, was the reduction of the Indian population of California from 150,000 in
1848 to roughly 30,000 by the end of the 1850s.23
To reach the gold country of California and settlements in Oregon and Utah, about
300,000 people traveled westward on the Platte River Trail between 1848 and 1860. As
in California, where conflicts over access to resources centered on river valleys, conflict
in the Great Plains between Indians and migrants began on the banks of the Platte River.
As they passed through the region, emigrants cut down most of the trees growing along
the Platte River. In the Great Plains, trees are present primarily in river valleys, which
comprise only about 7 percent of the region; the banks of the Platte were a source of
timber for Plains Indians as well as sites of winter camps. Emigrants also trailed about half
a million cattle and an equal number of sheep along the Platte River. The animals
consumed most of the grass within twenty miles of the Platte; as a result, neither bison
nor the horses that Plains Indians herded could find forage in the area.24
Beginning in 1859, numerous prospectors traveling along the Platte Road veered
south toward the Colorado Front Range. Gold discoveries in Colorado in early 1859
spurred the influx of roughly 40,000 prospectors and settlers into the territory. Hostilities
between settlers and the Kiowas, Arapahos, and Southern Cheyennes, who relied
primarily on hunting bison, quickly ensued. Prospecting and settlement degraded the
habitats of the bison along the South Platte, Republican, and Arkansas rivers. By the
spring of 1861, Indians, no longer able to subsist by hunting bison, were raiding ranches
and stealing livestock in the Denver hinterlands. In response, the governor of Colorado
Territory, John Evans, precipitated a war with the Indians. The conflict’s bloodiest
moment was a massacre, perpetrated by Colorado militiamen led by Colonel John
Chivington, upon an encampment of noncombatant Southern Cheyennes. The Cheyennes’
leader, Black Kettle, had met with Colorado authorities in September 1864 and sued for
peace before returning to an encampment at Sand Creek on lands guaranteed to the
Cheyennes by treaty. Black Kettle’s efforts toward peace were for naught: on November
29, 1864, Chivington’s militia attacked Black Kettle’s encampment, killing about 150
people, two-thirds of whom were women and children.25
Chivington’s massacre was part of a larger conflict with the Indians of the western
plains, as hostilities between settlers and natives in the short-grass plains along the
Colorado Front Range bled into Indian-white conflict in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and
Montana. Prospectors had discovered gold in Montana in 1862, and by the time of the
Sand Creek massacre the situation in the northern plains was beginning to resemble that
in Colorado. The U.S. Army built a road between Fort Laramie on the old Platte River
trail and the new gold mines near Bozeman, Montana. The Bozeman Trail cut right
through the northern plains nomads’ best remaining bison-hunting areas. Unwilling to
see what had happened along the Platte River or in Colorado happen in the northern
plains, the Lakota, led by Red Cloud, the leader of a Lakota sub-group, and joined by
the Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho, went to war. The Red Cloud War
consisted largely of Indians besieging three forts that the army had built along the

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Bozeman Trail. The Indians were not so foolish as to attempt a direct assault on the forts,
but they harassed any soldiers entering or leaving them and emigrants traveling between
them. From August to December 1866, the Lakota, led in many instances by Red Cloud’s
lieutenant, Crazy Horse, killed 154 soldiers and travelers, captured 700 livestock, and
made 50 brief attacks on the Fort Phil Kearney. On December 21, 1866, the Lakota lured
eighty cavalrymen out of Fort Phil Kearney and into an ambush in a narrow canyon,
killing all of them. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman demanded reprisals,
urging Congress “to provide means and troops to carry on formidable hostilities against
the Indians, until all the Indians or all the whites on the great plains, and between the
settlements on the Missouri and the Pacific, are exterminated.” Civilian authorities,
however, sued for peace. In the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, the United States agreed
to abandon the forts along the Bozeman Trail and granted the Lakota an enormous
reservation north of the Platte and west of the Missouri River.
Yet the treaty with the Lakota in 1868, like similar agreements made with other
groups in the plains around the same time, stipulated that the Indian reserves would last
only “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.”
Sherman, a member of the negotiating committee, wrote to his brother, a U.S. senator
from Ohio, that within a few years the agreements would be mooted, as “it will not be
long before all of the buffaloes are extinct.” Indeed, in the 1870s and early 1880s, thou-
sands of Americans streamed into the plains to hunt bison to satisfy an increasing demand
for leather in industrializing America: nineteenth-century mills relied on heavy leather
belting to power their machinery. The hunters were terrifically wasteful: poor hunters
wounded two or three bison for every one they killed; the crippled animals later fell to
wolves. Skinners ruined hides as they flayed them, or failed to stretch and stake them
to dry properly. Combined with environmental factors – a blizzard in the northern
plains, bovine disease introduced by cattle in the southern plains, and the crowding of
the range by cattle throughout – the bison population, which might have been as high
as 25 or 30 million at the outset of the nineteenth century, collapsed within a few years,
exactly as Sherman had predicted. Political and military leaders followed Sherman
in applauding the destruction by commercial hunters. One officer in the plains put it
to a hunter succinctly: “Kill every buffalo you can . . . every buffalo dead is an Indian
gone.”26
Though hunger forced most Indians to submit to the reservation system, violence
punctuated the 1870s. In the summer of 1874, General George Custer led a scientific
expedition to the Black Hills, in the center of the territory that had been guaranteed to the
Lakota at the conclusion of the Red Cloud War in 1868. Custer’s reports, printed in
eastern newspapers, trumpeted the easy availability of gold in the Black Hills. In a reprise
of the pattern that had started in California, Custer’s reports caused a gold rush into the
Black Hills, and a new round of violence between Indians and prospectors each seeking
stewardship of different natural resources. To put an end to the violence, in the summer
of 1876, the army dispatched three columns to force the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes,
and Arapahoes, led by the Lakotas Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, back to recognized res-
ervation agencies. Crazy Horse defeated one column, led by General George Crook, at
Rosebud Creek, and destroyed most of Custer’s command in a battle on the Little Big
Horn River a few weeks later. By the winter of 1876–77, however, the Indians had

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divided into hunting camps in search of the dispersed bison; army pressure on the winter
camps forced most of the Indians to surrender.
In short, in the thirty years between the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and the
surrender of most of the Lakotas to the reservation system in 1877, Americans lurched
successively into the goldfields of California, Colorado, Montana, and the Black Hills,
prompting violent conflicts with Indians who sought to protect their resources – salmon
in California and bison in the Great Plains – from the intrusions of settlers.
In the wake of the collapse of their resource strategies, natives adapted to new
economic and ecological realities and shifted into wage work.27 The proletarianization of
Indian labor was particularly rapid in gold rush California. Indians had worked in the
goldfields in the late 1840s and early 1850s; a decade later they were primarily agricultural
workers.28 The equestrian nomads of the Great Plains made a rapid transition from
hunting bison to herding cattle. Members of the two largest Lakota reservations – Pine
Ridge and Rosebud – worked as cowboys on numerous ranches in the Dakotas and
Nebraska.29 Likewise, in the sparsely-populated plateau in northeastern California, local
natives, the Modocs, had by the early 1870s largely accommodated to the local ranching
economy; Modoc men worked as ranch-hands and women in domestic service. Ironically,
when U.S. authorities tried to remove the Modocs to a reservation in Oregon in the
early 1870s, the natives enjoyed the support of local ranchers, who petitioned federal
authorities to allow the Modocs to remain in northeastern California because of their
utility as laborers. A brief conflict erupted in 1872–73 – the Modoc War – when the
Modocs resisted removal. The Modocs fought to remain in California not to pursue their
traditional resource strategies but to remain in proximity to wage work.30
Natives were not the only people to shift into wage work in the West. Mining and
logging industries attracted thousands of industrial workers to the West – particularly to
mining towns – by the end of the nineteenth century. Workers arrived in the West from
the eastern United States, Europe, East Asia, and Latin America.31 Miners organized
unions in the Comstock region in the 1860s, and when the Comstock silver mines
declined, those miners dispersed, taking their experience at union organization with
them. That experience was essential: organized labor faced numerous obstacles in the
nineteenth century. The federal government could issue an injunction against a laborer
to keep him or her from promoting a strike or a union. Large employers not infrequently
called in local police, federal troops, or private forces to break up strikes. National
Guardsmen and Pinkertons in Colorado, the Rangers in Texas, and the Mounties in
Canada used force to break strikes.32
Violent suppression of union efforts only fostered further labor radicalism and repeated
rounds of violence. After mine owners called in federal troops to put an end to a strike
in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1892, frustrated strike leaders formed the Western Federation
of Miners (WFM). During its first years the WFM saw its mission as like that of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL), a union that limited its membership only to skilled
laborers. Indeed, the WFM affiliated with the AFL for a year beginning in 1896. Yet by
that time, the WFM had fewer members than when it was founded in 1893. The
organization’s leaders thus took the union in an increasingly radical direction, shifting to
include unskilled workers in its ranks. In 1900 the WFM endorsed the Socialist Party;
within a few years even the Socialists found the WFM too radical and disavowed their

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endorsement. It was the WFM’s predilection for violence – notably violent strikes at
Coeur d’Alene in 1899 and Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1904 – that caused potential
allies such as the Socialists to recoil. At Cripple Creek, a union member, Harry Orchard,
detonated a bomb at a railroad station, killing thirteen strikebreakers; the mine owners
responded with violence of their own. In the end, the strike crushed the WFM, which
had about 9,000 members in Colorado in 1902 but almost none after the strike. Yet the
conflict did not sate the appetite of the most radical elements of the WFM for violence.
In 1905, Orchard planted another bomb that killed the anti-labor Idaho governor, Frank
Steunenberg.33
In 1904, the WFM was subsumed into the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
which like the WFM was a syndicalist organization that advocated the control of indus-
trial production and the state by a federation of workers. The IWW organized thousands
of loggers and itinerant agricultural workers in the West in the years before World War
I. The hyper-patriotism that accompanied the United States’ participation in World
War I, however, was deadly to the IWW and radical labor in general. Between 1920
and 1923, the state governments of California, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Idaho
arrested 5,000 IWW members on various laws which had been passed in the aftermath
of the Russian Revolution criminalizing syndicalism. By the mid-1920s, the IWW was
finished. In 1926, the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill,
and Smelter Workers, dropped its emphasis on class struggle, and focused on better
hours, wages, and working conditions.34
Thinking of the West in the second half of the nineteenth century as an industrial
empire contradicts some of Americans’ most cherished notions about the region during
that period. At least since 1893, with the publication of the historian Frederick Jackson
Turner’s enduringly influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American
History,” many Americans have thought of the West as a place characterized by agricul-
tural settlement.35 Conflict with natives, according to this idea, was incidental to the
main thrust of settlement, and those natives, once relegated to reservations, seemingly
vanished. Moreover, the frontier, as Turner and many of his followers maintained, drew
settlers away from the influence of the federal government and of the industrializing,
urbanizing East. These notions persist among many mainstream American historians: in
American history textbooks, the nineteenth-century West is almost universally depicted
as an agrarian, indeed almost backward, place; there is little mention of Indians after
their submission to the reservation system; and little acknowledgement of the central
role of the federal government in the making of the western empire. Yet an empire it
was, predicated on funneling natural resources on government land into the hands of
entrepreneurs as rapidly as possible, and on quashing resistance first by natives and later
by industrial workers.

Notes
1 Congressional Globe, 28th Cong. 2nd Sess. (January 27, 1845), 199. For the tenuousness of the
American hold on the West before the Mexican-American War, see the essays in a special issue
of Pacific Historical Review, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg, “Alternative Wests: Rethinking
Manifest Destiny,” Pacific Historical Review 86 (Feb. 2017), 1–152. See also Isenberg, “Between
Mexico and the United States: From Indios to Vaqueros in the Pastoral Borderlands,” in John

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Tutino, ed., Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2012), 85–109; Isenberg, “The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin
Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808–1826,” Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Fall 2001),
445–465; Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
2 For Texas independence, see Andrés Reséndéz, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas
and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); for the Mexican-
American War, see Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S.
Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian
Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); for California, see
Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997); for the conquest of Indians, see Brendan Lindsay, Murder
State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2012); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian
Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Ari Kelman, A Misplaced
Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York:
Penguin, 2008); Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison; Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians,
Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); James O.
Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1996); Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
3 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500
to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1987), 149; “The Railroads of the World,” Railroad Gazette,
May 30, 1902, 300.
4 For railroads in the West, see Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making
of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011); see also Carroll Van West, Capitalism on the
Frontier: Billings and the Yellowstone Valley in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993). For the post-Civil War West see Heather Cox Richardson, West from
Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007). For the nineteenth-century West as an industrial place, see Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining
California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Isenberg, “Environment
and the Nineteenth-Century West, or, Process Encounters Place,” and David Igler,
“Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and the Environment in the Greater West,” in
William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American West (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004),
77–111; Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001); Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in
the Late Nineteenth Century,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (May 2000), 159–192; Gray Brechin,
Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999); Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden,
1778–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); William F. Deverell, Railroad
Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American
West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Michael Williams, Americans and Their
Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991); Mark
Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979); Rodman Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947).
5 The Ohio Cultivator, 6 (November 15, 1850).
6 California was the leading wheat-producing state in the country in 1884 with 57 million
bushels. See Isenberg. Mining California, 163.
7 Isenberg, Mining California, 34, 84.

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8 Karl Marx, Capital. Volume One: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels
(New York: International Publishers, 1967), 355. For a discussion of the place of technology
in labor history, see Donald MacKenzie, “Marx and the Machine,” Technology and Culture 25
(July 1984), 473–502.
9 Charles F. Wilkinson, Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1992), 120. For “industrial versions of the Homestead Act,”
see Isenberg, Mining California, 14.
10 For Americans’ preference for relatively cheap technologies, see Alexander James Field, “Land
Abundance, Interest/Profit Rates, and Nineteenth-Century British and American Technology,”
Journal of Economic History 43 (June 1983), 405–431.
11 Isenberg, Mining California, 39–47.
12 Isenberg, Mining California, 47–50.
13 Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 94–123.
14 David J. St. Clair, “The Gold Rush and the Beginnings of California Industry,” in James J.
Rawls and Richard J. Orsi, eds., A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 185–208; Mark A. Eifler, Gold Rush
Capitalists: Greed and Growth in Sacramento (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2002).
15 Randall E. Rohe, “Hydraulicking in the American West: The Development and Diffusion of
a Mining Technique,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History (1985), 18–35. For British
Columbia, see General Review of Mining in British Columbia (Victoria: Richard Wolfenden,
1904), 42–43; Peter R. Mulvihill, William R. Morison, and Sherry MacIntyre, “Water, Gold,
and Obscurity: British Columbia’s Bullion Pit,” The Northern Review 25/26 (Summer 2005),
197–210. For Australia, see Barry McGowan, “Mullock Heaps and Tailing Mounds:
Environmental Effects of Alluvial Goldmining,” in Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and
Andrew Reeves, eds., Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–99.
16 Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 158. See also Timothy LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant
Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2009).
17 For the use of timber to support construction in the treeless grasslands, see Cronon, Nature’s
Metropolis, 148–206; for the impact of railroads on forests, see Williams, Americans and Their
Forests, 344–352. Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 55, viewed railroads as “decisive” to the
American industrial “take-off into sustained growth.” Robert Fogel qualified that view, seeing
railroads as significant but not “crucial.” See Fogel, “A Quantitative Approach to the Study of
Railroads in American Economic Growth: A Report of Some Preliminary Findings,” Journal
of Economic History 22 (June 1962), 163–197.
18 A. Kellogg, Forest Trees of California (Sacramento: J.D. Young, 1882), 24–26.
19 Reed F. Noss, ed., The Redwood Forest: History, Ecology, and Conservation of the Coast Redwoods
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000), xxi, 39; Raymond F. Dasmann, California’s Changing
Environment (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser, 1981), 29–38; Isenberg, Mining California, 75–79.
20 Isenberg, Mining California, 75–98.
21 Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 289–330. See also Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A
California History (New York: Norton, 2013); Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast; Donald Pisani,
“Forests and Conservation, 1865–1890,” Journal of American History 72 (1985), 340–359;
Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County,
Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 77–93; Thomas R. Cox, Mills and
Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1974). For the Douglas fir in the early twentieth century, see Emily K. Brock, Money
Trees: The Douglas Fir and American Forestry, 1900–1944 (Corvallis: Oregon State University
Press, 2015).

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22 Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–
1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47; Isenberg, Mining California, 46.
23 Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 100–124; Lindsay, Murder State; Madley,
American Genocide.
24 Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1995), 51–84.
25 Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre, 1–44; West, Contested Plains, 271–316.
26 Sir William Butler: An Autobiography (New York: Scribner, 1913), 97. For the bison, see
Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 123–163.
27 Louis Warren, “Wage Work in the Sacred Circle: The Ghost Dance as Modern Religion,”
Western Historical Quarterly 46 (Summer 2015), 142–168; William J. Bauer, Jr., We Were All
Like Migrant Workers Here: Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation,
1850–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Brian C. Hosmer,
American Indians and the Marketplace: Persistence and Innovation Among the Menominees and
Metlakatlans, 1870–1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Alice Littlefield and
Martha Knack, eds., Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).
28 Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 75–81; Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California
Frontier, 169–192.
29 Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American
West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 70–79.
30 Isenberg, Mining California, 131–162; Isenberg, “Between Mexico and the United States,”
100–101.
31 Mae Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century
California and Victoria,” Journal of American History 101 (March 2015), 1082–1105; Eric V.
Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the
U.S-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Gunther Peck, Reinventing
Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans,
Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1989).
32 Andrew Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier,
1875–1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 158–200; Thomas Andrews, Killing
for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
33 Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago:
Quadrangle, 1969), 28–96.
34 Mark Wyman, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2010); Dubofsy, We Shall Be All, 423–470; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First
World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
35 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” American
Historical Association Annual Report (1893), 199–227.

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 22
CRISIS, PROTEST, AN D R EF OR M I N
INDUSTRIALIZIN G A MER I C A

William A. Link

Contradictory trends characterized the period between Reconstruction and World War
I – what historians called the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The Civil War’s horrific
bloodletting was over, but its aftermath cast a long shadow. Efforts to rebuild dominated
the political scene, but these efforts led to doubt about social and political institutions.
Americans still had to deal with the war’s political, cultural, and psychological implications,
and to do so during years of intense, transformative change evident in industrialization,
market capitalism, and urbanization. Between the late 1870s and early 1890s, the railroad
network rapidly spread – so rapidly that few communities now lacked access to modern
transportation. Most communities greeted the railroad’s arrival enthusiastically, seeing it
as a measure of progress and as a promise of future prosperity. But railroads also brought
subtle and not-so-subtle changes: the rush of store-bought items whose prices usually
were better than local goods; the incorporation of farm products into a commercial
nexus; the new dependence on a cash economy; and the overall supremacy of an
unrelenting and unforgiving market. In good times, these seemed like blessings, but in
hard times, the crunch fell heavily. Economic expansion remade the United States into
a global industrial power, but wrenching changes left many other Americans on the
sidelines of prosperity.1
The nineteenth century’s social structure and stability eroded in other areas. Labor
conflict grew acute with major strikes such as the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886
and the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892; labor unions such as the Knights of Labor and the
American Federation of Labor attempted to represent workers and to make their voices
heard with the large economic organizations that were dominating life. Cities grew more
important, with the expansion of major metropolitan centers such as New York City and
Chicago. Urbanization during the post-Civil War era affected Americans outside of
metropolitan centers, with the growth of interior towns and cities whose expansion was
tied to railroads.2
The generation after Reconstruction came to terms with the post-Civil War social
transformation in different ways. Americans attempted to benefit from the expansion
of commercial markets, but they also sought the reassurance that these forces could be
contained. This essay explores three instances of responses to the Gilded Age through
the experience of freed slaves, farmers, and women during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.
Although very different examples, each was based upon uncertainty about the future in
an age of dizzying changes – and ordinary Americans’ desire to determine their future.

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The End of Reconstruction

On November 7, 1876, Americans went to the polls to elect a president. The result was
one of the closest presidential elections in American history, in which Democratic candi-
date Samuel J. Tilden outpolled Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by about 250,000
votes. In three states which federal troops still occupied – Florida, Louisiana, and South
Carolina – the results remained uncertain and unreported. As a result, neither Tilden nor
Hayes possessed the necessary majority of electoral votes. Up until March 1877, the elec-
tion remained contested, only resolved after an electoral commission proposed a solution
in which Hayes won. The disputed election of 1876 was resolved by what historian C.
Vann Woodward called the Compromise of 1877. According to its terms, the white
South acquiesced in Hayes’s election in exchange for the withdrawal of the last remaining
northern troops that occupied these three states, the last that Republican governments
ruled. More importantly, the Compromise marked a formal end to Reconstruction. After
1877, the North no longer mounted any further military intervention in southern affairs.3
For the next generation, the “redeemed” South – that is, governments captured by anti-
Reconstruction forces – prevailed, as the governments employed extraordinary means to
maintain power. Using a rhetoric combining race and sex, Redeemers urged white voters
to support them as a matter of social solidarity. Finally, in close elections Redeemers
resorted to other methods to win elections, including violence designed to intimidate black
voters into staying away from the polls, as well as redistricting, gerrymandering, and ballot
manipulation. Redeemer political control solidified the grip of white supremacy. Most
African Americans found little recourse to the revitalized plantation system, which assured
the control of white planters over black labor.4
The end of Reconstruction meant the end of any national efforts to protect freed
slaves from white oppression. During the spring of 1879, thousands of African Americans
from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas – 6,000 that year, followed by 15,000 a year later
– traveled up the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, perhaps 2,500 refugees fled the plantation
regions of eastern North Carolina for what they hoped were more hospitable communities
in Indiana and the Midwest. The departure of the migrants, known as Exodusters, seemed
an alarming development, to both southern white and black leaders. Frederick Douglass
denounced the migration, as did black leaders such as leading North Carolina Republicans.
“We cannot but regard the present agitation of an African Exodus from the South as ill
timed, and in some respects hurtful,” Douglass declared.

We stand today at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction. There is

growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American people to
guard, protect, and defend the personal and political rights of all the people of
the States . . . At a time like this, so full of hope and courage, it is unfortunate
that a cry of despair should be raised in behalf of the colored people of the
South.5

Other established black politicians agreed with Douglass. North Carolina Republican
James Harris denounced the exodus as the result of efforts of a “class of colored men who
may be very appropriately described as deadbeats and paupers.” Harris, a founder of the
state Republican party who was elected to the legislature, warned of false black leaders who

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were the “self-styled and self-appointed leaders of their race, and with unblushing effron-
tery assumed it as their peculiar prerogative to represent the colored people of the whole
South.” Harris saw migrants as “enemies of their people,” and he wanted “no intermed-
dling from such a source in their affairs.”6 In December 1879, the US Senate established a
five-member committee to investigate the causes of black migration. It held hearings in
early 1880, interviewing 153 witnesses.7
Their testimony provides a powerful statement about the condition of freed people at
the end of Reconstruction. The failure of Reconstruction, which formally ended during
the winter of 1877, only after the disputed presidential election of the previous November,
motivated many to leave. Exodusters came to believe that a Promised Land lay outside
the South. The end of Reconstruction did not end African Americans’ search for freedom,
however. Lacking political and economic power, during the late 1870s Exodusters voted
with their feet, fleeing white supremacy in hopes of finding better conditions elsewhere.
In terms of absolute numbers, the later, post-World War I departure of African Americans
to northern states dwarfed the Exodusters’ migration. However, the migration of the late
1870s was nonetheless significant. First, it charted out future routes of escape; the
Mississippi River became a path for later generations, as did the railroads of the Atlantic
Seaboard. Second, the Exodusters made a decisive commentary about declining conditions
for African Americans, how Reconstruction’s promise of civil and political equality had
failed. A new era in the South’s post-emancipation years was inaugurated, but it contained
dark augurs for the future.
Black people were keenly aware what the end of Reconstruction meant for their
economic status, citizenship, and political power. “If you want to educate your children
to be men, to imitate the white race, to own property, to become successful in life in any
respect,” said one promoter of emigration in North Carolina, “you must leave this poor,
God-forsaken country.”8 There were “no words which can fully express or explain the
real condition of my people through the south,” wrote one black leader, “nor how deeply
and keenly they feel the necessity of fleeing from the wrath and long pent-up hatred of
their old masters which they feel assured will ere long burst loose like the pent-up fires of
a volcano and crush them if they remain here many years longer.”9
One migrant, James Stokes, who traveled from Rocky Mount, in eastern North
Carolina, to Indiana, told his story in January 1880. He had thought of leaving a decade
earlier, but he had no idea how to move. Underpaid by white planters, Stokes found
himself the victim of white merchants’ price gouging. Working all the time, he could not
escape debt. Economic repression fed political inferiority: black people were “constantly
compelled to submit to insolence and insult, besides being robbed of the just reward of
their labor.” In North Carolina, Redeemer control of the legislature resulted in new laws
imposing white control on black-majority counties. Stokes saw no alternative. He
believed that Indiana was the right place “for the thousands of colored people, living in
darkness and under intolerable oppression in the South.”10
In Louisiana, ex-slave, Union veteran, and Republican activist Henry Adams established
the Colonization Council, while another ex-slave in Tennessee, Benjamin “Pap”
Singleton, organized emigration efforts independent of Adams. Still another leader,
Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall – known as O. S. B. Wall – helped to organize emigrants
from North Carolina. Adams, Singleton, and Wall shared common characteristics. Active

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in resisting slavery before the war, Singleton, a self-educated carpenter, escaped from
slavery and lived in Canada. Returning to Tennessee after the Civil War, he relied on an
underground network of information and support among postwar African Americans. As
early as 1869, Singleton, using that network, began efforts to sponsor migration to Kansas.
The son of a white planter and an enslaved woman who was born in Richmond
County, North Carolina, Wall was freed by his father and, in 1839, was sent to study in a
Quaker school outside Cincinnati. Attending Oberlin College, Wall read law under noted
black leader (and Oberlin graduate) John Mercer Langston, who became his brother-in-
law when he married Wall’s sister. In 1858, Wall was indicted for participating in an
antislavery mob thwarting Kentucky slave catchers in Ohio. Light-skinned (his subsequent
descendants eventually passed for white), Wall remained acutely race-conscious. Asked
about racial classifications of black people, Wall once quipped that whites saw them as
“black, blacker, and blackest.” Late in the Civil War, Wall became a very successful
recruiter for the United States Colored Troops in Ohio. In March 1865, he became
among the earliest African American commissioned officers, serving as a captain and seeing
duty in occupied Charleston. During Reconstruction, Wall served as a Freedmen’s Bureau
agent. Returning to Washington in 1867, he became the first African American magistrate
in the District of Columbia, a position that he held for about nine years. Wall became
president of the Emigrant Aid Society, founded in the 1870s to encourage black emigration
from the South.
While Wall worked with Henry Adams in recruiting, Adams’s organization, the
Colonization Council, became fantastically successful, eventually enrolling 98,000 African
Americans, with most of them in Louisiana and Mississippi. Adams traveled around these
states and Texas, carefully documenting widespread violence against black people. Adams
found 683 instances in which black men had been whipped, maimed, or killed in the
1870s. The turning point for Adams came in 1877, with the end of northern military
presence in the Deep South. Writing to President Hayes, Adams’s group appealed to
Congress “for a territory to which we might go and live with our families.” Failing that,
Adams sought transportation to West Africa, “somewhere where we could live in peace
and quiet.” When these appeals fell on deaf ears, Adams considered urging foreign
governments to provide refuge “to help us get away from the United States and go and
live there under their flag.”11

The Farmers’ Uprising

Unease about what the Gilded Age held for the future also affected rural Americans,
many of whom expressed increasing unease about the post-1877 economic and social
transformation. American agriculture underwent a major transformation during the
Gilded Age. Industrialization and urbanization meant that centers of wealth and prosper-
ity were concentrated outside the traditional heartland communities. Railroads proved a
mixed blessing, opening up rural communities to outside goods but exposing farmers to
the unforgiving realities of a global economic system. For farmers, railroads, seemingly
possessing a stranglehold on their livelihood, became a frequent object of their ire.
Increases in rates were greeted with complaints about monopoly power. Railroads sym-
bolized the domination of the market and its controlling effect on their lives and
livelihood.

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As early as the 1870s, farmers organized to express grievances. The Patrons of

Husbandry, or the Grange, spread across much of rural America, but its leadership and
constituency generally represented elite farmers rather than the rural masses. A much
more radical movement emerged during the early 1880s. Founded in 1879 in eastern
Texas, the Farmers’ Alliance included mostly small farmers opposing large cattle
operations. Unlike the Grange, the Alliance attracted farmers lacking many resources.
The order especially appealed to cotton farmers because of its deep suspicion of railroads
and its willingness to criticize the credit system oppressing small farmers. By 1886, when
the Alliance decided to expand beyond Texas, it had become a vehicle for mass protest.
Historians have differed about the origins, organization, and impact of the Alliance and,
later, the Populist Party. The earliest historian, John David Hicks, portrayed their rise as a
result of the closing of the frontier and economic opportunities. Others, such as Richard
Hofstadter, have seen Populists as reactionary nationalists, while Lawrence Goodwyn
portrayed them as a last outpost of grassroots democracy. More recent historians such as
Michael Kazin and Charles Postel have portrayed them as possessing a new vision of
revitalized American democracy.12 Few scholars would disagree, however, about the
Alliance’s and Populists’ significance as the largest political uprising in American history.
In August 1886, the Texas Alliance met outside Dallas, in Cleburne, and, after much
infighting, committed to a program of political action. The meeting adopted a manifesto
of seventeen “demands” urging action to secure “to our people freedom from the
onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of
arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations.”13 The Cleburne Demands authorized the
establishment of Alliance cooperative stores and a national bureau of labor statistics, while
they also called for an end to the convict-lease system. Bitterly anti-railroad, the Texas
Alliance endorsed the national regulation of railroad rates and practices. Criticizing the
inadequacies of the national finance and currency system, the Alliance also called for a
federal national bank to manage the currency.
In early 1887, the group reached another crucial decision to recruit new members
beyond Texas. With 200,000 members in Texas, the Alliance was poised for significant
expansion.14 Under President Charles W. Macune, the Texas Alliance dispatched
lecturer-organizers across the cotton South. Organizers promised to overcome the credit
and debt problems of farmers by establishing centralized buying and selling in cooperatives,
and by extending credit in advance of the cotton crop. Alliance cooperative exchanges
were established at the county, district, and state level – with a powerful grassroots appeal.
The lecturer-organizers were Texans, but they were often sent back to the states from
which they had migrated.
Nominally nonpolitical, the Alliance articulated a besieged rural culture. The organiza-
tion specified that its membership was only open to farmers, laborers, mechanics, teachers,
physicians, ministers, and editors of agricultural journals. Specifically excluded were those
associated with the market economy and corporate bullying – lawyers, bankers, railroad
men, cotton merchants, warehousers, and storekeepers. The Alliance also formed coali-
tions with existing protest groups. In early 1887, it merged with the Louisiana Farmers’
Union, adopting the name of National Farmers’ Alliance and Co-operative Union of
America. In Arkansas, the Agricultural Wheel, which claimed a region-wide membership
of 500,000, also joined forces in December 1888.

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By 1889, the Alliance claimed a peak membership of several million. With headquarters
established in Washington, the organization maintained a network of stores, exchanges,
and warehouses that attracted new members. Adopting a revival-style approach to
organizing, the Alliance maintained 35,000 lecturers whose main purpose was to beat the
bushes for new members and to promote an “education” program preaching “cooperation”
to the rank-and-file. The cooperative exchanges became wildly popular, and they drove
much of the order’s rapid growth.
Part of the Alliance’s rapid expansion lay in its militancy, its willingness to slay the
dragon of “monopoly” that seemingly oppressed rural Americans. In one of the organiz-
ation’s more spectacular successes, in 1888 it took on the so-called jute bagging trust. The
manufacturers of jute, a fabric used for cotton bagging, conspired to raise unilaterally
the price of jute from seven to eleven cents per yard. The Alliance, organizing in
Birmingham, mounted a boycott in the spring of 1889 against the trust. They instructed
Alliancemen to use cotton fabric for bagging instead. The state Alliances agreed to make
arrangements with cotton mills cooperatively; the membership avidly embraced this
cause. “The Standard of Revolt is up,” declared Georgia editor Tom Watson, “Let us
keep it up and speed it on.” By 1890, the jute trust had collapsed.15
Despite these successes, the Alliance confronted many obstacles. Some farmers
remained discouraged and dispirited. Organizing in Alabama, Alliance lecturer J. M.
Perdue complained that farmers were often “so crushed under the crop mortgage system
that they have lost almost all hope of bettering their condition.” Many depended for their
livelihood on local merchants, who intimidated the farmers into apathy.16 Henry W.
Grady, the boosterish editor of the Atlanta Constitution, called the Alliance “deluded
brothers” with socialist tendencies whose principles, “if carried out, would revolutionize
our entire system of government, shutting out all competition, placing the commerce,
the producer and manufacturer in the hands of one man, closing up all stores save their
own.”17
In truth, the Alliance was an unwieldy organization with divisions of geography, class,
and politics. Its sudden expansion, which brought in members from the Plains and Upper
Midwest grain belt, made these differences even more obvious. In some sense the co-
operative movement papered over internal tensions. Alliance leader Charles W. Macune
realized this, but from the beginning the market pressures to succeed worked against the
exchange system. In late 1889, Macune used the pages of the national Alliance journal,
the National Economist, to outline a new effort to seek to overcome the credit problems
of cotton farmers. Macune proposed a nationally established system of subtreasuries, or
warehouses, where farmers could store their crops and receive currency in advance of the
sale of their crops. Subtreasury certificates of deposit would serve, the Alliance’s 1889
platform stated, as “full legal tender for all debts, public and private.” The certificates
would provide the basis of legal notes up to 80 percent of the crop’s value. The subtreas-
uries would also try to stem the endemic price deflation that characterized the American
economy during the last third of the nineteenth century.18
Ultimately, the Alliance found its experiences in politics disheartening. The subtreasury
plan quickly stalled in Congress, and its sponsor, North Carolina senator Zebulon Vance
– who had endorsed the Alliance yardstick – voted against it, saying that he could not
support this “great and radical departure.”19 Regular Democrats consistently outmaneuvered

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Alliance Democrats, and in numerous states the agrarian legislatures accomplished little. In
states such as Georgia, where the “Farmers’ Legislature” elected conservative Democrat
Joseph Gordon to the U.S. Senate, the “silk-hat bosses” remained in charge.20 Despite
majorities elsewhere, important Alliance proposals were frustrated. In Texas and South
Carolina, respectively, Democrats James Hogg and Benjamin Tillman used the Alliance to
build up their machine organizations to elect themselves governor and to seize control of
the state Democratic parties.
The failure of the subtreasury plan during 1891–92 spurred a movement to organize a
third party – eventually known as the People’s or Populist Party. Radicals in the Alliance
used the issue to point out their divergence from Democrats. The most popular advocate
of a third party, North Carolinian Leonidas L. Polk, became active in the North Carolina
Grange, served as state agriculture commissioner, and then became the well-respected
editor of the North Carolina Progressive Farmer. Polk had much to do with building one
of the strongest state Alliance organizations.
Although hardly a radical by disposition, Polk felt that Democratic leaders had
abandoned the subtreasury plan, “so near to the heart” of the mass of rural North
Carolinians.21 Like other Alliance leaders, Polk favored the organization of a third party.
Elected president of the National Alliance in 1889, Polk announced his position at a
meeting of the Confederation of Industrial Organizations in February 1892. The time
had come, he declared, for the “great West, the great South and the great Northwest, to
link their hands and hearts together and march to the ballot box and take possession of
the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the
people.” This new mass movement intended to rectify the political system, “if we have
to wipe the two old parties from the face of the earth!”22 The St. Louis meeting essentially
verified the exodus of large numbers of Alliance members into a new third party, the
People’s Party, or Populists.
At the same time, other members of the Alliance could not stomach deserting white
supremacy, sentiments which Democrats worked hard to encourage. Elias Carr, president
of the North Carolina Alliance, was elected governor as a Democrat. In other states,
Democrats also tried to retain the agrarian vote. On the other hand, a large portion of the
order supported the Populists, though deserting the Democrats was not easy. When a
Virginian cast a Populist ballot, he said it was “like cutting off the right hand or putting
out the right eye.”23
In June 1892, Populists suffered a grievous blow when Polk died suddenly at age
fifty-five, only a month before the new third party was scheduled to meet in Omaha,
Nebraska. The Omaha convention endorsed Alliance principles but also attempted to
appeal to an urban-industrial workforce. The convention’s nomination of James B.
Weaver, an Iowan and former Union general, for the presidency, had little appeal in the
South. Weaver did not carry any southern states. Populists, however, assembled state
tickets, which, in some states, challenged Democratic hegemony. In Alabama, Reuben
Kolb ran for governor under a Jeffersonian Democratic banner, but he was defeated by
the regular Democratic candidate after massive fraud and what one Democratic news-
paper admitted was “trickery and corruption.” In Georgia, Tom Watson lost his reelec-
tion campaign for Congress after ballot chicanery and political violence tilted the election
to his Democratic opponent.24 In other states, Populists composed a significant minority,

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though they still faced the determined opposition of the political establishment. South
Carolina’s Benjamin Tillman maintained a stranglehold over the farmers’ movement, but
he was determined to undermine its influence. With Tillman in charge, the Alliance
collapsed. In other states such as Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia, the Alliance
for various reasons did not convert to Populism.

The Origins of Progressivism

The advent of the Progressive Era, beginning in the 1890s, represented a third attempt to
come to grips with the changing world of industrializing America. A worldwide financial
collapse in 1893 brought on a long depression and high industrial unemployment, collaps-
ing agricultural prices, and widespread distress. In part in response to the economic crisis
of the 1890s, a disparate and loosely connected movement sought to institute reforms that
strengthened the ability of the state to intervene to regulate the economy and stabilize the
social system. Involving various efforts as diverse as public health and the regulation of
the workplace, these early progressive reformers were motivated to try to perfect society
through purposeful intervention. Collectively, the reformers, who enjoyed a peak of
popularity and political success between the late 1890s and World War I, were known as
progressives.25
The Progressive Era also marked a coming of age for middle-class women, who played
a large role in shaping and directing reform, especially social reforms such as public
schools and the anti-saloon movement. During the early years of the twentieth century,
women exerted unprecedented public involvement in leadership by claiming their
position as mothers and protectors of the family. In literature, and as journalists, as well
as in social movements, such as prohibition, women burst on the public scene in
twentieth-century America.26
During the generation after the Civil War, the status of women slowly changed.
Although Victorian taboos restricted women’s ability to work outside of the home,
women became involved in activism in the public sphere. New opportunities for work
opened up, as a handful of women were able to become physicians and lawyers. Scores of
other women joined the workforce in the burgeoning industries. At the same time,
women became a powerful force behind early twentieth-century reform, and their
involvement coincided with their expanded public presence.
In the post-Civil War era, women became more active in missionary societies,
women’s clubs, and reform-minded organizations designed to protect the home. Home
and foreign missions attracted Protestant women as churches organized women’s boards
of missions. Mission activities often involved charity work with the poor. Laura Askew
Haygood, graduating from the all-women’s Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia,
became active in Methodist home missions. She helped to create the Trinity Home
Mission in Atlanta in 1882, the goals of which included the “physical, mental and moral
elevation of the poor of the city.”27
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, became one
of the most important women’s organizations of the Gilded Age. Its appeal lay in
expressing women’s moral power and its assertion over the primarily male world of
saloons and drinking. In addition to pressing for temperance and prohibition, some

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WCTU activists became involved in causes such as education, child labor, prison reform,
and anti-lynching campaigns. The group became an organizational training ground for
female leadership.
Another setting for activism was women’s clubs, which grew in popularity after the
mid-1880s. As Anne Firor Scott shows in her pioneering The Southern Lady (1970), early
women’s clubs were historical and literary, often reading groups of women in a single-
sex setting. Soon clubwomen became involved in social concerns related to traditional
female spheres of influence – children, education, and the home. The “improvement
of health, the betterment of morals, the modernizing of education and humanizing of
penology are perhaps the most vital matters in which . . . women have interested
themselves,” declared a North Carolina clubwoman.28 The women’s club movement
became a national mania, with most states participating in the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs by 1910.
Black women also used women’s clubs as an outlet for public activism. Much of the
ugly racism of the Progressive Era – lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation – was
focused on black men and the threat that they presented. Black women found a niche
under Jim Crow that had not previously existed. Ida Wells Barnett, a vocal critic of
lynching, was a leading organizer of black women’s clubs, and these in many ways
mirrored the activities of white women’s clubs – activism in children’s issues, neighborhood
improvement, education, and health. Black women’s clubs focused especially on racial
uplift in the age of Jim Crow. In 1896, the National Association of Colored Women’s
Clubs was organized, with Mary Church Terrell serving as its first president. Born in
Memphis in 1863, Terrell graduated from Oberlin College and moved to Washington,
D.C. A suffragist, Terrell participated in the National American Woman Suffrage
Association.29
Local black women’s clubs were also active in reform efforts. In Atlanta, Lugenia Burns
Hope helped to organize the Neighborhood Union in 1908. The Neighborhood Union
proved one of the most effective of the black women’s clubs in its emphasis on racial uplift,
education improvement, sanitation and health, arts and recreation facilities, and anti-
prostitution efforts. The wife of Morehouse president John Hope, Lugenia enjoyed the
relative autonomy of a larger city and the security of marriage to a prominent black leader.
But she became one of the most important black women leaders of the Progressive Era.
Most of black and white women’s activities occurred in isolation from each other. Not
until after World War I were there efforts to cross the racial divide.30
Middle-class white women’s missionary and club activities often led them toward pro-
jects in public health, education, city beautification, parks and playgrounds development,
poor relief, and anti-prostitution efforts. Clubwomen became especially involved in
improving the physical environment of cities. Many of them became involved in efforts at
conservation, for example by organizing local Audubon societies in order to prevent the
wholesale slaughter of birds by plume hunters (who used the popular feathers for women’s
hats) and sportsmen, often to the verge of extinction. Clubwomen were also especially
interested in urban schools, creating orphanages and establishing kindergartens.
Settlement houses became centers of social improvement, with women running their
operation. Founded in 1896 by Episcopalian rector Beverley Warner, the Kingsley House
in New Orleans became a leading settlement house. A Princeton graduate and New Jersey

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native, Warner was deeply influenced by the Social Gospel, the movement of liberal
evangelicals to use Christianity to solve social problems.”31
Kingsley House’s fortunes depended on a group of women who soon came to run its
affairs. Jean Gordon, active in anti-child-labor campaigns in New Orleans, started a day
nursery. Eleanor Laura McMain, a native Louisianan, moved to New Orleans in the 1890s
to work in the Free Kindergarten Association. In 1900, McMain became head of Kingsley
House. She studied leading settlement houses elsewhere, such as Hull House in Chicago,
in search of useful models. Kingsley House, which soon became nonsectarian, focused its
activities on health, education, and social betterment of the New Orleans poor. Operating
a health clinic, the settlement house also ran a kindergarten, adult education, a library,
athletics programs, and playgrounds. McMain became a key figure in the creation of the
Woman’s League in New Orleans, the leading social reform organization in the city.
Woman suffrage became a natural consequence of activism. Suffragists had existed
since the Civil War, as part of a larger national movement to achieve votes for women.
Yet the energizing impact of club, missionary, and temperance campaigning, along with
Progressive Era reforms, created momentum as a new generation saw suffrage as the
culmination of social reform. Nellie Nugent Somerville was a Methodist woman who
became active in church missions, women’s clubs, and the WCTU. In 1894, she became
the corresponding secretary of the WCTU. In 1897, Somerville joined the suffrage
movement, helping to found the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association. In 1915, she
became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
All-male legislatures elected by all-male electorates were responsible for moral ills such
as the age of consent for sexual intercourse, which was kept typically very low in the
South by modern standards. In many states, children as young as twelve years old could
legally marry. Reformers favored raising the legal age to protect children and provide a
higher moral standard. Children needed protection, reformers claimed, against parents
who wanted them to work rather than be educated. Children were not responsible for
their existence, but they were often robbed of their childhood, deprived of an education
and of youth for money. Providing the franchise to women, suffragists argued, would
result in an electorate more inclined to reforms such as an eight-hour labor law for
women, widows’ and mothers’ pensions, child-labor regulation, and more purity.
The generation after Reconstruction witnessed a transformation of American life.
Mark Twain parodied what he saw as the decline of political culture in his satiric novel,
The Gilded Age. Twain’s depiction of poor and generally corrupt political leadership in
Washington and elsewhere – which has become a prevailing popular image about the era
– obscures the importance of this period, surely one of the most tumultuous in American
history. The end of slavery created great uncertainty about the status of African Americans,
who saw the end of Reconstruction as part of the reestablishment of a new form of white
supremacy. They responded by leaving the South, and, although comprising only a small
minority, they made a strong statement about race and freedom. Farmers, whose liveli-
hood completely changed as a result of the arrival of railroads and market capitalism,
sought to speak out against their declining status and apparent impoverishment by organ-
izing the Farmers’ Alliance. Finally, in the totally different settings of the early Progressive
Era, middle-class women carved out a role in reforming American institutions in an era
of intense change.

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Notes
1 Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2012). For more about the post-Civil War expansion of capitalism, see Sven
Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie,
1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Jonathan Levy, Freaks of
Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012).
2 On the growth of corporations, the classic work is Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand:
The Managerial Revolution in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1977). On the process of urbanization, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago
and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). On labor, see David Brody, Steelworkers
in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); and Thomas
G. Andrew, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008).
3 C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction
(New York: Doubleday, 1956); Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876
and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); and Michael
F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2008).
4 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1988); Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of
America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014); Mark Wahlgren Summers,
The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2014).
5 http://ctah.binghamton.edu/exodusters.html.
6 Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States Senate to Investigate the Causes of
the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States, 46th Congress, 2nd
session, Report no. 693, Part I, 106–107.
7 On the Exodusters, see Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1976); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race,
Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South
from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 7.
8 Testimony of O. S. B. Wall, January 21, 1880, Report and Testimony of the Select Committee, Part
I, 26.
9 Painter, Exodusters, 184.
10 Stokes to the Greencastle, Indiana Banner, letter dated January 5, 1880, appearing in the edition
of January 8, 1880, in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee, Part I, 26.
11 Report and Testimony of the Select Committee, xxi.
12 John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931); Robert McMath, Populist Vanguard: A
History of the Southern Farmers Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975);
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955);
Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007); and Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-
Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
13 Samuel Proctor, “The National Farmers’ Alliance Convention of 1890 and Its ‘Ocala
Demands,’” Florida Historical Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Jan. 1950), 161–181.
14 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 47–50.
15 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 88.
16 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 59.

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17 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1951), 198.
18 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 92.
19 Stuart Noblin, Leonidas LaFayette Polk: Agrarian Crusader (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1949), 242.
20 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 237.
21 Noblin, Polk, 246.
22 Noblin, Polk, 273–274.
23 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 244.
24 Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 188.
25 On the Progressive Era, see Robert F. Weibe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1966); Michael F. McGirr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive
Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Jackson
Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America (New York: Harper, 2010).
26 Jonathan Daniel Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth Century South (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New
South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993); Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman
Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Nancy Hewitt,
Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s to 1920s (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2003).
27 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970), 142–143; Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the
Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995).
28 Scott, Southern Lady, 159.
29 Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New
York: Harper, 2009); Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York:
Hill & Wang, 2010). Also see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense
of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Crystal Feimster, Southern
Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2011).
30 Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1989).
31 Beverley Ellison Warner, Troubled Waters: A Problem of To-Day (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott,
1885), 323.

357
 INDE X

Ableman v. Booth (1859) 257 soldiers 208–9, 247–8, 261; “spectacle

abolition: and Age of Revolution 14; lynchings” 299; suffrage/suffragists 263,
challenging gender identities 57; and 276–7; Supreme Court decisions 264;
disunion 24; northern states 14–15; veterans 208, 323; wartime medical care
ratification 249; rhetorical discourse 140 193; white violence 263–4
abolitionist movements 69–70, 243 African American women: clubs 354;
abolitionists: foreign influence 98, 99; discrete gender 49; domestic ideology 278;
keeping slave states 178–9; Lincoln gender identity 56; ideals of gender 53;
Administration 219; northern politics 121; raping 295; Republican Motherhood 52;
reactions to slaves escaping 245–6 rights 275–6, 282; self-determination 56
absenteeism 211 African-American writers 136, 140–1
Abzug, Robert 68–9 African Exodus 347, 348
accommodationists 78 African Methodist Episcopal Church 63
accounting technologies 156 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
Adams, Abigail 50–1 282
Adams, Charles Francis 239 Age of Jackson (Schlesinger) 3
Adams, Henry 348, 349 Age of Reason (Paine) 64
Adams, John Quincy 89, 95 Agricultural Wheel (Arkansas) 350
Adams, Sean 151, 195 agriculture 150, 212, 337
Adelman, Jeremy 76 Alabama 297, 299
Adger, John 98 Alabama (Confederate ship) 237
admiralty law 254–5 Alaska 333
adultery laws 299 alcohol consumption 65–6
Adventures and Missionary Travels Alderman, Edwin 314–15
(Livingstone) 100 Alexander, Thomas B. 203
Africa 98, 99, 100 Alexander, W. W. 314
African-American literature 136–7, 141 Allen, Richard 52, 63
African-American politics 118 Allgor, Catherine 53
African-American Protestantism 63 Alliance Democrats 351–2
African Americans: abolitionists 98; all-male legislatures 355
challenging white supremacy 296; Altschuler, Glenn 113
citizenship 52, 248; controlled in South American and Foreign Antislavery Society 69
293; dis-franchisable offenses 297–8; American Anti-Slavery Society 57, 69, 98
education 52; electoral influence 295; American Bible Society 67
farmers 311; fate of Confederacy 206–8; American Colonization Society 25, 98, 99
homicide rates 295, 300; homicides 295; American empire 334
incapable of self-government 49–50; American Equal Rights Association (AERA)
male franchise 279; male sexuality 299; 58, 279
migration 348; political rights 118, 264; American Federation of Labor (AFL) 341,
property offenders 296; Reconstruction 346
period 295–6; sexual behavior 52–3; as American Historical Association 308

358
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American Law of Slavery (Tushnet) 161 Ash, Stephen 205, 206

American Literary History (journal) 133 Astor Place Riots (1849) 94
American Notes for General Circulation Atlantic, The (magazine) 324–5, 330
(Dickens) 97 Ayers, Edward L. 122, 181, 294, 297
American Reformers (Walters) 68
American Renaissance 131–43, 328; artistic Baker, Frank 241, 242
assessment 139; cultural development Baker, Jean 174, 280–1
138–9; cultural history 133–4; literary Baker, Paula 116–17
art 138–9; messiness of history 141–2; Bancroft, George 67
promise of democracy 137, 138, 142 banking 38, 42, 150
see also cultural history Banner, James 173
American Renaissance (Matthiessen) 131–2 Baptist, Edward 153, 160
“American-Renaissance Renaissance” Baptists 64
(Colacurcio) 132 Barlow, Joel 90
American Revolution 12, 16, 95–6 Barnum, P. T. 113
“American School” of ethnology 99 Barreyre, Nicholas 196
American Studies Association 136 Barry, Leonora 282
American Sunday School Union 65, 70 battlefield leadership 233
Amistad captives 100 Battle of Nashville 233–4
amputees 193 Beard, Charles 147, 149, 309
Anderson, Bonnie 276 Beard, Mary 149, 309
Andrews, Williams 141 Bear river (California) 336
Anglo-African Magazine 135 Beauregard. P. G. T. 211
Anglophobia 90 Beckert, Sven 161–2, 163, 195, 316
antebellum period: antislavery movement 69; Beecher, Catherine 48
election riots 114–15; financial crises 151; Beecher, Lyman 65, 66, 68
gender conventions 279; global influences Bell, John 173
89–101; partisan worldview 111; reform Belmont, August 225
movements 68; southern elites 149; Belz, Herman 261
Supreme Court decisions 253–7; taxation Beneath the American Renaissance (Reynolds)
policies 42; “weak state” 115 133
antebellum slavery 2, 150, 298 Benedict, Michael Les 264
“antebellum spiritual hothouse” (Butler) 62 benevolent empire 68
antebellum voting 111, 115 “benevolent” societies 64–5
antebellum women 47–58, 117, 277 Bennett, Judith 51
Anthony, Susan B. 47, 277, 281–2 Bensel, Richard 114
anti-abolitionist northerners 279 Benson, Lee 109, 110
anti-Catholicism 68 Beringer, Richard E. 203
antidissenter historiography 226–7 Berkhofer, Jr., Robert 75, 78
anti-establishment frustration 176 Berkin, Carol 51
Anti-Federalists 23, 24 Berlin, Ira 208, 241
anti-Lincoln traditions 261 Bible 67
anti-miscegenation statutes 299 Biddle, Richard 90
antipartyism 113–14, 116 Bierce, Ambrose 326
anti-reconciliationist sentiments 329 Bigelow, John 239
antislavery movements 16, 57, 69 Billings, Dwight 311–12
antislavery politics 21–3, 122 bills of exchange 38, 154
antislavery promulgations 149 Biracial Creeks 80
apartheid 316 birth control 278
Arapahos 339, 340 bison 340, 341
aristocrats 94 see also elites black civil rights movement 56, 57–8
Arkansas 77, 297 “Black Code” (South Carolina 1865) 298
Army of the Potomac 234, 244–5 Blackhawk, Ned 77, 81
Aron, Stephen 76 Black Hills 334, 337, 340
arson 297 black-on-white rape 300
“artisan” model of class development 41 “black poverty” (Wright) 311

359
 I N DEX

“black protest ideology” (Rael) 118–19 Caires, Michael 196

Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois) Calhoun, Floride 54
177 Calhoun, John C. 203
Blair, William 205, 222–3, 227 California: exploitation of resources 333–4;
Blassingame, John 2 gold 333–4, 336, 337; Indian and
Blight, David 322, 323–4, 328, 329, 331 American violence 338–9; lumber 334–5,
Bloody South 330 338; missions 81–2; population 336–7;
Bloomer, Amelia 278 rejecting slavery 121–2; wheat 337
Blue Jacket (Shawnee chief ) 79 California Commissioners of Fisheries 338
Blumin, Stuart 113 Calloway, Colin 79
Boldizzoni, Francesco 153 Calvinism 64
bonded labor 316 Cameron, Simon 232
bondswomen 53 Campbell, Alexander 63
Bonner, Michael 194 Camp, Stephanie 57
book-keeping 156 Cane Ridge (Kentucky) 62–3
Boorstin, Daniel 115 capital (finance) 36, 335
borderlands see frontiers and borderlands capitalism and slavery 2, 37, 42, 120, 146–63
Border South states 180–1 see also slavery
Boudinot, Elias 67 Capitalism and Slavery (Williams) 148
Bowen, Thomas Jefferson 98 capitalist expansion 115–16
Bowman, Davis Shearer 247 Captives and Cousins (Brooks) 81
Bozeman Trail 339–40 Carlton, David L. 312
Bradwell, Myra 281 carpetbaggers 330
Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) 281 Carr, Elias 352
Brady, Lisa 192 Carson, James 80–1
Bragg, Braxton 234 Cary, Mary Ann 282
Brandwein, Pamela 264 Casey, Jr., John A. 326, 327
Brasher, Glenn 245 Cashin, Joan 192
Braude, Anne 67 Cash, W. J. 309
Braund, Kathryn 79 Cayton, Andrew 76
Breadwinners (Vapnek) 282 celebrity travelers 90–1
Brewer, James 206 census decennial population reports 113
British North America 15 see also Great central government 116, 203
Britain “ceremonial of punishment” (Foucault) 159
Brooke, John 114 Chancellorsville 234
Brooks, James 81 Channing, William Ellery 160
Brown, Elsa Barkley 47, 49 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837)
Brown, John 135, 173 254
Brown, Joseph 204, 206 Charles, Robert 292, 299
Brown, Louise Fargo 1 Charleston 40
Brown, Mary Olney 281 Chase, Salmon P. 255
Brown, William Wells 136, 141, 142 Chatham County (Georgia) 297
Bruegel, Martin 39–40 chattel slavery 97
Buchanan, James 174–5 Cherokees 37, 80, 119
Buck, Paul 322 Chesapeake 17–18, 20
Burden of Southern History (Woodward) 317 Chesnut, James 211
Burkett, Charles William 315 Chesnut, Mary Boykin 204, 329
Burnham, Walter Dean 111 Cheyennes 339
Burnside, Ambrose 219, 223 Chickamauga 234
Burns, Ken 324, 328, 331 Chickasaws (Gibson) 78
Bushnell, Horace 33 children 65, 355
“Businessman’s Revival” 63 Chivington, John 339
Butler, Benjamin 241, 244, 259 Chivington’s massacre (1864) 339
Butler, Jon 62 Choctaw 37, 80–1
Butler, Pierce 97 Christianity 62–6, 99
butternuts (dissenters) 222 citizenship 248

360
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“citizenship of the heart” (Kantrowitz) 118 comparative slavery 247

civil-military operations 236 competition, and corruption 151
Civil Rights Act (1875) 264 Compromise (1850) 134–5
Civil Rights Cases (1883) 264 Compromise (1877) 347
Civil War: battles 233–5; business history Comstock silver mines 341
195–6; causation 96, 120, 171; “crisis in Confederacy 202–13; absenteeism 211;
gender” 118; deaths 193; environmental Black population 206–8; Civil War and
histories 192–3; innovation and intellectual slave economy 243; Congress 202–3;
property 193; labor history 196; leadership Constitution 177; control over citizens
231–9; literary legacy 331; logistical 203; departmental system 210; diplomacy
challenges 235; medicine and health 238; disaffection 204–6; environmental
care 193; nineteenth-century changes 5; history 211–13; food supply 212; frontier
railroads 192; “Second American conditions 205; independence 204;
Revolution” 149; as a slave rebellion 242; Middle South joining 180; military
technology 196; twentieth-century analysis strategies 208–11; mobilization 194, 244;
2; women’s rights 278–80 see also veterans morale 205, 232; naval operations 237;
Civil War diary (Chestnut) 329 reconciliation 324; slaves’ resistance 207;
Civil War documentary (Burns) 324, 328 war economies 194; war finance 195
Clarkson, Thomas 97 Confederate Negro (Brewer) 206
class divisions 35 see also elite privilege; Confederation Congress 25
planter class Confiscation Acts 219, 246, 247, 260
Cleburne Demands (1886) 350 Connelly, Thomas 211
clerkships 41 conscription 226
cliometrics 152 Constitution: amendments 262–3; ratification
Clotel (Brown) 136, 141 23–4; sectional compact 22; and slavery
clubs 353–4 23–4, 42, 255–6 see also named
coal 334 amendments
coastal slave societies 19 Constitutional Convention (1787) 11, 23–5,
Coast Redwood 337–8 120
coercion and free labor 159 consumerism 64
Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) 342 “consumer revolution” 34, 42
Cohen, Benjamin 36 Contact Points (Cayton and Teute) 76
Cohen, Patricia Cline 284 contraband camps 211–12, 247
Colacurcio, Michael J. 132 “contraband of war” (Butler) 241, 244, 259
Cold War 115 contraception 278
Colfax (Louisiana) 263–4 conviction rates 297
Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (Johnson, Embree convict lease system 298
and Alexander) 314 Cooke, John Esten 326
Collier-Thomas, Bettye 282 Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852) 254
“colonial agrarianism” (Woodward) 311 cooperationists 176
Colonization Council 348, 349 Cooper, James Fenimore 92, 142
colonizationists 99 copper 334, 337
Colorado 334, 339 Copperheads (dissenters) 222
Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise corruption 151
Association 282 Cosmos Crumbling (Abzug) 68
Comanche Empire (Hämäläinen) 77 Cott, Nancy 55
Comanches 77, 119 cotton: dependence of Britain and France
Committee of Thirteen 175 238; nineteenth-century depressions 311;
Committee of Thirty-Three 175 post-Civil War southern economy 314;
commoditization of territory 38 productivity 152; real price 153; slave
“communications revolution” (Howe) 34 labor and land speculation 155; subtreasury
Communitarian experiments 278 certificates of deposit 351
community organizations 117 Coventry, William 36
Company Aytch (Watkins) 326 cowboys 341
comparative emancipation 247 Cox, Mary J. 299
comparative histories 121, 197 craft production 39

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 I N DEX

Crane, Stephen 327 Diehard Rebels (Phillips) 211

Crazy Horse 340 digitizing primary sources 202
Creek Country (Ethridge) 80 diplomatic relations 237–9
Creeks 79–80 discontinuity 308, 309
Crews, Frederick C. 133 disease 193, 211–12
crime 292–300; “failed masculinity” 297; disestablishment 62, 63
intra-racial 295–6; newspaper reports 300; disfranchisement 293
political economy 293; and poverty 296; dissenters 217–29; acceptable limits 223;
against property 297; rape 295, 300; Copperheads and butternuts 222; denial of
“southern violence” 294; summary liberties 227; racist anger 224; surveillance
justice 296; white violence 263–4 223; wartime policies 218
see also lynchings District of Columbia 246
criminal justice system 293–4 “Disturbing the Peace” address (Washington)
Cripple Creek (Colorado) 342 136
“crisis in gender” (Whites) 279 disunion 22, 24, 121, 172, 178–9 see also
crisis of masculinity 325 Secession
“Crittenden Compromise” 175 Disunion series (New York Times) 321, 331
Crook, George 340 Divinity School Address (Emerson) 63–4
crop lien system 310, 351 Dix, John Adams 219
Cuba 162–3 domestic ideology 121, 277 see also
cultural history 133–4, 321–2 see also patriarchy
American Renaissance domesticity 48, 278
cultural turn 1–3, 6 donkey engines 338
culture: exceptionalism and embeddedness Douglass, Frederick: African Exodus 347;
92; foreign influences 93–4; independence black slavery and suffrage 263; Corinthian
100–1; Native American life 78; romance Hall address 138; Heroic Slave 141;
and reality 322 see also literature Narrative 5; rhetorical campaign 243–4;
culture of commemoration 323 secession crisis 279; visit to England 98–9
Curtis, Justice Benjamin 254, 257 Douglas, Stephen 257
Custer, George 340 Dowd, Gregory 78, 79
Doyle, Don H. 96, 312
Dalton (Georgia) 296 draft riots 221–2, 226
Davis, David Brion 12 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) 135, 255–7, 259
Davis, Jefferson 149, 177, 203, 209–10, 232 Du Bois, W. E. B. 1, 177, 207, 242
debt peonage 312 Dubois, Ellen 279, 281, 283
Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions Dudden, Faye 280
(Seneca Falls Convention) 70, 275–6 Due Process Clause (Fifth Amendment) 256
DeForest, William John 326 Dunning School 3
DeLay, Brian 77, 119 Dunning, William A. 313
demobilization 326 Dusinberre, William 123
Democracy in America (de Tocqueville) 146 DuVal, Kathleen 77
Democratic Party National Conventions Dwight, Timothy 63
172–3, 225
Democratic Republican Party 12 early American government 115–16
Democratization of American Christianity Eaton, Margaret 54
(Hatch) 64 economic booms and depressions 38–9, 315
Democrats: after Vicksburg and Gettysburg economic development 33–4, 37, 148–9
224; cultural debate 118; elections (1862) economic repression 348
220–1; political culture 111–12; political educating future mothers 51–2
opposition 223, 227–8; resistance to Edwards, Laura F. 265, 300
Lincoln 216–17; secret societies 223; Effingham, Eve 92
wartime policies 219–20; and Whigs 112 egalitarian ideologies 15–16
demographic pressures 35, 37 Egerton, Douglas 13
Destruction of Slavery (FSSP) 245 election violence 114–15, 116, 263
Devine, Shauna 193 electoral coercion 113
Dickens, Charles 97 electorate 110, 113 see also voting

362
 I N DEX

elite finishing schools 94 Feller, Daniel 34, 109

elite politics 123 female virtue 52
elite privilege 42 see also class divisions; Fenn, Elizabeth 82
planter class Fern, Fanny 142
elites: control of government 151; fighting Fields, James T. 328
205; surrendering power 149 Fifteenth Amendment 249, 263, 279, 280
elite women 50, 279 see also women Fifth Amendment 256
Elkins, Stanley 153 financial instruments 38, 154
Eller, Ronald 312 financial system 38–9
Elusive Empires (Hinderaker) 75 Finkelman, Paul 12
emancipation 241–50; Caribbean 204; Finney, Charles Grandison 63
effects of 204, 247–8; homicide 294–5; Fire Eaters 172–4, 177
laws protecting 21; moral imperative 99; First Amendment 62
northern states 16–17; permanency 248; Fitzgerald, Michael W. 296
rural/urban 246; source of conflict 311; Fitzhugh, George 147, 152
studies 249; Union policy 243; Upper Flexner, Eleanor 275
South 17–18; war measure 244 see also “flex-time” 159
freed blacks; slavery Florida 20, 297
Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 245, 246, Fogel, Robert 152–3, 160
248, 260–1, 262 Foner, Eric 109, 122, 243, 308
embeddedness 92 see also exceptionalism food supply 212
Emberton, Carole 248 Ford, Lacy K. 312
Embree, Edwin R. 314 foreign investment 335
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 63–4, 91 foreign policies 121
Empire of Cotton (Beckert) 161–2, 316 foreign travelers 90
“Empire of Liberty” 93 Formisano, Ronald 4, 114
Encounters at the Heart of the World (Fenn) 82 Forrest, Edwin 94
Engerman, Stanley 152–3, 160 Forten, Margarette 277
Enrollment Act (1863) 219, 221 Fort Monroe 241, 244–5
“enticement” policy 261 Fort Sumter 179–80
entrepreneurial processes 41–2 Foster, Charles 68
environmental histories 192–3 Foster, Francis Smith 140, 141
equestrian nomads 341 Foucault, Michel 159
Etcheson, Nicole 178 “four cardinal virtues” (Welter) 48
Ethridge, Robbie 80 Fourteenth Amendment 249, 262–3, 281,
Europe 90–2, 93, 99, 335 299
Eustace, John 92 France 238, 239
evangelical reformers 69 Frank, Andrew 80
evangelical revivals 62–3, 64–5 Franklin, John Hope 1
Evans, John 339 Fredericksburg 234
exceptionalism 12, 90, 92, 96, 99, 115 Fredrickson, George M. 140
Exodusters 347, 348 free black communities 17
Ex-Parte Merryman (1861) 218 freed blacks: civil and political rights 292–3;
extra-legal violence 299–300 fighting for British 20; property crime 297
see also emancipation
factors of production 335 Freedmen and Southern Society Project
families 278 (FSSP) 208, 241, 245
Faragher, John 76 Freehling, William 174, 207
Farmers’ Alliance 350 free labor 158–9, 316
“Farmers’ Legislature” (Georgia) 352 Freeman, Douglas Southall 236
Farmers’ Uprising 349–53 Freemen’s Aid Societies 245
Farragut, David G. 237 Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (Foner) 308
Faulkner, Carol 281 free-soil truisms 152
Faust, Drew 193 French Revolution (1789) 95
federal government 334 “From Borderlands to Borders” (Aron and
Federalists 53 Adelman) 76

363
 I N DEX

frontiers and borderlands 75, 76–7, 78, 80, Grant, Ulysses S. 232–3, 234, 235, 236, 263,
181 340
Fugitive Slave Act (1793) 20, 255, 257 Gray, Wood 226
Fuller, J. F. C. 210 Great Basin 77
Fuller, Randall 328 Great Britain 99, 119, 238–9
futility of conflict 222 Great Lakes 75, 76, 337
Great Plains 339
Gage, Matilda Joslyn 47, 278 Great South (King) 330
Gallagher, Gary 205 Great Southwest Railroad Strike (1886) 346
Gannon, Barbara A. 323 Greeley, Horace 178, 334
Garrison, William Lloyd 69, 99, 178 Greenberg, Amy 123
Gates Ajar (Phelps) 328 Greene, Ann Norton 193
Geiger, Mark 195 Green, Michael 79
gender conventions 279 see also “separate Greensboro County (Georgia) 297
spheres” ideology Grier, Justice Robert 259
gender identity 56–7 Griffin, Clifford Stephen 68
gender ideology 49–50 Grinspan, Jon 115
General Anti-Slavery Convention (1840) 69 “group cohesion” 211
General Federation of Women’s Clubs Groves v. Slaughter (1841) 255
354 guidebooks 91–2
General Mining Law (1872) 335
“general strike” (Du Bois) 207, 242 habeas corpus 218, 258–9
General Union for Promoting the Hackel, Steven 81–2
Observance of the Christian Sabbath 66 Hacker, J. David 193
Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh (1851) 254 Hahn, Steven 118, 122, 156–7, 207, 242
Genovese, Eugene 147, 149–51 Hair, William Ivy 300
gentility 94–5 Haiti 14–15
gentry 15, 16 see also white supremacy Half Has Never Been Told (Baptist) 153
Georgia 19, 297 Haltunnen, Karen 159
“Georgia trade” 17–18, 19 Hämäläinen, Pekka 77
Gibson, Arrell 78 Hammond, James Henry 97
Gienapp, William 94 Handmaiden of Civilization (Burkett and
Giesberg, Judith 194 Poe) 315
Gilded Age 324–6, 346, 349, 353–4 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 279
Gilded Age (Twain) 355 Harper’s Ferry raid 135, 173
Ginzberg, Lori 276, 277, 280, 283 Harris, James 347–8
Glatthaar, Joseph 194, 205, 208–9 Harris, M. Keith 323, 324, 328
Global South 316–17 Harrold, Stanley 181
Glymph, Thavolia 245, 279 Hartz, Louis 115
Godey’s Lady’s Book 277 Hatch, Nathan 64
God’s providence 67 Hawkins, Benjamin 80
gold 333–4, 335, 336–7, 340, 341 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 5, 139, 328
Goodheart, Adam 331 Hayek, Frederick 159
Goodrich, Charles 67 Hayes, Rutherford B. 347
Goodwyn, Lawrence 350 Haygood, Laura Askew 353
Gordon, Ann 280 Helper, Hinton Rowan 173
Gordon, Jean 355 Heroic Slave (Douglass) 141
Gordon, Joseph 352 herrenvolk democracy 203
Gordon, Linda 278 Hess, J. Earl 192, 196
Gove, Mary Nichols 284 Hettle, Wallace 203
government by consent 48 Hewitt, Nancy 275–6, 283
Graber, Mark 256 Hicks, John David 350
Grady, Henry W. 312–13, 315, 351 high-destructiveness interpretations 192
Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) 323 high economic rationalism 155–6
Grange (Patrons of Husbandry) 350 “high” politics 122–3
Grant, Catherine 277 Hill, Karlos K. 299

364
 I N DEX

Hinderaker, Eric 75 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 342

historiography: 1960–2000s 4, 12; anti- inevitable decline narrative 74 see also Native
Lincoln tradition 261; New South 316; Americans
white male scholars 1–2 infinite appropriation 154
History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination infliction of suffering 205
of the American Revolution (Warren) 66–7 innovation 193
History of the United States (Bancroft) 67 integrated market system 149
History of the United States (Goodrich) 67 interethnic predation 75
History of the United States (Webster) 67 internet research projects 202
History of Woman Suffrage (Stanton) 275, 281 interpretive communities 329–30
Hoffert, Sylvia 276 interracial democracy 307 see also
Hofstadter, Richard 350 Reconstruction
Hogg, James 352 interracial sex and marriage 298–9
Holcombe, William 97 intra-racial rape 300
Holloway, Pippa 297 Iroquois Indians 37, 76–7, 81
Holmes, William F. 296 Isenberg, Nancy 117, 277, 283
Homestead Act (1862) 335
Homestead Steel Strike (1892) 346 Jackson, Andrew 53–4, 94, 112
homicides 294–6, 300 Jacksonian Democrats 113, 114
Hood, John Bell 210, 233–4 Jacobs, Harriet 57
Hooker, Joseph 236 Jaffee, David 40
Horowitz, Tony 321 Janney, Caroline E. 324, 327
Horsman, Reginald 99 Jefferson, Thomas 62, 308
Hose, Sam 299 Jeffrey, Julie Roy 49
Howe, Daniel Walker 34, 117–18 Jewett, Isaac Appleton 92
Humphreys, Margaret 193 Jim Crow era 249, 316, 327–8, 354
Huston, Reeve 113 John, Richard 116
hydraulic mining 335, 336–7, 338 Johnson, Andrew 262
Johnson, Charles S. 314
ideology of race 49 Johnson, Herschel 203
idle Southerners/busy Northerners narrative Johnson, Michael 203
146–7 Johnson, Paul 68
Illinois 114 Johnson, Walter 154–5, 159
Ills of the South (Otken) 315 Johnston, Joseph E. 211, 234
“Imagining Authorship in America” Jones, Martha 276
(American Literary History) 133 Jones v. Van Zandt (1847) 255
Impending Crisis of the South (Helper) 173 Jordan-Lake, Joy 138
Imperial Crisis 15 Jordan, Winthrop 12
imperialism 75, 93 Jortner, Adam 79
Impossible Witnesses (McBride) 140, 141 Judd, Richard 39
independent female citizens 50–1, 277 juries 293, 296
Indian reserves 340 jute bagging trust 351
Indian-white relations 75–6 see also Native
Americans Kansas 279
individual rights 16 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) 135
industrial bourgeoisie 309–10 Kantrowitz, Stephen 118
industrial capitalism 151 Karok Indians 338
industrial economy and empire 334 Kazin, Michael 350
industrialization: capital-intensive Kearsarge (US ship) 237
developments 39; early developments 39, Kelley, Mary 50
41; exploiting natural resources 335; Kemble, Frances Anne 97
pollution 336; population surge 336–7; Kenner, Duncan 239
and slave-based agriculture 204 Kentucky 119, 246
industrial production 334 Khan, Zorina 193
industrial revolution 147 King, Edward 330
industrial West 334–9 Kingsley House (New Orleans) 354–5

365
 I N DEX

Kiowa Indians 77, 339 literature 131–43; character representation

Klamath River (California) 338 140; cultural concerns 325–6; European
Klement, Frank 226–7 critics 90; and grief 328; southern stories
Knights of Labor 346 329; speaking through tensions 142
Knights of the Golden Circle 223 see also culture
Know Nothing Party 114, 119 “Little Faded Flag” (White) 324–5, 329
Kolb, Reuben 352 livestock 212
Kolchin, Peter 247, 315 Livingstone, David 100
Kossuth, Lajos 96 Lockwood, Belva 282
Krauthamer, Barbara 81 lode mining 337
Ku Klux Klan 263, 295, 296, 330 “Lost Cause” narrative 323
Louisiana 296
labor 158–9, 196, 335 Louisiana Farmers’ Union 350
Laird rams 239 Louisiana Purchase 333
Lake Ontario 76 Lower South 17–18, 174n15, 176
Lakota Indians 340–1 loyalties 172
Lamar, Howard 75 lumber industry 334, 337–8
land 35, 37–8, 155 Lydia (slave) 161
land grants 335 lynchings 294, 296, 299–300 see also crime
Landis, Michael 121 Lynch, Jr., Thomas 11
Langston, John Mercer 349 Lyons, Clare 51, 52
Larson, John 116
Lasser, Carol 49 Machor, James L. 330–1
Laurie, Bruce 41, 120–1 Macready, William Charles 94
Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Macune, Charles W. 350, 351
Republic (Tomlins) 158 Magruder, John Bankhead 245
Lee, Robert E.: administration 235; Army Majewski, John 194
of Northern Virginia 238–9; battlefield Malanowski, Jamie 331
leadership 233–4; civil-military operations Mallory, Shepard 241, 242
236; Grant’s Virginia campaign 235; Mallory, Stephen 232
military strategies 209; offensive operations Mancini, Matthew J. 298
232 Mandan Indians 82
Lee’s Lieutenants (Freeman) 316 Mandell, Daniel 81
Leff, Mark 109 Mandle, Jay R. 311–12
Leonard, Elizabeth 279 Manning, Chandra 247
Leonard, Gerald 114 Mann, John 161
Lepler, Jessica 39 manufacturing 41 see also industrialization
Liberator, The 69, 99 manumission laws (Virginia) 15–16, 18
Liberia 99 market economies 79
liberty, and republicanism 111 market revolution 34–6, 37, 38, 40
License Cases (1847) 254 market society 157
Liebig, Justus 36 Marler, Scott 195
Life of Washington (Weems) 67 marriages: interracial 298–9; romantic ideals
Lincoln, Abraham: actions against dissenters 278
224; angry speeches 216; Dred Scott Marshall, Nicholas 40
decision 256n16, 257; election (1860) Marten, James 325–6, 327
173; Emancipation Proclamations 260–1; Martineau, Harriet 97
equality at risk 96; free soil indictment Martinez, Jaime 244
of slavery 147; habeas corpus 258–9; Martin, Joel 80
inaugural addresses 179, 250; military Marvel, William 232
experience 232; “Mister Polk’s war” 216; Marx, Karl 158–9, 163, 335
protective tariffs 33; and the Republican masculinity, and patriarchy 55
Party 178; support for emancipation 246; Mason, James 238
as white supremacist-in-chief 261 master and servant relations 158
Lincoln Administration 217–22, 226–7 “material reductionism” (Abzug) 68
literary history 136 Matthiessen, F. O. 131–6

366
 I N DEX

Mattison, Edward 335 Montana 334

McBride, Dwight 140, 141 moonshiners 296
McClellan, George B. 225, 234, 236 Moore v. Illinois (1852) 255
McClellan’s War (Rafuse) 236 “moral authoritarianism,” 296
McClintock, Anne 50, 56 morale 204–6
McCord, Louisa S. 48 moral establishment 64–5
McCurry, Stephanie 118, 194, 203, 205, “moral minorities” (Volk) 117
242, 279 moral reform 65
McLean, Justice John 257 Morgan, Chad 194
McLoughlin, William 68, 69 Morgan, Jennifer L. 49
McMain, Eleanor Laura 355 Morgan, John Hunt 224
McPherson, James 232 Morgan, J. Pierpont 310
Meade, George G. 235, 236 motherhood 51
Mead, Rebecca 280, 282 Mott, Lucretia 69, 70, 275, 276, 281
medicine and health care 193 Mullen, Lincoln 65
Meier, Kathryn 193 Murphy, Lucy 76
Memoirs (Sherman) 326 Murray, Judith Sargent 51
memory 281, 326, 328 Myers, Martha A. 297
mercury 336
Merryman, John 258–9 Narrative (Douglass) 5
Methodists 64 Nash, Gary 12, 13
Mexican American women 278 national characters 92
Mexican War (1846–48) 74, 78, 112, 121, National Convention for Women’s Rights
123, 333 (Worcester, MA 1850) 276
middle-class evangelicals 64–5, 68 National Economist 351
middle-class women 56, 353–4 National Farmers’ Alliance and Co-operative
Middle Ground (White) 75 Union of America (the Alliance) 350–1
Middle South states 180 national identity 90 see also exceptionalism
midiwiwin (medicine society) 81 nationalism 12
Midwest 40, 217 Native Americans 74–82; adopting European
“military-cotton complex” (Beckert) 162 customs 78; adopting slavery 81; clearance
military leadership 231–9; administration from lands 37–8, 42; conflicts over
235; assessing 232; diplomatic relations resources 338–9, 341; contact with whites
237–9; logistical challenges 235; team 75, 76; inevitable decline narrative 74;
concept 236; training 233 slaves escaping to 20; surrendering land
Military Reconstruction Act (1867) 307 76–7; traditional lifeways 80–1;
military supply 194–5 transnational dynamic 119
Miller, Cary 81 Native American women 278
Miller, Marla 41 Native Ground (DuVal) 77
Miller, William 63 “nativist” movement 78–9
Milton, George Fort 226 natural resources 335–6
Mineral Resources Act (1866) 335 natural rights 15, 21, 24, 69, 121
mining 335–6 naval operations 237
Minor v. Happersett (1875) 282 Neely, Mark 192, 203, 227–8
miscegenation 298–9 “Negro chicken thief” racial trope 297
missionary societies 353 Nelson, Megan Kate 192
Mississippi 37, 158, 296, 297–8 “New Americanists” 133
Mississippi Valley Historical Association 308 new bourgeoisie 312
Missouri 246 New England 35
Missouri Crisis (1819–1821) 25, 114 “New Historians” 309
“Mister Polk’s war” (Lincoln) 216 “new institutionalism” studies 115
mobilization 194, 244 see also wartime New Jersey 16
service Newmyer, R. Kent 255
Modoc Indians 341 New Orleans 40, 292, 310
Monitor (US ship) 237 new political history 110–12
“monopoly” in rural economy 351 “new social history” (1970s) 41

367
 I N DEX

New South 307–17; backwardness 311, Origins of the New South (Woodward) 309,
314, 315; continuity debate 307–8, 309, 311
313–14, 315, 317; historiography 316; Oshinsky, David M. 298
low-wage region 311; northern industries O’Sullivan, John 92
expanding 310; paradox of progress and Otken, Charles H. 315
poverty 308, 315, 317; planter persistence Our Nig (Wilson) 136, 141
312; political economy 307, 311; overseas travel 91
sharecropping 311–12
New South ideologues 312–13, 314–15 Pace, Tony 299
New York 16, 40 Pacific Railroad 334
New York draft riots (1863) 221–2 Pacific Railway Act (1862) 335
New York State, Second Married Women’s Page, Arthur W. 315
Property Act (1860) 277 Paine, Thomas 64
New York Times 321, 331 Panic (1837) 38–9
New York v. Miln (1837) 254 “Paper War” (1810) 90
Nichols, Mary Gove 278 Parker, Alison 284
Nieman, Donald G. 295, 297 Parker, Theodore 69
nightriding 294, 296 Parrillo, Nicholas 195
non-Anglo genders 50 party-above-principle style 114
noncombatants 326 party identity 111
non-slave regions 37 party loyalty 110
North: capitalism 157–8; slavery 16–17; as Party of Lincoln see Republicans
“un-South” 315; urban population 310 “party period” 110, 111–12, 114, 116
“North American Frontier as Process and Paskoff, Paul 192
Context” (Berkhofer, Jr.) 75 Passenger Cases (1849) 254
North Carolina 348 paternalism 161
Northeast 15, 36, 40, 310, 337 “patriarchal bargains” (Bennett) 51
“Northern people” 157–8 “patriarchal equilibrium” (Bennett) 51
northern robber barons 310 patriarchy 55, 118 see also domestic ideology
northern whites: attitude to slavery 21, patriotism 90 see also exceptionalism
242–3; excluding freed blacks 17 Patrons of Husbandry (Grange) 350
Northup, Solomon 159 peace plank 225
North–South binary 309 Pendleton, George 225
northwest conspiracy 223–4 Pennsylvania 151–2, 160
Northwest Ordinance 25 People of the Standing Stone 81
Norton, Mary Beth 50 Perdue, J. M. 351
Novak, William 116 Perdue, Theda 80
NWSA conventions 282 Pessen, Edward 4
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 54, 328
Oakes, James 121, 261 Philadelphia Constitution 24
O’Brien, Michael 92 Philadelphia convention (1787) 11, 23
“offensive defense” strategies 209 Phillips, Jason 205, 211
Ohio governorship election (1862) 224 Phillips, Ulrich B. 3, 147, 148, 309
Ohio Valley 75–6 Phillips, Wendell 277
Ojibwa Indians 81 Piedmont 17
Old and New South continuity debate “Pig Law” (Mississippi 1876) 297–8
307–8, 309, 313–14, 315, 317 plantation system: economic development
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth 148–9; emancipation 204; mass production
(Adams) 151 154; slaves during Civil War 207, 245;
Oneida (Iroquois) 81 twentieth century 310–11; urbanization 40
Opal, J. M. 40 see also Southern economy
Orchard, Harry 342 planter class 309, 311–12, 316
Order Number 18 (Burnside) 223 Platte River 339
Order of American Knights 223 Plea for the West (Beecher) 68
Order of the Sons of Liberty 223 Poe, Clarence Hamilton 315
organized labor 341–2, 346 Poe, Edgar Allan 142

368
 I N DEX

police forces 293 Protestantism 63–5, 67–8

“policy history” studies 115 Protestant parachurch organizations 64–5
political economy: continuity versus pro-Union rhetorics 94
discontinuity 315; crime and punishment “Prussian Road” model 312, 316
293; New South 307, 311; slave/free labor public sphere 48–50, 70, 117
151; studies 115; transnational context 316 public works 116
Political Economy of Slavery (Genovese) publishing 66–7
149–50 Purvis, Harriet Forten 276–7
political violence 115 Putnam, George B. 91
Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Hahn)
207 Quakers 16, 24, 69
“politics of command” (Connelly) 211 Quarles, Benjamin 1
Polk, James K. 216
Polk, Leonidas 352 Rabinowitz, Howard N. 294, 297, 300–1
polling places 115 race and racism 2, 3, 12, 99–100
Pomeroy, Marcus “Brick” 217 Race and Reunion (Blight) 322
population growth 35, 40, 336–7 “racial amalgamation” 298–9
Populist Party (People’s) 350, 352–3 racial hierarchy 150–1, 176–7
portable steam engines 334 Rael, Patrick 118
possibilities of democracy 133–4 Rafuse, Ethan 236
postal system 116 railroads 192, 334–5, 337, 349
postcolonial people 93 railway grab 310
Postel, Charles 350 Ransom, Roger L. 311
postmasters 223 rape 295, 300
postwar: culture and literature 321–31; ratification debates 11
economic development 315–16; pro- “reactionary agrarian elite” 312
development philosophy 334; social reader response theory 330–1
transformation 346; women’s rights 282 reconciliation 175, 324, 327–8, 329
postwar suffrage 279–80, 282 Reconstruction: twentieth-century analysis
Potter, David 172 2; constitutional amendments 262;
poverty 296, 311, 317 criminal justice 262–4; end of 347–8;
Poverty of Clio (Boldizzoni) 153 interracial democracy 307; legal system
pre-Civil War era see antebellum period 295–6; pro-business governments 309;
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation Supreme Court 264
(1862) 259 Red Badge of Courage (Crane) 327
Presbyterians 63, 64 Red Cloud War 339–40
presidential candidates (1860) 173 Redeemers 347, 348
presidential elections (1876) 347 Redemption 312
Preston, William C. 95 Redmond, Sarah 277
Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) 255 Red Stick movement 79–80
primary sources 202 refinement 94, 95
“primitive accumulation,” 162 Regular Democrats 351–2
Prince, Stephen K. 321, 329–30 Reilly, John 137
privateering 195 religion 62–70; consumerism 64;
“private sphere” 48–50, 55, 117 see also disestablishment 62, 63; new movements
women 63; partisan attachments 111; reform
Prize Cases (1863) 259 movements 65–6, 68–9
“Progressive Historians” 309 republicanism 96, 111
Progressivism 353–5 Republican Motherhood 47, 51, 52–3, 54–5
promise of democracy 137, 138, 142 see also True Women
property: laws and offences 297–8; and Republicans: abolitionists 121; antislavery
patriarchal families 55; seizing 194; slaves party 135; black electoral influence 295;
as 256 cultural debate 118; and dissenters 222–3;
“pro-slavery defense” 242 failure to compromise 175; free labor
pro-slavery ideology 49–50 ideology 308; goals 178; Manifest Destiny
prosthetics 193 149; manipulating soldier voting 226;

369
 I N DEX

opposing growth of slavery 243; political Second Great Awakening 68

culture 111; strategies against Democrats Second New York State Married Women’s
225–6 Property Act (1860) 277
Republic of Texas 333 second party system 4, 5, 54, 110–11, 116
Restoration movement 63 “second slavery” period 14, 153–4, 158
reunion and reconciliation 327–8, 329 sectional conflict 11–12, 19–26, 110, 114,
revenue wars 296 120, 122
Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform Sectional Crisis 109–23
(McLoughlin) 68 sectional differences 15–19, 120
revolutionary movements 95–6 sectional healing 324 see also reconciliation
Reynolds, David S. 133 sectionalism 12, 171, 308–9
Rise of American Civilization (Beard and sectional loyalties 114
Beard) 149, 309 sectional veto 22, 23, 24
River of Dark Dreams (Johnson) 155 segregation 293
Robinson, Armstead 207 self-awareness 90
Rockman, Seth 41 Self-Culture (Channing) 160
Roland, Charles 210 self-ownership 284 see also women’s rights
Roll Jordan, Roll (Genovese) 150–1 Sellers, Charles 34
“romantic racialism” (Fredrickson) 140 Seminoles of Florida 81
romantic worldview 328 Seneca Falls Convention (1848) 47, 70, 275
Roots of Southern Populism (Hahn) 156 Sensational Designs (Tompkins) 139–40
Rosecrans, William S. 234 sensory history 192, 211
Rosen, Hannah 295 “separate spheres” ideology 48–9, 117,
Rothman, Joshua 37 277–8
Rowson, Susannah 51 separationists 173, 176
Rubin, Anne Sarah 329, 330 settlement houses 354–5
Rugemer, Edward 204 Seward, William H. 225
Ruin Nation (Nelson) 192 sexual morality 52–3
runaway slaves 119 Seymour, Horatio 224–5
rural homicide rates 295 Seymour, Thomas 217
rural societies 35–6, 40–1 sharecropping 311–12
Russian serfs 316 Sharkey, Robert 196
Ryan, Mary P. 50, 115 Shawnee Indians 37, 79–80
Sheehan-Dean, Aaron 194, 205
Sacramento River 336, 338 Shelden, Rachel 123
Sacred Revolt (Martin) 80 Sherman’s March 329
salmon 338 Sherman, William T. 232–3, 234, 236, 326,
salvation stories 329 340
Sand Creek massacre 339 Shopkeeper’s Millennium (Johnson) 68
Sanders, Bernie 3 Shoshones 77
Sandow, Robert 229 Sierra Leone 99
San Francisco 336–7 “Significance of the Frontier in American
Saunt, Claudio 79 History” (Turner) 342
“Savage Ideal” (Cash) 309 Silber, Nina 329
Savannah police 300 “silk-hat bosses” 352
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur 3, 70, 109 silver 334, 337
Schoen, Brian 195 Simms, William Gilmore 142
Scott, Anne Firor 354 Simonsen, Jane 278
Scott, Joan 47 Singleton, Benjamin (“Pap”) 348–9
seasonal workers 39–40 Sinha, Manisha 69
Secession 171–81 see also disunion Sitting Bull 340
secession movements 96, 173–4, 177–8 Six Nations 76–7 see also Iroquois Indians
Secession Winter 171–2, 177, 180–1 Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) 263
second-class citizenship 292 slave-based agriculture 204
Second Confiscation Act (1862) 219, 247, slave breeding 52, 159–60
259 Slave Community (Blassingame) 2

370
 I N DEX

slave economy 36–7, 147–8 Somerville, Nellie Nugent 355

slaveholders: as aggressive imperialists 121; Soul by Soul (Johnson) 154
constitutional rights 255, 256–7; defining South: comparing 1860 and 1900 310;
slave gender 52; dominance in political continuity debate 307–8, 309, 313–14,
economy 120; misinformation on Union 315, 317; defending slavery 97;
army 245; powerful political class 13–14, distinctiveness 308–9, 317; as a foreign
121–2; property rights 15–16; protecting land 308; gender conventions 279; identity
staple crop production 162–3; reactions to 329; middle classes 121; political system
criticisms 97–8; secession movements 176 180; politicians 15, 22, 24–5; postbellum
slaveholders’ republics 12, 22 political economy 312; stories 329 see also
Slaveholding Unionists 246 New South
slave mistresses 56–7 South Africa 316
slave rebellions 119, 242 South Carolina 17–18, 19, 114, 173–4, 298
slavery: abolition 16, 248–9; American South Carolina Low Country 118
Revolution 12; Atlantic context 14; “southern backwardness” (Wright) 311
changes in work 17; dominant ideologies Southern capitalism 157–8
16; globalization 155; historiography 12; Southern economy 154, 156–7, 310, 315–16
Indians adopting 81; millstone for see also plantation system
Confederacy 207; moral problem 69; Southern industries 147–8, 310
multivalent system 81; national/sectional Southern Lady (Scott) 354
institution 122; as a necessary evil 97; “Southern people” 157–8
northern colonies 15; opposition to 120–1; “southern violence” 294
protected from commercial logic 161; southern whites: attitude to the Union and
scholarship 1960–1970s 12; scholarship slavery 172; defending slavery 242;
2000s 12–14; and self-government 160; homicide rates 296; plantation discipline
“total” social organization 161; white 207; reconciliation 327; sovereignty over
northerners’ attitude 242 see also capitalism slavery 18–19 see also white supremacy
and slavery; emancipation; white Southwest Ordinance (1790) 25
supremacy Spanish Florida 20
Slavery and American Economic Development Spirited Resistance (Dowd) 78
(Wright) 153 Stampp, Kenneth 1, 174–5
slavery cases 255–6 standard consensus narrative 311
Slavery (Elkins) 153 Stanley, Amy Dru 159–60, 279
slaves: “contraband of war” 241, 259; Stansell, Christine 277, 280, 283
escaping to the British 20; escaping to the Stanton, Edwin M. 218, 232
Union 207, 242, 245, 247, 278–9; passive Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 47, 69, 70, 275,
resistance 207; political actors 13, 120; 277, 280
political ideas 207–8; Protestantism 63; state, role of 42
Russian serfs 316; Secession Winter 177; state-centered nationalism 264
as security 38; struggle for national state religion 64
inclusion 55; taxed as property 11, 24, 25 states’ rights 203
see also emancipation Statute of Religious Freedom (Virginia 1786)
Slidell, John 238 62
Smith, Anna Ferry 282 steamships 92
Smith, Haskins 298 steam technology 334, 338
Smith, Mark M. 192 Stephens, Georgian Alexander 177
Smith, Timothy 68 Stephenson, Nathaniel 202
Sneider, Alison 284 Steunenberg, Frank 342
Snyder, Christina 81 Stevenson, Brenda E. 53
social contract 48 Stevens, Thaddeus 160, 243
social control 68 St. Louis (Missouri) 334
social differentiation 94 Stoker, Donald 209, 210
social network analysis 202 Stokes, James 348
social reforms 353 Stoll, Steven 36
Society of Friends (Quakers) 16, 69 Stone, Barton 63
soil exhaustion 35, 37 Stone, Lucy 278, 279, 282

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 I N DEX

stories 328–9 Tiro, Karim 81

Story, Justice Joseph 254 Tocqueville, Alexis de 90, 115, 146
Story, Wilbur 217 Tomlins, Christopher 158
Stowe, Harriet Beecher 57, 137–8, 140 Tompkins, Jane 139–40
Stowe, William W. 92 “total” wars 192
Strader v. Graham (1851) 255 tourism 92
strikes 341–2, 346 Towne, Stephen 228
subtreasury certificates of deposit 351 Townsend, James 241, 242
Suffolk system (Massachusetts) 38 trade and finance 195–6
suffrage 275, 281–2, 355 see also voting trades (artisans) 41
Suffragists in an Imperial Age (Sneider) 284 Train, George 279
Sugden, John 79 transatlantic networks 70, 98
summary justice 296 see also lynching transatlantic trade 14, 19, 34, 38, 148, 196
Sumner, Charles 243, 248 Transcendentalist movement 63–4
Sunday schools 65 transnational history 121
Supreme Court 253–7, 264 travel guides 91–2
surveillance 206, 223 travel writing 322, 329–30
suspicion of government 42 treason 219
Sutch, Richard 311 Trinity Home Mission (Atlanta) 353
“triumphalist” Union victory 323
Tallmadge Amendments 25 Trowbridge, John 322, 329
Taney, Chief Justice Roger B. 135, 253–7, “True Womanhood” ideology 47–8, 54
258–9 True Women 58 see also Republican
Taney Court 218, 253–7 Mothers
Tappan, Arthur and Lewis 69 Truth, Sojourner 276
taxation 11, 24, 25, 42 Tubman, Harriet 5
Taylor, Alan 76 Tullahoma campaign 234
Taylor, Amy Murrell 247 Turner, Frederick Jackson 75, 78, 109, 148,
Taylor, Bayard 90–1 342
tenancies 311, 312 Turner, Nat 135
Tennessee 119 Tushnet, Mark 161
Tenskwatawa (Shawnee prophet) 79 Twain, Mark 355
“term-slaves” 21 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup) 159
“territorial monopolies” (Ransom and Sutch)
311 unacceptable dissent 219 see also dissenters
Tetrault, Lisa 277, 281, 282 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 57, 138, 140
Teute, Fredrika 76 Unger, Irwin 196
Texas 333 Union Army: emancipating slaves 207, 241,
Texas Alliance 350 245, 247, 278–9; “enticement” policy 261;
theft 296, 297 leadership 233
Thirteenth Amendment 248–9, 262 unions 341–2, 346
Thirty-Sixth Congress (1859–61) 174 Union States: concern for 178–9; dissenters
Thomas, George H. 233–4 228–9; imperial nature 93; mobilization
Thomas, William 192, 236 194; naval operations 237; slaveholding
Thompson, Holland 313–14, 315 states 246; war economies 194–5; “white
Thompson, Leonard 75 only” version of victory 323
Thomson, Ross 193 Unitarians 63–4
Thornton, J. Mills 176 United States Colored Troops (USCT) 248
three-fifths clause 22, 23, 24 United States Military Academy (West
Tilden, Samuel J. 347 Point) 233
Tillman, Benjamin 299–300, 352, 353 United States v. Cruikshank (1876) 264
timber see lumber industry United States v. Reese (1876) 264
Timber and Stone Act (1878) 335 universal suffrage 280, 282 see also voting
timekeeping technologies 192 University of Maryland 241
Time on the Cross (Fogel and Engerman) University of Richmond 208
152–3, 160 unmanliness 325–6

372
 I N DEX

Unorganized Territory 333 War for Independence 16, 19, 74

Upper South 17–18, 20, 180 “war made men” rhetoric 327
urbanization 35, 40–1 Warner, Beverley 354–5
Utes 77 “War of a Thousand Deserts” (DeLay) 77
utopian experiments 278 Warren County (Mississippi) 295–6
Warren, Mercy Otis 51, 66–7
Vallandigham, Clement 217, 220, 222, 223, Warshauer, Matthew 229
224 wartime destruction 192
“vampire lien system” (Wallace) 315 wartime emancipation 248 see also
Van Buren, Martin 114 emancipation
Vance, Zebulon 351 wartime service 326 see also mobilization
Vapnek, Lara 282 Washington, Booker T. 315
Varon, Elizabeth 50, 54, 56, 121 Washington County (Texas) 295, 297
veterans 323–7; and civilians 326; Gilded Washington, Mary Helen 136
Age literature 324–5; gulf with civilians “wasting carnage” (Phelps) 328
327; as implacable enemies 324; Watertown (New York) 334
reconciliation 324; reintegration 326–7; Watkins, Sam 326
retreating to memories 326; shared Watson, Tom 351, 352
memories 323 see also Civil War Way, Peter 41
Vicksburg campaign (Grant) 235 Weaver, James B. 352
Views a-Foot (Taylor) 90–1 Weber, Jennifer 221, 228
“Village Enlightenment” (Jaffee) 40 Webster, Noah 67
Vindication of the Rights of Woman Weems, Mason Locke 67
(Wollstonecraft) 50, 276 Weiner, Jonathan 311–12
violence, as a mode of production 77 Weitz, Mark 205, 210
Violence over the Land (Blackhawk) 77 Welles, Gideon 232
Virginia 15–16, 18, 62, 151, 220, 235 Wells, Cheryl 192
Virginia (Confederate ship) 237 Welter, Barbara 48, 277
Vision of Columbus (Barlow) 90 Western Federation of Miners (WFM) 341–2
Visualizing Emancipation project (University West Point (US Military Academy) 233
of Richmond) 208 West Virginia 220
Volk, Kyle 117 Wharton, Vernon Lane 298
voluntary societies 64–5 “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July”
von Clausewitz, Carl 209 (Douglass) 138
Voorhees, Daniel 217 Wheatley, Phillis 52
Vorenberg, Michael 248 Whig Party 110, 112, 114
Voss-Hubbard, Mark 114 “Whig women” 54
voter turnout 111, 112 whipping 154, 159
voting 116; black political rights 263; blacks “white collar” occupations 41
with criminal records 298; fraud 113; White, Edward L. 324–5, 327
Republic manipulating soldiers 226; social white homicide rates 296
characteristics 110 see also electorate; suffrage; white officers 208–9
universal suffrage; women’s suffrage White, Richard 75
Whites, LeeAnn 279
Waite, Chief Justice Morrison 264 white supremacy 15, 21–2, 279, 299 see also
Walker, Mary 279 slavery; southern whites
Wallace, D. D. 315 white violence 263–4, 295
Wall, Orindatus Simon Bolivar 348–9 white women 53–4
Walters, Ronald 68, 69 Whitman, Walt 113, 142
Walther, Eric 172 Wigfall, Lewis 211
war capitalism 162–3 Wilentz, Sean 34, 41, 109, 110, 122
War Democrats 217 Wilkes, Charles 238
War Department 232 Wilkinson, Charles 335
war economies 194–6 Willard, Frances 283
Ware, Henry 63 Williams, David 205
war finance 196 Williams, Eric 148

373
 I N DEX

Williams, George Washington 248 ideology 50; losing right to vote 54;
Williams, Heather 208 self-ownership 284; transatlantic nature
Williams, T. Harry 232 of ideology 276; and “True Womanhood”
Wilmot Proviso 96 47–8
Wilson, Harriet 136, 141 Women’s Rights Convention 277
Wilson, Henry 243 women’s rights movements 57–8, 69–70,
Wilson, J. Leighton 98 275–6, 282
Wilson, Joseph 248 women’s rights reformers 278
Wiyots massacre (1860) 339 women’s sphere 49, 55, 56, 277
Wollstonecraft, Mary 276 women’s suffrage 282, 283, 355 see also
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union voting
(WCTU) 283, 353–4 “Won Cause” narrative 323
women: abolition and racial integration 57; Wood, Fernando 217
activism and work 353; antebellum Woodhull, Victoria 281
domestic realm 277; associations/clubs Woodward, C. Vann 1, 309, 310, 311, 312,
278–9, 353–4; Cherokee matrilineality 80; 316–17, 347
church membership 67; class and gender Woodworth, Steven 209
expectations 56; elite 50, 279; factory working classes 56, 94, 158, 282
workers 41; gender identity 117–18; world manufacturing 334
historians 47; independent legal identity Wright, Gavin 153, 311
50–1; “influence” 51; institutions of Wright, Martha 276
power 47; literature 136; missionary Wright, Paulina 278
societies 353; political activists 116–17;
property ownership 55; Protestant yeomen 157
morality 67–8; public life 70, 117; Yuba river (California) 336
resisting reconciliation 327; wartime
political actors 194 Zagarri, Rosemarie 48, 51, 54,
Women’s National Loyal League 279 277
women’s rights 47–58, 275–84; Civil War Ziesche, Philipp 96
278–80; contraception 278; gender Zimmerman, Andrew 316

374