African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Ashley Towle (review)

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• African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Ashley Towle
• Hannah Katherine Hicks

African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Ashley Towle. New Studies in Southern History. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2023. Pp. x, 190. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-66690-571-7.)

This well-researched book bridges the scholarship on the cultural history of death and historians’ work on African Americans’ experiences during emancipation and Reconstruction. Between epidemics in refugee camps and the [End Page 444] one-fifth of Black soldiers who perished during the Civil War, as well as the racial violence that erupted across the South during Reconstruction, many Black southerners lost their lives. Ashley Towle explores how African American communities both made sense of these deaths and invoked the memory of the dead to sustain their fight for civil rights and racial justice. Employing Vincent Brown’s concept of “‘mortuary politics’” from The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), Towle’s African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction demonstrates that Black southerners symbolically called on their dead when they denounced racial violence and staked claims to citizenship (p. 4). The author draws on an impressive range of sources, encompassing congressional hearing reports, Freedmen’s Bureau and military records, memoirs, and African American newspapers.

The first two chapters center on cemeteries. Black southerners created and maintained civilian cemeteries after the war, seizing the opportunity to exercise control over their dead and their burials. These cemeteries were not only places of sacred remembrance, but also sites for political meetings and mobilization. African Americans gathered in burial grounds like Wilmington, North Carolina’s Pine Forest Cemetery and Columbia, South Carolina’s Randolph Cemetery to mourn the dead, including Black politicians and civilians killed during Reconstruction, and to hold political events. Such events celebrated Black achievements since emancipation and galvanized communities to continue fighting for equality. The second chapter focuses on the central role of Black soldiers in creating the South’s national cemeteries. Here the author turns to records of the quartermaster general’s office to trace the extensive, somber work of Black troops in recovering fallen soldiers and giving them proper burials. These chapters show that both civilian cemeteries and national cemeteries, where generations of Black southerners celebrated Decoration Day and the emancipationist legacy of the war, became “counter-historical landscapes to Confederate cemeteries that valorized the Confederacy and the Lost Cause” (p. 28).

The third chapter discusses how the war dead helped sustain the living through the pensions paid to the families of Union soldiers. Towle shows how Black soldiers’ widows and other family members navigated the pension process and how the modest payments aided newly free families as they sought to secure economic independence. The fourth chapter explores how freedpeople crafted meaningful spiritual lives. This chapter briefly covers the centrality of Protestant churches to Reconstruction politics and how religion strengthened communal bonds. Refreshingly, the chapter also considers African Americans’ engagements with other spiritual traditions, such as conjure and Spiritualism. Finally, chapter 5 focuses on African Americans’ testimonies about racial violence during Reconstruction, including how deponents spoke for the dead men, women, and children they had seen killed. Many survivors named the murderers and so risked death themselves in speaking up. Through their accounts of events such as the 1866 Memphis Massacre, freedpeople led Congress and the northern public to understand the need for a more radical Reconstruction of the South and more expansive rights for African Americans.

The book demonstrates how African Americans worked to make meaning of death and to create discourses and physical sites, such as cemeteries, that [End Page 445] provided space for both honoring the dead and powerfully protesting racial injustice. In both bringing the concept of mortuary politics to bear on Black southerners’ experiences in the years after the Civil War and in tracing how communities made Black deaths matter, Towle makes a significant contribution. Scholars of Reconstruction and emancipation, as well as students and history...