CIVIL WAR HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a934381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a934381","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong><small>rosemary feurer</small></strong> is professor of history at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of <em>Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950</em> (2006) and dozens of essays and engaged history projects. She is currently working on a monograph titled \"The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860–1940.\" She is also at work on a new biography of Mother Jones, the renowned labor activist of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.</p> <p><strong><small>william horne</small></strong> is the Barbieri Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at Villanova University. He writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, and capitalism during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. His book manuscript, \"A Hate Hustle: Racial Capitalism and the Promise of an Egalitarian Revolution,\" identifies the ways Black radicals organized to overturn the racial state expressed in systems of incarceration, labor, relief, and consumption from slavery through Jim Crow. He is cofounder and editor of <em>The Activist History Review</em>.</p> <p><strong><small>brian kelly</small></strong> is reader in US history at Queen's University Belfast, formerly director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded After Slavery Project and cocreator of the online teaching resources on Reconstruction available through the online Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. He has published extensively on labor abolition, wartime slave self-activity, and Black labor and political mobilization during Reconstruction.</p> <p><strong><small>matthew e. stanley</small></strong> is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, where he specializes in race, regionalism, and labor during the Civil War era, as well as Civil War memory. He is the author or editor of three books, including the recent <em>Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War</em> (2021). His first book, <em>The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America</em> (2017), won the 2018 Wiley-Silver Prize for best first book in Civil War history.</p> <p><strong><small>rebecca capobianco toy</small></strong> received her PhD from William and Mary. She specializes in Civil War memory, commemoration, and constructions of national identity. Becca currently works as an Interpretation and Engagement Coordinator for the Washington Office of the National Park Service. <strong>[End Page 5]</strong></p> <p><strong><small>chad e. pearson</small></strong> is assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas and is primarily interested in ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has written two books—<em>Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century</em> (2022) and <em>Reform or Repression: Organizing America's A","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"197 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141939671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contesting \"the Insatiable Maw of Capital\": Mine Workers' Struggles in the Civil War Era","authors":"Rosemary Feurer","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a934383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a934383","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contesting \"the Insatiable Maw of Capital\"<span>Mine Workers' Struggles in the Civil War Era</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rosemary Feurer (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In 1861, immigrant Illinois coal miners organized a union and issued a manifesto that called for the emancipation of labor North and South. They simultaneously organized to send troops to the front. By 1863, they established the first national miners' union in the United States, the American Miners Association (AMA). Mine operators launched a countermovement to destroy the union and contested miners' capacious vision of free labor. For that, they organized the state as a legitimate use of force and ushered in the Pinkertons as a private police force. By profiling Illinois miners and operators organizing during the Civil War era, this article adds to understanding the Civil War as a crucial period in working-class history.<sup>1</sup> The history of the AMA, left out of accounts of labor and Civil War histories of this era, shows a robust contest over the boundaries of free labor. These collective campaigns entwined with state-based rights campaigns for full citizenship for freed people.<sup>2</sup> Miner and operator class formation unfolded in relation to the Civil War and set the stage for postwar battles.</p> <p>The miners' movement in this era started in the Belleville coalfield track, which comprised St. Clair and Madison Counties across from St. Louis, Missouri. This area produced two-thirds of the Illinois coal sold in the 1860s. Illinois <strong>[End Page 17]</strong> coal extraction started an uptick in the late 1850s, following the Illinois Central Railroad. Coal lay beneath almost two-thirds of Illinois, but in the American Bottom on the bluffs along the Mississippi, it was nearer to the surface. Laborers had dug and carted it since the 1840s. While Chicago's coal came from established fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1860, Belleville track coal fueled the developing industries in St. Louis, and those on the east side of the Mississippi. This led to sinking shafts just before the war. For that, coal operators hired miners from Great Britain, though with its seven-to-nine–foot-tall and dry seams, coal required less skill to extract. Among those who sought jobs were workers with union experience and with politically expansive ideas about the meaning of the war for workers.<sup>3</sup></p> <p>Belleville was a cosmopolitan German immigrant community fifteen miles from the Mississippi River border with Missouri. It was known as a freethinker's haven, \"ein kleines deutsches Athen in Amerika,\" in one scholar's description. German exiles from revolutions and others repulsed by slavery in Missouri found a refuge there. West Belleville, where the mines were located, included abolitionists. It is possible that the miners' union movement leaders traveled to th","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"311 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141939670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review Essay: After War and Emancipation, an Irrepressible Conflict","authors":"Brian Kelly","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a934387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a934387","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Book Review Essay<span>After War and Emancipation, an Irrepressible Conflict</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brian Kelly (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Professional historians who might benefit from a dose of humility about the earth-moving potential of our vocation need do no more than contemplate the gap between the outpouring of groundbreaking scholarship on war and emancipation over the past half century and its faint register in popular understanding. From the command bunkers of those directing the \"war on woke,\" Americans face increasingly strident and well-resourced efforts to restore a neo-Confederate reading of the past that resurrects the worst of the Dunning school, albeit with more unconcealed malice and less scholarly credibility. Such attempts should serve as an important wakeup call, sounding the alarm against complacency. But the breach between scholarly discourse and popular understanding long predates this recent skirmishing, and a focus on maneuvering at the margins of the culture wars can obscure the extent to which the liberal sensibility dominating the American academy has itself contributed to confusion and disarray.</p> <p>How many undergraduates emerge at the far end of their American history surveys or advanced courses on Civil War and Reconstruction concluding that nothing had changed, or that the essence of slavery continued unabated into the late nineteenth century under an all-conquering white supremacy? In academic writing, the ardor and sense of open possibility that drove a surge of new scholarship inspired by social movements associated with the New Left and struggles for Black liberation dissipated some years back, overtaken by the more cynical sensibility animating the antiwar turn in Civil War scholarship.<sup>1</sup> Even popular, <strong>[End Page 117]</strong> ostensibly radical representations of the period aimed at excavating the connections between post-Reconstruction brutality and the modern-day carceral state for the Black Lives Matter generation—as in the hugely popular Netflix documentary <em>13th</em>—seem to posit a direct line between the outcome of the war and the practical reenslavement of Black Southerners, with a strong sense of the inevitability of Reconstruction's unraveling. The restoration of white home rule in the postwar South—with all its attendant violence and oppression—was the only likely settlement, it can often appear. If the neoliberalist mantra \"There is no alternative\" continues to underpin the paralysis of our present conjuncture, the academy in all its shades seems to have projected this back in time to insist that there <em>never was</em> any alternative.</p> <p>Remarkably, the retreat from any sense of alternative possibility is often executed with the presumed endorsement of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose <em>Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880</em> remains","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141939673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"White Supremacy and Fraud: The \"Abolitionist\" Work of Henry Frisbie","authors":"William Horne","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a934385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a934385","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> White Supremacy and Fraud<span>The \"Abolitionist\" Work of Henry Frisbie</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> William Horne (bio) </li> </ul> <p>On January 13, 1875, just four months after a White League coup toppled the Louisiana state government, Henry Frisbie warned Maj. Gen. Régis de Trobriand that the state was on the verge of another rebellion. \"The same hatred of America, its name, its history, its traditions, [and] its glory,\" he observed, had inspired the September 1874 \"Liberty Place\" insurrection under the banner of white supremacy. If Americans were unwilling to punish those who orchestrated the coup or to prevent their paramilitary organizing in the future, they would lose the \"right of American citizens to live wherever the flag floats, without danger of assassination for being loyal to American unity.\" The state that had led the way in Black military service, voting, and civil rights, and integrated education teetered on the brink of destruction at the hands of a violent white backlash. \"Is liberty and republicanism,\" Frisbie challenged, \"so poor [that] none will fight for them?\"<sup>1</sup></p> <p>Frisbie began his letter to Trobriand with an allusion to his military service and a withering attack on white Southerners, whom he worried might \"repeat history\" in yet another insurrection. In his thinking, the Rebellion was ongoing <strong>[End Page 69]</strong> in the literal battles of Reconstruction, and only treating this insurrectionary violence with the seriousness it required would prevent the gains of the war from being overturned.</p> <blockquote> <p><small>new orleans</small>, <em>January</em> 13, 1875</p> <p><small>my dear general</small>: you are fighting the same battle we commenced at Pea Ridge. The spirit that drove the Third Louisiana from this city to the distant field of Elk Horn, to meet in battle face to face, and die under the fire of Illinois' Thirty-Seventh, is rampant here today, and would repeat history to-morrow, if not controlled by superior power.</p> <p>The Same Hatred of America, its name, its history, its traditions, its glory, its Yankees, and the glorying in the \"South\" and in being southrons, that marked and darkened their character in that epoch, are distinguishing characteristics of them to-day.</p> </blockquote> <p>White southerners were incapable and seemingly incapable, in Frisbie's estimation, of living in a free and equal society.</p> <p>During the Rebellion, Frisbie had gained a reputation as a steadfast defender of Black equality, often embracing explicitly abolitionist language. Yet while he trumpeted the cause of freedom in January 1875, he had by then also established himself as a well-known fraudster, and he would be removed from his post as a US commission agent by the end of the year. Indeed, his letter reads both as an indictment of white conservative \"threats, ost","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"141 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141969211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"We Can Take Care of Ourselves Now\": Establishing Independent Black Labor and Industry in Postwar Yorktown, Virginia","authors":"Rebecca Capobianco Toy","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a934384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a934384","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> \"We Can Take Care of Ourselves Now\"<span>Establishing Independent Black Labor and Industry in Postwar Yorktown, Virginia</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rebecca Capobianco Toy (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In May 1866, Lt. F. J. Massey, the Freedman's Bureau agent in charge of York County, Virginia, wrote to his superior officer of a recent conversation between himself and a formerly enslaved man. \"When asked if the new freed-people would be able to provide for themselves,\" the newly emancipated man had replied, \"'We used to support ourselves and our masters, too, when we were slaves, and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.'\"<sup>1</sup> In this assertion, the interviewee highlighted the reality that white observers often missed: formerly enslaved people had always been the backbone of the Southern economy. They emerged from slavery with the skills necessary to support themselves and knew that they were capable of doing so. In their interactions with the Freedmen's Bureau and other white benevolent workers, Black residents of York County frequently expressed their desire to direct the course of their own labor and resisted the bureau's attempts to manage their freedom. While the efforts of the federal government and benevolent organizations to establish a wage labor economy in the postwar South are well documented, a reevaluation of ground-level sources reveals the ways Black Southerners worked to negotiate and direct that process for themselves through locally specific \"personal economies\" such as subsistence farming, fishing, oystering, and shipping. In <strong>[End Page 43]</strong> defining the terms of their own labor, Black York County residents sought to manifest their own visions of freedom rather than have the terms of their freedom determined for them.</p> <p>A Jim Crow South was not inevitable. During the years of slavery's demise, and as Virginians began to imagine the nation without its peculiar institution, opportunities remained to define what that Commonwealth would look like.<sup>2</sup> While postwar political debates between Republicans and Democrats are well documented, the vision of freedom that Black Americans brought to this period is less so. Told from the perspective of federal agents or white Northerners, as events of this period so often are, formerly enslaved people found themselves in desperate need of intervention and direction from white authorities. Yet, buried in the often mundane Freedmen's Bureau records and those of other benevolent organizations, are the clear articulations of what freedom meant to Black Virginians, what they expected of their postwar worlds, and their intentions to make those visions reality. Focusing on sources at the level at which most Black Americans negotiated their lives—within their local communities—reveals the strategies they used and the types of work they ","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141969159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Open-Shop Movement and the Long Shadow of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction","authors":"Chad E. Pearson","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a934386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a934386","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Open-Shop Movement and the Long Shadow of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Chad E. Pearson (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Readers of the <em>Open Shop</em>, a nationally circulated publication popular with mostly urban-based businessmen, were reminded in 1907 that \"Abraham Lincoln freed the shackles from the limbs of 4,000,000 slaves.\" The nation's diverse set of employers used the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction to contend with rebellious workers committed to building closed-shop worksites, or places that employed union members exclusively. In the face of these challenges, the socalled Great Emancipator served as a model of moral clarity and principled action, someone worthy of high praise and emulation. Like Lincoln, spokespersons for the powerful, multilocational open-shop movement were determined to battle pushy union leaders and working-class militants who threatened to introduce what union fighters labeled a new type of \"slavery\"—this time against owners and nonunion workers who refused to subordinate their individual rights to the labor movement's dictates. In their collective minds, Lincoln, had he lived in the early twentieth century, would have stood squarely with employers and nonunionists during these intense confrontations. After all, according to the <em>Open Shop</em>, he \"gave up his life in the cause of perpetuating the institutions which organized labor, as represented by the American Federation of Labor, seeks to overthrow and destroy.\"<sup>1</sup> Indeed, movement leaders, representing thousands, regularly cited the <strong>[End Page 87]</strong> former president's iconic statements, insisting that, as the National Association of Manufacturers' (NAM) James A. Emery put it in 1905, the nation \"cannot endure half slave and half free.\"<sup>2</sup> According to Emery, a leader of the country's most powerful antiunion organizations, unions—their preponderance and influence—had revived and reanimated the practice of human bondage in the United States.</p> <p>Emery was one of countless Americans who raised the memory of Lincoln and the Civil War in the Progressive years. By this time, figures from multiple sides of labor controversies, as well a diverse set of individuals outside of industrial relations settings, found continuous value in the late president's words and actions.<sup>3</sup> This was, according to sociologist Barry Schwartz, a new development. As Schwartz maintained, Lincoln \"did not became a national idol until the first two decades of the twentieth century.\" By this time, an assortment of historians, journalists, poets, and architects had produced books, articles, and attention-grabbing statues of the former president, reminding Americans of his unparalleled place in history.<sup>4</sup> Employers and their allies, enjoying large platforms to communic","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141939672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Does the Civil War Matter?\": A Roundtable Discussion","authors":"Jim Downs, Yoni Appelbaum, Drew Gilpin Faust, Kerri K. Greenidge, Stephanie McCurry, Megan Kate Nelson, Adam I. P. Smith","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918896","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> \"Does the Civil War Matter?\"<span>A Roundtable Discussion</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jim Downs, ModeratorParticipants: Yoni Appelbaum, Drew Gilpin Faust, Kerri K. Greenidge, Stephanie McCurry, Megan Kate Nelson, and Adam I. P. Smith </li> </ul> <p>In 2004, <em>Civil War History</em> published Drew Gilpin Faust's \"'We Should Grow Too Fond of It': Why We Love the Civil War.\"<sup>1</sup> In the article, Faust analyzed the proliferation of Civil War scholarship and interrogated why the Civil War attracted the attention of a generation of scholars. She connected how the rise of social history benefited from the preservation of Civil War records. The article has become a classic in the field and remains a major contribution. As the journal's current editor, I have wondered if the Civil War still matters to scholars, teachers, readers, and the public as it did twenty years ago. As such, I organized a roundtable bringing together a range of scholars and writers to answer the question \"Does the Civil War Matter?\"</p> <p>I am deeply grateful that Drew Faust agreed to participate in the conversation. While anyone publishing or teaching or thinking about Civil War history could have participated, I selected the other panelists based on their specialties. Yoni Appelbaum, a member of the journal's editorial board, is a trained historian and is also the deputy editor at the <em>Atlantic</em>. I wanted his perspective on the reading public's interest in the war and how scholars might frame their research to interest a broader audience. Kerri K. Greenidge is a prolific historian of the Black experience in US history and has written widely on topics related to the Civil War. Stephanie McCurry is a leading historian of the South, whose research <strong>[End Page 50]</strong> questions led her to the Civil War. I wanted her insights as a Southern historian. Since region matters to the study of the Civil War, I asked Megan Kate Nelson, who has written three excellent books about the Civil War and about the Civil War both in the South and in the West, particularly among Indigenous people. Nelson is also a prolific writer and presents her research widely to nonacademic audiences. Adam I. P. Smith has written about the North during the Civil War and is also the director of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Given the great interest in the Civil War in the United Kingdom, especially among historians of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians organization, I was eager to add his perspective.</p> <small><strong>jim downs</strong>:</small> <p>Welcome! I'm really excited about this conversation, and I'm extraordinarily grateful for your time, especially in the last dog days of summer before classes start for many of you. One of the most generative aspects of editing the journal for me has been doing round","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant (review)","authors":"Sarah E. Chinn","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918900","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era</em> by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sarah E. Chinn (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era</em>. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-019601044. 448 pp., cloth, $34.95. <p>William T. Adams, who published under the pseudonym Oliver Optic (among others), was probably the best-selling children's writer of the mid-nineteenth century. Most of his more than one hundred books—filled with adventure and youthful slang—sold upward of a hundred thousand copies. By the mid-1860s, he was churning out two series featuring boy combatants, Tom Somers and his brother Jack, teenagers who enlisted in the army and navy. The \"Soldier Boy\" and \"Sailor Boy\" series were characterized by both bloody descriptions of battle and scenes of Christian virtue demonstrated by the young heroes, who never let military life seduce them into the sinful clutches of drink, gambling, and swearing.</p> <p>The Somers boys' admixture of heroism, self-sacrifice, and piety would have been a familiar characterological brew to both child and adult readers by the time <em>The Soldier Boy</em> was published in 1864. As Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant point out in <em>Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era</em>, their impressively comprehensive and deeply researched study of underage recruits both North and South, \"whether underage boys featured as sacrificial young martyrs or precociously brave-hearted boys, the public found their stories irresistible\" (10). From this imaginary narrative, however, they quickly plunge their readers into the realities of the lives of the youths who comprised a meaningful segment of both Union and Confederate armies.</p> <p>Clarke and Plant have several intersecting arguments within the book. The first is that if we are to talk meaningfully about the involvement of minors in the Civil War, we should both understand what <em>minority</em> as an age category signified in the 1860s and how many boys actually enlisted between 1861 and 1865. The second is that the presence of underage recruits in both Union and Confederate armies shaped military and government policy in important ways, which have not heretofore been fully understood and cannot be understood unless we take boy soldiers into account. And the third, and I think most original, is that the presence of large numbers of teenagers and younger boys on the battlefield was made possible by, and hastened, the centralization of power in a federalized army, displacing the previous dominance of local militias as the backbone of US military force.</p> <p>The authors establish a credible accounting of the number of underage soldiers, using regi","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"100 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139769012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Refugee Crisis of Sherman's March: Savannah, Port Royal, and the Transformation of the Sea Islands","authors":"Bennett Parten","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918894","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918894","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Refugee Crisis of Sherman's March<span>Savannah, Port Royal, and the Transformation of the Sea Islands</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Bennett Parten (bio) </li> </ul> <p>On Christmas 1864, Gen. Rufus Saxton spent his holiday pacing the docks along the wharf at Beaufort, South Carolina. The first \"seven hundred\" of the roughly twenty thousand freed refugees from slavery who had followed Sherman's army during its march from Atlanta to Savannah were set to arrive that afternoon. As military governor of the Department of the South, Saxton was tasked with integrating the refugees into the so-called Port Royal Experiment—an enterprise that had been ongoing since 1861, when the arrival of US gunboats prompted the region's white inhabitants to take flight, leaving behind nearly ten thousand enslaved people and a large supply of unsold cotton. Overwhelmed by only the first groups of refugees, many of whom suffered serious deprivations stemming from the long and difficult march, Saxton would later write to the freedmen's aid societies in the North for assistance. \"So extreme and entire is the destitution of this people that nothing that you can afford to give will come amiss,\" he told his audience, hoping the right amount of Northern benevolence might be enough to stave off disaster.<sup>1</sup></p> <p>Saxton, however, was unable to forestall what he so desperately wanted to avoid. The arrival of Sherman's army in Savannah transformed the self-contained <strong>[End Page 9]</strong> freedmen's colony at Port Royal into the epicenter of a sprawling refugee crisis. The influx of such a large number of refugees into the area swelled the size of the original population of freedpeople living on the islands around Port Royal. So many new inhabitants destabilized a region already in the throes of social revolution. To Saxton, the man charged with overseeing the transition, finding basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter presented one problem; finding these items and resettling the refugees from Georgia as quasi-free laborers was another task entirely. While the refugees were eventually resettled on the islands, their arrival in the aftermath of Sherman's March set off a series of events that would ultimately reshape the nature of the project at Port Royal.</p> <p>Historians have long recognized Port Royal's central place in the history of American emancipation. It was arguably there on sandy soils of the South Carolina Sea Islands that freedom came first, making Port Royal and its environs a sort of staging ground for the trials of Reconstruction. Yet this impulse to see the islands as a laboratory for experimenting with freedom has led historians to see the region as an outpost or enclave set apart from the wider developments of the war. As such, the story of the Georgia refugees often gets folded into the larger story ","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918892","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><small><strong>yoni appelbaum</strong></small>, deputy editor at the <em>Atlantic</em>, is a social and cultural historian of the United States. Before joining the <em>Atlantic</em>, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He previously taught at Babson College and Brandeis University, where he received his PhD in American history.</p> <p><small><strong>brie swenson arnold</strong></small> is W. P. and Gayle S. Whipple Associate Professor of History at Coe College. Her research interests center on nineteenth-century race and gender with an emphasis on print and political culture.</p> <p><small><strong>brent m. s. campney</strong></small> is professor of history at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of <em>Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest</em> (2019) and <em>This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927</em> (2015).</p> <p><small><strong>sarah e. chinn</strong></small> teaches American literatures and cultures in the English Department at Hunter College–CUNY. She is currently completing a book project that explores representations of amputation during Reconstruction and its relationship to white radicalism and antiracism.</p> <p><small><strong>jim downs</strong></small> is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of <em>Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine</em> (2021). His other books include <em>Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction</em> (2012) and <em>Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation</em> (2016).</p> <p><small><strong>drew gilpin faust</strong></small> is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard University, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. Faust is the author of several books, including <em>Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury</em> (2023) and <em>This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War</em> (2008).</p> <p><small><strong>kerri k. greenidge</strong></small> is Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also codirects the African American Trail Project. She is also codirector of Tufts's Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. Greenidge is the author of <em>Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter</em> (2019). Her most recent book is the much-lauded <em>The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family</em> (2022).</p> <p><small><strong>jonathan s. jones</strong></small> is assistant professor of history at James Madison University. His first book manuscript, \"Opium Slavery: The Civil War,","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}