CIVIL WAR HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War by Megan L. Bever (review)","authors":"Jonathan S. Jones","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918899","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>At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War</em> by Megan L. Bever <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jonathan S. Jones (bio) </li> </ul> <em>At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War</em>. Megan L. Bever. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-4696-6954-0. 260 pp., paper, $27.95. <p>This unique and much-needed book fills a stunning gap in the historiographies of the Civil War and the temperance movement. As Megan L. Bever rightfully observes, most historians of the latter have concluded that the Civil War was ultimately a setback for the temperance movement. Bever also contends that Civil War historians—with a few exceptions including Elaine Frantz, Lorien Foote, Margaret Humphreys, James Marten, and Scott C. Martin—have largely overlooked alcohol use in Civil War armies or approached drinking in the ranks as a window into topics like the culture of Civil War armies, common soldiering, the experiences of veterans, or contests over manhood.</p> <p>In contrast, Bever makes alcohol the central focus in <em>At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War</em>, providing the first thorough scholarly treatment of the topic to squarely address wartime alcohol use in the Union and Confederate armies situated within the historical context of the nineteenth-century temperance movement, medicine, and state development. Building on the work of Holly Berkley Fletcher, Paul Boyer, Bruce Dorsey, Ian Tyrrell, Elaine Frantz, Lorien Foote, Gerald F. Linderman, Kathryn Shively, <strong>[End Page 79]</strong> Peter S. Carmichael, and Lauren K. Thompson, <em>At War with King Alcohol</em> blends cultural, gender, medical, and military history methodologies. Bever draws on diverse sources ranging from temperance literature to medical texts, soldiers' letters, newspapers, and the records of courts martial and state legislatures. The result is a tightly constructed, well-executed, one-of-a-kind book that advances scholars' understanding of the Civil War and the temperance movement.</p> <p>While the book's subtitle refers to masculinity, the scope is broader in focus than the title suggests. Much of the book focuses on excavating alcohol use patterns among US and Confederate soldiers and officers during the Civil War. Bever finds that soldiers made war with alcohol as their constant recreational and medicinal aid. Although officers, who could licitly drink for fun, and soldiers, who were theoretically forbidden from nonmedicinal drinking, did not necessarily share a common drinking culture, most men in uniform imbibed regularly. Through trial and error, and despite spirited debate, prophylactic alcohol rations in the US and Confederate militaries became the norm during the war. Holidays and paydays als","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139769338","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 Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War by J. Matthew Gallman (review)","authors":"Brie Swenson Arnold","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918898","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>The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War</em> by J. Matthew Gallman <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brie Swenson Arnold (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War</em>. J. Matthew Gallman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-8139-4656-6. 416 pp., cloth, $35.00. <p>In this thought-provoking volume, noted historian J. Matthew Gallman offers his latest look at aspects of the political and social dynamics of the Civil War North. The emphasis here is Northern Democrats: who remained a Democrat between 1860 and 1865 and why; how various individuals and the party as a whole defined what it meant to be a Democrat during this pivotal period; and how Democrats navigated being the opposition in the midst of a civil war. <strong>[End Page 76]</strong> Though a sizeable contingent of Northerners continued to be Democrats during the era of the ascendency of the Republican Party, secession and the exodus of Southern Democrats, and the Civil War, Northern Democrats have remained less studied and understood. <em>The Cacophony of Politics</em> substantially attends to that, especially when read alongside other volumes that are part of an uptick in attention to Northern Democrats. (See, for example, Jennifer Weber, <em>Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North</em> [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006]; Michael Todd Landis, <em>Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis</em> [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014]; Adam I. P. Smith, <em>The Stormy Present: Conservatism and the Problem of Slavery in Northern Politics, 1846–1865</em> [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017]; Joshua A. Lynn, <em>Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism</em> [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019]; and Lauren Haumesser, <em>The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856–1861</em> [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022]. For the foundational study on the topic, see Jean Baker, <em>Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century</em> [1983; repr., New York: Fordham University Press, 1998]). Gallman wants to understand the \"men and women who did not see eye to eye with Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party\" and what those \"more ideologically conservative\" Northerners meant by terms like <em>loyalty, Union, Constitution</em>, and <em>Democrat</em> (9, 10). As members of the party of the opposition during a civil war, Northern Democrats also ran up against and helped to define the boundaries of acceptable wartime dissent.</p> <p>To tell this story, the book does not fol","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"166 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139769334","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":"Editor's Overview","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918893","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 --> Editor's Overview <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p>In 2004, in response to the prolific scholarship on the Civil War, distinguished historian Drew Gilpin Faust published \"'We Should Grow Too Fond of It': Why We Love the Civil War,\" in this journal. It immediately became canonical. Twenty years later, as editor, I wanted to know if we still love the Civil War. It remains a core part of scholarship, teaching, and reading for so many of us. but has the Civil War lost some of its appeal? To answer this question, I organized a round-table with some of the world's leading thinkers about the Civil War. We were fortunate enough to get Drew Faust to join the conversation!</p> <p>Also, in the issue are two terrific contributions to Civil War–era studies. The first, by Bennett Parten, brings to light the nearly twenty thousand formerly enslaved refugees who followed Gen. William T. Sherman's famous March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah. Building on the expanding raft of studies on emancipation, which he refers to as the \"refugee turn,\" Parten challenges Willie Lee Rose's classic 1964 study <em>Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment</em>, which shoehorns the Georgia refugees into the Port Royal experiment without realizing how their migration and displacement distinguished them from the freedpeople living on the Sea Islands. Pushing against the federal government's idea that the messiness of wartime emancipation could be easily rectified, Parten insists that the refugee framework better explains their status after slavery.</p> <p>Also upending traditional interpretations of the Civil War era, Brent Campney exposes how white Northerners engaged in mob violence against white Southerners in Kansas, flipping the familiar script of white Southerners attacking white Northerners. Setting his attention \"within Kansas onto the internecine struggle among white Kansans themselves,\" Campney covers a seven-year period \"when white Northerners jockeyed for power with white Southerners amid rapidly and profoundly shifting state and national debates.\" By emphasizing newspaper accounts of the conflicts in Kansas, Campney reconstructs the violence that shaped Kansas's political history during the Civil War era and in so doing expands the temporal parameters of Bleeding Kansas.</p> <p>The book review section, as always, delivers an exciting cast of reviews that would not be possible without Sarah Gardner's impeccable leadership and incisive editing. Brie Swenson Arnold reviews J. Matthew Gallman's much anticipated book on Democrats in the North during the Civil War, <em>The Cacophony of</em> <strong>[End Page 7]</strong> <em>Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War</em>, and Jonathan S. Jones reviews Megan L. Bever's insightful study, <em>At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War</em>.","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":"139769340","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":"\"Driven Out on the Old Charge of Being a Rebel\": White-on-White Sectional Violence and the \"Long\" Bleeding Kansas","authors":"Brent M. S. Campney","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918895","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 --> \"Driven Out on the Old Charge of Being a Rebel\"<span>White-on-White Sectional Violence and the \"Long\" Bleeding Kansas</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brent M. S. Campney (bio) </li> </ul> <p>\"Desperado Hung,\" blared the <em>Emporia News</em> on February 8, 1867, after white townspeople in nearby Council Grove hanged Jack McDowell, a fellow white man whom they accused of having been a bushwhacker during the American Civil War. To justify their actions, they claimed McDowell had been part of the guerrilla band that, under the leadership of William Clarke Quantrill, had burned Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863 and killed a minimum of 150 men and boys. They based their justification on thin evidence, including the following: \"When being brought down from Omaha [he] begged not to be brought through Lawrence, as he would be recognized there and hung. This circumstance seems to establish the general suspicion that he was a member of the Quantrell gang.\" Although the <em>News</em> professed to regret mob violence, it accepted the result: \"From the best evidence that could be procured this McDowell was a thief of long standing, and one of the old Missouri bushwhackers, and if hanging by the people could ever be excused[,] it could in this case.\"<sup>1</sup></p> <p>The lynching of an accused pro-Confederate bushwhacker by a unionist mob in Kansas early in Reconstruction reveals a violent dynamic rarely investigated—violence perpetrated by white Northerners against white Southerners in Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s and 1860s. In the historiography of <strong>[End Page 27]</strong> the Kansas Territory, historians tend to examine the intimidation by proslavery Missourians against the antislavery settlers from the Northeast and Midwest and the responses of the latter. In the historiography on Civil War violence on the Kansas-Missouri border, they tend to emphasize Missouri, where endemic guerrilla violence and neighbor-on-neighbor partisan strife raged. In the historiography on Kansas, they investigate attacks within the state by pro-Confederate guerrillas invading from Missouri. Responding to these biases, and focusing on the Civil War years and early Reconstruction, this study shifts the focus away from the intimidation of the proslavery forces and onto that perpetrated by free staters, away from Missouri and onto Kansas itself, and within Kansas onto the internecine struggle among white Kansans themselves.<sup>2</sup></p> <p>Although this essay incorporates the better-known story of the violence perpetrated by white Southerners against white Northerners, it focuses on the under-investigated story of mob violence by white Northerners against their white Southern counterparts or against those suspected of working in cahoots with them. Covering a seven-year period at the backend of what it calls the \"long\" Bleeding Kansas, the study exam","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768990","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 Whartons' War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton 1863–1865 ed. by William C. Davis and Sue Heth Bell (review)","authors":"Jonathan A. Noyalas","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918901","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>The Whartons' War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton 1863–1865</em> ed. by William C. Davis and Sue Heth Bell <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jonathan A. Noyalas (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Whartons' War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton 1863–1865</em>. Edited by William C. Davis and Sue Heth Bell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-4696-6829-1, 456 pp., paper, $45.00. <p>Near the end of his life, former Confederate general Gabriel Wharton took time to reread the wartime correspondence he had exchanged with his wife, Nannie. After revisiting the 524 letters the two sent to each other between March 8, 1863, and June 21, 1865, Wharton penned a simple note instructing his heirs to destroy the correspondence upon his death. While no one, fortunately, carried out Wharton's instructions, the content-rich letters resided in obscurity until by Sue Heth Bell, one of Wharton's descendants, discovered them recently.</p> <p>While historians interested in military operations in the Old Dominion, particularly southwestern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley, will find much useful material throughout these letters, smartly edited by Bell and William C. \"Jack\" Davis, one of the most prolific Civil War historians of our time, this volume offers significantly more than a recounting of military events, weather conditions, and war's impact on the landscape.</p> <p>Foremost, these letters reveal the difficulties married couples confronted during the conflict. Married on May 14, 1863, the two spent considerably little <strong>[End Page 84]</strong> time together during their first two years. Loneliness, fear, and frustration consumed both. Sometimes those emotions compelled one to lash out at the other. For instance, on December 15, 1864, Nannie expressed anger over her husband's inability to get away from the army and spend time with her and their infant son, William, born on June 11, 1864. She threatened to cease communicating with Gabriel until he spent time with them. However, she soon realized the folly of her ultimatum and apologized for threatening to cut off the only means the two had of building their relationship.</p> <p>Additionally, and perhaps most significantly, this collection offers an intriguing case study of the limits of Confederate patriotism. While the Whartons might not be representative of the entire Confederacy, their letters clearly demonstrate that battlefield success, lack of recognition for duty well performed, and the Confederacy's political landscape affected one's devotion to the Confederacy. While Gabriel expressed more optimism than Nannie about the South's prospects, even in the aftermath of catastrophic defeats, the honest and candid exchanges between t","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"85-86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768992","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":"Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney (review)","authors":"Lawrence T. McDonnell","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2024.a918897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2024.a918897","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>Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy</em> by William L. Barney <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lawrence T. McDonnell (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy</em>. William L. Barney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 392 pp. ISBN: 978-0190076085, cloth, $34.95. <p>Publication of <em>Rebels in the Making</em> is a cause for celebration among historians of the Civil War era. It is the most valuable single-volume study of the secession crisis, crafted by a master scholar at the apex of his career. Deeply researched and powerfully synthetic, it promises to spark debate and generate further explorations of this crucial subject.</p> <p>To say that William Barney's book has been long anticipated would be an understatement—but that has become almost par for the course for those who study disunion. The available sources are vast, the historiography so extensive, complex, and high-caliber, the problems to resolve so knotted and subtle. Making sense of the fateful choice to break up the Union and establish a slaveholders' Confederacy requires mastering the cultural, economic, and political contexts of the national crisis—an Everest that many sensibly shy away from. Others tackle just a portion of the problem—secession in a state or city, the role of an individual or a revolutionary network, the influence of gender, honor, or some other inspiring force. That alone can consume a professional lifetime. The hardiest, like Allan Nevins or William Freehling, have told their seemingly all-encompassing tales over multiple volumes, produced across decades. What hero can hope or dare to do that now?</p> <p><em>Rebels in the Making</em> reframes the task: to explain comprehensively a vast national tragedy in human terms on a reasonable scale. Against great odds, it succeeds splendidly. Meshing voluminous research in manuscripts, newspapers, and other contemporary sources with deep understanding of historiographical debates, Barney's book, with its brevity and flow, will astonish careful readers. Tightly focused on the crisis of 1860–61, <em>Rebels</em> makes its \"kaleidoscope of events and emotions\" abundantly comprehensible precisely by arguing its central thesis: that disunion was not inevitable or structurally foreordained (4). Rather, Barney <strong>[End Page 74]</strong> shows how contingency ruled everywhere, how the intersection of bad ideas and drastic decisions by specific people in distant locations combined to destroy the United States. For what? Slavery, not state rights or any other reason, he shows. Whodunit? Anxious, self-interested slaveholders, specifically, thwarted younger men of property who worried about the decay of debt, the fracture of class alliances, Republican scheming, and turncoats in thei","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139769013","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 Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans by Allison M. Johnson (review)","authors":"Marla Anzalone","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2023.a912513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2023.a912513","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>The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans</em> by Allison M. Johnson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Marla Anzalone (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans</em>. Allison M. Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8071-7707-5. 391 pp., paper, $29.95. <p>Through the span of the American Civil War, the Union army recorded more than sixteen thousand arm-related amputations, creating an unprecedented volume of disabled veterans who were tasked with learning to navigate the demands of postwar life as one-armed men (2). As chaplain at New York’s Central Park Hospital, editor and poet William Oland Bourne observed a Union soldier who had recently undergone a right-arm amputation signing his chaplain’s autograph book with his remaining, nondominant left hand. In witnessing this act, Bourne recognized the importance of learning to write with the left hand had for one-armed veterans’ recovery and overall social and professional success. Left-handed penmanship provided professional opportunities for veterans who were unable to perform manual labor by refining their writing skills to make them employable clerks or bookkeepers. Inspired through his hospital work, Bourne created two left-handed penman-ship contests for his newspaper, the <em>Soldier’s Friend</em>. Launched in 1864, the paper aimed to provide news and content relevant to soldiers’ interests and to find and furnish employment opportunities for Union veterans and their families. The first contest, announced in June 1865, called for submissions of original work containing “brief essays on patriotic themes, and especially narratives of the writer’s experience in the service of the country, incidents, or sketches of the war” (11). The collected prize essays from the 1865 competition were exhibited twice, first in New York and then Washington, DC, and presented to the public as narratives of war and recovery. In 1867, Bourne launched a second contest at the behest of members of the Left-Armed Corps who had not participated in the first contest. Across the two competitions, 333 entrants emerged, largely from New York, Ohio, and Illinois, the majority of whom were not commissioned officers. Of all the contestants, only two were Black soldiers, who submitted to the first contest.</p> <p>The archive of Bourne’s writing competitions through the <em>Soldier’s Friend</em> consists of thousands of pages detailing the experiences of the men who comprised the Left-Armed Corps. In <em>The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Soldiers</em>, Allison M. Johnson deftly navigates this archive to present entries of as many veterans as possible in a manner that allows these texts to be accessible and navigable for scholars and Civil War enthusiasts alike. For each ","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540222","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 \"First\" Emancipation Proclamation: Black Rebellion, Removal, and Freedom during the Seminole Wars","authors":"Kristen T. Oertel","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2023.a912507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2023.a912507","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 “First” Emancipation Proclamation<span>Black Rebellion, Removal, and Freedom during the Seminole Wars</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kristen T. Oertel (bio) </li> </ul> <p>The brutal war had dragged on for years with no end in sight. The president grew increasingly frustrated by how poorly US troops had performed, and the people’s tolerance of bad news waned with each casualty report from the battlefield. Perhaps most concerning, debates in the US House of Representatives revealed that support for the war was precariously low, with one congressman complaining, “Immense sums of the public money have already been expended on this war and . . . have been extracted, like teeth, from this House.”<sup>1</sup> Something drastic had to be done to turn the tide, to win this seemingly endless war. Could the emancipation of enslaved Blacks trigger that turn and launch the US Army on a path to victory?</p> <p>President Lincoln likely asked this question as he wrestled with issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862. But instead of picturing Lincoln in the Oval Office after Antietam, place yourself in a Florida swamp in 1838, and you will find Gen. Thomas Sidney Jesup issuing the “first” emancipation proclamation, twenty-six years before Lincoln’s, and freeing hundreds of enslaved <strong>[End Page 11]</strong> Blacks.<sup>2</sup> During the Second Seminole War, after repeatedly failing to negotiate peace with the Seminole Indians and their Black allies, Jesup promised the Black combatants “freedom and protection on their separating from the Indians and surrendering.”<sup>3</sup> Hoping to divide and conquer the Seminole and Black forces that had been fighting the US Army for decades, Jesup used emancipation of Black soldiers, many of whom were enslaved by Seminole citizens, as a military tool to weaken the opposition and quite literally remove a portion of enemy troops from Florida to Indian Territory. Negotiating with Black leaders like John Horse, he claimed that if they surrendered and moved to the West, the army would protect their freedom. In an order issued in March, he specified: “That all Negroes the property of the Seminole . . . who . . . delivered themselves up to the Commanding Officer of the troops should be free.”<sup>4</sup> As historian Kevin Mulroy has already noted, “Black emancipation and Removal had become the policy of the U.S. Army.”<sup>5</sup></p> <p>Of course, the British had offered the first promise of freedom to enslaved Blacks in what is now the United States during the Revolutionary War with Dunmore’s Proclamation in 1775, the Phillipsburg Proclamation in 1779, and again during the War of 1812, and the Spanish had used this playbook for decades in Florida and the Caribbean.<sup>6</sup> But Jesup’s is likely the first emancipation proclamation made by a US official, and similar procl","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"215 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540227","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":"\"Portraits Torn to Shreds\": Iconoclasm and the Destruction of Confederate Memory","authors":"Matthew Fox-Amato","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2023.a912508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2023.a912508","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 --> “Portraits Torn to Shreds”<span>Iconoclasm and the Destruction of Confederate Memory</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Matthew Fox-Amato (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In July 1863, Jefferson Davis was stabbed. To understand the attack, one needs to begin earlier in the war, when Davis’s eldest brother, Joseph E. Davis, had moved belongings from the family’s Brierfield and Hurricane plantations to Owen B. Cox’s house near Clinton, Mississippi. The possessions were hidden in the attic of the main house and an outbuilding, and they might have remained safe, were it not for the actions of Alfred, a man Cox enslaved. Alfred had previously fled to the Union army; when the Union troops arrived at Cox’s house, he pointed them toward Davis’s concealed property. The troops promptly ruined and looted those possessions and many other household objects. They destroyed books from Jefferson Davis’s private library, which by one account numbered in the thousands. They ripped paintings with their bayonets, cut up carpets, damaged a walnut table, wrecked a piano, and stole curtains to use as blankets.<sup>1</sup> And, in particularly brutal fashion, they laid waste to Davis’s image. As one witness described, “among the evidences of petty malice a book was found containing Your Excellency’s likeness; this the soldiers <strong>[End Page 36]</strong> stabbed as often as they could find a piece of the paper large enough to receive the point of a knife.”<sup>2</sup></p> <p>The vision of Union troops knifing a small Jefferson Davis portrait might seem of minor significance in comparison to the many better-studied visual media of the Civil War—including engravings in <em>Harper’s Weekly</em> and <em>Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper</em>, battlefield images by Alexander Gardner, and photographs of fugitive enslaved people.<sup>3</sup> But we would do well to view this incident as one part of a broader cultural phenomenon: the iconoclastic impulses of the Civil War. Such sources as diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers demonstrate that in households across the South, Northern soldiers and enslaved people engaged in different forms of iconoclasm, meaning the <em>harming, destruction, theft, or appropriation of images and other visual objects</em>.<sup>4</sup> Union soldiers stole and sliced painted and photographic portraits as <strong>[End Page 37]</strong> well as book illustrations they encountered in Southern households. Enslaved people watched and enabled this iconoclasm, as Alfred’s actions demonstrate. But they also engaged in their own iconoclastic acts—by taking paintings from their masters’ houses, defacing those images, exchanging them, selling them, and hanging them on their cabin walls. At the end of the war, one Black woman even destroyed a bust of John Calhoun in the office of the <em>Charleston Mercury</em>. These acts direct our atte","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"136 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540223","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":"Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis by Brian C. Neumann (review)","authors":"Michael E. Woods","doi":"10.1353/cwh.2023.a912510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2023.a912510","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>Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis</em> by Brian C. Neumann <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michael E. Woods (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis</em>. Brian C. Neumann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-8071-8790-0. 216 pp., cloth, $45.00. <p>When historian James M. Banner Jr. tackled “The Problem of South Carolina” nearly half a century ago, he focused on extremism: why was it that “South Carolina nullified alone and seceded first”? (James M. Banner Jr., “The Problem of South Carolina,” in <em>The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial</em>, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974], 60). Antebellum South Carolina certainly demands explanation. But Brian C. Neumann takes a different and fruitful approach to the task by concentrating on the four in ten Palmetto State voters who rallied to the Union Party and steeled themselves for a bloody showdown with their Nullifier neighbors. This study, the first book-length treatment of the subject, adds much to the literature on Nullification, South Carolina politics, and the coming of the Civil War, though there is undoubtedly more to say about the unionists and their world.</p> <p>Neumann uses newspaper editorials, private correspondence, and published speeches and pamphlets to reconstruct unionists’ worldview. Convinced that Nullification threatened the cohesion of the United States and the fate of liberty worldwide, they resisted their state’s movement down a path toward chaos, violence, and disunion. Confident that slavery was safe within the Union—and determined to keep it that way—they rejected Nullifiers’ claims that protective tariffs were an entering wedge for abolitionism. Committed to what Neumann aptly terms “southern proslavery Unionism,” unionists thwarted Nullifers’ effort to forge white unity and thus facilitated the resolution of the 1832–33 crisis (4). Soon, however, whites’ broad-based devotion to slavery undermined unionists’ position amid the onslaught of abolitionist petitions and mailings in the mid-1830s. Bitterness over Nullification-era battles persisted, but the American Anti-Slavery Society did what Nullifiers could not: convince an overwhelming number of white South Carolinians to close ranks against a serious threat to slavery. <strong>[End Page 92]</strong></p> <p>Along with improving our understanding of the Nullification Crisis, Neumann offers four historiographical interventions. One is to reevaluate the Civil War’s timing by exploring how white southern unionism, conditional and proslavery though it was, helped hold the Union together before 1860. Second, the book traces the meanings attached to “Union” back into the antebellum period, highlighting ideas an","PeriodicalId":43056,"journal":{"name":"CIVIL WAR HISTORY","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138540225","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}