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| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
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Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

Steaming with anger, Claude-Joseph Villars Dubreuil struck out from his plantation home on the Mississippi River one early morning in June 1748, to make his complaint before the Superior Council, the seat of government for the Parish of New Orleans and the Province of Louisiana. An original founder of the town, and its most important citizen in every sense, Dubreuil had good reason to be disgruntled. Despite his wealth and power, he had been insulted by the military police officer charged with keeping order, Major Membrède. Dubreuil regarded the man’s behavior as unendurable, the beginning of what was to become a fierce confrontation over the next three years.

All along his ride, Dubreuil saw evidence of his many contributions to the building of this still modest town, since his arrival at the beginning of its construction in 1719. His slaves had reinforced the natural levee before New Orleans, a massive project that made the town safe from floods for the next three centuries. The same slave workforce had built the governor’s residence, the charity hospital, a canal, royal vessels, a sawmill, and a fort one hundred miles below at the mouth of the Mississippi that protected the town’s approach. All of this activity had taken place under Dubreuil’s authority as contractor for the Royal Public Works. Just now, he was passing the imposing new Ursulines’ Convent, another project to which he had contributed. He could field 150 of his own slave laborers in 1748, from a total personal slave force between two and three hundred, by far the largest in a community where a force one-tenth that size was substantial. As a private entrepreneur, he had overseen the development of two major plantations at Tchoupitoulas, and had recently purchased a major plantation just below the town center. He had also been involved in the African slave trade to New Orleans, the establishment of indigo cultivation, spurge wax production, and an experiment in sugar production, to say nothing of major brick-making and timbering enterprises. If New Orleans’ isolation from the Atlantic world meant that it still had a sluggish economy in 1748, it owed what vitality it possessed to Dubreuil.

Although no nobles established themselves in Louisiana, Dubreuil was almost as exalted as a duke in his community: he far outstripped other founders by his great wealth and industrious pursuits. Supported by a distinguished family in France, he had sailed to Louisiana with a group of artisans he sponsored. With his remarkable variety of economic pursuits, he upheld a high standard of ambition and industriousness for the community. That such a man was willing to remain in such an unpromising location, and that he and wife Jeanne-Catherine La Boulaye married their children to locals, gave heart to lesser landowners and promoted entrepreneurial values. Like Claude and Jeanne-Catherine, and like Anglo-American planters in neighboring colonies, most New Orleans slave owners were committed to their patrimony in the colony, rather than thinking of themselves as temporary exiles from Europe like the West Indian planters. Like Claude and Jeanne-Catherine, most locals settled close to the town center to strengthen the capital and make it look stronger and more flourishing than it was.

Carefully planned at its founding in 1718, New Orleans Parish spread along the turn of a major crescent in the Mississippi River. By 1748, the white population totaled about two thousand, including the founding generation of immigrants from western France and New France, and the young creole (or American-born) generation. The slave population of perhaps four thousand consisted of the survivors among several thousand Africans brought to New Orleans in the 1720s, plus their creole children and a handful of Indian slaves. The town center, which lay on the left bank at the precise turning point in the crescent, was a rectangular grid designed to be a neat, compact residential space. From it radiated directly the indigo and rice plantations. These were distributed as narrow long lots in compact fashion, stretching from frontage on the river, through the riverine sediments the planters farmed, to the swamp or forest running behind the plantations.

Most plantations were just out of shouting distance from one another, so socializing was common, and all were relatively close to the town center. Known today as the Vieux Carré, the center housed the colony’s civil and military officials and soldiers, the clergy, some artisans, barkeeps, and shopkeepers. But the great majority of slaves, free white people, and free blacks lived in the adjacent plantation regions. To the town center, white and black resorted frequently to enjoy the social life there, or to conduct affairs in one of the official institutions. Travel between plantation and town center was frequent because it was easy. From the most extreme upriver district, Tchoupitoulas, where the main concentration of slaves and planters now lived, one could reach the town center in less than an hour and a half on foot, less than half that by horse, or in minutes by water. Dubreuil lived only minutes away by horse.

The Parish of New Orleans, then, was more tightly knit than it looked on a map. It was centered by the Place d’Armes, today’s Jackson Square. Dubreuil now came upon the official establishments clustered around the square, imposing edifices that gave the town center some claim to dignity despite its tiny population. The plaza served as the weekend market, and the gathering place for religious or other festivals, military drilling, and judicial executions. On one side ran the levee that held back the river. Opposite the levee was St. Louis Church, the presbytery housing the town’s spiritual fathers (the Capuchins), and a brick jail, which had four “cells” for blacks on the ground floor and four “rooms” for whites. The army barracks flanked the two sides of the plaza. In Dubreuil’s day, those streets oriented horizontally to the river already had the social characteristics they have today: Chartres and Royal Streets were the most richly and respectably built, while Bourbon Street was already a vice zone for locals and sojourners: a place for drinking, gambling, dancing, gorging on the produce of the immensely rich environment, and prostitution. From this central terrain of social life radiated the upper and lower plantation coasts.

The town was situated precisely where it had to be to control access to the Mississippi Valley. The site benefited from centuries of Indian custom in that it lay athwart an old Indian portage between Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne and the river, the trail that now terminated as Rue de l’Hôpital. Rather than sailing nearly one hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi, a vessel with Dubreuil’s cargo could take the backdoor route through the lakes to the gulf in two days or less. In New Orleans, Dubreuil not only farmed some of the richest sediments in North America, he lived at the exact nexus of transatlantic trade for people living in the interior of the continent west of the Appalachians. The town served as a catch basin for the produce of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri River Valleys.

Despite the site’s wealth of natural resources, numerous irritants existed that locals either had to suffer, or to drown with copious quantities of Bordeaux or cheap West Indian rum. It was very hot and damp six months a year, it was one of the least-favored ports in the New World, and huge swarms of insects appeared seasonally with terrifying predictability. Rapid decay dominated the atmosphere. Most buildings were constructed of wood, and so were subject to rapid disintegration and fire. The elevation was so low that the dead would not stay buried: the ooze was likely to thrust them up into the daylight. The population grew slowly by New World standards and may have declined between the early 1730s and early 1740s. Their only near neighbors were a little colony of German immigrants just above New Orleans, and the little French settlements far up the Mississippi and Mobile Rivers. The passing of a great man like Dubreuil or the execution of the occasional slave were among the few diversions in this usually sleepy town.

Early New Orleans gave off a bucolic atmosphere in an isolated setting, but underneath the apparent calm on the surface lay a basic social cleavage and with it, a dangerous tension. The whites preserved their idea of order only by constant vigilance and their willingness to apply brute force to defeat slaves’ aspirations to be free. Two decades before Dubreuil’s ride, the slaves had shown signs of concerted rebelliousness, and they would do so again in 1783 and 1811. It was, in other words, a typical North American slave society in which whites organized all social life to keep slaves enslaved. Dubreuil and the other planters ultimately held the upper hand only because of their alliance with colonists in other parishes–and because they had help from the soldiers.

New Orleans was different from Norfolk or Savannah, in that it always had a garrison of two to three hundred soldiers maintained by the French Crown. These career military men provided defense against external attack and internal unrest. Off duty, the soldiers also provided casual labor to supplement their meager incomes, but they could be an affliction to the locals. This was never truer than at this moment, for two reasons. First, the people of lower Louisiana were on high alert against attack by their English neighbors, for the War of the Austrian Succession was in its fourth year. Locals knew that they had a seaport of immense strategic importance. Fortunately for them, in 1748 their geographic situation was still too difficult of access to be captured by one of the several imperial powers that hoped to command that particular bend in the Mississippi. But in 1748, of course, the people of New Orleans did not know how secure they were, and the soldiers were edgy from being on wartime alert for years without an opportunity to engage the enemy.

A second reason the soldiers were a problem for the townspeople was that they were being used by a tyrannical post commandant, Major (Chevalier) Membrède, in a scheme to milk the local economy for personal profit. Membrède set his soldiers on anyone who opposed his effort to gain a monopoly on the sale of low-grade rum to soldiers and slaves, a form of extortion that festered for years and would end with Membrède’s dismissal. (The major may have been in partnership with the governor, Pierre de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial, who was notorious for soaking colonists through monopolies.) The usually placid atmosphere was poisoned by this clash between the major and leading townspeople like Dubreuil. The day before, Membrède’s soldier-police had arrested two of Dubreuil’s slaves in the night, for allegedly stealing three hundred dollars from army sergeant Marette’s quarters. As soon as he heard of the charge, Dubreuil had ordered his entire slave force to comb the town for the accused, but Membrède got to them first. The major now had the means to humiliate the planter: even if he could not force the slaves to confess to the crime, it was a personal rebuke to Dubreuil as a slave master for any of his chattels to be arrested. Everyone held their breath as the news traveled at lightning speed around a town where everybody knew everybody: Dubreuil was now going to stand up to Membrède.

The rum controversy between Membrède and civilians like Dubreuil involved a fundamental question of power: masters wanted to retain control of the distribution of rum to slaves, both by their own personal rations in the slave quarter and by civilian-controlled taverns in the sale of drams. In this contest between military and civilian authority, the civilian population had little recourse against the major’s tyranny, for they had no representative institution in which to exert their power, like the Virginia House of Burgesses. In other words, not even the richest planter like Dubreuil had a sure way to counter arbitrary military actions, except by formal appeal directly to Louis XV. On June 9, Dubreuil now tried anyway by approaching the Crown’s paid local magistrates of the Superior Council to complain.

Dubreuil probably went straight to the jail, awaited by the authorities and several of his slaves with the names Louis and Jean, the two most common male names in town, those provided by the crime’s only witness. One of the suspects named Louis was the most highly placed artisan in the colony, an eighteen-year-old Dubreuil had apprenticed in the royal hospital to become a surgeon. At the time of the crime, he was attending a woman with menstrual complications, and the nuns who served in the hospital would readily attest both to his unimpeachable character and his whereabouts. After interrogation, the procurator general (or attorney general) released him. Other slaves who had been arrested despite the fact they were named Claude and Joseph–both African-born with additional African names–also quickly passed their interrogations. They both claimed to have stayed in le camp, as locals called slave quarters. In ordinary circumstances, they might have gone to the town center in the night, but they had not that night. When interrogators finally got to suspects who knew something, they discovered that the supposed armed robbery was complicated and ambiguous.

The Louisiana-born slave Marie, twelve years old, was the only witness to the crime and may have been involved. She testified that two Dubreuil slaves she knew well–whom she now named as Joseph and Jean Gué–had broken through the window into her masters’ home, while she alone guarded the house. They took the money from an armoire, and demanded that she lie: she was to say that Bellair’s Louis and Jean had committed the crime. This was one very vulnerable child: her father was dead and her mother either belonged to or worked for another master. Marie herself was only rented by her owner Sieur Lamelle to Sergeant Nicholas Marette and his wife. The attorney general tried to get her to admit that she had stolen the money herself and given it to her mother, and then he tried to get her to say the robbers paid her for her silence. She stuck by her story.

Over the following two weeks, the authorities released all suspects, including the accused Dubreuil slaves. Like so many criminal cases in the records, the outcome of this one is not clear. The judges of the Superior Council probably agreed with Dubreuil that the accusations were groundless, and that Marie may have been the pawn of Marette and Membrède. It came out that the supposed victim Marette had only recently borrowed money to pay his debts, so how could he have had so much money to be stolen? They all knew that Marette’s superior, Membrède, had a motive to extort cooperation from Dubreuil on the rum issue by causing him shame about his slaves–a master was responsible for all his slaves’ behavior: he was supposed to be a bon père de famille. Dubreuil stood to lose not only the labor of his slaves if they were found guilty, but his dignity as a gentleman. This was, moreover, just the latest in a long series of incidents involving soldiers and citizens. In the previous year, the town watched the executioner break on a wheel a slave who had killed a soldier in a rage–for drunkenly poaching on the slave’s starling trap. In the following summer, some of Membrède’s men would resort to mere brute force in open intimidation of Dubreuil by ambushing one of his most valuable and unoffending slaves–a blacksmith for whom he had paid ten thousand livres–and beating the man so badly he could not work for months. By then, the Crown’s highest civil servant in the colony was reporting home that “the people groan and murmur” about the garrison. Even the Capuchin priests began protesting about the disorderly soldiers. The complaints were always limited, of course, by the citizens’ sense of gratitude that the king kept up the garrison: the soldiers were their first line of defense to keep the slaves in line. As a result, only in 1754 did the groaning and murmuring convince the Crown to recall Membrède to France.

Dubreuil’s predicaments were several and take us into the heart of slave society in the eighteenth century. The fact that his workers were slaves meant they had no personal rights–the law positively forbade them to defend themselves against any white person. That made them a good target for a bully with authority to use as leverage against their owner: Dubreuil dreaded the personal shame he would feel if any of his slaves was convicted of a crime. In this sense, slave society inexorably leads to disorder because the law makes slaves vulnerable. Against that disorder, Dubreuil felt a strong need for the soldiers as a local police force to overawe the slaves, even if the soldiers were a nuisance. More to the point, he especially needed the soldiers because the Crown would not allow the planters to organize their own structure of local institutional power to control the lower orders. Colonists in French and Spanish colonies were much more at the mercy of arbitrary power than their neighbors in English colonies, for they had no institution like the House of Burgesses, in which to concert their power and take primary responsibility for their society. By contrast with Virginia, Dubreuil and the rest of the citizens of New Orleans had to cope as individuals with the ambitions of the Crown’s bureaucratic and military representatives, as well as with career French soldiers who had no local loyalties.

Dubreuil undoubtedly knew when he left the house that morning that he would get no satisfaction in the Superior Council, that military power always had a superior claim in the colony. The rewards of the planter’s labor were rich, and his reputation was wreathed in glory, but Dubreuil–even he–could not call himself free. Tragically, as a master of chattels, the vulnerability of his slaves was also his own, and a jealous and unscrupulous major could make trouble for him with impunity. The planter was a special kind of slave to the system.

Further Reading: For further reading on New Orleans, see Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Early Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville, 1999); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992); Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1803 (Chapel Hill, 1992); Samuel Wilson Jr., The Architecture of Colonial Louisiana: Collected Essays of Samuel Wilson, Jr., F. A. I. A., comp. and ed. by Jean M. Farnsworth and Ann M. Masson (Lafayette, La., 1987); and Henry P. Dart, “The Career of Dubreuil in French Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 267-331.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Thomas N. Ingersoll is associate professor of history at Ohio State University, Lima, and adjunct professor of American history at the Université de Montréal. Besides a book and several articles on early New Orleans, he has written a forthcoming book (2004) on Indian mixed bloods in early North America.

Dry Creek Valley

On the second

and third

wires over the wire
on which forks the zinfandel vine:
barbed knots
and spirals of old
severed vinetips:
one can flick
these wishbones of waterless
grapewood into
full rotations
on the wire:
some are not wyes,
some have the look of shrew-sized
brainstems into
the knots
of which I fail
to not
project my proprioception
and the regulation
and insistence of my breathing here
in the plutocratic hills,
while quaked reactors fail
Japan, and bombs fall
in Afghanistan
for purposes of regulation
and insistence, and
there’s a crow (in an oak with a copy of
Whitman’s beard
on every limb)
counting to five
over and over and a propane truck
filling the tanks of the vineyard opposite.

Maalaea

Saugatuck Dunes

I and the others, over the dune hill wall,
confronted the Great Lake and wandered
with paper, pens and dying in different
parents
directions, and I sat a long time on a beech log and wrote

until one of the others walked
toward the black dot
that was me
and arrived
and sat, and I felt a pulsation, acute,
a desire to
protect, and felt, too,
protected, but she
sat with me
for less than
a minute in silence, then
asked for more paper and walked off.

Could it be True I
Once, Alone Walking,
Found

A split tree trunk
with a torn off back
half of a water-
logged Paradiso
in its hollow?

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

On a chilly weekend shortly before Christmas, the Stunning Significant Other (hereafter, SSO) and I took a quick trip from snowy, abstemious New England down to New York City. With no Friday night plans in place, as Metro North whisked us toward Grand Central I asked her if there were anything in particular she’d like to do that evening. Any restaurants she’d like to visit? Perhaps we could see what the Metropolitan Opera was performing? Or maybe a Broadway show? I will confess that I was not entirely lacking in ulterior motives in asking these questions. She replied that it would be great to see a show—but what was playing? Well, I cautiously replied, there was a soon-to-close musical that I’d heard was really great. “What’s it about?” Well, I ventured, even more cautiously, it’s about antebellum politics and Manifest Destiny. “That sounds absolutely awesome,” was the response. (A word of caution: I would not try this with just any significant other. It helps if he/she is also a devotee of nineteenth-century Americana. You’ve been warned.)

The opening number offers the essence of the show’s take on Jackson’s appeal, and also its less-than-subtle link to current political events.

That’s how we found ourselves at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre on West 45^th Street later that evening, ready to see “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” This musical, originally conceived by Les Freres Corbusier, a downtown theatre troupe that is “devoted to aggressively visceral theatre combining historical revisionism, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research,” had its roots in the downtown theater scene, although it was first performed in Los Angeles. This production was brought to Broadway by the Public Theater in fall 2010. Apparently the audience for a loosely historical musical satire about our seventh president was not as large as the producers had hoped. The show, which cost $4.5 million to stage, closed on January 2, 2011, after only 120 performances, finishing its run substantially in the red.

“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” combines the emo-rock musical stylings that made “Spring Awakening” such a smash earlier in the decade with an irreverent, free-wheeling approach to American history and presidential politics. In this respect, it is reminiscent of the little-seen but highly entertaining “President Harding is a Rock Star,” a glam rock musical that got its start on the experimental stages of the East Village before enjoying a run in Washington, D.C., in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, one of the main messages of BBAJ is the importance of media appeal—and particularly sex appeal—in the marketing of presidential candidates: the posters for the show seen on bus shelters around New York showed this image (fig. 1), whose slogan “History Just Got All Sexypants” seemed to be one of the key themes (if not desires) of the show.

The interior of the Jacobs Theatre was a welter of old-timey bric-a-brac, taxidermy, velvet swagged curtains, portraits of nineteenth-century political figures, duct tape, strings of lights, piles of empty beer cans and liquor bottles: picture Peale’s Museum, trashed by the Delta Tau Chis. Suspended from the ceiling was a stuffed horse, its legs trussed together by a chain. I waited all evening for it to burst open and shower something—Confetti? Whiskey? Worthless currency from the pet banks?—over the audience, to no avail.

Much of the press that BBAJ received related to the undeniable charisma and appeal of the show’s star, Benjamin Walker (fig. 2). He swaggered onstage at the outset of the show in tight jeans and a military jacket, a holstered pistol at his side, surveyed the audience, and declared, “You guys are sexy as shit!” After some additional prefatory patter, he declared “I’m Andrew Jackson! I’m your president! Let’s go!” And the night was off to the races with the show’s opening full-cast number, “Populism, Yea, Yea!” (A song that I was singing to myself on the way over to the theater—the SSO thought I had made it up.) The opening number offers the essence of the show’s take on Jackson’s appeal, and also its less-than-subtle link to current political events, describing populism as a movement that is

For people like us,
Who don’t just think about things—
People who make things happen.
Sometimes with guns,
Sometimes with speeches too,
And also other things.

The ironic, winking connection to contemporary politics runs throughout the musical, and can at times verge into the self-satisfied (as many reviews of the show noted, this tone did not translate well from smaller downtown venues to the scale of a Broadway production). The musical offers a loose—very loose—outline of Jackson’s upbringing on the Tennessee frontier (his family is depicted as being killed by Indians, cementing young Andrew’s remorseless hatred of the people whom he would as president persecute so thoroughly), and offering an explanation of his later populist politics in his father’s rants against the urban elites of the East who don’t give a damn about the needs of citizens in the West. The show races to put Jackson in action, in the War of 1812. It is in the wake of his stunning victory at the Battle of New Orleans that Jackson the public figure—the real subject of the musical—comes to the fore, in a song titled “I’m Not That Guy.” Jackson struggles with the implications of life in the public eye, including the exposure that a career in politics would bring to his marriage to his wife, Rachel, whose lack of an official divorce from her first husband before marrying Jackson would dog him throughout his career. Walker as Jackson quickly reconciles these misgivings, however, and at the end of the song declares what the rest of the musical will show to be the primary tenet of Jackson’s political beliefs: “Who am I? I’m Andrew Fucking Jackson!”

A ninety-minute musical that is primarily being played for laughs can’t be expected to offer much in the way of historical detail, and BBAJ makes no claim to fidelity to the facts (although the show’s Website does offer a link to additional resources for those who are interested in learning more about Jackson and his era). Most of the historical context that is present in the show is offered by the Storyteller (Broadway veteran Kristine Nielsen), supposedly a retired history teacher and admitted Jackson aficionado who periodically rolls onstage in a motorized wheelchair accessorized with an American flag. The central section of the musical deals with the high points of Jackson’s career: the election of 1824, and the “corrupt bargain” that put John Quincy Adams in the White House; Jackson’s decision to run again in 1828; and his first term in office. Through this portion of the show Jackson shares the stage with the main political players in those events: John Quincy Adams, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Martin Van Buren. It is in the depiction of these figures that many readers of Common-placemight find the most to enjoy.

Darren Goldstein plays Calhoun as a slick backroom wheeler-dealer, with a voice seemingly lifted from the cartoon chicken Foghorn Leghorn. Lucas Near-Verbrugghe’s Van Buren is a fawning, two-faced petty bureaucrat, interested in nothing more than feathering his own nest. The show’s version of John Quincy Adams is a far cry from Anthony Hopkins’ incorruptible idealist in the film “Amistad.” Here, Jeff Hiller plays the sixth president as a stupefied, incompetent, adenoidal lummox; when the deal is consummated that hands Adams victory in the 1824 presidential election, he clumps offstage and yelps, “This is exciting! I never win anything!” Most notable, however, is Bryce Pinkham’s performance as Henry Clay, who speaks in a near-incomprehensible shriek, may or may not have a hunchback, has hair that appears to have been styled by a mid-80s Robert Smith, and is continually stroking some sort of rodent—too sleek for a marmot, too big for a weasel. Perhaps a mink (fig. 3).

For theatre-goers who are familiar with the historical context, all of this is very entertaining. And the key message of this central section—that the qualities that it takes to get elected president are very different from those that are required to govern effectively—is one that has obvious connections to more contemporary periods. Yet many members of the audience seemed a bit baffled. The show’s satirical humor seemed to have difficulty connecting with the audience in a venue of this size, and its music and choreography are not as polished as many visitors to New York likely expect to see on a Broadway stage (especially if they paid the full price of over $100 a ticket).

Perhaps more perplexing was the show’s shift in tone in its final third, where things turned somber as the focus swung to the one historical event that most members of the audience probably associated with Jackson: the Trail of Tears. A Native American leader named “Black Fox” is depicted as being a close confidante of Jackson, aiding his policies of Indian removal by betraying numerous tribes in his role as Jackson’s chief negotiator (the character was called Black Hawk in the show’s first run at the Public Theater, but the name was changed after Native Americans who saw the show objected that the character’s negative portrayal could lead audiences to think that it referred to the real Black Hawk, the Sauk and Fox war leader of the early nineteenth century). But at the end of the show, Black Fox’s own people stand in the way of Jackson’s expansionist vision, and Black Fox is forced to take leave of Washington to lead his tribe in what he knows will be a futile war against U.S. troops. Jackson explains that the conflict between Indians and white settlers hungry for land was foreordained from the moment Europeans first set foot on the continent, and that even if he wanted to stop what he refers to as the “genocide” that is underway, he is powerless in the face of historical forces he can’t control.

The show concluded with a rousing version of “The Hunters of Kentucky,” an 1821 song that Jackson used as his campaign anthem in 1824 and 1828. Yet despite ending on this energetic note, the underlying theme of the show left one feeling somewhat uneasy. As BBAJ showed, the United States as it is presently constituted is the result of a long list of bad (if not downright immoral) decisions throughout history—decisions that modern voters might regret, but that have also made us who we are. We have been the material beneficiaries of Jackson’s power-mad, bloodthirsty streak, and even if we could right these wrongs, the musical asks us whether we would want to. BBAJ’s combination of history and satire was likely not well suited for the Broadway stage—it simply isn’t commercial enough to fill that many seats night after night. A smaller venue, and an even sharper edge, would have helped this entertaining historical mash-up enjoy a longer run.

By the time the Union army reached Bayou Boeuf—the neighborhood where Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped from upstate New York, had been enslaved for twelve years—it had become a tourist destination. The federals accompanying General Nathaniel P. Banks on the march to Port Hudson, Louisiana, who had read Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) made a point of seeking out the plantation of Edwin Epps, the last, longest, and most notoriously brutal owner of Solomon Northup before he regained his freedom (fig. 1). On May 19, 1863, 2nd Lt. William H. Root of the 75th New York Volunteers, wrote the following in his diary: “We are in the district that formed the theater of Solomon Northup’s bondage”:

Old Epp’s plantation is a few miles down the Bayou and Epps himself is on the plantation, anoted man made famous of his owning Solomon Northup. Plenty of negroes are found about here who say that they knew Platt [Northup’s name while enslaved] well and have danced to the music of his fiddle often. Some who remember when he was taken out of the lot by the “Northern gemman.” Bayou Boeuf was then the witness of quite a scene which made a lasting impression on the minds of the poor darkies who saw the affair.

The story of Northup did linger, both on the bayou and in the memories of soldiers who traveled in those parts during the war. S. E. Chandler, a sergeant with the 24th New York Cavalry, wrote to the National Tribune in 1894 about Northup and his story, noting that “the book is now out of print, cannot be procured of any regular dealer.” However, he had found a copy of Twelve Years in a secondhand bookshop in Albany. Chandler recalled meeting “a number of returned soldiers who were with Banks on his Red River expedition who told me of having read the book at the time it was published (1854[sic]) and who visited the plantation of Edwin Epps, where Northup … passed years of his life. They told of seeing and talking with his former slave comrades, whose names were Uncle Abram, Wiley, Aunt Phoebe, Patsy, Bob, Henry, and Edward.” Chandler hoped that others who had visited Bayou Boeuf during the war might also write to the National Tribune with “a brief account of what they learned” about the world and the people that Solomon Northup had left behind.

The film serves to remind us what the war accomplished: the dismantling of the institution that cost Northup twelve years of his life.

As the soldiers who went looking for Edwin Epps well understood, to remember the Civil War was also to recall its antecedents and its outcomes—that is, the South and the nation as they existed before, during, and after the bloody conflict. The recent film version of Northup’s story, appearing in the midst of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, exemplifies this broader understanding of war memory. Like the book before it, Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave points directly to the bitter roots of the conflict. The film also serves to remind us what the war accomplished: the dismantling of the institution that cost Northup twelve years of his life.

Recently, I began researching the editorial backstory to the first modern republication of Twelve Years a Slave, in 1968, and that edition’s translation into a feature film. It soon became clear that much of the press coverage of the film—which has focused on the film’s level of historical accuracy, and on how true it is to Solomon Northup’s account—has ignored the subsequent history of the story Northup told. Northup came to believe, when looking back at his escape from the bayou, that “all things were working together for my deliverance.” Little could he imagine that his published narrative would also experience redemption more than once in subsequent years.

Northup’s account reached the big screen after traveling the same hard ground of racial conflict that the nation as a whole crossed from the 1850s to the present. The book fell out of print after the Civil War and remained so through the nadir of race relations in the South and the rise of Jim Crow. It was not republished until 1968, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, when historians had begun to reflect on the African American past in search of antecedents for the radical politics of the present. Now that the Civil War has once again become present in American popular culture due to the sesquicentennial, Twelve Years a Slave has resurfaced, this time in cinematic form.

That such a searing film would appear now seems fitting. While most contemporary textbooks discuss the role that slavery played in disunion, antebellum southern slavery is not often integrated into the popular memory of the war. Although important films about slavery and the Civil War have appeared since the 1960s—from Roots to Glory to Lincoln—none of these are so closely tied to the testimony of one person’s daily experience of slavery. It is the particularity of Northup’s story, as many historians have noted, that allowed him to so keenly reflect antebellum society at large and especially slavery’s hold over daily life in the South before the war.

The film’s attention to violence (a focus it shares with the original text) and to the plantation landscape in which such routine brutality occurred, de-sanitizes slick political justifications for the Civil War. Like Alexander Gardner’s grisly photographs of Antietam in 1862, Twelve Years shocks its intended audience with horrors that have largely been kept from the public eye.

As a work of both memory and memorialization, the film version of Twelve Years a Slave is perhaps the most powerful answer yet to the movie that became the archetype of the Civil War epic from its debut in 1939, David O. Selznick’s production of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The inverse of that unforgettable monument to a fictional yet fiercely remembered “Old South,”Twelve Years a Slave reminds us of what the Civil War really swept from American society.

The resulting film is clear-eyed and painful to watch, closely following the experience of its protagonist and taking relatively few liberties with the original text. Countless critics, writers, and historians have hailed it as cinema’s first honest look at the South’s “peculiar institution.” Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby declared it “easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.” Were it not for the collaboration of two historians in Louisiana, however, McQueen’s film could not have become such a testament to what enslaved people endured before the Civil War.

In the spring of 1966, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon contracted with Louisiana State University Press to republish what seemed to be an improbable story. Solomon Northup was a free black man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1841 when he was lured to Washington, D.C., by two men posing as performers in need of Northup’s skill as a violinist. Awakening to find himself chained in a slave pen, Northup was quickly sent south to the New Orleans slave market, sold under the name of “Platt” to a man named William Ford, and carried to the Bayou Boeuf region of central Louisiana. There he remained in bondage for twelve years, much of that time to a cruel master named Edwin Epps, before he was able to reclaim his freedom.

On his return to New York, Northup arranged to tell his story to a lawyer named David O. Wilson. Like most slave narratives of this period, Twelve Years a Slave was both a condemnation of slavery and a much-needed source of income for its ex-slave narrator. Wilson does not seem to have had serious abolitionist leanings, but he was an aspiring writer and recognized a good publishing prospect in Northup’s story. Harriet Beecher Stowe had published her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin the year previous, and it met with unprecedented success. The original 1853 edition of Twelve Years a Slave was dedicated to Stowe, who had been pleased to see Northup’s experience come to light. She noted the similarities between Northup’s ordeal and Uncle Tom’s, particularly the fact that Northup had been enslaved to a sadistic master (Epps) in central Louisiana, very near to where Tom suffered the abuses of Simon Legree.

Although Eakin and Logsdon became interested in the narrative independent of one another, Eakin saw it first. She recalled that she was about twelve years old when she first read Twelve Years a Slave. She had accompanied her father to Oak Hall Plantation (near Alexandria, Louisiana), where he had some business with its owner, Dr. W. D. Haas. Haas was the grandson of Douglass Marshall, mentioned in Northup’s account, who owned fifty slaves at Oak Hall in 1860. To keep the young girl occupied, Haas gave her the family’s copy of Northup’s story. She recalled being struck by the familiar names and places in the narrative.

Despite her avid interest in Twelve Years a Slave, Eakin had a difficult time obtaining a copy of her own. The book had long been out of print, as a clipping in the New Orleans Item from 1922 attests. Someone from Eakin’s hometown of Bunkie with the initials “L.C.E.” placed an advertisement in search of a copy of the book and was told none could be had, even in local libraries (fig. 2). Eakin eventually found a copy in a secondhand bookshop in Baton Rouge. As a college student at LSU in the 1940s, she began tracing the life of Northup and apparently never stopped.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Sue Eakin’s is not the face most associated with the recent film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave (fig. 3). In fact, most people would be hard pressed to consider the woman in her author’s photo (white, grandmotherly, with her hair set and a chain on her eye glasses) on the cutting edge of anything, much less that of African American history. Although it was clearly Eakin who did most of the sleuthing, with Logsdon’s help she brought the remarkable narrative of freeborn Solomon Northup’s ordeal in slavery back into print.

Just as Lt. Root penned his letter from a South soon to be free of slavery, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon revived Northup’s narrative during another upheaval in American race relations. The political movements of the late 1960s brought with them a rising interest in African American history. At that critical point in a long racial struggle, in an age before digital archives put original nineteenth-century books at readers’ fingertips, Eakin and Logsdon made Twelve Years a Slave accessible to two generations of scholars and their students.

In doing so they became part of a long history of slave narrative publication and re-publication in American letters. With the rise of anti-slavery activism in the 1830s, the publication of slave narratives burgeoned. White abolitionists typically penned an introduction to the former slave’s account; many ex-slaves also relied on amanuenses (who often had heavy-handed editorial intent) to transcribe their stories. Some literary critics have seen this as an unequal relationship, and others see this same inequality in modern editions: the words of a former slave, so this critique goes, are never allowed to stand on their own, without the support of an editor to authenticate them.

In the case of Northup’s story, however, the process of authentication was always something of a communal one, and it began almost from the moment of Northup’s liberation. Given the illegal nature of Solomon Northup’s enslavement, the effort to retrieve evidence of his sale and to retrace his steps commenced once he was redeemed. After a failed attempt to send a letter to New York and a near lynching (fig. 4), Northup found an ally in Samuel Bass, an itinerant carpenter with antislavery sympathies who got word to those in New York who could vouch for Northup’s status as a free man. A descendent of his father’s owner, Henry B. Northup, traveled to Louisiana to retrieve him, with endorsements and aid from Louisiana Senator Pierre Soulé and the governor of New York.

Both Northups then traveled to New Orleans, where they visited the slave pen where he had been held and the room in which William Ford had purchased him. According to the New York Daily Times, they also visited the office of a notary to “trace the titles of the colored man from Tibaut [Tibeats] to Eppes [sic], from Ford to Tibaut, and from Freedman [the New Orleans trader] to Ford—all the titles being recorded in the proper books kept for that purpose.” The elaborate system of notarial record keeping in New Orleans, which today fills an archive like no other in the country, helped Northup corroborate his own memory of events.

In later years, the accounts of Lt. Root and Sgt. Chandler, too, served to authenticate Northup’s story. And Chandler’s list of people who remembered Northup and his sudden liberation suggests that those who were enslaved with him also were willing to affirm both his story and its strangeness. The inclusion of a woman named “Patsy” on that list is significant since in Northup’s telling she had been the main object of abuse in the Epps household, caught between the sexual coercion of Edwin Epps and the violent jealousies of his wife. That Patsy may have been there still, with Epps, means the war could not have come soon enough.

White members of the Bayou Boeuf community—contemporaries and immediate descendants of those Northup had encountered—also chimed in regarding the accuracy of Northup’s memories. There is evidence that white planter families from the Bayou Boeuf community kept copies of the 1853 edition of Twelve Years a Slave in their libraries. According to Eakin, a family named Townsend “undoubtedly was one of those who owned one of the original editions of which there were a number still preserved.” Apparently the people of Bayou Boeuf were eager to see their community recognized in print, even if it appeared in the context of a truthful account of the brutality of slavery and the slave trade.

In the footnotes to the 1968 edition, Eakin reprinted parts of an annotation Dr. Haas had written on the flyleaf of the book in 1930, around the time Eakin first read the narrative. Dr. Haas’s inscription reflected the grudging admission of residents of the area that Northup’s narrative was accurate in its recounting of people and places in Bayou Boeuf: “This story is remarkable in many respects [—] that an uneducated negro after twelve years spent in slavery under a drunken overbearing Master could give so correct a narrative of his experiences is remarkable.”

By 1966, Eakin had completed years of research on Northup’s narrative, but convincing the editors at LSU Press that she was the right person for the editing job was not easy and, ultimately, not entirely successful. When she first approached the press about publishing Twelve Years a Slave, she was a married woman with children, a master’s degree, and an instructor’s position at a small regional state university. Eakin did not receive a PhD until 1978. “(Mrs.) Sue L. Eakin,” as she signed her letters, was not the highly credentialed male historian university presses preferred.

In one telling, Eakin approached the press and was rejected. When she tried again, the editors expressed mild interest. Unbeknownst to her, however, a young scholar at LSU-New Orleans (later, the University of New Orleans) with a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, had discovered his own copy of Twelve Years a Slave, and had decided that it should be reprinted.

Joseph Logsdon first read Northup’s narrative when one of his students brought the book to class (fig. 5). The woman was a friend of the McCoy family, some of whom were mentioned in Northup’s account, and it was their copy she had brought for Logsdon to see. According to Northup, the young plantation mistress Mary McCoy was “the beauty and the glory of Bayou Boeuf” and a benevolent slave owner who held “about a hundred working hands, besides a great many house servants, yard boys, and young children” (fig. 6). In his first letter to her, Logsdon told Eakin: “The work came to my attention last fall when one of my students … brought me the family’s treasured (and humorously edited) copy of the narrative. After reading the fascinating book, I realized that it should be edited and republished.”

Both historians had gone to the press, within weeks of one another—Eakin with years of research in hand, and Logsdon with an interest in the subject matter and well-placed contacts in the field. After meeting Eakin and discussing a possible collaboration, Logsdon wrote to the director of LSU Press: “Her knowledge of the Bayou Boef [sic] region is truly impressive. There is no question in my mind that, working together, we shall write a much better book.” For Eakin, however, the decision to collaborate with Logsdon was not much of a decision at all, since she had little choice if she wanted to be an editor on the project.

They divided the work between them: Logsdon worked on the New York parts of the account as well as the introduction, and Eakin continued to research and write footnotes to the Louisiana portion. Together, they verified nearly every name, date, and landmark Northup mentioned in his narrative. John Ridley, who wrote the script of the film, told the New York Times that he relied upon the extensive notes in the Eakin and Logsdon edition to write the screenplay.

Logsdon’s most significant contribution, however, may have been his efforts to put Northup’s narrative in a larger context. Logsdon was aware that African American history was of increasing interest to publishers and within the academy. In his “Northup” file, he saved a clipping from theNational Observer dated March 21, 1966 (fig. 7), with the headline “A New Boom as Negroes Seek a Place in History.” The writer noted “the depth and diversity of the current Negro information explosion, a phenomenon that is inundating libraries and schools, spawning new businesses, and creating a sense of pride in heritage among thousands of American Negroes.” The Civil Rights movement and its fight for school integration, as well as “the emergence of Africa” in the popular consciousness, had created an “insatiable public appetite for information on Negro Life.”

In the same article, John Hope Franklin, then teaching at the University of Chicago, argued that “the Negroes’ contributions to the nation have been obscured by history, and deliberately so. The traditional view of the Negro that depicts him as irresponsible and shiftless was part of the apparatus used to uphold his degraded status, and justify the institution of slavery.” A “reexamination” of that view was underway, but not all of this new work was genuine. Pointing to the efforts of publishers and writers to turn a profit by quickly filling the void in black history, Franklin said: “There are people slapping anything at all to do with Negroes between two covers and making a profit on it.”

Logsdon must have seen the Northup project as one that would address Franklin’s concerns. The experience of enslavement narrated by one of the enslaved, a dramatic story filled with detail that could be verified and used by scholars and teachers, was the antithesis of the slapdash productions to which Franklin alluded. In light of Northup’s obvious intelligence, remarkable survival, and industrious frame of mind even under slavery (in addition to playing the violin at plantation parties, he saved his first master, William Ford, both time and money by devising a means for transporting timber down the bayou instead of over land), Twelve Years a Slave would contribute meaningfully to a rebirth of research and writing in African American history.

Logsdon also worked to promote the new edition among prominent historians. He enlisted the help of Kenneth Stampp, eminent historian of American slavery at the University of California-Berkeley, who agreed to write a blurb for the book (though it does not seem to have ever been used). Stampp called the narrative a “priceless document,” asserting that while Frederick Douglass’s narrative was the “superior” of the two, “in some respects Northup’s narrative is more valuable to the historian.” Because he had been born a free man, Northup (perhaps more so than Douglass) “tasted the bitterness of slavery.”

When the 1968 edition appeared—doubling the accepted canon of nineteenth-century slave narratives to two—it was as if Northup had offered up his story again, in another tumultuous era for race relations in America. A review for the Florida Historical Quarterly (whose blurb, strangely, still appears on the cover of the 2010 LSU Press edition) insisted that the book “should be must reading for every young Southerner. Only in accounts such as this can they understand the true nature of the curse which, more than a hundred years later, still hangs like a millstone around the neck of the South, hampering final emancipation for white and black alike.” Such a directive reflects the time and place in which Eakin and Logsdon reintroduced Northup’s remarkable story, delivering his account to an eager new generation.

If Logsdon provided the larger framework for Northup’s narrative, it was Eakin who reconstructed “the world of Solomon Northup,” to quote Logsdon himself. But in truth, Eakin’s relationship to her subject was not entirely academic—nor was it always objective. She seems to have been drawn to Twelve Years a Slave in large part because while it narrated Northup’s trials, the text also recorded a detailed history of her beloved Bayou Boeuf. In the early 1970s, for instance, she secured funding for a brochure called Backtracking: Twelve Years a Slave, which numbers the various sites of Northup’s enslavement and provides brief commentary on the people and places he encountered (fig. 8). This text serves as a (now mostly outdated) travel guide through the community where Northup was enslaved for so long.

Perhaps nothing so well illustrates Eakin’s familiarity with the world in which Northup found himself, however, than the map of “The Bayou Boeuf Country” she created with the help of a local cartographer named Rufus Smith (fig. 9). The names and property lines of plantation owners cluster on either side of the bayou, and the cleared land is ringed by swamps and mostly impassable forests. Like Northup’s narrative, the map is full of names and places, topographic notations, and marked routes between plantations. Eakin did her best to highlight Bayou Boeuf, its landmarks, and Northup’s journeys through it. But she was unable to render that same landscape from Northup’s perspective, that is, from the perspective of a free man who suddenly found himself enslaved in plantation country, far from a port or a coastline that might have afforded him swift passage home.

Sue Eakin’s mapping of Solomon Northup’s “world” and his journeys through it has been translated into three dimensions in Steve McQueen’s film. With the camera, he tracks Northup through what historian Walter Johnson describes as the “carceral landscape” of the mid-nineteenth century Lower Mississippi Valley, a vast territory of cotton and cane with few opportunities for escape. In Northup’s recollection, it was as though even the sun was beyond the reach of the bayou’s inmates: “In the edge of the swamp, not a half mile from Epps’ house was a large space, thousands of acres in extent, thickly covered with palmetto. Tall trees, whose long arms interlocked each other, formed a canopy above them, so dense as to exclude the beams of the sun. It was like twilight always, even in the middle of the brightest day.”

In McQueen’s film, elements of the landscape become characters in the story. He filmed oak trees, for instance, in long, watery shots of gnarled branches draped with Spanish moss and, at two points in the story, with the bodies of black men. In one scene, when Northup considers escape, the sweating indecision he suffers in the maze of scrub brush is frightening. When he then stumbles on a lynching—through which McQueen also evokes a more recent reign of terror in the South—the impassability of that space for a black man in the 1840s becomes plain.

Given how closely McQueen’s film hews to Northup’s account, Eakin would probably have been pleased with the film. But there is one important point on which Sue Eakin would have taken issue with McQueen’s version. It concerns the house where Epps lived—the very house where Lt. Root made a stop on his way to Port Hudson. Eakin exerted much effort to help preserve the Edwin Epps house, built with the help of Northup in 1852 (figs. 10 and 11). Since 1976, the structure has been moved twice and now sits, restored, on the campus of LSU-Alexandria. Eakin had found the house herself, after considerable searching: “I had a time documenting the house,” she wrote, “because I had mistaken it for another of the hundreds of thousands of old slave cabins which had once lined the Bayou Boeuf.” Eakin rightly pointed out that the house, a modest one, was “far more typical of plantation houses as known within the miles of plantations in the lower Red River Valley than the columned mansions ‘restored’ mostly with oil money after World War II.”

Much of the movie, in fact, was filmed on the grounds of the sorts of “columned mansions” to which Eakin alluded. The Felicity Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, plays the part of the Epps house in Steve McQueen’s movie and such a house, Eakin might have argued, would have been entirely too extravagant for a man who began his career as an overseer. In her Backtracking guide, she included a photograph of the P.L. Shaw House, a neighboring plantation to the Epps place with a nearly identical structure. The Shaw house was still in good repair at the time the photo was taken and probably offers something close to what Lt. Root and his companions found on Epps’s property in 1863 (fig. 12).

Eakin would have also appreciated the film’s high-profile release during the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. But she would have continued to point to our garbled understanding of the slave South and our even more confused attempts to remember the society that the Civil War upended. “It was here,” she seemed to say, “and here, and here.” The peeling houses and the bloodlines that persisted in Bayou Boeuf were also remains of the war and the last physical evidence of the antebellum society it (rightly) destroyed.

Further Reading

Two editions of Northup’s narrative have been published in advance of the film: Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York, 2013); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Enhanced Edition, ed. Sue Eakin (Longboat Key, Fla., 2013). The 1968 edition is Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, eds. (Baton Rouge, La., 1968).

On the history of slave narratives, see Marion Wilson Starling’s The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (New Haven, Conn., 1981).

For critiques of Twelve Years a Slave as a book and a film, see David Denby, “Fighting to Survive:Twelve Years a Slave and All is Lost,” The New Yorker (October 21, 2013); Noah Berlotsky, “How Twelve Years a Slave Gets History Right: By Getting It Wrong,” The Atlantic.com (October 28, 2013); Jimmy So, “The ‘12 Years a Slave‘ Book Shows Slavery As Even More Appalling Than In the Film,” The Daily Beast.com (October 18, 2013); and Forrest Wickman, “How Accurate is Twelve Years a Slave?” Slate.com Culture Blog (October 17, 2013).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

Mary Niall Mitchell is Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History and Ethel & Herman Midlo Chair in New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans.

Remembering Sand Creek, Rethinking the Civil War

The runners were exhausted. Mostly young people from the Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, they dripped with sweat and nibbled on energy bars. They talked and sipped from bottles of water, striking odd poses to stretch their road-weary hamstrings. They had just finished a relay of roughly 200 miles, a “healing run” intended to protect them from the ravages of drugs and alcohol, violence and deprivation, boredom and sorrow—just some of the maladies that stalked them on the reservations where they lived.

Early that morning and throughout the previous day, Thanksgiving, they ran past stores gearing up for sales, past families crammed into cars speeding toward holiday gatherings, and past mile after mile of empty prairie landscapes. At impromptu rituals along their route, they reacquainted themselves with venerated tribal traditions and with land that had once belonged to their ancestors. Having finally arrived at their destination, the state capitol building in Denver, they were ready to complete their journey. They stopped to catch their breath and to commemorate a painful tragedy from their collective past. The date was November 29, 2002, the 138th anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre.

They gathered around the plinth of a Civil War memorial atop the capitol steps, which seemed to some of the Cheyennes and Arapahos like an odd classroom in which to study tribal history. A teenager wearing Nike gear—from her hat all the way down to her fluorescent pink shoes—had traveled from Concho, Oklahoma, to participate in the healing run. She looked up at the statue and said, “I don’t get it.” A uniformed federal soldier, seemingly only a few years older than the athlete standing by his feet, gazed westward into the middle distance, across Denver’s Civic Center Park and toward the Rocky Mountains (fig 1). He carried his rifle in two hands and thrust one leg in front of the other, ready to meet the enemy or Colorado’s bright future, whichever crossed his path first. The runner asked, of nobody in particular, “Will someone tell me why we’re here? What does this Civil War guy have to do with us? With Indians? With Sand Creek?”

Americans … often recall their history as one of steady progress punctuated by the occasional righteous war. In this view, the nation fought the Civil War only because of slavery and to expand freedom.

She did not have to wait long for answers. Drum beats and the opening strains of Chief White Antelope’s death song signaled the start of a ceremony to reinterpret a plaque affixed to the north-facing side of the Civil War memorial (fig. 2). That marker first related the state’s early history and then boasted of its citizens’ patriotism—it reported that nearly 5,000 Coloradans had volunteered to serve the Union during the Civil War, “the highest average of any state or territory and with no draft or bounty”—before listing in neat columns the names of all of the “battles and engagements” in which those soldiers had fought, including, at the bottom right, a bloodletting typically labeled “a massacre”: Sand Creek.

Although that episode may have seemed out of place on what otherwise appeared to be an honor roll, the story of Sand Creek’s inclusion on that list suggests that as the United States continues its Civil War sesquicentennial celebration, taking a moment to study the intersection of Native and national histories, as well as the collision of the past and the present, may help to reshape popular conceptions of the Civil War’s causes and consequences in the American West. Confronting Sand Creek’s place as part of the Civil War forces onlookers to reckon with the fact that a conflict most often recalled only as a war of liberation should more properly be remembered as a war of empire as well.

Such an understanding may be foreign or uncomfortable for Americans, who often recall their history as one of steady progress punctuated by the occasional righteous war. In this view, the nation fought the Civil War only because of slavery and to expand freedom. Even the best scholarship can inadvertently contribute to such misconceptions. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, for instance, the most influential study of the war written in recent decades, begins in the far West. McPherson suggests that the conflict grew out of struggles between North and South over territory acquired from Mexico—struggles, in short, over the shape of an emerging American empire. By book’s end, though, McPherson largely drops the issue, focusing instead on the fate of the newly freed people, on struggles over definitions of citizenship, and on the growth of the federal government in the postbellum years. In other words, Battle Cry locates the roots of the war in the West, but then, with the return of peace, largely forgets the region.

Popular culture, much more even than scholarship, now typically frames the Civil War exclusively as a war of liberation. The recent film Lincoln, for example, might best be understood as answering a question Stephen Spielberg posed at the end of another of his war epics, Saving Private Ryan. Painting the earlier film’s final scene against a perfect commemorative canvas, the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, Spielberg places an aging James Ryan amidst a forest of gleaming white crosses. After kneeling before the gravesite of the man who saved his life during the war, Ryan, a synecdoche for citizen soldiers, asks his wife if he has led a good life and if he is a good man. She replies that he has and that he is. With that, Spielberg, as close to a national narrator as the United States has, reassures moviegoers that World War II was a good war. The music rises, Ryan salutes his fallen comrade, the scene fades to a backlit American flag stiff in the breeze, and then to black.

Lincoln recapitulates the same queries and repurposes similar tropes. Forgetting that the war exploded not just out of the sectional conflict over slavery, but also out of the fight between the North and the South to control a growing Anglo-American empire in the West, Spielberg ignores that region and also the war itself, confining himself to a detailed recounting of the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage. In doing so, he suggests that President Lincoln died so that the United States might live and that the nation, because it destroyed the institution of slavery during the war, redeemed itself in blood. Lincoln provides an object lesson in catharsis through suffering, as Spielberg transfigures tragedy, the death of more than 600,000 soldiers, into triumph, and violence into virtue. Was the Civil War a good war? Has the United States lived a good life in the years since? Yes and yes, the filmmaker reassures his vast audience. And so, by viewing the war through a narrow lens and a crimped regional perspective, Spielberg shades collective memory into teleology. With Lincoln, he reads the past backward, obscuring as much as he reveals.

But no matter how it is portrayed in cinema, cast in monographs, or understood in the popular consciousness, the Civil War was rooted, from its beginning to its end, in the far West. Long after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, long after President Lincoln’s assassination, long after the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification, the nation continued to focus on how best to settle the land beyond the 100th meridian, on how best to secure an empire that stretched from the Atlantic coast to the shores of the Pacific and beyond. And even after the war boasted a moment of redemption, a day of jubilee, for many Americans, it also featured episodes of terrible subjugation, days of dispossession, for others. Which is to say, even after the Civil War evolved into a war of liberation, it remained one of empire. For people who hope to understand this disjuncture, the experiences of Native Americans during the war, including at Sand Creek in 1864, may help.

Returning to November 29, 2002. As participants gathered around the memorial, state, municipal, and tribal officials spoke about Colorado’s early Anglo and Native histories. Then Laird Cometsevah, a Southern Cheyenne chief and leader of a Sand Creek descendants’ organization, recounted the details of the massacre. Cometsevah’s version of the Sand Creek story served as an official narrative for many Northern and Southern Cheyenne people. He explained that after a gold strike in 1859 triggered a rush to the mountains near Denver, his ancestors endured years of escalating violence with settlers on the plains to the east. Cometsevah’s forebears, weary of bloodshed and chaos by 1864, sought a truce with white authorities in Colorado. Late in September of that year, a group of peace chiefs, including Black Kettle, traveled to Denver, where they met with Governor John Evans and Colonel John Chivington. After Evans placed the negotiations in the hands of the region’s military leaders, Chivington suggested to the Native emissaries that if they wanted to keep their bands safe, they should travel immediately to Fort Lyon, a federal installation in southeastern Colorado. The Cheyennes and Arapahos did as they were directed. The fort’s commander told them to camp along the banks of Sand Creek. Then Colonel Chivington betrayed their trust.

Before daybreak on November 29, 1864, Cometsevah continued, 700 soldiers, men from the First and Third Colorado Regiments, “attacked that camp of peaceful Indians.” By day’s end, the Colorado volunteers had “slaughtered more than one hundred and fifty Indians,” most of whom were women, children, and the elderly. Cometsevah pressed on: “The white soldiers had no mercy. They desecrated their victims’ bodies, cutting open the belly of a pregnant woman, murdering children, and slicing the genitals from the corpses lying on the ground.” He concluded: “Our people still haven’t recovered from that treachery.”

As the assembled dignitaries and runners contemplated Cometsevah’s words, Bob Martinez, a Colorado state senator, stood next to a freshly cast plaque shrouded in sweetgrass. After Arapaho and Cheyenne singers performed an honor song, Martinez unveiled a bronze plaque, narrating the politics of memory surrounding Sand Creek’s placement on the nearby memorial (fig. 3). The text noted, “The controversy surrounding this Civil War monument has become a symbol of Coloradans’ struggle to understand and take responsibility for our past.” It then recounted the Sand Creek story before returning to the topic of the contingent and contested nature of public memory: “Though some civilians and military personnel immediately denounced the attack as a massacre, others claimed the [Cheyenne and Arapaho] village was a legitimate target.” The sponsors of the Civil War memorial, for their part, had “mischaracterized the actual events” when they “designated Sand Creek a battle.” In contrast, the plaque concluded by pointing to the “widespread recognition of the tragedy as the Sand Creek Massacre.” The ceremony complete, Martinez posed for pictures with the Cheyenne and Arapaho runners.

For some onlookers, Senator Martinez’s participation in the ceremony might have seemed incongruous. Four years earlier, rather than seeking to reinterpret elements of the monument, Martinez had tried to erase them. He had sponsored a bill in the state legislature to delete Sand Creek from the list of battles and engagements on the statue’s base. Congress had just authorized the National Park Service to commemorate Sand Creek at a new historic site located near the killing field, thrusting the massacre back into the spotlight in Colorado. Martinez found himself shocked when he walked by the statue on his way to work in the capitol.

It seemed to Martinez that Sand Creek, “a horrible atrocity,” in his view, had no place on this list of “battles.” After all, he believed the massacre “had nothing to do with the Civil War,” a conflict best remembered, he believed, for preserving the Union and ending slavery. Sand Creek’s inclusion on the memorial, Martinez suggested, insulted the tragedy’s Native American victims and diminished the sacrifices of the “Colorado Civil War veterans who fought and died in the actual Civil War battles that are listed.” Martinez’s colleagues in the state legislature agreed. On May 5, 1998, they passed a joint resolution reading, “Sand Creek was not, in fact,” part of the Civil War. Nor, the document continued, was it “a battle.” Instead, it was “a massacre,” and therefore it would have to “be removed from the memorial.”

A bit less than a century before that vote took place, Coloradans likely would have been shocked to learn that Sand Creek would someday be severed from its Civil War context. On July 24, 1909, the Pioneers Association, a heritage organization that celebrated Colorado’s earliest settlers, participated in a national commemorative project by unveiling the state’s Civil War memorial. With veterans of the war nearing the end of their lives around the country, archives throughout the United States acquired vast document collections, authors published stacks of regimental histories, and cities unveiled monuments designed to shape how future generations would remember the war.

As David Blight, Michael Kammen, Edward Linenthal, and other scholars have argued in recent years, this upsurge of memorialization embodied a reconciliationist impulse. A heroic narrative of the war emerged around the turn of the century, a glorious martial story in which Union and Confederate soldiers fought bravely, well, and in service of virtuous goals. The war’s root causes—struggles over the fate of slavery, over competing definitions of federal authority and citizenship, and over the right to shape an emerging American empire in the West—could be set aside in service of an amicable reunion between the North and the South.

At the dedication of Colorado’s Civil War memorial in 1909, event organizers stitched together national unity and regional pride, seamlessly integrating visions of empire and liberty. Robert Steele, chief justice of the state supreme court, oversaw the event. The statue’s designer, John Howland, had served in the First Colorado Regiment, and he, along with a crowd of other veterans, participated in the ceremony. A huge audience gathered to celebrate the heroic Colorado volunteers who had helped save the Union, and, at Sand Creek, cleared the way for the nation to realize its Manifest Destiny—projects that would have been inseparable for most onlookers.

A phalanx of riflemen fired a twenty-one-gun salute as Chief Justice Steele pulled back an American flag, unveiling the bronze foot soldier. A military band then broke the “hush of patriotic awe,” balancing the emancipationist spirit of “Marching Through Georgia” (“Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free!”) with the Lost Cause nostalgia of “Dixie” (“I wish I was in the land of Cotton, Old times they are not forgotten”). As he rose to speak, Thomas Patterson, a former U.S. Senator and owner of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, invoked the spirit of reconciliation, declaring that, “we are all Americans today, and we all glory in one flag and one country.” General Irving Hale, who a decade earlier had gained fame during the Spanish-American War as a proud imperialist and who later had helped to found the Veterans of Foreign Wars, followed Patterson to the dais, celebrating the Civil War “for making freedom universal for all Americans.” Hale’s remarks ignored the conflict’s effect on Native peoples, including the Cheyennes and Arapahos, but captured the spirit of the day. Nether Hale nor anyone else at the event seem to have given a moment’s notice to the fact that Sand Creek enjoyed pride of place on the monument.

That Sand Creek would be depicted on the statehouse steps both as a battle and as a chapter in Colorado’s Civil War story culminated nearly half a century’s wrangling over memories of the violence. John Chivington, for instance, worked from November 1864 until his death three decades later to shape public perceptions of Sand Creek. He always insisted that the engagement had been a legitimate part of the fight to preserve the Union and to spread civilization into the West. Late in 1864, when he first bragged about Sand Creek, the bloodshed’s status as part of the Civil War seemed like a foregone conclusion. Two years earlier, Chivington had secured his reputation for courage, fighting for the Union in New Mexico at the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Chivington recognized Sand Creek and the Civil War as having been catalyzed by the nation’s struggle over the future of the West. An abolitionist and Methodist minister, he had ridden the circuit in Kansas in the 1850s, hoping to ensure that territory’s future as free soil. He had experienced the 1860 election as a national referendum on competing visions of expansion: the Republican Party’s free soil campaign, kin to Thomas Jefferson’s promised “empire for liberty” in the West, versus the Democrats’ insistence that slavery should be allowed to root itself in land acquired during the U.S.-Mexican War.

The Republicans carried the day in the 1860 election and then, after most Southern members of Congress absented themselves, passed legislation (the Morrill Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the Homestead Act) and created new pieces of the federal apparatus (including the Department of Agriculture) to ensure that the conquest and settlement of the West would proceed according to the party’s plans. Chivington knew that many of his men in 1864 had volunteered to fight for the Union because they believed that the Lincoln administration had promised them the West as fair recompense for their service. In this vision, Native peoples would have to make way for onrushing white civilization—or, as in the case of the Arapahos and Cheyennes at Sand Creek, be crushed by the gears of war.

In spring of 1865, Chivington fine-tuned his Sand Creek story for the first of many times. In the months since the massacre, two things had happened to force changes in his recollections. First, despite his concerted public relations efforts, several of his former subordinates, haunted by memories of the carnage, had begun suggesting that Sand Creek had been a massacre, convincing federal authorities to launch inquiries into the violence. And second, the Civil War had ended, leaving the nation struggling to understand what had caused such a terrible paroxysm of violence. Chivington was determined that as this triage of national memories took place, Sand Creek would be bathed in the reflected glory of the war.

In April 1865, Chivington provided federal investigators with a lengthy account of Sand Creek, including lessons about the relationship between the Civil War, the nascent Indian Wars, and the future of the West. For several years prior to Sand Creek, Chivington claimed, he had “been in possession of the most conclusive evidence of an alliance, for the purposes of hostility against the whites, of the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Comanche river, and Apache Indians.” Ignoring diplomatic barriers and the bloody history separating those Native nations, Chivington insisted that the allied tribes had represented an existential threat both to white settlers in Colorado Territory and to the Republican vision for control of the Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and beyond. Without Colorado, without Sand Creek, he noted, the party of Lincoln and liberty would have lost its surest toehold in the West.

Chivington placed the horror of Sand Creek against a backdrop of Confederate intrigue. “Rebel emissaries,” he revealed, “were long since sent among the Indians to incite them against the whites.” George Bent, son of a borderlands trade tycoon and former federal Indian agent named William Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman, had supposedly served as the South’s agent. Bent, Chivington claimed, had promised the Plains tribes that with “the Great Father at Washington having all he could do to fight his children at the south, they could now regain this country.” In other words, Chivington suggested, with federal authorities distracted by fighting the Civil War back east, Native peoples could push white settlers out of the West, retaking land they had steadily lost since the beginning of the rush to Colorado. The specter of such carnage seemed terrifying in context. With memories of the Dakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862 and the Cherokees’ decision to side with the Confederacy still fresh, Chivington insisted that Sand Creek should properly be understood as part of the successful struggle to preserve the Union.

Federal investigators were unmoved by Chivington’s claims. Each of the investigations into Sand Creek damned Chivington and the violence he wrought, with none doing so more stridently than the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (JCCW). Founded in 1861, the JCCW inquired into a vast array of controversial topics, including the causes of Union losses, the treatment of wounded and imprisoned soldiers, and the use of so-called colored troops in the North’s armies. Its report in 1865, for example, covered the debacles the previous year at the Crater outside Petersburg, the infamous massacre of African American soldiers at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, and Sand Creek, among other contentious issues.

Pulling no punches, the JCCW recommended that Governor Evans be sacked and that Chivington—who, the committee concluded, had committed “murder”—be cashiered and court martialed. At once acknowledging Sand Creek’s place within the Civil War and also attempting to segregate the massacre from the struggle to crush the rebellion, the report’s authors raged, “It is difficult to believe that beings in the form of men and disgracing the uniform of the United States, soldiers and officers, could commit or countenance such acts of cruelty and barbarity.” Chivington, they noted, had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savages among those who were the victims of his cruelty.” Sand Creek so threatened the honor of the Union cause that the JCCW hoped its perpetrators would be regarded not as federal soldiers but as frontier rogues, less civilized even than the Indians they had killed.

Westerners, and Coloradans especially, did not accept that verdict. After the JCCW issued its findings, the Rocky Mountain News lauded Chivington and defended Sand Creek as a necessary part of taming the savage West. And years later, William Byers, the News‘s editor at the time of Sand Creek, began a print war with Indian reformer Helen Hunt Jackson, who had recently used Sand Creek as an example of the federal government’s malice toward Native peoples. In his attacks on Jackson, Byers hewed to the line drawn by Chivington, insisting that the Colorado volunteers had been loyal Union men who had killed hostile Indians. Although federal troops were still grappling with Native nations during the Indian Wars when Byers attacked Jackson, he nevertheless claimed that Chivington and his men had pacified rather than inflamed the Plains tribes. He concluded that Sand Creek had “saved Colorado and taught the Indians the most salutary lesson they ever learned.”

Jackson scoffed at the idea that Sand Creek had quieted the region’s tribes, rebutting Byers’s claims by waving the bloody shirt. The Indian Wars that the massacre had precipitated had cost federal authorities millions of dollars, she explained, requiring that some 8,000 troops be “withdrawn from the effective forces engaged with the Rebellion.” Not only had the massacre been an atrocity, she argued, it had also detracted from the Union war effort. Two years later, when Jackson published Century of Dishonor, she expanded her argument, suggesting that Sand Creek had been a predictable outgrowth of longstanding federal Indian policy. The Republican Party’s vision of empire, of a white man’s republic in the West, had helped set the nation on the path to the Civil War and the Indian Wars.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, with men like William Byers still trying to shape public memory of Sand Creek, George Bent decided that he had to weigh in on the massacre’s history. Anthropologists were arguing at the time that Native Americans were a vanishing race, historians were lamenting the closing of the frontier, and the public was consuming mountains of dime novels. The West, in popular culture and public policy, stood at the center of discussions about the nation’s future. Bent worried that Indians had no voice in those conversations. He began collecting tribal history and lore for James Mooney, a renowned Smithsonian ethnographer, and George Bird Grinnell, a founder of the discipline of anthropology. After the two scholars disappointed him (Mooney because he would not listen, Grinnell because he withheld proper credit), Bent sought out another collaborator. He began working with George Hyde, a relatively obscure historian. In 1906, the two men placed six articles in a magazine called The Frontier.

Those essays, published under Bent’s name, inverted Chivington’s Sand Creek stories. Although Bent acknowledged that he had fought for the South—he had served in General Sterling Price’s First Missouri Cavalry—he mocked the “men in Colorado [who] talked about Rebel plots” to ally with the region’s Indian peoples. Pointing to the constraints of Native diplomacy, he noted that the Kiowas and Comanches were “inveterate foes of Texas,” and suggested that the Cheyennes and Arapahos, though hardly staunch Unionists, likewise had no incentive to join with the Confederacy. Turning to the massacre itself, Bent, who survived a wound he received there, related details of Chivington’s betrayal of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peace chiefs; of Black Kettle’s decision to raise a white flag over his lodge, signaling that his people were friendly; and of the Colorado troops’ butchery. (In 2002, Laird Cometsevah would draw on Bent’s Sand Creek stories when, speaking on the steps of Colorado’s capitol building, he recounted the history of the massacre.)

For the lion’s share of his articles, though, Bent moved beyond the massacre’s particulars, instead considering the implications of the violence. He understood the Civil War as a war of imperialism rather than liberation, a conflict that, after it ended, left the Plains tribes and white Westerners awash in blood. Unlike Chivington and Byers, who maintained that Sand Creek had brought peace to the region, Bent believed that the fighting begat more fighting. The massacre touched off a period of violence that only ended with the subjugation of his people during the dawning Reservation Era. Sand Creek, in Bent’s telling, was part of the rotten foundation upon which the federal government constructed an empire in the West.

Chivington’s loyalists did not allow Bent’s charges to stand unchallenged. With most veterans of the First and Third Colorado Regiments well into their golden years, Jacob Downing read Bent’s essays in the Frontier as an attack on the memory of his own and his comrades’ honorable Civil War service. A retired major who, prior to Sand Creek, had distinguished himself fighting Confederates—at Apache Canyon, Glorieta Pass, and several other engagements in the conflict’s far western theater—Downing had in the years after the war become one of Denver’s most prominent citizens, a businessman and philanthropist devoted to various municipal causes. In 1906, he remained active in several local heritage organizations, including the Colorado chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic.

As a steward of the state’s early history and Civil War memory, Downing tried to uphold the status quo by attacking the Bent family. Outraged that an Indian had dared to label the actions of white men “savage,” in the pages of the Denver Times he called William Bent a “squaw man” and George Bent “a halfbreed.” Sand Creek, Downing continued, should be recalled as Chivington had always suggested: a righteous battle fought against hostile Indians determined to slow the march of progress in Colorado, and also as a critical part of the Union war effort in the West.

Before Downing died the next year, he helped to influence early planning for Colorado’s Civil War memorial, the statue that would sit atop the state capitol steps. After 1909, that monument would carve Chivington’s Sand Creek story into stone, lending an aura of permanence to what had been a contested narrative.

Less than a century later, in 1998, Senator Martinez decided to recast that story, a reminder of the contingent nature of public commemoration. After Martinez’s resolution passed the state legislature, the Capitol Building Advisory Committee hired a local metal worker. The artisan would remove the plaque from the statue’s base, grind the words “Sand Creek” away, burnish the remaining twenty-one “battles and engagements” to match their original color, and then reattach the nameplate to the memorial. The horror of the past could be erased for just $1,000.

Or not. When David Halaas, chief historian at the Colorado Historical Society, heard about Martinez’s resolution, he thought “it was a well-intentioned but lousy plan.” Halaas worked at the time with Cheyenne representatives on other efforts to memorialize the massacre, including the Park Service’s national historic site. He contacted Laird Cometsevah and Steve Brady, head of the Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek descendants committee. Cometsevah thought “that Sand Creek should not be a battle,” but he did not want to see it “erased” from the Civil War memorial. Brady agreed: “Sand Creek was part of the Civil War, though not as a battle.” He elaborated: “There were more than a few Indian massacres that happened during the Civil War, though white people tend to forget those stories.”

As word spread that the legislature had not consulted with the Sand Creek descendants, opposition to Martinez’s well-intentioned revisionism surfaced in Denver. Tom Noel, a historian and public intellectual known as “Dr. Colorado,” entered the fray, writing an opinion piece in the Denver Post just after Independence Day 1998. Noel argued that Coloradans should grapple with their history, warts and all, rather than forget it. He suggested that the state’s Civil War memorial should remain untouched and that “the story of Sand Creek, with all of its various interpretations, needs to be left open for public discussion and reflection.”

Some of Chivington’s latter-day defenders, including Mike Koury, an author, editor, and member of a national heritage organization known as the Order of the Indian Wars, agreed with Noel that the plaque should be left alone. “Taking [Sand Creek] off a statue,” Koury pointed out, “is not going to make it disappear. You gain nothing by hiding it under a blanket.” Unlike Noel, though, Koury advocated a conservative course not out of respect for the complexity of ever-shifting collective memories, but because he thought “politically correct” meddling would “dishonor people who fought in the Civil War.” Duane Smith, an American historian on the faculty at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, piled on. Annoyed by bureaucrats and activists doing violence to the past, Smith sneered that it would be “absolutely stupid” to alter the statue to suit the politics of the day. He concluded, “Sand Creek was a tremendously important Civil War battle,” suggesting that the volunteer soldiers under Chivington should still be honored for their patriotism.

Finally, on July 31, 1998, Cometsevah and Halaas testified before Colorado’s legislature. They explained that Sand Creek had been part of the Civil War. Halaas noted that details about the slaughter could be found in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (otherwise known as theOR), the go-to source for historians researching military aspects of the war; that the men of the First and Third Colorado Regiments had mustered into the Union army; and that Evans and Chivington had believed that the Native people at Sand Creek had likely forged an alliance with the Confederacy. Cometsevah and Halaas then offered the legislators a compromise. Rather than “removing Sand Creek,” the state should provide the memorial’s visitors with context, “inform[ing] the public about the massacre through historical markers.” Within a few months, the legislature adopted the suggestion.

Close to four years passed before the new interpretative plaque could be unveiled, four years filled with committee meetings and public outreach events, four years spent trying to spin a single narrative thread that would explain Sand Creek’s relationship to the Civil War while also satisfying descendants of the massacre’s victims and contemporary Coloradans fiercely proud of their state’s heritage. In the end, 138 years after Colonel Chivington and his Colorado volunteers descended on the Native Americans camped along Sand Creek, the plaque was ready.

After the unveiling ceremony, the Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders and the young runners from their tribes prepared to leave Colorado’s capitol, to make their long drives back to Oklahoma, Montana, and Wyoming. Laird Cometsevah asked the teenage girl wearing Nike gear if she had an answer to her question, if she understood what she was doing there, what Sand Creek had to do with the Civil War, and what the Civil War had to do with Indians. She replied, “I think so.”

Cometsevah later regretted that he did not press her to elaborate. “I hope she realized that white people were fighting over who would control Colorado and the West at that time,” he said, “and I hope she and other people who see the statue understand that Sand Creek happened during the Civil War, but that it wasn’t in any way, shape, or form a battle. Chivington and his men were Civil War soldiers, but it was a massacre.” With a sigh, Cometsevah concluded, “I hope that young lady understood all of that. But it’s always hard to know what people do and don’t understand. All we can do at these sorts of things [the healing run and the reinterpretation of the Civil War memorial] is the very best we can.”

In the ten years since the state of Colorado rededicated its Civil War memorial, hundreds of thousands of people have visited the capitol steps in Denver. Since 2007, tens of thousands more have traveled to the southeastern part of the state, where they have climbed a small rise overlooking the Sand Creek killing field, located within the National Park Service’s historic site. And now, with the Civil War sesquicentennial celebrations ongoing and the sesquicentennial of Sand Creek upcoming, the University of Denver and Northwestern University are grappling with John Evans’s role in the founding of their institutions, the Park Service is set to release an interpretive film about the relationship between Sand Creek and the Civil War, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples are planning more healing runs to mark the 150th anniversary of the massacre.

But even amid this uptick in memorial activity, it remains difficult, as Laird Cometsevah suggested, to know for certain what onlookers will make of their experiences, of the history and repercussions of Sand Creek, and of the massacre’s relationship to the Civil War—or even if they will make anything at all of that relationship. Most Americans, after all, prompted by popular culture and scholarship, still remember the Civil War only as a war of emancipation, a good war.

But viewed from Indian Country—from the gibbets of Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862, where thirty-eight Dakota Sioux were hanged; from the Bosque Redondo in New Mexico in 1864, where Navajos staggered to the end of their Long Walk; and from the banks of Sand Creek, where peaceful Arapahos and Cheyennes fell before John Chivington’s men—the Civil War looked different. It looked like a war of empire. Perhaps visitors to Colorado’s state capitol, when confronted with a reinterpreted statue of a Union soldier, will learn that the Civil War could actually be both of those things at once. Perhaps they will learn that the nation’s history is often shot through with such painful ironies and that the act of memorializing the past is fraught with unexpected lessons.

Further Reading

John M. Carroll, Sand Creek Massacre, a Documentary History (New York, 1973); Jerome A. Greene and Douglas D. Scott, Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology, and the 1864 Massacre Site (Norman, Okla., 2006), David F. Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent—Caught Between the World of the Indian and the White Man (New York, 2005); Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman, Okla., 1974); George E. Hyde (author) and Savoie Lottinville (editor), Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters (Norman, Okla., 1968); Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Gary Leland Roberts, “Sand Creek: Tragedy and Symbol” (PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1984); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers & the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, Kansas, 1998).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

Ari Kelman is a professor of history at the University of California-Davis. He is the author, most recently, of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013) and is currently completing, with Jonathan Fetter Vorm, Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

How Durben in Glasgow Became Dearborn in Quebec

I discovered a Revolutionary-era journal written by a Captain Durben—from an unexpected source—in 2009 while researching Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec, a disastrous 1775 attempt to invade Canada and capture the city for the American cause. One of my primary purposes at that time was to compile a comprehensive bibliography of all printings of every journal written about the Arnold expedition, which seems to have generated more journals than any Revolutionary War battle.

One of many Google searches took me to a surprising entry, featured in an online Americana exhibit created by the Special Collections Section of the University of Glasgow Library, which was devoted to eighteenth-century books and manuscripts. On the fourth page, I found a description of a manuscript titled, “A Journal of the Rebel Expedition,” written by a Captain Durben, along with an image of the journal’s first page. The subtitle stated that this was “An exact copy of a Journal of the Route and Proceedings of 1100 Rebels, who marched from Cambridge, in Massachusetts Bay, under the Command of General Arnold, in the fall of the year 1775; to attack Quebec.” I was immediately intrigued—this document purported to be a manuscript journal of the Arnold expedition that had previously been entirely unknown to me.

Upon reflection, I was astonished that an unknown journal of an important Revolutionary War event had been residing in a university library in Scotland for over 225 years and had never been mentioned in any scholarship on the Revolutionary War. At the same time, I was also skeptical. How did a manuscript journal written by an American officer end up in Scotland? Moreover, I had done enough research on the Quebec expedition to know that there was no American officer involved named Durben. The more I thought about the online exhibit, the more I was convinced that, when I researched it further, the manuscript would turn out to be a disappointment because it would prove not to be an original journal of the expedition to Quebec.

I was immediately intrigued—this document purported to be a manuscript journal of the Arnold expedition that had previously been entirely unknown to me.

The Durben manuscript was contained in a bound volume entitled “Manuscripts from the Library of William Hunter.” Dr. Hunter was a Scottish physician and private book and manuscript collector so active in his era that he was a competitor of the British Library. At his death in 1783, he bequeathed his collection, including the Durben journal, to the Library of the University of Glasgow.

I wrote to the Special Collection librarians there, requesting a photocopy of the manuscript journal. They readily copied the entire file and sent it to me. The package included the Durben journal plus two other, shorter journals of the expedition. No author is identified by name for either of these shorter journals.

After closely examining the Durben manuscript, I concluded that it was a period copy of a previously unknown journal originally authored by Captain Henry Dearborn (1751-1829) of New Hampshire, probably one of the best-known officers on the expedition other than Arnold himself. Dearborn was captured in the assault on Quebec on December 31, 1775, and was imprisoned in Quebec until he was released on parole early in May 1776. The journal entries cover the period September 13, 1775, through May 18, 1776. These entries were written contemporaneously as events occurred, as the author went along on the expedition and then, during the winter of 1775-1776, when he was imprisoned in Quebec. The transcription was evidently penned sometime thereafter, by Dr. Robert Robertson (1742-1829), a Scottish surgeon serving with the Royal Navy in Quebec in 1776. In what follows I’ll discuss the evidence that led me to these conclusions.

The name “Durben” at first threw me because, as mentioned above, there was no officer in the Arnold expedition with that name. Looking at names that might sound like Durben, I tentatively concluded that the author might be Captain Henry Dearborn. No other officer had a name that sounds anything like Durben, and no other officer’s name begins with the letter “D.”

Two entries in the journal provided additional evidence supporting Dearborn’s authorship. The author mentions two of his officers by name, both of whom were in Captain Dearborn’s company. The first is Joseph Thomas, who was appointed as Dearborn’s Ensign, according to the daily entry for September 18. The author also refers in an entry on November 2 to a Lieutenant Hutchins being in his company. Both Joseph Thomas and Nathaniel Hutchins were officers in Dearborn’s company, and both are listed in New Hampshire Troops in the Quebec Expedition, published by the state of New Hampshire in 1885.

The Durben journal concludes with entries for the days of May 17 and 18, 1776, which describe the author leaving on a boat with Major Return J. Meigs. The early exit from Quebec by the two officers, Meigs and Dearborn, is verified by other expedition journals, providing compelling supportive evidence that the author of the Durben journal was Henry Dearborn. In Private James Melvin’s journal, the entry on May 18, 1776, reads: “Pleasant weather; hear that Major Meigs and Captain Dearborn are gone home.” There are also two entries in Captain Simeon Thayer’s journal: “May 17 … Major Meigs had the liberty to walk the town until 4 o’clock. Mr. Laveris came and informed Capt. Dearborn that he had obtained liberty for him to go home on his parole … May 18. About ten o’clock they [Meigs and Dearborn] set sail for Halifax.” It is clear from these entries that it was well known by the men in prison in Quebec that Meigs and Dearborn went home together.

A note located at the end of the “Captia” portion of the Durben manuscript describes how the journal came into the hands of its transcriber. Here, the writer recounts that Meigs and Dearborn went on board the schooner that was to take them to Halifax on May 17, but it did not make it out of the harbor and had to return. It ended up sailing again the next day, but in the intervening period the journal was stolen from Dearborn. “By some accident or another, the Schooner that they sailed in was obliged to return to Quebec; and a person on board of her stole the originals from the author, & gave it to one of his own friends a shore, who was so obliging as to lend it to me to take a copy of it—at least this is the history which I got from that gentleman, of it.” It is clear from this information that Dearborn wrote this journal prior to May 17, 1776.

At the bottom of page 1, Dr. Hunter writes that the journal was given to him by a Mr. Robertson, whom he describes as a surgeon on HMS Juno. Documents held at the University of Glasgow identify the Juno as a “32-gun ship launched in 1757” and “a fifth rate shipping frigate which was burnt on 7 August 1778.” Entries in Naval Documents of the American Revolution confirm that Dr. Robertson was on board the Juno. The frigate arrived in Quebec on June 4, 1776, five months after the assault on Quebec and two weeks after Meigs and Dearborn left Quebec aboard the HMS Niger. Thus, Dearborn was long gone from Quebec when the journal made its way to Robertson via an unknown third party who had stolen it from its original author.

A little over two years later, on August 7, 1778, the Juno was burned in Providence Harbor to prevent its capture by American forces. Since Robertson was not listed as a surgeon on any other ship after 1778, it is reasonable to conclude that he was not on the Juno when it was destroyed, or else he would have been transferred to another ship. I believe it is likely that Robertson transcribed Dearborn’s original manuscript journal while he was on board the Juno, between the time it left Quebec in September 1776 and August 13, 1777, the last known date he was on board.

Dr. William Hunter, the subsequent recipient of the manuscript, died on March 30, 1783, and from his signed notation in the journal we know that it was in his hands before he died. Thus, sometime between 1777 and 1783 Robertson apparently gave his transcribed copy of the journal to Hunter. It has been in the Hunter manuscript collection since that time, and at the time I discovered it had never before been published.

What we have, then, is a journal dating back to 1775, written originally by Henry Dearborn. This original journal was subsequently stolen from its author, transcribed and edited by Robertson, and then given to Hunter. The original manuscript in Dearborn’s handwriting has long since disappeared, or at least its whereabouts are unknown.

After the Quebec experience, Dearborn went on to an impressive military career during the Revolution, participating in the battles of Saratoga, Monmouth, Sullivan’s campaign, and Yorktown, ending as a lieutenant colonel. After the war, Dearborn was appointed a major general in the Maine state militia, a United States marshal in Maine, and was elected to Congress. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson named Dearborn Secretary of War, and during the War of 1812 James Madison appointed him Senior Major General in the Army, in command of the northeast sector. From 1822 to 1824, he served as Minister Plenipotentiary to Portugal, and he died in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1829.

Henry Dearborn is known to have written five other journals of his Revolutionary War experiences, all of which survive in manuscript form. Four of these are in Dearborn’s handwriting. The last discovered journal, covering the march to Quebec, survives at the Boston Public Library (BPL) and was published in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1886. According to John Wingate Thornton, a nineteenth-century antiquarian and an expert on handwriting, this last journal held at the BPL is not in Dearborn’s handwriting, although he did make some corrections to the manuscript in his hand. In order to better compare the two journals, I spent a day reviewing the manuscript in Boston.

Comparing the Glasgow journal with the one published by the Massachusetts Historical Society, it is easy to see that many of the entries and the events that are covered are similar. However, the Glasgow journal is shorter and more succinct in its entries, which lends credibility to the conclusion that it was written during the events discussed. It is much more likely that someone writing during a significant army field maneuver would not have time for the more extensive and flowery descriptions that are found in the later journal.

An example of the differences in the two journals can be found in the entries for September 22, 1775. The Durben journal entry reads:

22^nd. We got up where the Bateaux were built; from thence we carried thirty three men of each Company in the Bateaux up to Fort Western; That is about forty miles up from the mouth of the River; and at night all our men had mostly got up to the Fort.

The MHS journal entry expands the account:

Septemr 22d. Proceeded up the River. We pass’d Fort Richmond at 11: O clock where there are but few Settlements at Present, this afternoon we pass’d Pownalborough, Where there is a Courthouse and Gaol—and some very good Settlements, This day at 4 O Clock we arrived at the place where our Batteaus were Built.

We were order’d to Leave one Sergeant, one Corporal and Thirteen men here to take a Long the Batteau’s, they embarked on Board the Batteaus, and we proceeded up the River to Cabisaconty, or Gardners Town, Where Doctor Gardner of Boston owns a Large Tract of Land and some Mills, & a Number of very good dwelling Houses, where we Stayed Last night, on Shore.

Another even more significant variation is found in the comparable entries for October 4, although it is not clear if the same events for that day are being described in the two accounts.

The Durben journal entry records: “4^th. We haled [hauled] up our Bateaux at the Portage, and dried them.”

The MHS entry states: “4 Our Course in general from the mouth of the river to this place has been from North, to North East, from here we Steer N.:W. to Norrigwalk, which is Twelve miles to where we arrived to night, the River here is not very rapid. Except Two bad falls, the Land on the North side of the river is very good, where there are 2 or 3 families settled, at Norrigwalk, is to be seen the ruins of an Indian Town, also a fort, a Chapel, and a Large Tract of Clear Land but not very good, there is but one family here at present Half a Mile above this old fort, is a Great fall, where there is a Carrying place of one Mile and a Quarter.”

The missing Quebec expedition journal in Dearborn’s own handwriting is an obvious omission in the personal accounts of his Revolutionary War experiences. Until now, it was thought that the original manuscript journal written at the time by Dearborn was the one published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1886—although not in his handwriting. Now, however, we know better, because we have that original journal, or at least a sanitized version of it, from the late eighteenth century.

Finding Henry Dearborn’s original journal has been exciting and rewarding in ways I could not have predicted. I am convinced that had I not followed through on tedious Google searches, this journal would have never been discovered and made public. As Revolutionary War manuscripts go, this one is not earth-shattering, nor does it contain any momentous revelations that will change the history of the invasion of Canada. But in its own right it is a significant finding that clarifies the history of one participant’s own narratives of the war, and presents the original version of an account that has been known only through later revisions.

After Benedict Arnold himself, Henry Dearborn was the most famous military man on the expedition to Quebec, and he was one of only a handful of American officers to write a journal covering the entire period of the Revolutionary War. Moreover, Dearborn’s subsequent career was unmatched by any other participant in the expedition. By virtue of his appointment as Senior Major General during the War of 1812, he rose to a higher military rank, and as congressman and Secretary of War, he attained a higher civilian position than any other expedition alumnus except for Vice President Aaron Burr. Discovery of the Dearborn journal also reveals a fascinating story about how an American manuscript made its way to from Quebec to Scotland, where it has been unknowingly preserved for over 200 years.

To date, I have succeeded in identifying thirty-three extant journals of the Quebec expedition, including the three found in the University of Glasgow Library. When I started this journey, I did not expect to find any previously unknown and unpublished journals, particularly in Scotland. Much to my surprise, there are still unknown manuscripts to be found in the unlikeliest of places. I now know that research that starts out in one direction can lead to surprising and unexpected results that are more rewarding than the original objective.

Further Reading:

The complete transcribed Dearborn journal, as well as the two smaller journals, and notes by Robertson and Hunter, can be found in Stephen Darley, Voices from a Wilderness Expedition: The Journals and Men of Benedict Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec in 1775 (Bloomington, Ind., 2011).

To read other journals of the Quebec expedition, see the compilation of thirteen journals by Kenneth Roberts, March to Quebec: Journals of the Members of Arnold’s Expedition (New York, 1946). The best histories of the Arnold expedition are Justin H. Smith, Arnold’s March from Cambridge to Quebec (New York, 1903); John Codman, Arnold’s Expedition to Quebec (New York, 1901), and Thomas A. Desjardin, Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold’s March to Quebec in 1775 (New York, 2006).

There are numerous publications of individual Revolutionary War journals from a variety of battles and campaigns. Two compilations of journals from the war are John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for American Independence (Chicago, 1980) and George C. Scheer and Hugh Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats (New York, 1957).

For background on Benedict Arnold, the most thoroughly researched biography is James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (New York, 1997).

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Stephen Darley is a retired attorney and independent scholar based in North Haven, Conn. He has been conducting research on the Revolutionary War in general, and Benedict Arnold in particular, for over forty years.

It’s rare for a single work of scholarship to fundamentally change the way I teach a topic in U.S. history, but historian James Oakes’ latest work has done just that. Oakes has thoroughly persuaded me that the Republicans came into the Civil War ready to carry out much of the abolitionist agenda, meaning that they were willing from the beginning to destroy what Francis Lieber called the “poisonous root” of slavery. In his Lincoln Prize-winning book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (2012), Oakes argues that as early as 1861, congressional Republicans, along with the president and his cabinet, and generals in the field, “insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensable means of suppressing it.” The Republicans were moving in lock-step with the abolitionists. As one widely circulated 1861 antislavery petition declared, Congress needed to utilize its “war-power” to destroy the “system of chattel slavery,” which the author of the petition labeled as the “root and nourishment” of the Confederacy.

Until recently, I have followed the trajectory of most textbooks and covered the abolitionist movement from the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829 to John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry thirty years later. Over the course of several weeks, we examine a selection of broadsides, pamphlets, images, and letters that have been scanned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library of Congress, the National Humanities Center and the Boston Public Library. We also discuss how these documents fit in with the PBS documentaries (Africans in America and The Abolitionists) that students watched and responded to online the night before.

After covering the attack on Fort Sumter, I left the abolitionists behind and focused on the Republican Party. The narrative I presented painted the Republicans as reluctant emancipators, a party that had neither the support nor the encouragement of most abolitionists. The trajectory of the war shifted only over the course of several years from a struggle for the restoration of the Union to a no-holds-barred war against human bondage.

I often ask my students whether they think the Confiscation Act would have been issued if hundreds of refugees had not shown up at Fortress Monroe weeks before. They often conclude that the slaves themselves were partly responsible for pushing the legislative agenda in Washington.

Oakes’ scholarship, however, has forced me to ask an obvious but important question: How did the abolitionists succeed in achieving their ultimate goal? In this, Oakes challenges historian Manisha Sinha’s argument that abolitionist precepts were not represented within the ranks of mainstream congressional Republicans and that President Abraham Lincoln “gave short shrift to the abolitionist agenda” in the early years of the war. Though Frederick Douglass was often frustrated with the Republican Party, Oakes argues that Lincoln and the Republicans were committed to achieving what Douglass called for in May 1861: put “an end to the savage and desolating war” being “waged by the slaveholders” by striking “down slavery itself.”

My students have responded enthusiastically to a multi-day lesson utilizing the Visualizing Emancipation Website. This ground-breaking digital history project allows students to map emancipation over the course of the war. Students view the unfolding of emancipation by tracking the movement of slaves toward the Union Army’s lines and the actions of soldiers and generals in the field. The Website can be used alongside the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and the Valley of the Shadow Project.

In the classroom, I use the students’ blog posts as a way to start a discussion. During their exploration of Visualizing Emancipation, many students picked up on the number of slaves that flooded Union lines in coastal Virginia not long after the firing on Fort Sumter. During the discussion we focused heavily on the role of General Benjamin Butler. On May 27, 1861, Butler, a conservative Democrat who opposed Stephen Douglas at the party’s 1860 convention, wrote to the Commander of the U.S. Armed Services General Winfield Scott asking him what he should do with the fugitives entering his lines at Fortress Monroe. “As a military question it would seem to be a measure of necessity to deprive their masters of their services … As a political question and a question of humanity can I receive the services of a Father and a Mother and not take the children?” asked Butler. “Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt.” What Butler needed was clarification on the political side of the equation. He decided to label the escaping bondmen “contrabands” under the rules of war and refused to turn them over. On May 30, Secretary of War Simon Cameron approved Butler’s decision not to return the “contrabands.” As Adam Goodheart has noted, slavery’s “iron curtain began falling all across the South.”

On August 8, 1861, two days after Lincoln signed the First Confiscation Act, which stated that Confederates who used slave labor to engage in rebellious acts would “forfeit” their claim to such “labor,” Secretary of War Simon Cameron issued instructions for slaves to be “discharged.” With his use of the word “discharged,” Cameron restored language used by Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull in an earlier version of Section 4 of the First Confiscation Act. Whereas Article 4, Section 2 of the 1787 Constitution prevented a “person held to labor or service” from being “discharged” if they escaped to a free state or territory, Trumbull’s amendment called for the military to emancipate or “discharge” enslaved people who reached Union lines. By treating the “contrabands” not as property, but as persons “held to labor,” the confiscation bill lined up with the long-standing view of antislavery Republicans. Cameron’s instructions also answered a question posed by Butler in a letter dated July 30, 1861: “Are these men, women, and children, slaves? Are they free?”

Lincoln never said a word in opposition to Cameron’s far-reaching order, which settled the status of those caught up under the terms of the First Confiscation Act on the side of freedom. There would be no further legal proceedings to debate the question. “Strictly speaking,” the act “freed only slaves used to support the rebellion,” writes Oakes. But “under the War Department’s instruction, all slaves voluntarily coming to Union lines from disloyal states were emancipated.” Indeed, in his December 1861 message to Congress, Lincoln used the word “liberated” when referring to slaves caught up under the provisions of the bill. I often ask my students whether they think the Confiscation Act would have been issued if hundreds of refugees had not shown up at Fortress Monroe weeks before. They often conclude that the slaves themselves were partly responsible for pushing the legislative agenda in Washington. As Steven Hahn has argued, black flight “began to reshape Union policy.”

Oakes tackles the long-standing assumption that the “purpose of the war shifted” from one designed to protect the Union to one that promoted emancipation. This is the conventional narrative found in numerous textbooks or classics like Allan Nevins’ multi-volume Ordeal for the Union (1947-1970). Take, for example, the traditional rendering of Lincoln’s battle with General John Frémont in the summer of 1861 and General David Hunter in the spring of 1862. Historians have typically used the clash with Frémont and Hunter to demonstrate Lincoln’s reluctance to embrace emancipation. As Oakes noted in his 2007 book on Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln merely ordered Frémont and Hunter to conform to the wording of Section 4 of the First Confiscation Act, which empowered officers to confiscate slaves that were being used against the Army or Navy, along with the subsequent War Department orders. Frémont had gone a step too far in his proclamation, emancipating slaves of all rebels in Missouri; Hunter declared the abolition of slavery in three entire states (South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida) not yet under Union control. Allan Nevins actually called Frémont’s order the first act for emancipation, ignoring the role of General Butler and Secretary of War Cameron.

Frémont and Hunter, in Lincoln’s analysis, had turned themselves into dictators. Lincoln told his friend Orville Browning on September 22, 1861, that he could not allow “this reckless position” to stand. Lincoln did not disagree with the agenda of freeing slaves; he simply wanted it done in a manner that followed what Congress had prescribed. In his order revoking Hunter’s emancipation edict, Lincoln reminded the public that he was still holding out hope that rebellious states would adopt a “gradual” emancipation plan. As Oakes noted in his book on Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the president wanted to make clear that he was being pushed by the actions of slaveholders; they were the ones who “lit the fuse.” The bomb exploded in 1862.

Virginia slaves continued to escape to freedom as the Army of the Potomac moved south in the spring of 1862. In mid-March, General Ambrose Burnside captured New Bern, North Carolina. Nearly 7,500 blacks from the eastern portions of the state quickly made their way to the city. As one slaveholder declared at the time, the idea of “the ‘faithful slave’ is about played out.” Burnside carried on the same policies Butler had enacted. According to Oakes, a “tacit alliance between escaping slaves and the Union army” was “created with the approval of officials in Washington.” In July 1862, Congress authorized the president to enlist black men. The Second Confiscation Act empowered the president to “employ … persons of African descent … for the suppression of the rebellion.” In November 1862, the prominent abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson took command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment composed of freed slaves. “No officer in this regiment now doubts that the key to the successful prosecution of this war lies in the unlimited employment of black troops,” wrote Higginson. “Instead of leaving their homes and families to fight, they are fighting for their homes and families, and they show the resolution and sagacity which a personal purpose gives.” One month later, Attorney General Edward Bates demolished Chief Justice Roger Taney’s racist ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) and declared in an official opinion that African Americans were full citizens of the United States.

In addition to the Visualizing Emancipation Website, another exercise that allows students to explore the ideas James Oakes raises in Freedom Nationalis to search the text of the Congressional Globe. I found it useful this past term to have my students access the Globeonline, particularly the debate over the First Confiscation Act, via the Library of Congress’ Website. Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson declared: “Our purpose is to save this Government and to save this country … and if traitors use bondmen to destroy this country, the Government should at once convert those bondmen into men” so they could not “be used to destroy our country.” For Wilson, along with many of his colleagues, especially Senator Trumbull, freedom and the war effort went hand in hand.

By focusing on political history, Oakes reminds us of the astounding legislative record of the 37th Congress. Congressional leaders pushed through bills strengthening efforts to prohibit the international slave trade, granted diplomatic recognition to Haiti, and abolished slavery in Washington, D.C. On the military front, thousands of slaves sought refuge behind Union lines after the U.S. Army and Navy took control of the coastal regions of the Carolinas and portions of the Tennessee Valley.

As “emancipation events,” to borrow a phrase from the editors of Visualizing Emancipation, became more prevalent, discussion of colonization also intensified. In the Second Confiscation Act, Congress attached an appropriation for voluntary emigration and authorized the president to implement it. Section 12 of the act reads: “The President of the United States is hereby authorized to make provision for the transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States.” In his second annual message to Congress in December 1862, Lincoln went so far as to call for a constitutional amendment authorizing funding for voluntary emigration.

For a long time, Lincoln held fast to the idea of voluntarily removing blacks, though there was only one tiny, privately organized experiment in voluntary exile. The businessman Bernard Kock asked Lincoln to help subsidize a project to send blacks to Île à Vache, a Caribbean island off of the coast of Haiti. Lincoln granted funding, signing off on the ill-conceived scheme on December 31, 1862. At this very moment Lincoln was also putting the finishing touches on the Emancipation Proclamation—something that my students often find shocking. Lincoln personally shut down the disastrous Île à Vache project within a year.

Michael Vorenberg’s research on colonization schemes during the Civil War has helped my students understand Lincoln’s writings concerning the removal of African Americans from the United States. I often use the September 1862 edition of Douglass’ Monthly to demonstrate the profound opposition to colonization within the black community. Douglass was responding to Lincoln’s August 14, 1862 disastrous meeting with a black delegation in Washington, D.C. The president urged the leaders to think about the possibility of mass emigration. “Taking advantage of his position and of the prevailing prejudice against them [African Americans] he affirms that their presence in the country is the real first cause of the war, and logically enough, if the premises were sound, assumes the necessity of their removal,” declared Douglass in response. However, as historian Kate Masur reminds us in a recent article, we need also to keep in mind that since so many “white Americans rejected the idea of a multiracial nation … many black Americans, recognizing the implications of that rejection, took steps to build their lives elsewhere.”

Another question history classes should explore is how mainstream abolitionists fit into this new narrative about the destruction of slavery that focuses heavily on the Republicans, a party of which many abolitionists were leery of trusting. I have found it useful to present my students with copies of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator from July 12, 1861 (accessed via the Early American Newspaper Project) in order to demonstrate the parallel tracks of Republican Party policy and abolitionist doctrine.

That edition recounts that on a warm and sunny July 4th afternoon in 1861 at Framingham, Massachusetts, a large town just west of Boston, more than 2,000 people gathered to listen to abolitionists lecture about the meaning of the war. In his inaugural address as the new president of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Edmund Quincy declared that there was never such an occasion as the one upon them to be “thankful.” The war had created a situation in which slavery could be destroyed. Quincy was greeted with laughter and applause when he told the crowd in Framingham: “The American Anti-Slavery Society has for its Office Agent—who? Abraham Lincoln … and it has for its General Agent in the field—General [Winfield] Scott.” Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair had “not the heart nor the wish to put back into the hell of Virginia slavery one single contraband article in Fortress Monroe.”

During his turn at the podium, Garrison reminded the crowd that Lincoln’s cause was their cause. Both he and Lincoln would be given “a coat of tar and feathers” by the white South, proclaimed Garrison. The Boston editor went on to talk about how the war powers could be used to destroy slavery. The abolitionist editor had long given up on the notion that “moral suasion” could bring an end to the Slave Power. In 1837, he admitted to the British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease that American antislavery advocates were not making nor were they going to make an “impression” upon slaveholders. “I have relinquished the expectation that they [slaveholders] will ever, by mere moral suasion, consent to emancipate their victims. I believe that nothing but the exterminating judgment of heaven can shatter the chains of the slave.” That judgment arrived in 1861 in the form of Lincoln and congressional Republicans.

However, not everyone in the all-star line-up of speakers at Framingham had confidence in the Lincoln administration. Stephen Foster, for example, did not want abolitionists to commit to supporting Lincoln until an emancipation edict had been issued. In Foster’s analysis, the president was not up to the task. Foster declared that the administration was “undeniably the most thoroughly subservient to slavery of any which has disgraced the country.” In the eyes of Sallie Holley, a close friend of Foster’s wife, Abby, Lincoln was a “sinner at the head of a nation of sinners.”

The Fosters, along with the New Hampshire radical abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, quickly found themselves in the minority. For the Garrisonians, the war was going to bring revolutionary changes in the political system that could not be accomplished through moral suasion. Beginning in the summer of 1861, David Lee Child wrote a series of wide-ranging articles in The Liberator on the war powers. The “slave, once freed by the war power, would be free for ever,” declared Child, who drew heavily from an 1836 speech by the venerable John Quincy Adams.

A “defeat, bloody and cruel” was needed in order to “anger” the North into “emancipation,” said Wendell Phillips during his remarks at the Framingham rally. The prominent antislavery attorney and orator got his wish a few weeks later. On July 29, Child wrote to Garrison offering his view on the Battle of Bull Run. According to Child, the massive Union defeat had “done more than a dozen victories” in terms of convincing politicians that using the war powers was absolutely necessary. Former Rhode Island Congressman Elisha Potter Jr. agreed: “We may commence the war without meaning to interfere with slavery; but let us have one or two battles, and get our blood excited, and we shall not only not restore any more slaves, but shall proclaim freedom wherever we go.”

In early August 1861, Congress responded by passing the First Confiscation Act. A month later, Garrison, Phillips, and other Bay State abolitionists organized the Emancipation League, with the purpose being to educate the North on how central the issue of slavery was to the successful prosecution of the war. As historian Stacey Robertson has argued, the League “tried to stimulate abolitionist sentiment by insisting that emancipation would help the North to win the war.”

In January 1862, Garrison gave a number of addresses to huge crowds in Philadelphia and New York. Speaking about the origins of the bitter and bloody conflict the nation found itself embroiled in, Garrison proclaimed:

There is war because there was a Republican Party. There was a Republican Party because there was an Abolition Party. There was an Abolition Party because there was Slavery. Now, to charge the war upon Republicanism is merely to blame the lamb that stood in the brook. To charge it upon Abolitionism is merely to blame the sheep for being the lamb’s mother. But to charge it upon Slavery is to lay the crime flat at the door of the wolf, where it belongs. To end the trouble, kill the wolf. I belong to the party of wolf-killers.

Garrison, who was undoubtedly reveling in the applause from the crowds that came to hear him speak, crowds that would have likely pelted him with rotten apples (or worse) only a year before, also spoke about the war powers: “What the people have provided” to “save their Government, is not despotism.” It “is as much a Constitutional act, therefore, for the President of the United States, Gen. McClellan, or Congress, to declare Slavery at an end in our country.”

Lincoln made this a reality on January 1, 1863, when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Too often, teachers criticize the Proclamation because it is couched in legalistic, military language, lacking the moral force of a radical antislavery address. However, as Oakes rightly observes, “most Americans at the time associated military emancipation with antislavery radicalism.” Lincoln was moving in lockstep with antislavery constitutionalism. Even Stephen Foster, who never hid his hatred for Lincoln, argued that “emancipation proclaimed by the national government and enforced by the Army” would “effectively destroy the slave power.” Critics might speculate as to Lincoln’s motives, but one important fact remains: no slave was ever returned to bondage. The Emancipation Proclamation also encouraged the enlistment of black freemen. As historian Douglas Egerton has recently argued, black abolitionists “were as anxious to destroy slavery” as “they were to establish a bid for citizenship.”

Shortly after Lincoln was re-nominated at the 1864 Republican Party convention in Baltimore, Garrison traveled to Washington. “There is no mistake about it in regard to Mr. Lincoln’s desire” to “uproot slavery, and give fair play to the emancipated,” wrote Garrison to his wife, Helen. What helped to draw the prominent abolitionist editor even closer to Lincoln in 1864 was the administration’s abandonment of colonization. Abolitionists, according to Sallie Holley, had to work to “explode utterly all ideas of colonization as not only a cruel insult to the colored people, but a miserable national policy.” In this they succeeded. Lincoln made no mention of colonization in the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1864, Garrison risked losing many of his devoted followers when he entered into a battle with his long-time friend Wendell Phillips, who was incensed over Lincoln’s announced reconstruction policy. As historian W. Caleb McDaniel argues in his engaging new book on democratic theory and slavery, Garrison—though unhappy about Lincoln’s unwillingness to commit to political rights for black Americans—still believed that the president deserved another term. In a September 1864 letter to Samuel May, in which he discussed the dangers of voting for John Frémont, the candidate of the Radical Democracy Party, Garrison declared that the “best thing” that the abolitionists could do is “join the mass of loyal men in sustaining Mr. Lincoln and thus save the country from the shame and calamity of a copperhead [Democratic] triumph.” Garrison was pleased with the Republican platform and its call for a constitutional amendment ending slavery. After the votes were tallied, Garrison, the man who had openly despised the American political system for decades, declared that Lincoln’s “re-election” was the “death-warrant of the whole slave system” and indicated that the country was “very near the day of jubilee.” In the final analysis, Republicans and abolitionists surely had their differences when it came to how slavery should be destroyed, but the historic significance lies not in what was different. What mattered most is what Republicans and abolitionists agreed on from the outset.

The author dedicates this article to Lawrenceville History Master Kristina Schulte.

Further Reading

Everyone interested in the destruction of American slavery should begin with Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, Steven Miller, Joseph Reidy, Leslie Rowland, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York, 1993). The best overview of the abolitionist movement remains James Brewer Stewart’s Holy Warriors (New York, rev. 1996). Students of the 19th century have been waiting anxiously for Manisha Sinha’s forthcoming, The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of America’s Interracial Democracy. In addition to Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York, 2013), see also Oakes’ The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007). Henry Mayer’s All on Fire (New York, 1998) remains the best biography of William Lloyd Garrison. No student of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War can be without a copy of Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010). Silvana R. Siddali’s From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861-1862 (Baton Rouge, 2005) is a detailed treatment of these landmark pieces of legislation.Michael Vorenberg’s Final Freedom (New York, 2001) is the definitive account of the Thirteenth Amendment. Kate Masur’s An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill, 2010) details how the nation’s capital became a laboratory for Republican racial policy during and after the Civil War. Janette Thomas Greenwood’s First Fruits of Freedom (Chapel Hill, 2009) chronicles the creation of a network between Massachusetts and the eastern shore of North Carolina after Union troops from Worcester County took control of the area in 1862. For more on Garrison and Phillips in 1864 see W. Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (Baton Rouge, 2013). Douglas R. Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, 2014) brilliantly chronicles what Frederick Douglass meant when he argued in December 1863 that “the old Union, whose canonized bones we so quietly inurned under the shattered walls of [Fort] Sumter, can never come to life again … We are fighting for something incomparably better than the old Union.”

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (September, 2013).

Erik J. Chaput is a History Master at the Lawrenceville School, a college preparatory boarding school in New Jersey. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013) and the co-editor with Russell J. DeSimone of the Letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr and the Letters of John Brown Francis (forthcoming summer 2014), which can be found on the Dorr Rebellion Project Site hosted by Providence College.

Hello, I’m Chef Kevin Mitchell of the Culinary Institute of Charleston. I am spokesman for the team of chefs who prepared tonight’s banquet for you, and I’m also appointed to stand as representative of our culinary forefather Nat Fuller. As you know, all of the dishes you will taste tonight come from his menus and are served in the style true to his banquets 150 years ago.

I’ve wondered what Nat Fuller would have said to the company assembled at the Bachelor’s Retreat at the end of the Civil War. I think he may have said something like this:

“All things are ready, come to the feast!
Come, for the table now is spread;
Ye famishing, ye weary, come
And thou shalt be richly fed.”

Welcome, friends and guests. I am sure many of you are looking around this table and seeing new and unexpected faces. But I remember that the Lord says that many who sit down at the banquet table in heaven will be the Father’s unexpected guests. We can do no better than to follow his example when it comes to hospitality.

These have not been hospitable times. Strife and sorrow have held the upper hand. For a long season, people have expressed themselves through violence.

War has never been my work.

My study has always been how to make people enjoy the times they share together. It is ancient custom that once people at the same table share bread and salt, they shall do no harm to one another. It is a matter of some pride to me that my work has always been to supply the bread and salt that makes peace break out.

I do more than that. I prepare dishes whose deliciousness makes pleasure go around the table. Tonight there is a particular pleasure, a particular taste that’s featured—the taste of liberty. I suspect that some here at this table have not tasted in their lives a food that was not produced by people in bondage. Everything here, however, was produced by free persons who received just compensation for their toils. I don’t know about you—for me, it just makes the food taste somehow better.

Friends, I’m not here to give a lecture or to teach you how to talk with one another. We have had lessons. Now is the time to talk with your neighbor, make a new friend, or hear someone tell his or her story. Of course at the end of the evening, when we bring dessert there will be toasts. Anyone then is free to stand and speak a sentence from the heart.

My mentor, my teacher Eliza Seymour Lee could not be present. But her great-great-granddaughter Robin Lee Griffith is here. Would you come and receive my hand in gratitude?

Tonight you shall taste the most celebrated dishes from my repertoire. I could not have offered them to you without the support of my colleagues, Chef Sean Brock, Chef B. J. Dennis, Chef Michael Carmel, and Chef Forrest Parker, and the faculty and students of the Culinary Institute of Charleston.

I have pressing work in the kitchen. I will return when it is time to issue the toasts. Until that time let me speak a benediction.

Dear Father, bless the people in this room, both guests and servers. Give the diners here health and pleasure from the food we serve. Give them appreciation of the peace of this time and place.

Keep the pains and evils of the world distant from us here.

Give us kindness, hope, and wisdom.

May peace, grace, and love be your portion until we enjoy your hospitality in heaven.

Amen.

Bon appetit.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Kevin E. Mitchell, CEC, CFSE, ACE chef instructor, Culinary Institute of Charleston studies the history of African American chefs and southern foodways. He oversaw the recreation of the famed African American chef Nat Fuller’s reconciliation dinner held in Charleston in 1865.

To look at the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters on a computer screen is to see all 2,600 miles of the Mississippi River at once (fig. 1). It begins as a barely perceptible stream in the upper left of the image, eventually taking shape as a hand-colored blue line winding its way through ten different states (the boundaries of which are indicated by block letters that parallel the river on either side). Seeing the river in this way conveys the fluctuating nature of the river’s course, from the bulbous expansion of Lake Pepin between Minnesota and Wisconsin to the looping cutoffs below Natchez, Mississippi, and offers a visual contrast between the sparsely populated upper river and the more densely settled lower portion. The user can zoom in at any point to read the names of towns, landings, and tributaries in amazing clarity, and then toggle back to the comprehensive view, controlling his or her own experience of the map.

In this image the map has been segmented into eight pieces, but the actual Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters is one continuous strip that measures nearly eleven feet long and a little over two inches wide. When encountering it in person, the river only gradually comes into view over time, making the experience of using the map more like traveling on the river itself. The digital image serves as a solution to a representational problem: namely, how a map of such an unusual size and shape can be made to conform to a rectangular screen. This twenty-first century challenge seems remote from the context of the post-Civil War era to which this map dates, but it mirrors difficulties that nineteenth-century Americans faced in translating their ideas and experiences of the river into visual representations. Published in 1866 by St. Louis-based entrepreneurs Myron Coloney and Sidney B. Fairchild, the ribbon map’s singular focus on the river and its exaggerated dimensions assert the enduring relevance of the Mississippi River after the Civil War, both to the nation’s identity and to its commercial future.

The map is a hand-colored lithograph that was initially printed on one sheet of paper (fig. 2). One version of it appeared in the 1866 edition of Edwards’ Descriptive Gazetteer and Commercial Directory of the Mississippi River, where the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters can be found between an advertisement for Barnum’s Hotel in St. Louis and an account of the Mississippi’s “discovery” by Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this context, the map helps to fold the river into popular contemporary narratives of U.S. history while also signaling that it was intended for use by travelers.

As a single, foldout sheet, the map was similar to maps and guides produced for a growing tourist and transportation industry. By the mid-1830s, examples such as J. Duff’s Traveller’s Guide were available for sale on western steamboats (fig. 3). They typically indicated the general shape of the river channel, gave the location of towns and cities, listed distances between landings, and sometimes included a range of steamboat fares. As might be expected, they almost always focused on the portion of the river system that was actually navigable by steamers. If one were to depart from the main stem of the river to embark on an overland journey, a river map would have been useless because it usually did not give information about the broader region or network of transportation options. By 1866, however, it was imperative to represent the host of railroad tracks increasingly extending from large and small cities alike. Bold black lines extend from various points along the Mississippi and testify to the centrality of the river’s location between western and eastern markets.

Coloney and Fairchild’s patented apparatus required that the single sheet be cut into strips, attached end-to-end, mounted on linen, and then rolled inside a wooden, metal, or paper spool (fig. 4). The resulting portability of the map was crucial because, as advertisements indicated, it was intended for business travelers, steamboat navigators, and tourists. Of this form, the Newberry Library and the Minnesota Historical Society Library hold what seems to be a first edition, while nearly a dozen archives around the U.S. hold an updated second version. With the addition of hundreds of towns, mile markers, islands, landings, landowner and plantation names, and significant Civil War locations, the Lower Mississippi appears to be a settled and thriving commercial space.

In the scroll form, the map’s user pulls the bottom tab to travel upriver from the Head of Passes, where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The seamless and gradual way one would have encountered the river led the New York Sun to christen the Coloney and Fairchild map “[t]he latest style of panorama,” recalling the moving panorama craze of the late 1840s and early 1850s (fig. 5). These gigantic scrolling paintings were presented to seated audiences in darkened rooms and accompanied by narration and music. Moving panoramas presented the river as a comprehensible succession of picturesque landmarks, burgeoning towns, western metropolises, and notable historical sites, simulating an imaginary steamboat journey. Scholars have asserted the central role that these popular spectacles had in supporting the ideology of Manifest Destiny, as the imagery naturalized a continuous and conflict-free progression through the American continent. The Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters capitalizes on this well-known visual form but allows users to enact their own imaginative travel up the length of the Mississippi. At the same time, since the ribbon map lacks a second spool around which to wrap the already viewed portion, the object had the potential to be as unruly and excessive as the river itself was during periods of high water (fig. 6).

Certain locales would have had particular resonance to the map’s postbellum viewers (fig. 7). The portion of the Mississippi that had been Confederate territory was the focus of a number of strip maps during the war. In January and May of 1862, Harper’s Weekly published depictions of the river between Cairo and New Orleans to orient readers in anticipation of military action in the region. The same year, advertisements for J.T. Lloyd’s Map of the Lower Mississippi from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico asserted that Union commanders requested his version for use in the field.

Just one year after the end of the Civil War, Coloney and Fairchild incorporated significant battle sites on and along the river into their ribbon map. The location of batteries, Jefferson Davis’s plantation, and even “Grant’s Cutoff”—an attempt to bypass the Confederate-controlled section of the river at Vicksburg that was ultimately abandoned—are all included. These new landmarks form elements of a newly unified river’s historical landscape and reinforce the notion that the Mississippi was national terrain.

Part of the reunification effort, as far as St. Louis businessmen like Coloney and Edwards were concerned, was the reestablishment of St. Louis as the preeminent commercial center of the West (fig. 8). Momentum had shifted away from St. Louis and the Lower Mississippi to Chicago and its rail networks by the end of the 1850s. Yet even in 1866, St. Louis boosters did not view Chicago’s permanent ascendance as inevitable. They put their stock in their city’s geographic position near the confluence of both the Missouri and the Ohio rivers. They continued to push for navigation improvements and strengthened their connection to the port at New Orleans. Additionally, in his position as commercial editor of the Missouri Democrat, Coloney was a vocal advocate for updating the city’s waterfront by adding grain elevators and using barges to transport grain in bulk. Although some railroad maps tried to shear St. Louis from the region, the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters pictures St. Louis as the natural repository for the agricultural bounty of the Upper Mississippi.

In the uppermost 470 miles of the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters—from St. Anthony Falls to the river’s headwaters—the Mississippi flows mostly west to east, though that is not made evident by the consistent linearity of the map (fig. 9). Despite the fact that others had shown this to be quite a watery area, only a few patches and lines of blue disrupt the relatively vacant space of the map. The two named lakes inscribe the river with national significance as the monikers refer to expeditions by territorial governor Lewis Cass and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to locate the source of the great river in 1820 and 1832, respectively. To reinforce the authenticity of his findings, Schoolcraft renamed what had been known as Elk Lake or Lac La Biche to the indigenous and French inhabitants of the area as “Itasca,” the composite of parts of two Latin words: veritas (true) and caput (head).

This uppermost portion—nearly one-sixth of the map’s total length—would have been unnecessary information for a steamboat traveler in 1866, as it is far beyond the head of navigation and there was no touristic infrastructure in the area. Its presence serves other ideological purposes, naturalizing the boundaries of the nation and emphasizing the connectivity provided by a unified river.

The completely unfurled map extends beyond the limits of the user’s reach, wondrously embodying the scope of the river in the time it took to unroll it and in the eleven feet of space it now occupies. At the same time, the care required to wind the strip back into Coloney and Fairchild’s patented spool apparatus reiterates the precariousness of human control—either representational or environmental—over the mercurial Mississippi. While digitization has immense value for the preservation of historical objects and for making archival collections more accessible, in this case, the opportunity to experience the map on its own material terms opens up layers of meaning that a digital interface obscures.

Further Reading

For a multifaceted discussion of the history of maps, see James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr., eds., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago, 2007). Martin Brückner has written about maps as mobile objects in “The Ambulatory Map: Commodity, Mobility, and Visualcy in Eighteenth-Century Colonial America,” Winterthur Portfolio (2011): 141-160. Recent attempts to relate the experience of nineteenth-century travel to its representation are Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America (Ann Arbor, 2006) and Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor, 2013). Louis C. Hunter’s Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, Mass., 1949) is a classic introduction to the steamboat age. On the Vicksburg campaign and the battle for the Mississippi River during the Civil War, see Lisa M. Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens, Ga., 2012) and William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (Lincoln, Neb., 2003). William Cronon tells the story of Chicago’s rise to prominence over St. Louis in Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), while Adam Arenson details the perspective of St. Louisans in The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). On the ways that the search for the river’s “true source” is related to claims about knowledge and authority, see Rich Heyman, “Locating the Mississippi: Landscape, Nature, and National Territoriality at the Mississippi Headwaters,” American Quarterly 62:2 (June 2010): 303-333.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Nenette Luarca-Shoaf was the 2014-15 Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota. She is working on a book about the role of nineteenth-century visual culture in shaping the identity of the Mississippi River.

Or, building a better world with iron

Several years ago, while teaching one of those history surveys that gallops across great events as if they were pebbles at Belmont, I asked my students to name a revolutionary. I had in mind Tom Paine—whose Common Sense we had just read—or perhaps Marx. I should not have been surprised by the answer I got: Bill Gates.

A revolutionary? Yes, my students told me. After all, Gates had changed everything. And he did not do this by accident. He even wrote a book, The Road Ahead (New York, 1996), whose first chapter bears the very Trotskyite title “A Revolution Begins.” In that chapter, Gates reflected upon his achievements, the revolutionary looking back on the revolution. What did they know, he and Paul Allen, a couple of school kids tinkering with some funky machine at little old Lakeside School? Well, “We caused a kind of revolution—peaceful, mainly—and now the computer has taken up residence in our offices and in our homes.” 

My students agreed. The PC had changed the world. For them, it was clear: things made history. It was a curious, if partly semantic, problem. Would this make Eli Whitney and James Watt more radical than Thomas Jefferson or John Brown? 

I had not given the problem much thought until I recently started doing some research on Tom Paine. What drew me to Paine was his peripatetic life. I had finished a project about a traveler who was a contemporary of Paine’s and who led a similarly transatlantic existence. This phenomenon was something I wanted to explore further and Paine seemed the ultimate exemplar of the mobile eighteenth century. 

As I started reading Paine, I found myself drawn in an unexpected direction, albeit one that in a weird way validated what those undergrads were telling me some years ago. Paine spent most of the final twenty years of his life pursuing answers to an extraordinary technological problem. The problem was simply this: how do you create a reliable, sturdy, weather-resistant bridge that can span rivers without impeding water traffic? What a mundane problem to occupy the author of The Rights of Man. 

And yet the problem was anything but mundane. Paine’s world was a water world. Everything traveled more quickly and more cheaply by water. Where there were no rivers or seas there was little of anything else. What farmers and trappers and miners and other producers could bring to market depended on ready access to water transport. We do not generally think of the Connecticut River or the Schuylkill River or the James River as hugely important commercial arteries. But in the eighteenth century they were. If you stood on their banks in the right season, you would see logs bound together as huge rafts, fifty and sixty foot dugout canoes loaded with deerskins or dried fish, and small sailing craft carrying grain, livestock, or tobacco. 

If you lived, say, in the far northwestern corner of Connecticut—hardly a remote place—you may as well have lived in Siberia. (Actually, you might have been better off in Siberia. The Russians had developed an enormous and well-traveled network of post roads—maintained by state-owned serfs—stretching from Lake Baikal in Siberia to St. Petersburg. Interestingly, these were more efficient arteries during the long winters when horse pulled sledges could glide across what would otherwise be wet, boggy terrain.). Getting anything to market—you would probably head to the river town of Hartford—would have involved a treacherous journey across barely maintained trails, usually unable to accommodate any kind of cart or carriage and all but impassible in the winter months. If, heaven forbid, you should stumble upon the swollen Housatonic or Farmington Rivers, you would hope to find a ferryman nearby and you would hope he knew and liked you and was happy to take a few pounds of grain or a few deer skins for his services. You would also hope the weather cooperated. Storms and spring ice made river crossings a deadly business.

Imagine a world without these problems. Imagine simply being able to carry your goods across a bridge. Sure, you might have to pay a toll, but you could travel when you wished, unimpeded by the comings and goings of ferrymen and foul weather. And you could expect, with a nice bridge across the Housatonic for instance, that others would be following you to market, perhaps now carrying large loads of corn and rye. And with those others now happily farming in northwest Connecticut, more people would be more dependent on roads and thus more inclined to band together to maintain them. Above all, if you could make rivers easy to cross you could open once remote tracts to European-style farming and if you could do that you could, in theory anyway, make more land available to more people. You could, to put it simply, help the cause of liberty.

This would all have been very agreeable to Tom Paine. He believed in property and he believed in the “projecting spirit,” that spirit of invention that seemed to inhere in the breasts of all men (this was, as far as I know, understood to be a distinctly masculine quality). He thus advocated the creation of a national system of copyright so that authors could, in effect, claim proprietary interests in their work. Not only would this afford fair remuneration, it would also—so Paine believed—spur creativity. Why create if you cannot serve yourself in the process?

Bridge technology was obviously not a new thing in Tom Paine’s America. The Romans had created great stone ones and Europeans continued to build stone bridges using what was basically a modified Roman design. In the new United States, small wooden bridges were most common. They required little specialized knowledge and far less labor than stone bridges. But above all, wood was far more abundant in North America than in Europe. 

Wooden bridges had a number of problems though. One was simply that they decayed. Moisture softens all but the rarest hardwoods, exposing load-bearing timbers to wood-boring organisms that can, in a matter of months, turn them into sawdust. The problem is especially acute on the flat road surface where pounding wagon wheels and horse hooves combine with accumulated rainwater, snow, or ice to speed decay. By the early nineteenth century, American bridge builders had devised a solution to this problem in the form of the covered bridge, but other problems with wood remained.

One was that building a wooden bridge long enough to span more than ten or fifteen feet was extremely difficult. With a growing scarcity of long, hard timbers, bridge builders had to rely on supporting piers. Aside from inhibiting river traffic, these were extremely difficult to build. They usually required temporary parapets, built midriver, within which stone foundations could be constructed. But even the most robust piers were vulnerable to forceful flood waters and spring ice.

Paine was among a small group of tinkerers who recognized that the solution to these problems lay in an old material put to a new use. That material was, of course, iron. In the short term, iron lost no strength when wet, and it could be easily fashioned into light, readily transported arches, western architecture’s strongest element. The strength of the arch allowed bridge builders to span waterways without costly piers that inhibited river traffic. But above all, Paine and his fellow inventors saw few limits to the potential span of iron bridges. As long as the basic design was sound, the scale was limited only by the ironworkers’ capacity to fashion the arches. 

The material’s first real trial came in 1779 when an ironmaster named Abraham Darby III completed the world’s first iron bridge over the Severn River Gorge near the town of Coalbrookdale in England. It was a spectacular achievement. The one hundred-foot arch eased the movement of labor, manufactured goods, and raw materials fueling the region’s booming industrial economy. 

Great though the Coalbrookdale Bridge was, Paine recognized several drawbacks. The first was that it was made from a vast, semicircular arch, whose height made the design feasible only for rivers running through deep gorges—or for bridges with costly embankment towers. And second, it remained largely the work of a single, creative mind. There were no plans or instructions on how similar structures might be erected elsewhere. If more such bridges were to be built, they would have to be built by Darby. This is one reason it took a decade and a half for Britain’s next full-scale iron bridge to appear.

Paine’s ambition was to solve both of these problems. He believed the same basic design principles could be applied to a much shallower arch, fashioned from a “small segment of a large circle.” Such a shallow arch could span more than a hundred feet and required no more than five feet of vertical clearance. An arch was an arch. The same principles that applied to large segments of smaller circles applied to smaller segments of giant circles.

But perhaps even more innovative was Paine’s approach to the design and construction process. Instead of crafting a bridge in the way a joiner might a house or a wheelwright a wagon wheel—relying on experience and individual knowledge passed from one craftsperson to the next—he would begin with a design. And that design would be carefully tested, codified, and disseminated. Though he was a great advocate of individual patents, he would not seek one for his iron bridge. It was to become part of the public domain, accessible to all much like the uncannily crisp prose of his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense.

It was all very democratic and very much contrary to the closed and carefully guarded practices of the artisans and trade guilds in which Paine had once found his most loyal political constituency.

This story, like much else in Paine’s life, ends in failure. Paine’s design never made it beyond a prototype exhibited near London. Paine eventually tried to persuade the American Congress to invest in an ambitious version, but to no avail. Nobody in the new American polity—an increasingly Christian polity—wanted to pay the price of associating with such an unapologetic skeptic. It would not be for another thirty years, long after Paine’s passing, that an actual iron bridge would be built in the United States. 

Paine blamed the initial collapse of the project on the French Revolution. It was that event that prompted his former friend, Edmund Burke, to publish a popular defense of hereditary rule. The greatest political pamphleteer of the time could not sit idly by. He abandoned the iron bridge project to compose The Rights of Man, a searing rejoinder to Burke. “The publication of this work of Mr. Burke,” he later wrote, “drew me from my bridge operations, and my time became employed in defending a system [of representative government] then established and operating in America and which I wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe.” 

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be. Paine saw in bridge design a handmaiden of social and political change. In encouraging freedom of movement, bridges could free individuals to better themselves. They could free farmers and merchants and craftspeople to move freely through the countryside, and in doing this, they could free them to prosper and become true citizens with a vested interest in the political nation. 

Further Reading:

Paine discussed his iron bridge activities in several letters but he said most about the project in his 1803 petition to Congress, reprinted in Eric Foner, ed., Paine: Collected Writings (New York, 1995). Paine’s remarks on copyright appear in a 1782 letter to the Abbé Raynal, reprinted in volume 2 of Philip S. Foner, ed. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945). The most recent and most complete treatment of Paine and his iron bridge appears in chapter 9 of John Keane’s Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 5.4 (July, 2005).

Edward Gray is the Editor of Common-place and associate professor of history at Florida State University.