American History: 19th Century

“A Gentleman and an Officer”: A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin's Civil War

James B. Griffin

Judith N. McArthur, Orville Vernon Burton (eds)

In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina, and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the ... More

In 1861, James B. Griffin left Edgefield, South Carolina, and rode off to Virginia to take up duty with the Confederate Army. He was thirty-five years old, a wealthy planter, and the owner of sixty-one slaves when he joined Wade Hampton's elite Legion as a major of cavalry. This book features eighty of Griffin's letters written at the Virginia front, and during later postings on the South Carolina coast, to his wife Leila Burt Griffin. The letters encompass Griffin's entire Civil War service, detailing living conditions and military maneuvers, the jockeying for position among officers, and the different ways in which officers and enlisted men interacted. The letters shed light on the life of a middle officer—a life of extreme military hardship, complicated further by the need for reassurance about personal valor and status common to men of the southern gentry. Griffin describes secret troop movements, such as the Hampton Legion's role in the Peninsula Campaign. Here he relates the march from Manassas to Fredricksburg, the siege of Yorktown and the retreat to Richmond, and the fighting at Eltham's landing and Seven Pines, where Griffin commanded the Legion after Hampton was wounded. Griffin recounts day-to-day issues, from the weather to gossip. Monumental historical events sent Griffin off to war but his heartfelt considerations were about his family, his community, and his own personal pride. Griffin's letters present the Civil War as the ordeal by fire that tested and verified—or modified—Southern upperclass values. Less

Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America

Martha H. Verbrugge

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and ... More

This book examines the philosophies, experiences, and instructional programs of white and black female physical educators who taught in public schools and diverse colleges and universities, including coed and single-sex, public and private, and predominantly white or black institutions. Working primarily with female students, women physical educators had to consider what an active female could and should do compared to an active male. Applying concepts of sex differences, they debated the implications of female anatomy, physiology, reproductive functions, and psychosocial traits for achieving gender parity in the gym. Teachers’ interpretations were contingent on where they worked and whom they taught. They also responded to broad historical conditions, including developments in American feminism, law, and education, society’s changing attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality, and scientific controversies over sex differences and the relative weight of nature versus nurture. While deliberating fairness for female students, white and black women physical educators also pursued equity for themselves, as their workplaces and nascent profession often marginalized female and minority personnel. Questions of difference and equity divided the field throughout the twentieth century; while some women teachers favored moderate views and incremental change, others promoted justice for their students and themselves by exerting authority at their schools, critiquing traditional concepts of “difference,” and devising innovative curricula. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book sheds new light on physical education’s application of scientific ideas, the politics of gender, race, and sexuality in the domain of active bodies, and the enduring complexities of difference and equity in American culture. Less

After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915

John M. Giggie

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start ... More

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s. Less

Aggressive Nationalism: McCulloch v. Maryland and the Foundation of Federal Authority in the Young Republic

Richard E. Ellis

This book examines the public debate that took place over Chief Justice John Marshall's famous decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). It sheds new light on how the case came before ... More

This book examines the public debate that took place over Chief Justice John Marshall's famous decision in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). It sheds new light on how the case came before the US Supreme Court. It also examines many of the key issues involved in the case that John Marshall either slighted or totally ignored: the private profit-making nature of the Second Bank of the United States (2 BUS); the power of the 2 BUS to create branches in the states without their consent, which many people viewed as a direct assault upon the sovereignty of the states and which they feared would lead to the creation of other privately controlled profit-making national corporations that could operate within a state and yet be beyond its control; and the differences between a tax levied by a state for the purposes of raising revenue and one which was meant to destroy the operations of the branches of the 2 BUS. These issues are particularly important to understand because they were at the heart of Ohio's unwillingness to abide by the Supreme Court's decision and which eventually led to Osborn et. al. v. Bank of the United States (1824) and formed the basis for Andrew Jackson's famous veto for the rechartering of the 2 BUS in 1832. The book also examines the relationship between McCulloch v. Maryland and the creation of a federal program of internal improvements. Less

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

J. Matthew Gallman

One of the most celebrated women of her time, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye ... More

One of the most celebrated women of her time, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades. This book offers a full-length biography of Dickinson. The book describes how Dickinson's passionate patriotism and fiery style, coupled with her abolitionism and biting critiques of anti-war Democrats struck a nerve with her audiences. In barely two years, she rose from being an unknown young Philadelphia radical, to becoming a successful New England stump speaker and eventually a national celebrity. At the height of her fame, Dickinson counted many of the nation's leading reformers, authors, politicians, and actors among her friends. Among the famous figures who populate this book are Susan B. Anthony, Whitelaw Reid, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book explores Dickinson's public triumphs but also discloses how, as her public career waned, she battled with her managers, critics, audiences, and family. The book demonstrates how Dickinson's life illustrates the possibilities and barriers faced by 19th-century women, revealing how their behavior could at once be seen as worthy, highly valued, shocking, and deviant. Less

Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War

Bruce Levine

This book offers an illuminating account of Major-General Patrick Cleburne's fascinating and politically charged idea — that “the most courageous of our slaves” be trained as soldiers ... More

This book offers an illuminating account of Major-General Patrick Cleburne's fascinating and politically charged idea — that “the most courageous of our slaves” be trained as soldiers and that “every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war” be freed. This book looks closely at such Confederate plans to arm and free slaves. It shows that by 1865, within only a year of Cleburne's proposal, which was initially rejected out of hand, Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Robert E. Lee had all reached the same conclusions. At that point, the idea was debated widely in newspapers and drawing rooms across the South, as more and more slaves fled to Union lines and fought in the ranks of the Union army. Eventually, the soldiers of Lee's army voted on the proposal, and the Confederate government actually enacted a version of it in March. The Army issued the necessary orders just two weeks before Appomattox, too late to affect the course of the war. The book aims to capture the voices of blacks and whites, wealthy planters and poor farmers, soldiers and officers, and newspaper editors and politicians from all across the South. In the process, it sheds light on issues such as what the Confederacy was fighting for, whether black southerners were willing to fight in large numbers in defense of the South, and what this episode foretold about life and politics in the post-war South. Less

Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands

Lindsay G. Robertson

In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down a Supreme Court decision of monumental importance in defining the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the English-speaking world (the ... More

In 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall handed down a Supreme Court decision of monumental importance in defining the rights of indigenous peoples throughout the English-speaking world (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). At the heart of the decision for Johnson v. M'Intosh was a “discovery doctrine” that gave rights of ownership to the European sovereigns who “discovered” the land and converted the indigenous owners into tenants. Though its meaning and intention has been fiercely disputed, more than 175 years later, this doctrine remains the law of the land. In 1991, while investigating the discovery doctrine's historical origins this book's author made a startling find: in the basement of a Pennsylvania furniture-maker, he discovered a trunk with the complete corporate records of the Illinois and Wabash Land Companies, the plaintiffs in Johnson v. M'Intosh. This book provides a complete and troubling account of the European “discovery” of the Americas, detailing how a spurious claim gave rise to a doctrine — intended to be of limited application — which itself gave rise to a massive displacement of persons and the creation of a law that governs indigenous people and their lands to this day. Less

Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era 1837-1873

Jay Sexton

The United States was a debtor nation in the mid-19th century, with half of its national debt held overseas. Lacking the resources to develop the nation and to fund the wars necessary to ... More

The United States was a debtor nation in the mid-19th century, with half of its national debt held overseas. Lacking the resources to develop the nation and to fund the wars necessary to expand and then preserve it, the United States looked across the Atlantic for investment capital. The need to obtain foreign capital greatly influenced American foreign policy, principally relations with Britain. The intersection of finance and diplomacy was particularly evident during the Civil War when both the North and South integrated attempts to procure loans from European banks into their larger international strategies. Furthermore, the financial needs of the United States (and the Confederacy) imparted significant political power to an elite group of London-based financiers who became intimately involved in American foreign relations during this period. This study explores and assesses how the United State's need for capital influenced its foreign relations in the tumultuous years wedged between the two great financial crises of the 19th century, 1837 to 1873. Drawing on the unused archives of London banks and the papers of statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, this work illuminates our understanding of mid-19th-century American foreign relations by highlighting how financial considerations influenced the formation of foreign policy and functioned as a peace factor in Anglo-American relations. This study also analyses a crucial, but ignored, dimension of the Civil War — the efforts of both the North and the South to attract the support of European financiers. Though foreign contributions to each side failed to match the hopes of Union and Confederate leaders, the financial diplomacy of the Civil War shaped the larger foreign policy strategies of both sides and contributed to both the preservation of British neutrality and the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy. Less

Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South

Lacy K. Ford,

A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, this book illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the ... More

A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, this book illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson. Drawing on primary sources, including newspapers, government documents, legislative records, pamphlets, and speeches, this book recaptures the varied and sometimes contradictory ideas and attitudes held by groups of white southerners as they debated the slavery question. The book conveys the political, intellectual, economic, and social thought of leading white southerners, vividly recreating the mental world of the varied actors. The book also shows that there was not one antebellum South but many, and not one southern white mindset but several, with the debates over slavery in the upper South quite different in substance from those in the deep South. Less