TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Political and Economic Virginia, 1820-1883
This section is under construction. For reviews currently available, see the webpage for this topic, or Survey Histories of Virginia for general, political and ethnic histories.
Antebellum Virginia Policy, 1820-1850
Sectionalism in Virginia
Sectionalism in Virginia, 1776-1861 was written by Charles Henry Ambler in 1910 and reprinted in 2013 and 2017 in the United Kingdom. It illuminates the political divisions within Virginia between eastern and western sections as they developed geographically, ethnically and economically from 1776 to 1861.
Independence, constitutional ratification, the rise of the Jefferson and Federalist parties, the personal entanglements of the National Republican period, and the Democratic-Whig party divisions are analyzed. Issues of internal improvements and slavery, the tariff and nullification, electoral reform, the churches and education are all explored. Learn more to buy “Sectionalism in Virginia” at Amazon.co.uk for your bookshelf.
The Slaveholding Republic
The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery was written by Don E. Fehrenbacher and edited by Ward M. McAfee in 2001 and reprinted in 2002, now available in paperback. After analyzing the original Constitution as neutral regarding slavery, Fehrenbacher describes how the federal government became implicated in the institution of slavery, becoming congenial to it even as it became increasingly isolated in the southern national minority.
Pro-slavery policy shaped America’s foreign policy before 1861, the federal government came to intervene in the northern states over fugitive slaves and in the territories over the establishment of slavery. Over time there came to be a hardening in the positions staked out by the two sections, and finally in the crucible of war the federal government adopted abolition as a war aim. Learn more to buy “The Slaveholding Republic” here for your bookshelf.
Conjectures of Order
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 was written by Michael O’Brien in 2004. It is a two volume examination of over one hundred southern intellectuals, with Virginians and South Carolinians dominating. Southern intellectuals were nationalists, postcolonialists preferring Continental writers over British, and imperialists seeking to expand white liberty and the black slavery on which it rested.
A late Enlightenment phase in the 1830s emphasizing the self-reliant republican freeholder yielded to a romantic notion of belonging that lamented the passing of family and traditional connections. During the 1850s a generation of realists emerged who conceded that one could not have both power and morality, advancing “an imperial regime of ruthless ambition”.
Southern political thought came to emphasize political economy at the hands of Virginia’s Thomas R. Dew, Charleston’s Jacob Cardozo, Kentucky’s Henry Clay and South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. An important dimension of the region’s intellectual life addressed slavery. William Harper insisted a defense of slavery required a repudiation of egalitarianism. Henry Hughes rejected individualism for collectivity in a supreme state, and George Fitzhugh denounced individualism and social contract for power and subjection. Learn more to buy “Conjectures of Order” here for your bookshelf.
The Second American Party System
The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era was written by Richard P. McCormack in 1966 and reprinted in 1973. Beginning in 1824 with the end of the Jeffersonian Virginia Dynasty and extending to the 1840s, a second American party system developed to elect the president with national party conventions, state caucuses and the extension of voter participation.
In a party system remarkably free of sectional bias, each state among the 24 states in 1824 save South Carolina developed a competitive two party system between Democrats and Whigs. It gave way to a third party system of sectional division only in the 1850s.
McCormick describes the state constitutional and legal frameworks that defined party operation such as changing presidential elector methods, along with the selection of Congressmen and state officials. The parties became engines of candidate nomination and electioneering. The popular rhetoric of both parties made elections an emotional experience, and it fostered the expansion of the electorate. Learn more to buy “Second American Party System” here for your bookshelf.
Democratizing the Old Dominion
Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861 was written by William G. Shade in 1996. The book explains Virginia’s rapid democratization that preceded the 1851 constitutional introduction of universal manhood suffrage. The engine of change was the vigorous two-party competition between Democrats and Whigs due to Virginia’s rapid economic and social changes.
While the fortunes of the eastern legislative majorities advocated for the declining tobacco interests, the more numerous and influential “new men” of a burgeoning commercial economy made the state on of the nation’s largest exporters of wheat and corn.
Both political parties appealed to the “plain folk” interests for their votes on issues with many-sided coalitions among groups and competing agricultural and industrial interests in a dozen sub-regions in Virginia, in the same way as Northern states did. Only in the 1850s did proslavery sentiment re-emerge to lead Virginians to defend slavery, whether readily or reluctantly. Learn more to buy “Democratizing the Old Dominion” here for your bookshelf.
Constitution Making in the Old Dominion
Revolution to Secession: Constitution Making in the Old Dominion was written by Robert P. Sutton in 1989. It explains that the conflict between republican ideals and sectionalism persisted throughout Virginia’s history until the final break away by West Virginia. The first convention of 1776 and the two in 1829-30 and 1850-51 failed to provide for amendment to accommodate changes in population and regional wealth distribution that drove calls for changes in suffrage and representation.
In both conventions of 1829-30 and 1850-51, the contests among progressives and traditionalists, westerners and easterners, democrats and aristocrats resulted in persistent eastern slave property values dominating state government. The white population of the west which surpassed that of the eastern Tidewater found proportionate representation only in the House of Delegates only after 1850. Learn more to buy “Constitution Making in the Old Dominion” here for your bookshelf.
Rise of the Whigs
The Rise of the Whigs in Virginia, 1824-1840 was written by Henry H. Simms in 1929 and reprinted in 2012. It looks at the county results in presidential elections following the end of the presidential Virginia Dynasty. The Whig Party found adherents among commercial interests of the state as well as propertied men of industry and slaveholding. The state divisions were not so much east-west or slave-free labor, but those who had a felt need for commercial, banking and transportation development, and those whose existing conditions sufficed for their empowerment. Whigs generally were anti-slavery, promoting colonization of free blacks they considered surplus population in a white man’s republic.
While Whigs grew to a competitive party after 1832 they did not carry the state in presidential elections of 1836 and 1840. Instead, they captured the General Assembly in 1834 and 1838-1840, and Virginia Governors in 1834, 1836, 1840, 1841 and 1842. The Democrats retained uninterrupted control, causing a deadlock for U.S. Senator, leaving only one representing Virginia 1839-41.
Though the Richmond Enquirer dominated the press and was countered by the Richmond Whig, other important papers are sourced from Lynchburg, Charlottesville and Winchester. Important leaders include Rives, Leigh, Tazewell, Tyler and Upshur. Learn more to buy “Rise of the Whigs” here for your bookshelf.
Road from Monticello
The Road from Monticello: A Study of the Virginia Slavery Debate of 1832 was written by Joseph C. Robert in 1941 and reprinted in 2010. Following Nat Turner’s insurrection and murder of 60 whites, Virginia’s House of Delegates took up a debate to abolish slavery. William O. Goode had proposed that no measure to abolish slavery be taken up in committee, and Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of Thomas Jefferson, proposed emancipation at birth for succeeding generations. Conservatives and slaveholders generally opposed abolition, an equal number of liberals and western Virginians generally favored it, and the balance of power was held by twelve who sought gradual emancipation after recover from the current economic downturn when it could be financed.
An account of the pro-slavery arguments stressing slavery as a positive good was written by Thomas Roderick Dew of William and Mary, “Review of the Debate”. It became a handbook for slavery advocates throughout the South. Henry Ruffner, President of Washington College wrote the anti-slavery “Address to the People of West Virginia”, which was taken up by the Abolitionists. Virginians retreated from calls for abolition due to fear of dividing the state, the growing influence of the nullifiers, resistance to Abolitionists, and the exportation of half a million slave population to the booming cotton states. Learn more to buy “Road from Monticello” here for your bookshelf.
Drift Toward Dissolution
Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832 was written by Alison Goodyear Freehling in 1982. Here Freehling sees no retreat from Jeffersonian liberalism, although the terms of the debate shift from natural rights to economic concerns related to slave freedman removal. The consensus was that slavery was a property right but a political evil that either posed a physical threat in slave majority counties, or served as an economic drag on the state’s economy.
Antislavery forces gained a kind of victory with the preamble to a resolution looking forward to a future free soil Virginia, only without blacks. The emancipation movement depended on the success of colonization efforts of free blacks, but African-American Virginians were reluctant to migrate. Antislavery momentum declined with the forced removal of slaves into cotton Gulf states, but the east-west sectional divisions in Virginia led to the creation of West Virginia. Learn more to buy “Drift Toward Dissolution” here for your bookshelf.
Dominion of Memories
From the richest state with the largest population, producing not only the tobacco cash crop, but also the most pig iron in the nation, Virginia became “poor on principle,” as Philip Nicholas declared in the General Assembly in 1829. In The Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of Virginia, Susan Dunn chronicles Virginia’s deliberate legislative choice over decades to throttle enterprise and industrial development.The Slave Power
Leonard L. Richards wrote The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1789-1860 in 2000. It is now available in paperback. The three-fifths rule of Congressional apportionment awarding seats to slave-holding states influenced presidential elections and national policy through the Congressional Caucus. Just at the caucus system died, the Jacksonian Democrats emerged to dominate with southern leaders and northern candidates submissive to the “slave power”.
Late antebellum Southern victories included annexing Texas, the Fugitive Slave Law and Dred Scott. Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court were anti-white majoritarian, and northerners resented it, and Lincoln’s Republican Party benefitted in 1960. Learn more to buy “The Slave Power” here for your bookshelf.
North Over South
Susan-Mary Grant wrote North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era in 2000. It is now available in paperback. The South as a region changed the least in the antebellum period, while the North was transformed. Amidst Northern insecurities from urbanization, immigration and industrialization, the South was represented by northern thinkers as a blight to Northern progress and a threat to the republic. A truly national outlook became impossible in the face of aggressive Northern sectionalism.
The North was energetic, entrepreneurial, free and virtuously republican, while the South was lazy, caste-ridden, slave-holding and run by petty despots. Learn more to buy “North over South” here for your bookshelf.
Storm over Texas
Joel H. Silbey wrote Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War in 2005. Texas Annexation began the shift away from partisan divisions related to “republican liberty” toward sectional divisions related to slavery. The ascendance of the James K. Polk faction in the Democratic Party dissolved sectional reciprocity. Many northern Democrats adopted the abolitionist view that there was a slave power conspiracy to control the country.
The Kansas Nebraska Act completed the loss of sectional comity that the national parties once provided, and the nation’s politics devolved into sectional animosity. Learn more to buy “Storm Over Texas” here for your bookshelf.
Antebellum Virginia Economics, 1820-1850
Notes from the Ground
Benjamin R. Cohen wrote Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil and Society in the American Countryside in 2009. It is now available from the Yale University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Around 1830 the number of agricultural, horticultural and floricultural societies exploded. Prominent agriculturists included Edmund Ruffin of Virginia who celebrated agricultural labor, local experience and systematic experimentation. First hand experience with the soil, even for a short period of time, took on a critical meaning, and knowledge of the soil became a way of credentialing public officials, and a common metaphor in public expression.
Through the pages of publications by the Albemarle Agricultural Society and the Agricultural Society of Virginia, chemistry, or “composition” emerged as the critical element of soil fertility or infertility. Its proper manipulation brought the promise of restoration for exhausted lands with surplus slaves and hard scrabble yeomanry.
To buy “Notes from the Ground” on Amazon, click here.
Tredegar Iron Works
Tredegar Iron Works: Richmond’s Foundry on the James (2015) by Nathan Vernon Madison is a 192 paged popular history of the Richmond iron works that produced military cannon and equipment during five wars and contributed to the growing railroads of the Gilded Age and supplied items for the railroad, horseshoe and ordnance industries into the 1920s. More than a small-time parochial business, it maintained the characteristics of an antebellum enterprise, without steel innovations and without the giant growth of Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel. Buy “Tredegar Iron Works” at Amazon.com here.
Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism
Daniel Goldfield wrote Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia, 1847-1861 in 1977. It is available in paperback new and used. Virginia’s sectionalism inspired leaders, including some planters, to promote commerce, trade and urbanization by investing in banking, railroad and manufacturing. Though growing at slower rate than New York City, Virginia cities had accelerating growth and prosperity following the Mexican War.
In this study of Richmond and Petersburg, Norfolk and Alexandria, Lynchburg and Wheeling, Goldfield explains how the “city builders” of a civic elite developed a conscious southern urban civilization. But in its close integration with the slave-holding hinterland, it was related to sectionalism. Learn more to buy “Urban Growth” here for your bookshelf.
A House Dividing
John Majewski wrote A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War in 2000. It is now available in paperback. Virginians prospered before secession, but they grew without developing entirely as a state because slave-holding interests proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to entrepreneurial plans. The book details an analysis of two failed canal companies in Albemarle County, Virginia and Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.
Both counties were nearby major cities (Richmond, Philadelphia). But Virginia never developed an integrated transportation centered on a single place, Tidewater slavery and slave interests enforced smothering policies that retarded development among both Piedmont slave-holding counties nearby Richmond, and free labor counties west of the Blue Ridge. Learn more to buy “A House Dividing” here for your bookshelf.
Coal, Iron and Slaves
Ronald Lewis wrote Coal, Iron and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia in 1979. It is out of print, but available online new and used. The study traces the rise and fall of iron and coal production in the Chesapeake and Piedmont from British imperial suppliers beginning in 1717, through new nation competition and its demise at the Civil War. Both state legislatures offered little support, and there was little innovation in new management procedures or technological advances.
Slaves continued to be used when their hiring costs rose relative to free white laborers, further marginalizing competitive advantage. The “overwork” system gained slaves material progress amidst labor relations of “forced compromise”, but still the industry was plagued by violence against masters and runaways. Learn more to buy “Coal, Iron and Slaves” here for your bookshelf.
Cabell’s Canal
Langhorne Gibson, Jr. wrote Cabell’s Canal: The Story of the James River and Kanawha in 2000. It is out of print but available online used. The title character is Joseph Carrington Cabell, who raised millions in private subscriptions and millions in legislature financing to promote the dream of a James River Canal. He advanced the dreams of visionaries such as Jefferson and Washington.
Several canal and lock proposals were funded by joint public and private schemes and failed, most notably at the resignation Napoleonic engineer Claudius Crozet who in turn promoted railroads. Cabell successfully retarded Virginia’s railroad development in the legislature until the 1850s, when rail mileage trebled in a decade. Learn more to buy “Cabell’s Canal” here for your bookshelf.
Southwest Virginia’s Railroad
Kenneth W. Noe wrote Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis in 1994. It is now available in paperback. The Virginia and Tennessee Railroad from Bristol, Tennessee to Lynchburg with connections to Richmond, transformed the regional economy in the 1850s. It promoted a commercial slave-based economy of tobacco and wheat, along with extractive industry and hot springs tourism.
The developments made for an “iron road to secession”, breaking the former political commonalities with other western Virginia counties. Learn more to buy “The Edge of the South” here for your bookshelf.
Appalachian Frontiers
Robert D. Mitchell edited Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society and Development in the Preindustrial Era in 1991. It is out of print but available online used. The anthology explores the commercial tendencies inherent in the region’s land tenure, agricultural output including cattle export, mercantile operations of trading posts and itinerants, and a diverse social structure.
Appalachia in the pre-industrial antebellum period should be viewed as a place in process undergoing recognizable changes. But instead of identifying a retarded development, Mitchell sees a prolonged stage of subsistence agragrarian forms. Learn more to buy “Appalachian Frontiers” here for your bookshelf.
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: coal politics and economy in Antebellum America (2010) by Sean Patrick Adams in 300 pages shows that state legislature politics built institutional structures for the coal industry in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. In Virginia the landed elites fostered policy that proved incapable of balancing disparate geographic and industrial interests. With limited canals improvements, restricted incorporation laws and prohibitive restraint on capital formation, Virginia fell behind Pennsylvania in coal production between 1820 and the end of the 1830s.
The Pennsylvanians started behind the Virginians in the 1790s, their anthracite coal was harder to mine and more difficult to ignite for commercial and domestic use than Virginia’s bituminous coal. But the Pennsylvania canal system connected its fields to eastern markets, and the addition of British coal miners brought skills and innovation that increased productivity not seen among Virginia’s enterprises of slave labor. The Virginian political strategy which served only its eastern tobacco interests led inevitably to an eclipse of Virginia’s leadership in coal production. Buy “Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth” at Amazon.com here.
American City, Southern Place
Greg D. Kimball wrote American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond in 2000. It is currently available in paperback. He evaluates the development of Richmond from 1840 through the Civil War both in its American characteristics and its Southern ties to slavery. He studies native merchants and manufacturers, German artisans and shopkeepers, British ironworkers and African Americans, slave and free in the city.
Richmond was part of a national urban culture including mass party politics, reform movements, Victorian values and neoclassical architecture. It was also tied to the rural slave-holding hinterland of the Piedmont and Tidewater. Richmond residents had various connections to world communities and to Northern society. Learn more to buy “American City, Southern Place” here for your bookshelf.
The Virginia Germans
Klaus Wust wrote The Virginia Germans in 1969. It is currently available in paperback. Wust traces the history of German migrations into Virginia across three centuries along with their “Virginianization” acculturating into the dominant English traditions.
For many years the communities of the mass migration of the 1700s from Pennsylvania and Maryland lived in pockets of “Little Germany”. They were primarily of peasant farming stock. The immigrants in the 1800s into Richmond were primarily artisans and shopkeepers. Learn more to buy “The Virginia Germans” here for your bookshelf.
Sectionalism and Civil War, 1850-1865
Road to Disunion
William W. Freehling wrote The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 in 1990 and reprinted in 2008. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Secessionists overcame the static wishes of a “vast majority of southern whites” by hard work, circumstance and luck. They used the telegraph, railroads and steam presses. Unapologetic about slavery, they insisted on establishing slaveholding states as closed societies, sealed off from any prospective dissembling from Lincoln Administration postal or revenue appointments within each state.
The focus is on the divisions among the South, Lower, Middle and Upper South, and the sharp divisions within border states such as Virginia. Southern disunity extended to topics of Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, Hinton Helper’s anti-slavery pamphlet, John Brown’s Raid and Lincolns election. Learn more to buy “Road to Disunion” here for your bookshelf.
Union at Risk
The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis was written by Richard E. Ellis in 1987. It illuminates three nation factions in contention during the nullification crisis. There were the nationalists of the north and two sorts of states’ righters: Andrew Jackson’s supported decentralized government and perpetual Union, and John C. Calhoun’s who upheld the rights of a national minority and the right to peaceable secession.
While Jackson feared nullification would bring civil war, the Force Bill allowed Calhoun to shift the debate to the question of tariff reform and a coerced Union. Jackson was weakened in his Bank War and had to agree to Henry Clay’s compromise to reduce the tariff. The Democrats gained the explicit merging of states’ rights thinking and proslavery advocacy, and secessionist thinking was strengthened throughout the South. Learn more to buy “Union at Risk” here for your bookshelf.
Gospel of Disunion
Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separation in the Antebellum South was written by Mitchell Snay in 1993. This intellectual history investigates the relationship between religious ideology and separatist movements and southern nationalism. After 1830, northern critics began to argue that slavery was immoral and southern society was evil in principle. The “abolitionist crisis of 1835” led white clerical leaders to first defend human bondage as Biblical, then sanctifying it as the Christianizing agent for Africans. Divisions arose among Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists, leading to sectional schisms among the latter three.
Ecclesiastical divisions provided a model for political disunion. For the Presbyterians, it was the southern churches could maintain their purity by separating from moral impurity. For the Methodists and Baptists, it was that schism was justified because the denominational majorities did not uphold constitutional guarantees upholding southern rights. Learn more to buy “Gospel of Disunion” here for your bookshelf.
Idea of a Southern Nation
John McCardell wrote The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860 in 1979. It is now available in paperback. The Southern sectionalist believed distinctive values and interests could be preserved in the Union in a loose but very real American nationalism. A southern nationalist by contrast saw sectional interests and values incompatible with continued Union.
Southern nationalists used the systematic defense of slavery to attack southern Unionists on every front, from commercial self-sufficiency, distinctive southern literature, separatist religion and education, and advocating southern territorial expansion including a Caribbean empire. Learn more to buy “The Idea of a Southern Nation” here for your bookshelf.
Fate of Their Country
Michael F. Holt wrote The Fate of the Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War in 2004. It is now available in paperback. It is a rehearsal of government intrigue, conflicting sectional interests, personal ambition and unstable expedient compromises made from short term calculations. These were maneuvered without any concern for the long term health or survival of the Union.
All the major political actors, Whigs, Democrats and Free-Soilers all stirred up sectional debates about slavery expansion on the hustings in spite of the Compromise of 1850. Holt sees no “compelling issue” at the time to take to the electorate among them. Learn more to buy “Fate of the Country” here for your bookshelf.
The Impending Crisis
David M. Potter wrote and Don E. Fehrenbacher edited The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 in 1976. It is now available in paperback. The period between the Mexican War and the Civil War has a history of its own where the separate cultural differences among the sections were subservient to an American nation. Potter sees no distinct civilization between the sections despite protestations of exteme advocates; southern nationalism broadly was born of resentment.
The great compromises of 1850 were meant to be an “armistice” on the slavery question in the territories, but provisions for territorial government were ambiguous. Old parties crumbled, and in the North, nativism was a powerful disintegrating force, almost as much as slavery in the South. Learn more to buy “Impending Crisis” here for your bookshelf.
The Shattering of the Union
Eric H. Walther wrote The Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s in 2004. It is now available in paperback. National and international politics in the 1850s was an interplay between political elites and their contending policies on the one hand, and “ordinary people” on the other. By mid century there were clear social and cultural distinctions between the sections North and South.
Northern abolitionists motivated opinion leaders by novels, sociological tracts, magazines and speeches. Yet northerners generally remained simultaneously racist, anti-slavery and opposed to abolition. Southerners saw slavery as a part of the compact of U.S. government. There was a steady rise in violence throughout the decade; the sectional crisis came from value conflicts among many actors. Learn more to buy “Shattering of the Union” here for your bookshelf.
The Dred Scott Case
Don E. Fehrenbacher wrote The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics in 1978. It is now available in paperback. In this Constitutional-legal history, Fehrenbacher analyses the enmeshed elements that became the Dred Scott case in its political, social and economic context. The actual litigation is parsed focusing on Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s distortions, exaggerations and misconstructions of American Constitutional and legal history. Lastly it considers the effects of the decision from the 1860s forward.
Taney sought to expand federal judicial power and influence in order to support slavery, expand it in the territories, and limit black citizenship. The Dred Scott case was the first judicial invalidation of a major federal statute, but it was flawed in its law, logic, history and factual accuracy. Learn more to buy “The Dred Scott Case” here for your bookshelf.
Roots of Secession
William A. Link wrote Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia in 2003. It is now available in paperback. Master-slave relations and slave owner anxieties of the 1850s lay the groundwork for secession in Virginia. Crimes against masters, including theft and overseer murder, runaways, increased slave independence with industrial hiring out, and the threat of John Brown’s raid, and northern Abolitionists along with “Black Republicans” all reinforced anxiety about destabilized slavery as an institution in Virginia.
The contentious Constitutional Convention of 1850-51 led easterners to believe western Virginians were secretly abolitionists. In 1852, Governor Joseph Johnson commuted the death sentence of slave Jordan Hatcher, convicted of murdering his overseer. Western Unionists and the eastern conditional Unionists could still stave off secession after the 1859 John Brown Raid, Lincoln’s 1860 election and Fort Sumter, but the center gave way in the face of Lincoln’s proclamation in April 1861 calling for troops to restore federal property confiscated by southern secessionists. Learn more to buy “Roots of Secession” here for your bookshelf.
Apostles of Disunion
Charles B. Dew wrote Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War in 2001. It is now available in paperback. During the Secessionist Winter of 1860-61, a group of proto-Confederates were sent to border states as Lower South state commissioners to advocate for the disunionist cause and the creation of a Southern Republic. They were all carefully chosen for their close connections to each state where they were assigned, including Whigs and Democrats, fire-eaters and conditional unionists. But regardless of their background, they all preached that the Lincoln administration was an assault on exclusive Southern white control of racial slavery. It threatened racial equality, slave insurrection and amalgamation.
Their advocacy and the echoes of their arguments during several state secessionist conventions demonstrate that the secessionist movement and the creation of the Confederacy hinged on perpetuating African American slavery and white supremacy. Both Jefferson Davis and his Vice President Alexander H. Stephenson referred to the principle frequently in their public speeches while in office, though after the Civil War neither man linked secession and slavery, and Lost Cause partisans ignored it. Learn more to buy “Apostles of Disunion” here for your bookshelf.
Showdown in Virginia
William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson edited Showdown in Virginia: The 1861 Convention and the Fate of the Union in 2010. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Some of the more insightful orations of the Virginia Secessionist Convention are featured in an abridged version of the Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861. They offer an insight into the larger controversies addressed among the delegates during the time of the Washington Peace Conference and Fort Sumter while Virginia teetered on the brink of secession following the first Unionist “no-go” vote.
The first part is initially dominated by Unionists, then Secessionists come to the fore. The second part elaborates the westerners concern over taxation favoring slaveholders, whether in or out of the Union. The third part focuses on the few tense days just before the final vote, when delegates debated former Governor Wise and his military action against federal property in Norfolk and Harper’s Ferry before a ratifying referendum on secession. Learn more to buy “Showdown in Virginia” here for your bookshelf.
Reluctant Confederates
Daniel W. Crofts wrote The Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis in 1989. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. The Upper South including Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee all had fewer slaveholders and a vigorous two-party system, unlike the Deep South. That was the source of their Unionist strength in the face of the hysteria of the Secessionist Winter of 1860-1861. They needed a peaceful solution to the sectional crisis.
The first wave of political change was the push for immediate secession on the election of Lincoln, which carried seven Deep South states. The second wave was a strong Unionist counterattack led by former Whigs and loyal Democrats who consulted with Republicans on the possibility of a new Unionists party in the border states.
After Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for troops to restore federal property confiscated in the South led to states’ rights Unionists to become reluctant Confederates, and so the CSA gained over half its white population along with most of the food, livestock and industrial goods it would require to wage war for four years. Learn more to buy “Reluctant Confederates” here for your bookshelf.
Reconstruction Virginia Policy, 1865-1883
Shattered Nation
Anne Sarah Rubin wrote A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy,, 1861-1868 in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. After the political reality of a nation-state for the duration of the Civil War, Rubin addresses the experience of a national culture that endured after the fall of the Confederacy. Once defeated, southern nationalists revitalized white supremacy as the core of their identity, using segregation to dominate social, economic and political life in the South.
For them, “Southerner” came to mean a white Southerner who supported the Confederacy. Before Southerners had stressed common “Cavalier” origins and a states’ rights view of the Constitution. Later during this period of war and Reconstruction to 1868, the emphasis was in shared and rehearsed Confederate experiences as white supremacists. Learn more to buy “Shattered Nation” here for your bookshelf.
Reconstruction: Unfinished Revolution
Eric Foner wrote Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 in 1988, an updated reprint in 2014. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Emancipation destroyed the social and economic system of the South, leading blacks to hope for free labor, citizenship and equal justice. In the North by the 1880s, industrialized class conflict replaced sectional divisions, and the South’s commercial leaders found allies to violently suppress black labor and overthrow Reconstruction Republican state governments.
Foner describes black agency creating independent lives apart from white domination both economically and socially. The part of white Unionists in the Republican Party is brought to light, as are events related women’s rights. Whites of all social classes contributed to the end of biracial democracy in the South. Learn more to buy “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution” here for your bookshelf.
Two Paths to the New South
James Tice Moore wrote Two Paths to the New South: The Virginia Debt Controversy, 1870-1883 in 1974, it was reprinted in 2014. It is now available in paperback. Beyond the initial attempts at bi-racial society represented by Reconstruction, lies the story of the Readjusters in Virginia. Led by former Confederate General William Mahone, a self made businessman in the railroad industry, Readjusters sought a modernity grounded in economic prosperity for all. The opposing Funders sought to pay all of Virginia’s prewar debt and restrict capitalization to industries that they could closely control. Once economic depression was averted in the 1870s, Funders dropped their economic program and successfully emphasized racial division to “redeem” the state for Conservatives.
Readjusters were Virginia westerners, blacks and new urban men, none of them connected to the old regime by family. They sought state education, racial justice and democratization in politics. Funders opposed them at every turn. They were typically related to prewar planters, veteran Confederate officers and lawyers educated at the University of Virginia. Learn more to buy “Two Paths” here for your bookshelf.
Old Southampton
Old Southampton: politics and society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (1994, 2015) by Daniel W. Croft illuminates state and national developments over thirty-five years, in Union, Confederacy and Reconstruction through his study of the local history of agricultural Southampton County in Southeast Virginia. The experiences of two diarists represent partisan county divisions throughout the book, demonstrating that the white South was not monolithic.
Southwest of the Nottoway River bisecting the county where the traditional planter Daniel Cobb lived, was cotton plantation country of slave labor, Methodists and Democrats. Northeast of the river where the innovating merchant Elliott Story lived, was a mixed agricultural economy of “smallholders” with few slaves, Baptists, Quakers and Whigs.
The political awakening of the African-American community to emancipation and enfranchisement resulted in the election of a black delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1868 from Southampton. Buy “Old Southampton” at Amazon.com here.
*Richard G. Lowe wrote Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 1865-1870 in 1991. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia” here for your bookshelf.
*Jack P. Maddex Jr. wrote The Virginia Conservatives, 1867-1879: A Study in Reconstruction Politics in 1970. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Virginia Conservatives” here for your bookshelf.
A Saga of the New South
Tarter, Brent, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Pubic Debt in Virginia(2016). It is now available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Following the creation of West Virginia, how the debt of the pre-Civil War Virginia was to be shared between the two states became a focus of political controversy over he next half century. Virginia and West Virginia each had their own history of race, reconstruction, redemption and the New South movement.
Efforts to expand canal infrastructure had been compromised in the bust cycles of antebellum economy, and Virginia ranked third among states for state debt behind only Pennsylvania and New York. Amidst an entrenched fiscal conservatism, the post-war ambition to build additional railroads held the promise of a prosperous future by rebuilding Virginia’s battle-scarred economy, and Virginia ended up both invested in railroads and readjusting its debt, but at a social cost.
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Social History in Virginia, 1820-1883
This section is under construction. For reviews currently available, see the webpage for this topic, or Survey Histories of Virginia for general, political and ethnic histories.
Bound Away
Three hundred years of Virginia’s frontiersmen and frontiersmen from Virginia are described in Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (2000) by David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly. The focus of this book is immigration of whites and blacks into eastern Virginia, internal migrations within Virginia west, and out-migrations to other frontiers and states.
Each wave of immigration used the cultural backgrounds of the participants to reformulate a new society in each succeeding far-flung place. Each wave was more democratic in its political organization. Many 19th century state began their histories with Virginia-born leaders in state government and in their Congressional delegations, not only from Kentucky which began as a Virginian county, but also Illinois, Missouri and Texas. Buy “Bound Away” at Amazon.com here.
Migrants Against Slavery
Migrants Against Slavery: Virginians and the Nation was written by Philip J. Schwarz in 2001. It shows that unlike other southeastern states following the Revolutionary era, Virginians in the early 1800s migrated to free and slave territory in approximately equal numbers. The emigration of free and slave Virginians impacted the national debate over slavery, from Edward Coles freeing his slaves, migrating to Illinois and becoming an anti-slavery Governor there, to Henry “Box” Brown and Shadrach Minkins who escaped and publicized their rejection of enslavement.
Schwarz concludes with biographies of the Gilliam family, the Newby family, the Gist freed slave families, and abolitionist George Boxley in their resettlement north. Learn more to buy “Migrants Against Slavery” here for your bookshelf.
Gender in Virginia, 1820-1883
We Mean to be Counted
Elizabeth R. Varon wrote We Mean To Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia in 1998. It is currently available in paperback. Virginia’s elite and middle class women used voluntary associations, legislative petitions, and political campaigns to advance their political views. They published reports, essays and novels. While they could not vote, they informed the men who did, becoming opinion makers and architects of public policy. Continuing throughout the antebellum period, they sought to protect the young and promulgate their faith through Sunday schools for both white and black.
In the 1820s they established orphan asylums and temperance societies. In the 1830s they became important in the American Colonization. In the 1840s they enlisted in the Whig party “womanhood” of moral uplift. In the 1850s they served as mediators both defending their section and calling for national unity to avoid conflict. But in the 1860s they became Southern nationalists. Learn more to buy “We Mean to be Counted” here for your bookshelf.
Revolution and the Word
Cathy N. Davidson wrote Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America in 2004. It is currently available in paperback. The revolution in novel writing, novel publishing and novel reading begins in the Revolutionary period with severe censure of novels and women novel readers from male leadership in churches and governments. Davidson studies gender and genre differences relative to the sentimental, picaresque and Gothic novel.
In the antebellum period there was a gradual maturing of the novel publishing industry. The radical message celebrating intellectual women carried a message that was individualistic for self-improvement and self-education. Learn more to buy “Revolution and the Word” here for your bookshelf.
Marriage in the Early Republic
Anya Jabur wrote Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal in 1998. It is currently available in paperback. William Wirt, aspiring lawyer of Swiss-German immigrants, married his wife Elizabeth, daughter of a wealthy Richmond merchant, promising a “companionate” marriage. Yet Elizabeth dutifully moved from Williamsburg to Norfolk to Richmond to Washington DC and finally to Baltimore as her husband practiced law in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, some years home only two months a year.
William was Attorney General under both James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and finally the Anti-Masonic candidate for President. Elizabeth bore thirteen children, ten of whom survived childhood, and she wrote a book on flowers. After the death of a devout daughter, William began to move towards the promised “companionate” marriage. Learn more to buy “Marriage in the Early Republic” here for your bookshelf.
Suzanne Lebock wrote The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 in 1986. Learn more to buy “Free Women of Petersburg” here for your bookshelf.
White Southern Womanhood
Jane Turner Censer wrote The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 in 2003. It is now available on Kindle and in online new and used. Censer focuses primarily on Virginia and North Carolina across three generations of women. The thoughts and behavior can be distinguished among those born before 1820, between 1820 and 1849, and after 1850. The changes adopted in the third generation demonstrate the effects of post Civil War life among educated white women.
They asserted more independence in social activities and courting rituals. With the equalization of sibling inheritance, teaching provided many with the means to remain single or unmarried widowed. Their distaste for African American domestics led to a more hands on work ethic assisted with new cook stoves, sewing machines and washing machines. The most striking development was access to public life through the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Ladies Memorial Associations concerned with reburial of Confederate dead, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Learn more to buy “White Southern Womanhood” here for your bookshelf.
The Big House After Slavery
Amy Feely Morsman wrote The Big House after Slavery: Virginia Plantation Families and Their Postbellum Domestic Experimentin 2010. It is now available at the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.
Morsman examines the transition of Virginia planter families to survive the challenges of defeat and emancipation. Economically the planter downsized agricultural speculation and struggled with new labor relations and old financial obligations. Men and women sought to maintain elite appearances in weddings, resort vacations and fashionable attire.
The family hierarchy shifted towards codependency. Many young men sought after the urban middle class while substantial numbers still stayed on the family farm. Elite women sought out teaching as their main occupation in the post-war years. Men and women engaged in politics over the public debt and farm clubs such as the Grangers and Virginia Farmers’ Assembly. Women’s civic organizations included fostering the Lost Cause.
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Religious Virginia, 1820-1883
The Gospel Working Up
Beth Barton Schweiger wrote The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth Century Virginia was written by Beth Barton Schweiger in 2000. It is currently available online. Urban Methodists and Baptists in Virginia moved towards a vision of religious and social progress under the leadership of an increasingly educated, professionalized clergy. They were supported by enlarged membership, greater funding, denominational schools, publications, and bureaucracy. Their reach extended to defending slavery, evangelizing Confederate soldiers, temperance reform and foreign missions.
The growth in nineteenth century literacy among Methodists and Baptists was linked to the decline of camp meeting revivalism in Virginia. Following the loss of black membership, urban religion merged with social respectability, greater emphasis on education and promoting the moral guidance of women in a society rebuilding itself.Learn more to buy “The Gospel Working Up” here for your bookshelf.
Garnett Ryland wrote The Baptists of Virginia, 1699-1926 in 1955. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Baptists of Virginia” here for your bookshelf.
William Warren Sweet wrote Virginia Methodism: A History in 1955. It is out of print but available new and used online. Learn more to buy “Virginia Methodism” here for your bookshelf.
William Warren Sweet wrote Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840 in 1952. It is out of print but available new and used online. Learn more to buy “Religion in the Development of American Culture” here for your bookshelf.
African American Virginia, 1820-1883
Plantation Slavery, 1820-1865
Generations of Captivity
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves was written by Ira Berlin in 2003 and reprinted in 2004, available now in paperback. The concepts of slavery and freedom saw continual change over the course of three hundred years in North America. Berlin chooses to focus on the slaves living under various degrees of freedom and terms of captivity with their families and in their communities.
The author describes five eras or “generations”. Charter generations of the 1600s were entrepreneurial and could achieve substantial social and economic independence. With the plantation revolution cultivating tobacco in the Chesapeake, the plantation generations imposed institutions to subordinate blacks to whites.
Revolutionary generations were held out the promise of larger liberty, but most remained under restrictive planter control. Migration generations of the 1800s were massively relocated into the booming cotton fields of the Deep South, a “Second Middle Passage” of more stringent control, while Upper South owners loosened restrictions to allow for hiring slaves out, slave-cultivated crops and buying their own freedom. The Freedom generations applied the lessons of slavery to their newly acquired status after emancipation. Learn more to buy “Generations of Captivity” here for your bookshelf.
The World the Slaveholders Made
The World the Slaveholders Made was written by Eugene D. Genovese in 1969 and reprinted in 1988, available now in paperback. In the book two essays explore his Marxist interpretations of history. The first relates the class and racial components of Western Hemisphere slavery as capitalistic, bourgeois versus seigneurial, patriarchal. The American Southern planter resembled the Brazilian in patriarchal structures. More independent of European metropolitan markets, they resisted abolitionism. Among the American planters, Genovese found the patriarchal brought about a kind of paternalism, the more profit seeking were more harsh and exploitative.
The second essay explores the pro-slavery, anti-capitalist thought of Virginian George Fitzhugh. His rationale for slavery asserted greater security than nineteenth century capitalism for owners, workers and society in general. Learn more to buy “The World the Slaveholders Made” here for your bookshelf.
Slave Laws in Virginia
Slave Laws in Virginia was written by Philip J. Schwarz in 1996 and reprinted in 2010, available now in paperback. It examines how whites viewed slave law-breakers, their responses in the variable administration of the law, and the responses to the legal regime by the slaves themselves. Africans arrived with their own legal traditions, and these conditioned their responses to Virginian law, and guided their own punishments for blacks committing crimes on blacks.
The essay on Thomas Jefferson as an example showed both merciful administration and cruel enforcement of the letter of the law. While slave law often prescribed the death penalty, many slave court justices suspended the sentence, while continuing punishment at the whipping post. A common commutation in the 1800s was transportation of the offender from Virginia into the Deep South. While ordinances became increasingly harsh against runaways who sought permanent escape, their numbers increased yearly until the end of the Civil War. Learn more to buy “Slave Laws in Virginia” here for your bookshelf.
A Troublesome Commerce
A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Inter-state Slave Trade in 2003; it is in limited supply. This intellectual history studies the domestic slave trade primarily from Virginia southwest between 1820 and 1850. It begins with an overview of the many kinds of forced migration for slaves. These included movement with relocating planters before the 1830s, increasingly the sale away by owners remaining behind during the cotton boom and throughout, the kidnapping of free blacks.
Gudmestad describes the rise of the domestic slave trade and the change in white southern conceptualization of the practice, from early objections to the practice as a threat to the morals of society by breaking up slave families, to a unified justification defending the removal of surplus workers in the border states and fuelling cotton expansion in the Deep South.
The publication of Walker’s Appeal and Nat Turners Rebellion operated as a push and the pull was from the vertical integration of supply, transport and resale under the dominant trading firm Franklin, Armfield and Ballard based in Alexandria, Virginia. Learn more to buy “A Troublesome Commerce” here for your bookshelf.
Carry Me Back
Steven Dyle wrote Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life and it was reprinted in paperback in 2006; it is readily available. Dyle offers a comprehensive study of the domestic slave trade. It guided the nation to a civil war on both sides. Even after ending legitimate slave trade from Africa, Abolitionists objected to it domestically in the nation’s capital and in interstate trade. Slaveholders saw an economic threat to their capitalization in slave property for the cotton boom and chose secession rather than chance slavery’s eventual demise.
While border state owners distanced themselves from the human trade by blaming disgruntled slaves and despised slave traders, the lower South essentially blackmailed Virginia into the Confederacy by threatening to cut off their continued forced migration of surplus slave labor. Learn more to buy “Carry Me Back” here for your bookshelf.
The River Flows On
Walter C. Rucker wrote The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture and Identity Formation in Early America in 2006 and the paperback was reprinted in 2008. This Afro-centric perspective focuses on African cultural persistence in dramatic moments of slave resistance in the late colonial and new nation periods. Rucker identifies specific cultural enclaves in New York, South Carolina and two in Virginia that are key to understanding resistance to the North American slave regime.
Large numbers of Africans from particular ethnic groups became the foundation for an enslaved black society that would support violent rebellion seeking freedom. Learn more to buy “The River Flows On” here for your bookshelf.
Gabriel’s Rebellion
Douglas R. Egerton wrote Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 in 1993. It is readily available in paperback. Egerton notes the inclusion of two Richmond Frenchmen joining the 1800 Gabriel (Prosser) conspiracy, and further concludes it was the same working class-artisan Revolutionary era ideology also evident in the 1802 Easter Plot.
Gabriel saw his enemies as the Richmond merchant class, not whites in general, but he failed to understand that the Jeffersonian Republican majority in the Richmond area was not run by the interracial working class of the city, but the planter class of the countryside. Governor James Monroe suppressed knowledge of the French involvement and Gabriel’s artisan republicanism. In 1802, Jefferson spurned requests to federally sponsor land for colonization of free blacks either in the West or abroad. Learn more to buy “Gabriel’s Rebellion” here for your bookshelf.
Nat Turner
Kenneth S. Greenburg edited Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory in 2003. The paperback was reprinted in 2004 and is readily available. The most significant, ferocious slave rebellion in U.S. history is examined by first introducing the historical character of Nat Turner, then analyzing the Confessions, describing the events of the revolt, and finally placing the revolt in the largest possible context.
The cultural significance of the meaning of Nat Turner’s Revolt began with accounts darkening his complexion from “rather bright” to a “coal-black prophet” of the true Negro race. There were differing political uses made from debates following the deaths of some 60 whites and 200 blacks. Learn more to buy “Nat Turner” here for your bookshelf.
The Rebellious Slave
Scott Frency wrote The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory in 2003. To begin, Frency examines the evolving image of Nat Turner himself. Then he critiques the 1830s social context and political debates relating to the revolt itself. Anti-slavery reformers both employed memory of the revolt and ignored it; both sides of the slavery issue appealed to interpretations of the revolt following John Brown’s Raid of 1859.
From the 1860s to the 1930s, Turner was an American patriot and a Christian martyr to conservative blacks, a defiant proto-Marxian race hero by radical black leaders, or a maniacal perpetrator of Gothic horrors. In the last half of the 20th century, Turner was either a self-deluded fanatic or a transcendent hero. The book is out of print, but available online. Learn more to buy “The Rebellious Slave” here for your bookshelf.
The African-American Family
Wilma A. Dunaway wrote The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation in 2003. It is now available in paperback. The system of American slavery in the Appalachian South among small plantations took away much of slave agency in making and sustaining their families. Fully one-third of the marriages among slaves were broken up by selling spouses away; the lucrative domestic trade was often locally taxed. Women were systematically exploited for reproduction and the practice of hiring out slaves separated spouses for long periods.
Profit-making led to the informal slave economy becoming a form of “super-exploitation”. Many slave owners took advantage of the Union’s permissive slave-holding policies for border states, held slaves in bondage well into 1866, and released them in mid-winter only after the crops were in. Learn more to buy “The African-American Family” here for your bookshelf.
Free Blacks, Artisans, and Slave Hires, 1820-1865
Bond of Iron
Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (1994) by Charles B. Dew is a contribution to Virginia history and industrial slavery in a location nearby Lexington, Virginia. In 448 pages, Dew describes Pennsylvania immigrant entrepreneur William Weaver as a well capitalized slaveowner, training field hands as master refiners such as Sam Williams and Garland Thompson, slave forgeman. Weaver was then able to supplement them occasionally with semi-skilled and unskilled hired slaves.
Dew portrays the production of an industrial community among the slaves, their familial roles, and how the slaves built their own work-a-day and cultural world, autonomously employing their cash wages and savings. Weaver’s laborers transitioned between plantation slavery and slavery in mixed economies, although disruptive or unproductive slaves were sold away rather than harshly discilplined. This study extends beyond the Civil War, describing the dynamics of the Valley of Virginia workplace under agricultural, industrial and post-emancipation conditions. Buy “Bond of Iron” at Amazon.com here.
Slaves Without Masters
Ira Berlin wrote Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South in 1974. It is out of print but can be found used online. Because he was a human being the Negro as slave was a troublesome property, and as a free citizen he was a troublesome anomaly. The free black eventually secured strategic positions in the Southern economy that made deportation by colonization and at the same time the free black community in the Upper South created economic competition with poor whites.
Free blacks in the Upper South were more numerous, mainly rural and seen as a potential cause of slave unrest. Those in the Lower South were lighter in color, largely urban and economically better off than slaves. In both regions they were not revolutionary, but sought independence and respectability in the face of rampant racism. They established their own churches, schools, fraternities and benevolent societies. Learn more to buy “Slaves Without Masters” here for your bookshelf.
Slaves without Masters
Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1976, 1992) by Ira Berlin describes a distinct social “caste” that was neither slave nor free. Berlin chooses the period in the southern United States history from the Revolution to the end of the Civil War. He distinguishes between their larger numbers of the Upper South and the smaller in the Lower South. Much of his scholarship on Virginia relies on Dr. Luther Porter Jackson of Virginia State University.
Especially in the Upper South, Americans freed thousands of slaves motivated by egalitarian ideals of the Revolution and evangelical Christianity. Their number grew to over a hundred thousand by 1810. The free blacks in turn created their own self-reliant communities of churches and schools, fraternal and benevolent societies. There they found an independence and dignity unavailable in the larger Southern society.
While those living in the Lower South encountered relatively less oppression due to kinship ties with whites, in the Upper South, free blacks were subject to tightened manumission law limiting the process of freeing enslaved relatives and increasingly circumscribed economic and social freedoms. They were seen as economic competitors to whites and a potential cause of slave unrest.
Nevertheless in the Confederate slave republic described at the conclusion, the free black in the South was neither enslaved nor expelled due to their essential economic contributions. Learn more about “Slaves without Masters” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Slaves for Hire
Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (2012) by John J. Zaborney looks at the practice of hiring out slaves as rented labor by the white population across industries, socioeconomic status and gender. The practice which was widespread with society-wide implications has been largely understated, in part because its complexity resists characterizations as either exploitive or quasi-liberating for the rented slave.
During the time of Virginia’s diversification and industrialization, Zaborney uses social history to look at owner-hirer-slave interrelationships, in urban and rural settings, for men, women and children in a dynamic and changing economy.
The owner’s profit-maximizing practice was applied to field hands, domestic servants, coal miners and railroad builders; depending on circumstances, the rented slave enjoyed nearly full autonomy or ruthless industrial exploitation. Buy “Slaves for Hire” here at Amazon.com.
Black Jacks
Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1998) by W. Jeffrey Bolster addresses the multi-generational development of a free black middle class across every phase of American maritime life, from cooks to able bodied seamen to captains. The working conditions were preferable to those working on land, including for those who were rented slaves aboard ship, and benefits included a decent wage and greater personal freedom.
The needs of the ship at sea determined the social order for those on board, and there, race was a tertiary consideration among interrelationships rather than the primary one.
Following the growth in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to twenty percent of U.S. seafaring population, African-American participation in seafaring occupations declined precipitously in the second half of the nineteenth century following the Civil War. Buy “Black Jacks” here at Amazon.com.
Divided Mastery
Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (2004) by Jonathan D. Martin explores the powerful economic utility and adaptive nature of slavery throughout the South, especially in the Antebellum period. By 1850, hiring out was no longer a step toward freedom or even relative independence amidst increasingly industrial settings.
Martin studies slavery and the practice of hiring out slaves from the point of view of masters, renters and the slaves rented. Although he traces beginnings of the practice in the Carolinas and the Chesapeake, he addresses the entire South and focuses on the similarities of practice. Slave-initiated self-hiring was outlawed by southern legislatures in the 1850s, further limiting any special opportunities for the slave to shape their everyday existence. Buy “Divided Mastery” here at Amazon.com.
Israel on the Appomattox
Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (2005) by Melvin Patrick looks at the free black community of Israel Hill in Southside’s tobacco growing Prince Edward County. In doing so he also makes connections to broader regional and national narratives, marking its anomalous existence of relative racial harmony in day-to-day life amidst Richmond’s growing legislative antagonism to free blacks generally.
While set in a county where two-thirds of the whites owned slaves, and the free blacks were outnumbered twelve to one by slaves, this book advances the story of black accomplishment. In this case, Israel Hill’s economic contribution to the county’s prosperity was effected by rural smallholders, artisans and the boatmen who plied the hundred miles along the Appomattox River to Petersburg. Learn more about “Israel on the Appomattox” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Free Blacks in Norfolk
Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (1997) by Tommy L. Bogger studies the free blacks of Norfolk from 1790 to 1860. In 1782 the General Assembly made private manumissions easier, but the slave rebellions in Haiti and Virginia led to restrictions on the personal liberty and economic opportunity of free blacks in Virginia.
In Norfolk, over half of the manumissions came from the self-purchase of artisan men and their families. A mutually supportive free black community developed in the city, though under constant fear of being kidnapped and sold into the Lower South.
Amidst economic decline in the port city, an influx of European immigrants led to sterner economic competition and a more precarious existence. Unlike the more tolerant conditions in Northern cities such as Philadelphia, the conditions in Norfolk led some numbers to join the colonization movement in Liberia, seeking the chance to escape persecution and better their economic condition. Learn more about “Free Blacks in Norfolk” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Artisan Workers, Petersburg
Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820-1865 (2008) by Diane Barnes looks at four classes of artisans in Antebellum Petersburg, including the largest free black community as a percentage of its population in Virginia, which in turn had the largest free black population in the South. Other artisan classes were skilled slaves for hire, white wage earners, and master mechanics who were both slave holding and hirers of white and black free labor. Each class has their own dedicated chapter.
In Petersburg, a center of industry and transportation second only to Richmond, there was railroad and construction work along with employment in tobacco, iron, cotton and milling manufacturing. The whites living in a slave society were not as concerned with exploitation by bosses as were their Northern counterparts; they were more persistently antagonistic towards black labor competition, both slave and free. Learn more about “Artisan Workers in the Upper South” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Without Consent or Contract
Robert William Fogel wrote Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery in 1989. It is now available in paperback. Fogel combines two efforts, first a cliometrician’s analysis of the profitable institution of slavery, and second an account of the anti-slavery abolition movements in Britain and America, concluding that the Civil War was a necessary tragedy to end the powerful and sustainable slave economy of the American South.
Industrial development in the South has been masked by census data that classified rural sugar factories, rice cleaning mills, flour mills, blacksmith and carpentry shops as “agriculture” in the South and “industry” in the rural North. Immigrants into Northern cities disaffected native workmen from Democratic and Whig Parties, sending them into the Republican Party and alliances with Abolitionists. Learn more to buy “Without Consent” here for your bookshelf.
Three Who Dared
Philip S. Foner and Josephine F. Pacheco edited Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner — Champions of Antebellum Black Education in 1984. It is out of print but can be found used online. Three white women brought controversy and legal censorship on themselves in Canterbury, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Norfolk, Virginia. Quaker Prudence Crandall received help from Friends charitable contributions, and ran a girls school for free blacks in Canterbury from 1833-34, marrying a controversial Baptist minister. Myrtilla Minor was horrified by slavery teaching at a girl’s school in Mississippi, and founded a school for free black girls supported by Quakers and Abolitionists from 1851 to 1864.
Margaret Douglass was not an abolitionist. Raised in Charleston, the single mother and member of the Christ Church Episcopal Church where matrons taught slave children to read. Douglass agreed to supplement earnings from tailoring vests with tutoring free black children to read. She was jailed for a month without a defense from the lawyer members of her church. Learn more to buy “Three Who Dared” here for your bookshelf.
Slavery and the Peculiar Solution
Eric Burin wrote Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society in 2005 and it was reprinted paperback in 2008. It is a series of essays on issues raised by the American Colonization Society (ACS) which sought to repatriate those of African descent back to Africa, both free blacks and manumitted slaves. African Americans migrating often had kinship relations, membership held themselves out to be anti-slavery, leadership stressed the ACS was not abolitionist, and southern whites routinely denounced the ACS as disrupting the social stability of slave society.
Early settler free slaves from Maryland and Virginia were joined by manumitted slaves primarily from the Upper South. Deep South whites who emancipated slaves were primarily born in the Upper South. Virginians and Kentuckians were prominent in ACS leadership, and most emancipated slaves originated from plantations owned by prominent slave owning families such as the Pages, Cockes and Randolphs. About 6,000 were emancipated by 560 slave owners among the approximately 15,000 African Americans migrating to Liberia before the Civil War. Learn more to buy “Slavery and the Peculiar Solution” here for your bookshelf.
Virginia’s Ninth President
C. W. Tazewell edited Virginia’s Ninth President: Joseph Jenkins Roberts in 1992. It is out of print. Joseph Jenkins Roberts was son of a free black Petersburg family who became the Governor and then first President of Liberia. Though used as a source in Wallentsein’s survey history of Virginia, “Cradle of America”, it was written by an amateur historian and was not reviewed in the history journals readily available online.
The Pearl
Josephine Pacheco wrote about a ship in The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac in 2005. The cargo of eight-five escapees from Washington DC was triggered by a failed court suit for the freedom of Mary Bell and the eminent sale away from her husband. The book examines the bi-racial networks and slave agency of antebellum DC that made it a node of the Underground Railroad even while it was a center of southern commerce and permitted a slave market.
After capture, most slaves were sold to slave traders and transported to the Deep South. Two light skinned slave Methodist women became Abolitionist celebrities and their co-religionists added to the heat of controversy on both sides. Those sold in New Orleans generated an Abolitionist crusade, and the notoriety of The Pearl became grist for Congressional debate and the Compromise of 1850. The event contributed to the The book is out of print, but available online. Learn more to buy “The Pearl” here for your bookshelf.
The Unboxing of Henry Brown
Henry Riggles wrote The Unboxing of Henry Brown in 2003. Born in Louisa County, Virginia, Henry Brown was hired out at a Richmond tobacco factory and earned a wage that provided a rented home for his enslaved wife and three children. His wife’s master sold her and the children south; Henry planned his escape. With the help of a free Richmond artisan to box him in a crate addressed to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, and made good his escape by rail and ferry.
Brown became a stage celebrity for the Abolitionist Society, then used his proceeds to commission a panorama exhibiting the “Mirror of Slavery” and his escape, which he narrated onstage. He married in England, successfully promoted a panorama on the Indian Mutiny, and returned to the U.S. The book is out of print, but available online. Learn more to buy “The Unboxing of Henry Brown” here for your bookshelf.
Life in Black and White
Brenda E. Stevenson wrote Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South in 1996. It is now available in paperback. Stevenson investigates Loudoun County, Virginia from the mid-1700s through the antebellum period before the Civil War. The first half addresses marriage and family formation of whites, focusing on the elites. The second half looks at blacks, both enslaved and free.
Many slaves did not have a “core” nuclear family; a majority of enslaved children did not come of age in two-parent households. Free blacks, though dependent on the good will of whites not to be deported after 1806, made a place for themselves by maintaining reputations of strong moral character and commercial usefulness. Learn more to buy “Life in Black and White” here for your bookshelf.
Notorious in the Neighborhood
Joshua D. Rotham wrote Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 in 2003. It is now available in paperback. In antebellum Virginia, nearly all Virginians were aware of discrete interracial relationships. In Richmond City there was a zone where interracial liaisons were countenanced. But biracial families found life harder when they lived openly under the same roof, and after 1850, legal controls tightened amidst growing intolerance for racial mixing.
Rotham focuses on behavior rather than values, beginning with Jefferson and Hemings, and continuing with other family case studies. The final chapter traces the experience of “mixed bloods” from 1785 to the 1850s. Learn more to buy “Notorious in the Neighborhood” here for your bookshelf.
*Allen W. Moger wrote Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd, 1870-1925 in 1968. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Bourbonism to Byrd” here for your bookshelf.
*James L Roark wrote Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1977. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Masters without Slaves” here for your bookshelf.
*David F. Allmendinger Jr. wrote Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South in 1990. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Ruffin: Family and Reform” here for your bookshelf.
Reconstruction African Americans, 1865-1883
Intimate Reconstructions
Catherine A. Jones wrote Intimate Reconstructions: Children in Postemancipation Virginia in 2015. It is now available from the University of Virginia press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Jones writes a social history of children and families during post war Virginia’s Reconstruction. Both white and black families faced malnutrition, disease and uncertainty leading to disrupted family life. While the Freedman’s Bureau furnished some material assistance, most officials recognized that the needs of children would be met by private efforts. Nevertheless the Bureau championed strengthened kinship ties within male-headed households.
Large numbers of orphans in cities such as Richmond and Norfolk led to the adoption of apprenticeships that were largely for black children. In practice it facilitated exploitation of child labor and it undermined freedpeople’s efforts to reconstitute families. Advocates of widespread elementary schooling sought education for citizenship, but opponents objected to undermining parental authority.
To buy “Intimate Reconstruction” on Amazon, click here.
Final Freedom
Michael Vorenberg wrote Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 2001. It is available on Kindle and online. The focus in on the final years of the Civil War and the immediate post war period, a time of many still enslaved African Americans, and a time of unsure prospects for the freemen. Should universal freedom for enslaved blacks come from a presidential proclamation, congressional law, or Constitutional Amendment? No side remained committed to a Thirteenth Amendment but vocal Abolitionist blacks.
There were intraparty battles between Peace and War Democrats, Conservative and Radical Republicans, and ex-Confederates against former Whig Unionists. The scope of the Amendment was also at issue, whether to be restricted to ending slavery, or to civil rights protections, or to include reconstruction of the South. Learn more to buy “Final Freedom” here for your bookshelf.
Before Jim Crow
Jane Dailey wrote Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia 1861-1890 in 1979 and reprinted in 2000. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. The book focuses on the years 1879-1883 and the intersecting forces of race and gender. The chapter on the Danville race riot stemming from a bump on the sidewalk is a telling example of where the freedmen and women with “acts of self definition” that provoked violent white reaction.
Daily concludes Jim Crow in Virginia did not begin until after the 1902 Constitution. “Before then…nothing was sure and, it often seemed, anything was possible,” from the political efforts of the Republicans, Readjusters, Knights of Labor and Populists. Learn more to buy “Before Jim Crow” for your bookshelf.
No Easy Walk to Freedom
James E. Bond wrote No Easy Walk to Freedom: Reconstruction and the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1997. It is now available on Kindle, Digitally and online used. Bond investigates the two-year ratification process of the 14th Amendment among the eleven former Confederate states. All but Tennessee initially rejected the Amendment in conservative legislatures. Using voices from two hundred newspapers, legislative committees and constitutional conventions, the political, legal and social issues at hand are discussed for each state.
Viewpoints of diehard racists and radical African Americans are heard from. Although Reconstruction majorities in Southern state legislatures subsequently ratified the Amendment in these ex-Confederate states, it was meant to guarantee fundamental rights, that states were the primary guarantors, and latitude was allowed in defining the scope of citizen rights.
Learn more to buy “No Easy Walk” for your bookshelf.
*Joseph B. James wrote The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1956. It is out of print but may be available at your central library or by interlibrary loan.
*Lynda J. Morgan wrote Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870 in 1992. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt” for your bookshelf.
*Crandall A. Shifflett wrote Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, 1860-1900 in 1982. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Patronage and Poverty” here for your bookshelf.
Freedom’s First Generation
Robert Francis Engs wrote Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890 in 1979 and reprinted in 2004. It is now available in paperback. Hampton black accomplishment was achieved despite misunderstanding, indifference and hostility. The presence of Union troops at Fort Monroe throughout the Civil War made Hampton a terminus of the Underground Railroad. But army management of the refugees resembled that of a slave master’s overseer, requiring labor without compensation. Northern missionaries failed to connect the right to be free with the right to be different.
Post war Hampton saw an active Freedman’s Bureau, black home ownership, businesses, schools and churches. In 1868 Hampton Institute was begun, and the community soon boasted teachers, lawyers, ministers, merchants and politicians. Black majorities participated in town and county governance.
Learn more to buy “Freedom’s First Generation” for your bookshelf.
Tell the Court
Peter Wallenstein wrote Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law – An American History in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It is a social, political and legal history of race and marriage over three hundred years, focusing on miscegenation regulating interracial marriage. In Virginia for most of its history “black” identity required one-quarter African ancestry, then one-sixteenth in 1910, and finally “one drop” in 1924. The laws in the public sphere governed the private, challenging basic tenants of individual liberty and the sanctity and desirability of marriage.
The intrusion of public regulation into personal lives became nearly universal with more severe punishments, defining “whiteness” as ever more exclusive. By the 1940s miscegenation laws came under increasing attack, finally collapsing with the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case.
Learn more to buy “Tell the Court” for your bookshelf.
*Diane Swann-Wright wrote A Way out of No Way: Claiming Family and Freedom in the New South in 2002. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Way out” here for your bookshelf.
Self-Taught
Heather Andrea Williams wrote Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It emphasizes black agency across the transition from bondage to emancipation. African Americans had a self-determination to learn sometimes in spite of initial slave holder instruction, northern benevolent groups and the Freedman’s Bureau.
Black men and women sought to expand their educational horizons, the drive for teaching former slaves originated with the freedpeople themselves. They built their own schools, including while serving as Union soldiers, taught in those schools and strove to attend and learn there.
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Education of Blacks
James D. Anderson wrote The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 in 1988. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It addresses important events and ideas that contributed to the black educational experience in the South over the seventy-five years following the Civil War. Critical in the period 1860-1880 was the impulse of the freedmen generation to secure public education to perpetuate their emancipation in a free society. From 1880-1900 the industrial school model of Hampton Institute emphasized economic security. After 1900 there was an emphasis on expanding literacy by investing in normal schools for teachers and a struggle to establish black public high schools.
Blacks and several denominational societies sought to maintain liberal educational institutions. Northern philanthropists sought industrial and agricultural education. Many white southerners feared that any education at all would make black laborers more intractable and so undermine the racial caste system.
Learn more to buy “Education of Blacks” for your bookshelf.
Booker T. Washington
Louis R. Harlan wrote Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 in 1972. It is now available in paperback. This first volume of the life and times of Booker T. Washington explores a restless, complex man. He acted as a conservative who was not a total accommodator to white supremacy, but one who sought advantage from a paternal upper class against the more militantly racist lower white class. He advanced a constructive, moderate and cooperative program of industrial and agricultural education.
B.T. Washington was an enigma, a race leader not so much for black activists who would be drawn to the NAACP, but certainly a focus for white philanthropists and paternally sympathetic southerners who acknowledge the need for artisan training in the cities and subsistence agriculture in the rural south. Despite his secret efforts at racial advancement, his stratagems also represented a setback to black liberal education.
John Mercer Langston
William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek wrote John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1829-65 in 1989. It is out of print but available online new and used. John Mercer Langston returned to Virginia after the Civil War to prominently advocate for higher education for freedmen and to become the first elected Congressman from Virginia. This book develops his early life and times in Virginia and Ohio before his return to Virginia.
Son of a wealthy Virginia planter and his emancipated mother, Langston was twice orphaned at four and again at the death of aristocratic white guardians at age nine. He was then nurtured by his brother in the free-black community of Cincinnati. Following an education at Oberlin College, Langston became a prominent Abolitionist and the first African American official in the U.S. Learn more to buy “John Mercer Langston” here for your bookshelf.
George Teamoh
Richard L. Hume and Rafia Zafar edited God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh in 1990. It is out of print, but available online new and used. Born a slave and raised in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Teamoh was hired out to the caulking trade in the naval shipyard. Following the selling away of his two older children in the 1840s, Teamoh made his escape to freedom in New England, then after the Civil War, returned to unionizing activity in Portsmouth and elective politics.
Becoming a leader in the Reconstruction era Republican party, he was first elected to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867 enfranchising blacks, and then as a multi-term State Senator beginning in 1869. Learn more to buy “God Made Man, Man Made the Slave” here for your bookshelf.
The Hairstons
Henry Wiencek wrote The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White in 1999. It is now available in paperback. The white Hairston patriarch owned ten thousand slaves and forty-five plantations in four states, mainly Virginia and North Carolina. The black Hairston matriarch was Chrillis, the daughter of Robert Hairston.
In 1840 Robert left his wife in Virginia to expand his plantation holdings in Mississippi. On his death in 1852, Chrillis disappears from historical record after she failed to inherit the property left in her father’s will. Overcoming racial prejudice and even an execution, black Hairstons became scientists, composers, military officers and educators. Learn more to buy “The Hairstons” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Wars in Virginia, 1820-1883
Virginia’s history of wars includes not only chronologies of campaigns and their battles, but also the cultural contexts of soldiering and the impact of war on Virginian society.
Mexican-American War
Civil War and Combat
The Civil War in Virginia, for those interested in political and social history, can be introduced with four books of the battlefield, the naval war and amphibious operations, motives of the fighting men, and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Battle Cry of Freedom is perhaps the best single volume of the Civil War that places military history in political and social context. Virginia saw naval developments both at sea and by river, with ironclads and by sail described in By Sea and By River: The Naval History of the Civil War.
The motives and the spirit of 19th century American armies are explored in For Cause and Comrades. Lee is evaluated as a field commander, a military strategist, and an historical figure in Lee and His Army in Confederate History.
Battle Cry of Freedom
Battle Cry of Freedom (1998, 2003) is written by James McPherson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for this book. The author captures the spirit of the times, beginning with the tides of sectional feeling in state capitol and county courthouse for the first third of the book.
He then develops a narrative of military and political events, including social and industrial aspects of the Civil War. McPherson features descriptions of major campaigns, with treatment of both strategy and tactics on both sides. Though there are numerous contingent moments where victory or defeat hung in the balance, the North gradually developed both military and industrial superiority.
A detailed bibliography and notes contributes to the usefulness of this volume as an introduction to the Civil War. Buy “Battle Cry of Freedom” at Amazon.com here.
By Sea and By River
By Sea and By River: The Naval History of the Civil War (1962, 1989) by Bern Anderson builds an account of the strategic civil war plans, battles and campaign attainments, and naval contributions to the final outcome, bringing to light the importance of the relentless Union blockade and the Confederacy’s inability to break it.
The emphasis on the strategic also includes context for individual engagements and developments in tactics and armaments. Anderson, a former assistant to famed WWII naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, also touches on navy department politics, comparative abilities of naval commanders and the development of joint naval-military amphibious operations all along the Confederacy’s coasts. Buy “By Sea and By River” at Amazon.com here.
*Russell F. Weigley wrote A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 in 2000. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Great Civil War” here for your bookshelf.
*William C. Davis wrote The Battle of New Market in 1975. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Battle of New Market” here for your bookshelf.
In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Edward L. Ayers wrote In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 in 2003. It is now available in paperback, a winner of the Bancroft prize. It is at once a local history of Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia and Chambersburg, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and also a chronicle of the Civil War as Ayers traces the movements of local units in battles from Manassas to Gettysburg.
Instead of history top-bottom or bottom-top, this is a whole history, written to convey the contingency of daily life in a conflict that participants had no idea about how it would finally resolve. For residents of these two counties, Ayers takes the opportunity to merge the participant stories of both home front and battlefront.
Learn more to buy “In the Presence” here for your bookshelf.
For Cause and Comrades
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (2003) by Gary W. Gallagher describes the Civil War fighting men’s motives for joining, fighting and persisting in the four year’s long conflict. He focuses on a thousand letters of the volunteers from 1861 and 1862, not the later conscripts, nor deserters, and Gallagher does not take under consideration what he estimates to be the half who were shirkers. Among his subjects who did most of the fighting and much of the dying, duty to save their country seemed uppermost among Northerners along with honor, honor seemed stronger among Southerners along with duty.
Patriotism was apparent on both sides, supported by 19th century evangelical religion less common in the 20th century. Men fought for fear of letting down comrades who were also neighbors in the hometown regiments, or disgracing the families left behind, or dishonoring themselves in a moment of cowardice.
Both sides expressed sentimental devotion to flag, Constitution, liberty and the American Revolution; Confederates also stressed defense of their hearth and home. Both sides held an ideology for freedom, which McPherson emphasizes in the Civil War fighting man’s motivation. Their respective “cause” was a guiding star to which they affixed devotion of duty and honor, with emotional aspects not seen in the letters of modern soldiers. Buy “For Cause and Comrades” at Amazon.com here.
Lee and His Army
Lee and His Army in Confederate History (1999, 2003) by Gary W. Gallagher is a collection of eight essays looking at both traditional and revisionist scholarship with an eye to understanding the Confederate experience with General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, in combat leadership, with his strategic thinking and the generalship of his lieutenants, and as an historical figure of the “Lost Cause”. Gallagher is at pains to consider a variety of viewpoints, using evidence from the Confederates of the time to counter both those who canonize Lee and those who dismiss him.
Lee’s early victories led to his great confidence in the army, and the army’s great confidence in him, however frustrating their defensive character might have been to him personally as a general. Even the reverse at Gettysburg was seen as minor in the Confederacy at the time, and home front morale that hinged on Lee’s Army remained high into the 1864 campaign. Lee understood mass armies in the 19th century democratic republic, modern national war as opposed to local conflict, and the implications of military operations on civilian morale.
Lee’s military abilities on the battlefield contributed to the duration of the Civil War and they crucially sustained the will to continue the fight on the Confederate home front, even as the rebel nation became surrounded and two-thirds of its initial territory became Union occupied by 1864.
Gallagher’s critique finds the prominent, dominant Lee in the story of the Confederacy akin to the military accounts of Jubal Early and Douglas Southall Freeman. And while he rejects dismissive analysis by revisionist historians, Gallagher also cautions that Lost Cause distortions of slavery and other matters cannot be swallowed whole. Buy “Lee and His Army” at Amazon.com here.
Robert E. Lee
Emory M. Thomas wrote Robert E. Lee – a Biography in 1995. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Seeking a biography somewhere between the laudatory work of Douglas Southall Freeman half a century ago, and revisionists focusing on faults in character and generalship, Thomas has addressed Lee the man in a new history to study the man in his time and circumstance.
The study highlights Lee’s own words to assess his actions in various roles as son, army engineer, slave owner, husband and father, loyal subordinate and army commander. Despite depressing racial attitudes and war leadership to sustain slavery, Thomas finds an historical figure who the modern can admire. Learn more to buy “Robert E. Lee” here for your bookshelf.
*James I. Robertson, Jr. wrote Stonewall Jackson—the Man, the Soldier, the Legend in 1997. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Stonewall Jackson” here for your bookshelf.
*Craig Simpson wrote A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia in 1985. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Life of Henry A. Wise” here for your bookshelf.
*F.N. Boney wrote John Letcher of Virginia: The Story of Virginia’s Civil War Governor in 1966. It is available online new and used. Learn more to buy “John Letcher” here for your bookshelf.
*Edward P. Crapol wrote John Tyler, the Accidental President in 2006. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Learn more to buy “John Tyler” here for your bookshelf.
*James W. Young wrote Senator James Murray Mason: Defender of the Old South in 1998. It is out of print, but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “James Murray Mason” here for your bookshelf.
Southern Lady, Yankee Spy
Elizabeth R. Varon wrote Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy in 2003. It is available on Kindle and in paperback. Not the mythical “Crazy Bet” said to have feigned madness to gain access to Union soldiers, Elizabeth Van Lew attended wounded in Richmond hospitals and prisons. She not only extended her pre-war Underground network among Richmond Unionists, white and black, she led a resistance movement as well.
Daughter of a transplanted Yankee Whig slave owner, she educated her slave, Mary Jane Richards, freed her and sent her to Liberia for a time. Other slaves were rented out so as to purchase their freedom. Her reform of Richmond’s post office included the efficient use of women and freedmen where she served as Postmistress until the end of Reconstruction. Learn more to buy “Southern Lady, Yankee Spy” here for your bookshelf.
*Cornelia Peake McDonald wrote A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862 in 1992. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Woman’s Civil War” here for your bookshelf.
The Last Generation
Peter Carmichael wrote The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War and Reunion in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and paperback. Virginians born between 1831 and 1843 and attending the University of Virginia were slave holding rebels who rejected the “old fogies” who had led Virginia into economic and political decline. The rejected the old Cavalier agrarian ideal for industrialization and as war loomed, demanded immediate secession to preserve slavery, religious orthodoxy and an independent community.
The 121 men studied all remained in Virginia after graduation and became regimental officers of the Army of Virginia, noted for mediating between general staff and the army’s rank and file yeomanry. They encouraged religious revivals, assisted in home front relief, provided furloughs and forgave minor infractions. In postwar Virginia they sought sectional reconciliation, and by the 1890s adopted a Lost Cause ideology. Learn more to buy “Last Generation” here for your bookshelf.
*Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown edited Virginia’s Civil War in 2005. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Virginia’s Civil War” here http://amzn.to/2G6irgA for your bookshelf.
*James I. Robertson, Jr. wrote Civil War Virginia: Battleground for a Nation in 1991. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Civil War Virginia” here for your bookshelf.
*Brian D. McKnight wrote Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia in 2006. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Contested Borderland” here for your bookshelf.
The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation
Glenn David Brasher wroteThe Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom in 2012. It is now available at the North Carolina University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Brasher explores the 1862 Peninsula Campaign the Union’s George McClellan, who was an opponent of interference with slavery. But McClellan’s campaign was unable to end the war, in part to Confederate use of numerous slaves to build fortifications. On the other hand, the large numbers of slaves entering Union lines and their troop’s acceptance of their manpower led to Radical Republicans convincing a reluctant Abraham Lincoln to issue an emancipation proclamation.
McClellan at first was persuaded to accept only runaways who had been employed in rebel military labor, preserving private property rights to slaves. But the overwhelming numbers of families fleeing into Union lines and many soldiers’ following Fort Monroe’s commander, Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler advocating for a hard war policy, led to Congressional allies to push Lincoln towards emancipation as a war measure.
To buy “The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation” on Amazon, click here.
Confederate Slave Impressment
Jaime Amanda Martinez wrote Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper Southin 2014. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Martinez focuses on Confederate use of slaves to build fortifications protecting troops, cities and ports in Virginia and North Carolina. At first slave impressment took place by local commander initiative, but in the middle years of the conflict, a federalized system of local, state and national governments evolved into a somewhat efficient organization. Slave experience while working on fortifications was extremely arduous with low rations and little medical care.
The result was widespread slave-owner complaints about the health of their returning slaves. Martinez interprets these complaints as “pragmatic” mostly during planting and harvesting seasons, rather than “unpatriotic”. They reflected a concern for owners’ self interest rather than an indication of weak Confederate nationalism. Most owners freely complied with government requisitions of their slaves until Jefferson Davis proposed the national government would buy 40,000 slave laborers and free them once the war was won. Slaves also shaped Confederate policies because by 1864 in Virginia most communities had lost at least 25% of their male slave population, but fewer than 10% ran away under government supervision. Martinez carefully distinguishes between impressed slaves working on fortifications and the mischaracterization of blacks as Confederate soldiers.
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Civil War Homefront
The Confederate Nation
Emory M. Thomas wrote The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 in 1979. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. The Southern society that chose to separate from the Union was agrarian based on racial slavery. To secure their nation’s autonomy initiated to protect slavery, the traditional localism and state autonomy began to be overridden by national centralization and government intervention in the exercise of personal liberties. While engaged in a revolution against the United States, the Confederacy underwent and internal revolution.
Still states’ rights over slave labor remained strong, weakening the new country trying to built a nation and fight it at the same time from scratch. The supreme act of nationalism to effect a political and social revolution would have been to arm and emancipate slaves as soldiers, but the initiative was too little, too late. Learn more to buy “Confederate Nation” here for your bookshelf.
South v. South
William W. Freehling wrote The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War in 2001. It is now available in paperback. In Freehling’s view, all fifteen slave-holding states should be accounted for in considering why the Confederacy failed. Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Delaware might have sent hundreds of thousands into grey uniform, added to food stores and vastly increased industrial capacity with Baltimore, Louisville and St. Louis. Lincoln’s Union-first strategy in the border states denied the Confederacy their assets, augmented the Union’s access to them and shortened the war.
Not only did African Americans both free and runaway slave add to Union laborers, teamsters and soldiers. Had slaves chosen violent servile insurrection instead of non-violent escape in self-liberation, the southern whites of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Delaware might have either turned against emancipation or joined the Confederate effort. Learn more to buy “South v. South” here for your bookshelf.
Look Away
*William C. Davis wrote Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Once launched as a nation to preserve slavery, the Confederacy fell into a feuding cauldron of arrogant, egotistical politicians who resented Jefferson Davis’ ascendency to the state of national government. The elite representatives of the state-based oligarchies oversaw restriction of the suffrage, popular disaffection with government and growing opposition to continuing the war.
Look Away! considers the Confederacy’s constitutional and legal structure, race relations, the role of women, and various disputes between Richmond and state authorities. The pretended secessionist unity of a courageous and dedicated populace unraveled under the stresses of petty disputes and a war economy. Learn more to buy “Look Away” here for your bookshelf.
*Gary W. Gallagher wrote The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat in 1997. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “The Confederate War” here for your bookshelf.
Virginians at War
John G. Selby wrote Virginians at War: The Civil War Experiences of Seven Young Confederates in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online. It is a study of the youth culture of the last generation of slaveholders in Virginia who participated in the Civil War as soldiers and women administering slave households. Alternate chapters address military service and homefront, including battles, motivation and morale, southern nationalism and the role of women.
Letters and diaries communicate elements of their character and faith through early months of elation, trials of wartime, devastation of defeat and middle class lives reconstructed in postwar Virginia. Some made Confederate nationalism the center piece of their lives, some tried to forget, some re-invented their experience in later commemorations. Learn more to buy “Virginians at War” here for your bookshelf.
*Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. wrote Black Confederates and Afro-American Yankees in Civil War Virginia in 1995. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Black Confederates” here for your bookshelf.
Virginia’s Private War
William Blair wrote Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 in 1998. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It is a Virginia state and local study of Lynchburg and Campbell County, Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and Staunton and Augusta County. Hardships and loss of liberty were accommodated in a shared suffering for common cause. The “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” ended with revoking substitutes, slave impressment and requiring farmers to sell food to soldiers families as less than market.
While Virginia’s unflinching popular support of the Davis administration was not reflected in southerly states removed from the actual fighting, Virginians in these communities did not abandon their commitment to Confederate nationalism until the winter of 1864-65 under the duress of battlefield reverses. Learn more to buy “Virginia’s Private War” here for your bookshelf.
Why Confederates Fought (Virginia)
Aaron Sheehan-Dean wrote Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia in 2007. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new in hardcover and paperback.
The Confederate Virginia among whites was remarkably mobilized for wartime service, perhaps 89 percent of eligible men, and after 1862 it suffered relatively low levels of desertion until the final months of 1865. Commitment to the Cause was manifested in a “diehardism”, so there was a distinction between initial and sustaining motivation. In Virginia the “War of Northern Aggression” was lost because the weight of Union arms destroyed it, as Robert E. Lee had explained in his fair well to the Army of Northern Virginia.
Throughout there was a racial preoccupation which saw military service as a means of protecting families, and that was extended during Reconstruction in a first massive resistance to the first race-based civil rights movement. The barely demobilized Confederate Army in Virginia continued to march together in politics as a continuation of war by other means to preserve Virginia as a white man’s country. In a way it was an obverse phenomenon of the “Bloody Shirt” and “Vote as You Shot” in the North.
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Southern Rights
Mark E. Neely wrote Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism in 1999. It is now available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.
Secessionists had promised at the outset of their independence movement to protect southern rights and individual liberties. In a study of 4,100 civilian prisoners held by Confederate military authorities from 1861 to 1865, Neely argues that the Confederate government curtailed civil liberties in a political community that docilely submitted to the sacrifice of their freedom on a daily basis. By the autumn of 1862, Jefferson Davis abandoned the writ of habeas corpus when citizens of Maryland and Kentucky failed to join secession in sufficient numbers to claim their states for the rebellion.
Life in the Civil War South was under the rule of a virtual police state marked by military guards posted across the landscape to ensure order. The passport system used to control internal travel for whites as well as enslaved blacks was imposed by military fiat and was maintained throughout the war despite post-war Lost Cause rhetoric to the contrary. In this and other circumstances, the demands of war led the Confederacy to deny liberties to its citizens that they had enjoyed under the United States Constitution.
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Defend This Old Town
Carol Kettenburg Dubbs wrote Defend This Old Town: Williamsburg during the Civil War in 2002. It is now available from the LSU Press and online new and used.
Dubbs investigates the Civil War’s impact on the people and community of Williamsburg, Virginia in a balance of military and social history. The series of battles around Williamsburg at the onset of Union General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign saw the emergence of military commanders such as George Custer, Winfield Hancock, Joseph Hooker, opposed by A.P. Hill, James Longstreet and J.E.B. Stuart. Union troops would occupy Williamsburg from May 1862 to the end of the war except for intermittent Confederate forays.
Dubb’s story of Williamsburg is one of an occupied southern town. William and Mary burns in September 1862, townspeople’s homes are raided, secessionists deported. The ransacking of the Wythe House lost papers of George Wythe from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Williamsburg’s society is studied from the wealthy to the enslaved, including secessionists and Union sympathizers. The story extends to the aftermath of the war. Although the College reopened in October 1865, it never fully recovered as a private institution.
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Beleaguered Winchester
Richard P. Duncan wrote Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861–1865 in 2007. It is now available from the LSU Press, on Kindle and new in hardcover.
Beginning in March 1862, Winchester may have changed hands between Federals and Confederates seventy-two times, more than once on some days. By the end of the Civil War, it was impoverished and badly battered. Both armies imposed martial law and confiscated property and supplies.
With each occupation came additional physical destruction, food shortages, economic inflation, sickness and death. The alternating occupations forced an uncertainly that townspeople reacted to by pragmatically befriending one another whether rebel or Unionist. Duncan’s narrative includes slavery and slaves, guerrillas and countryside.
To buy “Beleaguered Winchester” on Amazon, click here.
*George G. Kundahl wrote Alexandria Goes to War: Beyond Robert E. Lee in 2004. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Alexandria Goes to War” here for your bookshelf.
*Daniel E. Sutherland wrote Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (Culpeper County, Virginia) in 1995. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Seasons of War” here for your bookshelf.
Civil War Lynchburg
Steven Elliott Tripp wrote Yankee Town, Southern City: Race and Class Relations in Civil War Lynchburg in 1997. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Tripp focuses on race and class divisions undercutting a tradition of elite paternalism that began with the industrialization of the tobacco industry, endured throughout the Civil War and persisted in postwar Virginia. Tobacco made Lynchburg the second wealthiest city per capita in 1859 America, based on the city’s wage earning industrial slaves.
There were deep divisions among white elites attending Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches, artisans attending Methodist and Baptist churches, and laboring classes more often frequenting grog shops. Learn more to buy “Yankee Town, Southern City” here for your bookshelf.
*Brian Steel Wills wrote The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia in 2001. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “The War Hits Home” here for your bookshelf.
Civil War Richmond
*Emory M. Thomas wrote The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital in 1971 and it was reprinted in 1998. It is out of print, but available new and used online. Learn more to buy “Confederate State of Richmond” here for your bookshelf.
*Charles B. Dew wrote Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works in 1999. It is out of print but available used online. Learn more to buy “Ironmaker to the Confederacy” here for your bookshelf.
*Nelson K. Lankford wrote Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital in 2002. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Richmond Burning” here for your bookshelf.
*Ernest B. Furgurson wrote Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War in 1996. It is out of print but available online. Learn more to buy “Ashes of Glory” here for your bookshelf.
Ironmaker to the Confederacy
Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (1966, 1999) by Charles B. Dew is a 345 paged account primarily of the Iron Works as economic and management history, although Anderson’s support of secession as a means to concentrate his markets and increase profits, and later his wartime use of blockade running to build up reserves in British banks to continue operation after the fall of the Confederacy are also treated.
Perhaps outside of the flour mills surrounding Richmond, Tredegar was the major industrial presence in Virginia and in the South, employing over a thousand hired slaves and free laborers. In some ways this is a companion volume to Kathleen Bruce, “Virginia Iron Manufacture in the Slave Era” (1930), now out of print, which traced the industry from colonial times and ended with Civil War chapters.
The antebellum development of bridge and railroad equipment for Southern market is outlined, Tredegar’s role in the Confederate war effort is developed, and a brief consideration of the post-war marketing for railroad construction is detailed.
Slave labor, which gave a competitive cost advantage over northern producers could not overcome shortages in raw materials, transport difficulties and a dwindling labor pool during wartime. Buy “Ironmaker to the Confederacy” at Amazon.com here.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (1995) by Ervin L. Jordan, Jr. explores the many roles African-Americans assumed in Virginia before and during the American Civil War. The first half of the book focuses on Virginian plantation slavery life, including their diet. The second looks at the diverse range of field hands, laborers, body servants, artisans, hired slaves, free blacks, and soldiers for both the Union and Confederacy.
Skilled slave artisans and free blacks including shopkeepers initially prospered in Confederate wartime Virginia. After the first white volunteers left rebel armies for home in 1862, Confederate military service was eventually conscripted among them from age 16 to 60; slaves were likewise taken from masters to provide ancillary services to the army, including teamsters, cooks and engineering laborers for fortifications. While there were “undoubtedly more blacks who preferred to assist Unionists”, some three hundred used their Confederate military service as a path to their personal freedom. Buy “Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees” at Amazon.com here.
Seasons of War
Seasons of War: the Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (1996, 2013) – by Daniel E. Sutherland relates the experiences of people in Culpeper County Virginia during the Civil War on almost a daily basis. The county strategically lies between the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers on the only North-South railroad to nearby Richmond. About half the book deals with the civilian community, about half with the military fighting over it and occupying it.
This is the place of Confederate riflemen of the Culpeper Volunteers and Robert E. Lee, commanding, of Willis Madden, free black farmer, and Unionist John Minor Botts and his daughters. Yankee privates, corporals and Ulysses S. Grant are introduced when they are here, as well as army nurses in three Confederate hospitals and Union nurses Clara Barton and Walt Whitman.
It was a time of war in Culpeper County, including big battles at Cedar Mountain and Brandy Station, but also forays, sniper fire, skirmishes, and minor battles as the two sides switched their occupations. Civilian property depredations followed the Yankee John Pope’s General Order No. 5. Following the Emancipation Proclamation there was a mass exodus of blacks from local churches in 1863, and active slave Unionist activity late in the war. Buy “Seasons of War” at Amazon.com here.
When the Yankees Came
When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (1999, 2001) by Stephen V. Ash defines three spheres of Union occupation during wartime. Garrisoned towns provided physical safety, but greater military oppression. Confederate frontier was marked by slave patrols supporting secessionists and masters. No-man’s land featured economic suffering and physical danger for all from army marauders and bands of thieves; a majority of those occupied were refugees and women.
With Union occupation came internal divisions within the “rural communalism” typical in much of Southern hierarchical society, between Unionists and secessionists, masters and slaves, aristocrats and plain folk. These sometimes sparked guerrilla warfare, retaliatory raids and local feuds.
Eventually the forces of order among rebel citizens and Yankee occupiers combined against the chaos of bushwhackers, bandits and thieves. Although the initial “rose water” occupational policy became more stringent during the war in the face of civilian intransigence, Reconstruction proved too lenient and too short to alter persistent race and regional loyalties, and in large measure the old order survived. Buy “When the Yankees Came” at Amazon.com here.
Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation
William K. Klingman wrote Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, 1861-1865 in 2001. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Lincoln played a central role in the abolition of slavery but he began with merely opposing its extension, and at the outbreak of the Civil War he sought to keep border states in the Union, negotiate peace and restore a voluntary Union.
With the onset of war, Lincoln gradually approached universal emancipation through Confiscation Acts, compensation plans, the selective Emancipation Proclamation among Virginia counties, for instance, and finally supporting the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery universally within the U.S. Learn more to buy “Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation” here for your bookshelf.
A Grand Army of Black Men
Edwin S. Redkey wrote A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African American Soldiers in the Union Army in 1992. It is available on Kindle and in paperback. Over 200,000 black men served in Union forces of the Civil War: more than twenty-five percent of the Navy and over ten percent of the Army. While most were illiterate freed slaves, Redkey traces their experience through the correspondence of literate black free men. Their venues include blacks irregularly attached to white regiments, and black units fighting in Virginia, the South Atlantic Coast and Gulf States.
The letters give accounts of the horrors of war, routine life in the Army, and of the larger political and social issues of concern for African Americans in uniform looking forward to their return home in a land of racial freedom. Thematic chapters include “For the Rights of Citizens”, “The Struggle for Equal Pay”, and “Racism in the Army”. Learn more to buy “A Grand Army of Black Men” here for your bookshelf.
Confederate Emancipation
Bruce Levine wrote Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War in 2006. It is available on Kindle and in paperback. With the South’s population 40 percent in a war of mass conscription, as early as 1861 the Virginian, Brig. Gen. Richard S. Ewell observed that the Confederacy could offset the 3-1 manpower superiority of the North by enlisting slaves. Letters making the proposal appeared in Confederate newspapers and petitions were sent to the Richmond government, yet Jefferson Davis famously quashed Gen. Cleburne’s plan of January 1863.
Only at the verge of collapse did President Davis, then General in Chief Robert E. Lee and Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin advocate arming and emancipating slaves to replace the ranks thinned by death and desertion. In the event, Confederate legislation only provided for voluntary manumission by slave owners for military service, a promise too little to motivate slave recruitment for a plan too late to effect the war’s outcome. Levine observes that Confederate nationalism could never overcome the planter slave-power determination to preserve slavery with an uncompromised white supremacy in Southern society. Learn more to buy “Confederate Emancipation” here for your bookshelf.
Road to Disunion
The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 was written by William W. Freehling in 1990. In this first of two volumes, Freehling seeks to explain the disunion of the nation by investigating the many Souths found in the United States from the Revolution to the mid-1850s. The South is divided upper versus lower, extremist pro-slavery and states’ rights versus moderates, white egalitarians versus elitists over blacks and poor whites, those for perpetuating slavery versus conditional terminators.
While “Social Control in a Despot’s Democracy” explores social structure and societal relations, most of the volume is dedicated towards political developments related to slavery and sectionalism. While Whigs could carry the South by choosing the more southerly candidate in the case of William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, Northern Democrats caved to Deep South demands under the post 1844 two-thirds rule for nominating presidential candidates.
White southerners were too American to fully accept the elitist, undemocratic ideology required to defend slavery as a positive good, but too southern racially and economically to accept emancipation. The horns of dilemma was exemplified by Virginians such as Jefferson, Henry A. Wise and Abel Parker Upshur. Virginia’s constitutional conventions of 1829-30 and 1850-51 are examined along with the Assembly slavery debate of 1831-32. Learn more to buy “Road to Disunion” here for your bookshelf.
Books Out of Print
Ralph A. Wooster wrote Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk: Court House and State House in the Upper South, 1850-1860 in 1975. It is out of print but is available online used. Learn more to buy “Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk” here for your bookshelf.
Lynda J. Morgan wrote Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870 in 1992. It is out of print but available used online. Learn more to buy “Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt” here for your bookshelf.
Paul Finkelman wrote His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid in 1995. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “His Soul Goes Marching On” here for your bookshelf.
Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman edited Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown in 2005. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Terrible Swift Sword” here for your bookshelf.
Jane H Pease and William H. Pease wrote The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns: A problem in Law Enforcement in 1975. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Fugitive Slave Law” here for your bookshelf.
Albert j. Von Frank wrote The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston in 1998. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Trials of Anthony Burns” here for your bookshelf.
Ralph A. Wooster wrote The Southern Secession Conventions in 1962. It is out of print but may be available at your local central library or by interlibrary loan
Henry T. Shanks wrote The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847-1861 in 1934, reprinted in 2010. It is out of print but available online new and used. It is said to be the most complete study on the issue. Learn more to buy “Secession Movement” here for your bookshelf.
Frederick Siegal wrote Roots of Southern Distinctiveness: Tobacco and Society in Danville, Virginia, 1780-1865 1987. It is out of print, but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “Roots of Southern Distinctiveness” here for your bookshelf.
Orville Vernon Burgton and Robert C. McMath Jr. edited Class, Conflict and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies in 1982. Learn more to buy “Class, Conflict and Consensus” here for your bookshelf.
Edward Ayers and John C. Willis edited The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia in 1991. It is out of print, but available on line in paperback new and used. Learn more to buy “The Edge of the South” here for your bookshelf.