Journal of the Civil War Era

Spring 2012 Issue

William A. Blair

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780807852637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 2, Number 1
March 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Forum The Future of Civil War Era Studies Stephen Berry, Michael T. Bernath, Seth Rockman, Barton A. Myers, Anne Marshall, Lisa M. Brady, Judith Giesberg, & Jim Downs Articles Jacqueline G. Campbell "The Unmeaning Twaddle about Order 28? Ben Butler and Confederate Women in Occupied New Orleans David C. Williard Executions, Justice, and Reconciliation in North Carolina's Western Piedmont, 1865-67 Matthew C. Hulbert Constructing Guerrilla Memory: John Newman Edwards and Missouri's Irregular Lost Cause Book Reviews Books Received Professional Notes Kathi Kern & Linda Levstik Teaching the New Departure: the United States vs. Susan B. Anthony Notes on Contributors The Journal of the Civil War Era takes advantage of the flowering of research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.

BOOK REVIEWS

So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812–1848. By Will Bagley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Pp. 458. Cloth, $45.00.)

Will Bagley has begun an epic four-volume journey through the mountains of personal accounts, newspaper reports, government records, and scholarly studies that have recounted the saga of the overland trails. This book examines the era before the California gold rush, an event that changed dramatically both the number and destination of the emigrants. Starting in 1812 allows Bagley to recognize the importance of Robert Stuart’s discovery of South Pass, the gateway through the Rocky Mountains that made transit to Oregon and California more accessible. Other extreme obstacles lay farther west, such as the formidable Sierra Nevada in eastern California. A public historian with over a decade of experience working in the National Park Service, Bagley knows both the terrain and the literature.

Bagley is an accomplished writer and historian whose earlier book Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2002) produced enough concern within the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that a team of Mormon historians attempted a refutation. The book built on the heroic efforts of Juanita Brooks, the Mormon author who in 1950 exposed the Mormons’ involvement in the 1857 killing of at least 120 men, women, and children. Here Bagley’s first installment has another vital scholarly antecedent, John D. Unruh’s monumental The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 (1979). Unruh’s foreshortened career never intersected with those of a new set of historians, like John Mack Faragher, who demonstrated that westward emigration had a greater complexity than popular assumptions about heroic pioneers and wagon trains. By the mid-1980s, a “new western history” arose exemplified best by the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White.

Bagley’s interpretations are influenced by these no-longer-so-new historians, but his extensive research is impressive in its own right. He has utilized some five hundred overland narratives unknown to scholars before 1988. The desire of so many to record what they experienced in the journey has provided the greatest source of information. The prominent trails historian Merrill Mattes “estimated that of the almost 500,000 sojourners … between 1812 and 1866, about 1 in every 250 left some sort of meaningful record of their adventure” (285). Perhaps only the accounts of Civil War soldiers can match such an outpouring.

These records contain many surprises. For example, native peoples played an important peaceful role interacting with the overland migrants. John Unruh first researched this aspect of the journey, and Bagley effectively expands this analysis by looking at the work of Lillian Schlissel and Glenda Riley. Their examination of women’s trail diaries revealed much fear of possible Indian hostilities but remarkably few, and in many cases no, incidents. As Bagley recognizes, “Until the 1860s, the level of violence on the road west was surprisingly low” (348).

Women’s stories along the trail demonstrate the dominant male attitude in gender relations. Bagley incorporates the accounts of two women—Lucinda Jane Saunders and Narcissa Burdette Land Vasquez—that are not included in earlier histories of the overland trails. Saunders’s and Vasquez’s accounts reveal the hostility, as well as the occasional admiration, that independent women elicited from male observers. Yet, Bagley does not ignore the better-known episodes and prominent characters. For example, John Charles Frémont appears regularly with his government expeditions and political ambitions. The two disastrously foolish purveyors of “shortcuts” to California, Lansford W. Hastings and Peter Lassen, retain their notoriety. And the Donner party becomes trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, with many succumbing to desperate measures and starvation.

Very appropriately, Bagley uses the Jesuit missionary and traveler Father Pierre-Jean De Smet as a narrative bookend for his study. In 1841, De Smet journeyed with the Bidwell-Bartleson party, often proclaimed as the first pioneer train to reach the Oregon country. Before the end of his far-western endeavors, which included a voyage around Cape Horn, De Smet traveled more than forty-four thousand miles. In November 1846, he visited the encampment of some ten thousand Mormons near present-day Omaha, where he met Brigham Young and affirmed that the Great Salt Lake Valley could provide a potential site for settlement. In the spring of 1849, De Smet was reassigned to Saint Louis, where he watched as nearly forty thousand argonauts prepared to rush west to California. The Jesuit sojourner, along with many others, had helped map out the way across the plains and mountains, assuring that by the end of the 1840s what had once been a trail would now become a road. Bagley concludes that by the time of the California gold rush, for the overland routes “the great pioneering era was over” (400). His book describes not only the path making of this era but also the technology of wagons, the utilization of livestock, the daily life, and the social dynamics of the overlanders. Bagley proves to be an expert guide through this history. His next three volumes should be equally successful.

Clyde A. Milner II

CLYDE A. MILNER II is professor of history and director of the heritage studies Ph.D. program at Arkansas State University. Along with his wife, Carol O’Connor, he authored As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart (Oxford University Press, 2009). For eighteen years, 1984–2002, Milner edited the Western Historical Quarterly.

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Thoreau the Land Surveyor. By Patrick Chura. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Pp. 224. Cloth, $34.95.)

In this brave and gracefully written book, Patrick Chura does something that most other Thoreau scholars would blanch at attempting; he poses and answers the question, how could Henry David Thoreau, the father of American environmentalism, have been so deeply engaged in land surveying, a trade that led directly to the degradation of the environment in the Concord area? Using Thoreau’s journals and field notes, Chura convincingly shows us how Thoreau’s thinking about the environment changed over the course of about twenty years and how Thoreau resolved the tensions that he felt between his ideals and the surveying work he did in order to earn a living. Touching as it does on a variety of topics—American literature, slavery, Manifest Destiny, nineteenth-century attitudes toward Native Americans, and the rise of American science in the mid-nineteenth century, to name a few—this volume should be of interest to anyone interested in the Civil War era. But the book’s real strength is the story Chura tells of Thoreau’s concern about his environmental legacy and his growing determination to educate people about nature in order to outweigh any temporary damage he may have inflicted upon it.

Most literature on Thoreau as a land surveyor has appeared in engineering journals, where science writers have shown that Thoreau was a remarkably accurate surveyor, despite his lack of formal training and in the absence of sophisticated surveying tools. Studying Thoreau’s journals, field notes, and surveying maps, Chura shows how we can appreciate more fully how Thoreau’s surveying affected his literary imagination and how his occupation as a writer and a thinker informed his surveying methods. Chura’s experience as a surveyor’s assistant comes in handy in a charming chapter on Thoreau’s mapping of Walden Pond, where Chura retraces Thoreau’s accounting in Walden of how he built his cabin and how much he paid for it, reminding readers again of Thoreau’s observation that one can house himself or herself quite comfortably at little expense. Here Chura leads us to a clear, even stunning, realization about Thoreau’s map of Walden Pond—it was drawn from the perspective of the front door of Thoreau’s cabin. As Chura reminds us, “For Thoreau, to know the self was to study nature. Since self-analysis and environmental observation were the same thing, finding the bearings directly from one’s front door to significant landscape features was a logical and perhaps crucial endeavor” (32).

Chura places Thoreau’s map of Walden Pond and his book Cape Cod into the historical context of nineteenth-century American science and its new fascination with measurement and tracks Americans’ growing interest in the U.S. Coast Survey, which had been established in 1807 but did not earn public notice or enthusiasm until the mid-1840s. As he follows the evolution of Thoreau’s surveying career in the 1850s, Chura pays particular attention to Thoreau’s evolving skills and the increasing number of surveying jobs that he accepted. But as the decade progressed, Thoreau became increasingly uncomfortable with how his surveying work was leading to the destruction of the local ecosystem. Inspired by John Brown, who enlisted his surveying skills for a higher purpose—namely constructing an integrated farming community in North Elba, New York—Thoreau became convinced that he, too, could use discoveries he made while he was surveying to help future generations make wiser decisions about the use of the land. Thoreau the Land Surveyor is painstakingly researched and wonderfully written and deserves to be widely read.

Mark W. Sullivan

MARK W. SULLIVAN directs the Art History Program at Villanova University and is the author of numerous books and articles on transcendentalists and the paintings of the Hudson River School.

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David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. By Graham Russell Gao Hodges. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 280. Cloth, $30.00.)

Despite Graham Hodges’s claim that his biography of David Ruggles belongs “unabashedly” in the “contributionist” mode of black history, he offers not merely an impressive excavation of a forgotten champion of civil rights but an insightful take on the antebellum movement for black freedom as a whole (3). Well known in his day, David Ruggles has not benefited from the recent renewal of interest in black abolitionist biography. Not as notorious as David Walker, as foundational as Richard Allen, as intellectual as James McCune Smith, nor as wealthy as James Forten, Ruggles was a man whose significance appears initially to offer a harder case to make. Hodges succeeds admirably in arguing that Ruggles rightly deserves a place in the pantheon of black abolitionist heroes and heroines.

Born in Connecticut in 1810, free but under the shadow of a slavery that was only recently abolished, Ruggles threw himself into antislavery activity in New York City early in his adulthood. His energetic, plebeian youth exposed him to the ideological legacy of the American Revolution and the enthusiasms of evangelical religion, and his experience as a mariner along the Atlantic coast sharpened his radicalism. Settling in New York around 1828, Ruggles opened a small grocery shop and quickly began doubling as a purveyor of abolitionist texts. He soon began writing and publishing his own works, which explored familiar abolitionist themes, such as the rejection of African colonization of freed blacks and the struggle for equal voting and educational rights in the North. Ruggles shared his fervor with a rising generation of black activist leaders, such as William Cooper Nell, Sojourner Truth, and even Frederick Douglass, who first encountered the antislavery movement not through William Lloyd Garrison but through Ruggles.

Most important, Ruggles spearheaded the New York Committee of Vigilance, which served as a model of direct action on behalf of fugitive slaves. The committee offered succor to fugitive slaves, descended on the docks when ships containing slaves landed in New York, and resisted slave owners’ efforts to kidnap suspected fugitives and return them to bondage. In 1838 alone, the Vigilance Committee reported 173 ongoing cases, making Ruggles’s claim of having helped over a thousand fugitives not implausible.

The crux of Hodges’s case for Ruggles’s significance lies in his subject’s commitment to taking immediate, practical action to free slaves and to achieve civil rights for the freed. Ruggles’s dedication to this principle helped him transcend the internecine squabbles that plagued abolitionism—between Garrisonians and Tappanites, and white and black activists, for example. Ruggles approached the struggle with a kind ideological ecumenicalism; all else was secondary to his immediate and direct efforts to ameliorate the cause of the enslaved. Thus he could remain friends with Garrison while parting ways with him over pacifism.

Not that Ruggles was above controversy. Strident, polemical, and at times dogmatic, he created friction with many in the movement. Implicated in the financial mismanagement of the Vigilance Committee, Ruggles increasingly dedicated his energy to exonerating himself. Eventually, with his health as impaired as his reputation, Ruggles retired to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he struggled to cure his own blindness and built a hydrotherapy practice catering to the North’s reform-minded cognoscenti. Ruggles died young, at thirty-nine, inspiring few of the rhetorical monuments erected for other black abolitionists, but having laid claim to being one of the movement’s most practically successful workers.

Hodges re-centers our understanding of the Underground Railroad, locating it not primarily among white farmers of the west, nor in a series of ad hoc and disconnected efforts. Rather, he sees it as a function of urban black radicals like Ruggles, who in New York City formulated methods later adopted in other cities. It was the model of the Vigilance Committee, rather than that of Quaker abolitionist Levi Coffin, that inspired the great fugitive slave crises of the 1850s: the Christiana Riot, the Anthony Burns and Jerry cases, and the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, to name a few. This concern with the origins and rise of antislavery militance furthers the work of Stanley Harrold and others, who have been steadily elevating the significance of racially cooperative, “practical” abolitionism in the antebellum years.

There are moments of strained connection, as when Hodges asserts Ruggles’s familiarity with the work of David Walker or Maria Stewart. But these are plausible if not provable points and do not detract from Hodges’s larger arguments. Similarly, the idea that Ruggles is best described as a “black dandy” is intriguing but raises as many questions as it resolves (138). One might also wonder if Hodges might not too often take Ruggles at face value. Readers do not witness the author struggling over Ruggles’s self-presentation, which was filtered through his strong personality as well as the exigencies of defending himself against a long campaign of slander. Given scholarly concern with the process of “self-fashioning” in slave narratives and black autobiography, Hodges might have worked this ground more profitably.

Nonetheless, Hodges succeeds not only in elevating Ruggles to his rightful place in the movement but also in illuminating important, broader themes.

Patrick Rael

PATRICK RAEL, associate professor and chair of history at Bowdoin College, is editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008).

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Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carol Faulkner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 291. Cloth, $45.00.)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life. By Lori D. Ginzberg. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. Pp. 254. Cloth, $25.00; paper, $16.00.)

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton remain permanently enshrined in the creation myth of the American woman suffrage movement. Their tale runs from the legendary 1840 meeting between the newlywed Stanton and the committed Quaker abolitionist Mott at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, through the first public demand for woman suffrage at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, where Mott famously chided Stanton: “Why Lizzie, thee will make us ridiculous.” Mott then vanishes, and only in recent decades has Stanton reemerged with any prominence. In two new biographies, Carol Faulkner and Lori D. Ginzberg seek to restore balance to the traditional assessment of these nineteenth-century reformers.

Faulkner succeeds admirably in asserting that Mott was the “foremost white female abolitionist” (4). William Lloyd Garrison characterized Mott as a “bold and fearless thinker” (62), and her inflexible approach as a “radical purist” provided a necessary impetus to the abolitionist movement (149). The woman so fervently committed to “belligerent non-resistance” (166) that she called Lincoln’s first inaugural address “diabolical” (177) differs markedly from the sentimental image of Mott as the “gentle Quaker” (3). Faulkner also effectively exhumes Mott’s role in the tumultuous religious controversies that wracked the American Quaker community.

Mott’s place in the inception of the suffrage movement is more complex. Exclusion of women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention was a mere distraction for Mott, who would later be seen as a heretic for her radical views on immediate abolition. For Stanton, young enough to be Mott’s daughter, exposure to entrenched male privilege and a powerful female role model would permanently alter her life. Similar differences emerged at Seneca Falls, as Mott’s famous term “ridiculous” stemmed from a Quaker discomfort with government and party politics that Stanton, the daughter of a country lawyer, did not share.

Seventy-two years old when slavery was formally abolished, Mott lacked patience for the internecine conflicts that consumed the women’s rights movement, and she resigned from the National Woman Suffrage Association due to her deep discomfort with Stanton’s racist outbursts. Nevertheless, her last public appearance on the national stage was at the thirtieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1878, when she was well into her eighties.

Faulkner occasionally falters in bringing Mott to life, in light of her subject’s general lack of personal introspection, and occasionally she may overstate Mott’s prominence. Whether Mott would have approved of such praise is another matter; as she told one correspondent shortly before her death, “I’m a very much overrated wom...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Journal of the Civil War Era
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• EDITOR’S NOTE
• FORUM: The Future of Civil War Era Studies
• “The Unmeaning Twaddle about Order 28”
• Executions, Justice, and Reconciliation in North Carolina’s Western Piedmont, 1865–67
• Constructing Guerrilla Memory
• BOOK REVIEWS
• BOOKS RECEIVED
• PROFESSIONAL NOTES
• CONTRIBUTORS