How did you become interested in the Civil War?
I was a child of the Centennial, hitting ten years old by midway through the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. The war held a presence then in popular culture. My parents gave me a game that I think was called “North and South,” but I could be wrong. It did pit Union against the Confederacy and I pestered cousins to play it, much to their chagrin. I also bought the books by Bell Wiley, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb, which was the first to explore the common soldier in multiple facets. But then I lost interest. And it wasn’t until I was in my early 30s, and working as a journalist, that a lawyer friend rekindled my interest by giving me the trilogy written by Bruce Catton on The Army of the Potomac. Wonderful books; compellingly written and still resonant today. It came at a moment of my life when I was burned out as a journalist and looking for a new career. So I quit the profession, went to graduate school to specialize in the Civil War Era, and never looked back.
As a young man, did you ever envision yourself as a historian?
Strangely, not at all. I didn’t even major in history as an undergraduate student, but instead took English and minored in the Writing Option and Comparative Literature. At that time, I envisioned I would either be a lawyer or a writer—meaning of fiction or poetry. Fortunately, as a reporter covering school boards and council meetings, I saw what the life of a lawyer could be like (not exactly the excitement of Perry Mason). And I realized I didn’t have the talent or creativity to produce literature. So I fell into journalism.
Research can be very boring, with no end in sight. What has motivated you to keep on researching?
I don’t agree that research is boring. Research has been some of the most exciting parts of being a historian. Sure, there are tedious moments as you plow through haystacks to find a needle. But the chase feels a bit like Sherlock Holmes on the hunt. The game is afoot, Watson, and we must sort out this puzzle that is before us. Plus, it never gets old going back into documents that you might be the first person to touch in 100 years. And to know that a historical actor who interests you also touched that piece of paper can still give me chills.
Now, as for reading horrible cursive scrawl in manuscripts? Well, just don’t ask.
What factors into your decision to write a book?
It always begins with a problem to solve that just keeps nagging me. For my first book, which began as a dissertation, I couldn’t quite gibe the scholarship that said the Confederacy lost because of a lack of nationalism (or Confederate identity) with the fact that it took one helluvan effort from the Union army over four years to beat the rebels into submission. The resulting inquiry became Virginia’s Private War.
The second book began with encountering a snippet from a newspaper in Norfolk, Va., in which snipers in 1866 attacked a procession of Black veterans who marched in their uniforms. It told me that public commemorations—parades, dedications of cemeteries, and erection of monuments—conveyed politically charged meanings that spoke a great deal about power relations within a polity. These same rituals were also the means of creating and reinforcing social and political hierarchies. And that became Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South.
The third book came about through a charge by the editors for a series with University of North Carolina Press honoring the sesquicentennial. I was to come up with a way to interpret the homefront during the Civil War. I went a bit crazy trying to find an interpretive framework, but then settled on what stared me in the face: almost every day of the war in every Union newspaper the concept of treason was raised. And that became the book of your inquiry, With Malice Toward Some.
Finally, I just published a book that had been a burr under the saddle for more than two decades. As a grad student working on my dissertation, I stumbled onto microfilm of the Freedmen’s Bureau with the title: “The Records Relating to Murders and Outrages.” Historians had known about this collection in the National Archives and have mined it to tell rich stories about persecution of Black people and white Unionists during Reconstruction. But I wondered: why did the record exist? And did it have a use? The surprising answers led to The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction.”
What are your three favorite books (aside from your own titles)?
I already mentioned the trilogy by Bruce Catton, but I’ll treat that as one item. A really good read. I also think Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese is one of the most masterful books of history I’ve ever read. It contains much wisdom and it changed how many scholars have studied or thought about the institution of slavery. I also have been fascinated for many years by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which tragically did so much to shape human history. In this vein, I found The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker to be awfully compelling.
What has been the biggest surprise in your years of research?
While researching Cities of the Dead, I was in an archive where I discovered something I refer to as the White Supremacy letter. It underscored for me the cold, political calculation behind the creation of Jim Crow. The letter was written by attorney Charles Blackford to a political crony about the strategy for the 1889 state elections. Virginia whites had recently beaten back the Readjuster Movement, a white-black coalition that had effected progressive changes.
Blackford declared: “I am glad that the issue is square upon the color line. It is the only one by which we can win.” He added: “The negroes must understand that we will give them perfect equality before the law, and treat them with justness and fairness and liberality, but that they are not fit to rule us, and that we will die before they shall do so. The election must be carried peaceable if we can, but by force if necessary.”
Then Blackford showed how to break the white-black coalition. “You cannot keep the lower class of white men in line unless they distinctly understand that they are to make their selection between the negro on the one side and the white race on the other. Once get that clearly before the people as an issue and we are safe, otherwise the tariff and other matters which are perfectly immaterial in comparison, will beat us.” So, don’t offer policies, but raise the color bar and fan the flames of prejudice.
Sometimes students wonder: do we scholars push it too hard to describe segregation and discrimination as cold calculation, rather than portraying racism as a visceral response rather than an intellectual one? It was both. Leaders were savvy about how to manipulate racism.
What is the most frustrating or challenging part of being a historian, a writer, or an editor?
Time. There never seems to be enough of it. Scholarly books take years to develop and publish.
What do you like best about being a historian, a writer, or an editor?
First, the freedom to explore what interests you—the ability to follow your nose. And then, the ability to communicate the findings to a scholarly and/or non-academic public. To bring a fresh understanding of the past to people never gets old.
You have spent years studying the Civil War. What have you learned about the human condition?
How resilient people are. In my first book, that meant seeing how civilians in war-torn Virginia weathered horrible conditions, had their morale sink for a while, but then invariably bounced back and still thought they could win. In my latest publication, African Americans in the postwar South faced horrible violence. Thousands died between 1865 and 1868, many the product of political terrorism to stifle their voting. Yet they persevered. And they continued to turn out and vote, as well as to conduct activism to pursue justice. I think I would have given up.
What intriguing questions about the Civil War remain to be answered?
Oh, gosh. So many it’s hard to know where to start. We still don’t know enough about the political culture of the Confederacy—how did people vote under the stress of wartime and as refugees? Also, we have only begun to scratch the surface about the connections between the war and western engagements, especially for how the Confederacy envisioned expanding its territorial empire should it have won.
Canada and the Civil War remains a fruitful area for study—it served as a haven for draft dodgers and Confederate terrorists who launched strikes against New York City hotels and banks along the border. And little is known about the inter-relations of the U.S. Civil War, Canadian confederate in 1867, and developments in Mexico, which underwent its own civil strife during the same time. The entire hemisphere during the 1860s faced crises over sovereignty.
What is your next project, and how far advanced is it?
I’m working on a 100-year history of Black life on Arlington plantation, which became Arlington National Cemetery. What we know as a sacred military cemetery also was a slave plantation that became a Freedmen’s Village. It always served as a site of slave resistance and Black activism until nearly 1900. I’ve finished perhaps 60 percent of the research but still need to explore more about the antebellum period and the time after the Freedmen’s Bureau disbanded. A short essay that gives an outline of the project has appeared here in an online journal: https://southernspaces.org/2019/black-lives-arlington-national-cemetery-slavery-segregation/
What is your current mini-biographical sketch?
Walter and Helen Feree Professor Emeritus of American History and Director Emeritus of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University. Also the founding editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era.
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To read Part I of the conversation, click on this link: https://www.confederatesfromiowa.com/how-did-abraham-lincoln-handle-dissent-during-the-civil-war-a-conversation-with-william-a-blair-part-1/
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