John Brown’s “Soul Is Still Marching On”

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-166
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Noyalas
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Labor Contracts ◽  
The Face

The book’s final chapter studies the myriad obstacles the Shenandoah Valley’s African Americans confronted in the years following the Civil War and highlights the ways which they attempted to overcome those impediments and realize freedom’s potential. In addition to examinations of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s role in aiding formerly enslaved individuals to find employment and the challenges those labor contracts presented, this chapter also explores the establishment of freedmen’s schools throughout the Valley. Although former Confederates lashed out violently at students and teachers, this chapter illustrates that African Americans stood firm in the face of adversity and worked hard not only to learn but to increase the number of schools throughout the region. This chapter also analyzes the ways the Valley’s African Americans practiced political activism not only through voting in elections but in attempting to have Judge Richard Parker, the man who presided over John Brown’s trial in the autumn of 1859, removed from the bench. Finally, the chapter surveys Emancipation Day celebrations throughout the Valley and how African Americans used those commemorations of slavery’s annihilation to combat the mythology of the Lost Cause.

Race and the Visions of John Lafayette Girardeau

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Otis W. Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Coping With Death

This chapter focuses on John Lafayette Girardeau, a Presbyterian leader who, after the Civil War, simultaneously worked to shape churchly reform and Lost Cause religiosity. Girardeau's postbellum ecclesiastical reform in ordaining African Americans and pushing for their ecclesiastical equality places him among emancipationists. However, his work on the battlefield as a Confederate chaplain, his aid to the public in coping with death and destruction after the Civil War, and his service as pastor of an integrated church places him in the reconciliationist camp. Meanwhile, his work as a defender of the Lost Cause, which helped justify the racial violence perpetuated by Lost Cause adherents, places him within the emerging norms of a white supremacist vision. Ultimately, Girardeau's life and world presents a much more complex picture than his missionary activity, representative Calvinism, efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, or Lost Cause ideology reveal.

“Picture Makers”

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-152
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Women And Children

This chapter examines the photographs shot by Henry C. Norman and amateur photographer Mary Britton Conner of Natchez African Americans in the postwar era. Norman, a highly-skilled white photographer, created hundreds of magnificent portraits of African-American men, women and children, leaving a priceless record of how these people wanted to be remembered. At a time when American popular culture frequently ridiculed African Americans, Norman’s portraits gave his black customers a means to define themselves in the face of negative racist stereotypes. The images shot by Conner reveal the social climate of early twentieth century Natchez as seen through the eyes of a prominent white woman raised in an environment suffused in Lost Cause romanticism and Jim Crow racism. In stark contrast to the narrative visible in Norman’s portraits of black consumers, Conner’s photographic images reflect the depth of white southerners’ nostalgia for antebellum notions of race, dependency and paternalism.

Passionate Allegories: Staging Romance in Civil War Melodrama

2014 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Redling
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
The North ◽  
The Face ◽  
North And South ◽  
The Way

Abstract The essay traces the changing stages of allegorical melodrama, which heighten the respective Civil War goals of the North and South, from the beginning of the war to the silent film era. At the outset of the war both sides use portrayals of Civil War romance to create ‘passionate allegories’ that praise their own cause and disparage their opponents. Subsequently, spectacular allegorical enactments in postbellum Civil War romance plays serve to commemorate magnanimous, unifying encounters between North and South as well as the North’s victory. Finally, somewhat removed from the war, early silent movies of the new century draw on melodrama’s theater conventions (especially allegorical tableaux) to fire up the audience’s passion for the union of North and South: for instance, Edwin S. Porter’s film Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) shows that Tom’s death was not in vain because it paved the way for the reconciliation of North and South, while D. W. Griffith’s racist Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) ends with a double honeymoon to stress the need of a white union between North and South in the face of the perceived threat of African Americans.

All Is Dark before Me

2018 ◽  
pp. 197-234
Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville
Keyword(s):  
Substance Abuse ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Suicidal Ideation ◽  
White Women ◽  
Domestic Abuse ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Psychological Well Being ◽  
The Face

Surprisingly little attention has been paid to white women after the Civil War. This chapter explores the emotional and material suffering of white women in the postbellum South. Scholarly and popular treatments of Confederate women after the war, bolstered by Lost Cause efforts, have emphasized their resiliency and fortitude, which has obscured the extent to which many southern white women struggled in the wake of postwar economic disaster and personal tragedies tied to the war. They faced numerous challenges, which exacted a huge psychological toll from many women. Debt, high taxes, loss of property, dislocation, altercations with ex-slaves, troubled marriages, and grief contributed to profound individual suffering that hampered survival, reconstitution of families, and the reconstruction of communities. Wives of disabled or distressed veterans struggled with domestic abuse or discord and destitution. War widows without means who were left to support families adopted desperate strategies to survive including coresidence with other kin or even strangers, which disrupted and relocated families inducing stress. The psychological well-being of the region’s white women suffered in the face of prolonged hardship and frequently resulted in mental illness requiring institutionalization, substance abuse, or in suicidal ideation or behavior.

African Americans in the Civil War Years

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Escott
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Diverse Population ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Government ◽  
Black Populations

The nation’s African Americans, living in both the North and the South and in freedom and in slavery, formed a diverse population. This chapter focuses first on the South’s slaves, whose initiatives for freedom—by running to Union lines—changed the nature of the war. It also examines the determined political activism of black people in the North and the pressures they exerted on the government in order to win not just freedom for the race but equal rights as well. Questions about the organization and resources of Northern blacks as well as the connections between the Northern and Southern black populations deserve attention, and the chapter offers many suggestions or questions.

scholarly journals “Not Buried Yet”: Northern Responses to the Death of Jefferson Davis and the Stuttering Progress of Sectional Reconciliation

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (03) ◽  
pp. 324-348
Author(s):  
Robert J. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
The South ◽  
Public Displays ◽  
Mass Circulation ◽  
Difficult Transition

AbstractThis article, the first detailed scholarly assessment of northern responses to the death of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis in December 1889, contributes to ongoing academic debates over the troubled process of sectional reconciliation after the Civil War. Southern whites used their leader's funeral obsequies to assert not only their affection for the deceased but also their devotion to the Lost Cause that he had championed and embodied. Based on an analysis of northern newspapers and mass-circulation magazines in the two weeks after Davis's death, the essay demonstrates that many northerners, principally Republican politicians and editors, Union veterans, and African Americans, were outraged by southerners’ flagrant willingness to laud a man whom they regarded as the arch-traitor and that they remained opposed to reconciliation on southern terms. However, despite continuing concerns about public displays of affection for the Confederacy evident at the time of Davis's reinterment in Richmond in May 1893, northern opposition to the Lost Cause waned rapidly in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Full-blown sectional reconciliation occurred after the Republicans gave up on their efforts to enforce black voting rights in the South and President William McKinley's imperialist foreign policy necessitated, and to some degree garnered, support from southern whites. The death of Jefferson Davis, therefore, can be seen as an important event in the difficult transition from a heavily sectionalized postwar polity to a North-South rapprochement based heavily on political pragmatism, sentiment, nationalism, and white supremacism.

Óscar Romero and the Politics of Sainthood

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The One

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization

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