“Back into the Days of Slavery”: Freedom, Citizenship, and the Black Family in the Reconstruction-Era Courtroom

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-161
Author(s):  
Giuliana Perrone
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The South ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Domestic Law

This article analyses domestic law cases brought by former slaves during the decade following the Civil War. It argues that ending slavery was a long and complex process that included not only granting rights to freedpeople, but also subtracting the incapacities previously imposed by bondage and applying certain rights retroactively. Reconstruction-era judges, throughout the era and across the South, overlooked the realities of slavery as a lived institution. Instead, they reimagined slavery as a collection of legal disabilities that could simply be subtracted and summarily resolved. This is how they would carry out abolition. The notion that slavery had to be undone stands in contrast to prevailing scholarship that emphasizes the acquisition and exercise of rights as demonstrative of consummate freedom. Instead, this article shows that even when positive law and judicial rulings were used to deconstruct the peculiar institution, slavery, as a legal construct, could not be fully demolished. Judges and freedpeople alike were left to face troubling legacies for which there was no remedy. No performance of legal acrobatics could alter, undo, or fully resolve the myriad ways slavery continued to affect many former slaves and influence the direction of their free lives. Abolition would remain incomplete.

The Anti-Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles as a Reconstruction-Era Event

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Jew
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
American South ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
California History ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
Social Orders

Long regarded as a violent outburst significant mainly for California history, the 1871 Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre raises themes central to America’s Civil War Reconstruction era between 1865 and 1877, namely, the resort to threats and violence to preserve traditionally conceived social and political authority and power. Although the Los Angeles events occurred far from the American South, the Los Angeles anti-Chinese massacre paralleled the anti-black violence that rose in the South during Reconstruction. Although the immediate causes of the violence in the post–Civil War South and California were far different, they shared one key characteristic: they employed racial disciplining to preserve traditional social orders that old elites saw as threatened by changing times and circumstances.

2. Section to nation

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Economic System ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American South ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
Sectional Identity

‘Section to nation’ examines how, by 1830, the American South had long had a predominantly agricultural economy. Its people soon idealized the agrarian republic that had taken shape after the American Revolution as the basis for an emerging sectional identity. Slavery was the basis of a productive economic system, in which the South was enmeshed with northern merchants and traders and the whole financial world of England. The American Civil War undermined southern ideology dramatically through the emancipation of slaves. The Reconstruction era would be nearly equal to the Civil War in forging a self-conscious white southern identity.

Problems of Interactions of the White Army Commanders with Separatist Governments of South Russia in A. I. Denikin’s ‘Defamation of the White Movement’

2018 ◽  
pp. 1149-1162
Author(s):  
Konstantin N. Kurkov ◽  
◽  
Alexander V. Melnichuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The South ◽  
National Interests ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Sensitive Issues ◽  
Regional Interests

The article studies some of the more complicated and sensitive issues of the Civil War in the South of Russia – relations of the Armed Forces of South Russia with the Krai governments of the Don and the Kuban and separatist movements as an important factor in the Whites’ defeat in the South of Russia. Both issues are covered in ‘Defamation of the White Movement,’ one of the last works of General A. I. Denikin. Its manuscript has been introduced into scientific use by the authors. Commanders and military authorities of the Volunteer Army with A. I. Denikin at its head were not tied down by regional interests and could pursue national interests in their policy in order to restore an all-Russian unity destroyed by the revolution. Regional concerns of the Don, Kuban, Little Russian, Caucasian independentists were in direct conflict with the national tasks that the Volunteer Army and the Armed Forces of South Russia strove to solve. Unlike the Don Ataman P. N. Krasnov, who was forced to cooperate with the occupation authorities of Imperial Germany, whose troops had occupied the territory of the Great Don Army for the most of 1918, and unlike other regional administrators in the German-occupied territories, the Whites did not cooperate with the occupiers and at times counteracted their anti-Russian policy. Denikin's propaganda successfully used this fact to fall back on traditional patriotic sentiments and to eat away at the Kremlin regime’s support. Centrifugal tendencies in the South of Russia did not allow the Volunteers to consolidate anti-Bolshevik forces and made an armed resistance to the Bolsheviks impossible. Hence A. I. Denikin’s uncompromising stand on separatist aspirations of independentists. In his view, it was the separatists’ activities in different regions of the former Russian Empire that hindered the successful offensive of the armed forces of South Russia, for instance, on the Moscow direction. Internal dissent was exacerbated by intervention of foreign forces – German occupation forces, the Allied Intervention, and active Bolshevik influence on the outskirts of the former Empire. The article compares Denikin’s text with testimonies of contemporaries and writings of historians. Thus, the authors have been able to show that his slender work reliably and accurately recreates the complex and dramatic situation, which led to the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Civil War.

“In Fact, We Do Not Have a Regular Army Yet…” A Letter of the Commander of Kiev Region Armed Forces General A.M. Dragomirov to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia General A.I. Denikin. 12 (25) December 1919

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 245-264
Author(s):  
Andrey Ganin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
The South ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Policy And Strategy ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Regular Army ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Commander In Chief

The document published is a letter from the commander of the Kiev Region General Abram M. Dragomirov to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in the South of Russia General Anton I. Denikin of December, 1919. The source covers the events of the Civil War in Ukraine and the views of the leadership of the White Movement in the South of Russia on a number of issues of policy and strategy in Ukraine. The letter was found in the Hoover Archives of Stanford University in the USA in the collection of Lieutenant General Pavel A. Kusonsky. The document refers to the period when the white armies of the South of Russia after the bright success of the summer-autumn “March on Moscow” in 1919 were stopped by the Red Army and were forced to retreat. On the pages of the letter, Dragomirov describes in detail the depressing picture of the collapse of the white camp in the South of Russia and talks about how to improve the situation. Dragomirov saw the reasons for the failure of the White Movement such as, first of all, the lack of regular troops, the weakness of the officers, the lack of discipline and, as a consequence, the looting and pogroms. In this regard, Dragomirov was particularly concerned about the issue of moral improvement of the army. Part of the letter is devoted to the issues of the civil administration in the territories occupied by the White Army. Dragomirov offers both rational and frankly utopian measures. However, the thoughts of one of the closest Denikin’s companions about the reasons what had happened are interesting for understanding the essence of the Civil War and the worldview of the leadership of the anti-Bolshevik Camp.

“The last chord of the Silver Age”: science and culture in Crimea in 1920

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-4) ◽  
pp. 4-14
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kalinovsky ◽  
Alexander Puchenkov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The South ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Short Period ◽  
The Crimea ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia

This article is devoted to the development of science and culture in the short period of the Wrangel Crimea - 1920. At this time, the brightest figures of Russian culture of that time worked on the territory of the small Peninsula: O. E. Mandelstam, M. A. Voloshin, B.D. Grekov, G.V. Vernadsky, V.I. Vernadsky and others. The article provides an overview of the life and activities of the Russian intelligentsia in 1920 in the Crimea, based on materials of periodicals as the most important source for studying the history of the Civil war in the South of Russia whose value is to be fully evaluated.

Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction Era Federal Indian Policy Led to the Indian Wars

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Boyd Cothran
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Indian Policy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Reservations ◽  
Federal Indian Policy ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Moral Necessity

Abstract This article considers the event of a single year, 1873, to explain how President Ulysses S. Grant’s federal Indian policy led to the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century. Some historians have argued that Grant’s so-called Peace Policy failed due to systemic mismanagement and corruption; others have suggested it was due to administrative incompetence or ambivalence, while still others have accused the administration of cynicism in its approach to Indigenous affairs. This article argues that the Peace Policy reflected the unresolved tensions inherent in the era’s zeitgeist and that it failed to usher in a lasting peace because it did not account for the enmeshed reality of life in the American West where the boundaries and borders between Indian reservations and settler communities were entangled to say the least. The article begins with a detailed consideration of the Grant administration’s Indian policy as articulated by Francis Amasa Walker in the winter of 1872–73. Largely overlooked by historians of post–Civil War Indian policy, Walker was an influential thinker in his day whose policy recommendations emphasized the moral necessity of proprietary individualism and racial segregation on isolated reservations. The article then turns to the unfolding drama of the Modoc War (1872–73) to explore why the federal government abandoned the project of peacefully incorporating Indigenous people into the body politic, leading to a harsher and more militant approach to Indian affairs. By focusing on the nexus of ideas and events as they played out at this critical historical juncture, this article argues that the Modoc War was the precipitating event that marked the end of Grant’s so-called Peace Policy and the resumption of the Indian wars in the decades following the Civil War.

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